The Argentine left doesn’t like the new pope. Horacio Verbitsky, a leftist journalist and author in Argentina, responded to the election of Pope Francis with a bitter column in Página/12.
He describes former Cardinal Bergoglio as “a conservative populist,” who, like Pius XII and John Paul II, is “unwavering on questions of doctrine,” but open to the world, “and above all, to the dispossessed masses.” For Verbitsky, this fits into the standard Marxist frame of reference: the Church seducing the poor with a false solidarity. Religion as opiate of the masses.
Verbitsky ends with a warning to his fellow Argentines. Just as Pius XII worked to impede a communist victory in Italy after World War II, and then John Paul II worked to bring about the end of communism in Eastern Europe, so might the new Argentine pope use the seductive Christian rhetoric of solidarity with the poor to undermine the populist government of Argentina and restore the exploiters to power, etc.
I find the criticisms very interesting. Verbitsky knows the new Pope’s modus operandi quite well. Francis renounced the grandeur of his episcopal residence, and expressing solidarity with the common man as he rode a bus to work. (Not something Cristina Kirchner does.) But he did not do so for the sake of the revolution, at least not the Marxist revolution, but instead for the sake of the revolution of the Gospel. This, unlike free market ideologies, poses a direct threat to the modern left, which claims a monopoly interest in the poor.
Perhaps we’re about to open an interesting new chapter in the ideological story of the modern West.
Thanks to Katie Infantine for the translation of Verbitsky.
March 15th, 2013 | 8:37 am
“The Argentine left doesn’t like the new pope.”
Which makes me like him even more.
March 15th, 2013 | 9:30 am
Ditto.
March 15th, 2013 | 11:14 am
Well, the boys in Warsaw (Gierek, Jaruzelski, et al.) also were squirming October 16, 1978. Certainly the Argentine Left knows what happened to their Polish confreres 11 years later.
March 15th, 2013 | 11:45 am
The left wouldn’t have been satisfied with anyone short of Steven Colbert for pope.
The harshest unexpected criticism comes from the extreme right. SSPX is no fan. In his ecumenical outreach and lax liturgical standards, Pope Francis is a marked departure from Benedict. We might use that dreaded modernist phrase to describe him: Spiritual but not religious.
March 15th, 2013 | 11:58 am
i am Argentine as Mr. Verbisnsky but I think that Pope Francis is the man which the world and these times needs and we have to pray for him.
March 15th, 2013 | 12:43 pm
I am from Argentina. Verbitsky, the journalist that attacks the Pope, is an ex leftist terrorist from ‘Montoneros’, the left wing peronist guerrilla. That idiot wants now for example to eliminate prisons.
The pope is in fact from the left of the church, but for the goverment is rigth-wing. They want a pope that permits abortion and gay marriage.
March 15th, 2013 | 12:55 pm
This meme has been picked up by the US media already. They gave one day, perhaps less than one day, of reprieve from pope conspiracy/vatican bashing.
March 17th, 2013 | 11:12 am
The accuser should stand among the accused.
When I was a special correspondent in South America for Newsweek and the Washington Post (1982-1987), Horacio Verbitsky–who portrayed himself as a human rights and good government crusader–became one of my best friends.
It wasn’t until much later that I was able to prove that this self-proclaimed former leftwing Montonero guerrilla intelligence chief, and later–when I knew him– supposedly a small “d” democrat, was in fact the ghostwriter of a book published by the Argentina Air Force in May of 1979.
The date is very important. The generals’ dirty “war” against critical sectors of Argentine society was still in its most murderous phase, with the person who later became my friend and Newsweek colleague, Jacobo Timerman, still in captivity.
If one looks at the book, “El Poder Aereo de los Argentinos,” published at that time, not only was Horacio given full credit for being its ghostwriter, but the tome was dedicated in part to the military regime responsible for the secret torture and death of some 25,000 people. (I have a copy of the book.)
For more information about Verbitsky’s collaborationist role during the dictatorship, please look at the 2000 version (in Spanish) of my book, Dossier Secreto: Argentina’s Desaparecidos and the Myth of the “Dirty War”
Or go to the open letter I wrote in 2004 to U.S. pollster John Zogby, who was about to attend a conference with Verbitsky in Miami, about him. (http://www.offnews.info/verArticulo.php?contenidoID=233).
Mr. Verbitsky’s veracity and true course of his professional career need to be challenged if the truth is to be told.
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