No one is a prophet in his own land, Jesus warns in the Gospel of Luke—not even, apparently, the Pope. Francis was broadly popular around the world, especially among liberals. Toward the end of his life, though, his approval ratings dipped in the United States, where he had angered conservatives, and though he still enjoyed more than seventy-per-cent approval in some Latin American nations—Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, and Peru—that support was falling. But in no country was the drop sharper than in his native Argentina, where, last year, his favorability had fallen twenty-seven points below the ninety-one per cent he had received at the time of his election, a dozen years ago.
This will come as no surprise to anyone who is familiar with the extreme political polarization that has become characteristic of Argentina. In that climate, Francis, too, was seen as a divisive figure. In a majority-Catholic country, he was the voice of a Church that, traditionally, sided with the conservative élites. He found himself at odds with almost every administration of the past two decades. And, once he went to the Vatican, as the first Argentinean Pope in history, he never, unlike his two predecessors, visited his home country. Even so, he continued to fuel polarization there—but this time, to just about everyone’s surprise, from the left.
Francis, who was born Jorge Mario Bergoglio, in Buenos Aires in 1936, was immersed in the nation’s conflicts from the beginning of his career in the Church. At the young age of thirty-six, in 1973, he was appointed to lead the order of the Jesuits in Argentina and Uruguay, a role he maintained during the first half of Argentina’s last military dictatorship. His behavior during that period, along with that of many other Church leaders, was the subject of much speculation, particularly with regard to the abduction and torture of two priests, Orlando Yorio and Franz Jalics. (They were eventually released.) No evidence was found implicating Bergoglio in any crimes, but many felt that he had not done enough to save lives.
Politically, Bergoglio was a right-wing Peronist—a social conservative and a political populist. (As he wrote in his autobiography, “Hope,” published in January, “Nearing adolescence, I began to take an interest in the social reforms that Perón was carrying out, and I started to feel a certain liking for him.”) He felt close to the poor, lived frugally, and could often be found drinking maté with residents of the Buenos Aires slums, even after he became a cardinal. Bergoglio stepped down from his leadership role in 1979 and became the rector of the Jesuit seminary in Buenos Aires. In 1990, when a critic of his was appointed leader of the order, Bergoglio was sent to a remote post in Córdoba, in the middle of the country. That exile ended two years later, when the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Antonio Quarracino, named him his auxiliary. Quarracino was an outspoken conservative who, unlike Bergoglio, enjoyed the perks of his post. He lived opulently and flaunted his friendship with the neoliberal Peronist President Carlos Menem, whose government was riddled with corruption scandals. But Bergoglio never publicly contradicted Quarracino, and he succeeded him after the Archbishop’s death, in 1998. He was elevated to cardinal, by Pope John Paul II, in 2001.
As Archbishop, Bergoglio took on a more oppositional role, criticizing Menem’s free-market policies. Washington Uranga, a veteran religion columnist at the newspaper Página/12, who had a decades-long relationship with Bergoglio, told me that Bergoglio represented “an idea that was prevalent” in a Latin American Catholic country: that the head of the Church should have a decisive influence in national affairs. Uranga said, “Once, I told him, ‘The President wants to see you.’ And he said, ‘Let him come.’ I said, ‘Excuse me, Father, but he is the President of the country.’ And he replied, ‘And I am the Archbishop of Buenos Aires.’ ”
The husband-and-wife Presidencies of Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner dominated the country’s political scene for the majority of Bergoglio’s tenure as Archbishop. Néstor became President in 2003 and stepped aside in 2007, after which Cristina succeeded him. The Kirchners were Peronists, like Bergoglio, but they were more progressive on social issues, and he opposed them from the start. Néstor won the 2003 election with only twenty-two per cent of the vote after Menem withdrew from the race. Bergoglio questioned Kirchner’s legitimacy and regularly criticized his economic policies, especially an agricultural export tax that further split the country by tapping into old divides over the role of the state, economic policy, and the distribution of wealth. The relationship became so openly confrontational that the President referred to the Archbishop as “the spiritual leader of the opposition.”
The low point in that relationship came in 2010, when Cristina Kirchner was President and the government was attempting to pass a law legalizing same-sex marriage. Bergoglio, in a letter to a group of Carmelite nuns which was leaked to the press, wrote that same-sex marriage was “the Devil’s envy, through which sin entered the world, cunningly seeking to destroy the image of God: man and woman who receive the mandate to increase, multiply, and dominate the earth.” The bill, he wrote, was “a war against God.” It was passed three weeks later.
That October, Néstor died of a heart ailment, and the next month Bergoglio was called to testify in front of a panel of judges about the abduction, more than thirty years earlier, of the Jesuit priests. (The members of the junta had been tried in the nineteen-eighties, but Menem had pardoned them and closed investigations into human-rights violations; the pardons were annulled under the Kirchners and the investigations were reopened.) Though the tribunal found no evidence of wrongdoing by Bergoglio, he was convinced that members of Cristina Kirchner’s government had pressured the judges to condemn him. “They wanted to cut off my head,” he told a group of Hungarian priests, during a trip to Budapest in 2023.
Cristina Kirchner was still President when Bergoglio was elected Pope, in March, 2013. The country celebrated his ascension as a source of great pride: he was the first Pope from Latin America. Kirchner’s popularity, in the meantime, had plummeted, owing to corruption scandals and a weak economy. Yet, to the country’s amazement (I was then a political reporter in Buenos Aires), the enmity between the adversaries melted away. Kirchner had nothing but public praise for the new Pope. He received her seven times in the next two years, before she stepped down from the Presidency, including a two-and-a-half-hour lunch on the first anniversary of his papacy. The meetings often involved an exchange of thoughtful presents: on the first, she brought him an elaborate maté gourd; he gave her baby shoes and socks for her first grandson. While still President, Kirchner discouraged attempts to legalize abortion, in what was seen by many analysts as a gesture of good will toward Francis.
Pope Francis was almost unrecognizable to Argentineans. Bergoglio had been a stern figure; Francis was an expansive, gentle man. He himself acknowledged this transformation in his autobiography. “Does anyone understand this Pope?” he quotes Cristina Kirchner as saying. “When he was in Argentina he had the face of a . . . [and here she used a rude word], and now he smiles to the whole world!” He also recalls an Italian Archbishop saying, “I had only one doubt about Bergoglio, that he never laughed. . . . And now he does it all the time, he always has a smile.” Francis explained the change by noting that he “was rather too anxious as a cardinal, worried about making mistakes, maybe more self-conscious.” But his development marked a political turnaround, too. The Pope started advocating for more social justice in the world, even retracting some previous standpoints. “If someone is gay and is searching for the Lord and has good will, then who am I to judge him?” he famously said. The new direction made him widely popular around the world.
