...One activist who has "argued" (not proven) that his silence hurt investigation is one Horacio Verbitsky, author of the book El Silencio. Verbistky was a leftist guerrilla commander who shot people, so, yeah, he should know about atrocities.
They also didn't mention that other accounts that "reveal" that he took major risks include Amnesty International, who, according to a source in this CNN report, cleared Bergoglio of any wrongdoing. NPR did interview Michael Warren, Buenos Aires bureau chief for the Associated Press, who said that
Adolfo Perez Esquivel ... won the Nobel Peace Prize for his Argentine human rights work. And he said Bergoglio was no accomplice of the dictatorship.
So, a B-minus job, NPR. You had to listen closely to hear how shaky are the accusations against Bergoglio, but it was a reassuring story in general...
Mark Shea does good work further scotching all rumors of complicity here. Excerpts:
...So, confronted by a major Catholic prelate of such palpable integrity, what’s the media to do? Only one thing: Look up what country the prelate calls home, find out what trauma that country suffered (that’s not hard to do, all modern countries suffer from traumas, generally those organized by their governments), and accuse the prelate of—wait for it—Not Speaking Out.
NSO is the perfect accusation: first, it can only be levied by history, that is, by folks with access to much more information than was possessed by those against whom an NSO is aimed; indeed, as NSO is almost always raised well after the trauma and its agents have passed from the scene, retaliation by such agents for reminding folks of their travesties is unlikely or impossible; very importantly, NSO allows the media to claim the moral high ground by implying that, had it been on scene during the trauma, it would surely have “spoken out”. That last claim is, of course, the most laughable (as—to take just one example of ignored victims of modernity—hundreds of millions of baby souls will attest on Judgment Day). Best of all, even if evidence of “speaking out” can be found, it can always be dismissed as “not enough”.
Totalitarian regimes (whether left or right) act like rabid dogs in that their behavior, while irrational, is often predictable. Now, if one can, according to the information available to one at the time, predict that “speaking out” will provoke an act of irrational savagery, pray, where exactly is the obligation to speak out such that one’s “failure” (a judgmental word, notice) to speak out is later sanctionable by those not remotely confronted with the crisis? What if, moreover, one directly confronted by a crisis, on the basis of the information available at the time, makes the choice to oppose the savagery in other, even hidden, ways, though not in a way that big media pundits, separated from the crisis by decades and oceans, are so sure was the “correct” way to act?...
In response to accusations against Pope Francis, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and human rights defender said the new Pontiff has no ties to the dictatorship that Argentina endured from 1976 - 1983.
Adolfo Perez Esquivel, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1980, is known for his sympathy for the left in Latin America and for his defense of Marxist Liberation Theology and the Castro regime...
Despite those previous statements, Perez Esquivel told the BBC this week that “there were bishops who were accomplices of the dictatorship, but not (Cardinal) Bergoglio.”
Pope Francis “is being questioned because they say he did not do enough to get two priests released from jail when he was superior of the Jesuits,” Perez Esquivel said. “But I personally know that many bishops asked the military regime to release prisoners and priests and it was not granted.”
“He has no connection to the dictatorship,” the Nobel laureate stated.
Rumors and questions are circulating about Pope Francis' time as the Jesuit provincial of Argentina and his relationship to two imprisoned Jesuits and the Argentine military dictatorship...
There were also disagreements about how to respond to the military junta in Argentina. As provincial, Father Bergoglio was responsible for the safety of his men. He feared that Jesuit Fr. Orlando Yorio and Jesuit Fr. Franz Jalics were at risk and wanted to pull them out of their ministry. They, naturally, did not want to leave their work with the poor.
Yorio and Jalics were arrested when a former lay colleague, who had joined the rebels and then been arrested, gave up their names under torture as people he had worked with in the past. This was normal practice for the military. The junta did not get information from Bergoglio. Contrary to rumor, he did not throw them out of the society and therefore remove them from the protection of the Society of Jesus. They were Jesuits when they were arrested. Yorio later left the society, but Jalics is still a Jesuit today, living in a Jesuit retreat house in Germany.
The Jesuit historian Fr. Jeff Klaiber interviewed Jesuit Fr. Juan Luis Moyano, who had also been imprisoned and deported by the military. Moyano told Klaiber that Bergoglio did go to bat for imprisoned Jesuits. There are disagreements over whether he did as much as he should have for them, but such debates always occur in these circumstances.
Adolfo Esquivel, the Argentine who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1980, says Bergoglio was not involved with the military and did try to help the two Jesuits...
Other rumors circulating say that as archbishop, Bergoglio allowed the military to hide prisoners in an archdiocesan retreat house so that they would not be seen by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights visiting the ESMA prison. Fact: Bergoglio was not archbishop when this took place. Horacio Verbitsky, an Argentine investigative journalist, says Bergoglio helped him investigate the case.
It is also said there is written evidence in the Argentine foreign ministry files that Bergoglio gave information on the Jesuits to the military. The alleged conversation took place when Bergoglio was trying to get the passport of one of the Jesuits extended. Not only did this take place after they were arrested and after they were released, it was after they were safely out of the country. Nothing he could say would endanger them, nor was he telling the government anything it did not already know. He was simply trying to convince a bureaucrat that it was a good idea to extend the passport of this man so he could stay in Germany and not have to return to Argentina.
More recently, Cardinal Bergoglio was involved in getting the Argentine bishops to ask forgiveness for not having done enough during the dirty war, as it was called in Argentina...
Those who have not lived under a dictatorship should not be quick to judge those who have, whether the dictatorship was in ancient Rome, Latin America, Africa, Nazi Germany, Communist Eastern Europe, or today's China. We should revere martyrs, but not demand every Christian be one...
Accusations that Pope Francis denounced two priests to Argentina's military junta during the 1970s have been denied by one of the survivors in a boost to the reputation of the new pontiff.
Francisco Jalics, who now lives in a German monastery, issued an online statement on Wednesday to clear up what he said were misinterpretations of his earlier comments about the role played by the pope in his five-month incarceration by the navy.
He said he was addressing reports that he and another Jesuit priest, Orlando Yorio, were imprisoned because the leader of their order, Jorge Bergoglio – as the pope was known until last week – passed on information about them to the authorities.
"I myself was once inclined to believe that we were the victims of a denunciation," Jalics said. "[But] at the end of the 90s, after numerous conversations, it became clear to me that this suspicion was unfounded. It is therefore wrong to assert that our capture took place at the initiative of Father Bergoglio."...
"The fact is: Orlando Yorio and I were not denounced by Father Bergoglio."...
does good work further scotching all rumors of complicity here. Excerpts:
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