Habemus Papam! Pope Francis l

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Re: Habemus Papam! Pope Francis l

Postby FourthBase » Thu Mar 14, 2013 6:18 pm

Alert, the Guardian article was just amended, the most crucial part, too.
No further explanation is given. Very strange: Either the bad info initially, or this hurried edit.

• This article was amended on 14 March 2013. The original article, published in 2011, wrongly suggested that Argentinian journalist Horacio Verbitsky claimed that Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio connived with the Argentinian navy to hide political prisoners on an island called El Silencio during an inspection by human rights monitors. Although Verbitsky makes other allegations about Bergoglio's complicity in human rights abuses, he does not make this claim. The original article also wrongly described El Silencio as Bergoglio's "holiday home". This has been corrected.
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Re: Habemus Papam! Pope Francis l

Postby Julian the Apostate » Thu Mar 14, 2013 8:17 pm

FourthBase wrote:Alert, the Guardian article was just amended, the most crucial part, too.
No further explanation is given. Very strange: Either the bad info initially, or this hurried edit.

• This article was amended on 14 March 2013. The original article, published in 2011, wrongly suggested that Argentinian journalist Horacio Verbitsky claimed that Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio connived with the Argentinian navy to hide political prisoners on an island called El Silencio during an inspection by human rights monitors. Although Verbitsky makes other allegations about Bergoglio's complicity in human rights abuses, he does not make this claim. The original article also wrongly described El Silencio as Bergoglio's "holiday home". This has been corrected.



Woah! That's quite a misunderstanding
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Re: Habemus Papam! Pope Francis l

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Mar 14, 2013 10:00 pm

Craven Guardian:

Bullshit!

Here's Verbitski, today!


http://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/14/p ... journalist

Thursday, March 14, 2013
Pope Francis’ Junta Past: Argentine Journalist on New Pontiff’s Ties to Abduction of Jesuit Priests

While praised for his work with the poor, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio — now Pope Francis — has long been dogged by accusations of his role during Argentina’s military dictatorship. We speak to Horacio Verbitsky, a leading Argentine journalist who exposed Francis’ connection to the abduction of two Jesuit priests. Verbitsky is an investigative journalist for the newspaper Página/12, or Page/12, and head of the Center for Legal and Social Studies, an Argentine human rights organization.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: For more on the new pope, we turn now to one of Argentina’s leading investigative journalists, Horacio Verbitsky, who has written extensively about the career of Cardinal Bergoglio and his actions during the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. During that time, up to 30,000 people were kidnapped and killed. A 2005 lawsuit accused Jorge Bergoglio of being connected to the 1976 kidnappings of two Jesuit priests, Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics. The lawsuit was filed after the publication of Verbitsky’s book, The Silence: From Paul VI to Bergoglio: The Secret Relations Between the Church and the ESMA. ESMA refers to the former navy school that was turned into a detention center where people were tortured by the military dictatorship. The new pope has denied the charges. He twice invoked his right under Argentine law to refuse to appear in open court to testify about the allegations. When he eventually did testify in 2010, human rights activists characterized his answers as evasive.

AMY GOODMAN: Horacio Verbitsky joins us on the phone now from his home in Buenos Aires, an investigative journalist for the newspaper Página/12; Page/12, it’s called in English. He is also head of the Center for Legal and Social Studies, an Argentine human rights organization.

We welcome you to Democracy Now! I wanted to just begin by you laying out for us what you believe is important to understand about the new pope, Pope Francis.

HORACIO VERBITSKY: The main thing to understand about Francis I is that he’s a conservative populist, in the same style that John Paul II was. He’s a man of strong conservative positions in doctrine questions, but with a touch for popular taste. He preaches in rail stations, in the streets. He goes to the quarters, the poor quarters of the city to pray. He doesn’t wait the people going into the church; he goes for them. But his message is absolutely conservative. He was opposed to abortion, to the egalitarian matrimony law. He launched a crusade against the evil when Congress was passing this law, and in the very same style that John Paul II. This is what I consider the main feature on the new pope.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, now, Horacio Verbitsky, that would be true of many of the cardinals elevated during the period of John Paul and now also of Benedict XVI, this basic conservatism. But in the case of Bergoglio, there’s also the issue, as you have documented and many—and several other journalists in Argentina, of his particular role or accusations about his involvement in the dirty wars in Argentina. Could you talk about that and some of the things that—because you’ve been a leading investigative reporter uncovering the relations between the church and the government in terms of the dirty wars?

HORACIO VERBITSKY: Of course. He was accused by two Jesuit priests of having surrendered them to the military. They were a group of Jesuits that were under Bergoglio’s direction. He was the provincial superior of the order in Argentina, being very, very young. He was the younger provincial Jesuit in history; at 36 years, he was provincial. During a period of great political activity in the Jesuits’ company, he stimulated the social work of the Jesuits. But when the military coup overthrow the Isabel Perón government, he was in touch with the military that ousted this government and asked the Jesuits to stop their social work. And when they refused to do it, he stopped protecting them, and he let the military know that they were not more inside the protection of the Jesuits’ company, and they were kidnapped. And they accuse him for this deed. He denies this. He said to me that he tried to get them free, that he talked with the former dictator, Videla, and with former dictator Massera to have them freed.

And during a long period, I heard two versions: the version of the two kidnapped priests that were released after six months of torture and captivity, and the version of Bergoglio. This was an issue divisive in the human rights movement to which I belong, because the president founding of CELS, Center for Legal and Social Studies, Emilio Mignone, said that Bergoglio was a accomplice of the military, and a lawyer of the CELS, Alicia Oliveira, that was a friend of Bergoglio, tell the other part of the story, that Bergoglio helped them. This was the two—the two versions.

But during the research for one of my books, I found documents in the archive of the foreign relations minister in Argentina, which, from my understanding, gave an end to the debate and show the double standard that Bergoglio used. The first document is a note in which Bergoglio asked the ministry to—the renewal of the passport of one of these two Jesuits that, after his releasing, was living in Germany, asking that the passport was renewed without necessity of this priest coming back to Argentina. The second document is a note from the officer that received the petition recommending to his superior, the minister, the refusal of the renewal of the passport. And the third document is a note from the same officer telling that these priests have links with subversion—that was the name that the military gave to all the people involved in opposition to the government, political or armed opposition to the military—and that he was jailed in the mechanics school of the navy, and saying that this information was provided to the officer by Father Jorge Mario Bergoglio, provincial superior of the Jesuit company. This means, to my understanding, a double standard. He asked the passport given to the priest in a formal note with his signature, but under the table he said the opposite and repeated the accusations that produced the kidnapping of these priests.

AMY GOODMAN: And these priests—can you explain, Horacio, what happened to these two priests, Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics?

HORACIO VERBITSKY: Yes. Orlando, after his releasing, went to Rome.

AMY GOODMAN: How were they found?

HORACIO VERBITSKY: Sorry?

AMY GOODMAN: How were they found? In what condition were they? What had happened to them?

HORACIO VERBITSKY: Well, he was released—both of them were released, drugged, confused, transported by helicopter to—in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, were abandoned, asleep by drugs, in very bad condition. They were tortured. They were interrogated. One of the interrogators had externally knowings about theological questions, that induced one of them, Orlando Yorio, to think that their own provincial, Bergoglio, had been involved in this interrogatory.

AMY GOODMAN: He said that—he said that Bergoglio himself had been part of the—his own interrogation, this Jesuit priest?

HORACIO VERBITSKY: He told me that he had the impression their own provincial, Bergoglio, was present during the interrogatory, which one of the interrogators had externally knowledge of theological questions. And when released, he went to Rome. He lived seven years in Rome, then come back to Argentina. And when coming back to Argentina, he was incardinated in the Quilmes diocesis in Great Buenos Aires, where the bishop was one of the leaders of the progressive branch of the Argentine church opposite to that of Bergoglio. And Orlando Yorio denounced Bergoglio. I received his testimony when Bergoglio was elected to the archbishop of Buenos Aires. And Bergoglio—I interviewed Bergoglio also, and he denied the charges, and he told me that he had defended them.

And Orlando Yorio got me in touch with Francisco Jalics, that was living in Germany. I talked with him, and he confirmed the story, but he didn’t want to be mentioned in my piece, because he told me that he preferred to not remember this sad part of his life and to pardon. And he was for oblivion and pardon. That he was, during a lot of years, very resented against Bergoglio, but that he had decided to forgot and forget. And when I released the book with the story, one Argentine journalist working for a national agency, [inaudible], who has been a disciple of Jalics, talked with him and asked him for the story. And Jalics told him that he would not affirm, not deny the story.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Horacio—Horacio Verbitsky, I’d like to ask you about another priest who was involved in the dirty wars, Christian von Wernich, who was a former chaplain of the police department in Argentina and also later was convicted of being involved—

HORACIO VERBITSKY: He was convicted—he was convicted, and he’s in jail, in a common jail, but the Argentine church, during the tenure of Bergoglio, hasn’t punished him, in canonical terms. He was convicted by the human justice, but by the church standards, he’s always a priest. And this tells something about Bergoglio and the Argentine church also.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And von Wernich was involved in murders, tortures and kidnappings. Could you detail some of the crimes that he was convicted of committing?

HORACIO VERBITSKY: Bergoglio involved in the crimes of von Wernich?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: No, no, von Wernich. Von Wernich, I said.

HORACIO VERBITSKY: Oh, von Wernich was part—was active part in torture and killings, and he was convicted not as an accomplice, but as a participant in the crimes. He was present during the torture sessions, von Wernich. And there is not the just one chaplain; there are some others that are under trial in this moment. Chaplain Regueiro is under house arrest because he’s an older man. A Chaplain Zitelli in Santa Fe province, for being present during torture sessions. So, there are a lot of them that were part of the dirty war.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to read, Horacio, a part of a State Department cable released by WikiLeaks that references, well, the Roman Catholic priest Christian von Wernich, who you were just talking about, convicted in 2007 of being an accomplice in several cases of murder, torture and illegal imprisonment in Argentina during the military dictatorship. It notes the conviction came, quote, "at a time when some observers consider Roman Catholic primate Cardinal Bergoglio to be a leader of the opposition to the Kirchner administration because of his comments about social issues, the Von Wernich case could also have the effect, some believe, of undermining the Church’s (and, by extension, Cardinal Bergoglio’s) moral authority or capacity to comment on political, social or economic questions," unquote. That was a State Department cable that was released by WikiLeaks. Horacio, could you respond?

HORACIO VERBITSKY: We can go attack this paper by parts. First of all, the State Department considered that Bergoglio was the chief of the position to the Kirchner government. And I agree with this statement. The State Department tells also that the conviction of Father von Wernich can be directed to undermine Bergoglio’s position. This is not true, to my understanding. The conviction of Father von Wernich is a consequence of a trial that started much before the Kirchners arriving to power and has its own judicial logic and not a political timetable.

AMY GOODMAN: Horacio, are you still there?

HORACIO VERBITSKY: Sorry?

AMY GOODMAN: Ah, let me ask you a question. We thought we lost you for a minute. We’re talking to Horacio Verbitsky, a leading Argentine investigative journalist, well known for his human rights investigations. I wanted to ask you about this issue of hiding political prisoners when a human rights delegation came to Argentina. Can you tell us when this was, what are the allegations, and what was the role, if any, of Bergoglio, now Pope Francis?

HORACIO VERBITSKY: No, in this episode, Bergoglio has no intervention. The intervention was from the cardinal that in that time was the chief of the church in Buenos Aires. That is the position that Bergoglio has in the present. But in that time, he was not archbishop of Buenos Aires. When the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights came into Argentina to investigate allegations of human rights violations, the navy took 60 prisoners out of ESMA and got them to a village that was used by the Cardinal Aramburu to his weekends. And in this weekend property were also the celebration each year of the new seminarians that ended their studies. In this villa in the outskirts of Buenos Aires were the prisoners during the visit of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. And when the commission visited ESMA, they did not find the prisoners that were supposed to be there, because they were—

AMY GOODMAN: ESMA being—ESMA being the naval barracks were so many thousands of Argentines were held. So where were they?

HORACIO VERBITSKY: Yes, but Bergoglio has no intervention in this—in this fact. Indeed, he helped me to investigate a case. He gave me the precise information about in which tribunal was the document demonstrating that this villa was owned by the church.

AMY GOODMAN: He said that they were hidden in a villa that was owned by the Catholic Church?

HORACIO VERBITSKY: Yes. And the prisoners were held in a weekend house that was the weekend house of the cardinal archbishop of Buenos Aires in that time. And Bergoglio gave me the precise information about the tribunal in which were the documents affirming this relationship between this property and the archbishop of Buenos Aires.

AMY GOODMAN: We have to break, and then we’re going to come back to Horacio Verbitsky, as well as our guest in studio named Ernesto Semán, who is a historian at New York University, former reporter for the Argentine newspaper, both the same as Horacio’s newspaper, Página/12, and Clarín, where he reported on politics and human rights, as well as, well, Father Bergoglio, now Pope Francis.

This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.

Thursday, March 14, 2013
A Social Conservative: Pope Francis Led Effort Against Liberation Theology and Same-Sex Marriage

During the military dictatorship in Argentina, the new pope openly criticized liberation theology’s combination of religious teachings and calls for social justice. His social conservative streak continued when he was elevated to cardinal in Argentina. In 2010, he called the Argentine government’s legalization of gay marriage "an attempt to destroy God’s plan" and opposed adoption by gay couples. We discuss Pope Francis’ social conservatism with Ernesto Semán, a historian at New York University and former reporter for two Argentine newspapers, and with Argentine journalist Horacio Verbitsky. [includes rush transcript]
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Our guests are Horacio Verbitsky, an Argentine investigative journalist for the newspaper Página/12, or Page/12. He has reported extensively on the church’s involvement in Argentina with the military junta that once ruled Argentina, specifically on the role of Father Bergoglio, who is now Father—who is now Pope Francis. Among his books, The Silence: From Paul VI to Bergoglio: The Secret Relations Between the Church and the ESMA. ESMA refers to the former Navy school that was turned into a detention center where people were tortured. Verbitsky also heads the Center for Legal and Social Studies, an Argentine human rights organization. You can also go to our website at democracynow.org, where we broadcast from Buenos Aires several years ago, talking about these issues, including the children who were taken from dissidents who were then killed and handed to military families to be raised, which we’ll talk about.

Ernesto Semán is with us, as well. Semán, the historian at New York University, former reporter for the Argentine newspapers Página/12 and Clarín, where he reported on politics and human rights, as well as Father Bergoglio.

As we continue this conversation, Ernesto Semán, can you underscore what Horacio is saying, what you think we know at this point about Pope Francis, what we don’t?

ERNESTO SEMÁN: Yeah, I think that what Horacio Verbitsky wrote during these several years is he’s tried to uncover what is this kind of social conservatism, that you were trying to describe at the beginning of the program. It’s not—in terms of the discourse, it’s not the kind of Catholic conservatism that you’re going to find in the United States, with this emphasis on the individual salvation, on government crushing individual liberty and economic activity, and because it’s much more socially loaded. But the paradox—and I think that that’s the most important point of Horacio Verbitsky’s work—is how this same discourse, with a lot of emphasis on social justice and on equality, at the same time has worked to undermine the work who had tried to solve those same problems.

The case of this complicity of Bergoglio with human rights violations during the dictatorship is by far the most important episode. But during the last decade, he did, as the State Department implicitly suggests, the opposition to the government, in a decade in which Argentina lived the largest and fastest reduction of poverty and inequality, as in most of all Latin American countries. So that kind of paradox between the kind of social conservatism and an opposition to social agenda that has been pretty successful during the last years is very important.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you about that, precisely, and the parallels, it seems to me, in terms of the cardinals selecting John Paul II, when he was elevated to pope, he coming out of Poland, where there was a Solidarity movement and in opposition to the previous government, that, in essence, his elevation helped to fortify that movement. I’m wondering whether there’s some parallel now with the changes in Latin America now to the elevation of a very conservative cardinal from that region, might help to bolster forces that are opposed to continuing this enormous change that’s occurring in Latin America.

ERNESTO SEMÁN: You might say so. The problem that you have there is to what extent that’s going to make the gap between the church and the Catholic followers even deeper. In the case of Argentina and some of the social issues that happened over the last decade, you see that in a country that 75 percent of people consider themselves Catholic, has been a strong support to some of the social decisions made by the Kirchner administration that Bergoglio opposed. The last and most important one was the same marriage law—that is, matrimonio igualitario in Argentina, egalitarian marriage.

AMY GOODMAN: Yeah, and let’s talk about this—

ERNESTO SEMÁN: Sure.

AMY GOODMAN: —because Bergoglio really took on the Argentine president in a major way. This was 2010. Then-Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio led the opposition against Argentina’s law that gives same-sex couples the right to marry and adopt children. Before the law passed, Bergoglio wrote a letter, and addressed the monasteries in Argentina, in which he asked monks to pray fervently about a, quote, "situation whose outcome can seriously harm the family. ... At stake are the lives of many children who will be discriminated against in advance, and deprived of their human development given by a father and a mother and willed by God. At stake is the total rejection of God’s law engraved in our hearts. ... Let us not be naive: this is not simply a political struggle, but it is an attempt to destroy God’s plan," he said—

ERNESTO SEMÁN: Yeah, yeah. I think—yeah, I think [inaudible]—

AMY GOODMAN: —about what President Cristina Kirchner was pushing for, which was—

ERNESTO SEMÁN: Exactly.

AMY GOODMAN: —legalization of gay marriage.

ERNESTO SEMÁN: Cristina—Cristina Kirchner promoted this, but it was a movement by the LGTB movement that had been going on for many years. It’s an extensive social movement that the government took and put into law. And after that, Bergoglio called to a holy war, una guerra de Dios, against this evil’s move.

AMY GOODMAN: Is he saying that President—

ERNESTO SEMÁN: In the same level.

AMY GOODMAN: —Kirchner represented that evil?

ERNESTO SEMÁN: That the law was an evil’s move. So, some degree of ambiguity. But it was clearly that kind of conservative message in relation to a law that, A, was passed overwhelmingly after two months of very open and public debate, and, B, that polls suggested that between 60 and 70 percent of people had no problem whatsoever with this kind of law. So that shows you—and he was personally involved and clearly involved in leading the opposition to this.

It was the last point of several other issues, including abortion and contraception, in which Bergoglio took the side of an opposition to the administration. The most important, one of the most—one of the most famous ones was when the military chaplain in 2005 said that the minister of health, because of the contraception policy, had to be thrown into the sea. And the government—

AMY GOODMAN: Bergoglio said the—

ERNESTO SEMÁN: No, no, no, no, the military chaplain—

AMY GOODMAN: Oh, the military chaplain.

ERNESTO SEMÁN: —said that the government immediately asked for his remotion, and Bergoglio refused to do so and has just waited until the priest had to retire because of his age. But this shows you the kind of—how this emphasis on social justice and equality goes along with the very, very conservative stance in cultural and social issues that makes the work of the church and the relation with the followers much more, much more difficult. And it’s a challenge for them in Latin America.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Horacio Verbitsky, I’d like to ask you—you’ve interviewed the former Cardinal Bergoglio many times. You have a sense of him, not only his political role, but his personality. Do you have any expectations that, now that he’s been elevated to pope, that he may have some change in his perspectives on some of these issues? Or do you expect him to maintain the same populist conservatism that you say have marked his rise through the church hierarchy?

HORACIO VERBITSKY: I do believe that he is a man—he is the man he is, and he will not change. His first days as a pope show perfectly this attitude of humility. He refused the limousine and took the bus. He asked the people to pray for him, instead of praying him for them. These kind of gestures would be common in his tenure as a pope. And it’s possible that he would be revered by the masses because of this different attitude that seems more democratic and less monarchical than that of the former Benedicto XVI.

But in doctrinary questions, he would be tied to conservative, and this is the thing that I wait. And I believe that he can play, concerning Latin America and the populist governments of the region, the same role that Pope John Paul played against East Europe during the first years of his tenure.

AMY GOODMAN: Horacio Verbitsky, do you think that Cardinal Bergoglio would have become Pope Francis if he hadn’t played the role he did during the dirty wars, if he had sided with these two Jesuit priests, who were speaking up for the poor at the time and who were great proponents of liberation theology?

HORACIO VERBITSKY: He was against liberation theology. He was a man, during his tenure in the Jesuit company—the publication of the Jesuit company are full of articles, of pieces, against liberation theology. Being among the poor doesn’t mean to be for the poor. I remember a very funny thing that happened during the trial to the first military junta in 1985. The French government sent in 1979 an emissar to investigate the disappearance of French citizens in Argentina. This man, François Cherome, talked with Almirante Chamorro that was the chief of the main concentration camp of the navy, ESMA. And this Admiral Chamorro told François Cherome, who told the story to the justices in 1985, that also the church was infiltrated by communism. And as a demonstration, he cited that the new pope was Polish. Well, in the same meaning, Bergoglio is a Third World pope. He comes from the Third World, but he is not a partisan of the liberation theology, in the same sense in which John Paul came from Poland but wasn’t communist.

AMY GOODMAN: We are going to have to leave it there. We want to thank Horacio Verbitsky for spending this hour with us, Argentine investigative journalist for Página/12, or Page/12, the newspaper in Argentina, has reported extensively on the church’s complicity with the military junta during the dirty wars in Argentina. And Ernesto Semán, historian at New York University, former reporter for the Argentine newspaper Clarín, as well as Página/12, where he reported on politics, human rights, as well as Bergoglio.


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Re: Habemus Papam! Pope Francis l

Postby FourthBase » Fri Mar 15, 2013 3:03 am

Okay, please, someone, tell me who to despise here: O'Shaughnessy? The Guardian? Both??
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Re: Habemus Papam! Pope Francis l

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Mar 16, 2013 4:40 pm

Pope Francis, CIA and ‘Death Squads’
March 16, 2013
Exclusive: In the 1970s, Father Jorge Bergoglio faced a moment of truth: Would he stand up to Argentina’s military neo-Nazis “disappearing” thousands including priests, or keep his mouth shut and his career on track? Like many other Church leaders, Pope Francis took the safe route, Robert Parry reports.


By Robert Parry

The election of Argentine Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio as Pope Francis brings back into focus the troubling role of the Catholic hierarchy in blessing much of the brutal repression that swept Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, killing and torturing tens of thousands of people including priests and nuns accused of sympathizing with leftists.

The Vatican’s fiercely defensive reaction to the reemergence of these questions as they relate to the new Pope also is reminiscent of the pattern of deceptive denials that became another hallmark of that era when propaganda was viewed as an integral part of the “anticommunist” struggles, which were often supported financially and militarily by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.


Pope John Paul ii reprimanding Father Ernesto Cardenal at Managua Airport for Cardenal’s support for “liberation theology” and his work with the Sandinista government.
It appears that Bergoglio, who was head of the Jesuit order in Buenos Aires during Argentina’s grim “dirty war,” mostly tended to his bureaucratic rise within the Church as Argentine security forces “disappeared” some 30,000 people for torture and murder from 1976 to 1983, including 150 Catholic priests suspected of believing in “liberation theology.”

Much as Pope Pius XII didn’t directly challenge the Nazis during the Holocaust, Father Bergoglio avoided any direct confrontation with the neo-Nazis who were terrorizing Argentina. Pope Francis’s defenders today, like apologists for Pope Pius, claim he did intervene quietly to save some individuals.

But no one asserts that Bergoglio stood up publicly against the “anticommunist” terror, as some other Church leaders did in Latin America, most notably El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero who then became a victim of right-wing assassins in 1980.

Indeed, the predominant role of the Church hierarchy – from the Vatican to the bishops in the individual countries – was to give political cover to the slaughter and to offer little protection to the priests and nuns who advocated “liberation theology,” i.e. the belief that Jesus did not just favor charity to the poor but wanted a just society that shared wealth and power with the poor.

In Latin America with its calcified class structure of a few oligarchs at one end and many peasants at the other, that meant reforms, such as land redistribution, literacy programs, health clinics, union rights, etc. But those changes were fiercely opposed by the local oligarchs and the multinational corporations that profited from the cheap labor and inequitable land distribution.

So, any reformers of any stripe were readily labeled “communists” and were made the targets of vicious security forces, often trained and indoctrinated by “anticommunist” military officers at the U.S.-run School of the Americas. The primary role of the Catholic hierarchy was to urge the people to stay calm and support the traditional system.

It is noteworthy that the orchestrated praise for Pope Francis in the U.S. news media has been to hail Bergoglio’s supposed “humble” personality and his “commitment to the poor.” However, Bergoglio’s approach fits with the Church’s attitude for centuries, to give “charity” to the poor while doing little to change their cruel circumstances – as Church grandees hobnob with the rich and powerful.

Another Pope Favorite

Pope John Paul II, another favorite of the U.S. news media, shared this classic outlook. He emphasized conservative social issues, telling the faithful to forgo contraceptives, treating women as second-class Catholics and condemning homosexuality. He promoted charity for the poor and sometimes criticized excesses of capitalism, but he disdained leftist governments that sought serious economic reforms.

Elected in 1978, as right-wing “death squads” were gaining momentum across Latin America, John Paul II offered little protection to left-leaning priests and nuns who were targeted. He rebuffed Archbishop Romero’s plea to condemn El Salvador’s right-wing regime and its human rights violations. He stood by as priests were butchered and nuns were raped and killed.

Instead of leading the charge for real economic and political change in Latin America, John Paul II denounced “liberation theology.” During a 1983 trip to Nicaragua – then ruled by the leftist Sandinistas – the Pope condemned what he called the “popular Church” and would not let Ernesto Cardenal, a priest and a minister in the Sandinista government, kiss the papal ring. He also elevated clerics like Bergoglio who didn’t protest right-wing repression.

John Paul II appears to have gone even further, allowing the Catholic Church in Nicaragua to be used by the CIA and Ronald Reagan’s administration to finance and organize internal disruptions while the violent Nicaraguan Contras terrorized northern Nicaraguan towns with raids notorious for rape, torture and extrajudicial executions.

The Contras were originally organized by an Argentine intelligence unit that emerged from the country’s domestic “dirty war” and was taking its “anticommunist” crusade of terror across borders. After Reagan took office in 1981, he authorized the CIA to join with Argentine intelligence in expanding the Contras and their counterrevolutionary war.

A key part of Reagan’s Contra strategy was to persuade the American people and Congress that the Sandinistas represented a repressive communist dictatorship that persecuted the Catholic Church, aimed to create a “totalitarian dungeon,” and thus deserve violent overthrow.

A special office inside the National Security Council, headed by longtime CIA disinformation specialist Walter Raymond Jr., pushed these propaganda “themes” domestically. Raymond’s campaign exploited examples of tensions between the Catholic hierarchy and the Sandinista government as well as with La Prensa, the leading opposition newspaper.

To make the propaganda work with Americans, it was important to conceal the fact that elements of the Catholic hierarchy and La Prensa were being financed by the CIA and were coordinating with the Reagan administration’s destabilization strategies. [See Robert Parry’s Lost History.]

Evidence of Payments

In 1988, I discovered evidence of this reality while working as a correspondent for Newsweek magazine. At the time, the Iran-Contra scandal had undermined the case for spending more U.S. money to arm the Contras. But the Reagan administration continued to beat the propaganda drums by highlighting the supposed persecution of Nicaragua’s internal opposition.

To fend off U.S. hostility, which also included a harsh economic embargo, the Sandinistas announced increased political freedoms. But that represented only a new opportunity for Washington to orchestrate more political disruptions, which would either destabilize the government further or force a crackdown that could then be cited in seeking more Contra aid.

Putting the Sandinistas in this “inside-outside” vise had always been part of the CIA strategy, but with a crumbling economy and more U.S. money pouring into the opposition groups, the gambit was beginning to work.

Yet, it was crucial to the plan that the CIA’s covert relationship with Nicaragua’s internal opposition remain secret, not so much from the Sandinistas, who had detailed intelligence about this thoroughly penetrated operation, but from the American people. The U.S. public would get outraged at Sandinista reprisals against these “independent” groups only if the CIA’s hand were kept hidden.

A rich opportunity for the Reagan administration presented itself in summer 1988 when a new spasm of Contra ambushes killed 17 Nicaraguans and the anti-Sandinista internal opposition staged a violent demonstration in the town of Nandaime, a protest that Sandinista police dispersed with tear gas.

Reacting to the renewed violence, the Sandinistas closed down La Prensa and the Catholic Church’s radio station – both prime vehicles for anti-Sandinista propaganda. The Nicaraguan government also expelled U.S. Ambassador Richard Melton and seven other U.S. Embassy personnel for allegedly coordinating the disorders.

Major U.S. news outlets, which had accepted their role as treating the Sandinistas as “designated enemies” of the United States, roared in outrage, and the U.S. Congress condemned the moves by a margin of 94-4 in the Senate and 385-18 in the House.

Melton then testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee first in secret and then in public, struggling to hide the open secret in Washington that Nicaragua’s internal opposition, like the Contras, was getting covert help from the U.S. government.

When asked by a senator in public session about covert American funding to the opposition, Melton dissembled awkwardly: “As to other activities that might be conducted, that’s – they were discussed – that would be discussed yesterday in the closed hearing.”

When pressed by Sen. Howard Metzenbaum on whether the embassy provided “encouragement – financial or otherwise – of dissident elements,” Melton responded stiffly: “The ambassador in any post is the principal representative of the U.S. government. And in that capacity, fulfills those functions.” He then declined to discuss “activities of an intelligence nature” in open session.

On the Payroll

In other words, yes, the U.S. government was covertly organizing and funding the activities of the supposedly “independent” internal opposition in Nicaragua. And, according to more than a dozen sources that I interviewed inside the Contra movement or close to U.S. intelligence, the Reagan administration had funneled CIA money to virtually every segment of the internal opposition, from the Catholic Church to La Prensa to business and labor groups to political parties.

“We’ve always had the internal opposition on the CIA payroll,” one U.S. government official said. The CIA’s budget line for Nicaraguan political action – separate from Contra military operations – was about $10 million a year, my sources said. I learned that the CIA had been using the Church and Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo to funnel money into Nicaragua.

Obando was a plodding but somewhat complex character. In the 1970s, he had criticized the repression of the Somoza dictatorship and expressed some sympathy for the young Sandinista revolutionaries who were trying to bring social and economic changes to Nicaragua.

However, after the murder of El Salvador’s Archbishop Romero in 1980 and Pope John Paul II’s repudiation of “liberation theology,” Obando shifted clumsily into the anti-Sandinista camp, attacking the “people’s church” and accusing the Sandinistas of “godless communism.”

On May 25, 1985, he was rewarded when the Pope named him Cardinal for Central America. Then, despite mounting evidence of Contra atrocities, Obando traveled to the United States in January 1986 and threw his support behind a renewal on military aid to the Contras.

All this made a lot more sense after factoring in that Obando had essentially been put onto the CIA’s payroll. The CIA funding for Nicaragua’s Catholic Church was originally unearthed in 1985 by the congressional intelligence oversight committees, which then insisted that the money be cut off to avoid compromising Obando further.

But the funding was simply transferred to another secret operation headed by White House aide Oliver North. In fall 1985, North earmarked $100,000 of his privately raised money to go to Obando for his anti-Sandinista activities, I learned from my sources.

I was also told that the CIA’s support for Obando and the Catholic hierarchy went through a maze of cut-outs in Europe, apparently to give Obando deniability. But one well-placed Nicaraguan exile said he had spoken with Obando about the money and the Cardinal had expressed fear that his past receipt of CIA funding would come out.

What to Do?

Discovering this CIA funding of Nicaragua’s Catholic Church presented professional problems for me at Newsweek, where my senior editors were already making clear that they sympathized with the Reagan administration’s muscular foreign policy and felt that the Iran-Contra scandal had gone too far in undermining U.S. interests.

But what was the right thing for an American journalist to do with this information? Here was a case in which the U.S. government was misleading the American public by pretending that the Sandinistas were cracking down on the Catholic Church and the internal opposition without any justification. Plus, this U.S. propaganda was being used to make the case in Congress for an expanded war in which thousands of Nicaraguans were dying.

However, if Newsweek ran the story, it would put CIA assets, including Cardinal Obando, in a dicey situation, possibly even life-threatening. So, when I presented the information to my bureau chief, Evan Thomas, I made no recommendation on whether we should publish or not. I just laid out the facts as I had ascertained them. To my surprise, Thomas was eager to go forward.

Newsweek contacted its Central America correspondent Joseph Contreras, who outlined our questions to Obando’s aides and prepared a list of questions to present to the Cardinal personally. However, when Contreras went to Obando’s home in a posh suburb of Managua, the Cardinal literally evaded the issue.

As Contreras later recounted in a cable back to Newsweek in the United States, he was approaching the front gate when it suddenly swung open and the Cardinal, sitting in the front seat of his burgundy Toyota Land Cruiser, blew past.

As Contreras made eye contact and waved the letter, Obando’s driver gunned the engine. Contreras jumped into his car and hastily followed. Contreras guessed correctly that Obando had turned left at one intersection and headed north toward Managua.

Contreras caught up to the Cardinal’s vehicle at the first stop-light. The driver apparently spotted the reporter and, when the light changed, sped away, veering from lane to lane. The Land Cruiser again disappeared from view, but at the next intersection, Contreras turned right and spotted the car pulled over, with its occupants presumably hoping that Contreras had turned left.

Quickly, the Cardinal’s vehicle pulled onto the road and now sped back toward Obando’s house. Contreras gave up the chase, fearing that any further pursuit might appear to be harassment. Several days later, having regained his composure, the Cardinal finally met with Contreras and denied receiving any CIA money. But Contreras told me that Obando’s denial was unconvincing.

Newsweek drafted a version of the story, making it appear as if we weren’t sure of the facts about Obando and the money. When I saw a “readback” of the article, I went into Thomas’s office and said that if Newsweek didn’t trust my reporting, we shouldn’t run the story at all. He said that wasn’t the case; it was just that the senior editors felt more comfortable with a vaguely worded story.

Hot Water

We ended up in hot water with the Reagan administration and right-wing media attack groups anyway. Accuracy in Media lambasted me, in particular, for going with such a sensitive story without being sure of the facts (which, of course, I was).

Thomas was summoned to the State Department where Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams heaped more criticism on me though not denying the facts of our story. Newsweek also agreed, in the face of right-wing pressure, to subject me and the article to an internal investigation, which quietly reconfirmed the facts of the story.

Despite this corroboration, the incident damaged my relations with senior Newsweek editors, particularly executive editor Maynard Parker who saw himself as part of the New York/Washington foreign policy establishment and was deeply hostile to the Iran-Contra scandal, which I had helped expose.

As for Obando, the Sandinistas did nothing to punish him for his collaboration with the CIA and he gradually evolved more into a figure of reconciliation than confrontation. However, the hyper-secretive Vatican has refused to open its archives for any serious research into its relationship with the CIA and other Western intelligence services.

Whenever allegations do arise about the Catholic Church’s hierarchy winking and nodding at the kinds of human rights atrocities that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s, the Vatican PR department lashes out with sternly worded denials.

That practice is playing out again in the days after the election of Pope Francis I. Rather than a serious and reflective assessment of the actions (and inactions) of Cardinal Bergoglio, Cardinal Obando, Pope John Paul II and other Church leaders during those dark days of torture and murder, the Vatican simply denounces all allegations as “slander,” “calumny” and politically motivated lies.
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Re: Habemus Papam! Pope Francis l

Postby Project Willow » Sun Mar 17, 2013 1:20 pm

http://news.yahoo.com/south-africa-cardinal-says-pedophilia-not-crime-155418854.html
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - A South African cardinal who helped elect Pope Francis this week has told the BBC pedophilia is an illness and not a crime.

Cardinal Wilfrid Fox Napier, the Catholic Archbishop of Durban, told BBC Radio 5 on Saturday that pedophilia was a "disorder" that needed to be treated.

"From my experience, pedophilia is actually an illness. It's not a criminal condition, it's an illness," he said.

Napier said he knew of at least two priests who became pedophiles after they were abused as children.

"Now don't tell me that those people are criminally responsible like somebody who chooses to do something like that. I don't think you can really take the position and say that person deserves to be punished. He was himself damaged."

The Catholic Church has had its image deeply tarnished by a widespread child sex abuse scandal.

Napier was one of the 115 cardinals in the Vatican conclave that elected Pope Francis on Wednesday, the BBC reported.

The first non-European pope in nearly 1,300 years, Francis has signaled a sharp change of style from his predecessor, Benedict, for the 1.2-billion-member Church, which is beset by scandals, intrigue and strife.

He said on Saturday the church should be poor and remember that its mission is to serve the poor.
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Re: Habemus Papam! Pope Francis l

Postby FourthBase » Sun Mar 17, 2013 3:28 pm

Project Willow wrote:http://news.yahoo.com/south-africa-cardinal-says-pedophilia-not-crime-155418854.html
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - A South African cardinal who helped elect Pope Francis this week has told the BBC pedophilia is an illness and not a crime.

Cardinal Wilfrid Fox Napier, the Catholic Archbishop of Durban, told BBC Radio 5 on Saturday that pedophilia was a "disorder" that needed to be treated.

"From my experience, pedophilia is actually an illness. It's not a criminal condition, it's an illness," he said.

Napier said he knew of at least two priests who became pedophiles after they were abused as children.

"Now don't tell me that those people are criminally responsible like somebody who chooses to do something like that. I don't think you can really take the position and say that person deserves to be punished. He was himself damaged."

The Catholic Church has had its image deeply tarnished by a widespread child sex abuse scandal.

Napier was one of the 115 cardinals in the Vatican conclave that elected Pope Francis on Wednesday, the BBC reported.

The first non-European pope in nearly 1,300 years, Francis has signaled a sharp change of style from his predecessor, Benedict, for the 1.2-billion-member Church, which is beset by scandals, intrigue and strife.

He said on Saturday the church should be poor and remember that its mission is to serve the poor.


Not a crime? Not a criminal condition?? WTF???

Well, there you have it, the ugly (in this case diabolically ugly) math behind the church's non-pedophile middle management's willingness to hide pedophiles. "Yes, they are guilty of spiritually murdering and physically raping children...but [and no human with a functioning conscience would follow that with a qualifier] look at how many other parishioners they helped! Also, it isn't a crime, it's just an illness." To which one says, it may be an illness, it may be the perpetuation of an evil done to them, but it is still most definitely a crime, a hideous crime, a legal sin for the courts and citizens to reckon, not merely an internal religious matter, and any attempt to protect such criminals from prosecution is also a crime, one for which you must go to jail, Cardinal. There is no way in hell Bergoglio doesn't also share this cardinal's philosophy, no way in hell Bergoglio didn't sweep at least one pedophile under the rug, or worse.

And for emphasis:

Now don't tell me that those people are criminally responsible like somebody who chooses to do something like that. I don't think you can really take the position and say that person deserves to be punished. He was himself damaged."


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Re: Habemus Papam! Pope Francis l

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Mar 17, 2013 4:11 pm

Is Pope Francis a Fraud?
After a right-wing coup crushed the reforms of Vatican II, one scholar says the last two popes are illegitimate.

Pope Francis waves upon arrival for a private audience with members of the media at the Paul VI hall at the Vatican, on March 16, 2013. The pontiff has called for "a poor Church for the poor", saying he chose his papal name because St Francis of Assisi wa

March 16, 2013 |
It’s easy — maybe too easy — for people with progressive political views to dismiss the Roman Catholic Church as a vile anachronism, a nightmarish patriarchy of aging pedophiles, woman-haters, homophobes and/or closet cases that can offer nothing of value to the contemporary world. When it comes to the church hierarchy, and especially the Roman Curia, the corrupt and labyrinthine Vatican bureaucracy that makes the Soviet-era Kremlin look like a model of transparency, that point of view seems more than justified.

But the church is not just the hierarchy, and as the spectacle of the last several days has demonstrated, there are millions or billions of people around the world — Catholics and non-Catholics alike — who wish the newly elected Pope Francis well and yearn to see in him the possibility of hope and renewal for this ancient, powerful and heavily tarnished institution that claims direct succession from the apostles of Jesus. As the first Latin American pope and the first Jesuit pope, Francis represents a break with tradition in several ways. Both the name he has chosen and his personal modesty and humility are meant to recall St. Francis of Assisi, one of the most adored figures in the Christian tradition, and no doubt also St. Francis de Sales, a 17th-century mystic, author and ascetic known for his devotion to the poor.

But the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio emerges from a Jesuit order that has been largely purged of its independent-minded or left-leaning intellectuals, and his reputation at home in Latin America is decidedly mixed. While Francis seems to be an appealing personality in some ways — albeit one with a shadowy relationship with the former military dictatorship in Argentina, along with a record on gay rights that borders on hate speech — it’s difficult to imagine that he can or will do anything to arrest the church’s long slide into cultural irrelevance and neo-medieval isolation. His papacy, I suspect, comes near the end of a thousand-year history of the Vatican’s global rise to power, ambiguous flourishing and rapid decline. It also comes after 40 years of internal counterrevolution under the previous two popes, during which a group of hardcore right-wing cardinals have consolidated power in the Curia and stamped out nearly all traces of the 1960s liberal reform agenda of Pope John XXIII and Vatican II.A handful of intellectuals, both inside and outside the church, quietly believe that means Pope Francis isn’t a legitimate pope at all.

I’m a “legacy Catholic,” or ancestral Catholic, rather than the genuine article; my parents were both previously married and declined to come crawling back and undergo the necessary humiliation. Then again, as the former Dominican priest, radical theologian and bestselling author Matthew Fox told me in a recent phone conversation, a large number of the 1.2 billion believers the church claims are “disaffiliated Catholics, ex-Catholics, Catholics with one foot in and one foot out.” Like many of those people, I’m not immune to all the emotion and adulation being poured onto the new pope just because I think it’s misplaced. More than anything else, that passion is the enduring, if confusing, legacy of Vatican II, the historic reform council of 1962–65 that promised all sorts of big changes within Catholicism that never quite came to pass.

As Fox and many other Catholic and ex-Catholic dissidents see it, Vatican II marked the moment when the church had the chance to reinvent itself as a flexible moral and spiritual force in a rapidly changing world. Indeed, it briefly seemed to do just that – and it’s important to understand that Bergoglio, like Joseph Ratzinger and Karol Wojtyla before him, was part of the right-wing counterrevolution within the church that aggressively rolled back those changes, crushed dissident thought and reasserted the absolute power of the pope and his hierarchy. Pope Francis is a longtime ally of Communion and Liberation, a fiercely conservative Catholic organization that insists on “total fidelity and communion” with the church leadership and is devoted, among other things, to battling European socialism and Latin American liberation theology. In Italian politics, CL has been closely tied to the party of Silvio Berlusconi, and its founder was an intimate friend of Cardinal Ratzinger before he became Benedict XVI.

If you engaged with the Catholic church in any way between the mid-1960s and the late 1970s, you witnessed the limited effects of Vatican II on the ground: the Mass was in English and could partly be understood (more’s the pity); many dioceses were afflicted with faintly groovy young priests and nuns who played folk guitar; fish was no longer mandatory for Friday night’s dinner (an innovation resisted to this day by many older Catholics). But Vatican II was intended — at least by Pope John XXIII, who convened it, and the group of theologians who wrote and rewrote its central documents — to cover a lot more ground than Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks and “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.”

Vatican II offered the promise of a church that communicated openly with the modern world. It specifically repudiated the church’s history of anti-Semitism and vowed to pursue dialogue with non-Catholics and non-Christians of many stripes. It held out the possibility of a new dogmatic flexibility in which the church would assert the truth of the Christian Gospels while permitting freedom of conscience on a wide range of issues. Millions of learned words have been written on what was and was not addressed or implied in the ambiguous Latin prose crafted by the bishops and scholars of Vatican II, but it might be fair to sum it all up this way: No specific promises were made about changing church policy on priestly celibacy or the role of women or the moral status of homosexuality or the decentralization of Vatican power. But it was implied or understood by many participants and observers that those issues were potentially on the table, and at least you wouldn’t be punished or excommunicated for discussing them.

There was an ideological counterattack against Vatican II almost immediately, with Cardinal Ratzinger as its intellectual leader, and that became the dominant current in the church hierarchy after the ascension of John Paul II in 1978. Fox believes that the last two popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, departed so far from both the letter and spirit of Vatican II — which should have been viewed as the authoritative teachings of the church — that they should be considered “schismatic,” or illegitimate. “In the Catholic tradition, a council trumps a pope,” he says. “A pope does not trump a council.” (In the great tradition of Catholic intellectuals, he cites precedence in the Council of Constance, convened in 1414, which fired three warring popes and appointed a new one.) “What’s happened since John Paul II is that he and Ratzinger have turned back all the basic principles of Vatican II. I would include the principle of freedom of conscience, the principle that theologians have a right to think. They brought the Inquisition back, there’s no question about it.”

Fox’s 2012 book “The Pope’s War: Why Ratzinger’s Secret Crusade Has Imperiled the Church and How It Can Be Saved” contains a list of 105 prominent Catholic theologians who have been silenced or expelled under the last two popes, including many influential figures of the Vatican II period and its aftermath. Fox himself is on the list; he was silenced by then-Cardinal Ratzinger in 1988 after publishing his New Age-flavored bestseller “The Coming of the Cosmic Christ” and expelled from the Dominican order five years later. (I noted during our conversation that Fox, who is now an Episcopal priest, consistently refers to the most recent pope — his particular nemesis — as “Ratzinger” rather than Benedict XVI.) This climate of inquisition, Fox says, “runs totally contrary to the entire attitude and teaching of Vatican II. In the Vatican councils, they defined the church as the people, not as the hierarchy. Under these last two popes, it’s all about the hierarchy.”

Fox insists that he’s not alone in believing that the authoritarian reign of the last two popes represents a kind of illegitimate intra-Catholic coup d’état. He says he got the idea from the late Edward Schillebeeckx, a prominent liberal Dutch theologian and Dominican priest who managed to remain inside the church, at a private lunch in the late 1990s. “He told me, ‘I and many other European theologians feel that the present papacy’ — that would have been John Paul II — ‘is in schism.’ My response was very American. I said immediately, ‘What are we gonna do about it?’ I’ll never forget his look, which without saying anything said, ‘These Americans are so crazy. They think you can do something!’”

Fox argues, in essence, that the Schillebeeckx doctrine means the official church no longer exists or, to put it another way, that the power of the church has been diffused and now belongs to everyone. “What it means is that every cardinal, priest and bishop anointed in the last 42 years is illegitimate. What that means to the Catholic in the pew is, ‘Hey, there’s no one looking over your shoulder!’ If you’re trying to live out the principles of Vatican II, combined of course with the Gospels, that’s what the church is. The church is the people.”

That’s a lovely argument – as well as a distinctively Catholic one, I would say – and ex-Catholics and dissidents who already agree with Fox will no doubt find it unassailable. But those Catholics who’d like to go to Mass on Sunday and simply wish the church could be a bit less antiquated and noxious may not find it satisfying. Fox imagines a grassroots-based, decades-long popular uprising within the church, one that would install female priests and openly gay priests and married priests, would reclaim the spirit of Vatican II and ultimately render the repellent and backward hierarchy irrelevant. That’s a lovely idea too, but in the meantime we have the realities of political power, and a new pope with a soft spot for dictatorship and a hatred of gays at the reins of a decaying right-wing junta with especially fancy uniforms. Fox’s friend Schillebeeckx saw this coming more than 20 years ago, when he wrote that many conservatives of the John Paul II era were pushing toward a shrinking, outdated and increasingly isolated “monolith church … a ghetto church, a church of the little flock, the holy remnant.”

When I asked Fox whether he actually held out hope for Pope Francis, he briefly tried to be diplomatic, saying he was praying for the new pontiff and wished him well. Then he said, “But remember that all those cardinals that voted for him were appointed by John Paul II and Ratzinger” – and therefore, from Fox’s point of view, are not legitimate cardinals at all. “They’re all cut from the same cloth. Can he break out of that history, that background? That would take a major miracle.”
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Re: Habemus Papam! Pope Francis l

Postby justdrew » Sun Mar 17, 2013 10:28 pm

so anyone who's been abused has been "spiritually murdered" ? :hrumph

is that really what you think? or a good message to send to such victims?
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Re: Habemus Papam! Pope Francis l

Postby FourthBase » Mon Mar 18, 2013 12:56 am

justdrew wrote:so anyone who's been abused has been "spiritually murdered" ? :hrumph

is that really what you think? or a good message to send to such victims?


Gah! :( Sorry, did not choose words carefully enough. My fault, forgive me. Seriously.

Would it be better to describe it as attempted spiritual murder, from which most survive and overcome? How to properly convey the crime and yet not demoralize the victim? What would qualify as neither an overstatement nor an understatement? Did you have :shrug: a suggestion?
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Re: Habemus Papam! Pope Francis l

Postby divideandconquer » Mon Mar 18, 2013 1:10 am

"And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea." --Jesus

I think that says it all.
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Re: Habemus Papam! Pope Francis l

Postby justdrew » Mon Mar 18, 2013 1:20 am

FourthBase wrote:
justdrew wrote:so anyone who's been abused has been "spiritually murdered" ? :hrumph

is that really what you think? or a good message to send to such victims?


Gah! :( Sorry, did not choose words carefully enough. My fault, forgive me. Seriously.

Would it be better to describe it as attempted spiritual murder, from which most survive and overcome? How to properly convey the crime and yet not demoralize the victim? What would qualify as neither an overstatement nor an understatement? Did you have :shrug: a suggestion?


well, I'm not sure, I think it's an open question for society, though the specifics vary a lot, I do think the tendency to react as if the victims are irredeemably damaged or "ruined" is a big part of the process of harm. though that doesn't directly happen (at least not right away) in all cases.
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Re: Habemus Papam! Pope Francis l

Postby conniption » Mon Mar 18, 2013 5:43 am

doghouseriley

Thursday, March 14

Her Lips Are Moving

OKAY, so by now everybody's had his little fun with that Noonan column. So all I want to add is that, being dedicated to a sportive enjoyment of Bronze Age superstition on a daily basis, I watched every fifteen-to-twenty-minute segment the CBS morning program opened with while it had Charlie and Nora in Rome, and they kissed more rings in a week than Vince Lombardi did in a lifetime. I also watched the locals, of course, and stopped any time I saw a shot of that chimney, or a progression of men in lace, and I never caught a moment when the coverage didn't take this stuff at least as serious as it takes itself. And that is Damned Serious, indeed.

If Nooners doesn't like the fact that the teleprompter readers might've mentioned “gender” and “celibacy” and “pedophile” a couple times, in between bouts of mass Stendahl syndrome caused by the pageantry of it all, she ought to take it up with her fellow American Catholics, whose concerns those are. Because as far as I'm concerned "news" coverage of the RCC ought fairly to scream a reminder every thirty seconds that these same child rapists, professional erotophobes, and cosmogonical sexists are, when they aren't out playing dress up, tapping vast sources of untaxed cash in an attempt to keep women who don't share their faith from controlling their own reproductive systems. Care to comment, Peg? There was so much fluffing of Timothy Cardinal Dolan (he of the private masses for The Media), to name the most egregious example, that if the thing had gone on through the weekend I think his vow of chastity would'a been compromised. I saw two interviews with the man where the toughest question was whether the mic was at the right height for him.

Look, Peg: your Church already had a nineteen-hundred year history of avarice, torture, enslavement, genocide, class warfare, theft, usury, deception, gluttony, and aerodynamically unsafe wimple design. The Catholic Church had, let's be charitable for no reason other than it puts the mock to the euphemism and call it a questionable relationship with European fascism in the living memory of, among others, your Pope Emeritus. And which was, in the postwar world, given a pass Werner von Braun must've envied. The new guy, was a mere child, and should be asked only to justify his own relationship to the sometimes unpleasant realities of Argentinian politics and assassination. And who will, no doubt, be as forthcoming as his recent predecessors have been.

I'm sorry, but if "church observers" on "th' teevee" brought any of that up I missed it. The Church managed, without a bit of outside assistance, to add to that history an organized ring of boy buggery and fucking topped that with a systematic program of avoiding the problem, as well as the laws of men. That didn't happen once, or twice. It happened often enough to invoke RICO statutes. It is so shocking, and so extensive, that swoon apologists such as yourself are required to admit it existed.

But the rest of us are supposed to apologize to you for noticing.
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Re: Habemus Papam! Pope Francis l

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Mar 18, 2013 11:20 am

Image
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Re: Habemus Papam! Pope Francis l

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 19, 2013 10:52 am

Pope Francis accused by family and friends of tortured priests
Jorge Mario Bergoglio known for his opposition to progressive governments and clerics, is accused of silence, cooperation with Argentinean dictatorship
Watch full multipart Pope Francis
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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