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POPE Francis has been criticised by some for his actions during Argentina's "Dirty War."

Many Argentines remain angry over the Catholic Church's acknowledged failure to openly confront a right-wing dictatorship that was kidnapping and killing thousands of its citizens as it sought to eliminate "subversive elements" after a 1976 coup.

Under his leadership, Argentina's bishops issued a collective apology in October 2012 for the church's failures to protect its flock during the 1970s.

But the statement blamed the era's violence in roughly equal measure on both the junta and its enemies.

That statement came far too late for some activists, who accused Jorge Bergoglio of being more concerned about the church's image than about aiding human rights investigations in Argentina.

Bergoglio twice invoked his right under Argentine law to refuse to appear in court.

When he eventually did testify in 2010, human rights lawyer Myriam Bregman said his answers were evasive.

At least two cases directly involved Bergoglio. One examined the torture of two of his Jesuit priests - Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics - who were kidnapped in 1976 from the slums where they advocated liberation theology.

Yorio accused Bergoglio of effectively handing them over to the death squads by declining to tell the regime that he endorsed their work. Jalics refused to discuss it after moving into seclusion in a German monastery.

Both men were freed after Bergoglio took extraordinary, behind-the-scenes action to save them. Bergoglio never shared the details until he was interviewed for a 2010 biography.

Bergoglio - who ran Argentina's Jesuit order during the dictatorship - told his biographer that he regularly hid people on church property during the dictatorship.

But all this was done in secret, at a time when church leaders publicly endorsed the junta and urged Catholics to restore their "love for country" despite the terror in the streets.

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/wo ... z2NWHhrcdx" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Despite the joyful celebrations outside the Municipal Cathedral in Buenos Aires yesterday, the news of Latin America's first pope was clouded by lingering concerns about the role of the church – and its new head – during Argentina's brutal military dictatorship.

The Catholic church and Pope Francis have been accused of a complicit silence and worse during the "dirty war" of murders and abductions carried out by the junta that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983.

The evidence is sketchy and contested. Documents have been destroyed and many of those who were victims or perpetrators have died in the years that followed. The moral argument is clear, but the reality of life at that time put many people in a grey position. It was dangerous at that time to speak out and risk being labelled a subversive. But many, including priests and bishops, did so and subsequently disappeared. Those who stayed silent have subsequently had to live with their consciences — and sometimes the risk of a trial.

Its behaviour during that dark period in Argentine history was so unsaintly that in 2000 the Argentine Catholic church itself made a public apology for its failure to take a stand against the generals. "We want to confess before God everything we have done badly," Argentina's Episcopal Conference said at that time.

In February, a court noted during the sentencing of three former military men to life imprisonment for the killings of two priests that the church hierarchy had "closed its eyes" to the killing of progressive priests.

As head of the Jesuit order from 1973 to 1979, Jorge Bergoglio – as the new pope was known until yesterday – was a member of the hierarachy during the period when the wider Catholic church backed the military government and called for their followers to be patriotic.

Bergoglio twice refused to testify in court about his role as head of the Jesuit order. When he eventually appeared in front of a judge in 2010, he was accused by lawyers of being evasive.

The main charge against Bergoglio involves the kidnapping of two Jesuit priests, Orland Yorio and Francisco Jalics, who were taken by Navy officers in May 1976 and held under inhumane conditions for the missionary work they conducted in the country's slums, a politically risky activity at the time.

His chief accuser is journalist Horacio Verbitsky, the author of a book on the church called "El Silencio" ("The Silence"), which claims that Bergoglio withdrew his order's protection from the two priests, effectively giving the military a green light for their abduction.

The claims are based on conversations with Jalics, who was released after his ordeal and later moved to a German monastery.

Bergoglio has called the allegations "slander" and holds that, on the contrary, he moved behind the scenes to save the lives of the two priests and others that he secretly hid from the death squads. In one case, he claims he even gave his identity papers to one dissident who looked like him so that he could flee the country. *BTW - This is the same shit excuse Pius and his apologists use - He hid people in the Vatican... blah, blah, blah - meanwhile millions of jews a being incinerated and fascism tightens it's grip on the two most catholic nations in Europe - Italy and Spain. He should have confronted it PUBLICLY before it got going. Behind the scenes means - "We didn't do a fucking thing so we're gonna make up anything we want and the clueless will believe us - they have to, or they won't go to heaven and be with Jesus."[/b]

For some, that makes him a hero. Other are sceptical. Eduardo de la Serna, co-ordinator of a left-wing group of priests who focus on the plight of the poor, told Radio del Plate that: "Bergoglio is a man of power and he knows how position himself among powerful people. I still have many doubts about his role regarding the Jesuits who went missing under the dictatorship."

Many in the church are keen to move on from that dark period in the history of Argentina and the church. They say the new pope helped to heal the wounds of the dirty war and to restore the credibility of the Catholic hierarchy.

"As archbishop, he faced a monumental task, and he was even accused of collaboration with the dirty war, which he strenuously denied and was ultimately cleared. If he can restore the credibility of the church there [in Argentina], he can handle the scandals that have befallen the church worldwide because he knows how to connect to the people" said Ramon Luzarraga, theologian-in-residence at the University of Dayton.

But the issue is unlikely to go away any time soon, particularly while high-profile trials are still taking place. This week a Buenos Aires court sentenced the "Last Dictator" Reynaldo Bignone to life in jail for crimes relating to the disappearance of 23 people, including two pregnant women, when he was in power in the 1980s.

Former Argentinian dictator says he told Catholic Church of disappeared


Jorge Videla said the hierarchy advised him on ‘managing’ the dirty war, writes TOM HENNIGANin São Paulo

ARGENTINA’S FORMER military dictator said he kept the country’s Catholic hierarchy informed about his regime’s policy of “disappearing” political opponents, and that Catholic leaders offered advice on how to “manage” the policy.

Jorge Videla said he had “many conversations” with Argentina’s primate, Cardinal Raúl Francisco Primatesta, about his regime’s dirty war against left-wing activists. He said there were also conversations with other leading bishops from Argentina’s episcopal conference as well as with the country’s papal nuncio at the time, Pio Laghi.

“They advised us about the manner in which to deal with the situation,” said Videla in a series of interviews conducted by the magazine El Sur in 2010 but published only on Sunday.

He said that in certain cases church authorities offered their “good offices” and undertook to inform families looking for “disappeared” relatives to desist from their searches, but only if they were certain the families would not use the information to denounce the junta.

“In the case of families that it was certain would not make political use of the information, they told them not to look any more for their child because he was dead,” said Videla. He said the church “understood well . . . and also assumed the risks” of such involvement.

The confession confirms long-held suspicions that Argentina’s Catholic hierarchy collaborated with the military’s so-called process of national reorganisation, which sought to root out communism. In the years following the 1976 coup led by Videla, thousands of left-wing activists were swept up into secret detention centres where they were tortured and murdered. Military chaplains were assigned as spiritual advisers to the junior officers who staffed the centres.

In contrast to the Catholic hierarchy in Brazil, where church leaders denounced that country’s military dictatorship and provided sanctuary to its victims, in Argentina bishops were prominent defenders of the regime against accusations of human rights abuses from abroad.

At the height of the state’s offensive, Cardinal Primatesta refused to meet with mothers of the disappeared who, in the face of violent intimidation and media silence, were seeking help in finding out what had happened to their missing loved ones. He also prohibited the lower clergy from speaking out against state violence, even as death squads targeted Catholic priests critical of the regime.

The cardinal’s defenders said he believed a break with the regime would be counter- productive and that in private he characterised disappearances and torture as against the Christian spirit. On his death in 2006 human rights campaigners in Argentina said he took to the grave many of the junta’s secrets after they failed to force him to testify about his dealings with it.

Accusations of collaboration with the junta also dogged the subsequent career of Laghi, who had been a regular tennis partner of the navy’s representative in the junta, Admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera, when in Buenos Aires.

The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo human rights group tried to prosecute him in Italy for his involvement with Argentina’s dictatorship but the effort failed.

Videla is serving life in prison for human rights abuses committed while in power. Earlier this month a court sentenced him to 50 years for orchestrating the theft of babies born in captivity to women subsequently murdered by their military captors.

He gave the interview to El Sur on condition that it be published only after his death, saying he did not want to cause any more pain. But the magazine said it was released from its obligation after Videla subsequently gave a series of interviews to other journalists that were published.

As a leading member of the Catholic Church in Argentina for the last 40 years, the new Pope's role during the notorious Dirty War of the 1970s, which resulted in the death of 30,000 left-wing activists at the hands of the military junta, could become the first scandal to haunt Latin America's first pontiff.

Indeed, in 2005, a human rights lawyer filed a criminal complaint against the then Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, accusing him of conspiring with the Argentinian junta in 1976 to kidnap two Jesuit priests. He had asked the priests to leave the Society of Jesus of Argentina because of a conflict within the society over how it should respond to the new military dictatorship. Some priests had advocated a violent overthrow of the regime.

His spokesman flatly denied the allegations and no evidence was presented linking the cardinal to the kidnapping.

While generally the Church's support for the regime was implied by its absence of criticism and its cooperation with the junta, there were documented instances of outright callousness by individual churchmen.

One example is that the head of the Argentine church, Cardinal Aramburu, refused to receive the relatives of those who had disappeared. He also allowed federal police to go into his cathedral to clear out the Mothers of the Plaza - mothers whose children had "disappeared" during the Dirty War and who had sought sanctuary. Shame!

Another is that of Father Christian von Wernich, a police chaplain during the period, who was convicted of complicity in multiple murders, abduction and torture. At the trial of Wernich, in 2007, Father Ruben Capitanio, also a Roman Catholic priest, accused the Church of being "scandalously close to the dictatorship".

In 1995, 12 years after the end of the military junta, the Argentine army apologised for the Dirty War. The following year the Argentine Catholic Church delivered its own mea culpa, with bishops issuing a document saying they made insufficient efforts to stop human rights violations.

They also asked for forgiveness for crimes committed by Catholics on both sides of the political fence but of themselves they only conceded "there is no doubt that all that was done was not enough."

One critic later characterised the bishops' statement as "a laundered document, with evasive phrases".

ASUMountaineer wrote:Quite the conversation you're having.

kalm wrote:Who would have been your choice?

D1B wrote:

kalm wrote:Who would have been your choice?

The dude from Canada.

D1B wrote:His country and his church is embroiled in one of the worst sex abuse/murder/concentration camp/slavery/genocide scandals in the world.

Wikipedia

There has long been significant historiographical and popular controversy about the conditions experienced by students in the residential schools. While day schools for First Nations, Metis and Inuit children always far outnumbered residential schools, a new consensus emerged in the early twenty-first century that the latter schools did significant harm to Aboriginal children who attended them by removing them from their families, depriving them of their ancestral languages, and exposing many of them to physical and sexual abuse at the hands of staff and other students. This consensus was symbolized by the June 11, 2008 public apology offered, not only by Prime Minister Stephen Harper on behalf of the Government of Canada, but also by the leaders of all the other parties in the Canadian House of Commons.[1] As well, just nine days prior, the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established to uncover the truth about the schools. As of 2012 the Commission's hearings are ongoing.


The pope also offered the following mealy-mouthed apology for the catholic church's significant role in fostering the abuse and torture of these children.

His Holiness recalled that since the earliest days of her presence in Canada, the Church, particularly through her missionary personnel, has closely accompanied the indigenous peoples. Given the sufferings that some indigenous children experienced in the Canadian Residential School system, the Holy Father expressed his sorrow at the anguish caused by the deplorable conduct of some members of the Church and he offered his sympathy and prayerful solidarity. His Holiness emphasized that acts of abuse cannot be tolerated in society. He prayed that all those affected would experience healing, and he encouraged First Nations Peoples to continue to move forward with renewed hope.


The other issue with Ouellet is his brother is a convicted pedophile.

D1B wrote:

kalm wrote:Who would have been your choice?

The dude from Canada.

Grizalltheway wrote:

D1B wrote:

The dude from Canada.

Really?

D1B wrote:His country and his church is embroiled in one of the worst sex abuse/murder/concentration camp/slavery/genocide scandals in the world.

Wikipedia

There has long been significant historiographical and popular controversy about the conditions experienced by students in the residential schools. While day schools for First Nations, Metis and Inuit children always far outnumbered residential schools, a new consensus emerged in the early twenty-first century that the latter schools did significant harm to Aboriginal children who attended them by removing them from their families, depriving them of their ancestral languages, and exposing many of them to physical and sexual abuse at the hands of staff and other students. This consensus was symbolized by the June 11, 2008 public apology offered, not only by Prime Minister Stephen Harper on behalf of the Government of Canada, but also by the leaders of all the other parties in the Canadian House of Commons.[1] As well, just nine days prior, the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established to uncover the truth about the schools. As of 2012 the Commission's hearings are ongoing.


The pope also offered the following mealy-mouthed apology for the catholic church's significant role in fostering the abuse and torture of these children.

His Holiness recalled that since the earliest days of her presence in Canada, the Church, particularly through her missionary personnel, has closely accompanied the indigenous peoples. Given the sufferings that some indigenous children experienced in the Canadian Residential School system, the Holy Father expressed his sorrow at the anguish caused by the deplorable conduct of some members of the Church and he offered his sympathy and prayerful solidarity. His Holiness emphasized that acts of abuse cannot be tolerated in society. He prayed that all those affected would experience healing, and he encouraged First Nations Peoples to continue to move forward with renewed hope.


The other issue with Ouellet is his brother is a convicted pedophile.

At least two cases directly involved Bergoglio. One examined the torture of two of his Jesuit priests - Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics - who were kidnapped in 1976 from the slums where they advocated liberation theology.

Yorio accused Bergoglio of effectively handing them over to the death squads by declining to tell the regime that he endorsed their work. Jalics refused to discuss it after moving into seclusion in a German monastery.

Both men were freed after Bergoglio took extraordinary, behind-the-scenes action to save them. Bergoglio never shared the details until he was interviewed for a 2010 biography.

Bergoglio - who ran Argentina's Jesuit order during the dictatorship - told his biographer that he regularly hid people on church property during the dictatorship.

But all this was done in secret, at a time when church leaders publicly endorsed the junta and urged Catholics to restore their "love for country" despite the terror in the streets.

GannonFan wrote:

D1B wrote:

The dude from Canada.

He couldn't be your choice, you didn't like his brother.

GannonFan wrote:I'm not sure you read your own stuff you post, D1B - here's an excerpt from what you posted...

At least two cases directly involved Bergoglio. One examined the torture of two of his Jesuit priests - Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics - who were kidnapped in 1976 from the slums where they advocated liberation theology.

Yorio accused Bergoglio of effectively handing them over to the death squads by declining to tell the regime that he endorsed their work. Jalics refused to discuss it after moving into seclusion in a German monastery.

Both men were freed after Bergoglio took extraordinary, behind-the-scenes action to save them. Bergoglio never shared the details until he was interviewed for a 2010 biography.

Bergoglio - who ran Argentina's Jesuit order during the dictatorship - told his biographer that he regularly hid people on church property during the dictatorship.

But all this was done in secret, at a time when church leaders publicly endorsed the junta and urged Catholics to restore their "love for country" despite the terror in the streets.

So in your own excerpt, Bergoglio apparently defied his own Church (remember, he was the leader of the Jesuit Order in Argentina, he was not a bishop at the time), saved the lives of two priests who were tending to the poor, and even hid numerous people and saved their lives again in defiance of the military dictatorship in place at the time. And for that you castigate him? How many lives should he have saved where you would at least be neutral on him?

Grizalltheway wrote:

D1B wrote:

The dude from Canada.

Really?

D1B wrote:His country and his church is embroiled in one of the worst sex abuse/murder/concentration camp/slavery/genocide scandals in the world.

Wikipedia

There has long been significant historiographical and popular controversy about the conditions experienced by students in the residential schools. While day schools for First Nations, Metis and Inuit children always far outnumbered residential schools, a new consensus emerged in the early twenty-first century that the latter schools did significant harm to Aboriginal children who attended them by removing them from their families, depriving them of their ancestral languages, and exposing many of them to physical and sexual abuse at the hands of staff and other students. This consensus was symbolized by the June 11, 2008 public apology offered, not only by Prime Minister Stephen Harper on behalf of the Government of Canada, but also by the leaders of all the other parties in the Canadian House of Commons.[1] As well, just nine days prior, the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established to uncover the truth about the schools. As of 2012 the Commission's hearings are ongoing.


The pope also offered the following mealy-mouthed apology for the catholic church's significant role in fostering the abuse and torture of these children.

His Holiness recalled that since the earliest days of her presence in Canada, the Church, particularly through her missionary personnel, has closely accompanied the indigenous peoples. Given the sufferings that some indigenous children experienced in the Canadian Residential School system, the Holy Father expressed his sorrow at the anguish caused by the deplorable conduct of some members of the Church and he offered his sympathy and prayerful solidarity. His Holiness emphasized that acts of abuse cannot be tolerated in society. He prayed that all those affected would experience healing, and he encouraged First Nations Peoples to continue to move forward with renewed hope.


The other issue with Ouellet is his brother is a convicted pedophile.

Relax, Francis.

I'm not saying he shouldn't be pope, just that he won't, IMO, cuz of all the trouble in his country and his family.

To clarify, his brother is also a pedophile.

The church has been avoiding even this level of controversy.

BTW, St. Augustine, the last of these barbaric schools closed in 1996. So he was around.

GannonFan wrote:

Grizalltheway wrote:
Really?

See, I don't think it's the same D1B that posts everyday. I think there's more than one of him and the Wednesday D1B didn't let the Thursday D1B know what had been discussed. A memo was missed somewhere. Hopefully the Friday D1B is better organized.

Relax, Francis.

I'm not saying he shouldn't be pope, just that he won't, IMO, cuz of all the trouble in his country and his family.

To clarify, his brother is also a pedophile.

The church has been avoiding even this level of controversy.

BTW, St. Augustine, the last of these barbaric schools closed in 1996. So he was around.

LONDON — The election of an Argentine to the papacy has revived a polemic about the role of the Roman Catholic Church during his country’s so-called “dirty war” and about his own dealings with a military junta that murdered up to 30,000 citizens.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio was head of the Jesuits in Argentina between 1973 and 1979, a period that saw the worst excesses of a campaign of repression that targeted real and perceived opponents of the military dictatorship, including radical clerics.

The Argentine justice system has conducted numerous investigations into the junta’s crimes and no personal blame has been attached to Pope Francis, but the church in Argentina continues to live under the shadow of the dirty war.

As recently as last December, a provincial tribunal denounced the “complicity” of the church in the human rights violations of the dictatorship and a continued reticence on behalf of church authorities and clerics to throw light on such crimes.

It was a dark period for the country and the church, as a junta headed by Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla, an ultra-traditionalist Catholic, employed torture and murder in a self-declared crusade against godless communism.

The victims included priests and seminarians who worked with the poor. Two French nuns were among those who were thrown alive from aircraft into the South Atlantic.

With Cardinal Bergoglio’s elevation as Pope Francis, questions have once more been raised about how much he knew of the abuses and how much he did to try to prevent them.

The controversy stems from an accusation in 2010 by Horacio Verbitsky, a journalist and former leftist guerrilla, that the Jesuit leader had withdrawn his protection from two fellow priests who were subsequently kidnapped and tortured in 1976. They were later released.

Cardinal Bergoglio told a tribunal in 2010 that he had met with General Videla and his deputy, Adm. Emilio Massera, to plead for the lives of the abducted clerics.

He was also called to testify in a case that involved the forced adoption of babies born to female detainees, a phenomenon he said he was unaware of until years after the fact.

The future pope told his biographer he had helped to hide potential targets of the junta and “I did what I could, given my age and my limited contacts, to plead on behalf of those who had been seized.”

Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, a human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was among those who leapt to the defense of the new pope.

He told the BBC his fellow Argentine had no links to the military dictatorship. “There were bishops who were complicit, but not Bergoglio,” he said in an interview.

“I personally know many bishops who called on the military junta to free prisoners and priests and whose pleas were rejected.”

Although some clerics actively helped the military by attending secret detention centers at which suspects were tortured, the main charge against the church is that it was guilty of the sin of omission by failing to do enough to help those in need.

Argentine Catholic leaders have long admitted the church’s failings during the dirty war. As archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Bergoglio last year led bishops in an acknowledgment of the church’s failure to protect its flock during the 1970s.

However, the statement angered some human rights activists by placing equal blame for the violence on the military and its opponents.

The statement was in part a response to trial testimony by General Videla in which he spoke of the Church’s cooperation during the dirty war and boasted of his “excellent, very cordial, sincere and open” relationship with its leaders.

psychoCAT wrote:And yet you're too much of a coward to renounce your baptism as I so blatently called you out on a couple of weeks back. Here's the deal, if you want to be with a congregation that support women and gays as priest, go join the Episocpal church because the Catholic Church is not changing.

Renounce your baptism mr atheist boy if you got the balls to do so. You're scared. You are flat out scared. Yet through it all, God loves you and desires your friendship.

I ain't going away. I'm gonna taunt, haunt, and badger you until you can't take it anymore. Anytime you're in South Carolina, look me up.