Pope Francis in Context: Have the End Times Arrived in Buenos Aires? by E. Michael Jones

Author:E. Michael Jones
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw
Publisher: Fidelity Press
Published: 2017-06-11T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Intellectual Formation

Bergoglio began thinking about a vocation to the priesthood when he was 12 or 13, a time which coincided with the high noon of the first Peronist government. Perón’s failure to implement Catholic principle in any lasting way cast a shadow of doubt over Bergoglio’s mind at a crucial point in his intellectual development. If a charismatic leader like Perón couldn’t do it, who could? What Peronism had become in Bergoglio’s mind could be summarized by an incident he remembered from his student days. A parrot within earshot of the students kept repeating, “Viva Perón, carajo!” Long live Perón, dammit!

Bergoglio entered the Jesuit seminary in March 1956 at the age of 20. His formation there occurred a time of what he would later term intellectual decadence. “I studied philosophy from textbooks that came from decadent or largely bankrupt Thomism,” Pope Francis told Fr. Spadaro, S.J. in 2013 in a lengthy interview published in Jesuit journals throughout the world.[84] The vacuum created by the Jesuits abandonment of Thomism had been filled by the writings of the Jesuit anthropologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. According to Ivereigh:

Jacinto Luzzi gave classes on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit author of The Phenomenon of Man and The Divine Milieu, who was a forbidden theologian prior to the Council. Teilhard not only reconciled faith with the natural world and science but posited an optimistic, evolutionary, incarnate kind of thinking that was at odds with the neo-scholastic philosophy taught at the time.[85]

The monitum which had been placed on Teilhard de Chardin’s writings was still in effect when Bergoglio was in the seminary, but that did not deter the Jesuits from promoting the Jesuit anthropologist as the alternative to a bankrupt Thomism which no one believed in anymore. Once Teilhard’s writings became part of the de facto curriculum in Jesuit seminaries, the order converted to belief in an evolutionary modernism at war with any fixed position in terms of Catholic dogma.

After the Jesuits as a body became committed to Teilhardian modernism, the implementation of those theories varied according to location. In South America, the Jesuits’ commitment to Teilhardian modernism eventuated in their involvement in Marxist liberation theology and armed revolutionary struggle. In North America, the Jesuits migrated to the opposite pole in the Cold War struggle, when the Rev. John Courtney Murray, S.J. became a CIA asset in the agency’s attempt to subvert the Church’s teaching on Church and State. During the same period of time, the order as a whole become a vehicle for overturning the Church’s teaching on birth control. Eventually, the Jesuits were rewarded for their loyalty to the regime and willingness to subvert Church teaching when Georgetown was allowed to take its place beside Yale as a feeder school for the United States State Department.

Bergoglio’s intellectual formation took place in the intellectual no-man’s-land which existed between the collapse of Peronism and the beginning of the Second Vatican Council, which filled the intellectual vacuum which the intellectual defection of the Jesuits had left behind in Bergoglio’s mind.

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