ARGENTINA
Foreign Policy
Posted By Elias Groll
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
With the selection of Argentine Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio as pope, the Catholic Church broke new ground by tapping its first modern non-European pontiff, an acknowledgement of the church’s growing flock in the developing world.
Unlike many other contenders for the position, Bergoglio — who took Francis as his papal name — remains untainted by the widespread sex abuse scandal in the church, a welcome development for those looking to the new pope to make a definitive break from that chapter of the church’s troubled past. But Francis still arrives wth something of a troubled history. As the head of the Jesuit Order during the country’s military dictatorship, he may be tainted by the church’s well-documented history of turning a blind eye to the regime’s practice of killing progressive priests.
From 1973 to 1979, a period that overlapped with military dictatorship lasting from 1976 to 1983, Francis served as the top Argentine Jesuit official. During that time, the Catholic Church remained silent in the face of widespread human rights violations during the country’s so-called “Dirty War,” an effort by the military government to root out dissent by torture, murder, and disappearances. In several cases, Catholic priests collaborated with the government and were even in the room as prisoners were tortured. In February, an Argentine court ruled that the Catholic church hierarchy, of which Francis was arguably a member, had “closed its eyes” to the killing of progressive priests. In 2005, human rights lawyers filed a case against then-Cardinal Bergoglio alleging that he had been complicit in the kidnapping of two Jesuit priests.
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