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The Political Theology of Pope
Francis

This book explores the political dimension of Pope Francis’ theology from
a variety of perspectives and makes a unique contribution to the ongoing
historiography of his pontificate. It defines the concept of political theology
when applied to Pope Francis’ discourse and reflects on the portrayal of him
as the voice of Latin America, a great reformer and a revolutionary. The
chapters offer a thorough investigation of core texts and key moments in Pope
Francis’ papacy (2013–), focusing in particular on their relation to canon
theory, liberation theology, the rise of populism, and gender issues. As well
as documenting some of the continuities between the ideas of Pope Francis
and his predecessor Benedict XVI, the author asks what the Argentinian
pontiff has brought from Latin America and considers the Latin American
dimension to what has become known as the ‘Francis effect’. Overall, the
book demonstrates how the Pope’s words and actions constitute a powerful
political theology disseminated from a unique religious and institutional
position. It will be of interest to scholars of theology, religion, and politics,
particularly those with a focus on world Catholicism, political theology,
and church history.

Ole Jakob Løland is an associate professor of religion, worldviews, and

ethics at the University of South-Eastern Norway.
Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology
and Biblical Studies

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Religion and Intersex

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African Churches Ministering ‘to and with’ Persons with Disabilities

Perspectives from Zimbabwe
Nomatter Sande

The Fathers on the Bible

Edited by Nicu Dumitraşcu

The Theological Imperative to Authenticity

Christy M. Capper

The Political Theology of Pope Francis

Understanding the Latin American Pope
Ole Jakob Løland

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

religion/series/RCRITREL
The Political Theology
of Pope Francis
Understanding the Latin American
Pope

Ole Jakob Løland

First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2023 Ole Jakob Løland
The right of Ole Jakob Løland to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-032-38727-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-39288-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-34909-9 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003349099
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents

Acknowledgementsvi

1 Introduction 1

2 The canonical ecology of Pope Francis – a comparison

with Benedict XVI 22

3 Pope Francis and liberation theology – a conflict

solved39

4 Pope Francis and populism – resemblances

and differences 69

5 The eternal feminine in the Catholic church – a gender

perspective on Pope Francis 92

6 The non-historical Jesus of Pope Francis’ political

theology107

Conclusion 134

Index138
Acknowledgements

This book is a product of my research as a postdoctoral fellow at the Uni-

versity of Oslo, but it is also a result of decades of studies of Latin American
Christianity – which I have undertaken both in Latin America and at a long
distance. As a young theology student, I sought traces and concrete expres-
sions of the Theology of Liberation movement in slums and poor neigh-
bourhoods in countries such as Argentina, Paraguay, Mexico, El Salvador,
Costa Rica, Bolivia, and Brazil. During these years, I learned a lot about the
contextual nature of theology from my excellent Jesuit teachers in El Salva-
dor and Brazil, as well as from outstanding lecturers in indigenous theology
in the Andean context of La Paz, Bolivia.
In my youth I had the privilege of getting to know the liberation theo-
logian Lidio Dominguez (1936–2012), who had lived in my hometown as
a refugee, escaping from the brutal human rights violations of the military
regime in Argentina (1976–83). This friendship led me to write a biography
in Norwegian about the spectacular life story of Dominguez, who served as
secretary to Bishop Jerónimo Podestá at the Second Vatican Council, was
a co-founder of the Christian Agrarian Leagues in Paraguay, committed
himself to the Montoneros guerilla movement in Argentina, and thereaf-
ter worked as an advisor to Pope John Paul II. When Jorge Mario Ber-
goglio (1936–) was elected pope in 2013, I knew that I had studied the
life of a Catholic theologian (Dominguez) of exactly the same age as the
newly elected pope. Both had lived most of their lives in the same ecclesial
and political context of Buenos Aires during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s,
before the military regime forced one of them into exile. And it is telling
that one of them could safely remain in the Argentinean metropolis. What
is more, when I realized that Dominguez had collaborated with the two
Jesuits whom the current Pope was accused of handing over to the military
regime in Argentina, I understood that, by coincidence, I had studied Ber-
goglio’s social and religious context for several years. I thank the board of
the Faculty of Theology for offering me the position as postdoctoral fellow
to continue my studies of recent forms and expressions of Latin American
Christianity and more specifically of Argentinean Catholicism.
 Acknowledgements vii
Many colleagues deserve to be thanked for having shared their knowledge
over the years, having discussed with me, for sometimes having posed chal-
lenges through disagreements and not least for having inspired me through
their passionate interest in various forms of contemporary Christianity and
its multiple forms of theology: Rafael Ruiz Andrés, Ragnar Misje Bergem,
Maren Christensen Bjune, Einar Braathen, Benedicte Bull, Maria Soledad
Catoggio, James Crossley, Enrique Dussel, Massimo Faggioli, Virginia Gar-
rard, Vebjørn Horsfjord, Werner Jeanrond, Marianne Bjelland Kartzow, Yuri
Kasahara, Sven Thore Kloster, Gina Lende, Fortunato Mallimaci, Enrique
Santos Marinas, Marco Marzano, Geraldo di Mori, Halvor Moxnes, Afonso
Murad, Brynjulv Norheim, Pablo Richard, Nilo Ribeiro Junior, Carlos Pala-
cio, Gregory M. Reichberg, Pedro Rubens, Knut W. Ruyter, Riccardo Sac-
centi, Rafael de Sivatte, Jon Sobrino, Roberto di Stefano, Terje Stordalen,
Sturla Stålsett, Juan Jacob Tancara, Jakob Egeris Thorsen, Javier Fernández
Vallina, Jaldemir Vitorio, Georg Wink, Margit Ystanes, José Zanca, and
Rodrigo Zaragaza. That said, I am, of course, responsible for this work in
its entirety, with all its hypotheses and conclusions.
In addition to stimulating conversations, it was also crucial for this
research project to get help with reference tools, translations, proofreading,
and library services. All the kind help from Patricia Battig, Irene Elordi,
Pablo Etchebehere, Mario Iribarren, Lars E. Lørdahl, and Daniel Miño is
very much appreciated. In particular, it has been a privilege to cooperate
with translator Brian McNeil due to his expertise on Catholicism and his
remarkable efficiency. I am also grateful to Tarjei Solvang Tjønn for setting
up a little database with excellent search possibilities in the corpus of Pope
Francis’ speeches and writings.
An earlier version of chapter 3 appeared in the journal International Jour-
nal of Latin Americans Religions (Springer), and chapter 5 was published in
its entirety in the Norwegian journal Kirke og kultur (Scandinavian Univer-
sity Press – Universitetsforlaget). This article, originally written in Norwe-
gian, was translated by Brian McNeil and appears here for the first time in
English. These materials appear here with the permission of the publishers
of these journals.
Ole Jakob Løland
1 Introduction

In 2013, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected as the first Latin American Pope
in history. It was, in a certain sense, not before time. Latin America had
for a long time been the heartland of Global Catholicism. Although the
­Catholic church during the last decades had lost a considerable percent-
age of its members to charismatic Protestant movements in every Latin
­American country, Latin America still remained the most Catholic region
in the world. Due to demographic changes and high numbers of Europeans
and North Americans being raised Catholic and then actively disaffiliated
with the church, the centre of gravity in Catholicism had shifted even more
to Latin America and to the rest of the so-called Third World. With an
Argentinean pope, the world’s largest religious organization was for the first
time to be governed by a representative of the Global South. What differ-
ence might this make?
At the very least, the election of Bergoglio had an immediate impact in the
public perception of the head of the Catholic church, and this was to influ-
ence the mediatized image and public credibility of global Catholicism in
the years to come. As the newly elected Roman Pontiff, Bergoglio presented
himself as a humble person from “the end of the world” and chose the name
Francis while paying homage to and seeking support in the figure of Saint
Francis of Assisi. As the first non-European pope in centuries and with the
saintly name of Francis, Bergoglio could effectively build his charisma on
his Latin American otherness.1 What was perceived by many as the Latin
American foreignness in the figure of a new pope appeared to strengthen the
radical sense of a new beginning for an old institution set in scene with the
fresh style and the hitherto unprecedented acts of Bergoglio. With symbolic
deeds such as refusing to live in the papal palace, insisting on carrying his
own briefcase on papal journeys, or washing the feet of a Muslim woman
among Rome’s prisoners, Bergoglio energized the mediatized image of an
entirely different pope that the reports in the media confirmed repeatedly.
Less attentive to theology and more inclined to expressions of the religiosity
that could be visualized and thereafter commented upon in dramatic terms,
the media cultivated this idea of a radically new pope with a coverage of the
modern papacy that had not been observed for decades. According to the
DOI: 10.4324/9781003349099-1
2 Introduction
Pew Research Center, there was less talk in the media about Pope Benedict
XVI in his eight years than about Pope Francis in his first year (Martín 2017,
175). What is more, the unprecedented act of Benedict XVI’s abdication, by
many interpreted against the background of the various scandals surround-
ing the institutional centre of global Catholicism, enforced the sense inside
and outside the church that with a new Roman pontiff something drastic
had to happen. After all, the reports of sexual abuse in the church continued
to shock the public.2 And the financial scandals had also erupted and left
the Vatican under Benedict XVI in public disgrace. All this gave rise to huge
expectations of what was to come in the governance of the Catholic church
under Pope Francis. One of the first biographies published in English of the
present Pope was entitled The Great Reformer (Ivereigh 2014). This picture
of the Argentinian as a reformer also became an icon for Western popular
culture, thanks to the front cover of the magazine Rolling Stone in 2014,
which depicted Pope Francis with a headline taken from Bob Dylan’s song:
“The times they are-a changin’ ”. The magazine described the pontificate
of the Latin American as nothing less than a “revolution” (Rolling Stone
2014). Marco Politi’s (2015) book on Pope Francis bore the subtitle “The
Inside Story of a Revolution”. “Revolution” was on many lips and in a lot
of headlines. Was it all a well-orchestrated simulacrum of a true revolution,
or did the headlines reflect a real turnaround of structures, hierarchies, and
power?
On a general level, some patterns under Bergoglio’s governance of the
Catholic church can be discerned. After Pope Francis’ nearly decade-long
pontificate, certain lasting tendencies and long-term developments can be
distilled in spite of the tabloid headlines and turmoil surrounding the papacy
that now carries a Latin American face. Evaluated in retrospect, it is clearer
how Pope Francis’ decisions were implemented and his messages received in
a global context marked by an unexpected wave of rightist populism with
a forceful anti-immigration agenda and the neglect or outsight denial of the
deteriorating effects of climate change. These new agendas of the radical
right went hand in hand, however, with positions on issues such as abortion
and gender in line with the Catholic church.3 What is more, they were partly
results of a cultural war of which Christian identities and Catholic positions
already formed an integral part. And within the prevailing logic of these
culture wars, the Catholic vote in a country like the United States was, to a
considerable extent, reduced to a single-issue vote centred on the question
of abortion (Millies 2018).
With a significant support from Catholics, Donald Trump was elected
president in the United States, where the Catholic church continued to be
the church with the highest number of members and the largest institutional
presence. In the country on earth with the highest number of Catholics, Jair
Bolsonaro, with a rhetoric and programme in many ways similar to Trump’s,
was embraced by a majority of the Brazilian voters. Approximately half of
the Catholic population in Brazil reported that they intended to vote for
 Introduction 3
Bolsonaro (Datafolha 2018). Two of the three countries in the world with the
biggest Catholic populations (Pew Research Center 2013) opted for author-
itarian populists who promised restrictive policies on reproductive rights
for women and openly denounced and disrespected the separation of pow-
ers that lay at the heart of modern democracies. As the flow of migrants to
Europe’s border and Trump’s rhetoric on building a wall on the US-Mexican
border occupied the global media’s attention, Pope Francis’ message of
neighbourly love towards migrants stood out as a fresh contrast to power-
ful regimes and leaders within this new political conjuncture.
Pope Francis’ accentuation of a broader spectre of an already-established
Catholic social teaching effectively tempered some of the logic of the culture
wars to which many Catholic authorities in several countries had commit-
ted themselves. When Pope Francis stated in an interview with his collabo-
rator Antonio Spadaro in August 2013 that “[w]e cannot insist only on
issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive meth-
ods” (Spadaro 2013), the Argentinian signalled a significant shift in pasto-
ral focus, but not in the content of theology or papal teaching. Although
abortions, considered as murders, were taking place in modern hospitals
throughout the world, Pope Francis chose the island of Lampedusa as the
destination for his first official visit outside Rome after his election. In the
years to come, the Pope would sometimes add places associated with social
exclusion and human suffering to his list of destinations on his official visits,
for instance when he chose to approach the wall on the West Bank in Pal-
estine or Tijuana on the US-Mexican border. At Lampedusa in 2013, he set
the tone for his preaching as Pope by concretely speaking about the boats
on the sea outside the island as “vehicles of death”, by denouncing what he
deemed “a globalization of indifference” towards the suffering and deaths
of migrants.
But Pope Francis not only accentuated the papal teaching established
by his predecessors, he also moved this papal tradition in new directions
theologically. In his first apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium from
2013, Francis placed the materially poor at the centre of his theology, and
in his first encyclical Laudato Si from 2015 he made the care for our natu-
ral environment in light of a climate change caused by human technocracy
into a Christian plight. This encyclical was historic for being the first such
papal text to recognize the fact of global climate change. His 2020 encycli-
cal Fratelli Tutti summed up and communicated the social teaching of the
Pope’s previous messages in a more accessible way to a public that was not
limited only to Catholics. And significantly, in this encyclical the pope reit-
erated his admiration for Saint Francis of Assisi by pointing to the medieval
saint’s efforts of peace and dialogue with the non-Christian world when he
travelled to meet the Egyptian Sultan Malik-el-Kamil. In the previous year,
Pope Francis had travelled to the Arabian Peninsula as the first pope in
history, where he made a controversial declaration about the divine origin
of religious pluralism in a joint declaration with Ahmed el-Tayeb, Grand
4 Introduction
Imam of al-Azhar. To proclaim that “[t]he pluralism and the diversity of
religions, colour, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom”
(Francis and Al-Tayyeb 2019) goes beyond previous papal statements on
interreligious relations or theology of religions. Moreover, it also takes a
step further than the Vatican II document Nostra Aetate, the Declaration
on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions. Through a new
accentuation of established Catholic teaching and some new steps in the
theology of the magisterium, the Pope broadened what the public could
perceive as the papal agenda. The pontiff’s new emphasis could potentially
halt, for instance, Catholics’ support for anti-immigration rhetoric based on
Islamophobic attitudes or the Catholic embrace of policies with deteriorat-
ing ecological effects over the globe.
The church historian Massimo Faggioli has succinctly formulated as fol-
lows the modern political role of the Catholic church: “The loss of temporal
power due to the extinction of the Papal States and the secularization of the
Western world, the historical cradle of Christianity, have given birth to an
internationally and diplomatically more active papacy” (Faggioli 2020, 65).
By accentuating social concerns of the church through such successful medi-
atizations, Pope Francis was capitalizing on this new profile of the papacy.
This moral capital could then be turned into effective currency for the facili-
tation of new political initiatives, such as the establishing of diplomatic ties
between the Obama administration in the United States and the Castro-led
Communist regime in Cuba in 2015 or negotiations in late 2016 between
the opposition and the authoritarian Maduro government in Venezuela. In
this last case, the crucial role of the Catholic church became visible in the
condition put forward by the opposition, that without the Vatican there
would be no talks with Maduro’s representatives. This shows that the theol-
ogy behind the political actions of the Vatican is a powerful one, although,
after the loss of the papal states, it is built on a unique soft power or moral
capital. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to discern the changes in
this political theology under a new Pope. And this makes the discipline of
theology very valuable in the work of critical academic analysis.

Political theology
The social doctrine of the Catholic church is another name for political the-
ology. Since the so-called “social question” was set on the Catholic agenda
at the end of the nineteenth century, the social doctrine of the church has
denoted the Catholic vision of how modern societies should be governed
in accordance with Catholic tradition as heralded by the Roman pontiff,
and therefore ultimately according to the Catholic discernment of the divine
will. First, it seeks to guide the involvement of Catholic agents, movements,
and parties in the social and political sphere. Second, the doctrine as articu-
lated by the social teaching of the pope entails a vision of the entire soci-
ety should be organized. From the time when Pope Leo XII initiated the
 Introduction 5
tradition of social reform from a Catholic perspective, therefore, this social
doctrine cannot be separated from a political theology that analyses and
prescribes the governance of the polis on the basis of interpretations of the
divine will for the world.4
The words and actions of a pope in the Catholic church constitute a
powerful political theology disseminated from a unique religious and insti-
tutional position. The Catholic church is by far the largest religious organi-
zation in the world, and its social doctrine has political implications that
depend on how it is understood and articulated, and not least on the inter-
pretative position of a pope. For the sake of the argument, political theology
is not defined here in the Schmittian sense of the category,5 but rather in the
broader sense that includes a wide array of uses of theology in a kind of
politics that cannot be reduced to partisan politics and democracies nor to
the exercise of power in authoritarian states (Vries 2006).
Religion is often used in everyday language to denote something that is
sharply distinct from politics. The appearance in politics of what scholars
conventionally classify as religious narratives, metaphors, and symbols
may question our basic assumptions of what counts as religion in the first
place.6 Given that definitions of religion are themselves products of histori-
cal processes and that there is little consensus among scholars of religion
about how to define it, definitions of religion become working hypotheses
that we employ for analytical purposes.7 Rather than conceiving of religion
and politics as isolated spheres that at some points intersect, we should
a priori expect the papacy and the Catholic church, with high levels of mem-
bership and institutional outreach and therefore importance for everyday
socialization in many nations, to have political dimensions. This implies
that we consider politics in a broader sense than the conventional view of it
as the presence and impact of states and public institutions, but should also
recognize the politics expressed in practices or institutions that are com-
monly seen as religious (Levine 2012, 8–11). At the heart of politics in a
liberal democracy is, of course, winning elections and thereby reshaping
non-material (cultural) or material structures in society, by the distribution
of material resources to a population. Nevertheless, the decisions about how
to distribute these resources are always products of cultural processes that
privilege certain symbolic goods or moral norms over and at the cost of oth-
ers. Notions such as the destiny of the people, the virtue of the nation, or the
will of God cannot be empirically verified, but can nonetheless shape politi-
cal attitudes. In the allocation of immaterial resources or supra-empirical
goods, religion and politics overlap and compete.
Accordingly, any utterance or action taken by the pope with political
dimensions or implications in the broad sense can be considered an expres-
sion of his political theology. Pope Francis’ political theology is, of course,
grounded in Catholic ideas and practices, but political theology is not a phe-
nomenon that can be delimited to Catholicism or Christianity. It is, rather,
the set of ideas that motivates religious actors from different confessions and
6 Introduction
traditions in politics (Toft, Philpott and Shah 2011, 26–31). Political theol-
ogy stands behind politicized and political religion. Of course, political the-
ology is not unscathed or unaffected by political events and ideologies. Ideas
do not operate in social and cultural vacuums. Hence, in this monograph,
Pope Francis’ political theology will be politically situated and historically
contextualized. Nevertheless, there are theological ideas and reasons that
are cultivated more independently of shifting political circumstances. There
are certain theological principles behind actions with political ramifications
that are discernable over time, for instance in the case of the late-modern
papacy of the Catholic church.
This means that this book is primarily focused on the external orienta-
tion of Pope Francis’ deeds and actions, those that affect the political world
outside the strictly religious and institutional sphere of the church. But as
will be made clear regarding such a question as gender, the internal govern-
ance of the church and the vision of how societies should be governed from
a papal point of view cannot be entirely kept apart from each other. Pope
Francis’ opposition to the priestly ordination of women leads him to envi-
sion social roles for women more broadly, and vice versa. Given this inter-
dependence, a study of Pope Francis’ political theology must also pay some
attention to his key decisions in the running of the church. And if we are to
believe an analyst of Pope Francis’ pontificate, the importance of the Pope’s
decisions for matters of the church has not been reduced: “Francis has re-
signified and reinterpreted the power in and of papal Rome, but he has not
renounced or diminished the role of Rome” (Faggioli 2020, 66).

Pope Francis – from Buenos Aires to Rome

Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born in Buenos Aires in Argentina on 17 Decem-
ber 1936. He was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest on 13 December
1969 and lived for most of his life in the Argentinean metropolis. Bergoglio
was named Provincial Superior of the Society of Jesus in Argentina on 31
July 1973. He assumed this influential ecclesial position at a dramatic and
turbulent time in the modern history of Argentina and of the Argentinean
Catholic church (Løland 2018). Argentinean Catholicism seems to be a the-
ological and political battleground that partly reflects the national political
conflict that to a high degree revolves around the future of Peronism. The
Movement of Priests for the Third World is one of the uniquely Argen-
tinean expressions of a regional radicalization of Catholicism that also
makes visible the division of the clergy and the generational tensions that
reach the church and threaten the traditional authorities in this institution.
These new movements, conflicts, and confrontations are also symptoms
of social processes in which the Catholic church in Argentina is losing its
religious monopoly and the authority of its formal leadership is in decline,
as Catholicism is diversifying; this too is a signal of various secularization
processes.8
 Introduction 7
When Bergoglio is named the Provincial Superior of the Jesuits in the
order on a national level in the South American country at the relatively
young age of 36, the conclusions of the Second Vatican Council are to be
implemented. But the battle over their implementation only seems to accel-
erate the changes and deepen the division within the church. In this battle,
the young Bergoglio stands out as a traditionalist who is eager to call young
novices and the rest of the Company to resist many of the new ideas, hab-
its, and changes (Klaiber 2009, 299), for instance the Decree Four about
the “promotion of justice” from the General Congregation of the Jesuits
1974–75.9 And it is important to note that the Catholic church in Latin
America sets out to implement the Second Vatican Council and its adop-
tion of human rights and freedom of religion in midst of the rise of political
authoritarianism and evangelical Protestantism. On a national level, politi-
cal polarizations become reflected in a deeply divided Church until the so-
called Dirty War in Argentina. This national tragedy cast shadows over the
national church in South America, which, more than any other national
Catholic church in the region, symbolizes the failure of speaking out against
human rights violations during the Cold War. Bergoglio acts as a typical
herald of the ecclesial institution during the military regime (1976–83) and
represents the strategy taken by most Catholic leaders in Argentina during
these brutal years marked by state terror and political violence. Bergoglio
is wary of speaking out publicly against the regime. He neither explicitly
embraces the military regime as antisecular protector of Christian civiliza-
tion nor joins forces with the minority of church leaders and bishops who
commit themselves to the human rights struggle as an inherent dimension
of the praxis of their Catholic faith.10 While Bishop Desmond Tutu became
the great symbol of the truth commission after apartheid in South Africa,
the leader of the work for a comparable truth commission in Argentina
after the rule of the military regime in Argentina was Ernesto Sabato – not a
bishop, but a writer and an atheist (Morello 2017, 246). And unlike Catho-
lic churches in other Latin American countries, neither any major dioceses
nor the episcopal conference in the Argentinean church created mechanisms
for documenting human rights violations or for protecting victims of torture
and political persecution (Morello 2014, 24).
Bishop Antonio Quarracino comes to symbolize the unwillingness of
the Catholic church to bring those responsible for the state terror and the
political violence to justice in the sense of holding them legally account-
able (Marina Franco 2018, 207–8). In 1983, Quarracino declared that there
should instead be a “law of oblivion” (ley del olvido) (Robben 2018, 204).
Given that the church plays an influential public role in the era of the return
of democracy and freedom of expression to Argentina from 1983 onwards,
there is a striking absence of any explicit concern about these matters in the
few writings that Jorge Mario Bergoglio has left us from the 1980s and in
his homilies of the 2000s as archbishop.11 Quarracino plays a key role in
the nomination process of Bergoglio in 1992 as auxiliary bishop of Buenos
8 Introduction
Aires (an appointment that surprised many), and then in 1997 as his coadju-
tor with the right to succeed him as Archbishop of Buenos Aires. Bergoglio
takes over in the following year (Esquivel 2004, 229). But when, as arch-
bishop, he is confronted by these realities in 2010, he does not replicate
Quarracino’s position. When pressured to take a stand, he calls for a rec-
onciliation that also involves juridical prosecution (Rubín and Ambrogetti
2013, 135–46). Bergoglio’s politics of memory differed from Quarracino’s,
but that was long after the decisive debates of the 1980s and 1990s had
taken place. The Argentinean sociologist Fortunato Mallmaci has pointed
out that Bergoglio as a bishop was careful to avoid controversies in the pub-
lic square (Mallimaci 2015, 235). Even as Archbishop in a country heading
for recognition of same-sex marriage Bergoglio held a low public profile
(Larraquy 2013, 219–28).12
When the conclave in 2013 elected Bergoglio as the new Pope, they
selected a representative from a national Catholic church that between 1976
and 2012 never accompanied in public human rights organizations in their
demand for truth and justice for the victims and the crimes committed under
the rule of the military junta from 1976 to 1983 (Mallimaci 2015, 204). But
the fact that the Pope was Latin American may have been a more impor-
tant factor in the election than his national identity. The election may have
reflected a strategy to regain religious territory in a region where Catholi-
cism lost ground to Evangelical Protestantism, particularly in its Pentecostal
forms, but was also weakened by secularization processes in some South
American countries. Perhaps a Latin American pope would mean a Catholic
renaissance in this part of the world?
In constitutional terms, the Pope’s home country has remained one of
the least secularized countries in Latin America. Arguably, only Costa Rica
has a constitutional regulation of religion that provides greater privileges
to the Catholic church than Argentina.13 Article 2 in the Argentinean con-
stitution about state-church relations has remained unchanged since 1853.
It says: “The Federal Government supports the Roman Catholic Apostolic
religion”.14 Sociologically, in terms of reported beliefs, attitudes, and reli-
gious practice, Argentina is one of the most secularized countries in the
region. First, some research concludes that in no other country in the region
are the people so sceptical towards religious leaders’ influence on national
politics as in Argentina.15 In this sense, the Argentinian people can be said
to be marked by a modern mentality that calls for a clearer differentiation
between the religious and the political spheres; this is an essential aspect
of secularization. Second, if Catholic leaders in Argentina had hoped for
something comparable to the Catholic renaissance that was witnessed in
Poland after the election of Karol Wojtyla in 1978, they were indeed dis-
appointed after the ascent of their fellow countryman to papal power in
2013. In Argentina, Catholicism has been in decline during the years that
the Catholic church worldwide has been governed by an Argentinian. From
2009 to 2018, the proportion of Catholics in the Argentinean population
 Introduction 9
sank from 76.5 to 62.9%. As an interesting indication of secularization
processes in the country, the proportion who said that they had no religion
rose to nearly 20% (Mallimaci et al. 2019).
Third, the elevation of Jorge Mario Bergoglio to the highest rank in the
Catholic church does not seem to have made people in Argentina more
confident and respectful of his religious authority when the question of
abortion is considered. Five years into Pope Francis’ pontificate, the public
support for a proposal to legalize abortion took the church by surprise.
And in 2019, Alfredo Fernández won the presidential election with clear
promises of advancing the issue of softening the law and its penal legislation
against women who had abortions. The legislation had been in place from
1921. Although Pope Francis made harsh statements on the matter from
2018 onwards and his local bishops in Argentina employed their full moral
weight to stop the legalization, the government’s proposal of legal abor-
tion up to the twelfth week in pregnancy passed the two chambers of Con-
gress in December 2020. It was a major theopolitical defeat of Pope Francis
and his national church since this made Argentina the first large country in
Latin America to legalize abortion. What is more, the success of the Argen-
tinean mobilization against the will of Catholic authorities could also have
a regional ripple effect. This was an indication of the weakened position of
the moral authority of the Catholic church, particularly among the younger
generations. This change was another sign that the conclave’s choice would
not result in a renewal and flourishing of Catholic religious life in a country
like Argentina. When we add to the picture the protests in Chile during Pope
Francis’ visit in 2018 in light of the sexual abuse scandals, together with the
active disaffiliation of so many Catholics in the country,16 we get a sense of
the accelerating secularization on the Southern Cone that Pope Francis has
not been able to reverse.17
That said, the rest of Pope Francis’ region has over the last decades been
more characterized by vibrant religiosities than by the secularization per-
ceived on the Southern Cone. And it is interesting to note that the competi-
tion in this religious market, where the Catholic church no longer enjoys
a monopoly, seems to have mobilized Catholics in areas where the rise
of Charismatic Protestantism has been most clearly felt (Stark and Smith
2012). The vitality of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal and the high levels
of church attendance in Catholic churches in Latin America is a strong man-
ifestation of this. The missionary language and pastoral programme formu-
lated under Bergoglio’s leadership at the CELAM meeting in Aparecida in
2007 and further articulated in Pope Francis’ first apostolic exhortation,
Evangelii Gaudium, seem to be influenced by this rise of Protestant Pen-
tecostalism and the Charismatic turn within Catholicism in Latin America
(Thorsen 2015). As I have already pointed out, Pope Francis has gained
an extraordinary amount of publicity in secular media in the West. If the
conclave in 2013 intended to promote to the highest rank of the church a
cardinal who was familiar with the vibrant religious life that marks many
10 Introduction
Latin American countries and the secularization that leads people either
to distance themselves from the church or to lose interest in it, the Met-
ropolitan Archbishop from Buenos Aires from 1998 onwards was a wise
choice. As an Argentinian, Bergoglio appears to communicate well both in
the European sphere and in the Latin American sphere.
The Argentinian social anthropologist Eloísa Martín has pointed out that
the smiling Pope who has been interpreted as a sign that big changes are on
their way in the Catholic church has little to do with the man whom the
Argentinians knew as Jorge Mario Bergoglio until he was elected Pope in
2013. Ernst Kantorowicz described the two bodies of medieval kings, one
natural and one political; today, the mass-medialization of Pope Francis
has, in Martín’s opinion, created a third body: the virtual body. This third
body mixes the natural body (Bergoglio) with the political body in ways that
strengthen the power of this pontificate. The Pope of mass-medialization
keeps on breaking the Vatican’s protocols and displays his popular warmth
in drawing near to the laity (E. Martín 2017). But there is more to this dis-
continuity between Bergoglio and Pope Francis than the mass-medialization.
For an analysis that primarily focuses on papal messages as texts, it is also
important to bear in mind the collective nature of their authorship. A pope
has a much larger bureaucracy to serve his interests and major resources
to engage intellectual experts to inform and co-write texts. Pope Francis is
to some extent open about this. He makes it clear in an interview that he
did not write the whole encyclical Laudato Si, but that he merely gave his
style to the content provided by scientists, theologians, and philosophers
(Reyes Alcaide 2017, 93). Since there is no full transparency of this edito-
rial processes, we cannot know what comes from co-authors and what can
be traced back to the Pope himself. We do not know where the work of
collaborators begins and the revisions of Jorge Mario Bergoglio end. As
Pope, however, Bergoglio will always have the final word. But Pope Francis
cannot be reduced to Bergoglio. Pope Francis is a wider and more complex
phenomenon than Archbishop Bergoglio.18
The Second Vatican Council affirmed: “For the Roman Pontiff, by rea-
son of his office as Vicar of Christ and as pastor of the entire church, has
full, supreme and universal power over the whole Church, a power he can
always exercise freely” (Lumen Gentium, no. 22). Pope Francis is sovereign.
Although there are checks and balances in the form of collaborators and
consultants in the Vatican, in the end, he and only he decides the content
of the papal texts. This is not new, but the conditions in which the Pope
decides are now considerably different than under his predecessors. After
having taken the initiative to gather bishops at one extraordinary synod in
2014 and one ordinary in 2015 with the family as the theme, Pope Francis
published in 2016 the post-synodal apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia.
Through the synodal process he had met considerable resistance to his pas-
toral view on the need to open the reception of communion to divorced and
remarried Catholics (see AL, no. 242). This made the internal opposition
 Introduction 11
in the church to Pope Francis’ pontificate more visible than before. And
when a prominent Vatican diplomat, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò,
called in a public letter in 2018 for Pope Francis’ resignation, Viganò met
support among some high-ranking officials in the church, including cardi-
nals (O’Connell 2018). This was unprecedented in the recent history of the
papacy. What was new was arguably not so much the existence of an inter-
nal opposition to a pope, but the public visibility of this opposition and the
explicit demand for the pope’s resignation. It was as if after Pope Benedict
XVI’s abdication it made sense to call for a pope’s renunciation of his sover-
eign position and for a new vote by the college of cardinals. If this was not
enough, Pope Francis also had to cope with the existence of a pope emeri-
tus. Pope Benedict XVI had generally withdrawn from public and did not
challenge Pope Francis’ public role as the supreme voice of the institution
of the papacy. But at a time that the Catholic church globally was under an
unprecedented amount of public pressure on the topic of sexual abuse in
the church, Pope Benedict XVI wrote an essay giving his explanation of the
abuse crisis, primarily blaming secular societies after the sexual revolution
of the 1960s (Benedict XVI 2019). This 2019 essay, published only a month
after Pope Francis’ global summit in February the same year on the sexual
abuse, was a unique moment in the history of Pope Francis’ pontificate. In a
rare moment, the world could hear the pope emeritus’ opinion on a matter
high up on the agenda of the church and the media that potentially diverged
or conflicted with the voice of the governing Pope voice. The tension laid
bare some aspects of what it meant for the church to have two popes living
at the same time.

State of research
One of the presuppositions that guide this work is that much of current
research has not sufficiently considered Pope Francis’ Latin American back-
ground. One obvious example is the Pope’s relation to liberation theol-
ogy, which is not straightforward, but deserves more attention than it has
received up to now in scholarship on the current pontificate. Another sign
of this limitation in certain strands of scholarship is the notable absence of
engagement with Latin American and particularly Argentinean scholars.
There has also been a tendency in some scholarship to approach the figure
of Pope Francis in a rather acritical manner. Marco Marzano has rightly
pointed out that superficial journalism has exaggerated the changes under
Pope Francis (Marzano 2018, 5). One challenge in this field is that there
is not always a clear delineation between findings of journalists and con-
clusions of scholars, since popular works can be referred to and cited in
scholarship without the necessary scrutiny of their sources or because of
the lack of better sources. Jorge Mario Bergoglio is, after all, a person who
kept a low public profile in Argentina before he became archbishop in 1998,
and he has left little written material for us as researchers to work with.
12 Introduction
Another difficulty arises from the imprecise generalizations and somewhat
idealized descriptions of the Pope that not only permeate some of the popu-
lar literature but that sometimes also leave their traces on works of scholars
too.19 “Humble”, “compassionate”, and “merciful” are categories for hagi-
ographies, not for critical research.20 It appears necessary to move beyond
the heroic portrayals and treat Jorge Mario Bergoglio like any other his-
torical agent embedded in social, cultural, and political complexities. When
a scholar reduces the complexity of the matter and writes that “[m]ercy
is the defining characteristic of Pope Francis’ leadership” (Mescher 2019,
102), Bergoglio is uncritically turned into a religious hero. What is more,
“mercy” can hardly be said to count as a critical category for academic
research that intends to grasp the historical significance of a pope. Some
of the seemingly premature conclusions of certain earlier academic works
appear to be guided by a clear normative interest in the success of Pope
Francis’ pontificate. One can, as a scholar, appreciate Pope Francis’ voice
and function as a global religious leader in a world plagued by xenophobia,
the climate crisis, and the hegemony of capitalism. Nevertheless, this appre-
ciation can also be articulated as acritical appraisals that affect the accuracy
of our descriptions as scholars. We therefore need a more critical distance
and awareness, particularly in the academic field of theology. The level of
precision of portrayals and descriptions in some cases appears to be reduced
by a strong sympathy for Pope Francis’ causes or by fear of the effects of the
various forms of opposition to his pontificate, both inside and outside the
Catholic church.21 For these reasons, some of the ambition in this book is
to contribute with sober reasoning to identifying the historical significance
of the first Latin American pontificate in history, with a focus on theology
and its contexts.
Another indication of this lack of critical approaches to Pope Francis is
the impatience or urgency to exonerate him for the misdeeds he is accused
of in Argentina in the case of the arrest and torture of the Jesuits Yorlando
Orio and Francisco Jalics in May 1976.22 While some scholars carefully
avoid drawing swift conclusions, given the lack of clear evidence (­Catoggio
2016, 137–42; Massaro 2018, 8; Zanatta 2015, 238–40), some authors
use the good deeds of Bergoglio during the military regime (1976–1983) as
proofs of his innocence,23 while others again run quickly to the conclusion
that Jalics’ declaration, that he had reconciled himself with the events, con-
stitutes a proof of Bergoglio’s innocence.24 Furthermore, there is a striking
neglect or unwillingness to engage with a first-hand source like the letter
Orlando Yorio wrote about his relation to Bergoglio after he was released
from captivity (Yorio 1977).25
The purpose of this book is not to provide an exhaustive answer to the
question about the Francis effect in relation to all the issues related to politi-
cal theology. This field of research is vast and complex. The ambition is
thus rather to modestly contribute to some new insights about the historical
significance of Pope Francis’ political theology through some case studies
 Introduction 13
with a set of theories that has yet to be applied to Pope Francis’ theological
thinking. This contribution aims not only at showing the clarity and coher-
ence of Pope Francis’ political theology but also at bringing to light some of
the major tensions and possible incoherencies of his pontificate. This entails
that the study explores not only the content of the pope’s teaching but also
the ways by which he builds and legitimates his unique religious authority.
The longer period of time that has passed since the election of Pope Fran-
cis in 2013 means that a larger corpus of the Pope’s writings can now be
taken into consideration. Several key decisions that some earlier works
awaited with uncertainty have now been taken by the Pope, with a lasting
impact that probably will remain in effect until the end of this pontificate.
This means that nearly a decade after Bergoglio’s ascension to the position
of a Roman pontiff, a more mature historical understanding of the current
pontificate is possible.

Structure of the book

This book consists of several case studies of aspects of Pope Francis’ theol-
ogy that have political implications in a broad sense. By using perspectives
from theories on canonicity, liberation theology, populism, biblical recep-
tion, and gender, new knowledge is gained about the historical and theo-
logical significance of Pope Francis’ papacy.26 As a whole, these different
perspectives contribute to a deeper understanding of what has been “the
Francis effect” since Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s ascension to papal power in
2013. When the Jesuit Patrick Howell, in an otherwise illuminating memoir,
affirms that Pope Francis has redirected the mission of the church because
the Argentinian “has not caught up in the American cultural wars, but has
returned to the gospel as his primary text” (Howell 2019, 210), this descrip-
tion of the Francis effect remains too vague. Accordingly, we still need to
ask more thoroughly in what ways Pope Francis interprets the gospels of
the New Testament. Hence, biblical reception becomes one of several useful
tools for describing the Francis effect more accurately.
Pope Francis is the first in several senses of the word. He is the first Jesuit
Pope, the first Pope from the Americas, and the first non-European Pope
in 12 centuries. No wonder that many have emphasized the election of
Bergoglio as a major rupture in the recent history of the modern papacy.
These acritical assumptions of a new beginning and a radical break with the
past can, however, be put to the test by critical scholarship. While paying
close attention to possible discontinuities, important historical continuities
between the ideas of Pope Francis and his predecessor Benedict XVI may be
discerned when their words and actions are studied.
Chapter 2 will document some of these continuities between the two
Popes through a comparison of the two socially oriented encyclicals Caritas
in Veritate (2009) and Laudato Si (2015). Recent studies of canonicity have
illuminated the ways the biblical canon has been interpreted and received in
14 Introduction
history. The theory of canonical ecologies serves to analyse how Pope Ben-
edict XVI and Pope Francis have construed their papal authority with refer-
ences to the biblical canon and to non-biblical authorities that exemplify
some of the flexibility of the actual canon for their Catholicism. This com-
parison not only emphasizes historical continuity but also indicates some
of the novelties of Pope Francis as the first Latin American Pope. In tune
with the Latin American tradition of the General Bishops’ conferences since
Medellín in 1968, Pope Francis uses Scripture for a more inductive way
of theological reasoning than Pope Benedict XVI. Pope Francis’ canonical
ecology reflects a broader theological horizon than can be detected in the
case of Benedict XVI. Finally, Pope Francis’ invoking of the canonical com-
mentaries of regional and national bishops’ conferences around the world
effectively recognizes episcopal collegiality in a stronger manner than we
find in his predecessor’s writing.
Chapter 3 focuses on Pope Francis’ relation to Latin American liberation
theology. With the election of the Argentinean Jorge Mario Bergoglio as
head of the global church in 2013, the question about the legacy of libera-
tion theology was actualized in new forms. The canonization of Archbishop
Óscar Romero and the pope’s rapprochement with the public figure of Gus-
tavo Gutiérrez signalled a new approach in the Vatican to the liberation
theology movement. This chapter argues that Pope Francis as pontiff shares
some of the main theological concerns of liberation theology. Although the
Pope remains an outsider to liberation theology, he has, in a sense, solved
the conflict between the Vatican and the Latin American social movement.
Through an analysis of ecclesial documents and theological literature, this
can be discerned on three levels. First, Pope Francis’ use of certain theologi-
cal ideas from liberation theology has been made possible and less contro-
versial by post-Cold War contexts. Second, Pope Francis has contributed to
the solution of this conflict through significant symbolic gestures rather than
through a shift of official positions. Third, as Pope Francis, the Argentinian
Jorge Mario Bergoglio has appropriated certain elements that are specific to
liberation theology without acknowledging his intellectual debt to it.
The starting point in chapter 4 is the rise of populism as a worldwide phe-
nomenon with a long history in Latin America and Argentina. The chapter
then discusses the claim that Pope Francis is some sort of a populist. As a
religious leader from a unique position, Pope Francis has criticized populism
in strong terms, at the same time as he has been defined by commentators
as himself a populist. This chapter argues that the definition of populism
as embedded in Pope Francis’ discourse is not a scholarly one and that the
Pope’s criticism does not imply that he cannot be considered a populist. Of
the three core concepts of populism (people, elite, and the general will), the
Pope invests most in the concept of the people. Pope Francis constructs the
notion of a morally virtuous people in ways that resemble the typical pop-
ulist construction of the people. Although the typical populist demoniza-
tion of the political enemy of the people is less present in Pope Francis, his
 Introduction 15
criticism of Donald Trump might constitute an exception. As a whole, Pope
Francis’ political theology can be said to have some affinities with populism.
Chapter 5 explores Pope Francis’ and gender issues. A pattern in Pope
Francis’ pontificate with regard to gender has become discernable. First,
Pope Francis disseminates gender-stereotypical prejudices through an essen-
tialist categorization of women as a group. Second, the Argentinian refuses
to give women access both to priestly ordination and to ordination as dea-
cons. Third, Pope Francis confirms the Catholic church’s construction of
the so-called “gender ideology” – a rhetorical figure that has proved to be a
politically effective concept, especially over the past decade.
Chapter 6 maps the reception of the gospels in Pope Francis’ most authori-
tative writings, alongside his historic homily in March 2020 that was part of
his response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The reception of the Jesus figure
in Pope Francis’ theology is contextualized through the perspective of the
turn to history within Latin American theology and Catholic biblical inter-
pretation after the Second Vatican Council. Although Latin American theo-
logians claimed after the Council that an emphasis on the historical Jesus
safeguarded their interpretations against apolitical readings that served the
interests of the rich, Pope Francis reads Jesus as a non-historical figure who
sides with the poor.
When English translations of biblical passages are quoted, the New
Revised Standard Version (NRSV) is used in this book. Citations of English
translations of documents from the Second Vatican Council are taken from
Austin Flannery’s 1996 translation (New York/Dublin: Costello Publishing
Company Dominican Publications).

Notes
1 Some of the origins of this charisma are encapsulated by Massimo Faggioli’s
words: “Francis is the first pope in modern church history born in a multicul-
tural capital, located in the southern hemisphere, and one of the most important
destinations on the map of global migrations in the first half of the twentieth
century. Francis has introduced the world to a particularly Catholic imagination
of space, and he has introduced Western Catholics to a new global imagination
of the space of the church” (Faggioli 2020, 65).
2 However, the crisis the Catholic church found itself in was caused by more fac-
tors than the sexual abuse scandals alone (Helmick 2014).
3 The radical right can be distinguished from the extreme right. Whereas the
extreme right forcefully rejects democracy, the radical right accepts the basics
of democracy, while nevertheless working against central elements of liberal
democracy (Mudde 2019, 7).
4 On the emergence in the nineteenth century of the tradition of social reform in
the Catholic church, see Camp (1969).
5 By following the Schmittian direction, political theology becomes a matter of
asking whether the supposedly secular secularism has freed itself from religious
categories of thought. It includes a critical inquiry into Schimtt’s dictum that “all
significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological
concepts.” Schmitt quoted in Newman (2019, 6). Since the object of this study
16 Introduction
is not the presumably secular state that sustains democracy, but a papacy and its
openly theological arguments, Schmitt’s theopolitical problem is less relevant to
this study.
6 Religion is not an antecedently existing entity that can be observed independently
of the scholars’ interpretations. In the words of Jonathan Z. Smith, “ ‘Religion’ is
not a native term; it is a term created by scholars for their intellectual purposes
and therefore is theirs to define” (Smith 2004, 194).
7 As Brent Nongbri writes: “Religion could be deployed in nonessentialist ways
to treat something as a religion for the purposes of analysis” (Nongbri 2013,
155). Talal Asad’s argument about the difficulty of a universal consensus on the
meaning of the term “religion” is also strong: “My argument is that there can-
not be a universal definition of religion, not only because its constituent elements
and relationships are historically specific, but because that definition is itself the
historical product of discursive processes” (Asad 1993, 29).
8 For a deeper understanding of these intensified ecclesial divisions in the after-
math of the Second Vatican Council, see Di Stefano and Zanatta (2000, 487–
545). See also Martín (2013).
9 In written form, Bergoglio is wary in his criticism of the Decree Four, restricting
himself to the affirmation that the Decree gave rise to interpretations that were
not always orthodox (Bergoglio 1988).
10 The labelling of Bergoglio as herald of the institution is based on the three
ideal types of these various strategies formulated by the Argentinean sociolo-
gist Gustavo Morello: The committed, the antisecular, and the institutional
(Morello 2016). This minority of church leaders committed to human rights
struggles included Catholic church leaders such as the bishops Enrique Ange-
lelli, Jaime de Nevares, Miguel Hesayne, and Carlos Ponce de León (Franco
2018, 115).
11 See for instance Bergoglio (1984). To consult Bergoglio’s homilies from the
2000s, see the three volumes published by Fordham University Press, In Your
Eyes I See My Words.
12 The most critical statement from Bergoglio came not in a homily or official dec-
laration, but via a letter to Carmelite nuns, which thereafter was widely quoted
in the media. Bergoglio affirmed that the proposed bill on same-sex marriage was
part of a demonic intent to destroy God’s plan for the world (Spanish: “Aquí
también está la envidia del Demonio, por la que entró el pecado en el mundo . . .
no se trata de una simple lucha política; es la pretension destructive al plan de
Dios”) (Pecheny, Jones and Ariza 2016, 212). Juan Cruz Esquivel has also noted
Bergoglio’s low public profile over the years (Esquivel 2004, 229). Spanish origi-
nal of the letter quoted from Larraquy (2013, 226).
13 For the historical roots of the Argentinean exception, see Stefano (2014).
14 www.biblioteca.jus.gov.ar/Argentina-Constitution.pdf. Accessed 10.12.21.
15 When Argentinians were asked in a poll around the year 2000 about what they
thought about religious influence in politics, 76% of the respondents held that
religious leaders ought not to influence the political choice of voters. The per-
centage for Argentina was considerably higher than in Venezuela, Mexico, and
Chile (Hagopian 2008, 27).
16 During Pope Francis’ pontificate, the percentage of Chileans who consider them-
selves Catholic has continued to drop, from 61% in 2010 to 51% in 2020 (Lat-
inobarometro 2020, 39).
17 To underline the point about the relatively secularized Southern Cone in Latin
America, one could add the case of Uruguay, where levels of church attendance
and percentages of religiously disaffiliated have more in common with trends in
Europe than with the rest of Latin America.
 Introduction 17
18 A critical reading of these papal documents also needs to consider the pos-
sible censorship of some of Francis’ utterances, such as his press confer-
ences and the revision of them before their publication on the website of the
Vatican. Several Vatican observers have noted this aspect of Francis’ papacy
(Allen 2021).
19 To adopt the concept of a “Francis miracle” and to conclude that “the pro-
foundly persuasive and percussive impact” that Pope Francis’ words had on all
the 115 cardinals was “clearly felt” are examples of how some research con-
tributes to this laudatory tone (Oldenburg 2018, 119, xiv). It is hardly reassur-
ing when a scholar claims to know the intention behind Bergoglio’s “simple”
language and attempts to assure the reader that this simplicity “is rooted in
long reflection and in evangelical simplicity, not in any limitation of expression”
(Borghesi 2018, xix). Nor is it comforting for critical research when an author
declares his “love of things Argentine, including Cardinal Bergoglio, now Pope
Francis” (Rourke 2016, vii).
20 Austen Ivereigh is sometimes referred to in scholarship as an authority, but he
is also an author who subscribes to the hagiographic notion of Pope Francis as
someone who has “an ability to read hearts” (Ivereigh 2019, 185). Generaliza-
tions in laudatory terms such as this are hardly enlightening for current research:
“He is a pope of the people, for the people; but most of all, he is a pope with the
people” (Ivereigh 2019, 5).
21 See for instance Boff (2014). One can, of course, fully understand the need among
formerly marginalized ecclesial groups to support Pope Francis in the struggle
for the direction of the future church. It is illustrative that the base communities
in Brazil have recourse to the figure of Pope Francis in order to legitimate their
place in the Brazilian Catholic Church. But understanding of these strategies
need not lead to an uncritical attitude towards them.
22 This accusation was made public in Mignone (1987, 158). Some of Yorio’s accu-
sations are articulated in Wornat (2002). Bergoglio’s version of the story, when
he was asked as Archbishop about this issue, is to be found in Rubín and Ambro-
getti (2013, 150–53).
23 “Given the testimonies in his favor from persons like Adolfo Pérez Esquivel,
Nobel Peace Prize winner, it can be verified, four decades after the fact, that the
then-provincial of the Jesuits in Argentina, Jorge Bergoglio, helped those who
needed shelter and protection during these terrible years in his country” (Binge-
mer 2017, 95). See also Scavi (2014, 77; Tornielli 2013).
24 Politi (2015). As Roberto Blancarte affirms, Jalic’s declaration is not necessarily
an expression of an exoneration of Bergoglio. To forgive is not to declare some-
one’s innocence (Blancarte 2013, 296).
25 Important exceptions to this unwillingness are the admirable effort to take this
testimony of one of the victims of state terror seriously in Mallimaci (2013a,
2013b).
26 In this study, reception functions as a critical academic category, not as a theo-
logical category in the traditional Catholic sense of the word as the pious recep-
tion of the message of the church in accordance with God’s will and as the
manifestation of the Spirit’s work among God’s people.

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truth of the statement. Lord Raglan in one of his dispatches to the
Duke of Newcastle said, “Lord William [Paulet] like Brown [Sir
George Brown] speaks loudly in praise of Miss Nightingale,” adding
that he was confident that she had “done great good.” As the weeks
passed by, Lord Raglan grew to consider the Lady-in-Chief a most
efficient auxiliary “general.”
 CHAPTER XIII
AT WORK IN THE BARRACK HOSPITAL

An Appalling Task—Stories of Florence Nightingale’s interest

in the Soldiers—Lack of Necessaries for the Wounded
—Establishes an Invalids’ Kitchen and a Laundry—
Cares for the Soldiers’ Wives—Religious Fanatics—
Letter from Queen Victoria—Christmas at Scutari.

Neglected, dying in despair,

They lay till woman came,
To soothe them with her gentle care,
And feed life’s flickering flame.
When wounded sore, on fever’s rack,
Or cast away as slain,
She called their fluttering spirits back,
And gave them strength again.
Francis Bennoch.

T HE events of the war in the autumn of 1854 will convey some

idea of the number of wounded men crowded into the
hospitals on the Bosphorus when Florence Nightingale entered upon
her duties at Scutari. Balaclava was fought on October 25th, four
days after she left London; the battle of Inkerman followed on
November 5th, the day after she landed. Before the average woman
would have found time to unpack her boxes, Miss Nightingale was
face to face with a task unparalleled in its magnitude and appalling in
its nature.
The wounded arrived by the shipload until every ward, both in
the General and in the Barrack Hospital, was crowded to excess,
and the men lay in double rows down the long corridors, forming
several miles of suffering humanity. During these terrible days
Florence Nightingale was known to stand for twenty hours at a time,
on the arrivals of fresh detachments of sick, apportioning quarters,
directing her nurses and attending at the most painful operations
where her presence might soothe and support. She would spend
hours over men dying of cholera or fever. “Indeed,” wrote one who
watched her work, “the more awful to every sense any particular
case might be, the more certainly might be seen her slight form
bending over him, administering to his ease by every means in her
power and seldom quitting his side until death released him.”
Her womanly heart prompted her to acts of humanity which at
once made her recognised by the men as the soldier’s friend. When
the wounded were brought by hundreds to Scutari after Inkerman,
the first duty of the surgeons was to separate the hopeful cases from
the desperate. On one occasion Miss Nightingale saw five soldiers
set aside in a hopeless condition. She inquired if nothing could be
done for the poor fellows, and the surgeons replied that their first
duty was with those whom there seemed to be more hope of saving.
“Will you give me these five men?” said the Lady-in-Chief.
“Do as you like with them,” replied the surgeons; “we think their
case is hopeless.”
If life could be saved, Florence Nightingale was determined to
save it, and throughout the night, assisted by one of the nurses, she
sat beside the men, feeding them with a spoon until their senses
awakened and their strength began to return. She washed their
wounds, cheered their hearts with kind words, and in the morning
had the satisfaction of finding that they were in a fit condition to be
operated on.
At another time a Highland soldier was about to undergo an
amputation. Miss Nightingale asked that the operation might be
delayed, as she thought that careful nursing might render it
unnecessary. Through her unremitting care the man’s arm was
saved; and when asked what he felt towards his preserver, he said
that the only mode he had of giving vent to his feelings was to kiss
her shadow when it fell on his pillow as she passed through the
wards on her nightly rounds.
When cholera and plague cases came in, foaming at the mouth
and black in the face, none were too bad for Florence Nightingale’s
patient care. Her influence over the men was established from the
first. She was their “good angel” and their confidence in her was
unbounded.
Still, her task was a heavy one in these first days. There was
official prejudice to overcome, and an overwhelming number of
patients to deal with in a huge building devoid of the commonest
hospital accessories and arrangements. The Barrack “Hospital,” so
called, had been designed only for soldiers’ barracks, so that when
suddenly converted into a hospital it lacked almost everything
necessary for the sick, and the supplies forwarded from England had
by a series of misadventures been delayed. A letter sent home by
one of the nurses six days after the arrival of Miss Nightingale and
her band may be quoted as giving a graphic picture of the state of
affairs at this time. She writes:—
“I have come out here as one of the Government nurses, and the
position in which we are placed induces me to write and ask you, at
once, to send out a few dozens of wine, or in short anything which
may be useful for the wounded or dying, hundreds of whom are now
around us, under this roof, filling up even the passages to the very
rooms we occupy. Government is liberal, and for one moment I
would not complain of their desire to meet all our wants, but with
such a number of the wounded coming in from Sebastopol, it does
appear absolutely impossible to meet the wants of those who are
dying of dysentery and exhaustion; out of four wards committed to
my care, eleven men have died in the night, simply from exhaustion,
which, humanly speaking, might have been stopped, could I have
laid my hand at once on such nourishment as I knew they ought to
have had.
“It is necessary to be as near the scene of war as we are, to
know the horrors which we have seen and heard of. I know not
which sight is most heartrending—to witness fine strong men and
youths worn down by exhaustion and sinking under it, or others
coming in fearfully wounded.
“The whole of yesterday was spent, first in sewing the men’s
mattresses together, and then in washing them, and assisting the
surgeons, when we could, in dressing their ghastly wounds, and
seeing the poor fellows made as easy as their circumstances would
admit of, after their five days’ confinement on board ship, during
which space their wounds were not dressed.
“Miss Nightingale, under whom we work, is well fitted in every
way to fill her arduous post, the whole object of her life having
hitherto been the superintendence of hospitals abroad. Wine and
bottles of chicken broth, preserved meat for soups, etc., will be most
acceptable.
“We have not seen a drop of milk, and the bread is extremely
sour. The butter is most filthy—it is Irish butter in a state of
decomposition; and the meat is more like moist leather than food.
Potatoes we are waiting for until they arrive from France.”
 MISS NIGHTINGALE IN THE HOSPITAL AT SCUTARI.
[To face p. 144.

Nursing in a hospital which received soldiers straight from the

battlefield, their wounds aggravated by days of neglect, was a
difficult task under the most favourable circumstances, but when
intensified by the lack even of proper food, such as the above letter
discloses, the task was indeed formidable.
There was an organising brain, however, at work in that dreadful
Barrack Hospital now, and within ten days of her arrival, in spite of
the terrible influx of patients which taxed her powers to the utmost,
Miss Nightingale had fitted up an impromptu kitchen, from which
eight hundred men were daily supplied with well-cooked food and
other comforts. It was largely supplied with the invalid food from the
private stores of the Lady-in-Chief, which fortunately she had
brought out with her in the Vectis. Beef-tea, chicken broth, jelly, and
little delicacies unheard of before were now administered to the sick
by the gentle hands of women nurses. Small wonder that the poor
fellows could often only express their gratitude in voices half-choked
with sobs!
One Crimean veteran told the writer that when he received a
basin of arrowroot on his first arrival at the hospital early in the
morning, he said to himself, “Tommy, me boy, that’s all you’ll get into
your inside this blessed day, and think yourself lucky you’ve got that.
But two hours later, if another of them blessed angels didn’t come
entreating of me to have just a little chicken broth! Well, I took that,
thinking maybe it was early dinner, and before I had well done
wondering what would happen next, round the nurse came again
with a bit o’ jelly, and all day long at intervals they kept on bringing
me what they called ‘a little nourishment.’ In the evening, Miss
Nightingale she came and had a look at me, and says she, ‘I hope
you’re feeling better.’ I could have said, ‘Ma’am, I feels as fit as a
fightin’ cock,’ but I managed to git out somethin’ a bit more polite.”
Hitherto, not only had there been a lack of food, but the cooking
had been done by the soldiers themselves in the most free and easy
manner. Meat and vegetables were boiled together in the huge
coppers, of which there were thirteen in the kitchen attached to the
barracks. Separate portions were enclosed in nets, and all plunged
together into the seething coppers, and taken up when occasion
demanded. Some things were served up done to rags, while others
were almost raw. This kind of cooking was bad enough for men in
ordinary health, but for the sick it meant death.
The daily comforts which the nurses’ kitchen afforded received
ample testimony from the witnesses before Mr. Roebuck’s
Commission for inquiry into the conduct of the war. In one day
sometimes thirteen gallons of chicken broth and forty gallons of
arrowroot were distributed amongst the sick. At first nearly all the
invalid food had to come from the private stores brought out by the
Lady-in-Chief, which the charitable at home replenished as the true
state of affairs became known, for not only was there a deficiency in
the Government stores, but the things supplied officially were often
not fit for food. It was the general testimony of witnesses before the
Commission that Miss Nightingale’s services were invaluable in the
hospital as well for what she did herself as for the manner in which
she kept the purveyors to their duties.
The method of distributing the Government stores was as erratic
as the cooking. There appeared to be no regulations as to time.
Things asked for in a morning were probably not forthcoming until
evening, when the cooking fires in the barracks kitchen were all but
out. Nothing could be obtained until various “service rules” had been
observed. An official board must inspect and approve all stores
before they could be distributed. One can think of nothing more
exasperating to the Lady-in-Chief, in her responsible duty towards
the sick, than to see exhausted men dying for want of the proper
nourishment because the board of inspection had not completed its
arrangements. On one recorded occasion she took the law into her
own hands, and insisted that the stores should be given out,
inspected or not. She could not ask under-officials to incur the
penalty of martial law by fulfilling her behests, but she could brave
the authorities herself and did so. The storehouse was opened on
the responsibility of the Lady-in-Chief, and the goods procured for
the languishing soldiery.
Miss Nightingale’s defiance of red-tape made her some enemies,
and the “groove-going men,” as Kinglake calls them, “uttered
touching complaints, declaring that the Lady-in-Chief did not choose
to give them time, and that the moment a want declared itself, she
made haste to supply it herself.”
“This charge,” says the same authority in an appendix note, “was
so utterly without foundation as to be the opposite of truth. The Lady-
in-Chief used neither to issue her stores, nor allow any others to do
so, until the want of them had been evidenced by a duly signed
requisition. Proof of this is complete, and has been furnished even
by adversaries of the Lady-in-Chief.”
After her improvised kitchen was in working order, Miss
Nightingale next set to work to establish a laundry for the hospital
and institute a system for disinfecting the clothes of fever and
cholera patients. Up to the time of her arrival there was practically
little washing done, the “authorities” had only succeeded in getting
seven shirts washed, and no attempt was made to separate the bed-
linen and garments of infectious patients from those suffering only
from wounds. Washing contracts were in existence, but availed little.
At the General Hospital the work was in the hands of a corps of eight
or ten Armenians. There was no fault to be found with the manner in
which they did the work, only they stole so habitually that when a
man sent his shirt to be washed he was never sure that he would get
it back again, and in consequence the sick were unwilling to part with
their garments.
At the Barrack Hospital a Levantine named Uptoni had the
washing contract, but broke it so repeatedly that the sick were
practically without clean linen, except when they were able to get the
soldiers’ wives to do a little washing for them. Such was the state of
affairs in a hospital where two to three thousand men lay wounded
and sick.
Miss Nightingale hired a house close to the hospital and set up
an efficient laundry, partly out of her private funds, and partly out of
money subscribed to The Times fund started for the relief of the
soldiery. She had it fitted up with coppers and regulated under
sanitary conditions, and there five hundred shirts and one hundred
and fifty other articles were washed each week.
There was a further difficulty to meet, and that was to provide the
men with a change of linen while the soiled went to the wash. Many
of the wounded had been obliged to leave their knapsacks behind
and had no clothing save the dirty and dilapidated garments in which
they arrived. In the course of the first three months Miss Nightingale
provided the men with ten thousand shirts from her own private
sources.
There was the same scarcity in surgical dressings, and the
nurses had to employ every minute that could be spared from the
bedside of the sufferers in making lint, bandages, amputation
stumps, and in sewing mattresses and making pillows.
Great confusion existed with regard to the dispensing of drugs.
The apothecaries’ store at Scutari, which supplied the hospitals and
indeed the whole army in the Crimea, was in the same state of
confusion as everything else. The orderlies left to dispense often did
not know what the store contained. On one occasion Mrs.
Bracebridge, Miss Nightingale’s invaluable friend and helper, applied
three times for chloride of lime and was told there was none. Miss
Nightingale insisted on a more thorough search being made, with the
result that 90 lbs. were discovered.
The defective system of orderlies was another evil which the
Lady-in-Chief had to contend with. These men had been taken from
the ranks, most of them were convalescents, and they did not trouble
to understand the duties of an orderly because they were liable to
return and serve in the ranks. The advent of the ladies had an
excellent effect upon the orderlies in arousing their sense of chivalry,
and they soon grew to think it an honour to serve the Lady-in-Chief.
During all that dreadful period, when she had to tax the patience and
devotion of the orderlies and other soldiers attending in the wards to
the utmost, not one of them failed her “in obedience, thoughtful
attention, and considerate delicacy.” For her they toiled and endured
a strain and stress of work which mere officialdom would have failed
to obtain. Yet “never,” Miss Nightingale says, “came from any one of
them one word nor one look which a gentleman would not have
used; and while paying this humble tribute to humble courtesy, the
tears come into my eyes as I think how amidst scenes of loathsome
disease and death there arose above it all the innate dignity,
gentleness, and chivalry of the men (for never surely was chivalry so
strikingly exemplified), shining in the midst of what must be
considered as the lowest sinks of human misery, and preventing
instinctively the use of one expression which could distress a
gentlewoman.”
If such was the chivalrous devotion yielded by the orderlies and
convalescent soldiers, it can readily be understood that the prostrate
sufferers worshipped the Lady-in-Chief. Her presence in the
operating room acted like magic. Case after case became amenable
to the surgeon under the calming influence of her presence. It is not
surprising that men prostrate with weakness and agonised with pain
often rebelled against an operation. Anæsthetics were not
administered as freely then as they are to-day, and many brave
fellows craved death rather than meet the surgeon’s knife. But when
they felt the pitying eyes of the Lady-in-Chief fixed upon them, saw
her gentle face, heard her soothing words of comfort and hope for
the future, and were conscious that she had set herself to bear the
pain of witnessing pain, the men would obey her silent command,
and submit and endure, strengthened by her presence.
Those who at first were inclined to cavil at the power which the
Government had placed in the hands of the Lady-in-Chief speedily
reversed their judgment, as day by day they witnessed her strength
of character and her amazing fortitude and self-control in the midst of
scenes which tried the strongest men.
The magnitude of Miss Nightingale’s work in the hospital wards
has caused historians to overlook the womanly help and sympathy
which she gave to the soldiers’ wives who had come out with their
husbands. Even Kinglake, who is unsurpassed in his admiration for
the Lady-in-Chief, does not mention this side of her work.
When Miss Nightingale arrived at Scutari she found a number of
poor women, the wives or the widows (may be) of soldiers who had
gone to the front, living in a distressing condition, literally in the holes
and corners of the Barrack Hospital. These women, being detached
from their husbands’ regiments, had no claim for rations and
quarters. The colonel of each regiment had power to allow a certain
number of women to accompany their husbands on foreign service.
Each woman belonged to her regiment, and if separated, even
through no choice of her own, there was no provision for her. No
organisation to deal with them existed at this period, because for
forty years there had been no general depôt of an English army. The
widows were by degrees sent home by order of the Commandant,
but the other women, many of them wives of soldiers in the hospital
or of orderlies, refused to return home without their husbands.
Miss Nightingale found these poor creatures, for the most part
respectable women, without decent clothing—their clothes having
worn out—going about bonnetless and shoeless and living as best
they could. After many changes from one “hole” to another the
women were housed by the authorities in three or four dark rooms in
the damp basement of the hospital. The only privacy to be obtained
was by hanging up rags of clothes on lines. There, by the light of a
rushlight, the meals were taken, the sick attended, and there the
babies were born and nourished. There were twenty-two babies born
from November to December, and many more during the winter.
It needs no words to picture the gratitude of the women to the
dear Lady-in-Chief who sought them out in their abject misery, gave
them decent clothing and food from her own stores in the Nurses’s
Tower, and saw that the little lives ushered into the world amid the
horrors and privations of war had at least tender care. At the end of
January, owing to a broken drain in the basement, fever broke out,
and Miss Nightingale now persuaded the Commandant to remove
the women to healthier quarters. A Turkish house was procured by
requisition and Miss Nightingale had it cleaned and furnished out of
her funds. Throughout the winter the women were assisted with
money, food and clothes, and outfits were provided for widows
returning home. Miss Nightingale also organised a plan to give
employment to all the soldiers’ wives who were willing to work in her
laundry at ten shillings to fourteen shillings a week. The upper part of
the wash-house was divided into a sick ward and a laundry, and
offered a refuge for the more respectable women. She obtained
situations for others in families in Constantinople. A school was also
started for the children. Lady Alicia Blackwood, wife of Dr.
Blackwood, an army chaplain, visited the women and helped to care
for them. Through Miss Nightingale’s initiative about five hundred
women were raised from their wretched condition at Scutari and
enabled to earn honest livings. “When,” wrote Miss Nightingale later,
“the improvements in our system which the war must suggest are
discussed, let not the wife and child of the soldier be forgotten.”
While Florence Nightingale was thus heroically grappling with
disease, suffering, and death, and bringing order out of chaos in the
hospitals at Scutari, small-minded fanatics at home were attacking
her religious opinions. Some declared that she had gone to the East
for the purpose of spreading Puseyism amongst the British soldiers,
others that she had become a Roman Catholic, some people were
certain that she was a Unitarian, while others whispered the dreadful
heresy, “Supralapsarian.” A clergyman warned his flock against
subscribing money for the soldiers in the East if it was to pass
through Popish hands. Controversy waxed strong in The Times and
The Standard, and Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Herbert warmly defended
their absent friend.
“It is melancholy to think,” wrote Mrs. Herbert to a lady
parishioner of an attacking clergyman, “that in Christian England no
one can undertake anything without these most uncharitable and
sectarian attacks, and, had you not told me so, I could scarcely
believe that a clergyman of the Established Church could have been
the mouthpiece of such slander. Miss Nightingale is a member of the
Established Church of England, and what is called rather Low
Church, but ever since she went to Scutari her religious opinions and
character have been assailed on all points. It is a cruel return to
make towards one to whom all England owes so much.”
An Irish clergyman, when asked to what sect Miss Nightingale
belonged, made the effective reply: “She belongs to a sect which,
unfortunately, is a very rare one—the sect of the Good Samaritan.”
Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort had from the first taken a
sympathetic interest in Miss Nightingale’s work, and the following
letter from the Queen to Mr. Sidney Herbert did much towards
silencing adverse criticism, as it showed the confidence which her
Majesty had in Miss Nightingale and her nurses:—

“Windsor Castle.
“December 6th, 1854.
“Would you tell Mrs. Herbert,” wrote the Queen to Mr. Sidney
Herbert, “that I beg she would let me see frequently the accounts
she receives from Miss Nightingale or Mrs. Bracebridge, as I
hear no details of the wounded, though I see so many from
officers, etc., about the battlefield, and naturally the former must
interest me more than any one.
“Let Mrs. Herbert also know that I wish Miss Nightingale and
the ladies would tell these poor, noble wounded and sick men
that no one takes a warmer interest or feels more for their
 sufferings or admires their courage and heroism more than their
Queen. Day and night she thinks of her beloved troops. So does
the Prince.
“Beg Mrs. Herbert to communicate these my words to those
ladies, as I know that our sympathy is much valued by these
noble fellows.
“Victoria.”

This kindly letter, coming straight from the good Queen’s heart,
without any official verbiage to smother the personal feeling, was
forwarded to Miss Nightingale, and on its receipt she placed it in the
hands of one of the chaplains, who went from ward to ward reading it
to the men, ending each recital of the letter with “God save the
Queen,” in which the poor sufferers joined with such vigour as they
possessed. Copies of the letter were afterwards posted up on the
walls of the hospital.
Although the Lady-in-Chief’s work and personality had already
overcome much official prejudice, there is no doubt that Queen
Victoria’s letter greatly strengthened her position. It was now evident
that it was to Miss Nightingale that the Sovereign looked for tidings
of the wounded and in her that she trusted for the amelioration of
their terrible sufferings.
When Christmas Day dawned in the great Barrack Hospital in
that terrible war winter of 1854, it at least found its suffering inmates
lying in cleanliness, with comfortable surroundings and supplied with
suitable food. Not a man throughout the huge building but had such
comforts as the willing hands and tender hearts of women could
devise. This change had been brought about in less than two months
by the clear head and managing brain which ruled in the Nurses’
Tower.
The “Merry Christmas” passed from man to man was not a
misnomer, despite the pain and suffering; the men were at least
“merry” that the “nightingales” had come. When the Queen’s health
was drunk, in some cases from medicine glasses, each man in his
heart coupled with the loyal toast the names of the Lady-in-Chief and
her devoted band.
 CHAPTER XIV
GRAPPLING WITH CHOLERA AND FEVER

Florence Nightingale describes the Hardships of the Soldiers—

Arrival of Fifty More Nurses—Memories of Sister Mary Aloysius
—The Cholera Scourge.

So in that house of misery,

A lady with a lamp I see
Pass through the glimmering gloom,
And flit from room to room.
Longfellow.

T HE New Year of 1855 brought no mitigation in Florence

Nightingale’s arduous task. Though there was no longer the
influx of wounded from the battlefields, disease was making fearful
ravages amongst the soldiers now engaged in the prolonged siege
of Sebastopol. Miss Nightingale thus described the hardships
endured by the men in a letter to a friend. “Fancy,” she writes,
“working five nights out of seven in the trenches! Fancy being thirty-
six hours in them at a stretch, as they were all December, lying
down, or half lying down, after forty-eight hours, with no food but raw
salt pork sprinkled with sugar, rum, and biscuit; nothing hot, because
the exhausted soldier could not collect his own fuel, as he was
expected to do, to cook his own rations; and fancy through all this
the army preserving their courage and patience as they have done.
There is something sublime in the spectacle.”
The result of this life of exposure in the trenches during the
rigours of the Crimean winter was terrible suffering amongst the
soldiers from frost-bite and dysentery, and there was a great
increase in cholera and fever, which kept the hospitals more
crowded than ever.
At the beginning of the year a further staff of fifty trained nurses
under Miss Stanley, the sister of the late Dean, arrived at Scutari and
were distributed amongst the various hospitals in the East. Miss
Nightingale had now five thousand sick and wounded under her
supervision, and eleven hundred more were on their way from the
Crimea. Under her immediate personal care in the Barrack Hospital
were more than two thousand wounded, all severe cases. She had
also now established her régime in the General Hospital at Scutari,
and some of the new nurses were installed there under Miss Emily
Anderson, while others went to Kullali Hospital on the other side of
the Bosphorus and worked under Miss Stanley until she returned to
England.
Sisters of mercy from some of the Irish convents were among
the new nurses, and one of the number, Sister Mary Aloysius, is still
at the time of writing living in her convent home at Gort, Co. Galway.
Her “Memories” of the Crimea afford a graphic picture of the state of
the General Hospital at Scutari and of the arduous toil of the nurses.
The aged sister has a keen sense of humour, and in describing
the departure of Miss Stanley’s company from London Bridge for
Scutari, evidently derived some satisfaction that her nun’s garb was
less extraordinary than the dresses provided by the Government for
its nurses. “The ladies and the paid nurses,” she relates, “wore the
same uniform—grey tweed wrappers, worsted jackets, white caps
and short woollen cloaks, and a frightful scarf of brown holland
embroidered in red with the words ‘Scutari Hospital.’ The garments
were contract work and all made the same sizes. In consequence
the tall ladies appeared to be attired in short dresses and the short
ladies in long.” It was a similar evidence of official blundering to that
which sent a cargo of boots for the soldiers in the Crimea all shaped
for the left foot. “That ladies could be found to walk in such a
costume was certainly a triumph of grace over nature,” adds Sister
Aloysius. The fact is interesting as showing the advance made in
modern times in a nurse’s official dress as exemplified in the
charming though useful costumes worn by military nurses in the
South African war.
However, all honour to the noble pioneers who sank personal
considerations and effaced self in a desire to discharge their errand
of mercy.
A powerful sidelight is thrown on the work of the Lady-in-Chief by
the experiences of her subordinates. Sister Mary Aloysius writes:
“Where shall I begin, or how can I ever describe my first day in the
hospital at Scutari? Vessels were arriving and orderlies carrying the
poor fellows, who with their wounds and frost-bites had been tossing
about on the Black Sea for two or three days and sometimes more.
Where were they to go? Not an available bed. They were laid on the
floor one after another, till the beds were emptied of those dying of
cholera and every other disease. Many died immediately after being
brought in—their moans would pierce the heart—and the look of
agony on those poor dying faces will never leave my heart. They
may well be called ‘the martyrs of the Crimea.’
“The cholera was of the very worst type, and the attacked men
lasted only four or five hours. Oh, those dreadful cramps! You might
as well try to bend a piece of iron as to move the joints. The medical
staff did their best, and daily, hourly, risked their own lives with little
or no success. At last every one seemed to be getting paralysed and
the orderlies indifferent as to life or death.... The usual remedies
ordered by the doctors were stuping and poultices of mustard. They
were very anxious to try chloroform, but did not trust any one with it
except the sisters.”
If the Lady-in-Chief and her nurses had been at first rather coldly
welcomed in the surgery wards, their presence when the epidemic of
cholera set in was indeed counted a blessing. These trained and
devoted women could be entrusted with applying the desperate
remedies needed for the disease, which the medical staff would
have felt it useless to leave in the hands of orderlies. The stuping, for
example, required the most careful attention to have any chance of
success. The method of the sisters was to have a large tub of boiling
water, blankets torn in squares, and a piece of canvas with a running
at each end to hold a stick. The blankets were put into the boiling
water, lifted out with tongs and put into the canvas. An orderly at
each end wrung the flannel out so dry that not a drop of moisture
remained. Then chloroform was sprinkled on the hot blanket, which
was then applied to the patient’s stomach. Rubbing with mustard and
even with turpentine followed, until the iron grip which had seized the
body was released or the end had come.
The nurses fought with the dread disease in the most heroic
manner, but the proportion saved among the stricken was small
indeed. The saddest thing was that it was generally the strong and
healthy soldier who was attacked.
“One day,” says Sister Aloysius, “a fine young fellow, the picture
of health and strength, was carried in on a stretcher to my ward. I
said to the orderlies, ‘I hope we shall be able to bring him through.’ I
set to work with the usual remedies; but the doctor shook his head,
and said, ‘I am afraid it’s all no use, sister.’ When the orderlies, poor
fellows, were tired, I set to work myself, and kept it on till nearly the
end—but you might as well rub iron; no heat, no movement from his
joints. He lived about the usual time—four or five hours.”
Week after week the fearful scourge continued, until the avenues
to the wards were never free from the two streams of stretchers, one
bringing in the stricken, the other carrying out the dead. The spread
of the infection was thought to be largely due to the graves not being
deep enough, and the air surrounding the hospitals had become
putrid.
Scarcely less dreadful than the cholera patients were the men
suffering from frost-bite, who arrived in hundreds from the trenches
before Sebastopol. Nothing enables one to realise their terrible
condition like the narrative of one on the spot. Referring to her
experience amongst the frost-bitten patients, Sister Aloysius says:
“The men who came from the ‘Front,’ as they called it, had only thin
linen suits—no other clothing to keep out the severe Crimean frost.
When they were carried in on the stretchers, which conveyed so
many to their last resting-place, their clothes had to be cut off. In
most cases the flesh and clothes were frozen together; and, as for
the feet, the boots had to be cut off bit by bit—the flesh coming off
with them; many pieces of the flesh I have seen remain in the boot.
Poultices were applied with some oil brushed over them. In the
morning, when these were removed—can I ever forget it?—the
sinews and bones were seen to be laid bare. We had surgical
instruments; but in almost every case the doctors or staff-surgeons
were at hand, and removed the diseased flesh as tenderly as they
could. As for the toes, you could not recognise them as such.”
One could multiply these ghastly descriptions if further evidence
was needed to show the terrible sufferings endured by officers and
men alike in the trenches before Sebastopol. Mention the famous
siege to any of the old Crimean veterans as they sit beneath the
trees in the grounds of Chelsea Hospital, and they will tell you stories
of hardships endured which makes one regard their still living bodies
with amazement. And they are not mere soldiers’ tales: the old
heroes could scarcely invent greater horrors than history has
recorded. The weary weeks were passed for the most part by the
men sitting or lying in holes dug in the frozen ground deep enough to
shelter their heads from the flying bullets and bursting bombs. If a
poor fellow decided to stretch his numbed and cramped legs, he was
more than likely to have his head blown off. Lord Wolseley bears to-
day the marks of his experiences as a venturesome young subaltern
in the trenches at Sebastopol, when, riddled with bullets and a part
of his face blown away, he was laid on one side by the surgeons as
a “dead un.” Fortunately he managed to prove that he was yet alive.
The Life of Captain Hedley Vicars reveals also the privations of the
time. He himself lay in the open air on a bed of stones and leaves,
having given up his tent to men who were sick.
The cold was so intense that in a sudden skirmish the men were
often unable to draw their triggers. A frost-bitten soldier lying ill at
Balaclava, when he tried to turn in the night, found that his feet were
frozen to those of another soldier lying opposite.
Hundreds of these poor men, worn out by every imaginable kind
of suffering, were constantly arriving at the already crowded
hospitals at Scutari. As many as sixty men were known to die in a
single night, and for two months the death rate stood at 60 per cent.