Francis, the ‘Peronist’ Pope Argentinians hate to love
Foto: Flickr | Mazur/catholicnews.org.uk bajo licencia CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
This story was published by Argentine journalist Leonardo Oliva on Connectas on April 25, 2025. This version was republished on Global Voices under a media agreement.
“My God!” was the title on the cover of the newspaper Página 12 on March 14, 2013, following the election of the Argentinean pope. The article stated that, as Bishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Bergoglio “faced accusations of involvement with the military dictatorship; had a conflictive relationship with Kirchnerist governments; and was a fierce opponent of same-sex marriage, as well as of sexual education and reproductive health policies.” On April 22, 2025, 12 years later, the same newspaper wrote “Godspeed” on its cover to announce the death, not of Bergoglio, but of Pope Francis.
But Página 12, an outlet aligned with Kirchnerism, was not the only one that backpedaled. Many Argentineans did too, from the president of Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo), Estela de Carlotto (very close to the latest Peronist governments), to Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, for whom Bergoglio went from being a “right-wing” bishop and the true “representative of the opposition” to the “progressive” Pope she so quickly wanted to take her picture with at the Vatican.
In Argentina, Peronism* became more Catholic than the Pope, and others did as well. Javier Milei referred to him as “the representative of evil on Earth,” when he was a candidate. However, soon after his death, the president praised his “kindness and wisdom,” and his government claimed he was the “most important Argentinean in history,” a sentence echoed by many of the people who threw shade at him when the Jesuit was appointed Roman pontiff (12 years ago).
These contradictions are embedded in the country’s DNA. For years, it struggled with the glory of having a compatriot as Pope and the distress of its inability to solve a basic thing such as inflation. The country of virtuosos such as Maradona and Messi, idols of millions around the globe, also exports some of that arrogance that distinguishes Argentineans outside of its borders. The nation ruled by Milei, a man who baffles most, is also the land of an indecipherable politician: Juan Domingo Perón, the father of Peronism, the most significant political movement of the 20th century, and the most popular, by far. Francis, the Pope that Argentineans hate to love, became just as popular.
A Peronist Pope?
Francisco es incomprensible sin Bergoglio; Bergoglio sin el peronismo; y el peronismo sin el nacionalcatolicismo que con varios matices impregnó a la Iglesia y a la cultura argentina.
Francis is incomprehensible without Bergoglio; Bergoglio without Peronism; and Peronism without National Catholicism, which imbued the Church and Argentinean culture with different nuances.
This sentence, written by historian Loris Zanatta, hits the mark as the sharpest criticism of the deceased pontiff in Argentina. Nevertheless, the Pope always stood up for his independence: “I was never a member of the Peronista party, I was never even a militant or an activist of Peronism,” Francis claims in the book “El Pastor,” an extended conversation with journalists Sergio Rubin and Francesca Ambrogetti.
Yet, whenever the Pope focused on concepts such as social justice, when he championed for the poor and the dispossessed, or appealed to the “people,” accusations that he was aligned with the narrative of Peronism ensued.
International analyst Luis Rosales, author of the book “Francisco, el argentino que puede cambiar el mundo” (“Francis, The Argentine who Can Change the World”), avoids identifying him as a Peronist, but he admits there are influences present. In an interview with CONNECTAS, he says that “undoubtedly, Peronism is very influential in Argentina. And since Bergoglio was in major posts of the local church in very complex times, sometimes he passed close to Peronism.”
Perón wasn’t far from the Church’s doctrine, either. Rosales cites the encyclical of 1871 “Rerum Novarum” of Leo XIII, which promotes the third ecclesiastical order: neither socialists nor capitalists. The analysis claims that the encyclical would inspire the founder of Peronism, decades later.
Ignacio Zuleta, author of the book “El papa peronista” (“The Peronist Pope”), explains that Francis went to the seminary in the 50s and 60s, when the Peronist version of National Catholicism was on trend: “That was the world in which Bergoglio was trained, in the local leg of the Liberation Theology. And he took that doctrine to the Vatican.”
But Zanatta takes it a step further. In his book, aside from populism, he mentions two of Francis's traits that are present in Peron’s doctrine: anti-Western sentiment and antiliberalism. “In all of his trips to the global south, Francis warned the ‘poor’ not to give in to the temptations of Western progress,” the Italian author wrote.
The legacy of the first Latin American Pope
While Argentina gets used to the idea of the death of its most universal child, the world is still debating the real legacy of Francis. He was the first non-European Pope in over 1,300 years. He came from “the end of the world” (as he himself claimed when he arrived in The Holy See), and he set out to open the door of geographies that had never been represented in the College of Cardinals, in charge of electing his successor.
Pope Francis, on a visit to Bolivia in 2015. Image by Fabiola Chambi, used with permission.
In his 12 years as Pope, he traveled 47 times and visited 66 countries. In his seven trips to Latin America, he went to 10 countries (although not to Argentina, one more contradiction for his fellow compatriots). In that sense, his papacy planted a revolutionary idea: “It’s not the world towards Rome, as it used to be. It’s Rome towards the world. He took the Chair of Saint Peter on those 47 trips around the world’s five continents,” says Néstor Pongutá, an expert on The Vatican, to CONNECTAS.
Another man close to The Vatican, Spanish journalist José Manuel Vidal (director of the outlet Religión Digital), values what Bergoglio’s Argentinean and Latin American nature brought to his style in the papacy. As he explains to that outlet, “synodality, community, empathy, closeness, all of those qualities are experienced to the fullest in Latin American churches, but not so much in the Western Church.”
In March 2013, when Jorge Bergoglio joined the conclave to elect the successor of Benedict XVI, he took a small bag with him and nothing else, expecting to return to Buenos Aires in a couple of weeks. He couldn’t have known that he would never come back. Nor that he would become Francis, the “Peronist” Pope that made history. Now, Argentineans, those who hate to love him, are in mourning.
