On Retreat with the Jesuit Pope

On Retreat with the Jesuit Pope Austen Ivereigh (bio) Somewhere between my two biographical books about Pope Francis I realized I'd written out a vital protagonist. When it came out, right at the start of the pontificate, The Great Reformer had a good title that has stood the test of time.1 But it risked falling into the Pelagian myth of the heroic leader. The missing character was grace. I didn't, of course, believe that Jorge Mario Bergoglio depended wholly or even mainly on his considerable strengths and astuteness as a leader. I also stressed his capacity for discernment, his austerity, and disciplined prayer life. But I didn't properly grasp how grace operated in his leadership until I met him at the Vatican for our first sit-down, in the midst of the sex abuse crisis, in June 2018. I tell the story at the start of the second book, Wounded Shepherd, which came out the following year. At our encounter Francis had, in the most gracious way possible, warned me against admiring him too much. He hadn't expected to be elected, hadn't come with a plan, and was managing the best he could in response to what he had found. Not only did he not have all the answers, he didn't even always have the questions clear. Later Fr Antonio Spadaro SJ told me he had asked the Pope if he thought of himself as a great reformer, and he had said no, he was trying to put Christ at the centre, and said the reforms would flow from there.2 What I came to realize was that humility for Francis wasn't only a style or personal virtue. It was his program for the Church. Humility is the key Ignatian virtue, because admitting our dependence on God allows us to come closest to Christ. Francis wasn't just operationally humble; he was educating the Church in humility. It was why his pontificate had such a firm purpose and direction. Because true renewal wasn't firstly about changing structures and rules but a conversion of the heart, a rearrangement of priorities. It means rejecting reliance on wealth, honour and power, and being purified from its ecclesiastical equivalents: from clericalism, culture wars and moralism. It meant being willing to suffer humiliation with Christ, for the sake of Christ–to follow his Way, his way. Later that year of 2018, watching Francis navigate the storms of the abuse crisis, charting a path through the hatred and accusations thrown at [End Page 90] him, I realized that he leads us just as a director guides retreatants through the Spiritual Exercises: opening us to the grace that converts us, while warning against the obstacles that prevent and the temptations that distract from that opening. I coined a phrase that caught on: he was 'humanity's spiritual director.' Even in its title Wounded Shepherd reflected that new awareness. It was what allowed me to understand what he did next, when COVID-19 threw the world into paralysis in March 2020. When the Pope addressed humanity from a dark, wet, empty St Peter's square, I saw him fill that spiritual director role that providence seemed to have cast him for. We are not alone, he told us. Right there, in the crisis, in the emergency we face, is where God's grace has forged a path for us–in the place of our powerlessness, out of our misery and need. A crisis is a time of illumination, re-evaluation and a fresh start. Be led by that grace, and we come out better; fall back in fear, and we build a dead end for ourselves. I wrote to him to suggest a short book explaining this, a retreat manual for humanity facing that choice, using a simple Latin-American, social-Catholic framework for conversion: to see, to choose, to act. It was based on the stages he said in Evangelii Gaudium we needed in response to the signs of the times: recognizing, interpreting, and choosing.3 When Let Us Dream came out late in 2020, it offered his 'path to a better future': he gave his own scrutiny...