The Pope and Milei, strange couple.
So different!
So different?
Opposites often attract, in some ways they even resemble each other.
Raised on bread and Hegel, a student of Guardini, Bergoglio always theorized the overcoming of “opposite polarities.”
In pursuit of “harmony”, of the “whole superior to the part”, it seeks the “overcoming synthesis”.
His call to the President surprised many.
Why wouldn't he do it?
A lifetime of preaching bridges, and would you build a wall against him?
At first glance, the abyss is unbridgeable: Miles is an anarchist and Bergoglio is holistic, that is, the opposite, one individualist, the other communitarian, the first turbo-capitalist, the second non-capitalist.
There is no way to square the circle.
All in all, I suspect that Milei is less indigestible to the Pope than is believed.
And the Pope is less indigestible to Milei than was thought.
He was going to break relations with the Holy See!
Israel aside, his international baptism was in the Vatican!
On your knees before “the evil one”!
Happy, in turn, to receive the “tyrant” aspirant.
Is so much hypocrisy normal?
Delightfully...
Whether he knows it or not, Milei thus pays tribute to the unwritten law of Argentine history, to the tacit bicephaly established by the myth of the Catholic nation.
She fights with everyone, but with the Church she seeks to understand each other, if not in everything, then in a lot.
In fact, he is straightening the Pope's hair, promising to take care of the “most vulnerable” whom he did not consider before.
And his deputies are trying to annul the law on abortion: to think that he theorized the free market in organs!
The Bergoglian Church hates the market that Milei adores.
That's clear.
But he doesn't live on Mars, neither does the Pope.
They know that as it is, the situation cannot be sustained, that the “poor” of those who set themselves up as spokespersons have voted for him, that his messianism has had a deep impact on their flock.
It has been a long time since Bergoglio got off the ship of welfare statism whose launching he had blessed: he does not have, never had, a vocation for shipwreck, if he had he would not be Pope.
He did not spare criticism of unionism, a time so cultivated, nor of clientelism, managed by old friends.
The demagogic harangues to the “popular movements” were archived.
Now its model is the newly discovered “social market economy.”
Educated by “first world” Catholic economists, he celebrates Wilhelm Röpke, his mastermind of postwar Germany.
Was it not, after all, a third way between liberalism and collectivism?
A Teutonic version, you think, of the old Justicialism?
It is no coincidence that Bergoglio seeks in the German, organic and communitarian world, what the President finds in the Anglo-Saxon, individualistic and libertarian world.
Even less so that he emphasizes the “social” over the free market, in whose name Perón massacred him.
But ten years of pontificate in the heart of the West have renewed his outdated national-popular repertoire.
Of course, to get along with Milei you need something more.
For him, he said in Davos, Christian Democrats are as collectivist as communists, and that Germany was Christian Democrat.
But words are one thing and actions another, we are seeing it, the economy is one thing and, broadening our perspective, the “spirit of the times” is another.
And the “spirit of the times” reminds us that if the ways of the Lord are infinite, so are those of the Catholic nation.
So infinite as to benefit from the coming to power of a President with the smell of Judaism, but a Christian nonetheless.
Why not?
The “older brothers” and the Old Testament will always be better than the intemperate secularism of the PRO!
Both Milei and Bergoglio, one enthusiastic and the other adapting, observe the pendulum of Argentine history swinging cyclically from the national-popular pole to “liberal” purgatory.
That's why Menem's ghost hovers so much.
Milei makes no secret of it: then, he says, the only serious attempt at economic liberalization ever attempted was born.
It ended badly, it created the Kirchnerist rebound, but it doesn't matter: it strangled hyperinflation, opened the country to the world, hit, more or less, the corporations.
And Bergoglio?
Could it be that he harbors nostalgia for Menemism, which he fought tooth and nail in his terminal phase?
Certainly not.
But his triumph allowed the rise of Antonio Quarracino and that of Quarracino that of Bergoglio.
Without Menem, look at the twists and turns of history, it would not be what it is.
Of course: for the Church, Menem redeemed the “beliefs of the people,” mortally wounded by Alfonsín's “anti-national secularism.”
Couldn't Milei, mutatis mutandi, do something similar?
Promote the religious over the secular?
Oppose both the secular liberalism of the “right” and the secular Peronism of the “left”?
Milei is not another more radical Macri, in the eyes of the Pope: in his way he is a people, the other was chaste, he embraces the first, he gave the other a wakeful face.
With him, Bergoglio shares a key trait, the most relevant and profound.
His fiery homilies as archbishop, his furious Te Deum in the Cathedral, expressed the same virulent preaching of Milei against the caste, the politicians, the ruling class in the name of a “chosen people.”
Although they differ in their content, and are addressed to different audiences, both consider society divided between a pure people and a corrupt elite, both cultivate utopia, both have an eschatology.
Even Cristina, smelling a family air, couldn't contain her praise.
It will not be enough to love each other, no one knows if and how long the honeymoon will last, but it will help to understand each other, perhaps, who knows, to contain the social protest a little.
What liberalism does not unite, populism brings closer.
Perhaps the Pope will finally decide to visit Argentina.
Loris Zanatta is a historian. Professor at the University of Bologna, Italy.