Pope Francis celebrates his inaugural Mass with cardinals inside the Sistine Chapel, 03/14/13. (photo: CTV/AP)
Pope Francis and Argentina's Dirty War: Nine Questions He Needs to Answer
22 March 13
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Old Testament prophets, dogged journalists from Argentina and around
the world have raised concern about the election of Cardinal Jorge
Bergoglio to become Pope Francis. Was he, they ask, complicit with the
Argentine military that kidnapped, tortured, raped, killed, and
"disappeared" tens of thousands of people starting even before the coup
of March 1976? The victims included two bishops and as many as 150
priests and nuns, and the atrocities reached the absolute horror of
stealing newborn babies from their mothers and throwing living prisoners
from helicopters and airplanes into the South Atlantic.
The journalists are simply messengers. Most of their
first-hand testimony come from sources within Argentina's divided Church
and will not go away no matter how often Vatican spokesmen dismiss it
as old smears spread by the anti-clerical left. We have heard this spin
before, over both the Church's complicity with the Nazi Holocaust and
early allegations of sexual abuse and cover-up. Pope Francis needs to do
better than that. If he wants to put the dirty war behind him, he needs
to provide full and convincing answers to nine deeply disturbing
questions.
1. Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla, the imprisoned leader of
the military junta, credits Papal Nuncio Pío Laghi, Archbishop Raul
Francisco Primatesta, and other Church leaders with advising the
military junta and helping handle the situation of the disappeared. "In
some cases," the former dictator told Argentina's Revista El Sur, "the
Church offered its good offices and told the relatives to give up
searching for their child because he [or she] was dead." But the Church
only did this, said Videla, "if it was certain that the relatives would
not use the information politically" against the junta. How, Your
Holiness, do you explain such close collaboration?
2. Church officials in Argentina have repeatedly asked
forgiveness for their failure to speak out against the junta's human
rights violations, and Bergoglio personally called for the Church to do
public penance for the sins of the dirty war. The Church obviously
lacked courage and moral clarity, but it was far from silent. It
publicly supported the military junta. Cardinal Archbishop Juan Carlos
Aramburu gave communion and his blessing to the newly installed
dictator, Gen. Videla. Bishop José Miquel Medina, the head chaplain of
the armed forces, and other church leaders justified torture, while
providing chaplains to help the torturers overcome their moral qualms.
In his visit to Buenos Aires in April 1982, Pope John II publicly
embraced Videla's successor General Leopoldo Galtieri and refused to
meet with the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who were demanding justice
for their disappeared relatives. When, Your Holiness, will the Church
face up to the depth of its complicity?
3. In 2007, an Argentine court convicted Father
Christian von Wernich, a police chaplain, for his complicity in seven
murders, 42 abductions, and 31 cases of torture. According to BBC News,
several former prisoners testified that he used his position as a priest
to win their confidence and then passed what they told him to police
torturers and killers. The former prisoners said that he attended
several torture sessions and told the torturers that they were doing
God's work. Von Wernich is now serving a life sentence. As archbishop,
Bergoglio ruled against giving holy communion to politicians and health
care workers who facilitate abortion, while allowing von Wernich to
remain a priest and provide communion to his fellow prisoners. Does Your
Holiness truly believe that Church doctrine on abortion and
contraception is more important to uphold than prohibitions against
torture and mass murder?
4. In a case directly involving Bergoglio when he was
the top Jesuit in Argentina, the army kidnapped, drugged, tortured, and
held captive two of his subordinates who had been living and doing
social work in a Buenos Aires slum. The army held Fathers Orlando Yorio
and the Hungarian-born Franz "Francisco" Jalics blindfolded and in
chains for five months and then dumped them half-naked and drugged into a
field on the outskirts of the city. Soon after, Father Yorio sent the
Jesuit hierarchy in Rome a first-hand report in which he accused
Bergoglio of promising to speak to people from the armed forces and
assure them that the two priests were not working with the left-wing
guerrillas. But, wrote Yorio, Bergoglio spread rumors that we were. "We
began to suspect his honesty," wrote Yorio, who reportedly forgave
Bergoglio, but never withdrew his charges. Would Your Holiness release
the late Father Yorio's full report and your detailed response to it?
5. Father Jalics made similar charges and has never
withdrawn them. Now at a monastery in Germany, he says he has forgiven
Bergoglio and does not want to comment on the new pontiff's role in what
happened. Would Your Holiness ask him, in the name of truth, to testify
about what he knows?
6. In 1979, Father Jalics was living in Germany and
asked Bergoglio to help him get his passport renewed. Bergoglio made the
formal request, but The Guardian has published a typed note from the
foreign ministry archives that "appears to prove that Bergoglio said one
thing and did the opposite." The note records that Jalics and Yorio
"lived in small communities that the Jesuit Superior [Bersiglio]
disbanded in February 1976. They refused to obey, requesting that they
be removed from the order." According to the note, the information came
from Bergoglio, who recommended that the foreign ministry not renew
Jalics' passport. How, Your Holiness, do you respond to this damning
evidence?
7. Horacio Verbitsky, one of Argentina's best-known
investigative journalists, uncovered the above document and interviewed
many of the dissident voices within the Church, presenting their
evidence in his left-leaning Peronist daily Pagina 12 and his
best-selling "El Silencio: De Paulo VI a Bergoglio." He is also a direct
participant in the story, having shown the courage after the coup to
take up arms in the guerrilla war against the military dictators, and he
is a staunch supporter of Argentine President Christina Kirshner, who
fought against Bergoglio and the Church to legalize gay marriage and
provide free contraception. But, whatever his politics, Verbitsky is an
internationally respected journalist and human rights campaigner who
interviewed and corresponded with Bergoglio, initially published the
prelate's version of events, and still goes out of his way to defend the
new pontiff where the evidence against him is lacking. Would Your
Holiness ask your defenders to stop trying to kill the messenger and
deal with the specific evidence Verbitsky offers?
8. Pope Francis has long talked of making the poor
central to the Church, encouraging Christian charity toward them and
criticizing inadequate government and even IMF policies. But, in line
with John Paul II and Benedict XVI, he worked to suppress Liberation
Theology, which called for helping the poor to organize to fight for
their own rights. This appears to have been an underlying issue in his
treatment of Fathers Yorio and Jalics and in the heated divisions within
Argentina's Catholic Church. Will Your Holiness now reopen the debate
and allow defenders of Liberation Theology to speak freely within the
Church?
9. Horacio Verbitsky and other critics are quick to
credit Bergoglio with helping many of the junta's opponents and even
hiding them from arrest. "I know people he helped," said Father Yorio's
brother Rodolfo. "That's exactly what reveals his two faces, and his
closeness to the military powers. He was a master at ambiguity." Over
the years, Your Holiness, you have been a reluctant, vague, and often
evasive witness about your role – and the role of your fellow priests –
in the dirty war. Would you now, in the spirit of truth and
reconciliation, give independent journalists and historians access to
Church archives, which – along with in-depth interviews and already
available government archives – will allow them to set the record
straight?
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and
the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in
London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now
lives and works in France, where he writes on international affairs.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for
this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a
link back to Reader Supported News.
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