The Election of Pope

by anon Sun Mar 17, 2013 18:09

Its hard to know whether this is muck raking or not but a report in the Huffington Post claims there is controvsersy around the new pope mainly based on his alleged cozy relationship with the regime back them.

The gist of it is:
The election of Pope Francis, previously Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, has resurfaced a decades-old controversy surrounding the kidnappings of two Jesuit priests.

Bergoglio was a high-ranking official in the Society of Jesus of Argentina when a military junta was installed in the South American country in 1976. According to the Los Angeles Times, priests Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics were kidnapped in May of that year by the navy. "They surfaced five months later, drugged and seminude, in a field," the Times reported. A 2005 lawsuit accused Bergoglio of unspecified involvement in the abductions. Reuters explains that "the military government secretly jailed [Yorio and Jalics] for their work in poor neighborhoods."

A spokesman for Bergoglio called the claims "old slander."

by Baggie - Human Race Mon Mar 18, 2013 19:13

One of the Jesuits concerned, Orlando Yorio, openly said Jorge Bergoglio handed them over to the military. The other, Francisco Jalics, never spoke about it until he released a statement last Friday [15-03-13] through the German Jesuits he is living with. It said:

“Starting in 1957 I lived in Buenos Aires. In the year 1974, moved by an inner wish to live the gospel and to draw attention to the terrible poverty, and with the permission of Archbishop Aramburu and the then-Provincial Fr. Jorge Mario Bergoglio I moved together with a confrere into a "Favela," one of the city's slums. From there we continued our teaching at the university.

In the civil-war-like situation back then, the military junta killed roughly 30,000 people within one to two years, leftist guerrillas as well as innocent civilians. The two of us in the slum had contact neither with the junta nor with the guerrillas. Partly due to the lack of information and through targeted misinformation our situation was also misunderstood within the church. At this time we lost our connection to one of our lay coworkers who had joined the guerrillas. After he was taken prisoner nine months later by the soldiers of the junta and questioned, they learned that he had been connected with us. Under the assumption that we also had something to do with the guerrillas we were arrested. After five days of interrogation the officer who led the questioning dismissed us with the words, "Fathers, you were not guilty. I will ensure that you can return to the poor district." In spite of this pledge, we were then inexplicably held in custody, blindfolded and bound, for five months. I cannot comment on the role of Fr. Bergoglio in these events.

After we were freed I left Argentina. Only years later did we have the chance to discuss what had happened with Fr. Bergoglio, who in the meantime had been named archbishop of Buenos Aires. Afterwards we together celebrated a public mass and solemnly embraced. I am reconciled to the events and view them from my side as concluded.
I wish Pope Francis God's rich blessing for his office.”

Hardly a ringing endorsement.

When Bergoglio got the job I Googled him and the first page up was Wikipedia and I got various leads from that article. Obviously Wiki is not a trusted source. I went back there and all references to the above incident and several others have been removed. There have been hundreds of alterations made in a short space of time. Allegations of the abduction of children by the Junta which he knew about; the use of church property to hide political prisoners from human rights investigators; etcetera.

by T Mon Mar 25, 2013 21:14

The election of the pope may not matter to those who have left their religion behind them but it still does matter a fair amount to those who keep the faith and thereby this gives the pope quite a lot of influence in certain spheres and these are not just religious ones but political ones too.

A few minutes thought on this would make it obvious that the different power blocks in their world would want their own candidates. Thus we would expect the Anglo-American axis to favour someone who would be weak and whom they could control to some extent and get them to validate the neo-liberal capitalist empire whilst one from say Africa or Latin American would put an emphasis on the poor and been allowed to be independent.

The first comment above refers to allegations that the Pope failed to intervene to save two Jesuits from kidnap by the military. It is hard to know how much it is true. Perhaps there was nothing he could do about it, perhaps not. But we need to observe that the story got wide coverage from mainstream media.

However Press TV commentary (see report link below), sees his election as a good thing because they see him as working for the poor, is anti-NeoLiberal -which has to be a good thing, supported debt reduction, opposes austerity and opposes speculation. So could it be that the USA/UK did not get their man in and they set about trying to slander him immediately? Who knows. Maybe we need somebody like that in Ireland to speak out and get the remaining faithful to join forces and stop austerity.

Anyhow here are some extracts from the Press TV coverage and they make for some interesting reading

The election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio as head of the Roman Catholic Church marks a watershed, .......

Bergoglio is also strongly identified with Catholic social doctrine, which has traditionally stressed a preferential option in favor of the needs of the poor, rather than a concern with the privileges of the rich, combined with a rejection of laissez-faire, neoliberal, or monetarist economics in favor of social solidarity.

This papal election was also remarkable for what did not occur. Elements of the US Catholic hierarchy, evidently backed by forces within the State Department and the Obama White House, had made no secret of their desire to take control of the Vatican and employ it henceforth as an abject tool of US imperial policy. The New York Times and Washington Post contributed articles seeking to highlight the many advantages which they claimed would derive from electing the first American pope. The delegation of US cardinals, second in numbers only to the Italians, attempted to act as a political machine in Rome on the eve of the conclave, giving daily press conferences in an attempt to stampede the 115 members of the College of Cardinals into electing an American.

According to insider reports, the manager of this effort to elect an American pope was New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who focused on the effort to install Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley as the new pontiff. Italian newspaper accounts revealed that O’Malley’s main advisor was the clergyman Terrence Donilon, the brother of Tom Donilon, the political operative who currently serves as the director of the National Security Council in the Obama White House. The danger was thus clear enough that, if O’Malley had prevailed, the next pope would get his inspiration from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
....
Since the 1943 Anglo-American invasion of Italy during the time of Pius XII, the Vatican has continuously found itself under pressure to toe the London-Washington imperial line. Some popes were able to assert a significant degree of independence, notably Paul VI Montini, whose reign marked the high point of influence within the church by veterans of the wartime European resistance against fascism. More recently, the Polish Pope John Paul II sought to condemn the aggression committed by the Bush administration, but was always pulled in the other direction by the Polish tendency to look to Washington as a counterweight against Russia. Benedict XVI turned out to be far weaker, reflecting the postwar subordination of Germany to the United States.


And then there is another throw away line which hints at Washington displeasure in the past with previous Pope's and their attempts to get rid of him which opens up even more questions and brings to mind previous scandals with the Vatican related to drug money laundering.


....On the day after his election, Francis went personally to the guesthouse where he had been staying in Via della Scrofa in downtown Rome to pay his bill and pick up his baggage. As part of this gesture of humility, he had no elaborate security and no disruptive motorcade, but rode in a single automobile of the papal gendarmes. Under Benedict XVI, the Vatican had appeared under siege, doubtless as a result of the pope’s gullible acceptance of the Anglo-American phantom of a global war on terror. The Vatican remains haunted by the mysterious death of John Paul I in 1978, and by the 1981 attack carried out by Ali Agca, a co-worker of Frank Terpil of the CIA. But Francis is signaling that he is not afraid, and is not willing to hunker down behind the Vatican walls....

And finally the article contains this statement which gives some support to the notion that the stories of collusion are an attempt to discredit him.

....The Argentine human rights activist and leading opponent of the military junta, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, has formally stated that Bergoglio was not one of the churchmen who collaborated with the dictatorship....

by Damien M - PopeWatch Mon Mar 25, 2013 23:13

is irrelevant now the burning issue is that he is part of a more sinister group now~

If he is so humble surely he should be pushing this bus he keeps harping on about!