A Social Conservative: Pope Francis LED Effort against Liberation Theology and Same-sex Marriage

Democracy Now!
March 14, 2013

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/14/a_social_conservative_pope_francis_led#.UUI2HhNK-oU.email

During the military dictatorship in Argentina, the new pope openly criticized liberation theology’s combination of religious teachings and calls for social justice. His social conservative streak continued when he was elevated to cardinal in Argentina. In 2010, he called the Argentine government’s legalization of gay marriage "an attempt to destroy God’s plan" and opposed adoption by gay couples. We discuss Pope Francis’ social conservatism with Ernesto Seman, a historian at New York University and former reporter for two Argentine newspapers, and with Argentine journalist Horacio Verbitsky. [includes rush transcript]

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Our guests are Horacio Verbitsky, an Argentine investigative journalist for the newspaper Pagina/12, or Page/12. He has reported extensively on the church’s involvement in Argentina with the military junta that once ruled Argentina, specifically on the role of Father Bergoglio, who is now Father—who is now Pope Francis. Among his books, The Silence: From Paul VI to Bergoglio: The Secret Relations Between the Church and the ESMA. ESMA refers to the former Navy school that was turned into a detention center where people were tortured. Verbitsky also heads the Center for Legal and Social Studies, an Argentine human rights organization. You can also go to our website at democracynow.org, where we broadcast from Buenos Aires several years ago, talking about these issues, including the children who were taken from dissidents who were then killed and handed to military families to be raised, which we’ll talk about.

Ernesto Seman is with us, as well. Seman, the historian at New York University, former reporter for the Argentine newspapers Pagina/12 and Clarin, where he reported on politics and human rights, as well as Father Bergoglio.

As we continue this conversation, Ernesto Seman, can you underscore what Horacio is saying, what you think we know at this point about Pope Francis, what we don’t?

ERNESTO SEMAN: Yeah, I think that what Horacio Verbitsky wrote during these several years is he’s tried to uncover what is this kind of social conservatism, that you were trying to describe at the beginning of the program. It’s not—in terms of the discourse, it’s not the kind of Catholic conservatism that you’re going to find in the United States, with this emphasis on the individual salvation, on government crushing individual liberty and economic activity, and because it’s much more socially loaded. But the paradox—and I think that that’s the most important point of Horacio Verbitsky’s work—is how this same discourse, with a lot of emphasis on social justice and on equality, at the same time has worked to undermine the work who had tried to solve those same problems.

The case of this complicity of Bergoglio with human rights violations during the dictatorship is by far the most important episode. But during the last decade, he did, as the State Department implicitly suggests, the opposition to the government, in a decade in which Argentina lived the largest and fastest reduction of poverty and inequality, as in most of all Latin American countries. So that kind of paradox between the kind of social conservatism and an opposition to social agenda that has been pretty successful during the last years is very important.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I wanted to ask you about that, precisely, and the parallels, it seems to me, in terms of the cardinals selecting John Paul II, when he was elevated to pope, he coming out of Poland, where there was a Solidarity movement and in opposition to the previous government, that, in essence, his elevation helped to fortify that movement. I’m wondering whether there’s some parallel now with the changes in Latin America now to the elevation of a very conservative cardinal from that region, might help to bolster forces that are opposed to continuing this enormous change that’s occurring in Latin America.

ERNESTO SEMAN: You might say so. The problem that you have there is to what extent that’s going to make the gap between the church and the Catholic followers even deeper. In the case of Argentina and some of the social issues that happened over the last decade, you see that in a country that 75 percent of people consider themselves Catholic, has been a strong support to some of the social decisions made by the Kirchner administration that Bergoglio opposed. The last and most important one was the same marriage law—that is, matrimonio igualitario in Argentina, egalitarian marriage.