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Aljazeera Friday, discredited media reports that former Buenos Aires Cardinal, Jorge Mario Bergoglio played a major role, if any in Argentina’s brutal military dictatorship.
Aljazera reports claims suggesting that Bergoglio was friendly with the military dictatorship seem less credible because Bergoglio was a young priest at the time of the Dirty War.
Media have released a photo, supposedly of Bergoglio giving Holy Communion to General Jorge Rafael Videla, but Aljazeera points out, they omit to mention the man giving the general Communion cannot be identified and is clearly too old to be Bergoglio.
While Aljazeera has other pictures suggesting the church hierarchy was likely complicit with the military dictatorship, at the time of the Dirty War, Bergoglio was in his 40’s, leader of the Jesuits in Argentina, and not a bishop.
Buenos Aires reporter Lucia Newman said opinion in Argentina is unclear whether Bergoglio did or did not do sufficient to reduce human rights abuses, but all acknowledge he was not a bishop at the time.
Newman says the current priority in Argentina is not the past, but on social justice, and fixing the current problems the Catholic Church is facing.
She says Bergoglio gets high marks as a bishop in Argentina.
Newman says before leaving for the Conclave Bergoglio gave an interview to a leading Argentinian journalist, Joaquin Morales Solia.
Bergoglio told the reporter he did not have a chance in being elected pope, that he was too old.
With this background, Bergoglio told the journalist what he would have done had he become elected.
One of the things he spoke about was the need to eradicate the corruption from the gilded palaces of the Vatican.
“Everyone knows who the corrupt cardinals are,” he was quoted as saying.
He also said that the Vatican Bank needed to be cleaned up and made immediately transparent.
Sources
- Aljazera
- Image: Global Post
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