BILL VAN AUKEN, wsws.org. • First posted Mar 13, 2013. "The Argentinean Catholic church support was by no means platonic. The junta’s detention and torture centers were assigned priests, whose job it was, not to minister to those suffering torture and death, but to help the torturers and killers overcome any pangs of conscience. Using such biblical parables as “separating the wheat from the chafe,” they assured those operating the so-called “death flights,” in which political prisoners were drugged, stripped naked, bundled onto airplanes and thrown into the sea, that they were doing “God’s work.” Others participated in the torture sessions and tried to use the rite of confession to extract information of use to the torturers." For over a week, the media has subjected the public to a tidal wave of euphoric banality on the Roman Catholic Church’s selection of a new pope. This non-stop celebration of the dogma and ritual of an institution that for centuries has been identified with oppression and backwardness is stamped with a deeply undemocratic character. It is reflective of the rightward turn of the entire political establishment and its repudiation of the principles enshrined in the US Constitution, including the wall of separation between church and state. What a far cry from the political ideals that animated those who drafted that document. It was Thomas Jefferson’s well-founded opinion that “In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.” Jefferson’s view—and the reactionary character of the media’s sycophantic coverage—finds no more powerful confirmation than in the identity of the new pope, officially celebrated as a paragon of “humility” and “renewal.” Placed on the papal throne is not only another hard-line opponent of Marxism, the Enlightenment and all manner of human progress, but a man who is deeply and directly implicated in one of the greatest crimes of the post-World War II era—Argentina’s “Dirty War.” Amid the pomp and ceremony Friday, the Vatican spokesman was compelled to address the past of the new Pope Francis—the former Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Bergoglio. He dismissed the accusations against him as the work of “anti-clerical left-wing elements.” That “left-wing elements” would denounce the complicity of the Church’s leaders in the “Dirty War” waged by the military junta that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983 is scarcely surprising. They accounted for many of the estimated 30,000 workers, students, intellectuals and others who were “disappeared” and murdered, and the tens of thousands more who were imprisoned and tortured. But some of Bergoglio’s harshest critics come from within the Catholic Church itself, including priests and lay workers who say he handed them over to the torturers as part of a collaborative effort to “cleanse” the Church of “leftists.” One of them, a Jesuit priest, Orlando Yorio, was abducted along with another priest after ignoring a warning from Bergoglio, then head of the Jesuit order in Argentina, to stop their work in a Buenos Aires slum district. During the first trial of leaders of the military junta in 1985, Yorio declared, “I am sure that he himself gave over the list with our names to the Navy.” The two were taken to the notorious Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA) torture center and held for over five months before being drugged and dumped in a town outside the city. Bergoglio was ideologically predisposed to backing the mass political killings unleashed by the junta. In the early 1970s, he was associated with the right-wing Peronist Guardia de Hierro (Iron Guard), whose cadre—together with elements of the Peronist trade union bureaucracy—were employed in the death squads known as the Triple A (Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance), which carried out a campaign of extermination against left-wing opponents of the military before the junta even took power. Adm. Emilio Massera, the chief of the Navy and the leading ideologue of the junta, also employed these elements, particularly in the disposal of the personal property of the “disappeared.” Yorio, who died in 2000, charged that Bergoglio “had communications with Admiral Massera, and had informed him that I was the chief of the guerrillas.” The junta viewed the most minimal expression of opposition to the existing social order or sympathy for the oppressed as “terrorism.” The other priest who was abducted, Francisco Jalics, recounted in a book that Bergoglio had promised them he would tell the military that they were not terrorists. He wrote, “From subsequent statements by an official and 30 documents that I was able to access later, we were able to prove, without any room for doubt, that this man did not keep his promise, but that, on the contrary, he presented a false denunciation to the military.” Bergoglio declined to appear at the first trial of the junta as well as at subsequent proceedings to which he was summoned. In 2010, when he finally did submit to questioning, lawyers for the victims found him to be “evasive” and “lying.” Bergoglio claimed that he learned only after the end of the dictatorship of the junta’s practice of stealing the babies of disappeared mothers, who were abducted, held until giving birth and then executed, with their children given to military or police families. This lie was exposed by people who had gone to him for help in finding missing relatives. The collaboration with the junta was not a mere personal failing of Bergoglio, but rather the policy of the Church hierarchy, which backed the military’s aims and methods. The Argentine journalist Horacio Verbitsky exposed Bergoglio’s attempted cover-up for this systemic complicity in a book that Bergoglio authored, which edited out compromising sentences from a memorandum recording a meeting between the Church leadership and the junta in November 1976, eight months after the military coup. The excised statement included the pledge that the Church “in no way intends to take a critical position toward the action of the government,” as its “failure would lead, with great probability, to Marxism.” It declared the Catholic Church’s “understanding, adherence and acceptance” in relation to the so-called “Proceso” that unleashed a reign of terror against Argentine working people. This support was by no means platonic. The junta’s detention and torture centers were assigned priests, whose job it was, not to minister to those suffering torture and death, but to help the torturers and killers overcome any pangs of conscience. Using such biblical parables as “separating the wheat from the chafe,” they assured those operating the so-called “death flights,” in which political prisoners were drugged, stripped naked, bundled onto airplanes and thrown into the sea, that they were doing “God’s work.” Others participated in the torture sessions and tried to use the rite of confession to extract information of use to the torturers. This collaboration was supported from the Vatican on down. In 1981, on the eve of Argentina’s war with Britain over the Malvinas (Falkland) Islands, Pope John Paul II flew to Buenos Aires, appearing with the junta and kissing its then-chief, Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri, while saying not a word about the tens of thousands who had been kidnapped, tortured and murdered. As Jefferson noted, the Church is “always in alliance with the despot,” as it was in backing Franco’s fascists in Spain, its collaboration with the Nazis as they carried out the Holocaust in Europe, and its support of the US war in Vietnam. Nonetheless, the naming of a figure like Bergoglio as Pope—and its celebration within the media and ruling circles—must serve as a stark warning. Not only are the horrific crimes carried out in Argentina 30 years ago embraced, those in power are contemplating the use of similar methods once again to defend capitalism from intensifying class struggle and the threat of social revolution.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bill Van Auken is a leading political analyst with the wsws.org, information arm of the Social Equality Party.
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5 comments
Even before the white smoke hit the sky, I was certain that whomever the graying red penguins picked, would be immediately hailed, spotless as his glowing white robes. As this, near look alike for the Pope who found it vital to”run, not walk” to a monastery, one can only wonder why; this new leader took to the “stage”…not my words, but a Freudian slip from a bishop who was organismic ally listing every virtue known to man, and in his ecstasy, he said, “Once the Holy Father took to the stage, I mean, the balcony…” Hmm, better he stuck with his truthful description of the place where the endless party began for the new Jesuit boss in town! Facts are as welcomed in this gold-encrusted city, as the proverbial skunk at the dinner party. Too bad, seems that the Vatican never learns that perverts, ignoring government mass murder, banking corruption, and injustice of every stripe, sooner or later comes out and sullies the unearned hype. The power of the Catholic church is veiled beneath all the pseudo-sanctity that is an attempt to smother those who would address the reality of the man and institution. The media, ever hitting their knees while delivering the soap suds to the gullible public, should instead present a objective, good/bad, or at least problematic areas of this individual. Maybe they are as tied to the power of the church as they are to the Shadow Masters. Disgusting thought. But the endless pedophile scandal that the church tried to hide by persecuting the victims, has not been able to silence the pandemic abuse. He is the first Jesuit to wear the layers of gold, and that, to me,
is a bit alarming; not a pretty history, the Jesuits have, rather vicious. John Paul II was a true, NWO
player and I fear this one will extend those cryptic plans. What he was complicit, and/or advocated in the mass murders in Argentina surely could be labeled, “War crimes” and makes laughable the
sweet little label as a “humble man.” PLEASE! Stop with the thesauruses and just comment on his
ability to wave and grin for hours on end.
Hell of a piece, brother, and what’s common to everything I’ve read on the new Pope is those who most strongly indict him are priests who served under him. We obviously don’t see a trace of this in the mainstream media, bringing to mind the inaugural issue of Cyrano’s in ‘82—exposing the complicity of the media long before it was “fashionable” to do so. Tragically, few were listening then, and judging by the ratings of the drivel that passes for news on TV, not that many are listening now.
Now Mr. Van Auken, let me turn on the criticism to you … Your piece lacks proof and references to support it.. A few people who are against the Argentine Junta and were harmed by them have come forth to say that they do not agree with the accusations and show that Bergoglio helped them in those times.. Some versions say that Bergoglio worked to release the priests… He also gave information that some prisoners were held in Church property.
You base significant parts of your piece on the version of Verbitzky and the spinoff that come from his book…You do not explain to your readers that he was part of the Montoneros with a nickname “the Dog” (El Perro) and was a part of a brutal war they waged with bombs and kidnappings in the 70´s. Verbitzky and his newspaper are now totally identified with the Kirchner government which is considered extremely corrupt and have an ongoing total disagreement with Bergoglio who has criticized them for lack of real attention tho the conditions of the poor…
You may do an internet search on the newspaper Clarin of the days 14 March and on to see other versions before you chose to give your piece a biased contrarian slant…of course Clarin is confronted with the Kirchner government which wants to put it out of business… So much for freedom of the press…
Now I do not pretend to know what Bergoglio did or not do… But your kind of Journalism is very deficient as you do not present the full spectrum…Your article is based on hearsay from one side. It is not information… So please put that it is your opinion, and do not present it as proof.
Finally the regime in your country is perpetrating in the Near/Middle East a crime 100 times greater than the Junta (again I condone neither) So it would be nice that you focus on cleaning your own back yard.
Sir, you need to take lessons from the great Journalists or is it you are pushing another agenda?
Greanville Post: I like you but please be a bit more critical of the articles you reproduce.
Manuel,
I think it would be enlightening for you to read that not just the essays here depict the pope as having blood on his hands; the New York Times had a similar expose, as did the Washington Post, Pulitzer prize winning writer whose essay is on the the Greanville post. How many newspapers of high repute are you going to chastise and champion someone whose track record in Argentina is known and reviled by even priests in that country? Sounds so similar to the attacks leveled against the altar boys until the over whelming truth was no longer able to be rationalized or blaming the victims. If you are going to crusade for the Vatican, you will find that the same scenario will be
revealing the WHOLE truth of this pope. As to your, “Be objective…” PLEASE, that national media is extolling him and definitely their sources are the Vatican, so never fear that the pope has his
legions to assert his saintliness, true or not. As to the Greanville Post’s editorial policy, you are once again howling at the moon if you think the editors would censor their contributors…this is one website where differences of opinion are ENCOURAGED, not edited by others who may have their own agendas that would eliminate our right for truth…you’ve got an uphill battle to silence those who
tell the history of this man.
Manuel’s critique deserves a reply.
First of all, if he cared to look, he’d see that Bill Van Auken is a political commentator, not a reporter, although the standards of minimum decency and integrity apply to all categories of people voicing opinion or dispensing information. Any cursory look of media or the Internet can show a veery broad range of opinion, some excellent and on target, some pure drivel, mental manure. I’d like to think Auken is among the former. His output proves it. (The correctness of reporting is proven, like science, by the accuracy of its predictions. In that regard Auken has an admirable record unmatched by any “journalist” working for the corporate media in the US or elsewhere.)
Auken is a socialist and says so openly. He does not, like most creatures working for the plutocrats’ media, pretend to “objectivity.” He is a prominent commentator with the World Socialist Web Site. Auken does not pretend to be “impartial” about the news. “Impartiality and objectivity” are bourgeois myths, everybody transmits an ideology into what they report because no one is a blank devoid of opinions and prejudices. The pursuit of “objectivity” is one of the most cherished conceits of capitalist “journalists” with a very long history of baloney and active misrepresentation and omission of fact under the cover of “presenting all views” as if all views had the same weight of truth.
The American media, the foremost practitioner of this imposture has completely betrayed its mission. Many decades of manipulation, sensationalism and obfuscation have resulted in one of the dumbest and worst informed nations in the world, which, not accidentally, allows the American ruling circles to do as they please with the nation’s awesome military and economic power, to the detriment of billions of people around the world, and a regime of constant war enforced behind a curtain of enormous falsehoods never challenged by the “professional, and objective” American journalists.
This journal—The Greanville Post— has published many analyses denouncing this practice. Consider these which I have read over the years, and still remember:
We Have No Idea Who’s Right: Criticizing “he said, she said” journalism at NPR
(https://www.greanvillepost.com/2011/09/17/we-have-no-idea-whos-right-criticizing-he-said-she-said-journalism-at-npr/)
The Political Function of PBS / By Alex Cockburn
https://www.greanvillepost.com/2010/04/26/the-political-function-of-pbs/
The above piece, by the late Cockburn, is not only completely spot on, but the product of one of the most perceptive minds in the Anglophone world, a legendary journalist and diarist of great refinement and sense of irony. It savages with plenty of humour the sacred practice of “balancing the facts,” which, when it comes to truth, is not only deceptive but impossible.
Lastly—and there other things I could easily take issue with—you represent, as most “centrists” middle class people and certainly Argentinians (I think you are), the Argentine left and guerrillas as “violent”, waging a war unworthy of civilized people, etc., etc., typical of those who never see or admit the systemic violence of the status quo which condemns society to a perennial rule of oligarchs and a reign of profound inequality. The preceding then allows the Junta—representing the established order and its supporters, to wage a real war on what was in fact a practically unarmed population, as happened later in Chile with similar ugly results, all supported and organized in tandem with the CIA. It’s not surprising that this false equation of “evenly” matched combatants, and of people on the left who, through their supposedly unwarranted violence, brought it upon themselves to be persecuted with a barbarism unworthy of the Argentinean nation, was and remains the version of events distributed by the Western media.
Auken, whatever faults he may have from a perfectionist perspective, correctly reported and analyzed such events, something which, as noted above, the American mass media totally failed to do. Under such circumstances, give me Auken any day. Humanity is the better for his reporting. If anything, it’s “the great journalists” you allude to but fail to mention (care to give some examples of what you think is a great journalist?) who need to take lesson from Auken and his kind. But for that they’d have to abandon profitable careers and shed their bankrupt ideologies.
In regard to the Pope and his past: Anyone with his kind of influence is likely to have people corroborating his claims to innocence. Up to this day there is no visible record of opposition during the worst years of the Junta and many facts pointing in the other direction. Apparently, like os many millions of “good Germans” he never heard of the atrocities occurring right under his nose.
And one more thing: It’s an oxymoron to say that a dyed in the wool conservative can be in favor of the poor. Conservatives everywhere (including institutions like the Catholic Church) help to maintain regimes that “produce” poverty and grotesque inequality. When the Catholic Church at last sprouted the “liberation” clergy, Bergoglio (as Ratzinger and other recent Popes) worked tirelessly to stamp it out. Some record for a man who claims to be a humble servitor of Christ.
—Horace Denison, PhD
Brisbane