Pope Francis and the dirty war

Reviewed by Winnie Graham
Argentine-born Pope Francis, elected head of the Catholic Church less than two years ago, carries a cross with which many South Africans could identify.

He has been accused of not doing enough to protect his people during Argentina’s guerra sucia, the dirty war of 1976-83 which began after the military overthrew the democratically elected government and embarked on a ruthless campaign to eliminate communists.

It is an accusation that has followed him all the way to the Vatican. Virtually on the eve of the election for a new pope, following the resignation of Benedict XVI, someone sent what appeared to be a damming dossier to the cardinals gathered in Rome to elect a new pontiff. The sender did not want the Argentine cardinal to be elected.

Nevertheless, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires was elected and took the name Pope Francis. As the pope of the poor he has become probably the best-loved of all the Church’s leaders.

But to what extent was Bergoglio guilty through acts of omission? Should he have done more to protect the opponents of the military regime, which in ten years tortured and killed more than 30000 people?

In Pope Francis: Untying the Knots, British-based writer Paul Vallely takes a hard look at the accusations, and at the way in which Jorge Bergoglio reacted as a leading Catholic churchman in Buenos Aires at the time.

Vallely is one of the world’s leading writers and commentators on political, religious and ethical matters and in his biography he tells a riveting story of a very human clergyman on the horns of a dilemma.

For starters, the pope at the time, St John Paul II, had been a victim of communism in his home country, Poland, and his strong anti-communist leanings permeated throughout the Church, taking a focus especially in the liberation theology of South America.

Bergoglio, as a young Jesuit superior, had to walk a tight rope. He certainly was no supporter of liberation theology.

The military regime’s cleansing process started with a range of people, from students and journalists to academics and artists, summarily picked up and tortured. Tens of thousands of people disappeared in a campaign of kidnappings and torture. Pregnant women suspected of leftist leanings had their babies removed and these were given to more conventional families  while the mothers were removed, their bodies dropped into the sea.

But it was Fr Bergoglio’s handling of two Jesuit priests working in the slums of Buenos Aires for which he is often judged.

The question that is being posed is what the Jesuit superior did and should have done when Frs Francisco Jalics and Orlando Yorio were picked up and charged with communist tendencies, for no better reason than working among the poor?

When the two priests refused to abandon their people, they were taken in, shackled, and spent the next four months in a torture detention camp.

Vallely describes the circumstances: The two Jesuits, Yorio and Jalics, naked apart from the hoods which blinded and confused them, were fastened with shackles hand and foot….The method of torture involved semi-drowning and shocks from electric prods….

Vallely asks: Was Bergoglio complicit in this?

In the first part of his book the author closely investigates the circumstances of the superior’s role. He gives an honest assessment and concludes, to put it briefly, that during the dirty war Fr Bergoglio did much to protect many victims of the military junta.

Oddly, it is the background the author provides rather than his conclusionsthat makes the early chapters so eminently readable.

The second part outlines the impact the period had on Bergoglio himself. Despite the ups and downs of the junta era, it was to be the making of the priest.

There is no doubt he must have asked himself if he’d done all he could to protect his people. In the years that followed he is known to have spent considerable time in prayer and contemplation, a time he must surely have examined his role in his country’s tragic history.

What is apparent is that Bergoglio emerged a changed man, given more to consultation than to the dictation he was prone to, by his own admission, as Jesuit superior.

Even more importantly, he began to see the people  specifically the poor  as the foundation of the Church.

And this is the pope whom Catholics around the world have come to know and love, a man who does not stand on ceremony, who cares nought for creature comforts, and whose thoughts are constantly on the poor. He is, in short, a pontiff who has tossed aside the red slippers of his predecessors and kept on his old shoes.

If, indeed, he has sinned as he constantly asserts he has  then a life of constant prayer and meditation has literally transformed Pope Francis into the man he has become.

Vallely’s well-researched work provides the world with the true story of the man ordinary folk have come to love. He is first a human, then a man.

The telling of his story will endear him to people even more.