Did the Pope keep 'his mouth shut' as children were taken from their mothers?

Pope Francis (or Jorge Mario Bergoglio to non-believers like you and me) is on a visit to Ireland.

Bergoglio is a ‘nice guy’ (the narrative goes) and he met Leo Varadkar another ‘nice guy’. Leo had to politely tell the Pope off because of some of the Churches failings over child abuse scandals and Bergoglio was suitable contrite. However he has a way of masking is true persona. As part of the ‘nice guy’ image Francis steps out of the Popemobile sometimes to visit refugee centres or wash peoples feet.

However there is another Francis. Long before the scandals erupted around the Church a decade ago Bergoglio was allegedly passive or complicit as official murder gangs stalked the streets in his home country Argentina. He was part of the faction of the Church that opposed the liberation philosophy that was sweeping some parts of the Latin American Church at the time. An article I read recently said:

“Bergoglio came up through the ranks of an Argentinian church dominated by reactionaries who shared this deep conservatism, and in his early career seemed comfortable in that milieu. Across much of Latin America, the hierarchy identified its interests with those of the ruling elites, and in the context of the Cold War came to identify defense of the Church with support for right-wing, fanatically anti-communist regimes across the region, including those ruled by military dictatorships. Rome not only did not object, but seemed to eagerly endorse this approach.

“Bergoglio’s Argentina occupied a unique position throughout this period: in 1976 the military seized control with the full consent of senior clergy. One historian describes the Argentine hierarchy as “the black sheep of Latin America in the passive way they dealt with the military dictatorship”; an ex-General recalled with relief that the Argentine Church never became “carried away by the leftist Third World tendencies [elsewhere on] the continent.” The Argentine hierarchy—with openly fascist elements at the top—were complicit in horrific brutality. They staffed regime torture centres with Catholic ‘chaplains’ whose actual function was to gather intelligence for the military; they oversaw a system under which infants born to pregnant women undergoing torture would be “taken from their mothers immediately” and handed over to “families sympathetic to the regime.” They absolved the regime for its policy of tossing political prisoners (including nuns) out of helicopters into the Atlantic Ocean: “[military] chaplains told the men performing the killings that their actions were justified by the Gospel parable of separating the wheat from the chaff”.

“Though he was not part of the hard-Right element in the upper levels of the Argentine hierarchy, Bergoglio’s role during Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ remains a subject of intense controversy. In the face of shift to the left within the Church, he distinguished himself as a conservative hostile to liberation theology. It was largely down to Bergoglio’s leadership, for example, that while across the region Jesuits were prominent on the left, in Argentina the order “did not march in unison” with developments elsewhere. His most sympathetic biographers concede that Bergoglio “kept his mouth shut” throughout the period the regime was carrying out its worst atrocities, but there are indications that his actions bordered on complicity. The ‘social institute’ he directed in Buenos Aires was silent on torture at a time when 20,000 victims were known to have been ‘disappeared’ by the regime. In the most serious controversy, critics charge that Bergoglio “gave a green light” for the regime to arrest two Jesuit priests who had defied his directive to withdraw from working in the slums: they were abducted and subjected to severe torture. He was so despised among rank-and-file Jesuits that the order banished him to Córdoba for two years exile.”

The full article is here:

http://www.rebelnews.ie/2018/07/18/pope/

I’m not a Catholic (or indeed religious at all) but I’ll celebrate the Pope’s visit to Ireland by watching the Ricardo Darin film ‘The White Elephant’ set in Argentina this evening. It recounts the story of priests working against injustice and practising liberation theory via religion. I had been waiting for an opportune time to view it and now seems rights.

Image: Pio Laghi and the archbishop of Buenos Aires, Juan Carlos Aramburu act kindly with, Jorge Videla, Leopoldo Galtieri, Omar Graffigna and Armando Lambruschini. The Church was always close to the Junta even as it tortured and killed its own people.

Bernard Moffatt