Source: Business Insider
New Pope Francis isn’t a Hitler Youth like the last guy, but he has his own troubled history.
Francis I along with the whole Argentine Catholic Church have faced criticism for their silence or complicity during the post-1976 military dictatorship — a failure for which the Church apologized in 2012.
Known as the Dirty War, this period saw a brutal battle between the ruling military elite and leftist guerrilla fighters, in which up to 30,000 Argentines were “disappeared” and others were raped or killed.
Argentine journalist Horacio Verbitsky chronicled how the Church and Bergoglio were involved in this dark era. As described by Hugh O’Shaughnessy of The Guardian in 2011:
[Verbitsky] recounts how the Argentine navy with the connivance of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now the Jesuit archbishop of Buenos Aires, hid from a visiting delegation of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission the dictatorship’s political prisoners. Bergoglio was hiding them in nothing less than his holiday home in an island called El Silencio in the River Plate. The most shaming thing for the church is that in such circumstances Bergoglio’s name was allowed to go forward in the ballot to chose the successor of John Paul II. What scandal would not have ensued if the first pope ever to be elected from the continent of America had been revealed as an accessory to murder and false imprisonment.
Read more:
Editorial Reviews
The Flight: Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior: Horacio Verbitsky
Amazon.com Review
Francisco Silingo was a junior naval officer in the Argentinean military dictatorship of the 1970s. Convinced by his superiors that extreme measures were essential in defending Argentina from subversives, he pushed drugged political prisoners out of airplanes into the Atlantic Ocean. Silingo related his experiences to author Horacio Verbitsky because his former commanders began denying such practices ever occurred–though they had gone to great lengths to justify them to their men. This book caused outrage in Argentina in 1995, when nearly 9,000 of the “disappeared” remain unaccounted for.
From Publishers Weekly
A bestseller in Argentina, this electrifying document is the businesslike confessional of retired Lieutenant Commander Adolfo Scilingo, who admits to participating in the Argentine military dictatorship’s campaign of torture and murder between 1976 and 1983. In extensive interviews, Scilingo tells Argentine journalist Verbitsky how he took part in “aerial transports”?throwing heavily sedated, naked political prisoners out of airplanes into the Atlantic Ocean. Under Verbitsky’s relentless cross-examination, Scilingo also admits that he joined in a kidnapping and observed a prisoner being tortured. Aerial executions of the regime’s opponents, he charges, were approved by Church authorities, and a chaplain comforted the officers after their missions. In the introduction, Mendez, general counsel for Human Rights Watch, notes that hundreds of known torturers have avoided prosecution thanks to the Argentine military’s clout, and more than 9000 families still do not know the fate of loved ones. Translation rights: Planeta Argentina, Buenos Aires.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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