Jorge Bergoglio Peron????
I had originally intended this to be a companion piece to Carl Olson's essay on 'Francis and fundamentalism', because while Olson tackled JMB's
astonishingly self-deluding mindset about Islam and religious fundamentalism, in general, Samuel Gregg, author and research director of the
Acton Institute, examines JMB's equally skewed perspective on economics and politics, as well as major personality traits that resemble those
of Juan Peron. Or perhaps not so much of Peron himself, as of his genre - the archetypical supremely autocratic Latin American caudillo in the
mold of the Castros of Cuba and Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales, with their mythical 'love for the poor' which is ubiquitous in their rhetoric.
The Pope and Perón
Does a long-deceased Latin American populist
provide us with insight into Pope Francis?
An analysis
by Samuel Gregg
August 03, 2016
Until Jorge Bergoglio was elected pope in 2013, the most famous Argentine of modern times was an army officer and politician named Juan Domingo Perón. Perón served as Argentina’s president from 1946-1955 and 1973-1974.
Although Perón died 42 years ago, the man and the movements he inspired have cast a long shadow over many Argentines’ lives. Given his age, that definitely includes Pope Francis. But do Francis’s ideas and governing-style reflect anything of the thought and words of a man who remains a major reference-point for many Argentines today?
Outside Latin America, most people probably know of Perón because of an award-winning hit musical. First released in 1976 and composed by Andrew Lloyd Weber with lyrics by Tim Rice,
Evita traces the life of Perón’s second wife, Eva Duarte (“Evita”). She died from cancer at age 33, but not before Argentina’s Congress declared her “Spiritual Leader of the Nation” in 1952. That underscores the iconic status she was accorded by many Argentines and which Weber and Rice used as Evita’s centerpiece.
Careful readers of Evita’s lyrics, however, soon recognize that it contains considerable criticisms of the Peróns.
Evita alludes to widespread corruption associated with Perónist organizations, a cynical attitude on Juan Perón’s part towards his working-class supporters, pseudo-religious cults of personality surrounding the Peróns, and their intolerance of dissent.
Nor is the musical shy about highlighting how the Peróns were
out-and-out populists who used nationalist and class-warfare language to whip up resentment against their political rivals and foreigners: specifically, British and Americans.
Like many 20th-century Latin American politicians, Juan Perón’s road to power began with the military. He first became prominent following a military coup in 1943 and his appointment as Minister of Labor. Then-Colonel Perón swiftly introduced labor laws that favored employees and trade unions: so much so that he earned an abiding loyalty from what were called
los descamisados (literally, the shirtless ones) or, broadly-speaking, the working-class and the poor. Even today, Argentina’s powerful trade unions remain a bedrock of Perónist support.
Perón’s economic ideas are best described as
a mixture of economic nationalism, extensive wealth-redistribution, efforts by the state to coordinate different groups from the top-down (also known as “corporatism”), and a suspicion of markets. This resulted in heavy tariffs on foreign products, subsidies for domestic businesses (especially those close to government officials), and nationalization of key industries.
After being elected president in 1946, Perón was initially elusive about his precise political beliefs. In 1948, he stated that Perónism “is not learned, nor just talked about: one either feels it or else disagrees. Perónism is a question of the heart rather than the head.”
[I can literally hear JMB saying that about Bergoglianism!]
In an April 1949 speech to the National Congress of Philosophy, however, Perón outlined a political model called
justicialismo. Its goal was what Perón called an “organized community”: one which sought to balance classes and interest-groups so that each exercises “its functions for the good of all.”
Achieving this equilibrium, Perón maintained, required what he called a conductor: someone who, like a military officer, can exercise tactical flexibility in pursuing a strategic goal.
As one of Perón’s biographers Joseph Page observes,
justicialismo essentially sought to rationalize the alliance which propelled Perón to power: the working-class, the lower middle-class, trade unionists, and farm-workers. This was accompanied by increasing authoritarianism on Perón’s part, the parodying and demonizing of opponents, and constant appeals to “the people” against real and invented adversaries. In short, Perón’s economic policies went hand-in-hand with increasing restrictions on freedom.
There was, however, another side to Perón’s politics. This had less to do with content than with style. Perón’s emphasis on
el conductor’s need to be flexible involved him, Page states, “not only
cultivating vagueness but also glorifying it as a virtue.” This in turn produced “flights of nonsensical obscurantism.” [My, my, sounds very familiar, does it not?]
In 1950, for instance, Perón claimed that
Perónism “is an ideological position that is in the center, on the left, or on the right, according to circumstances. We obey circumstances.” [Once again, mutatis mutandis, that is exactly what Bergoglianism seems to be! And 'We obey circumstances' is a great three-word description of 'following what the world thinks' as well as of situational ethics - both, of course, cornerstones of Bergoglian thinking.]
Yet there was a method to this apparent madness. And that was a refusal to be limited by principles or the inner logic of ideas. On many occasions, Perón expressed impatience with intellectual abstraction. What mattered was movement and adaptation to existing conditions. [Once again, these are concepts JMB has expressed not infrequently and almost in the same words.]
Some of this will remind readers of expressions used by Pope Francis. Take, for example, Francis’s often-repeated statement: “Realities are greater than ideas.”
[A nonsense statement that is simple and short enough to sound profound at first hearing, and I suppose, sounds truly profound to JMB, however senseless it may be!]
Precisely what this means is unclear. After all, an idea is a reality. Moreover, the claim that “realities are greater than ideas” is an idea, just as Perón’s assertion that we must adapt to circumstances is a theory about how we should act.
But is Francis really a Perónist? Or does some of his rhetoric just happen to mirror that of Perón and his followers? These are difficult questions to answer, given (1) Perón’s gift for ambiguity
[that Bergoglio has in scads!] and (2) the pitfalls involved in drawing correlations.
It’s no secret, for example, that Francis is, like Perón, skeptical about free markets. That, however, doesn’t automatically make the pope a Perónist. Doubts about capitalism run the political gamut, ranging from royalists to Marxists.
On the other hand, it was impossible for an Argentine of Jorge Bergoglio’s generation not to have a position vis-à-vis Perón. Perón was in exile between 1955 and 1973. Perónist organizations were officially suppressed. Nevertheless,
Perón and Perónism remained the alternative for decades to those dissatisfied with non-Perónist governments.
It would also be unsurprising for an Argentine Catholic like Bergoglio to have Perónist sympathies. Perón wasn’t a particularly observant Catholic. At one point, he was formally excommunicated. He also dabbled in Spiritism. Nonetheless, Perón wanted the Church’s support. He occasionally referenced Pius XI’s 1931 encyclical
Quadragesimo Anno as one of his inspirations. At one point, a Jesuit, Father Hernán Benítez, functioned as a Perón advisor while serving as Eva’s confessor. He also administered the last rites before she died.
Perón turned against the Church in the early 1950s as his regime drifted down the authoritarian path invariably taken by all Latin American populists. The Church particularly resisted its organizations being subsumed into Perón’s corporatist state.
Even so, Perón’s populist rhetoric about
los descamisados in a highly class-conscious society struck a chord with Argentine Catholics concerned about poverty. This magnified as Argentina’s economic situation continued deteriorating throughout the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.
Looking at Bergoglio’s life in Argentina, there’s no evidence of any significant personal encounters with Perón. There are conflicting accounts of Bergoglio’s views of Perónism as a schoolboy and young man. But according to Armando Rubén Puente, author of the revealing book,
La Vida Oculta de Bergoglio (The hidden life of Bergoglio) (2014), Bergoglio grew close to one particular Perónist movement in the early 1970s: the Guardia de Hierro (Iron Guard).
This movement, especially active at the Universidad del Salvador in Buenos Aires, resisted many Perónists’ drift into Marxism and leftist violence. Though influenced by ideas from across the political spectrum, Guardia members worked with those living on the margins. This would have appealed to Father Bergoglio, as would their emphasis on being with “the people.”
It’s also clear that some of the Argentines who developed the
teología del pueblo, which has influenced Francis's thought
[More than being just influenced by it, he has adopted it for his own, as he and his one-man brain trust Mons. Fernandez have referred to their theology as expressed in Evangelii gaudium as a 'theology of the people'], were close to Guardia Perónism.
Bergoglio’s Guardia empathies were one reason, Rubén Puente suggests, that the young Jesuit provincial was asked in 1974 to join a small group involved in drafting Perón’s political testament. '
El conductor imagined this document would overcome the deep divisions in Argentine society after his death.
That very year, Perón died. Argentina was subsequently paralyzed by a violent leftist insurgency, swiftly succeeded by military repression. Such was the calamitous state in which Perón left Argentina.
In a text circulated to Argentine Jesuits upon hearing of Perón’s death, however, Bergoglio noted that the deceased Perón had been thrice elected by the people and enjoyed their support. That’s undoubtedly true. And for someone like Bergoglio, whose theological outlook has invoked
el pueblo since the 1970s, this greatly mattered.
All in all, the evidence suggests that while it’s possible to describe Francis as a Perónist, one should hesitate before drawing too close a link between the pope and Perón himself.
[One does not have to. It's enough to observe the striking similarities in personal style and ex-cathedra self-assurance!] Nor should we conclude that Bergoglio embraced all Perón’s ideas or blindly supported anyone claiming the Perónist label.
As Buenos Aires’s archbishop, for instance, Bergoglio often challenged Argentina’s Perónist presidents, Néstor and Cristina Kirchner, who dominated Argentine politics between 2003 and 2015 and whose left-populist policies wreaked further havoc upon Argentina’s already fragile economy.
That said, Perón and Perónism were inescapable presences for any Argentine of Francis’s vintage. In this respect, Perón’s impact upon several generations of Argentines is comparable to that of Ronald Reagan’s ideas and rhetorical style upon many Americans in the 1980s, or Saint John Paul II’s personality and teachings upon many Catholics from the 1980s until the early 2000s.
Correlation isn’t causation. Yet parallels exist between the styles of El Conductor and Francis.
[There you go!] These include:
(1) an imprecision of language which strikes many as intentional;
(2) a rhetorical tendency to caricature critics rather than seriously engage their arguments;
(3) an emphasis upon action that’s inattentive to the fact that coherent action depends upon coherent thought; and
(4) an attachment to
el pueblo — something invested with almost mystical qualities by Perón and Francis, but which often morphs into populism.
Above all, it adds up to a shared penchant for unpredictability, sometimes, it seems, for unpredictability’s sake. In Perón’s case, it contributed to Argentina enduring decades of economic dysfunctionality, periodic violence, and deep political instability. What it indicates about Francis’s long-term impact upon Catholicism is anyone’s guess. [Though of course, the chaos and confusion within the Church in the past three years and five months already tell us enough of its short- and medium-term impact!]