Pope Francis Part Two April 5, 2013
“These are of one mind.” Revelation 17:13, NKJV
APOLOGY, IS NOT A STRONGER ENOUGH WORD FOR WHAT I WANT TO SAY! WHAT YOU RECEIVED ON WEDNESDAY, APRIL 3, WAS NOT WHAT I INTENDED! WHAT YOU READ WERE SOME OF MY RESEARCH NOTES OUT OF WHICH I DECIDE WHAT TO WRITE FOR YOU. NONE OF WHICH WAS INTENDED FOR ANYONE ELSE'S EYES—JUST WORKING RESEARCH FULL OF SPELLING ERRORS, ETC. BUT NOT FOR PUBLICATION. I HOPE YOU WILL TRY TO UNDERSTAND. HERE BELOW IS WHAT I INTENDED TO SEND OUT LAST WEDNESDAY. AGAIN, I APOLOGIZE!
The media of the world is full of comments regarding the pluses and minuses of the Catholic Church's new pope, Pope Francis. Obviously, we must do our best to understand the personal agenda of anyone making his or her comments—and that is not always easy to do.
For example: “I’m in shock that we have a Jesuit pope. This is just not our mind-set. We don’t look for these kinds of offices,” the Rev. Thomas Smolich, president of the Jesuit Conference of the United States, said Friday. “The idea that — it blows the mind.”
A DARK PAST AS PRIEST
I read an article by Hugh O’Shaughnessy posted on the London Guardian website on January 4, 2011. He takes the Catholic Church to task for the role it played in Operation Condor and, ultimately, the disappearance and murder of over 30,000 South Americans. He cites Argentine author Horacio Verbitsky, who documented the summary execution of thousands of political dissidents. The preferred method of murder was to push dissidents from airborne Argentine military planes into the waters of the Rio de la Plata or the Atlantic Ocean.
Verbitsky recounts how the Argentine navy with the connivance of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now (2011) the Jesuit archbishop of Buenos Aires, hid from a visiting delegation of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission the dictatorship’s political prisoners. Bergoglio was hiding them in nothing less than his holiday home in an island called El Silencio in the River Plate. . . . What scandal would not have ensued if the first pope ever to be elected from the continent of America had been revealed as an accessory to murder and false imprisonment.”
Dr. Alberto Treiyer, whom I introduced to you in the last Alert, has a lengthy web page entitled: d:
http://dventistdistinctivemessages.com/Spanish/articulos.html, under El Vaticano y los Grandes Genocidios del S. XX, where he deals with the HispanicAmerican genocide (Argentinean Dirty War--late 70s and early 80s). He shares there the tremendous documentation that some leftist historians give of the Roman Catholic Church's involvement in the Argentinean “Dirty War.” Commanding General Videla was a good and faithful Catholic and never felt remorse for the genocide of near 30,000 people that took place under his government. Because as a good Catholic, he submitted his conscience to his spiritual leaders: he had their approval.
Although I have reams of material on Pope Francis' record while a top Catholic official in the last 40+ years, I decided to reduce this Alert to a quick look at the New York Times, March 17, 2013 , article with the headline: “Starting a Papacy, Amid Echoes of a ‘Dirty War’”
The Time writer opines: “As he starts his papacy, Francis, until this month Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, faces his own entanglement with the Dirty War, which unfolded from 1976 to 1983. As the leader of Argentina's Jesuits for part of that time, he has repeatedly had to dispute claims that he allowed the kidnapping of two priests in his order in 1976, accusations the Vatican is calling a defamation campaign.
Now his election as pope is focusing scrutiny on his role as the most prominent leader of the Roman Catholic Church in Argentina, an institution that remains under withering criticism for its role in failing to publicly resist — and in various instances actively supporting — the military dictatorship during a period when as many as 30,000 people are thought to have been killed or disappeared. . . .
“'The combination of action and inaction by the church was instrumental in enabling the mass atrocities committed by the junta,' said Federico Finchelstein, an Argentine historian at the New School for Social Research in New York. 'Those like Francis that remained in silence during the repression also played by default a central role,' he said. 'It was this combination of endorsement and either strategic or willful indifference that created the proper conditions for the state killings.'. . .
“Though Francis has had to respond to doubts about his own past during the Dirty War, he has faced other issues that still haunt the church. He was head of Argentina’s bishops’ conference in 2007, when the Rev. Christian von Wernich, a former police chaplain, was found guilty of complicity in the killing and torture of political prisoners.
“Even after his conviction, Father von Wernich was allowed to offer Mass to fellow prison inmates. Other priests have similarly faced charges related to abuses from the dictatorship era. And still there are other priests who have not been charged with a crime, but who face serious accusations about their connection to the armed forces.
“The church has tried to account on different occasions for its actions during the dictatorship. In 2000, it apologized for its “silences” that enabled rights abuses. And last November, after the future pope’s tenure as head of the bishops’ conference had ended, the church issued another statement in response to the assertion by Jorge Videla, the former head of the military junta, that Argentine bishops had in effect collaborated with the dictatorship.
“The church rejected Mr. Videla’s claim, but said it would “promote a more complete study” of the Dirty War years.”
In other words, a very interesting shadow follows the new Pope—a shadow ongoing in the courts of Argentina today. However, I predict that we will see Pope Francis in his new, universal role, as the Man of the People---to those in poverty everywhere who long for relief and those in Judaism and Muslimism who long for world peace. HE MAY REACH OUT TO ALL, EVERYWHERE, AS THE MORAL LEADER OF THE ENTIRE WORLD.
R&H, Aug. 5, 1902: "Those who place themselves under God's control, to be led and guided by Him, will CATCH THE STEADY TREND OF EVENTS ordained by Him to take place.”
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Topic: Yet another view of Pope Francis from Dr. Herbert Douglas (Read 5084 times)
