Pope Francis, though a Jesuit, takes a Franciscan name, lives in Franciscan simplicity lacking only sandals and a cowl, chases cardinals who drive Mercedes-Benzes out of the temple, and goes alone to the island of Lampedusa to show solidarity with refugees fished out of the Mediterranean as though the draconian laws of the Italian state did not exist. Is he really the only person who can still be described as left wing by what he says and does? At first there were rumors about his excessive prudence toward Argentinean generals, and some recalled his opposition to liberation theologians, and that it wasn’t clear where he stood on abortion, on stem cells, on homosexuals, on whether a pope should go around doling out condoms to the poor. Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?
I think it’s a mistake to consider him an Argentinean Jesuit: he’s a Paraguayan Jesuit. It’s impossible for someone with his training not to have been influenced by the “holy experiment” of the Jesuits of Paraguay. What little people know about these Jesuits comes from the film The Mission, which condensed, with much license, a hundred and fifty years of history into two hours of entertainment.
In brief, the Spanish conquistadores had committed unspeakable massacres from Mexico to Peru, supported by clergy who claimed the Indios were bestial, orangutans to a man. Only one brave Dominican priest, Bartolomé de las Casas, was prepared to stand up against the cruelty of people like Cortés and Pizarro, showing the native people in quite another light. In the early seventeenth century the Jesuit missionaries decided to acknowledge the rights of the natives—particularly the Guaraní, who lived in very primitive conditions—and organized them into “reductions,” which were independent, self-supporting communities. The Jesuits didn’t round them up to make them work for the colonizers, but they taught them to look after themselves, free from slavery, sharing all the commodities they produced. The structure of the villages and the methods of this “communism” remind us of Thomas More’s Utopia or Tommaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun, and Benedetto Croce writes of “so-called Campanellian communism,” but the Jesuits were inspired more by early Christian communities. They set up elected councils consisting only of natives, though the fathers administered justice, and they taught their subjects architecture, agriculture and sheep farming, music and the arts, reading and writing, and sometimes produced talented artists and writers. The Jesuits had established a strict paternalistic regime, not least because civilizing the Guaraní meant rescuing them from promiscuity, indolence, ritual drunkenness, and sometimes cannibalism. And so, as with every ideal city, we are all ready to admire their organizational perfection, but we wouldn’t want to live there.
Their rejection of slavery and the attacks of the bandeirantes, or slave hunters, led to the setting up of a popular militia, which bravely fought against the slave traders and colonialists. In the course of the eighteenth century, the Jesuits, who were seen as troublemakers and dangerous enemies of the state, were first banished from Spain and Portugal and then suppressed, bringing an end to the “holy experiment.”
Many Enlightenment thinkers attacked this theocratic government as the most monstrous and tyrannical regime the world had ever seen. But others, such as Ludovico Muratori, spoke of “voluntary communism of high religious inspiration,” while Montesquieu said that the Company of Jesus had begun to heal the wound of slavery, Gabriel de Mably compared the reductions to the government of Lycurgus of Sparta, and Paul Lafargue would later speak of the “first socialist state ever.”
Before attempting to interpret Pope Francis’s actions, we should bear in mind that four centuries have passed and that the notion of democratic freedom is now shared even by Catholic hardliners. The pope doesn’t go to Lampedusa to carry out holy or secular experiments, and it would be for the best if he got rid of the Vatican Bank. But it’s no bad thing, every now and then, to see the glimmer of history in what is happening today.
2013