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In this picture made available by the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Pope Francis attends a special audience with the members of the UCIIM Catholic union of Italian secondary school teachers, in the Pope Paul VI hall, at the Vatican, Saturday, March 14, 2015. (AP Photo\/L’Osservatore Romano, Pool)<\/p><\/div>\n
by Whitney Webb
\nMintPress News<\/p>\n
I<\/span>n 1973, Chile fell to a U.S.-backed coup that led to the installation of the brutal military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. At the time, the Cardinal of Santiago, Ra\u00fal Silva Henr\u00edquez,\u00a0took a stand against<\/a>\u00a0the newly-installed military regime at great personal risk, a move that is believed to have somewhat curbed the tide of political assassinations and torture targeting supporters of Chile\u2019s deposed President Salvador Allende and other opponents of Pinochet\u2019s rule.<\/p>\n Three years later in 1976, Argentina also fell victim to\u00a0a U.S.-backed coup<\/a>\u00a0that installed a military junta led by. However, the Catholic church\u2019s response to the Videla regime could not have been more different than what had transpired in Chile.<\/p>\n At the time, Pope Francis, then known by his birth name Jorge Mario Bergoglio, was Provincial of the Argentine Jesuits. While a handful of figures in the Catholic church dissented against Videla\u2019s rule, Bergoglio was not one of them. In fact, Bergoglio actually aided the Videla regime in its murder of dissidents.\u00a0Government documents<\/a>\u00a0written at the time have confirmed his role in reporting members of his own order who he deemed to be \u201cleftists,\u201d along with several innocent parishioners, to the military government.<\/p>\n In May 1976, two Jesuit priests, Francisco Jalics and Orlando Yorio,\u00a0were kidnapped by death squads<\/a>\u00a0and taken to the Escuela de Mec\u00e1nica de la Armada (ESMA), a detention center for dissidents with a sinister reputation for torture and \u201cdisappearing\u201d detainees. After five months of grueling torture, they were released, thrown into a field half-naked and pumped full of drugs \u2013 essentially left for dead. Upon their release, the priests complained about Bergoglio to the Vatican, only to be told that they had already been expelled from the Jesuits due to alleged contact with women and \u201cconflicts of obedience.\u201d<\/p>\n During the first trials regarding the crimes of the Argentine military government in 1985,\u00a0Yorio directly accused Bergoglio<\/a>\u00a0of handing them over, along with six civilian members of his parish, to the death squads. He told the court \u201cI am sure that he himself [Bergoglio] gave over the list with our names to the Navy.\u201d<\/p>\n Jalics refused to comment on the matter at the time, having entered a life of seclusion in a German monastery. However, years later, he recounted in a book that Bergoglio had told the priests that he would make sure the military knew that they were not terrorists.\u00a0Jalics wrote<\/a>: \u201cFrom subsequent statements by an official and 30 documents that I was able to access later, we were able to prove, without any room for doubt, that this man did not keep his promise, but that, on the contrary, he presented a false denunciation to the military.\u201d<\/p>\n The other six members of the parish that Bergoglio had reported to the government became among the thousands of those who \u201cdisappeared\u201d during Argentina\u2019s Dirty War. They included four teachers associated with the parish and two of their husbands.<\/p>\n In the years since, Bergoglio has invoked his right under Argentinian law to avoid appearing in open court, testifying only once in 2010 regarding the crimes that he had been accused of.\u00a0According to human rights attorney<\/a>\u00a0Myriam Bregman, his answers were \u201cevasive.\u201d<\/p>\n Bergoglio has also tried to claim that he was unaware of the dictatorship\u2019s many atrocities until after the military regime fell. However, as Bregman noted, Bergoglio\u2019s own statements proved that church officials knew from early on that the junta was torturing and killing its citizens. \u201cThe dictatorship could not have operated this way without this key support,\u201d she added\u00a0in an interview with CBS News.<\/a><\/p>\n In addition, Bergoglio has claimed that he was unaware of the dictatorship\u2019s practice of stealing the babies of disappeared mothers, who were abducted, kept alive until giving birth and then executed, with their children then given to military families. However,\u00a0the testimonies of those<\/a>\u00a0who had reached out to him at the time for help in finding their missing relatives have proven this claim inaccurate.<\/p>\n Most ironic of all is that Bergoglio \u2013 as Pope \u2013\u00a0has been praised<\/a>\u00a0for bringing anti-capitalist \u201cliberation theology\u201d to the Catholic church. But decades earlier, Bergoglio\u00a0had accused<\/a>\u00a0the very priests he had condemned to torture of propagating that same theology. During his time as Provincial of the Jesuits, Bergoglio supported an ideology that ra contrary to liberation theology, embracing the neoliberal policies of the dictatorship, which were crafted by then-Economic Minister Jos\u00e9 Alfredo Mart\u00ednez de Hoz \u2013 a close friend of David Rockefeller.<\/p>\n Despite his past crimes, the Pope\u2019s continued chorus of support from Western media shows that, with enough positive media coverage, even the most sinister crimes can be buried and hidden from view.<\/p>\n Feature photo | Pope Francis. L\u2019Osservatore Romano | AP<\/p>\n
\nPope Francis continues to dodge responsibility<\/h2>\n