Would any of the Cardinals at the conclave have been progressive?

[MannyGoldstein]

My sense is that any Cardinal ordained under the last two Popes would have have been very conservative. But I don't know much about these things.

If that's the case, then at least it's good that the Church has a new leader that pays attention to poverty and inequality. I sure hope it doesn't turn out that Francis was complicit in Argentina's past horrors.

Religion is both a great blessing and an awful curse, depending on how it's administered. Like government, I suppose.

[undeterred]

1. No.

[BainsBane]

2. NO

All were appointed by two conservative popes. Also Ratzinger controlled appointments for a number of years at the end of John Paul II's papacy.

There was a Curia faction and a reform faction. This guy is supposedly among the reformers. Remember that he is reactionary on cultural issues but to the left of the Democratic party on economic/ social justice. I think he will be better than the last pope. The choice of the name Francis is encouraging.

[dsc]

3. It is remotely possible that some dating from early in John Paul's reign would be

I think he got more into naming based on ideology over time. But he was a very long serving Pope and no one over 80 is allowed to vote. I think at most 1 or 2 were not orthodox on sexual teaching of the church.

[RainDog]

4. As Cardinal, a respected Argentinian journalist said Bergoglio assisted the fascists

"Horacio Verbitsky, one of Argentina's most notable journalists, in his book El Silencio (Silence)...recounts how the Argentine navy with the connivance of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now 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."

iow, this is a Pope who collaborated with fascists in Argentina - the ones who threw dissidents out of airplanes and waited until pregnant dissidents had babies before they killed the woman and gave their babies to fascist sympathizers to raise as their own.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/jan/04/argenitina-videla-bergoglio-repentance

This was written in 2011, so it's not a "new pope" article.

[RainDog]

5. The Argentinian Navy was the group throwing dissidents out of planes n/t

[MannyGoldstein]

6. That's pretty ugly, if true

Hopefully it gets investigated and justice is served.

[RainDog]

7. The NYTimes glosses another accusation

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/14/world/europe/new-pope-theologically-conservative-but-with-a-common-touch.html

He was ordained a priest a few days short of turning 33, and from that point on, his ascent within the church was rapid: by 1973, he had been named the Jesuit provincial for Argentina, the church official in charge of supervising the order’s activities in the country.

He remained in that post through 1979, and his performance during the Dirty War has been the subject of controversy in Argentina. In 2005, shortly before the Vatican conclave that elevated Joseph Ratzinger to the papacy, Cardinal Bergoglio was formally accused by an Argentine lawyer in a lawsuit of being complicit in the military’s kidnapping of two Jesuit priests whose antigovernment views he considered dangerously unorthodox.

...After the church had denied for years any involvement with the dictatorship, he testified in 2010 that he had met secretly with Gen. Jorge Videla, the former head of the military junta, and Adm. Emilio Massera, the commander of the navy, to ask for the release of the priests. The following year, prosecutors called him to the witness stand to testify on the military junta’s systematic kidnapping of children, a subject he was also accused of knowing about but failing to prevent.

but maybe he's not as bad as others...

In November 2005, Cardinal Bergoglio was elected head of the Argentine Conference of Bishops for a three-year term, which was renewed in 2008. At the time he was chosen, the Argentine church was dealing with a notorious political scandal, that of the Rev. Christian von Wernich, a former chaplain of the Buenos Aires police who had been accused of aiding in the questioning, torture and death of political prisoners.

The church authorities had spirited Father von Wernich out of the country and placed him in a parish in Chile under a false name, but he was eventually brought back to Argentina and put on trial. In 2007, he was found guilty on seven counts of complicity in homicide, more than 40 counts of kidnapping and more than 30 of torture, and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Iow, he is not out of the liberation theology tradition in Latin America.

After he stepped down as archbishop, the church refuted what Argentina's former dictator, General Videla, said was complicity on the part of the church with the govt's activities. (Videla admitted, in a biography, that the military dictatorship had killed about 8000 people - the figure is assumed to be more like 30,000. Videla also admitted that the military junta took babies that had been born to women who were political prisoners, but didn't admit to what the Grandmothers and journalists and others who testified to the Truth Commission claimed - that these mothers were then thrown into the Atlantic Ocean while still alive, and their babies were given to good fascists to raise.

However, the existence of this tactic of throwing dissidents into the ocean became known because bodies were washing up on shore. So, those who carried out this work split open people's bowels so they would sink instead of float ashore.

I would hope the current Pope knew nothing about this. Nevertheless, he supported the junta rather the people in Argentina.

[MannyGoldstein]

8. In all fairness, an accusation is different from a conviction

Certainly troubling, though.

[BlueCheese]

9. I think those are the same accusation, aren't they?

That he hid two priests from the commission.

There are also reports that he worked behind the scenes to get the two priests freed. I'm not sure what to believe as of now.

[RainDog]

11. There are two different accusations that I know of

Here's what the Guardian had to say in 2011 -

To the judicious and fair-minded outsider it has been clear for years that the upper reaches of the Argentinian church contained many "lost sheep in the wilderness", men who had communed and supported the unspeakably brutal western-supported military dictatorship that seized power in that country in 1976 and battened on it for years. Not only did the generals slaughter thousands unjustly, often dropping them out of aeroplanes over the River Plate and selling off their orphan children to the highest bidder, they also murdered at least two bishops and many priests. Yet even the execution of other men of the cloth did nothing to shake the support of senior clerics, including representatives of the Holy See, for the criminality of their leader General Jorge Rafael Videla and his minions.

What one did not hear from any senior member of the Argentinian hierarchy was any expression of regret for the church's collaboration and in these crimes. The extent of the church's complicity in the dark deeds was excellently set out by Horacio Verbitsky, one of Argentina's most notable journalists, in his book El Silencio (Silence). He recounts how the Argentinian navy with the connivance of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now 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. The most shaming thing for the church is that in such circumstances Bergoglio's name was allowed to go forward in the ballot to chose the successor of John Paul II. 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.

Now, you may take that to mean only those two priests. However, those two priests were not the only political prisoners of the regime and they were found, drugged, months after they disappeared - they disappeared one week after Bergoglio had dismissed them from the church because of their association with liberation theology.

Next month (this was 2011) the convicted murderer Videla will be arraigned for his part in the killing of Enrique Angelelli, bishop of the Andean diocese of La Rioja and a supporter of the cause of poorer Argentinians. He was run off the highway by a hit squad of the Videla régime and killed on 4th August 1976 shortly after Videla's putsch.

Cardinal Bergoglio has plenty of time to be measured for a suit of sackcloth – perhaps tailored in a suitable clerical grey – to be worn when the church authorities are called into the witness box by the investigating judge in the Angelelli case. Ashes will be readily available if the records of the Argentinian bishops' many disingenuous and outrightly mendacious statements about Videla and Angelelli are burned.

This is a separate incident.

This compares with the treatment of a bishop who actively participated in torture and murder during the junta.

From the NYT -

The church authorities had spirited Father von Wernich out of the country and placed him in a parish in Chile under a false name, but he was eventually brought back to Argentina and put on trial. In 2007, he was found guilty on seven counts of complicity in homicide, more than 40 counts of kidnapping and more than 30 of torture, and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Father von Wernich was allowed to continue to celebrate Mass in prison, and in 2010, a church official said that “at the appropriate time, von Wernich’s situation will have to be resolved in accordance with canonical law.” But Cardinal Bergoglio never issued a formal apology on behalf of the church, or commented directly on the case, and during his tenure the bishops’ conference was similarly silent.

ONLY AFTER Bergoglio left his position did the bishop's conference complain that the junta said they had participated in maintaining its power - but von Wernich most certainly did AND he was taken out of the country by members of the church hierarchy in order to shield him from prosecution for MURDER AND TORTURE.

So, you think Bergoglio, the archbishop, knew nothing about this, had no say in how the priest was treated? The treatment of the leftist vs. the fascist faction seems to indicate where priorities came down.

[treestar]

10. Of course not.

Everything is relative however. To my wingnut friends, Obama is a communist.