WASHINGTON (RNS) In 1974, when the Rev. Jorge Bergoglio was the top Jesuit in his native Argentina, a former nightclub dancer named Isabel Peron came to head the nation – an accidental and weak president.
Her husband, President Juan Peron, had suffered a lethal heart attack in office. She was his vice president and third wife, but she was no Eva Peron, his dramatic second wife who was beloved by the working class and served as the inspiration for the hit Broadway musical “Evita.”
Eva Peron on the balcony of the Casa Rosada in 1951. Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain (http://bit.ly/13YYD8t)
Isabel Peron served less than two years in office before a right-wing military coup placed her under house arrest, and launched a seven-year campaign of torture and killings of tens of thousands of trade unionists and other leftists: Argentina’s Dirty War.
The bloody times ended only when the junta, seeking to divert attention from a human rights record that was drawing increased global outrage, started a turf war with Britain over the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. The speedy and conclusive British victory also spelled the end of the military dictatorship.
But the Dirty War continues to cast a shadow over Argentina and nearly everyone who lived through it, including Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires who was elected Wednesday (March 13) as Pope Francis.
Pictures and newspaper clips of desaparecidos (victims of forced disappearance) in a former illegal detention center in Rosario, Argentina. Photo by Pablo D. Flores / courtesy Wikimedia Commons (http://bit.ly/10TLahA)
Attempts to bring the junta and its collaborators to justice continue, and the new pope is again faced with questions of where he stood during the Dirty War, and whose side he was on.
As life in communist Poland propelled Pope John Paul II’s crusade against the Soviets and coming of age in Nazi Germany shaped Pope Benedict XVI, Argentina’s Dirty War posed deep, existential questions for the future Pope Francis.
Certainly Bergoglio didn’t do all he could at the time to counter the junta, said Virginia Garrard-Burnett, a professor of the religious history of Latin America at the University of Texas at Austin.
She points to the fate of two Jesuit priests targeted by the junta – a case resurrected in the media worldwide this week. The two priests were slum workers and adherents of liberation theology – a left-leaning school of Catholic thought rejected by Bergoglio and suppressed by John Paul. They might have been spared torture, some argue, had the Jesuit leader protected them.
As a conservative, Bergoglio may have at first appreciated the junta’s promise to restore order and traditional morality to Argentina, said Garrard-Burnett. But claiming, as some of his critics do, that he actually collaborated with the military? “I think goes that too far,” she said.
“I don’t mean to be defensive of him — I’m a progressive myself — but it’s fair to say those questions weren’t as cut-and-dried in those days as they seem to be now,” she said from Oslo, Norway. “It would take a lot of courage in those days to stand up to the junta. It could get you killed. And a lot of people, prominent people, did get killed.”
Bergoglio, as Uki Goni and Jonathan Watts write in The Guardian newspaper, has deemed slanderous the allegations that he allowed the two priests to be tortured, and has said he worked behind the scenes to save their lives and others.
But for many who suffered at the hands of the junta, and their survivors, there is no question that anything short of fighting for its overthrow was a moral failing.
Led by Jorge Videla, the military government orchestrated a reign of terror that plucked political enemies from their homes and sent then to sadistic torture centers where they were often raped, drugged and subjected to mock executions before they were killed. A common practice was to throw victims out of planes flying over the ocean.
The victims are called “los desaparecidos” or “the disappeared,” and number as high as 30,000. Argentinians today are still searching for the remains of the disappeared and their living offspring – scores of babies were born in their parents’ torture chambers and given to military families to adopt.
Since the late 1970s, the so called “Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo” have gathered regularly in a famed Buenos Aires square to press for information about their children’s fate, and that of grandchildren they never met.
The Catholic Church in Argentina did not take a uniform stand on the Dirty War. Some priests backed the military, but others worked against it and died for their outspokenness.
But Bergoglio has been outspoken more recently. Argentina’s bishops apologized last year for failing to protect the junta’s victims. But the apology itself drew criticism, because it also blamed the leftists who — sometimes violently — opposed the junta.
The apology left open the question, The Associated Press reported at the time, as to how much Catholic leaders knew of the junta’s atrocities. As pope, it still may be one that Francis will be called to answer.
3 Comments
James Edward Kelley
I doubt that Pope Francis or Pope John Paul II deliberately or intentionally supported the junta and allowed those two priests to be subjected to the tortures carried out by said because the two priests were in favor of Liberation Theology as Liberation Theology is a movement using Biblical and theological principles to oppose any form of oppression of any type of individual or group. The life, and I personally consider one’s life as one’s most important resume in determining one’s character, of Pope Francis has been dedicated to the impoverished and it was the junta which was oppressive to those impoverished people of Argentina. Pope John Paul II was not opposed, in reality, to Liberal Theology as much as a lot of Leftists like to think he was. People outside of the Catholic Church tend to think in turns of power and powerlessness and the gray in between the two extremes. In the Catholic Church, each individual male or female, Priest or Nun, has a job that is equal to all the other jobs. The Catholic Church takes very seriously the words of St. Paul where that describe each part of the body as being as important as each other and that when one part of the body is malfunctioning, the rest of the body malfuntions in one way or another. Can we say that St. Paul was a prophet of Holistic Medicine? Definitely. But, back to the point. Just because nuns are relegated mainly to prayer (but, remember that a lot of priests are relegated to prayer as well), they have chosen that path out of conviction of prayer’s power. Priests have done so as well throughout the ages, hence, we have monasteries and such. People outside of the Church only see what’s on the surface and that surface consists of those who preach, the Priests, Cardinals and Popes. People don’t realize that those who are behind the scenes, so to speak, are just as important within the Church and to the Church, itself and are seen as such by the Church. People may ask, but isn’t the Papacy, as the main leadership position within the Church, a power-position? No. The Papacy is, yes, the leadership position of the Church, but is it a power position? No. The Catholic Church does not work the way the rest of the world does because the Catholic Church has more important goals to satisfy than Earthly gain. The Mission Statement of the Church is not to become rich, not to make anyone else rich, not to become powerful, not to become famous, etc. and so forth. The Mission Statement of the Church is to lead people to live for that Kingdom which is Eternal, not Earthly. And in that Kingdom which is Eternal there is no man, no woman, no poor, no rich, no races, creeds, etc. as St. Paul once again writes better than I can. In that Kingdom that which is Eternal every entity is equal and therefore no strife is present, no abuse, everything is peace perpetual. Whenever a Pope has used his position as a position of power rather than peace (peace is always opposed to power), that is a representative of the alterior motive(s) of that Pope and not a representation of what the Church, itself, is about. Should women become Priests if they want? I don’t see why not. I am a devout Catholic and see no problem with this. There may be a reason why it is not happening of which I am not aware. In fact, I wrote to Pope John Paul II one time about this and received a letter back from a Monsignor that was quite honest and sincere which said the Pope was praying about it. I’m sure he was doing that at least. But to say that the Church oppresses women in toto is wrong as the roles of nuns in the church are deemed equal in importance to the roles priests play in the church. Another example of how Pope John Paul II was not really against Liberation Theology was that he, when a priest, or perhaps before then when he was an actor and a writer as well as a local environmentalist before environmentalism was even considered an eminent cause, he housed and protected all the Jewish men, women and children he could from being collected by the Nazi soldiers lurking around his neighboorhood at the time. In fact, one Nazi soldier actually knocked on the door of where Karol Wojtyla (sp?) (Pope John Paul II’s secular name) lived and housed some of the Jews he protected and asked him if he had any Jews in his house. Wojtyla (sp?) said no. According to God’s grace, Wojtyla (sp?) and his Jewish friends were spared. Normally the Nazi soldier would have barged into the house anyway and took away any Jew they found as well as the person(s) with them. Pope Francis’s “evasive” remarks about the junta affair seem only “evasive” to those who want to find any reason to lambast the Church, the Pope, himself, or those who were against the junta to begin with. Anyone else would call Pope’s Francis’s remarks “evasive” if they were not familiar with the one characteristic that has been consistent throughout his life and that is humility. Most humble people do not talk much about their actions on behalf of others, they just do them out of the love of their hearts. People against said humble individual would call any of their comments on what they have done “evasive” while others who are for said humble individual would say, and say truly, that there is proof enough in the pudding that the humble individual created and that anything that individual says about how he made it or what went into it is superfluous. And believe me, the pudding Pope Francis has created would rival any blancmange you would find in Paris.
Nonbloko
On a matter of principle, I refuse to read long comments posted in the form of a single paragraph.
James Edward Kelley
Hi, Nonbloko.
Why do you find long posts in the form of one paragraph unprincipled, if that is indeed the thought behind your comment? If that is not, indeed, the thought behind your comment, then why don’t you have the courage to say straightforwardly, what it is instead of hiding behind a line that ultimately ends further discussion with you as having the last word even though you really hadn’t said anything substantial?