Saturday, March 16, 2013 9:42:01 PM
Wolf Whisperer in the Vatican
By TIMOTHY EGAN
March 14, 2013, 9:00 pm
The world is full of Roman Catholics who long ago stopped following the dogma, doctrine and medieval sexual dictates of the church. But they never lost faith in Francesco, the merchant’s son who spoke to wolves, slept on dirt floors and dined with lepers.
That the new pope would take the name of Francis, in honor of the saint from the Umbrian town of Assisi, is the most radical first move by a pontiff in some time. The 12th century mystic is the nature saint, patron of the environment, the poor, the dispossessed. He did not believe in owning money or property, let alone shoes. And for all of that, he was never a self-righteous grump; he “was fun, a quality not always found in saints,” as Joan Acocella wrote in The New Yorker earlier this year.
Secularists from San Francisco (yes, it’s named for him) to Paris may shun everything that the church teaches but keep statues of Francis in the garden, preaching to birds. In a popular culture dominated by showy vulgarians like Donald Trump, granting a global stage to someone named for a half-starved ascetic could be transformative.
And therein lies the conflict, and the potential for much positive power. Nearly half the world lives on less than $2 a day, and a billion people are without safe drinking water. By the philosophy of St. Francis, the church of Rome would not spend its days lecturing people about condoms and condemning homosexuals. There would be no secretive obsession with protecting the organized crime network built around pedophile priests. Humility would be a guidepost.
The stories of the new Pope cleaning the feet of AIDS patients in his native Argentina and disparaging fellow clerics for refusing to baptize the children of unmarried mothers show just how much the energies of the Vatican bully pulpit could be redirected.
In Francis’s day, the poor lived shunned lives in the malarial shadows below the sun-washed hill towns of Italy, while bishops and cardinals resided in gaudy splendor. At the same time, the church launched one of its violent purges of heretics in Europe. In a single day, 20,000 people were slaughtered. What would Jesus think?
Francis knew violence, and he knew wealth. He had gone to war with nearby Perugia as a young man, a party animal with family money. Captured, he spent a year in a rat-infested cell. After release, he was a changed person, stripping himself of his clothes at the feet of his father. He was duty-bound, he said, to follow the gospel of helping the least among them.
And he had that feel for nature, a view of the interconnectedness of all living things, similar to the spiritual world of many Native American tribes. Fire was a brother, as was the moon, the stars and physical pain. The many biographies tell of bird-preaching episodes and charming a wolf. On Wednesday this week, as birds alighted on the chimney of the Sistine Chapel just minutes before the white smoke appeared, many a Catholic sensed a Franciscan moment.
Francis also reached out to the Muslim world, traveling deep into North Africa on a mission that should have gotten him killed and, in this day, would be condemned by conservatives of his own faith.
This fresco, “The Expulsion of the Devils from Arezzo,” is one of 19 by Benozzo Gozzol (1420-1497) in Montefalco, Italy, that depicts the life of St. Francis.
Scala/Art Resource, NY
Though Francis of Assisi is the most popular saint in a long history of tortured bodies and souls, the fact that no pope until Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio would take his name says a lot about the timeless shadow from the 12th century to the 21st. The legacy of the first Francis is almost too much to bear.
Today, on the spine of Assisi, where pilgrims jostle with peddlers of all things Francis, you see the extraordinary Giotto frescoes inside the basilica, a narrative of the saint’s life. That such a magnificent structure was built over the bones (interred beneath the floor of the lower church) of a man who often slept without a roof over his head is a testament to how a powerful movement can be co-opted.
But another legacy, far removed from marbled ostentation, can be found in the Franciscan priests who try to follow the example of their founder. When my young nephew was murdered by gunfire a few years ago, it was soothing that a man in the brown robes, sandals and roped belt of the Franciscan order conducted the most humane of funeral masses.
Pope Francis is a Jesuit, an order known for its rigorous intellectual tradition. They were disbanded in 1773 by a pope who didn’t like their politics and were restored by popular demand in 1814. The Jesuit influence is another reason to hope that reform is in the early spring air of Rome.
It may be too much to expect that this new Francis will be devoutly inspired by the old Francis. He follows the repressive dogma on sex and gays, and there remain questions about his role during Argentina’s Dirty War, a time of unholy alliances between the church and state-run terrorism.
Joseph Stalin famously wondered how many divisions the pope had. None, of course. The real power of the papacy is its moral force. For good reason, the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said Pope John Paul II was instrumental in bringing an end to the cold war.
With a visit to a slum in Rio de Janeiro, a hospital in the South Bronx or a stroll up an Umbrian peak, Pope Francis can claim a mantle from a pauper who still changes lives, eight centuries after his death.
*
Related Posts from Opinionator
Misconceptions
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/23/misconceptions/
Returning to the Sermon on the Mount
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/returning-to-the-sermon-on-the-mount/ [first item at/see (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=74667154 and preceding (and any future following)]
Birth Control, Bishops and Religious Authority
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/birth-control-and-the-challenge-to-divine-authority/ [second item at/see (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=72279452 and preceding and following]
*
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/14/wolf-whisperer-in-the-vatican/ [with comments]
--
Snub of Reformers’ Choice Seen Before Pope’s Anointing
A screen in St. Peter’s Square on Thursday showed the Mass led by the pope.
Oded Balilty/Associated Press
By DANIEL J. WAKIN
Published: March 14, 2013
ROME — The choice of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/francis_i/index.html ] as pope was so surprising, the Italian bishops sent out an e-mail congratulating the wrong man. His profile was so low that he was barely mentioned by the feverish handicappers and Vaticanologists who make their living scrutinizing the Holy See. But the Argentine emerged from the conclave a swiftly anointed Pope Francis on Wednesday evening, barely 28 hours after it began.
While the workings of the conclave are secret, Cardinal Bergoglio won the papacy, according to comments from cardinals, Vatican [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/r/roman_catholic_church/index.html ] experts and leaks to Italian newspapers, in part because the Vatican-based cardinals protective of their bureaucracy snubbed the presumptive front-runner, and a favored candidate of reformers, Cardinal Angelo Scola.
That created an opening for a Latin-American Jesuit whose attractive mix of piety, humility and administrative skills won over many cardinals, including those intent on addressing the Vatican’s recent troubles with corruption and disarray in the Vatican hierarchy, or Curia. Still, it remains to be seen how, and if, Francis will fulfill those hopes.
“By choosing Bergoglio we chose someone who was not in the Curia system, because of his mission and his ministry,” said Cardinal André Vingt-Trois, the archbishop of Paris, in a news conference. “He is not part of the Italian system, but also at the same time, because of his culture and background, he was Italo-compatible. If there was a chance that someone could intervene with justice in this situation, he was the man who could do it best.”
Francis’ immediate march to the papacy, to draw a rough analogy, began with the all-inclusive meetings of cardinals called congregations that occurred before the conclave. They function roughly like primary season in United States presidential elections. The cardinals all give speeches — about 150 this time — talk among themselves and size one another up.
Cardinal Bergoglio “talked about the need of the church to stay focused on her mission, the spiritual mission,” Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington, said in a briefing for a few reporters. “He always, always has a preferential option for the poor.” That seemed to strike a chord.
At the same time, he kept a low profile ahead of the conclave, making few public appearances or statements. Giving the appearance of holding oneself out as a possible pope is one of the worst political mistakes ahead of a conclave, and he avoided it. He may have had good reason, given his prominent place in the last conclave, in 2005.
The most authoritative accounts of that election suggest Cardinal Bergoglio garnered the second most votes to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in the penultimate round. Then, at lunch, he was said to have thrown his votes to Cardinal Ratzinger, who was quickly elected Benedict XVI. Some accounts suggest he did not want to be pope; others, that he knew he did not have a chance of winning.
Renunciation is not unheard-of. “People say, ‘Don’t consider me,’ ” said Chicago’s archbishop, Cardinal Francis George, in an interview, and that was the case this time as well. “Some people were very disturbed by the idea” that they might be considered for pope, he said.
“He’s someone who was looked at who could do the office, particularly in light of the challenges that we now face,” he added. “First thing is, ‘Is he a man of the faith who connects us to Christ?’ Next, ‘Can he govern?’ ” The church needs “a revision to the way things work in the Curia,” Cardinal George said. “That impacts our own diocesan curias.”
The third factor, he said, was “the fact that he has a heart for the poor.”
It is difficult to know whether his role in the last conclave had an effect on the thinking of his fellow 114 cardinals this week, 47 of whom took part in the 2005 balloting. An unwritten rule holds that a second-place finisher should not be chosen pope because it could be seen as a slight to the previous pope. But Benedict’s resignation at 85, the first of a pope in 598 years, may have changed that thinking.
Cardinal Bergoglio apparently went through the first round of voting, which took place on Tuesday evening, into the conclave as a leading vote-getter, but a number of other eminences garnered some votes, which were handwritten on Latin ballots with Pilot gel pens. Carlo Marroni, who covers the Vatican for Il Sole 24 Ore, reported that Cardinal Bergoglio, Cardinal Scola and Cardinal Marc Ouellet of Canada were the leaders.
Ignazio Ingrao, the Vatican expert for the newsweekly Panorama, said that at the beginning cardinals voted for a number of individuals as a “courtesy vote.” But, “Then they went fairly quickly to Bergoglio,” he said. Private conversations in the evening helped put the focus on him, analysts said.
In the final round of voting, the future Francis hit 77 — the required two-thirds minimum — before all the votes were counted. Applause broke out, several cardinals said, but the counting continued for completeness. He ended up with “more than sufficient” votes to win, the Brazilian cardinal, Geraldo Majella Agnelo, said. The final tally was kept secret.
Cardinal Scola went into the conclave with a solid block of votes, including many of the Americans and Europeans, who saw in him an Italian who was nevertheless at a distance from the intrigues of the Vatican. But it quickly became apparent this was not going to be enough, particularly given what news reports said was the opposition of Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the powerful secretary of state under Benedict.
“The rapidity with which the choice of Bergoglio was arrived at confirms that the votes that Scola could count on immediately became insufficient,” wrote Massimo Franco, the Vatican expert for the daily Corriere della Sera. The numbers also tell a tale: Latin America had 19 electors, second only to Europe’s 61, and Cardinal Bergoglio may have gotten strong support from the region.
While Cardinal Bertone failed to give him support, Cardinal Scola certainly had his share of believers in the Italian Bishops Conference — it sent out a message congratulating him on becoming pope 20 minutes after Francis was named. The conference later blamed a technical glitch.
“The Argentine archbishop was elected after the third balloting when Angelo Scola had sent his votes toward him,” wrote Paolo Rodari, La Repubblica’s Vaticanista.
Another source of surprise was Bergoglio’s age, 76. A number of cardinals had suggested that a younger man was needed — in the early 60s range — especially after a pope resigned because of waning strength in old age.
Cardinal Bergoglio’s age may have cut both ways, said Mr. Ingrao, the Vatican expert for Panorama. Reformers may have believed it would motivate him to act quickly, while cardinals favoring the status quo may have hoped his papacy would be too short to effect much change.
“So there were thoughts about looking to someone much younger,” said Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, archbishop of Bordeaux. “But there were two reasons” to choose Cardinal Bergoglio, he said. “First it was his personality that was the determiner. The other thing was that we remembered that we had popes like John XXIII who was old but he was decisive for the evolution of the church. So the question of age wasn’t such a big factor.”
The first public view of Francis was on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, where he asked the crowd in the piazza for their blessing and then wished them a good rest, earning praise from many Catholics for his humble bearing and choice to name himself after the beloved St. Francis of Assisi.
On Thursday, his first full day as pope, he prayed at the St. Mary Major Basilica and passed by the clergy residence — where he stayed before the conclave — to pick up his luggage and pay the bill.
“I think this is the style of our new pope,” Cardinal Ricard said.
Elisabetta Povoledo and Rachel Donadio contributed reporting.
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/15/world/europe/new-popes-piety-and-humility-aided-his-surprise-selection.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/15/world/europe/new-popes-piety-and-humility-aided-his-surprise-selection.html?pagewanted=all ] [with embedded videos, additional images, and comments]
--
Is Pope Francis a fraud?
Theologian and Episcopal priest Matthew Fox (left) and Pope Francis
(Credit: Reuters)
After a right-wing coup crushed the reforms of Vatican II, one scholar says the last two popes are illegitimate
By Andrew O'Hehir
Saturday, Mar 16, 2013 12:30 PM CDT
It’s easy — maybe too easy — for people with progressive political views to dismiss the Roman Catholic Church as a vile anachronism, a nightmarish patriarchy of aging pedophiles, woman-haters, homophobes and/or closet cases that can offer nothing of value to the contemporary world. When it comes to the church hierarchy, and especially the Roman Curia, the corrupt and labyrinthine Vatican bureaucracy that makes the Soviet-era Kremlin look like a model of transparency, that point of view seems more than justified.
But the church is not just the hierarchy, and as the spectacle of the last several days has demonstrated, there are millions or billions of people around the world — Catholics and non-Catholics alike — who wish the newly elected Pope Francis well and yearn to see in him the possibility of hope and renewal for this ancient, powerful and heavily tarnished institution that claims direct succession from the apostles of Jesus. As the first Latin American pope and the first Jesuit pope, Francis represents a break with tradition in several ways. Both the name he has chosen and his personal modesty and humility are meant to recall St. Francis of Assisi, one of the most adored figures in the Christian tradition, and no doubt also St. Francis de Sales, a 17th-century mystic, author and ascetic known for his devotion to the poor.
But the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio emerges from a Jesuit order that has been largely purged of its independent-minded or left-leaning intellectuals, and his reputation at home in Latin America is decidedly mixed. While Francis seems to be an appealing personality in some ways — albeit one with a shadowy relationship with the former military dictatorship in Argentina, along with a record on gay rights that borders on hate speech — it’s difficult to imagine that he can or will do anything to arrest the church’s long slide into cultural irrelevance and neo-medieval isolation. His papacy, I suspect, comes near the end of a thousand-year history of the Vatican’s global rise to power, ambiguous flourishing and rapid decline. It also comes after 40 years of internal counterrevolution under the previous two popes, during which a group of hardcore right-wing cardinals have consolidated power in the Curia and stamped out nearly all traces of the 1960s liberal reform agenda of Pope John XXIII [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_John_XXIII ] and Vatican II [ http://www.vatican2voice.org/ ]. A handful of intellectuals, both inside and outside the church, quietly believe that means Pope Francis isn’t a legitimate pope at all.
I’m a “legacy Catholic,” or ancestral Catholic, rather than the genuine article; my parents were both previously married and declined to come crawling back and undergo the necessary humiliation. Then again, as the former Dominican priest, radical theologian and bestselling author Matthew Fox [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Fox_(priest) ] told me in a recent phone conversation, a large number of the 1.2 billion believers the church claims are “disaffiliated Catholics, ex-Catholics, Catholics with one foot in and one foot out.” Like many of those people, I’m not immune to all the emotion and adulation being poured onto the new pope just because I think it’s misplaced. More than anything else, that passion is the enduring, if confusing, legacy of Vatican II, the historic reform council of 1962–65 that promised all sorts of big changes within Catholicism that never quite came to pass.
As Fox and many other Catholic and ex-Catholic dissidents see it, Vatican II marked the moment when the church had the chance to reinvent itself as a flexible moral and spiritual force in a rapidly changing world. Indeed, it briefly seemed to do just that – and it’s important to understand that Bergoglio, like Joseph Ratzinger and Karol Wojtyla before him, was part of the right-wing counterrevolution within the church that aggressively rolled back those changes, crushed dissident thought and reasserted the absolute power of the pope and his hierarchy. Pope Francis is a longtime ally of Communion and Liberation [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communion_and_Liberation ], a fiercely conservative Catholic organization that insists on “total fidelity and communion [ http://ncronline.org/blogs/grace-margins/one-pope-francis-allegiances-might-tell-us-something-about-churchs-future ]” with the church leadership and is devoted, among other things, to battling European socialism and Latin American liberation theology. In Italian politics, CL has been closely tied to the party of Silvio Berlusconi, and its founder was an intimate friend of Cardinal Ratzinger before he became Benedict XVI.
If you engaged with the Catholic church in any way between the mid-1960s and the late 1970s, you witnessed the limited effects of Vatican II on the ground: the Mass was in English and could partly be understood (more’s the pity); many dioceses were afflicted with faintly groovy young priests and nuns who played folk guitar; fish was no longer mandatory for Friday night’s dinner (an innovation resisted to this day by many older Catholics). But Vatican II was intended — at least by Pope John XXIII, who convened it, and the group of theologians who wrote and rewrote its central documents — to cover a lot more ground than Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks and “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.”
Vatican II offered the promise of a church that communicated openly with the modern world. It specifically repudiated the church’s history of anti-Semitism and vowed to pursue dialogue with non-Catholics and non-Christians of many stripes. It held out the possibility of a new dogmatic flexibility in which the church would assert the truth of the Christian Gospels while permitting freedom of conscience on a wide range of issues. Millions of learned words have been written on what was and was not addressed or implied in the ambiguous Latin prose crafted by the bishops and scholars of Vatican II, but it might be fair to sum it all up this way: No specific promises were made about changing church policy on priestly celibacy or the role of women or the moral status of homosexuality or the decentralization of Vatican power. But it was implied or understood by many participants and observers that those issues were potentially on the table, and at least you wouldn’t be punished or excommunicated for discussing them.
There was an ideological counterattack against Vatican II almost immediately, with Cardinal Ratzinger as its intellectual leader, and that became the dominant current in the church hierarchy after the ascension of John Paul II in 1978. Fox believes that the last two popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, departed so far from both the letter and spirit of Vatican II — which should have been viewed as the authoritative teachings of the church — that they should be considered “schismatic,” or illegitimate. “In the Catholic tradition, a council trumps a pope,” he says. “A pope does not trump a council.” (In the great tradition of Catholic intellectuals, he cites precedence in the Council of Constance, convened in 1414, which fired three warring popes and appointed a new one.) “What’s happened since John Paul II is that he and Ratzinger have turned back all the basic principles of Vatican II. I would include the principle of freedom of conscience, the principle that theologians have a right to think. They brought the Inquisition back, there’s no question about it.”
Fox’s 2012 book “The Pope’s War: Why Ratzinger’s Secret Crusade Has Imperiled the Church and How It Can Be Saved [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/1454900016 ]” contains a list of 105 prominent Catholic theologians who have been silenced or expelled under the last two popes, including many influential figures of the Vatican II period and its aftermath. Fox himself is on the list; he was silenced by then-Cardinal Ratzinger in 1988 after publishing his New Age-flavored bestseller “The Coming of the Cosmic Christ [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/0060629150 ]” and expelled from the Dominican order five years later. (I noted during our conversation that Fox, who is now an Episcopal priest, consistently refers to the most recent pope — his particular nemesis — as “Ratzinger” rather than Benedict XVI.) This climate of inquisition, Fox says, “runs totally contrary to the entire attitude and teaching of Vatican II. In the Vatican councils, they defined the church as the people, not as the hierarchy. Under these last two popes, it’s all about the hierarchy.”
Fox insists that he’s not alone in believing that the authoritarian reign of the last two popes represents a kind of illegitimate intra-Catholic coup d’état. He says he got the idea from the late Edward Schillebeeckx [ http://ncronline.org/news/people/theologian-edward-schillebeeckx-dead-95 ], a prominent liberal Dutch theologian and Dominican priest who managed to remain inside the church, at a private lunch in the late 1990s. “He told me, ‘I and many other European theologians feel that the present papacy’ — that would have been John Paul II — ‘is in schism.’ My response was very American. I said immediately, ‘What are we gonna do about it?’ I’ll never forget his look, which without saying anything said, ‘These Americans are so crazy. They think you can do something!’”
Fox argues, in essence, that the Schillebeeckx doctrine means the official church no longer exists or, to put it another way, that the power of the church has been diffused and now belongs to everyone. “What it means is that every cardinal, priest and bishop anointed in the last 42 years is illegitimate. What that means to the Catholic in the pew is, ‘Hey, there’s no one looking over your shoulder!’ If you’re trying to live out the principles of Vatican II, combined of course with the Gospels, that’s what the church is. The church is the people.”
That’s a lovely argument – as well as a distinctively Catholic one, I would say – and ex-Catholics and dissidents who already agree with Fox will no doubt find it unassailable. But those Catholics who’d like to go to Mass on Sunday and simply wish the church could be a bit less antiquated and noxious may not find it satisfying. Fox imagines a grassroots-based, decades-long popular uprising within the church, one that would install female priests and openly gay priests and married priests, would reclaim the spirit of Vatican II and ultimately render the repellent and backward hierarchy irrelevant. That’s a lovely idea too, but in the meantime we have the realities of political power, and a new pope with a soft spot for dictatorship and a hatred of gays at the reins of a decaying right-wing junta with especially fancy uniforms. Fox’s friend Schillebeeckx saw this coming more than 20 years ago, when he wrote that many conservatives of the John Paul II era were pushing toward a shrinking, outdated and increasingly isolated “monolith church … a ghetto church, a church of the little flock, the holy remnant.”
When I asked Fox whether he actually held out hope for Pope Francis, he briefly tried to be diplomatic, saying he was praying for the new pontiff and wished him well. Then he said, “But remember that all those cardinals that voted for him were appointed by John Paul II and Ratzinger” – and therefore, from Fox’s point of view, are not legitimate cardinals at all. “They’re all cut from the same cloth. Can he break out of that history, that background? That would take a major miracle.”
Copyright © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2013/03/16/is_pope_francis_a_fraud/ [with comments]
--
When Pope Francis Testified About the Dirty War
In a closed hearing, he disputed accusations of complicity with the junta
BY SAM FERGUSON
MARCH 14, 2013
While the world has generally welcomed the Catholic Church's selection of the Argentine Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio as pope, one large and dark question hangs over his ascension: As the head of the Jesuit order during Argentina’s last dictatorship, was he complicit with the military regime that kidnapped, tortured, and murdered thousands of its citizens?
Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, has rarely spoken about his own role in what's known as the "Dirty War," during which at least 9,000 people were forcibly disappeared. But in 2010, he appeared as a witness in the criminal trial of eighteen officers who had worked at the notorious Naval Mechanics School, where the country's military junta detained political prisoners—including a pair of Jesuit priests who'd been kidnapped shortly after the regime took power in a 1976 coup. Bergoglio, who was not a defendant in the case, insisted on clerical testimonial privilege and did not testify in open court; proceedings were held in his office. As part of my research into that trial, I obtained access to a transcript from the hearing, during which prosecutors and human rights lawyers grilled him for more than four hours over his alleged complicity in the kidnappings. The transcript has not been widely circulated, though it recently appeared in Spanish on the website of an Argentine human rights NGO [ http://www.abuelas.org.ar/ (apparently "Declaraciones en torno al nombramiento de Bergoglio" {with working embedded audios where it appears on the http://www.abuelas.org.ar/ home page}, http://www.abuelas.org.ar/comunicados/judiciales/jud130315_1943-1.htm {link evidently not working at this time}, and "Bergoglio declaró como testigo en el juicio por Plan Sistemático de apropiación y en la megacausa ESMA", http://www.abuelas.org.ar/comunicados/judiciales/jud130313_1934-1.htm , dated "13 de marzo de 2013")]. It offers a unique insight into the steps Bergoglio took and did not take to save the desaparecidos.
By the time he testified, Bergoglio had been facing criticism about the kidnapping for years. His critics allege that he withdrew Church protection from the priests, Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics, who worked with the poor in the Bajo Flores slum of Buenos Aires. According to this theory, Bergoglio had warned the priests that they should abandon the slum because sectors of the military and church saw their activity as "subversive." When the priests refused, he allegedly told them they'd have to leave the Compañia de Jesus, their local order, if they wanted to keep working there—effectively giving the green light to the military junta to detain them. In a 1999 interview, conducted shortly before he died, Yorio said that he faulted Bergoglio for his kidnapping. Bergoglio denied complicity. After the interview was published in a book in 2005, a local human rights lawyer filed a criminal complaint against Bergoglio over the incident. The courts, however, have not taken any steps to indict Bergoglio, according to the lawyer, Marcelo Parrilli. But the interview appeared just as Bergoglio was being mentioned as a possible successor to Pope John Paul II.
Bergoglio's 2010 testimony offers his take on events. Prior to the coup, he said he had given Yorio and Jalics permission to work in the Bajo Flores slum. The two priests, who practiced liberation theology, saw their life mission as alleviating the plight of the poor. Bergoglio testified at trial that "every priest that worked with the poor was a target for suspicion and accusation from some sectors," but as a "Jesuit brother" of the priests, he wanted to do what he could to help them "continue working." Bergolgio testified that Yorio and Jalics told him several times that they thought they were in danger. He also recalled that he was pressured from inside the church to dissolve the religious community where Yorio and Jalics worked and transfer the priests elsewhere in the church, though he claimed it was for organizational reasons, not ideological ones. Bergoglio was also questioned about allegations that Yorio's ministerial license had been revoked several days before the kidnapping, another alleged signal to the military that the priests were fair game. He disputed this account, saying, "I don't believe that their licenses were suspended." As evidence, Bergoglio said that the priests continued to work in the slum, which they would not have been permitted to do "if their licenses had been formally suspended."
Bergoglio also insisted that he was helping Yorio and Jalics. Before the coup, the two had renounced their affiliation with the Jesuit order, and were in a period of "transition," as Bergoglio called it, looking for a Bishop to sponsor them. During this period, Bergoglio told the priests that "that they could celebrate mass." Whether Bergoglio had authority to allow them to do so he left “to their interpretation," implying that their work might not be officially sanctioned, but that he would not disapprove.
Furthermore, when asked if the priests were exposed to slander during this period of transition between leaving the Jesuit order and finding a Bishop's sponsorship, Bergoglio said the priests were only "relatively exposed” because “they knew that they had access to the provincial priesthood of the Jesuits … and that they were in dialogue with the Church." Bergolgio recalled that "I offered them the chance to come live at the provincial priesthood" at the time rumors of an imminent coup began to circulate. Bergoglio said that Yorio and Jalics, in fact, lived there after the coup, in the days before they were kidnapped.
In May of 1976, security forces kidnapped the priests, along with several other activists. The military officers involved in the raid were dressed in army camouflage, but they were probably agents from the navy, and did not display identification. After being taken to the Naval Mechanics School, Argentina's largest and most notorious secret prison, Yorio and Jalics were blindfolded, shackled, drugged, and threatened with electrocution. At some point during their captivity, they were transferred to a house outside Buenos Aires, where they were kept in a dark room in shackles and blindfolds, and scarcely fed. They were freed five months later, in late October 1976, after being drugged and abandoned in an open field.
Bergoglio recounted during his testimony the steps he took to ensure Yorio and Jalics' releases. He testified that he "began to move immediately" when he was alerted of their arrests, which he called a "moment of desperation." He said he began to "speak with priests that I assumed had access to the police and the armed forces," to find out which service branch kidnapped the priests. He met twice with Jorge Rafael Videla, the Army dictator. He also met twice with Emilio Massera, the junta's navy representative. In the first meeting with Massera, he said he "went to find out, because I didn't know [where they were]. I gave my testimony that these priests were not involved in anything raro ['rare']." But after the meeting Bergoglio said he discovered through back channels that the navy had, in fact, kidnapped the priests. (He did not specify who gave him this information, only that it was "vox populi.") After this discovery, the second meeting with Massera was "ugly" and brief. He remembered saying, "look Massera, I want them to appear." Then, he testified, "I got up, and I left."
When Yorio and Jalics were eventually freed (unlike thousands of other victims who were murdered by incineration, or thrown alive from military airplanes), Bergoglio told the court that he helped ensure the priests' physical safety and arranged for them to leave the country. Bergoglio admitted that he did not file any judicial charges, nor did he make any public statements about Yorio and Jalics. But when asked by one of the three presiding judges if Yorio or Jalics ever told him what they thought about his behavior during their kidnapping, he replied that, in personal conversations, "neither one of them asked me what more I could have done. … They didn't blame me."
But Yorio's assertion that he blamed Bergoglio had, in fact, been on the record for several years. "I don't have any reason to think that [Bergoglio] did anything for our freedom," he told journalist Horacio Verbitsky in a 1999 interview for the book El Silencio. Yorio accused Bergoglio of lobbying Argentina's bishops to stay away from him and Jalics. He also said he thought Bergoglio talked with Massera, the commander in chief of the navy, who had informed him that Yorio and Jalics were guerilla leaders. This, according to Yorio, allowed Bergoglio to "wash his hands" of concern for the priests. "He didn't wait for me to come out alive," Yorio said. (Jalics lives in Germany and does not talk about his experience as a victim of Argentina's repression. He did not respond to an email request for comment.)
Asked at the trial about Yorio's accusations, Bergoglio testified that Yorio probably thought he had not done enough because Yorio was "conditioned by the suffering that he had to go through." Bergoglio also insisted that he never thought Yorio and Jalics were extremists.
Some prominent human rights activists have come to Bergoglio's defense. Argentine Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel, who was jailed and tortured by the dictatorship, told the BBC's Spanish-language service [ http://www.bbc.co.uk/mundo/ultimas_noticias/2013/03/130314_ultnot_perez_esquivel_papa.shtml ] that Bergoglio "was not an accomplice of the dictatorship. … There were bishops who were accomplices of the Argentine dictatorship, but not Bergoglio."
"It was a difficult time for the Church," recalls Robert Cox, the editor of the Buenos Aires Herald. Cox was forced to go into exile in 1979 after he received threats for publishing news stories on the disappeared. "The Church was worried that if they split, the country would split, and there would be a civil war. This was always their excuse for not taking a firmer stance." He speculates that Bergoglio did "as much as he could, behind the scenes," but has not done enough to publicly explain the incident, or the role of the Catholic Church and the dictatorship more broadly.
Luis Zamora, a human rights lawyer who did the majority of the examination, at one point asked Bergolgio, "In these thirty-four years what was the reason that you never approached the courts to give all of the information that you knew and that you are now giving us?" The court did not allow the question, and Bergoglio did not answer.
After the hearing, Zamora described Bergoglio [ http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elpais/1-154782-2010-10-12.html ] as "reticent," adding, "when someone is reticent they are lying, they are hiding part of the truth." Reached for comment, Zamora added that Bergoglio has "completely failed" in his explanation of the past. He added that those who say Bergoglio was an insignificant figure in the Church at the time are mistaken, as evidenced by his ability to arrange meetings with Videla and Massera, the country's two most powerful military men. In his testimony, Bergoglio said he did not remember the names of those who helped him make contact with the military. When asked about records of his conversations with Videla and Massera, he said that he didn't have any because the time pressures were so great that he had to move quickly and he did not have time to write anything down.
In an interview published with Perfil in 2010 [ http://www.perfil.com/contenidos/2010/04/18/noticia_0024.html ], Bergoglio said publicly for the first time that he had helped save several others from the dictatorship, some after he hid them in his seminary, another after he loaned him priest's clothing and his identification to cross the border into Brazil. Asked why he never spoke about this before, Bergoglio said that "if I didn't speak at the time, it was so that I didn't do what other people wanted, not because I had something to hide." At trial he added, "I have spoken a lot about this with those who asked. I have given everything I know: Obviously the injustice of what they suffered, all of this, my position is clear. I don't give journalistic interviews as a matter of course. But, at one time I gave one journalist (Verbitsky) an interview, so that he could know my point of view. Those that know me know that I always have spoken in the tone that I have spoke here today."
Sam Ferguson is a visiting fellow at the Schell Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School and a former Fulbright Scholar. He is writing a book, Remnants of a Dirty War, about human rights trials in Argentina.
COPYRIGHT 2013 © THE NEW REPUBLIC
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112656/pope-francis-and-argentinas-dirty-war-what-he-knew [with comments]
--
Vatican says 'dirty war' accusations about Pope Francis just a left-wing smear
March 15, 2013
The Vatican on Friday denied “anti-clerical” accusations that Pope Francis failed to protect priests during the so-called “dirty war” waged by Argentinian dictators more than 30 years ago.
“We have every reason to affirm that these accusations are not reliable and there is no reason for them today to cast a shadow over the new pope,” Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said at a briefing.
A second spokesman, Father Tom Rosica said the accusations by a Argentinian journalist amounted to a political smear campaign against the new pope, who was known as Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio until his election on Wednesday.
“They reveal left-wing elements, anti-clerical elements that are used to attack the Church,” Rosica said. “They must be firmly and clearly denied.”
[...]
http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/15/17325546-vatican-says-dirty-war-accusations-about-pope-francis-just-a-left-wing-smear [with embedded video report, and comments]
--
Amid 'dirty war' debate, Argentines divided by pope's legacy
March 15, 2013
http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/15/17327871-amid-dirty-war-debate-argentines-divided-by-popes-legacy [with embedded video report, and comments]
--
Pope Francis on gay rights: His 5 worst quotes
(Credit: AP)
The new pontiff is being hailed as a fresh choice, but there's nothing new about his opposition to gay rights
By Katie Mcdonough
Thursday, Mar 14, 2013 11:08 AM CDT
Pope Francis has been praised for his humility (he picks up his own luggage! [ http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/pope-francis-displays-humility-picks-luggage-hotel-article-1.1288258 ]), his acceptance of other faiths (he won’t insult the Prophet Mohammed [ http://www.salon.com/2013/02/12/pope_benedict_xvi_his_best_of_the_worst/ ] in public addresses!) and his “precedent shattering [ http://www.salon.com/2013/03/13/cardinal_bergoglio_archbishop_of_buenos_aires_is_new_pope/ ]” name choice (more humility!).
But the pontiff who is being hailed as a “new direction” for the Catholic Church is the same-old brand of theological conservative who opposes the ordination of women, abortion and the fundamental rights of gays and lesbians.
In fact, then-Cardinal Jose Bergoglio was a major force against the 2010 move to legalize same-sex marriage in his native Argentina. Though he ultimately failed, Bergoglio used the full weight of the church to crush the measure.
Here, a collection of his very worst quotes on the issue.
1. A Senate vote on gay marriage is a destructive pretension against the plan of God
From a letter [ http://globovision.com/articulo/nuevo-papa-francisco-i-se-pronuncio-en-2010-contra-el-matrimonio-gay ] to the Carmelite Sisters of Buenos Aires on the perils of marriage equality:
“Let’s not be naïve, we’re not talking about a simple political battle; it is a destructive pretension against the plan of God. We are not talking about a mere bill, but rather a machination of the Father of Lies that seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God.”
2. Gay marriage will destroy the family
More from the same letter [ http://www.ncregister.com/blog/edward-pentin/cardinal_bergoglio_hits_out_at_same-sex_marriage ] to the four monasteries of Argentina:
“The Argentine people will face a situation whose outcome can seriously harm the family… At stake is the identity and survival of the family: father, mother and children."
3. Gay parenting is a rejection of God’s law engraved in our hearts
Again:
“At stake are the lives of many children who will be discriminated against in advance, and deprived of their human development given by a father and a mother and willed by God. At stake is the total rejection of God’s law engraved in our hearts.”
4. The political struggle against marriage equality is war
And finally:
“The bill will be discussed in the Senate after July 13. Look at San Jose, Maria, Child and ask them [to] fervently defend Argentina’s family at this time. [Be reminded] what God told his people in a time of great anguish: ‘This war is not yours but God’s.’ May they succor, defend and join God in this war.”
5. Gay adoption is discrimination against children
According to the National Catholic Reporter, Francis called gay adoption a form of “discrimination against children.” A comment that resulted in a public rebuke from Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who said [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixVrmrQg9AM (next below)]
Copyright © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2013/03/14/pope_francis_on_gay_rights_his_5_worst_quotes/ [with comments]
--
Pope Francis Against Gay Marriage, Gay Adoption
By Cavan Sieczkowski
Posted: 03/13/2013 4:57 pm EDT | Updated: 03/13/2013 7:14 pm EDT
Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a 76-year-old Argentinean, was chosen as the first Latin American pope on Wednesday. He will lead the world's 1.2 billion Catholics as Pope Francis [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/13/pope-francisco-cardinal-jorge-mario-bergoglio-_n_2855101.html ]. While his selection may be historic, it may also mean more of the same when it comes to gay rights in the Catholic Church.
Pope Francis is a conservative who is anti-gay marriage and anti-gay adoption [ http://www.tmz.com/2013/03/13/new-pope-announced-cardinal-cardinal-jorge-mario-bergoglio/ ]. He has described same-sex marriage as the work of the devil and a “destructive attack on God’s plan [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/14/world/americas/14argentina.html ].” He has also said that gay adoption is a form of discrimination against children.
In 2010, Francis championed against a bill for same-sex marriage and gay adoption [ http://www.ncregister.com/blog/edward-pentin/cardinal_bergoglio_hits_out_at_same-sex_marriage ], according to the National Catholic Register.
“[T]he Argentine people will face a situation whose outcome can seriously harm the family," he wrote to the four monasteries in Argentina. "At stake is the identity and survival of the family: father, mother and children. At stake are the lives of many children who will be discriminated against in advance, and deprived of their human development given by a father and a mother and willed by God. At stake is the total rejection of God’s law engraved in our hearts.”
He went on to describe it as a "‘move’ of the Father of Lies who seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God" and asked for lawmakers to "not act in error." In John 8:44 [ http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p1s2c1p7.htm ], the Father of Lies is the devil.
Argentina approved same-sex marriage [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/16/world/americas/16argentina.html ] in 2010, making it the first Latin American country to legalize the union, the New York Times previously reported. The country is also progressive when it comes to contraception. President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has promoted free contraception [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/04/argentina-pope-cardinals-sandri-bergoglio-very-different-papal-candidates_n_2805693.html ] and artificial insemination, the Associated Press notes. In the past, Francis has clashed with the Argentinean government over his stance [ http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2013/03/13/cardinals-elect-new-pope/ ] on these issues.
GLAAD [ http://www.glaad.org/ ] President Herndon Graddick responded to the election of the new pope in a statement obtained by The Huffington Post.
For decades the Catholic hierarchy has been in need of desperate reform. In his life, Jesus condemned gays zero times. In Pope Benedict's short time in the papacy, he made a priority of condemning gay people routinely. This, in spite of the fact, that the Catholic hierarchy had been in collusion to cover up the widespread abuse of children within its care. We hope this Pope will trade in his red shoes for a pair of sandals and spend a lot less time condemning and a lot more time foot-washing.
Graddick also specifically addressed Francis' previous comments about gay adoption being a "discrimination against children."
"The real discrimination against children is the pedophilia that has run rampant in the Catholic Church with little more than collusion from the Vatican," he said.
Along with GLAAD, Stonewall [ http://www.stonewall.org.uk/ ] Chief Executive Ben Summerskill responded to the new pope's election, saying: ‘We hope Pope Francis shows more Christian love and charity to the world’s 420 million lesbian, gay and bisexual people than his predecessor."
Despite the pope's prior anti-gay sentiments, Francis' official biographer, Sergio Rubin, defended him as a noble man.
"Is Bergoglio a progressive – a liberation theologist even? No," he told the AP. "He's no third-world priest. Does he criticize the International Monetary Fund, and neoliberalism? Yes. Does he spend a great deal of time in the slums? Yes."
In 2001, he visited a hospice and washed the feet of AIDS patients [ http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/papabile-day-men-who-could-be-pope-13 ], according to The National Catholic Register. That same year he spoke out in defense of those less fortunate, contrasting "poor people who are persecuted [ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1481313.stm ] for demanding work, and rich people who are applauded for fleeing from justice."
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/13/pope-francis-gay-marriage-anti_n_2869221.html [with embedded video report, and comments]
--
(linked in):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=22198799 (and preceding) and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=54568354 and preceding and following;
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=83702026 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=70066579 (and preceding) and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=84628488 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=85669181 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=85764804 and preceding (and any future following)
By TIMOTHY EGAN
March 14, 2013, 9:00 pm
The world is full of Roman Catholics who long ago stopped following the dogma, doctrine and medieval sexual dictates of the church. But they never lost faith in Francesco, the merchant’s son who spoke to wolves, slept on dirt floors and dined with lepers.
That the new pope would take the name of Francis, in honor of the saint from the Umbrian town of Assisi, is the most radical first move by a pontiff in some time. The 12th century mystic is the nature saint, patron of the environment, the poor, the dispossessed. He did not believe in owning money or property, let alone shoes. And for all of that, he was never a self-righteous grump; he “was fun, a quality not always found in saints,” as Joan Acocella wrote in The New Yorker earlier this year.
Secularists from San Francisco (yes, it’s named for him) to Paris may shun everything that the church teaches but keep statues of Francis in the garden, preaching to birds. In a popular culture dominated by showy vulgarians like Donald Trump, granting a global stage to someone named for a half-starved ascetic could be transformative.
And therein lies the conflict, and the potential for much positive power. Nearly half the world lives on less than $2 a day, and a billion people are without safe drinking water. By the philosophy of St. Francis, the church of Rome would not spend its days lecturing people about condoms and condemning homosexuals. There would be no secretive obsession with protecting the organized crime network built around pedophile priests. Humility would be a guidepost.
The stories of the new Pope cleaning the feet of AIDS patients in his native Argentina and disparaging fellow clerics for refusing to baptize the children of unmarried mothers show just how much the energies of the Vatican bully pulpit could be redirected.
In Francis’s day, the poor lived shunned lives in the malarial shadows below the sun-washed hill towns of Italy, while bishops and cardinals resided in gaudy splendor. At the same time, the church launched one of its violent purges of heretics in Europe. In a single day, 20,000 people were slaughtered. What would Jesus think?
Francis knew violence, and he knew wealth. He had gone to war with nearby Perugia as a young man, a party animal with family money. Captured, he spent a year in a rat-infested cell. After release, he was a changed person, stripping himself of his clothes at the feet of his father. He was duty-bound, he said, to follow the gospel of helping the least among them.
And he had that feel for nature, a view of the interconnectedness of all living things, similar to the spiritual world of many Native American tribes. Fire was a brother, as was the moon, the stars and physical pain. The many biographies tell of bird-preaching episodes and charming a wolf. On Wednesday this week, as birds alighted on the chimney of the Sistine Chapel just minutes before the white smoke appeared, many a Catholic sensed a Franciscan moment.
Francis also reached out to the Muslim world, traveling deep into North Africa on a mission that should have gotten him killed and, in this day, would be condemned by conservatives of his own faith.
This fresco, “The Expulsion of the Devils from Arezzo,” is one of 19 by Benozzo Gozzol (1420-1497) in Montefalco, Italy, that depicts the life of St. Francis.
Scala/Art Resource, NY
Though Francis of Assisi is the most popular saint in a long history of tortured bodies and souls, the fact that no pope until Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio would take his name says a lot about the timeless shadow from the 12th century to the 21st. The legacy of the first Francis is almost too much to bear.
Today, on the spine of Assisi, where pilgrims jostle with peddlers of all things Francis, you see the extraordinary Giotto frescoes inside the basilica, a narrative of the saint’s life. That such a magnificent structure was built over the bones (interred beneath the floor of the lower church) of a man who often slept without a roof over his head is a testament to how a powerful movement can be co-opted.
But another legacy, far removed from marbled ostentation, can be found in the Franciscan priests who try to follow the example of their founder. When my young nephew was murdered by gunfire a few years ago, it was soothing that a man in the brown robes, sandals and roped belt of the Franciscan order conducted the most humane of funeral masses.
Pope Francis is a Jesuit, an order known for its rigorous intellectual tradition. They were disbanded in 1773 by a pope who didn’t like their politics and were restored by popular demand in 1814. The Jesuit influence is another reason to hope that reform is in the early spring air of Rome.
It may be too much to expect that this new Francis will be devoutly inspired by the old Francis. He follows the repressive dogma on sex and gays, and there remain questions about his role during Argentina’s Dirty War, a time of unholy alliances between the church and state-run terrorism.
Joseph Stalin famously wondered how many divisions the pope had. None, of course. The real power of the papacy is its moral force. For good reason, the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said Pope John Paul II was instrumental in bringing an end to the cold war.
With a visit to a slum in Rio de Janeiro, a hospital in the South Bronx or a stroll up an Umbrian peak, Pope Francis can claim a mantle from a pauper who still changes lives, eight centuries after his death.
*
Related Posts from Opinionator
Misconceptions
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/23/misconceptions/
Returning to the Sermon on the Mount
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/returning-to-the-sermon-on-the-mount/ [first item at/see (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=74667154 and preceding (and any future following)]
Birth Control, Bishops and Religious Authority
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/birth-control-and-the-challenge-to-divine-authority/ [second item at/see (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=72279452 and preceding and following]
*
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/14/wolf-whisperer-in-the-vatican/ [with comments]
--
Snub of Reformers’ Choice Seen Before Pope’s Anointing
A screen in St. Peter’s Square on Thursday showed the Mass led by the pope.
Oded Balilty/Associated Press
By DANIEL J. WAKIN
Published: March 14, 2013
ROME — The choice of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/francis_i/index.html ] as pope was so surprising, the Italian bishops sent out an e-mail congratulating the wrong man. His profile was so low that he was barely mentioned by the feverish handicappers and Vaticanologists who make their living scrutinizing the Holy See. But the Argentine emerged from the conclave a swiftly anointed Pope Francis on Wednesday evening, barely 28 hours after it began.
While the workings of the conclave are secret, Cardinal Bergoglio won the papacy, according to comments from cardinals, Vatican [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/r/roman_catholic_church/index.html ] experts and leaks to Italian newspapers, in part because the Vatican-based cardinals protective of their bureaucracy snubbed the presumptive front-runner, and a favored candidate of reformers, Cardinal Angelo Scola.
That created an opening for a Latin-American Jesuit whose attractive mix of piety, humility and administrative skills won over many cardinals, including those intent on addressing the Vatican’s recent troubles with corruption and disarray in the Vatican hierarchy, or Curia. Still, it remains to be seen how, and if, Francis will fulfill those hopes.
“By choosing Bergoglio we chose someone who was not in the Curia system, because of his mission and his ministry,” said Cardinal André Vingt-Trois, the archbishop of Paris, in a news conference. “He is not part of the Italian system, but also at the same time, because of his culture and background, he was Italo-compatible. If there was a chance that someone could intervene with justice in this situation, he was the man who could do it best.”
Francis’ immediate march to the papacy, to draw a rough analogy, began with the all-inclusive meetings of cardinals called congregations that occurred before the conclave. They function roughly like primary season in United States presidential elections. The cardinals all give speeches — about 150 this time — talk among themselves and size one another up.
Cardinal Bergoglio “talked about the need of the church to stay focused on her mission, the spiritual mission,” Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington, said in a briefing for a few reporters. “He always, always has a preferential option for the poor.” That seemed to strike a chord.
At the same time, he kept a low profile ahead of the conclave, making few public appearances or statements. Giving the appearance of holding oneself out as a possible pope is one of the worst political mistakes ahead of a conclave, and he avoided it. He may have had good reason, given his prominent place in the last conclave, in 2005.
The most authoritative accounts of that election suggest Cardinal Bergoglio garnered the second most votes to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in the penultimate round. Then, at lunch, he was said to have thrown his votes to Cardinal Ratzinger, who was quickly elected Benedict XVI. Some accounts suggest he did not want to be pope; others, that he knew he did not have a chance of winning.
Renunciation is not unheard-of. “People say, ‘Don’t consider me,’ ” said Chicago’s archbishop, Cardinal Francis George, in an interview, and that was the case this time as well. “Some people were very disturbed by the idea” that they might be considered for pope, he said.
“He’s someone who was looked at who could do the office, particularly in light of the challenges that we now face,” he added. “First thing is, ‘Is he a man of the faith who connects us to Christ?’ Next, ‘Can he govern?’ ” The church needs “a revision to the way things work in the Curia,” Cardinal George said. “That impacts our own diocesan curias.”
The third factor, he said, was “the fact that he has a heart for the poor.”
It is difficult to know whether his role in the last conclave had an effect on the thinking of his fellow 114 cardinals this week, 47 of whom took part in the 2005 balloting. An unwritten rule holds that a second-place finisher should not be chosen pope because it could be seen as a slight to the previous pope. But Benedict’s resignation at 85, the first of a pope in 598 years, may have changed that thinking.
Cardinal Bergoglio apparently went through the first round of voting, which took place on Tuesday evening, into the conclave as a leading vote-getter, but a number of other eminences garnered some votes, which were handwritten on Latin ballots with Pilot gel pens. Carlo Marroni, who covers the Vatican for Il Sole 24 Ore, reported that Cardinal Bergoglio, Cardinal Scola and Cardinal Marc Ouellet of Canada were the leaders.
Ignazio Ingrao, the Vatican expert for the newsweekly Panorama, said that at the beginning cardinals voted for a number of individuals as a “courtesy vote.” But, “Then they went fairly quickly to Bergoglio,” he said. Private conversations in the evening helped put the focus on him, analysts said.
In the final round of voting, the future Francis hit 77 — the required two-thirds minimum — before all the votes were counted. Applause broke out, several cardinals said, but the counting continued for completeness. He ended up with “more than sufficient” votes to win, the Brazilian cardinal, Geraldo Majella Agnelo, said. The final tally was kept secret.
Cardinal Scola went into the conclave with a solid block of votes, including many of the Americans and Europeans, who saw in him an Italian who was nevertheless at a distance from the intrigues of the Vatican. But it quickly became apparent this was not going to be enough, particularly given what news reports said was the opposition of Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the powerful secretary of state under Benedict.
“The rapidity with which the choice of Bergoglio was arrived at confirms that the votes that Scola could count on immediately became insufficient,” wrote Massimo Franco, the Vatican expert for the daily Corriere della Sera. The numbers also tell a tale: Latin America had 19 electors, second only to Europe’s 61, and Cardinal Bergoglio may have gotten strong support from the region.
While Cardinal Bertone failed to give him support, Cardinal Scola certainly had his share of believers in the Italian Bishops Conference — it sent out a message congratulating him on becoming pope 20 minutes after Francis was named. The conference later blamed a technical glitch.
“The Argentine archbishop was elected after the third balloting when Angelo Scola had sent his votes toward him,” wrote Paolo Rodari, La Repubblica’s Vaticanista.
Another source of surprise was Bergoglio’s age, 76. A number of cardinals had suggested that a younger man was needed — in the early 60s range — especially after a pope resigned because of waning strength in old age.
Cardinal Bergoglio’s age may have cut both ways, said Mr. Ingrao, the Vatican expert for Panorama. Reformers may have believed it would motivate him to act quickly, while cardinals favoring the status quo may have hoped his papacy would be too short to effect much change.
“So there were thoughts about looking to someone much younger,” said Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, archbishop of Bordeaux. “But there were two reasons” to choose Cardinal Bergoglio, he said. “First it was his personality that was the determiner. The other thing was that we remembered that we had popes like John XXIII who was old but he was decisive for the evolution of the church. So the question of age wasn’t such a big factor.”
The first public view of Francis was on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, where he asked the crowd in the piazza for their blessing and then wished them a good rest, earning praise from many Catholics for his humble bearing and choice to name himself after the beloved St. Francis of Assisi.
On Thursday, his first full day as pope, he prayed at the St. Mary Major Basilica and passed by the clergy residence — where he stayed before the conclave — to pick up his luggage and pay the bill.
“I think this is the style of our new pope,” Cardinal Ricard said.
Elisabetta Povoledo and Rachel Donadio contributed reporting.
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/15/world/europe/new-popes-piety-and-humility-aided-his-surprise-selection.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/15/world/europe/new-popes-piety-and-humility-aided-his-surprise-selection.html?pagewanted=all ] [with embedded videos, additional images, and comments]
--
Is Pope Francis a fraud?
Theologian and Episcopal priest Matthew Fox (left) and Pope Francis
(Credit: Reuters)
After a right-wing coup crushed the reforms of Vatican II, one scholar says the last two popes are illegitimate
By Andrew O'Hehir
Saturday, Mar 16, 2013 12:30 PM CDT
It’s easy — maybe too easy — for people with progressive political views to dismiss the Roman Catholic Church as a vile anachronism, a nightmarish patriarchy of aging pedophiles, woman-haters, homophobes and/or closet cases that can offer nothing of value to the contemporary world. When it comes to the church hierarchy, and especially the Roman Curia, the corrupt and labyrinthine Vatican bureaucracy that makes the Soviet-era Kremlin look like a model of transparency, that point of view seems more than justified.
But the church is not just the hierarchy, and as the spectacle of the last several days has demonstrated, there are millions or billions of people around the world — Catholics and non-Catholics alike — who wish the newly elected Pope Francis well and yearn to see in him the possibility of hope and renewal for this ancient, powerful and heavily tarnished institution that claims direct succession from the apostles of Jesus. As the first Latin American pope and the first Jesuit pope, Francis represents a break with tradition in several ways. Both the name he has chosen and his personal modesty and humility are meant to recall St. Francis of Assisi, one of the most adored figures in the Christian tradition, and no doubt also St. Francis de Sales, a 17th-century mystic, author and ascetic known for his devotion to the poor.
But the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio emerges from a Jesuit order that has been largely purged of its independent-minded or left-leaning intellectuals, and his reputation at home in Latin America is decidedly mixed. While Francis seems to be an appealing personality in some ways — albeit one with a shadowy relationship with the former military dictatorship in Argentina, along with a record on gay rights that borders on hate speech — it’s difficult to imagine that he can or will do anything to arrest the church’s long slide into cultural irrelevance and neo-medieval isolation. His papacy, I suspect, comes near the end of a thousand-year history of the Vatican’s global rise to power, ambiguous flourishing and rapid decline. It also comes after 40 years of internal counterrevolution under the previous two popes, during which a group of hardcore right-wing cardinals have consolidated power in the Curia and stamped out nearly all traces of the 1960s liberal reform agenda of Pope John XXIII [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_John_XXIII ] and Vatican II [ http://www.vatican2voice.org/ ]. A handful of intellectuals, both inside and outside the church, quietly believe that means Pope Francis isn’t a legitimate pope at all.
I’m a “legacy Catholic,” or ancestral Catholic, rather than the genuine article; my parents were both previously married and declined to come crawling back and undergo the necessary humiliation. Then again, as the former Dominican priest, radical theologian and bestselling author Matthew Fox [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Fox_(priest) ] told me in a recent phone conversation, a large number of the 1.2 billion believers the church claims are “disaffiliated Catholics, ex-Catholics, Catholics with one foot in and one foot out.” Like many of those people, I’m not immune to all the emotion and adulation being poured onto the new pope just because I think it’s misplaced. More than anything else, that passion is the enduring, if confusing, legacy of Vatican II, the historic reform council of 1962–65 that promised all sorts of big changes within Catholicism that never quite came to pass.
As Fox and many other Catholic and ex-Catholic dissidents see it, Vatican II marked the moment when the church had the chance to reinvent itself as a flexible moral and spiritual force in a rapidly changing world. Indeed, it briefly seemed to do just that – and it’s important to understand that Bergoglio, like Joseph Ratzinger and Karol Wojtyla before him, was part of the right-wing counterrevolution within the church that aggressively rolled back those changes, crushed dissident thought and reasserted the absolute power of the pope and his hierarchy. Pope Francis is a longtime ally of Communion and Liberation [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communion_and_Liberation ], a fiercely conservative Catholic organization that insists on “total fidelity and communion [ http://ncronline.org/blogs/grace-margins/one-pope-francis-allegiances-might-tell-us-something-about-churchs-future ]” with the church leadership and is devoted, among other things, to battling European socialism and Latin American liberation theology. In Italian politics, CL has been closely tied to the party of Silvio Berlusconi, and its founder was an intimate friend of Cardinal Ratzinger before he became Benedict XVI.
If you engaged with the Catholic church in any way between the mid-1960s and the late 1970s, you witnessed the limited effects of Vatican II on the ground: the Mass was in English and could partly be understood (more’s the pity); many dioceses were afflicted with faintly groovy young priests and nuns who played folk guitar; fish was no longer mandatory for Friday night’s dinner (an innovation resisted to this day by many older Catholics). But Vatican II was intended — at least by Pope John XXIII, who convened it, and the group of theologians who wrote and rewrote its central documents — to cover a lot more ground than Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks and “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.”
Vatican II offered the promise of a church that communicated openly with the modern world. It specifically repudiated the church’s history of anti-Semitism and vowed to pursue dialogue with non-Catholics and non-Christians of many stripes. It held out the possibility of a new dogmatic flexibility in which the church would assert the truth of the Christian Gospels while permitting freedom of conscience on a wide range of issues. Millions of learned words have been written on what was and was not addressed or implied in the ambiguous Latin prose crafted by the bishops and scholars of Vatican II, but it might be fair to sum it all up this way: No specific promises were made about changing church policy on priestly celibacy or the role of women or the moral status of homosexuality or the decentralization of Vatican power. But it was implied or understood by many participants and observers that those issues were potentially on the table, and at least you wouldn’t be punished or excommunicated for discussing them.
There was an ideological counterattack against Vatican II almost immediately, with Cardinal Ratzinger as its intellectual leader, and that became the dominant current in the church hierarchy after the ascension of John Paul II in 1978. Fox believes that the last two popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, departed so far from both the letter and spirit of Vatican II — which should have been viewed as the authoritative teachings of the church — that they should be considered “schismatic,” or illegitimate. “In the Catholic tradition, a council trumps a pope,” he says. “A pope does not trump a council.” (In the great tradition of Catholic intellectuals, he cites precedence in the Council of Constance, convened in 1414, which fired three warring popes and appointed a new one.) “What’s happened since John Paul II is that he and Ratzinger have turned back all the basic principles of Vatican II. I would include the principle of freedom of conscience, the principle that theologians have a right to think. They brought the Inquisition back, there’s no question about it.”
Fox’s 2012 book “The Pope’s War: Why Ratzinger’s Secret Crusade Has Imperiled the Church and How It Can Be Saved [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/1454900016 ]” contains a list of 105 prominent Catholic theologians who have been silenced or expelled under the last two popes, including many influential figures of the Vatican II period and its aftermath. Fox himself is on the list; he was silenced by then-Cardinal Ratzinger in 1988 after publishing his New Age-flavored bestseller “The Coming of the Cosmic Christ [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/0060629150 ]” and expelled from the Dominican order five years later. (I noted during our conversation that Fox, who is now an Episcopal priest, consistently refers to the most recent pope — his particular nemesis — as “Ratzinger” rather than Benedict XVI.) This climate of inquisition, Fox says, “runs totally contrary to the entire attitude and teaching of Vatican II. In the Vatican councils, they defined the church as the people, not as the hierarchy. Under these last two popes, it’s all about the hierarchy.”
Fox insists that he’s not alone in believing that the authoritarian reign of the last two popes represents a kind of illegitimate intra-Catholic coup d’état. He says he got the idea from the late Edward Schillebeeckx [ http://ncronline.org/news/people/theologian-edward-schillebeeckx-dead-95 ], a prominent liberal Dutch theologian and Dominican priest who managed to remain inside the church, at a private lunch in the late 1990s. “He told me, ‘I and many other European theologians feel that the present papacy’ — that would have been John Paul II — ‘is in schism.’ My response was very American. I said immediately, ‘What are we gonna do about it?’ I’ll never forget his look, which without saying anything said, ‘These Americans are so crazy. They think you can do something!’”
Fox argues, in essence, that the Schillebeeckx doctrine means the official church no longer exists or, to put it another way, that the power of the church has been diffused and now belongs to everyone. “What it means is that every cardinal, priest and bishop anointed in the last 42 years is illegitimate. What that means to the Catholic in the pew is, ‘Hey, there’s no one looking over your shoulder!’ If you’re trying to live out the principles of Vatican II, combined of course with the Gospels, that’s what the church is. The church is the people.”
That’s a lovely argument – as well as a distinctively Catholic one, I would say – and ex-Catholics and dissidents who already agree with Fox will no doubt find it unassailable. But those Catholics who’d like to go to Mass on Sunday and simply wish the church could be a bit less antiquated and noxious may not find it satisfying. Fox imagines a grassroots-based, decades-long popular uprising within the church, one that would install female priests and openly gay priests and married priests, would reclaim the spirit of Vatican II and ultimately render the repellent and backward hierarchy irrelevant. That’s a lovely idea too, but in the meantime we have the realities of political power, and a new pope with a soft spot for dictatorship and a hatred of gays at the reins of a decaying right-wing junta with especially fancy uniforms. Fox’s friend Schillebeeckx saw this coming more than 20 years ago, when he wrote that many conservatives of the John Paul II era were pushing toward a shrinking, outdated and increasingly isolated “monolith church … a ghetto church, a church of the little flock, the holy remnant.”
When I asked Fox whether he actually held out hope for Pope Francis, he briefly tried to be diplomatic, saying he was praying for the new pontiff and wished him well. Then he said, “But remember that all those cardinals that voted for him were appointed by John Paul II and Ratzinger” – and therefore, from Fox’s point of view, are not legitimate cardinals at all. “They’re all cut from the same cloth. Can he break out of that history, that background? That would take a major miracle.”
Copyright © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2013/03/16/is_pope_francis_a_fraud/ [with comments]
--
When Pope Francis Testified About the Dirty War
In a closed hearing, he disputed accusations of complicity with the junta
BY SAM FERGUSON
MARCH 14, 2013
While the world has generally welcomed the Catholic Church's selection of the Argentine Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio as pope, one large and dark question hangs over his ascension: As the head of the Jesuit order during Argentina’s last dictatorship, was he complicit with the military regime that kidnapped, tortured, and murdered thousands of its citizens?
Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, has rarely spoken about his own role in what's known as the "Dirty War," during which at least 9,000 people were forcibly disappeared. But in 2010, he appeared as a witness in the criminal trial of eighteen officers who had worked at the notorious Naval Mechanics School, where the country's military junta detained political prisoners—including a pair of Jesuit priests who'd been kidnapped shortly after the regime took power in a 1976 coup. Bergoglio, who was not a defendant in the case, insisted on clerical testimonial privilege and did not testify in open court; proceedings were held in his office. As part of my research into that trial, I obtained access to a transcript from the hearing, during which prosecutors and human rights lawyers grilled him for more than four hours over his alleged complicity in the kidnappings. The transcript has not been widely circulated, though it recently appeared in Spanish on the website of an Argentine human rights NGO [ http://www.abuelas.org.ar/ (apparently "Declaraciones en torno al nombramiento de Bergoglio" {with working embedded audios where it appears on the http://www.abuelas.org.ar/ home page}, http://www.abuelas.org.ar/comunicados/judiciales/jud130315_1943-1.htm {link evidently not working at this time}, and "Bergoglio declaró como testigo en el juicio por Plan Sistemático de apropiación y en la megacausa ESMA", http://www.abuelas.org.ar/comunicados/judiciales/jud130313_1934-1.htm , dated "13 de marzo de 2013")]. It offers a unique insight into the steps Bergoglio took and did not take to save the desaparecidos.
By the time he testified, Bergoglio had been facing criticism about the kidnapping for years. His critics allege that he withdrew Church protection from the priests, Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics, who worked with the poor in the Bajo Flores slum of Buenos Aires. According to this theory, Bergoglio had warned the priests that they should abandon the slum because sectors of the military and church saw their activity as "subversive." When the priests refused, he allegedly told them they'd have to leave the Compañia de Jesus, their local order, if they wanted to keep working there—effectively giving the green light to the military junta to detain them. In a 1999 interview, conducted shortly before he died, Yorio said that he faulted Bergoglio for his kidnapping. Bergoglio denied complicity. After the interview was published in a book in 2005, a local human rights lawyer filed a criminal complaint against Bergoglio over the incident. The courts, however, have not taken any steps to indict Bergoglio, according to the lawyer, Marcelo Parrilli. But the interview appeared just as Bergoglio was being mentioned as a possible successor to Pope John Paul II.
Bergoglio's 2010 testimony offers his take on events. Prior to the coup, he said he had given Yorio and Jalics permission to work in the Bajo Flores slum. The two priests, who practiced liberation theology, saw their life mission as alleviating the plight of the poor. Bergoglio testified at trial that "every priest that worked with the poor was a target for suspicion and accusation from some sectors," but as a "Jesuit brother" of the priests, he wanted to do what he could to help them "continue working." Bergolgio testified that Yorio and Jalics told him several times that they thought they were in danger. He also recalled that he was pressured from inside the church to dissolve the religious community where Yorio and Jalics worked and transfer the priests elsewhere in the church, though he claimed it was for organizational reasons, not ideological ones. Bergoglio was also questioned about allegations that Yorio's ministerial license had been revoked several days before the kidnapping, another alleged signal to the military that the priests were fair game. He disputed this account, saying, "I don't believe that their licenses were suspended." As evidence, Bergoglio said that the priests continued to work in the slum, which they would not have been permitted to do "if their licenses had been formally suspended."
Bergoglio also insisted that he was helping Yorio and Jalics. Before the coup, the two had renounced their affiliation with the Jesuit order, and were in a period of "transition," as Bergoglio called it, looking for a Bishop to sponsor them. During this period, Bergoglio told the priests that "that they could celebrate mass." Whether Bergoglio had authority to allow them to do so he left “to their interpretation," implying that their work might not be officially sanctioned, but that he would not disapprove.
Furthermore, when asked if the priests were exposed to slander during this period of transition between leaving the Jesuit order and finding a Bishop's sponsorship, Bergoglio said the priests were only "relatively exposed” because “they knew that they had access to the provincial priesthood of the Jesuits … and that they were in dialogue with the Church." Bergolgio recalled that "I offered them the chance to come live at the provincial priesthood" at the time rumors of an imminent coup began to circulate. Bergoglio said that Yorio and Jalics, in fact, lived there after the coup, in the days before they were kidnapped.
In May of 1976, security forces kidnapped the priests, along with several other activists. The military officers involved in the raid were dressed in army camouflage, but they were probably agents from the navy, and did not display identification. After being taken to the Naval Mechanics School, Argentina's largest and most notorious secret prison, Yorio and Jalics were blindfolded, shackled, drugged, and threatened with electrocution. At some point during their captivity, they were transferred to a house outside Buenos Aires, where they were kept in a dark room in shackles and blindfolds, and scarcely fed. They were freed five months later, in late October 1976, after being drugged and abandoned in an open field.
Bergoglio recounted during his testimony the steps he took to ensure Yorio and Jalics' releases. He testified that he "began to move immediately" when he was alerted of their arrests, which he called a "moment of desperation." He said he began to "speak with priests that I assumed had access to the police and the armed forces," to find out which service branch kidnapped the priests. He met twice with Jorge Rafael Videla, the Army dictator. He also met twice with Emilio Massera, the junta's navy representative. In the first meeting with Massera, he said he "went to find out, because I didn't know [where they were]. I gave my testimony that these priests were not involved in anything raro ['rare']." But after the meeting Bergoglio said he discovered through back channels that the navy had, in fact, kidnapped the priests. (He did not specify who gave him this information, only that it was "vox populi.") After this discovery, the second meeting with Massera was "ugly" and brief. He remembered saying, "look Massera, I want them to appear." Then, he testified, "I got up, and I left."
When Yorio and Jalics were eventually freed (unlike thousands of other victims who were murdered by incineration, or thrown alive from military airplanes), Bergoglio told the court that he helped ensure the priests' physical safety and arranged for them to leave the country. Bergoglio admitted that he did not file any judicial charges, nor did he make any public statements about Yorio and Jalics. But when asked by one of the three presiding judges if Yorio or Jalics ever told him what they thought about his behavior during their kidnapping, he replied that, in personal conversations, "neither one of them asked me what more I could have done. … They didn't blame me."
But Yorio's assertion that he blamed Bergoglio had, in fact, been on the record for several years. "I don't have any reason to think that [Bergoglio] did anything for our freedom," he told journalist Horacio Verbitsky in a 1999 interview for the book El Silencio. Yorio accused Bergoglio of lobbying Argentina's bishops to stay away from him and Jalics. He also said he thought Bergoglio talked with Massera, the commander in chief of the navy, who had informed him that Yorio and Jalics were guerilla leaders. This, according to Yorio, allowed Bergoglio to "wash his hands" of concern for the priests. "He didn't wait for me to come out alive," Yorio said. (Jalics lives in Germany and does not talk about his experience as a victim of Argentina's repression. He did not respond to an email request for comment.)
Asked at the trial about Yorio's accusations, Bergoglio testified that Yorio probably thought he had not done enough because Yorio was "conditioned by the suffering that he had to go through." Bergoglio also insisted that he never thought Yorio and Jalics were extremists.
Some prominent human rights activists have come to Bergoglio's defense. Argentine Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel, who was jailed and tortured by the dictatorship, told the BBC's Spanish-language service [ http://www.bbc.co.uk/mundo/ultimas_noticias/2013/03/130314_ultnot_perez_esquivel_papa.shtml ] that Bergoglio "was not an accomplice of the dictatorship. … There were bishops who were accomplices of the Argentine dictatorship, but not Bergoglio."
"It was a difficult time for the Church," recalls Robert Cox, the editor of the Buenos Aires Herald. Cox was forced to go into exile in 1979 after he received threats for publishing news stories on the disappeared. "The Church was worried that if they split, the country would split, and there would be a civil war. This was always their excuse for not taking a firmer stance." He speculates that Bergoglio did "as much as he could, behind the scenes," but has not done enough to publicly explain the incident, or the role of the Catholic Church and the dictatorship more broadly.
Luis Zamora, a human rights lawyer who did the majority of the examination, at one point asked Bergolgio, "In these thirty-four years what was the reason that you never approached the courts to give all of the information that you knew and that you are now giving us?" The court did not allow the question, and Bergoglio did not answer.
After the hearing, Zamora described Bergoglio [ http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elpais/1-154782-2010-10-12.html ] as "reticent," adding, "when someone is reticent they are lying, they are hiding part of the truth." Reached for comment, Zamora added that Bergoglio has "completely failed" in his explanation of the past. He added that those who say Bergoglio was an insignificant figure in the Church at the time are mistaken, as evidenced by his ability to arrange meetings with Videla and Massera, the country's two most powerful military men. In his testimony, Bergoglio said he did not remember the names of those who helped him make contact with the military. When asked about records of his conversations with Videla and Massera, he said that he didn't have any because the time pressures were so great that he had to move quickly and he did not have time to write anything down.
In an interview published with Perfil in 2010 [ http://www.perfil.com/contenidos/2010/04/18/noticia_0024.html ], Bergoglio said publicly for the first time that he had helped save several others from the dictatorship, some after he hid them in his seminary, another after he loaned him priest's clothing and his identification to cross the border into Brazil. Asked why he never spoke about this before, Bergoglio said that "if I didn't speak at the time, it was so that I didn't do what other people wanted, not because I had something to hide." At trial he added, "I have spoken a lot about this with those who asked. I have given everything I know: Obviously the injustice of what they suffered, all of this, my position is clear. I don't give journalistic interviews as a matter of course. But, at one time I gave one journalist (Verbitsky) an interview, so that he could know my point of view. Those that know me know that I always have spoken in the tone that I have spoke here today."
Sam Ferguson is a visiting fellow at the Schell Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School and a former Fulbright Scholar. He is writing a book, Remnants of a Dirty War, about human rights trials in Argentina.
COPYRIGHT 2013 © THE NEW REPUBLIC
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112656/pope-francis-and-argentinas-dirty-war-what-he-knew [with comments]
--
Vatican says 'dirty war' accusations about Pope Francis just a left-wing smear
March 15, 2013
The Vatican on Friday denied “anti-clerical” accusations that Pope Francis failed to protect priests during the so-called “dirty war” waged by Argentinian dictators more than 30 years ago.
“We have every reason to affirm that these accusations are not reliable and there is no reason for them today to cast a shadow over the new pope,” Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said at a briefing.
A second spokesman, Father Tom Rosica said the accusations by a Argentinian journalist amounted to a political smear campaign against the new pope, who was known as Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio until his election on Wednesday.
“They reveal left-wing elements, anti-clerical elements that are used to attack the Church,” Rosica said. “They must be firmly and clearly denied.”
[...]
http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/15/17325546-vatican-says-dirty-war-accusations-about-pope-francis-just-a-left-wing-smear [with embedded video report, and comments]
--
Amid 'dirty war' debate, Argentines divided by pope's legacy
March 15, 2013
http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/15/17327871-amid-dirty-war-debate-argentines-divided-by-popes-legacy [with embedded video report, and comments]
--
Pope Francis on gay rights: His 5 worst quotes
(Credit: AP)
The new pontiff is being hailed as a fresh choice, but there's nothing new about his opposition to gay rights
By Katie Mcdonough
Thursday, Mar 14, 2013 11:08 AM CDT
Pope Francis has been praised for his humility (he picks up his own luggage! [ http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/pope-francis-displays-humility-picks-luggage-hotel-article-1.1288258 ]), his acceptance of other faiths (he won’t insult the Prophet Mohammed [ http://www.salon.com/2013/02/12/pope_benedict_xvi_his_best_of_the_worst/ ] in public addresses!) and his “precedent shattering [ http://www.salon.com/2013/03/13/cardinal_bergoglio_archbishop_of_buenos_aires_is_new_pope/ ]” name choice (more humility!).
But the pontiff who is being hailed as a “new direction” for the Catholic Church is the same-old brand of theological conservative who opposes the ordination of women, abortion and the fundamental rights of gays and lesbians.
In fact, then-Cardinal Jose Bergoglio was a major force against the 2010 move to legalize same-sex marriage in his native Argentina. Though he ultimately failed, Bergoglio used the full weight of the church to crush the measure.
Here, a collection of his very worst quotes on the issue.
1. A Senate vote on gay marriage is a destructive pretension against the plan of God
From a letter [ http://globovision.com/articulo/nuevo-papa-francisco-i-se-pronuncio-en-2010-contra-el-matrimonio-gay ] to the Carmelite Sisters of Buenos Aires on the perils of marriage equality:
“Let’s not be naïve, we’re not talking about a simple political battle; it is a destructive pretension against the plan of God. We are not talking about a mere bill, but rather a machination of the Father of Lies that seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God.”
2. Gay marriage will destroy the family
More from the same letter [ http://www.ncregister.com/blog/edward-pentin/cardinal_bergoglio_hits_out_at_same-sex_marriage ] to the four monasteries of Argentina:
“The Argentine people will face a situation whose outcome can seriously harm the family… At stake is the identity and survival of the family: father, mother and children."
3. Gay parenting is a rejection of God’s law engraved in our hearts
Again:
“At stake are the lives of many children who will be discriminated against in advance, and deprived of their human development given by a father and a mother and willed by God. At stake is the total rejection of God’s law engraved in our hearts.”
4. The political struggle against marriage equality is war
And finally:
“The bill will be discussed in the Senate after July 13. Look at San Jose, Maria, Child and ask them [to] fervently defend Argentina’s family at this time. [Be reminded] what God told his people in a time of great anguish: ‘This war is not yours but God’s.’ May they succor, defend and join God in this war.”
5. Gay adoption is discrimination against children
According to the National Catholic Reporter, Francis called gay adoption a form of “discrimination against children.” A comment that resulted in a public rebuke from Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who said [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixVrmrQg9AM (next below)]
that Francis’ remarks suggested “medieval times and the Inquisition.”
Copyright © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2013/03/14/pope_francis_on_gay_rights_his_5_worst_quotes/ [with comments]
--
Pope Francis Against Gay Marriage, Gay Adoption
By Cavan Sieczkowski
Posted: 03/13/2013 4:57 pm EDT | Updated: 03/13/2013 7:14 pm EDT
Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a 76-year-old Argentinean, was chosen as the first Latin American pope on Wednesday. He will lead the world's 1.2 billion Catholics as Pope Francis [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/13/pope-francisco-cardinal-jorge-mario-bergoglio-_n_2855101.html ]. While his selection may be historic, it may also mean more of the same when it comes to gay rights in the Catholic Church.
Pope Francis is a conservative who is anti-gay marriage and anti-gay adoption [ http://www.tmz.com/2013/03/13/new-pope-announced-cardinal-cardinal-jorge-mario-bergoglio/ ]. He has described same-sex marriage as the work of the devil and a “destructive attack on God’s plan [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/14/world/americas/14argentina.html ].” He has also said that gay adoption is a form of discrimination against children.
In 2010, Francis championed against a bill for same-sex marriage and gay adoption [ http://www.ncregister.com/blog/edward-pentin/cardinal_bergoglio_hits_out_at_same-sex_marriage ], according to the National Catholic Register.
“[T]he Argentine people will face a situation whose outcome can seriously harm the family," he wrote to the four monasteries in Argentina. "At stake is the identity and survival of the family: father, mother and children. At stake are the lives of many children who will be discriminated against in advance, and deprived of their human development given by a father and a mother and willed by God. At stake is the total rejection of God’s law engraved in our hearts.”
He went on to describe it as a "‘move’ of the Father of Lies who seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God" and asked for lawmakers to "not act in error." In John 8:44 [ http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p1s2c1p7.htm ], the Father of Lies is the devil.
Argentina approved same-sex marriage [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/16/world/americas/16argentina.html ] in 2010, making it the first Latin American country to legalize the union, the New York Times previously reported. The country is also progressive when it comes to contraception. President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has promoted free contraception [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/04/argentina-pope-cardinals-sandri-bergoglio-very-different-papal-candidates_n_2805693.html ] and artificial insemination, the Associated Press notes. In the past, Francis has clashed with the Argentinean government over his stance [ http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2013/03/13/cardinals-elect-new-pope/ ] on these issues.
GLAAD [ http://www.glaad.org/ ] President Herndon Graddick responded to the election of the new pope in a statement obtained by The Huffington Post.
For decades the Catholic hierarchy has been in need of desperate reform. In his life, Jesus condemned gays zero times. In Pope Benedict's short time in the papacy, he made a priority of condemning gay people routinely. This, in spite of the fact, that the Catholic hierarchy had been in collusion to cover up the widespread abuse of children within its care. We hope this Pope will trade in his red shoes for a pair of sandals and spend a lot less time condemning and a lot more time foot-washing.
Graddick also specifically addressed Francis' previous comments about gay adoption being a "discrimination against children."
"The real discrimination against children is the pedophilia that has run rampant in the Catholic Church with little more than collusion from the Vatican," he said.
Along with GLAAD, Stonewall [ http://www.stonewall.org.uk/ ] Chief Executive Ben Summerskill responded to the new pope's election, saying: ‘We hope Pope Francis shows more Christian love and charity to the world’s 420 million lesbian, gay and bisexual people than his predecessor."
Despite the pope's prior anti-gay sentiments, Francis' official biographer, Sergio Rubin, defended him as a noble man.
"Is Bergoglio a progressive – a liberation theologist even? No," he told the AP. "He's no third-world priest. Does he criticize the International Monetary Fund, and neoliberalism? Yes. Does he spend a great deal of time in the slums? Yes."
In 2001, he visited a hospice and washed the feet of AIDS patients [ http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/papabile-day-men-who-could-be-pope-13 ], according to The National Catholic Register. That same year he spoke out in defense of those less fortunate, contrasting "poor people who are persecuted [ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1481313.stm ] for demanding work, and rich people who are applauded for fleeing from justice."
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/13/pope-francis-gay-marriage-anti_n_2869221.html [with embedded video report, and comments]
--
(linked in):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=22198799 (and preceding) and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=54568354 and preceding and following;
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=83702026 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=70066579 (and preceding) and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=84628488 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=85669181 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=85764804 and preceding (and any future following)
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
Join the InvestorsHub Community
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
