One of the mysteries of the life of Pope Francis is how a man regarded for many years as an authoritarian by his colleagues was reinvented as a global icon of forgiveness.

The news that he visited a psychoanalyst every week for six months may cast some light on this question. At the time of his therapy, he was 42 and Argentina was two years into the terrible struggle between a military junta that killed about 30,000 people and tortured many more, and the left, which included everyone from urban guerrillas to unarmed priests. Fr Bergoglio, as he then was, found himself in the middle as the head of the Jesuit order.

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Jesuits were prominent in the resistance to the junta, and two of his priests, who had refused his orders to leave their mission in a shanty town, were kidnapped and savagely tortured for five months by the military. Both men blamed him for their treatment, but much later, one changed his mind. The other never forgave him.

Francis secured their release, and that he behaved with exemplary courage is not in doubt. But the incident cast a lasting shadow on his character and relationships with his fellow Jesuits, which would not entirely recover for another 35 years.

Paul Vallely, the author of Pope Francis: Untying the Knots, pointed out that the year before he saw the psychoanalyst, Bergoglio had refused to intercede when approached by the father of a pregnant woman who was kidnapped, “disappeared”, and presumably murdered by the junta.

It may seem that these are things a priest should ask God to forgive, not a human psychoanalyst. But the choice is not binary. Catholics believe “grace works through nature”, which implies, among other things, that God’s forgiveness can be experienced through human actions.

Although Sigmund Freud, one of the founders of psychoanalysis, was an atheist for whom God was self-evidently the projection of human fatherhood, another, Carl Gustav Jung, was deeply concerned with spirituality. He thought the search for meaning and wholeness lay at the heart of human life and mythologies dramatised profound truths inexpressible in any other way.

The use of analysis to help you understand your own actions, or “clarify things”, as Francis told his interviewer, is no different in principle from using modern medicine rather than praying for miraculous healing.

Indeed, one of the Jesuit retreat houses in Britain is run by a psychotherapist. A great part of any priest’s pastoral work consists of counselling people and helping them through emotional distress, and psychological insight is necessary to help others and keep a check on the temptation to exploit such relationships.

So in one sense, these revelations are not at all surprising. But two things about them will shock some traditionalists: the future pope’s analyst was a woman, and she was Jewish. Neither would have been conceivable before the reforming Vatican council of the 1960s, but they show the considerable distance that the pope and most of his church have travelled since then.