BUENOS AIRES (AP) — Francisco passed away on Monday without having returned to his native Argentina since assuming the papacy in 2013, leaving many compatriots puzzled. The religious leader may have been avoiding getting caught up in the polarization that has dominated his country’s politics for years, the divisions generated around his figure, and the strained relationship he maintained in recent times with the far-right president Javier Milei, analysts and acquaintances of the religious leader point out.
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Jorge Bergoglio’s election as pope was celebrated in Argentina with a jubilation similar to winning a World Cup. However, the initial fervor gradually diminished over the years, confirming the famous expression that “no one is a prophet in their own land.”
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A report published in September 2024 by the Pew Research Center titled “How People in Latin America and the United States View Pope Francis”, based on surveys, found that attitudes towards the pope in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru were generally positive, although less so than a decade ago.
The biggest drop was recorded in Argentina: 10 years before the study, 91% of its inhabitants said they had a positive opinion of Francis, a percentage that dropped to 64%.
The fact that Bergoglio, born in Buenos Aires and a lover of tango and soccer, never set foot in his homeland after reaching the Vatican has also left Argentine Catholics sunk in frustration.
Lucía Vidal, a retired nurse who used to attend the masses led by Bergoglio when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires, told The Associated Press that it caused her “great pain” not to see him stepping on Argentinean soil. “I know of people who were here supporting him before he was named pope, and they are no longer in this world; they passed away with the desire to see him and receive his blessing in Argentina,” the woman stated.
Vidal pointed out that when John Paul II was named pope in 1978, with all the problems that were happening, the first thing he did was go to Poland, his homeland, less than a year later. “I mean, why didn’t Bergoglio do that? Because of politics! He went to Brazil, Peru, Chile; he passed over us and wasn’t able to come here... that hurts me a lot,” lamented the church member.
For analysts and people with close information from the Vatican, the pope avoided returning to his homeland to not be dragged into the political polarization that has divided the Argentinians in the last two decades.
One of the deepest divides was the one that pitted “Kirchnerism” - the center-leftist current of Peronism - against its detractors during much of Pope Francis’s papacy, as noted by Sergio Berensztein, PhD in Political Science from the University of North Carolina and director of the consulting firm Berensztein.
Critics have labeled him as a “Peronist pope”
Bergoglio, who was pointed out by conservative sectors in his country as a Peronist, felt that anything he said or did in relation to both sides would be a reason for conflict, indicated the analyst.
The speech of the religious leader against exclusion and an “economic system that continues to discard lives” was read as an endorsement of the movement founded by the three-time president Juan Domingo Perón, which advocates for social justice.
According to Berensztein, those conservative sectors in politics and within the Argentine Catholic Church “failed to understand the change in attitude” of Bergoglio when, shortly after being appointed pope, he approached the then president of Argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007-2015), in contrast to the cold relationship he had previously maintained with her and her husband, President Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007).
The then Archbishop of Buenos Aires and president of the Argentine Episcopal Conference criticized from the pulpit of the capital cathedral the autocratic tendencies of the political class, words that the Kirchners interpreted as a direct attack.
The Pope was definitively caught in the political rift when a photograph showed him with a stern expression during an audience held in 2016 at the Vatican alongside President Mauricio Macri, the successor of Fernández. His furrowed brow was interpreted as a sign of his displeasure with the conservative leader and his austerity policies, as well as his sympathy for the Peronist leader.
Francisco clarified in interviews for the book “El pastor,” by journalists Sergio Rubin and Francesca Ambrogetti, that he was never a militant or sympathizer of Peronism, although he added that “in the hypothesis of having a Peronist conception of politics, what would be wrong with that?”
Rubin, an expert in religion, questioned the fact that the pope has even been seen as a Kirchner supporter, which is absurd because Kirchner supporters accused him of being complicit with the military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983.