Henry Sire, author of The Dictator Pope, has an interesting article at One Peter Five, looking at the accusations of two left wing Jesuit priests in Argentina that Pope Francis back in the seventies sold them out to the military dictatorship then ruling Argentina. Sire’s conclusions are interesting:
Information was also given to Verbitsky by the brother of Fr. Yorio, Rodolfo, who was able to tell the writer from his own knowledge that Fr. Bergoglio had personal contacts with the military regime. He recalled a meeting with the provincial, who told him he was about to receive a visit from the military, and after he left the house, he saw a car draw up outside the door and three officers get out of it. Rodolfo Yorio added that Fr. Bergoglio sometimes used these contacts to protect people: “I know people whom he helped. That shows his two faces and his closeness to the military authorities. His way of managing ambiguity is masterly. If they were killed he was rid of them, if they were saved he was the one who had saved them. That’s why there are people who consider him a saint and others who are terrified of him.”
As I began by saying, it is not my purpose to discuss whether Fr. Bergoglio did in fact betray Fathers Yorio and Jalics to the military regime. It is generally agreed that Verbitsky failed to prove his accusations, although neither were they conclusively disproved. What I am concerned with here is the picture of Bergoglio’s character that emerges from the above narrative. A politically motivated accusation that he collaborated with the military regime would be easy to invent, but it would be difficult to manufacture out of nothing the pervasive impression of duplicity and the charges and counter-charges of untruthfulness that mark the story told by Fathers Yorio and Jalics. Moreover, they correspond closely with the accounts of Bergoglio that come from other sources. The Church’s faithful are thus challenged to contemplate the possibility that they have as pope a figure who falls short of the standards of integrity that we have come to assume in that office, and who has conducted a careful and highly successful whitewashing campaign to present himself as a limpid spiritual figure, first to the Argentine public and then to the world as a whole.
Go here to read the rest. One of the hallmarks of this pontificate has been rampant mendacity, and it apparently has a long pedigree.
I never, ever, thought it would come to this.
But…still looking forward to the Dublin synod family picnic thing. Dads&Moms, moms&moms, dads&dads.
Not to worry. The trajectory is DD&M, MM&D,
MM&collies, DD&sheep.
What? You got somthin’ against animals?
“For there is nothing hid that shall not be made manifest, nor anything secret that shall not be known and come to light.” Luke 10:17
Ranger01,
What happens when one of them uses a plastic straw? [Bongino]
One recalls a remark of Lord Deas, an eminent Scottish Judge, on the Society of Jesus: “Schooled by their casuists in the doctrines of evasion, equivocation and mental reservation, they are a class of men who consider truthfulness an eccentricity and sworn testimony a marketable commodity,”
Michael Paterson-Seymour: From the film The Scarlet Pimpernel: “An oath to a scoundrel has no value”.Call it mental reserve, Saint Thomas More spoke the truth to all.