Pope Francis in Context: Have the End Times Arrived in Buenos Aires?

In the weeks following Jorge Bergoglio’s elevation to the papacy, Pope Francis, in a series of dramatic gestures, led a certain segment of the Church to announce the end of the Culture Wars. The Church hadn’t won; the pope simply sidestepped the whole issue by reframing the argument. Pastoral care trumped doctrinal conflict. Unfortunately, the news never reached the pope’s native Argentina, where the Church was subjected to unprecedented attacks. In Mar del Plata, the cathedral was surrounded by a howling mob of bare-breasted women who threatened to burn it to the ground. In Tucuman, a woman dressed as the Blessed Mother threw a bucket of pig blood and guts onto the sidewalk in front of the cathedral in what she claimed was a performance art rendition of the abortion of Jesus Christ. In Rome, the rancorous haggling over the footnotes to Amoris Laetitia threatened to plunge the Church into schism. With the euphoria of the early days of Francis’s papacy now a distant memory, it’s time to take a look at the man at the center of the storm in the only context that allows us to make sense of the current crisis. The context is Argentina—from the halcyon days following the Eucharistic Congress which took place in Buenos Aires around the time he was born to the troubled times when he was the Jesuit provincial during the Dirty War—and it is the only way to understand the complex figure who is now the leader of the world’s largest religious body.