ARGENTINA
International Business Times
By Julian Kossoff
March 13, 2013
As a leading member of the Catholic Church in Argentina for the last 40 years, the new Pope’s role during the notorious Dirty War of the 1970s, which resulted in the death of 30,000 left-wing activists at the hands of the military junta, could become the first scandal to haunt Latin America’s first pontiff.
Indeed, in 2005, a human rights lawyer filed a criminal complaint against the then Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, accusing him of conspiring with the Argentinian junta in 1976 to kidnap two Jesuit priests. He had asked the priests to leave the Society of Jesus of Argentina because of a conflict within the society over how it should respond to the new military dictatorship. Some priests had advocated a violent overthrow of the regime.
His spokesman flatly denied the allegations and no evidence was presented linking the cardinal to the kidnapping.
While generally the Church’s support for the regime was implied by its absence of criticism and its cooperation with the junta, there were documented instances of outright callousness by individual churchmen.
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