When Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio was announced as the new head of the Catholic Church in 2013, his compatriots in Argentina were just as surprised as the rest of the world, but had an added question in mind: how would the new global figure of Pope Francis play into the country’s domestic politics?
As it turned out, the most common political speculations during the first days of his Papacy proved to be wrong: despite a history of clashes with the government throughout the Kirchnerite decade, the Pope’s relations with Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in her final years in charge and with Alberto Fernández during the first days of his administration have so far proven to be friendlier than those with former President Mauricio Macri, throughout his four years in office.
A closer look at Pope Francis’ ideology and personality, and a dive into his role in recent Argentinian political history, might help illuminate the reasons behind his friendly approach towards Peronism—despite its support for causes historically opposed by the Church, including gay marriage and abortion.
Orthodox but popular
Pope Francis is hard to pin down. For his followers, he’s an idol who arrived to revitalize the Catholic Church and take it back to its roots as a Church of the poor and the needy, with a critique of capitalism and an anti-consumerist bent. For his liberal and left-wing secular detractors, he’s just another conservative priest who opposes individual freedoms and turns a blind eye to institutional abuses. And for those on the right, he might as well be a Marxist revolutionary.
In reality, the Pope’s indirect and often ambiguous style, his close contact with poverty and his stern will to power, which allowed him to rise up from a third world priest to the head of the world’s longest-existing institution, means his approach is not that different from that of Peronism in Argentinian politics.
Pope Francis traversed his formative years in the 1960s and 1970s, when Liberation Theology was in full swing. Liberation Theology originated in Latin America and proposed that the Church had to be an active participant in the process of change and revolution that would free oppressed peoples of the continent, all the while fully incorporating Marxist thought into their religious beliefs.
Pope Francis, on the other hand, is a Jesuit, an order founded to act as direct emissaries of the pope in the Counter-Reformation struggle. As such, concepts such as authority, loyalty, secrecy, and political acumen are paramount to him. While vying to protect the Church’s core beliefs, the Jesuits also responded to a strong request of believers during the Modern Era: the need for the Church to abandon venality, excess, and luxury in favor of poverty and spiritual reflection. They took vows of poverty, something which Francis—the first Jesuit pope—takes very seriously.
Francis was never a big fan of Liberation Theology. Instead, he embraced the Theology of the People, which contrasts both with Liberation Theology and other conservative doctrines. The Theology of the People argues people are rarely wrong, and they are rarely evil, and that the Church should accept popular religiosities and customs and guide them, rather than trying to suppress them in order to return to an orthodoxy that isolates priests from their communities. This people’s theology was never strictly Marxist, but in the Argentinian landscape it resulted in an acceptance of Peronism. Their rationale was: if Argentinians are Peronists, then...
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