Pope Failed to Protect Tortured Priest, Says His Sister

By Michael Warren
Irish Independent
April 20, 2013

http://www.independent.ie/world-news/americas/pope-failed-to-protect-tortured-priest-says-his-sister-29209382.html



Pope Francis has been accused in an Argentine courtroom of failing to help protect a fellow Jesuit priest from the country's military dictatorship and right-wing death squads.

Graciela Yorio accused the then Jorge Mario Bergoglio of turning his back on her brother, the late Orlando Virgilio Yorio, before and after he and another priest were taken by the junta's agents and tortured in 1976.

Fr Bergoglio has said he did what he could as a young Jesuit leader with no real power to protect Fr Yorio and other slum priests from being kidnapped.

He testified in 2010 that he worked behind the scenes to win the freedom of Fr Yorio and the other priest, Francisco Jalics. But Ms Yorio disagreed.

"My brother was practically abandoned by the church," said Ms Yorio, who is one of more than 800 witnesses in a two-year trial of 67 defendants accused of human rights violations against 789 people.

Ms Yorio testified that even before the March 1976 coup, her brother and Fr Jalics were turned away by Fr Bergoglio after being accused of being "extremists" for their work with the poor.

Prosecutor Eduardo Taiano said that after Mass on May 23, 1976, Fr Yorio and Fr Jalics were taken to the Navy Mechanics School's torture centre.

Gagged

They were blindfolded, chained, gagged, prevented from going to the toilet or allowed to drink or eat. Yorio was the victim of insults, death threats and electric shocks and was drugged and terrorised during constant interrogations.

Ms Yorio said she and her mother went to Fr Bergoglio seeking help. "We had three interviews, and he never told us anything'," she testified.

Five months after being taken, the two priests reappeared, drugged and blindfolded, in a field near Buenos Aires.

Fr Bergoglio told his biographers and the court, in 2010, that the men were freed in part because he quietly and repeatedly pleaded for their release.

Fr Yorio died in 2000. Fr Jalics has said he considers the episode to be closed.