[ANALYSIS] When Pope Francis was called ‘leader of the Opposition’

Careless retweet? The authors of a petition making rounds on the social media calling on Pope Francis to remove Charles Scicluna from Archbishop for retweeting an opinion piece which compares the Maltese political system of patronage to the Mafia are making the wrong call: as Archbishop of Buenos Aires and then as cardinal, Jorge Mario Bergoglio himself was rebuked for meddling in Argentine politics.

The contrast in style between the Argentine Pontiff and Malta’s Archbishop is striking: Bergoglio’s popular touch has been boosted by optics that portray the Pope washing prisoners’ feet or with the media highlighting his austere lifestyle and love of tango – Scicluna on the other hand does not shun the trappings of tradition and retains a princely demeanour as the leader of the Maltese Church.

Yet both hail from humble backgrounds, Scicluna born to Qormi parents who migrated to Canada and returned to Malta when he was just 11 months old, and Bergoglio to an Italian migrant who settled in Buenos Aires’s working-class quarter.

But even more striking are the similarities between two prelates who do not shun from speaking their truths to power. Both faced governments with a liberal agenda which included same-sex marriage and both faced governments facing serious accusations of corruption. Both hailed from countries characterised by open historical wounds in which the Church played a major role. And both are engaging intellectuals who speak with clarity.

The battle with the Kirchners

Sure enough Scicluna’s relationship with Labour leader Joseph Muscat is nowhere as bad as that between Bergoglio and the Kirchners.

Former Argentine President Nestor Kirchner, who died in 2010, branded the future pope as his principle political enemy: “the head of the Opposition”.

His wife and successor Cristina never invited Bergoglio to meet with her in the Casa Rosada (Argentina’s Government House) even though it’s just a one-minute walk across the Plaza de Mayo from the Cathedral.

The couple stopped attending the annual Te Deum, a service in celebration of the independence holiday, in Buenos Aires after in 2004 Bergoglio publicly questioned “the exhibitionism and strident announcements” of those in power and denounced “dishonest and mediocre” politics with President Nestor Kirchner sitting in the congregation for the last time.

“Power is born of confidence, not with manipulation, intimidation or with arrogance,” Bergoglio warned in 2006.

And leaked US cables show Bergoglio actively backed a coalition that included Catholic Church leaders seeking to block an attempt to extend the term of a Peronist ally of Kirchner.

Just a year before becoming Pope, Bergoglio denounced that Argentina was being harmed by “demagoguery, totalitarianism, corruption and efforts to secure unlimited power”.

The Argentine Church also exposed statistical deceit issuing its own poverty figures showing that the number of poor people was much higher than the Kirchners asserted.

Same-sex marriage and more

Both Scicluna and Bergoglio faced a push for liberalisation by left-leaning governments.

In clear defiance of the Catholic Church, the Kirchners pushed for mandatory sex education in schools, free distribution of contraceptives in public hospitals, and the right for transsexuals to change their official identities on demand.

Their most public clash was over Argentina’s legalisation of gay marriage in 2010 when Argentina became the first nation in Latin America to legalise same-sex marriages. Bergoglio called it “a plan to destroy God’s plan”. Cristina Kirchner hit back describing Bergoglio’s comments as “reminiscent of the times of the Inquisition.”

Neither did Bergoglio spare Opposition mayor and future president Mauricio Macri, who decided not to appeal a judge’s decision to grant a marriage licence to the first gay married couple in Latin American history. Bergoglio accused him of having “gravely failed” in the task of government.

In many ways one could well consider Scicluna’s approach on these issues far more timid than Bergoglio’s. For while sometimes expressing reservations, Scicluna seems keener on confronting government on governance and environmental destruction.

The bad breath of corruption

In a booklet penned in 1991 and republished in 2005 Bergoglio denounced the culture of impunity in his country. “A sinner expects forgiveness. The corrupt, on the contrary, don’t because they don’t feel they have sinned,” he said.

Comparing corruption to “bad breath” he noted that “it’s always others who notice it and have “to point it out” to the corrupt” and warned that “the amount of built-up resistance is enormous.”

Bergoglio often referred to creeping corruption in Argentina under the Kirchners even if he did not directly single out the couple. Cristina Kirchner was herself accused of amassing a fortune while she and her husband were in office.

In 2005, Bergoglio was the first public personality to sign a petition for justice in the bombing of a Jewish Community Centre in Buenos Aires, which officially remains unsolved. Ten years later, prosecutor Alberto Nisman was found dead in his apartment, the night before he was due to deliver evidence that, he claimed, would show that Cristina Kirchner had conspired with Iran to conceal its involvement in the 1994 bombing of the Jewish Community Centre.

Pope Frances had a private audience with the former wife of Alberto Nisman telling her that he prays for Nisman’s memory and their two daughters.

Since Kirchner left office, federal prosecutors have ramped up an investigation into the activities of a group of businessmen with close ties to Kristina and her late husband. Lázaro Báez, who grew extremely wealthy from government construction contracts during the Kirchners’ years in power, was arrested after a former associate testified against him and the Kirchners.

Báez has been charged with participating in a scheme in which hundreds of millions of dollars from government contracts were laundered through a complex web of
fictitious offshore companies. Mossack Fonseca, the firm at the centre of the recent Panama Papers scandal, is alleged to have played a role in the laundering scheme.

One may have been in a better position to judge Scicluna had he had the opportunity to confronta PN-led government

The wounds of the past

In Malta the divisive legacy of the 1960s is often invoked as a warning against Church intervention in politics. Argentina had a far more traumatic experience during the 1970s, during which the Church, including Bergoglio, was accused of remaining silent during the “disappearance” of left-wing sympathisers, including Jesuits inspired by Liberation theology.

Bergoglio has been criticised in particular for failing to protect two Jesuit priests, Orland Yorio and Francisco Jalics, after they were arrested and tortured. Bergoglio denied the charges but admitted that the Church could have done more to protect those killed.

He had bishops issue a collective apology in 2012 for the Church’s failures to protect people during Argentina’s dictatorship. The apology blamed both the government and leftist guerrillas for the violence. Since his appointment, Pope Francis has ordered the Vatican to open its files for an investigation into this era, with the goal of discovering the fate of at least some of the estimated 30,000 victims.

Bergoglio’s consistency

One notable difference between the two Church prelates is that while Scicluna served for a long time in the Roman Curia, Bergoglio remained firmly anchored in the Argentinian reality.

Scicluna held positions in the Roman curia from 1995 to 2012 serving as Promoter of Justice in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger – later Pope Benedict XVI.

Bergoglio was deeply rooted in the Argentine reality serving from 1973 to 1979 as Argentina’s provincial superior of the Society of Jesus and becoming the Archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998.

Therefore while Scicluna’s term coincided mostly with a Labour government, Bergoglio oversaw different Argentinian governments.

In fact our perception of Scicluna mostly derives from him exclusively shadowing a Labour government. One may have been in a better position to judge Scicluna had he had the opportunity to confront a PN-led government.

Bergoglio’s incursions in politics pre-date the election of the Kirchners. His first speech on being made cardinal in 2001, delivered against a backdrop of vibrant anti-austerity rallies, denounced a national situation in which “there are poor people in the street and rich people feasting lavishly.”

At the height of a devastating economic crisis in 2001-02 that plunged millions into poverty, Bergoglio’s criticism of those in power was blunt. Former President Eduardo Duhalde sat stony-faced as Bergoglio delivered an unusually harsh homily in 2002 as the crisis raged outside the cathedral gates. “Let’s not tolerate the sad spectacle of those who no longer know how to lie and contradict themselves to hold onto their privileges, their rapaciousness, and their ill-earned wealth,” Bergoglio said in the televised sermon.

In 2011, after a long economic boom, he took aim at Buenos Aires’s city government led by the Opposition over the persistent exploitation of illegal immigrants in clandestine sweatshops. “This city has failed and continues to fail in freeing us of this structural slavery,” he said.

Even after his elevation to the papacy Francis has not shied away from conflict with Argentina’s rulers. The election of the conservative Macri did not change his attitude to those in power. The difficult relationship between Bergoglio and Macri serves as what the Catholic Herald calls “another example of Pope Francis’s place in the politics of his homeland: as an internal critic, usually at cross-purposes with the ruling party.”

Francis even rejected a 16,666,000 pesos (€752,000) donation to his educational foundation Scholas Occurrentes. “I don’t like the 666,” he wrote back, according to La Stampa’s Vatican Insider. The Catholic Herald says the real reason was that he felt he shouldn’t be accepting money from the Argentine government when the population had so many pressing needs. “Macri’s own background may have increased the Pope’s sense that this money was being used irresponsibly: the

President is the son of a millionaire, and he still spends his leisure time at exclusive parties of the wealthy.”

Macri on his part has tried to woo the Pope, couching the government’s plans to welcome 3,000 Syrian refugees in explicit relation to Francis’s advice, declaring: “I agree with the Pope.”

A political papacy

Pope Francis has distinguished himself as a politically engaged leader. On Twitter, roughly one of every eight tweets tend to reflect a political issue or a politically relevant event.

His most politically charged encyclical: “Laudato Si” was released after massive 2014 marches for the climate held in London, New York and other places.

While Bishop Scicluna has taken the lead of Pope Francis on environmental issues, taking a firm stand against the American University of Malta Zonqor development, Scicluna has been less pronounced on social inequality. Except for a tweet published in 2016, in which he wrote that it was “shameful” that the General Workers Union would be earning €300 off each worker employed as part of a new government scheme, he was largely absent in the debate on minimum wage and rising rents.

In fact, while Bergoglio always struck a chord with the Argentinian working class and is widely perceived as a Peronist populist at heart, Scicluna is less keen on social issues which could make him more relevant to working class Labour voters. It was Bergoglio’s appeal to the working class which made him a greater threat to the Kircheners than Scicluna is to Muscat.

In contrast the Pope has shifted the focus of the Church towards a critique of capitalism and a condemnation of the “globalisation of indifference”. In his Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, the Pope referred to “a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power”.

The Pope also expressed concern about a culture that cultivated global indifference, where according to the Pope, society seems content to believe that poverty is somebody else’s problem. For him, the poor are not only exploited but also excluded. They have become “the outcast, the leftovers”.

Pope Francis also hammers the injustice of growing inequality. He sees this income gap as a “result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace”. He denounces “sacralised workings of the prevailing economic system”.

Neither does the Pope shy away from confronting global leaders like Donald Trump by suggesting that his recent decision to end a program protecting undocumented young people from deportation contradicts the pro-life values he proclaims.

Ironically the fates of the two prelates have been intertwined by one of the greatest scandals facing the Papacy – the alleged cover-up of a child abuse scandal in Chile. The appointment of Scicluna by Pope Francis to investigate complaints about Bishop Juan Barros – who has been strongly defended until now by the Pope – confirms the high esteem in which the Maltese Archbishop is held by Pope Francis.