Media fawning on a new pope who may have blood on his hands – Hugh O’Shaughnessy & Megan Carpentier

The Catholic Church was complicit in dreadful crimes in Argentina – Hugh O’Shaughnessy

“What one did not hear from any senior member of the Argentinian hierarchy was any expression of regret for the church’s collaboration 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).” – Hugh O’Shaughnessy

Benedict XVI gave us words of great comfort and encouragement in the message he delivered on Christmas Eve.

“God anticipates us again and again in unexpected ways,” the pope said. “He does not cease to search for us, to raise us up as often as we might need. He does not abandon the lost sheep in the wilderness into which it had strayed. God does not allow himself to be confounded by our sin. Again and again he begins afresh with us”.

If these words comforted and encouraged me they will surely have done the same for leaders of the church in Argentina, among many others. 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.

As it happens, in the week before Christmas in the city of Córdoba Videla and some of his military and police cohorts were convicted by their country’s courts of the murder of 31 people between April and October 1976, a small fraction of the killings they were responsible for. The convictions brought life sentences for some of the military. These were not to be served, as has often been the case in Argentina and neighbouring Chile, in comfy armed forces retirement homes but in common prisons. Unsurprisingly there was dancing in the city’s streets when the judge announced the sentences.

What one did not hear from any senior member of the Argentinian hierarchy was any expression of regret for the church’s collaboration 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 hid from a visiting delegation of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission the dictatorship’s political prisoners on an island linked to senior clerics.

One would have thought that the Argentinian bishops would have seized the opportunity to call for pardon for themselves and put on sackcloth and ashes as the sentences were announced in Córdoba but that has not so far happened.

But happily Their Eminences have just been given another chance to express contrition. Next month 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. – The Guardian, 4 January 2013

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Media sucking up to ‘the virgin bachelor’ pope – Megan Carpentier

In the “New Rules” segment of “Real Time With Bill Maher” on Friday night, host Bill Maher begged the media to stop with their fawning coverage of the new Pope, who he dubbed “the virgin bachelor.” He said, “I have just about had it with the press squealing in delight at every mundane thing the new pope does. ‘Oh, look, he walked across the street! He picked the name Francis! He shook hands!’ Oh, he’s a 76-year-old executive who got a promotion, they act like he’s a baby who just made a boom-boom.”

But then Maher turned his attention to Catholicism as a whole. “Can we at least stop saying that the job of Pope is so hard, such a burden, no one would even want it. What? First of all, you’re selling an invisible product. It doesn’t get any easier than that,” he began. “No one’s ever going to come back from the dead and say, ‘Ah, it’s bullshit up there, there’s no heaven, it’s just an empty lot.’”

“And what other business could you be in where your company gets caught running a child sex ring since forever and you still keep your customers?” he asked.

Maher, who said he was raised Catholic, continued to mock the religion, saying, “The Catholic Church has basically always done what we do here at ‘Real Time,’ it’s a bunch of guys sitting around making up new rules.” He went on to site examples of Catholic doctrine not found in the Bible, from the rite of confession (“They pulled that out … in the twelfth century”) to papal infallibility (“another … edict that came in the year 1870″) and beyond. “I mean, the whole thing is just so shamelessly made up as they go along,” he said.

“I tell you, religion, it’s like Wikipedia,” he concluded. “Anyone can write something in.”

Watch the whole segment, which first aired on HBO on March 22, 2013, below. – The Raw Story, 23 March 2013

See also

• Argentina’s bishops have blood on their hands