Javier Miley It is usually contradictory, but it is never so paradoxical as when it is noticed that there coexists a person with deep religious convictions and someone capable of insulting and humiliating his real or imaginary adversaries. He Pope Francisco Above all, he valued Milei’s religious training to leave some messages (or advice) to the Argentine president, more with gestures than with words.
It is likely that the head of the Catholic Church only received a sketch of Milei, but no one in Buenos Aires can ignore that the President is the same person as last Wednesday, after he ordered his omnibus law to be withdrawn from the debate in the Deputies. treated the governors already the deputies of “criminals”, “traitors” and “corrupts” among other corrosions of language never heard before in democratic life.
Five days before, the Argentine president had achieved 144 affirmative votes from those same legislators for the general approval of the law. It is true that in the particular debate many deputies left some articles of the law empty, but in the Chamber of Deputies There is a consensus that there were ample margins to continue negotiating. When Pope Bergoglio hugged Milei in public, he set before the President the example that someone religious must know how to forgive and, at the same time, must look not for dissidence, which always exists, but for coincidences.
Milei had given Bergoglio during the electoral campaign the worst insult that could be done to someone who is, according to Catholic doctrine, the vicar of Christ on earth. He said that Francis was “the representative of the evil one (the devil) on earth.” After the elections, the Pontiff himself pointed out that he never takes into account the things that are said during the electoral campaign. “They are words that come and go”, he pointed out to dismiss the offenses. Leaving aside the fanaticism of some religious sectors, which also exist, the truth is that the moral order established by religions is incompatible with verbal violence, wherever it comes from.
A little-known aspect of the Pope is his adherence to institutionality. “Respect for institutions is essential for the peaceful coexistence of societies. It is like an elemental axis for the equality of people”, he told this journalist several times. In fact, Francis never fired any of the many critics he has among conservatives in the Vatican and outside the Vatican; He simply preferred not to renew their appointments when they completed their term in office or accepted their resignation only when they reached the stipulated age for retirement.
The most emblematic case of the Pope’s patience is that of the Argentine cardinal Leonardo Sandri, who led a belligerent anti-Bergoglian wing in the Vatican when the current Pope was archbishop of Buenos Aires. They say that a conspiracy commanded by Sandri, in his times of vast power in the Vatican Curia during the last years of John Paul II, the intervention of the Buenos Aires archbishopric was proposed; If he had achieved that goal, Bergoglio would never have been Pope. It is only verifiable that Cardinal Sandri made a trip to Buenos Aires and met with the then president, Cristina Kirchner, when she was seriously in conflict with Bergoglio. However, Francis did not exact any revenge against Sandri when he was elected universal head of the Church. Sandri retained the position he had with Benedict XVI, prefect of the Congregation for the Eastern Churches, until his retirement, four years after reaching the statutory age of 75. His resignation was accepted in November 2022 when Sandri was already 79 years old.
The Pope’s gesture before Milei was also the way of putting into practice one of his favorite phrases: “Unity is more important than conflict” or, as he said in another report published in THE NATION, “I don’t like conflict.” The truth is that the Pontiff has been in Rome for almost 11 years, he will complete them next March, going through one prejudice after another in his divided country. He first charged with his supposed sympathy towards Kirchnerism. Nothing is more unfair than that qualification because he was, and can be corroborated in any newspaper archive, a persistent critic of the practices of the two Kirchner presidents.
Nestor Kirchner He even described him as “head of the opposition”; of his opposition, from now on. It happens that, once elected Pope, Cristina Kirchner she used and abused her status as head of state and asked Bergoglio for several interviews; She bordered on ridicule when she once traveled from Buenos Aires to New York, to attend the annual assembly of the United Nations, via Rome. “They threaten me with death because I am a friend of the Pope”was dispatched after that incredible meeting and long before they really attacked her.
Recently, Alberto Fernandez, now a former president who vacations in Madrid (or is preparing to settle in the Spanish capital – who knows -) asked the Pontiff for an interview in the name of nothing. Alberto Fernández reneged on a promise he made to the Pope when he saw him for the first time after being elected president: he told him that he would place his management under the advice of the head of the Catholic Church. When he returned to Buenos Aires, the then Kirchnerist president became an activist in the project that legalized abortion in the country. Bergoglio is a consistent and staunch critic of the practice of abortion. It’s not a secret to anyone. Or was only Alberto Fernández unaware of it?
The Pope became accustomed in his years in Rome to being used by Argentine politicians. The case of a politician who attended a Wednesday general audience in the St. Peter’s Square, greeted the Pope and then had the photo edited in such a way that it looked like a meeting inside the Vatican. Politics continues to use the Pontiff, such as the aforementioned case of Alberto Fernández, who never had a personal relationship with Bergoglio. The only contrary example that the Pope usually remembers is that of José Manuel de la Sota, now deceased, who once visited him with his wife and daughters. De la Sota never made that meeting transcend.
Another example that the Pope usually evokes, although it is not from politics, is that of the former judge Claudio Bonadio, who never broadcast his meetings with the Pope nor participated in the judges’ tours with seminars included in the Vatican. However, when Bergoglio learned that Bonadio had been seriously threatened with death, it was he himself who spread a long friendship with the Argentine magistrate. “He has been a friend of mine for 30 years.”, the Pope told this journalist; The Pontiff was evidently distressed by the threats the judge was receiving. Bonadio was then leading judicial investigations into the alleged corruption of the Kirchnerist governments.
A special case of misunderstanding and prejudice was Bergoglio’s relationship with the then president Mauricio Macri. The length of the audience is never a good thermometer of the quality of the meetings with the Pope. It depends on the verbose capacity of his interlocutor and also, of course, on the Pope’s desire to know the thoughts of the person in front of him. Comparing the time he dedicated to Milei with the time he gave to Macri is not a good measurement. Bergoglio knew Macri from the times when their offices were only 50 meters away, in the Plaza de Mayo. One was the archbishop of Buenos Aires; the other was the head of the capital government. They saw each other in reserved meetings or at public events.
On the other hand, the Pope had never seen Milei before, that character striking for his appearance and his speech. In the Macri years, in the Vatican offices and in the Argentine Church they always suspected that Macri leaders (or officials of the former president) were behind an intense operation of media erosion of the head of the Church. Macri always denied that this was true, although he came to accept that anti-papal sectors crossed paths with some of his followers by chance, not by political decision.. In a clear attempt to fix things, the Pope told this journalist in a formal report that was published in THE NATION: “I have no problem with Macri. I think he is a well-born person, a noble person.” That report was reproduced by the Vatican newspaper: The Osservatore Romano. However, shortly afterwards suspicions intensified in Catholic circles, both in Rome and in Buenos Aires. The then President Macri preferred not to insist on requests for meetings with the Pope, and perhaps that was his mistake.
The Pontiff sees in Milei, however, a leader who did not participate in the old social division between Kirchneristas and anti-Kirchneristas or between Macristas and anti-Macristas. For anyone who knows the Pope, Milei’s assertion, after the meeting with Bergoglio, that the head of the Church “was satisfied with the economic program and social containment,” was an excessive deduction. It is unlikely, if not impossible, that the Pontiff made such claims about a political program; Surely he just listened and wished the President luck.
There is one issue on which the two of them do agree: the mutual opposition to abortion. It can also be deduced that the Pontiff is paving the way for his visit to the country, announced for this year, although conditional on his physical condition, which can be summarized in a short paragraph: absolute mental lucidity and obvious bone discomfort. The Pope made the announcement of his intention to visit the country during the current year to this journalist in April 2023, long before any definition of the then incipient Argentine presidential race. The Pope’s desire to visit his country is almost tangible; Milei’s presence here, away from the old Argentine rift, makes it easier for him to fulfill that old and understandable desire.
In the homily he gave at the canonization of the first Argentine saint, Mother Antula, the Pope defined “intolerance, selfishness and indifference” as the “leprosy of the soul.” He was speaking to the world, not to Milei, but the Argentine president was among those attending the solemn mass. It was a day before Milei met with Bergoglio in the papal library. That is a synthetic, excessively brief compendium of the ideological corpus and set of principles of the Argentine Pope. Enough, however, if politics accepted that there is a friendlier way to coexist in public spaces.
Themes
Other news from Javier Milei
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The agreement with Milei. In Pro they aim to organize themselves, they talk about Macri as a national driver and they do not rule out Larreta’s slamming of the door
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And Harvard. Sturzenegger defended Milei’s reforms and assured: “You have to impoverish interest groups to beat them”
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