Since Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, S.J., became Pope Francis earlier this week, accusations have been flying about how and whether he collaborated with the military junta that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. The Guardian and the Associated Press provide overviews of the accusations.
I’m no expert on Argentine history, but a few factors seem to weigh in the pope’s favor. From another A.P. story, one prominent accusation against Bergoglio is undermined by facts that emerged just a few years ago:
One [human rights case] examined the torture of two of [Bergoglio's] Jesuit priests — Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics — who were kidnapped in 1976 from the slums where they advocated liberation theology, which is the belief that Jesus Christ’s teachings justify fights against social injustices.
Yorio accused Bergoglio of effectively handing them over to the death squads by declining to tell the regime that he endorsed their work. Jalics refused to discuss it after moving into seclusion in a German monastery.
Both men were freed after Bergoglio took extraordinary, behind-the-scenes action to save them, including persuading dictator Jorge Videla’s family priest to call in sick so that Bergoglio could say Mass in the junta leader’s home, where he privately appealed for mercy. His intervention likely saved their lives, but Bergoglio never shared the details until [Sergio] Rubin interviewed him for the 2010 biography.
Bergoglio told Rubin that he regularly hid people on church property during the dictatorship, and once gave his identity papers to a man with similar features, enabling him to escape across the border.
Second, Nobel Peace Prize winner and Argentine activist Adolfo Perez Esquivel—who, as an active opponent of the dictatorship, would have little reason to defend someone who aided it—has told multiple news outlets that Bergoglio “had no ties” with the dictatorship. In an interview with Reuters, he said:
“What Bergoglio tried to do was help where he could,” said Adolfo Perez Esquivel, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for defending human rights during the dictatorship.
“It’s true that he didn’t do what very few bishops did in terms of defending the human rights cause, but it’s not right to accuse him of being an accomplice,” Perez Esquivel told Reuters. “Bergoglio never turned anyone in, neither was he an accomplice of the dictatorship.”
Third, a 2011 Guardian column by Hugh O’Shaughnessy that accused Bergoglio and the Church in Argentina of collaborating with the dictatorship (and began circulating in the wake of Bergoglio’s election) has been revised this week to delete the most damning accusation it contained. The attack on Bergoglio was so baseless that the Guardian had to backtrack completely with this correction at the end of the column (emphasis mine):
This article was amended on 14 March 2013. The original article, published in 2011, wrongly suggested that Argentinian journalist Horacio Verbitsky claimed that Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio connived with the Argentinian navy to hide political prisoners on an island called El Silencio during an inspection by human rights monitors. Although Verbitsky makes other allegations about Bergoglio’s complicity in human rights abuses, he does not make this claim. The original article also wrongly described El Silencio as Bergoglio’s “holiday home”. This has been corrected.
The Guardian’s credulity is mirrored in the online circulation of incorrectly captioned photos that claim to show Bergoglio giving Communion to dictator Jorge Videla, when in fact the priest in the photo is someone else.
It would seem, then, that we should take vitriolic accusations of the pope’s alleged collaboration with the regime with a grain of salt. Perhaps he and the Church deserve criticism for their actions during the dictatorship, but as the Guardian reversal and the deceptive photos show, some of the published denunciations are likely to prove false.
March 15th, 2013 | 3:26 pm
These stories will be relegated to the fringe rather quickly but as with attacks on past popes, the lingering mainstream attack will be that he didn’t do enough. That’s fair though I wouldn’t consider that a major moral failing.
March 15th, 2013 | 3:37 pm
I have heard the “not enough” charge, too (just like with Pius XII). What is “enough?” Did he single-handedly take down the dictatorship. Well, no, he didn’t do that. The “not enough” charge seems unfair without describing what exactly he ought to have done, within the realm of human possibility.
March 15th, 2013 | 4:25 pm
The Church is only accused of “not doing enough” when the regime is rightist. When its leftist, simply saying mass is often considered “too much”
March 15th, 2013 | 4:59 pm
Ed Peters has a great blog post at In the Light of the Law noting that if there are no other accusations to make against someone who challenges the liberal views of the media then the charge becomes they didn’t Speak Out Enough against some event they had nothing to do with. There may be no evidence that speaking out more would have helped but how can that be proved either way? It’s the perfect accusation to make many years after an event has happened.
March 15th, 2013 | 5:51 pm
I saw the original allegations and discounted them. I’m not Catholic and don’t entirely understand the interaction of the Catholic faith and government in other countries, but that just didn’t fit in with the other things I’d read about him. I’m always suspicious of allegations that are clearly out of character. The new Pope impresses me very much. I hate that some people think a story isn’t balanced unless you can find some sort of scandal to include.
March 15th, 2013 | 6:13 pm
Jesus did not speak out enough against the corruption of the administration of Tiberius Caesar.
March 15th, 2013 | 6:51 pm
Speaking out forcefully even if it doesn’t make a difference can turn men into saints. But not speaking out, in my mind, is like not donating a kidney. I won’t hold it against you. We don’t hold anyone else to that high a standard. Mostly just bishops. In a sense, the Church is a victim of its own moral authority. Many expect every bishop to be a saint.
March 15th, 2013 | 11:52 pm
Thank you for an excellent blog. Once again, we have a situation where the media is trying to destroy the character of a Pope. Consider, what they tried to do when Pope Benedict XVI took office as pope.
March 16th, 2013 | 3:03 am
Thanks for the excellent blog, on this. I didn’t think these claims were true when I first heard them.
March 16th, 2013 | 9:54 am
“Not doing enough” is a charge typically leveled by those who did nothing at all.
March 17th, 2013 | 1:28 am
To offer a different voice in this echo chamber, “not doing enough” is not an issue of right nor left, (although some here would like to make it so) but a moral failing. I raised my son to understand that bearing silent witness to oppression – even that of a schoolyard bully – was unacceptable. The culpability, while not the same as that of the bully, exists nonetheless. When discussing events as monstrous as the Holocaust or the Dirty Wars and the contemporaneous choices made by men who would presume to lead us spiritually, my expectation is at least as great as it was of my 6 year old. Undoubtedly, few of you will enjoy reading this as it appears at odds with your biases. That doesn’t render it false or wrong-minded; we can all profit from examining our preconceived notions and doctrinaire beliefs. “Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” is more than a humorous quote. Was it not the practice of Jesus himself?
March 17th, 2013 | 10:12 pm
Sure Paco, but this man may well have done more than enough, given the constraints he was operating under at the time. There are examples, already surfacing, in which he broke certain constraints and made more than a little difference. In the fullness of time, as they say, more will be learned of those years.
March 17th, 2013 | 11:35 pm
Chairm – without some incontrovertible evidence one way or the other, I don’t think this is the sort of concern that can ever be “decided”. And I ‘m the first to concede that unless/until we’ve found ourselves in a parallel circumstance, who can say, definitively, how they would behave. I’d like to think I’d speak truth to power but I’m not so arrogant as to be certain that I’d have the strength. But then again, I do not hold myself up as worthy to be the spiritual leader of millions of the devout. That was really my point. Along with the observation that the author of the blog and some of the commentators betray just the sort of narromindedness they care to lay on those who express their dismay at the elevation of someone with Bergoglio’s history. There are sincere people in Argentina, who suffered unspeakable loss, who feel this was a shameful decision. I give their sense of justice more credence than I do to people sitting comfortably 1,500 miles and 40 years removed from the events.
March 18th, 2013 | 12:07 am
Defenders like to offer the counter-factual that speaking out would’ve been ineffective or counter-productive. I find that highly unlikely. The Philippines, El Salvador, Poland, South Korea, etc. The positive PR for the Church alone has done far more good in the long run. At any rate, the Argentinian bishops have apologized for failing to do more so that settles that.
The better defense might be that Pope Francis’ failure is minor enough to be readily forgivable. It’s easy for people to condemn the regime in retrospect on the internet. It’s always harder in the midst. Adolfo Perez Esquivel, the Nobel laureate Argentinian human rights activist, seems to have a, more or less, neutral view of Pope Francis’ conduct during the Dirty War. Those courageous internet critics of the Pope who didn’t even know about the Dirty War until last week are essentially claiming superior moral judgment to a Nobel Peace Prize winning human rights activist.
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