Vatican Rejects Argentine Accusations Against Pope Francis

[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. . . .

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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