The Pope

by Anthony McCarten

  However, others discount these efforts, made over twenty years after the events, and believe that Bergoglio’s motivations were not so pure. The priests claimed that in the subsequent meeting between them and Bergoglio on March 19, 1976, five days before the coup, Bergoglio informed them it had been decided they were to be expelled from the society. The future Pope Francis remembered the occasion quite differently, maintaining that he suggested they resign and the pair agreed.

  Upon learning that Yorio and Jalics were no longer members of the Society of Jesus, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, Juan Carlos Aramburu, withdrew their licenses, to prevent them from celebrating mass and carrying out priestly activities in the diocese.

  A few days later, they were abducted.

  Bergoglio first heard that the men had been kidnapped when one of their neighbors telephoned him that same day. He testified at the November 2010 federal court hearing that he sprang immediately into action, informing the relevant Argentine and Roman clergy and contacting the families of the victims. He then had what he described as a “very formal” meeting with President Videla, during which “he [Videla] took notes and he said that he would make enquiries.” After this somewhat unsatisfactory conversation, Bergoglio decided to appeal to Videla via a different route: “The second time, I managed to find out which military chaplain was going to celebrate Mass in the residence of the Commander in Chief. I persuaded him to say he was sick and to send me in his place. That Saturday afternoon, after the Mass, which I said before the whole Videla family, I spoke with him there. There I had the impression that he was going to take action, and take things more seriously.”

  By this time, rumors around Flores were suggesting that a naval task force had snatched Yorio and Jalics. Bergoglio approached Admiral Emilio Massera, head of the navy, to plead the priests’ case. The tone of this meeting was similar to that of his first conversation with Videla. Massera listened to Bergoglio’s assurances that the men had not been involved in anything subversive, and he agreed to look into the matter and get back to him. After several months of silence, Bergoglio was “almost certain” that the navy was responsible and so met with Massera again in an interview he described as “very ugly.” The admiral kept Bergoglio waiting for ten minutes, then the two men had a heated exchange during which Massera attempted to dismiss him, stating, “I’ve already told Tortolo [archbishop of Buenos Aires] what I know.” Infuriated by Massera’s evasive response, Bergoglio declared that he knew where the priests were. He said, “Look, Massera, I want them to appear,” and then “got up and left.”

  During Bergoglio’s retelling of events thirty-four years later, lawyers found him evasive, and in their closing statement to the court described his as “one of the most difficult testimonies” they had faced on account of “dozens of references made” that indicated “a great knowledge on facts that are investigated here but also a great reluctance to provide all the information.” When explaining his understanding that a naval task force had snatched the priests, Bergoglio would give no greater detail other than he had heard it through the grapevine, or “vox populi,” as he termed it. Luis Zamora, one of the attorneys questioning Bergoglio, was frustrated by this lack of detail and pushed him for greater clarity:

  Zamora: Maybe you can tell us what was going around as vox populi, because publicly people couldn’t know this.

  Bergoglio: The people that one asked said it was the navy, it was navy infantry.

  Zamora: Whom did you ask?

  Bergoglio: The people that had influence, the people that you could consult, that had connections with judges, with some military guy, with a policeman, with the interior ministry. Everything pointed to the navy.

  Zamora: Do you remember any name from these people who so easily accessed power?

  Bergoglio: No.

  Zamora: Were they ecclesiastical superiors? The cardinal?

  Bergoglio: It was everyone that one could go to in a moment of desperation, you know? They were friends, acquaintances, “I have an acquaintance, I’m going to find out.” These type of things.

  Zamora: That they were kidnapped by the navy is a very important piece of information. Let’s see if you can try hard, Mr. Bergoglio. This is a very important piece of information that you are giving us that can help us understand the origin, to identify those that you talked about, that you believe were trustworthy, as you indicated to Massera, that it was a serious source, not just anyone, yeah?

  Bergoglio: It was said as “vox populi.” The whole world agreed. It was not that one person said it. Everyone said, “It was the navy infantry.” I don’t remember well if they identified the agents that participated in the operation as naval infantry, I think they also identified themselves as a task force from the navy.

  Bergoglio continued with his testimony, recounting how, when he met with Yorio and Jalics after they were released, the priests expressed near certainty that they had initially been held and tortured at ESMA, having heard planes taking off and landing nearby—Buenos Aires’s domestic airport is located near the naval center. When asked by Zamora if he made “any denouncements for the lives of those people,” Bergoglio answered, “We did everything via the ecclesiastical hierarchy.” Zamora probed further: “Why not the legal hierarchy, since it was a crime?” Bergoglio simply replied, “Due to our discipline, we preferred to do it via the ecclesiastical hierarchy.”

  In Bergoglio’s defense, one could argue that denouncing these crimes to the “legal hierarchy” was not a realistic option under the junta’s rule. After all, the military had made substantial amendments to the constitution that “legalized” many of the gross abuses of human rights committed during the process of reorganization and had effectively assumed control of the justice system as well. This was a fact that Alicia Oliveira, a judge and close friend of Bergoglio’s, was all too familiar with after the junta sacked her immediately after taking power on March 24, 1976. Despite being castigated by the military, she continued to work as a human rights lawyer and held the impressive statistic of having written the most habeas corpus writs issued to the courts on behalf of detainees and disappeared persons during the Dirty War.

  Nonetheless, even without a fair and unbiased justice system to rely on, Bergoglio’s decision to handle issues via the “ecclesiastical hierarchy” was, it will be seen, a hollow option.

  THE TRUTH WILL OUT

  In 2006, the church published a collection of internal documents and correspondence sent during the Dirty War, entitled The Church and Democracy in Argentina. Such collections are sporadically produced by various sectors of the Catholic Church, so on the surface this one appeared to be no great exception. The duties of editing, writing an introduction, and overseeing the selection of material fell to the president of the Argentine Episcopal Conference, who was at this time none other than Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires. But what set off this particular publication from the rest was that it included a memorandum dated November 15, 1976, detailing the minutes from a meeting between the military junta and Cardinal Juan Aramburu, archbishop of Buenos Aires; Cardinal Raúl Primatesta, president of the Argentine Episcopal Conference; and Monsignor Vicente Zazpe, archbishop of Santa Fe, in which the church outlined its concerns regarding the current state of the country. The meeting was described in the 2006 book this way: “On November 15, 1976, representatives of the Argentine Episcopal Conference, speaking with representatives of the military junta, expressed that although the church is careful not to be manipulated by anyone in political campaigns on the occasion of the defense of human rights, it cannot cede anything in this field.”

  What was not immediately apparent to readers would become clear only when the Argentine investigative journalist and former montoneros guerilla Horacio Verbitsky published the entire original memorandum in a 2010 piece for the Argentine newspaper Página/12. The truth was particularly damning for Cardinal Bergoglio, because it revealed the document had been heavily redacted for its 2006 publication. Verb
itsky published the two copies side by side in response to a comment made by Bergoglio in the 2010 book El Jesuita, in which he stated, “Contrary to the suggestions of certain ill-intentioned journalists, they’re complete, with no omissions. The church spoke out.”

  This was, speaking plainly, a lie. In the unredacted documents is proof of what the church had always denied: that it had indeed colluded with the regime and turned a blind eye to the brutalities being committed to save itself from a confrontation with the junta.

  The extracts below are taken from the original:

  OBJECT OF THE MEETING:

  First of all, clarify the position of the church.

  We do not intend to take a position of criticism of government actions, an attitude that does not correspond to us, but only to warn of the dangers that we have come to see.

  What is the aim of the church?

  First, not to mix politically—Faced with this, the bishops are aware that a failure [of the junta] would, very likely, lead to Marxism, and therefore, we accompany the current process of reorganization of the country, undertaken and led by the armed forces, with understanding, and in time with adhesion and acceptance …

  What we fear:

  Seeing us forced into a dilemma

  –Or a conscientious silence of our consciences, which, however, would not serve the process [or reorganization]

  –Or a confrontation that we sincerely do not want

  –In both of the two cases the country loses

  Proposition:

  –A communication channel, which can serve as an authorized consultation, unofficially.

  Although the memo does express concerns over the kidnappings, torture, and general repression of freedoms, it rationalizes that these crimes were probably committed by a few bad apples at the “intermediate level” and even praises the junta for its “notable efforts” so far at acceptable “reorganization.” The memo as a whole firmly contradicts Bergoglio’s assertion of 2010: “At the beginning, little or nothing was known; we became aware gradually. I myself, as a priest, knew that something serious was happening and that there were a lot of prisoners, but I realized it was more than that only later on.”

  If the meeting did take place on September 15, 1976, as the original internal church memo states, then Yorio and Jalics were still missing but Bergoglio had definitely already informed his superiors of suspected naval involvement and of his meetings with Valida and Massera. If it, in fact, occurred on November 15, 1976, then nearly ten priests and seminarians had already been murdered, including one bishop, and the church would have been well aware of the release of the two priests three weeks prior and of the priests’ belief that they had been held and tortured at the ESMA naval camp. Either way, the information the church had in its possession was highly incriminating, yet none of it was discussed with the junta.

  An addendum in the 2006 publication declares that the church could not “cede anything” when it came to the defense of human rights. If this was truly the case, why, then, did it remove large sections of the original document? What to make of the church’s proposal of an unofficial direct channel of communication—one that, later, did not prevent the murders of 150 Catholic priests as well as “hundreds of nuns and lay catechists” by the end of the Dirty War? That church leaders kept their “communication channel” open throughout the junta’s rule was proven by another leaked document dated April 10, 1978, detailing a meeting between the same three senior clerics, but this time with President Videla himself. Over lunch, the president frankly admitted that the disappeared persons had indeed been murdered, but he dismissed the church’s suggestion that his government should publish a list of the victims’ names because “it gives rise to a series of questions about where they are buried: in a common grave? In that case, who put them in that pit?” It goes without saying that a record of this conversation did not appear in the 2006 church publication.

  The Catholic Church had denied the existence of any documentation that would aid criminal prosecutions against the perpetrators of the Dirty War. Again, this document was discovered by Verbitsky’s tireless campaigning for justice and relentless pressure on the church to acknowledge its true crimes during this time. This evidence had not been lost; it had been carefully filed in the episcopal archives under the record number 10,949. One can only begin to imagine what is contained in the other 10,948 documents, which still remain locked in the archives despite the Vatican’s announcement in October 2016 that it had digitized records from the church of Argentina and would release them to the victims and relatives of those involved, at the request of Pope Francis. The documents have yet to be published, almost two years later.

  When the drama of their release subsided, Yorio and Jalics finally began to consider their abduction in the cold light of day. As more time passed, their thoughts turned to the disturbing possibility that someone within the church had handed them over to the authorities, and their suspicions fell heavily on Jorge Bergoglio. According to Vallely, Yorio confided in friends that “his interrogators had asked questions based on theological information and spiritual confession he thought only his Provincial could have known.” Their speculations only increased when, in 1977, Admiral Massera was awarded an honorary professorship from the University of El Salvador—the same institute that Bergoglio had purged of leftist Jesuits in 1973, replacing them with the Iron Guard. Coincidentally, it was around the same time that Yorio submitted a detailed twenty-seven-page report to the Vatican outlining his and Jalics’s ordeal. No official action was taken in response to the allegations. In a 1999 interview with Verbitsky, Yorio said, “I don’t have any evidence to think that Bergoglio wanted to free us, quite the contrary.” He died a year later, still convinced of Bergoglio’s guilt.

  The Hungarian-born Jalics remained a Jesuit but left Argentina almost immediately after his and Yorio’s release. Following a short spell in the United States, he relocated to Germany and began running retreats based on the Jesus Prayer—Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner—“since [he] survived psychologically in captivity by reciting it over and over.” Jalics had Argentinian citizenship, but when his Argentinian passport expired in 1979, he was terrified at the prospect of returning to renew it and so asked Bergoglio to act on his behalf, despite his suspicions. The provincial superior duly sent the requested official letter to the Argentine Foreign Ministry, but the passport application was refused on account of Jalics’s previous record.

  The reason would not be known were it not for the efforts of Verbitsky, who discovered an official memo dated December 4, 1979, and signed by the director of Catholic worship at the Foreign Ministry. In it, he explained that he had refused the renewal based on information personally relayed to him by Father Bergoglio, who had made a special request for the application to be declined. The evidence presented included Jalics’s conflicts of obedience.

  On April 15, 2005, shortly after Verbitsky published this new evidence, a criminal lawsuit was filed against Bergoglio over his alleged involvement in the kidnap and torture of Fathers Olando Yorio and Franz Jalics. This was just three days before the conclave that saw Joseph Ratzinger beat out strong competition from Cardinal Bergoglio to become pope. A strong and vocal contingent of Catholics, at both the conclave and back home in Argentina, was deeply opposed to the man they saw as a collaborator. Alicia Oliveira believed the leaked dossier that found its way into the inboxes of cardinal electors at the 2005 conclave came from Bergoglio’s enemies within Opus Dei, while others believed it was the work of high-ranking Argentine Jesuits with whom Bergoglio had fallen out during his time as provincial superior.

  The motives and names of those priests remain a mystery to this day, and the lawsuit was eventually dismissed, but the allegations of Bergoglio’s complicity would continue to haunt him, even before another case that suggested his complicity surfaced.

  VOWS OF SILENCE

  “Bergoglio’s silence is thunderous and shameful. Where is Bergoglio? Does
he have nothing to say about this trial?”

  These questions were asked by the witness Estela de la Cuadra de Fraire during her testimony at the trial of a police chaplain, the Reverend Christian von Wernich. He was found guilty on October 10, 2007, of involvement in forty-two kidnappings, thirty-one cases of torture, and seven murders during the Dirty War. Von Wernich received a life sentence for his crimes.

  The trial lasted several months, during which the testimonies of hundreds of victims and witnesses described in detail how von Wernich worked alongside the police in torture sessions held at several of the secret concentration camps. After gaining detainees’ trust, he would extract confessions and then pressure them into revealing information about other potential “subversives.” The priest also developed relationships with the families of four kidnapped young left-wing guerilla fighters, collecting considerable sums of money—fifteen hundred dollars per family in 1977—on the promise that he would buy their way out of prison and smuggle them out of the country. When the desperate parents handed over their savings, it never even occurred to them to consider that a priest would conspire with the military; told by the chaplain that their sons were now in hiding, they believed it. The families later discovered that the men had been executed and that Father von Wernich was among those to witness the executions.

  Another of his victims was Estela de la Cuadra de Fraire’s sister Elena, who was abducted, along with her husband, Héctor Baratti, in February 1977. She was twenty-three years old and five months pregnant. As militant members of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party and vocal campaigners for human rights, they and other family members had been identified by the junta as enemies of the state. Elena’s brother Roberto José had already been “disappeared” in September 1976, and her parents were distraught at the prospect of losing another child and their grandchild.