Vatican Rejects Argentine Accusations Against Pope Francis

[cbayer]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/16/world/europe/pope-francis-praises-benedict-urges-cardinals-to-spread-gospel.html?_r=0

L'Osservatore Romano, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Pope Francis lead mass at the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican on Thursday.

By DANIEL J. WAKIN, ALAN COWELL and GAIA PIANIGIANI
Published: March 15, 2013 Comment

VATICAN CITY — — For the first time since the election of the Argentine Pope Francis two days ago, the Vatican on Friday formally defended his role in the so-called Dirty War in Argentina when critics have accused him of failing to do enough to halt abuses of which he had knowledge.
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Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said there had “never been a credible accusation against him” relating to the period in the 1970s when he was the superior of the Jesuit order in Argentina.

Indeed, “there have been many declarations of how much he did for many people to protect them from the military dictatorship,” Father Lombardi said in a statement at a news conference.

“The accusations belong to the use of a historical-social analysis of facts for many years by the anti-clerical left to attack the church and must be rejected decisively.”

more at link

[ucrdem]

1. Thanks.

I'd really like to see this settled quickly and not fester forever in the online comments of the Guardian etc as did the claims about Benedict. Possibly Rome has learned a lesson in rapid response and if so it will be a great relief. I still don't know exactly why Benedict resigned, but controlling the noise machine never seemed high on his agenda, and consequently he seemed far more a victim of propaganda than a sly manipulator of public opinion, to me at least. Personally i don't fault him for giving slight attention to scoring p.r. points with pundits but in the end I think his reluctance to sell himself more vigorously at least partly did him in. Ironic that it should be so, as he was and is the soul of piety, but that's the way it is. So if this is a sign of things to come amen to that.

[goldent]

2. i agree that the Vatican needs to firmly respond to accusations like this that are widely publicized

I think theologians like Pope Benedict are like some scientists, who consider PR work to be unseemly.

Regarding the Pope's reason for retiring, I will take him at his word. None of the alternate stories I have heard make sense to me.

[cbayer]

5. I don't think we will ever know exactly why Benedict retired, but

my suspicion is that he just wasn't willing and/or able to do the housecleaning that needs so desperately to be done at this point.

[okasha]

3. Despite being a natty dresser

it seems to me that Benedict is the sort of person who would rather stand behind the throne than sit on it. Speaking from the perspective of a thank-the-gods retired teacher, it's never the really scholarly types who get into the hair pulling and eye-gouging over who's going to be department chair.

[cbayer]

4. I think it was settled years ago, but am not surprised that it is getting stirred up again.

I'm sure there was some old dirt ready to be spread on each and every one of these guys, and they factored that in.

Agree with your assessment of Benedict. He just seemed inept to me, but I respect his decision to step down.

[okasha]

6. The whole thing seems to center on

Francis' allegedly «removing his protection» from Frs. Jalics and Yorio. It's really unclear what that means. I wish someone would clarify this.

[pinto]

7. Read this morning that one of the two priests (one's deceased) said they were told

by then Fr. Bergoglio to stop their work in the neighborhoods for their own safety. For what ever reason, apparently they didn't. Whether Bergoglio withdrew his protection or couldn't provide protection seems a point. I'll look for the article, I'm sure it's still up somewhere. Saw it this AM, maybe the BBC?

[cbayer]

9. That's the story I have been consistently hearing.

They defied his order and he withdrew protection.

[pinto]

8. Here's the WaPo piece from yesterday -

Pope Francis’s defense against the worst allegation about his role in the dirty war

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/03/15/pope-franciss-defense-against-the-worst-allegation-about-his-role-in-the-dirty-war/

[ucrdem]

10. thanks Pinto. The Freudian-slip typo in that article's conclusion says it all,

Last edited Mon Mar 18, 2013, 09:30 AM - Edit history (1)

doesn't it? In the first sentence of his concluding paragraph, Fisher's last word, "nothing," appears to be a typo for "noting":

Again, none of these divergences or contradictions are especially damning, but they are worth nothing. Perhaps it’s a sign that the now-pope may have left something out, or maybe it’s just what happens when you ask a then-74-year-old about a conflict that happened decades earlier and was difficult to understand even then.

Meaning literally that the "contradictions" noted in Sam Ferguson's New Republic article are worthless. And I have to say that at this point, although I've been waiting for the waters to cool before wading very deeply into this one, that is my conclusion too. Here's what I've gathered so far:

1 - The arrests of priests Yorio and Jalics occurred in 1976, when Bergoglio was an unusually young (37) prefect of the Jesuit order in Argentina, and that's really young;

2 - The hearing whose transcript Ferguson is evidently picking through was held in 2010, 34 years and half a lifetime later;

3 - Both priests were released alive after several weeks;

4 - Ferguson's suspicions in the TNR article mostly rest on (a) his feeling that Bergoglio didn't make it crystal clear exactly what he told the two priests in 1976, what he didn't tell them but hoped they'd infer, what official actions he took and what actions he implied he would take but didn't, and what permissions he unofficially reinstated after officially revoking them (mainly regarding their licenses to say mass)'; and

5 - (b) the fact that Bergoglio didn't subsequently go to law over the arrests, i.e. file charges to complain about them.

And though I haven't yet consulted Ferguson's TNR article, or much else besides the recent Democracy Now transcript and the 2011 Guardian article that have been banging around (links below), given the circumstances, including the reluctance of religious orders to insert themselves into secular matters -- and Jesuits were at one time famous (really infamous) for their habit of doing just that, to the point where the order was dissolved by the pope in 1773 and as a condition of reinstatement in 1814 explicitly forbidden to put priests into political office, meaning that a sensible Jesuit prefect is going to do everything possible to avoid the appearance of playing politics -- I strongly suspect that Bergoglio did what he had to do to protect the work of the order, unofficially did something else to protect the two priests, purposely did not create a paper trail, and wisely chose to let the matter drop once the priests reappeared alive.

Unfortunately this is a matter of sufficient complexity, ambiguity, and plain old antiquity to guarantee that it will never really go away.


p.s. many thanks to posters here and in GD valiantly trying to straighten all this out and say it in a few crisp sentences. Much easier I suspect to do what Amy Goodman (for example) does so well, i.e. dish dirt for a few minutes to an eager audience and then move on to the day's next juicy morsel. . . .

-----------------------
Added links:

1.) Jan. 4, 2011 Guardian article by Hugh O'Shaughnessy, which mostly rehashes dubious claims by "journalist" Verbitsky:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/jan/04/argenitina-videla-bergoglio-repentance


2.) Transcript of Horacio Verbitsky's Democracy Now interview of Thursday, March 14, 2013:
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/14/pope_francis_junta_past_argentine_journalist


3.) Sam Ferguson's New Republic article, "When Pope Francis Testified About the Dirty War," of Thurs., March 14, 2013, the subject of Max Fisher's WaPo piece linked in Pinto's post above: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112656/pope-francis-and-argentinas-dirty-war-what-he-knew#


4.) "Five facts about the Jesuits," January 8, 2008: http://www.christiantoday.com/article/five.facts.about.the.jesuits/16052.htm

[ucrdem]

12. p.s. an observation or two about Sam Ferguson's TNR article

that is the subject of Fisher's Washington Post piece:

1. Apparently the key testimony alleging that Bergoglio conspired with the Argentinian government in arranging for Yorio and Jalics' arrest comes from a personal interview with Yorio conducted by "journalist Horacio Verbitsky," the Democracy Now expert, but not published until six years later, in 2005, at which point (a) Yorio was six years dead, having died shorty after his interview with Verbitsky, and (b) Bergoglio's name was in play as a replacement to John Paul II. Needless to say, the job went instead to Joseph Ratzinger:

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.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112656/pope-francis-and-argentinas-dirty-war-what-he-knew#

Additionally, Yorio's recollections, confided only to Verbitsky, are of events that took place while he was in prison, and the other priest, who is still alive, has made no such statement against Bergogolio. There's more but it's late . . .

[okasha]

11. S4P had a post in Religion this morning

that appears to clarify the charge of «withdrawing protection» as a rumor Bergoglio had expelled Frs. Yorio and Javics from the order. I think that's well above a Provincial's pay grade. It also turns out that the two priests were identified to the junta's goons by a fellow leftist under torture.

Someone might want to post a link to that thread. I'm using my Kindle 3G connection, and I'm not terribly handy with it.

[cbayer]

13. Here is the link:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/121873553