Mea Culpa – The Pope Is Not A Fascist.

IT’S NOT OFTEN we are deceived by a major international newspaper. So jealous of their reputations are the great media mastheads that it is very rare for them to allow an article chock-full of errors to be published.

But that is exactly what The Guardian – yes, The Guardian! – did when it published Hugh O’Shaughnessy’s 2011 article on the relationship between the Catholic Church and the murderous military junta that ruled Argentina from 1976-1983.

In that article O’Shaughnessy levelled a number of serious accusations at the then Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio – all of which he has been forced to retract.

Crucially, these errors were retracted on 14 March – the day the former Archbishop, now Cardinal, Bergoglio become Pope Francis I.

On that day, all over the world, left-wing journalists (myself included) had registered the fact that the new pope was an Argentine; that he had been born in 1936; and that he had been a senior Catholic prelate in Buenos Aires during Argentina’s “Dirty War”.

Immediately, we Googled “Bergoglio” and “Dirty War”, and – Bingo! – up popped O’Shaughnessy’s 2011 article. Twitter ensured that the story was up-and-running before the Pope had finished blessing the cheering crowds in St Peter’s Square.

Who was this O’Shaughnessy bloke? Was he reliable? The Guardian informed us that their correspondent had been reporting on South American politics for 40 years. Well, that was good enough for me. After all, as the The Guardian’s is so fond of telling its readers: “Opinion is Free – But Facts are Sacred”.

So we kept trawling the Internet. What had Wikipedia to say about Jorge Bergoglio? Ah ha! It seems he was in involved in the Junta’s abduction and mistreatment of two Jesuit priests. Followers of “Liberation Theology”, these radical clerics had gone to work in the slums, come into contact with leftist revolutionaries, and paid the price.

Now we had more than enough! The new pope had consorted with fascists. As the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he had not only failed to protect his flock, he hadn’t even protected members of his own Jesuit Order!

This was a scandal!

Except it wasn’t.

Within hours of Cardinal Bergoglio’s elevation to the Papacy, something very strange happened at The Guardian.

Those linking to O’Shaughnessy’s article later that same day discovered the following message:

This article was amended on 14 March 2013. The original article, published in 2011, wrongly suggested that Argentinian journalist Horacio Verbitsky claimed that Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio connived with the Argentinian navy to hide political prisoners on an island called El Silencio during an inspection by human rights monitors. Although Verbitsky makes other allegations about Bergoglio’s complicity in human rights abuses, he does not make this claim. The original article also wrongly described El Silencio as Bergoglio’s ‘holiday home’. This has been corrected.

Uh-oh!

Gone entirely were the sentences in which, with delicious irony, O’Shaughnessy noted:

“The most shaming thing for the church is that in such circumstances Bergoglio’s name was allowed to go forward in the ballot to choose 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.”

The story of the two kidnapped Jesuit priests also turned out to have a twist.

According to The Washington Post:

“As the young leader of the country’s Jesuit order, Bergoglio was aware of the atrocities that were being carried out and worked quietly to save victims, according to people who knew him then. But Bergoglio, like many other clerics at the time, remained publicly silent about the abuse and did not openly confront the military leaders.

“He was anguished,” said Alicia Oliveira, a former federal judge and top human rights official in Argentina, who said that she has known Bergoglio for more than four decades. The two met frequently during the ‘Dirty War’ years, but when Oliveira urged him to speak out, ‘he said he couldn’t. That it wasn’t an easy thing to do,’ she said.”

In this respect, at least, Bergoglio was quite correct. Standing up to military dictatorships in the 1970s and 80s could be very bad for your health.

The courageous Cardinal Oscar Romero defied the military rulers of El Salvador and was murdered by the junta in March 1980 whilst saying mass in a hospital chapel.

In those dark days the options appeared to be: speak out and die a martyr’s death. Or, remain silent and do what you can behind the scenes.

Archbishop Bergoglio took the second option.

Once again, according to The Washington Post:

“Bergoglio told investigators that he personally intervened with the country’s military rulers on behalf of the young priests. A transcript of his four-hour interview has been published online by Argentine rights groups, and attorneys close to the case verify its accuracy.

“At one point, Bergoglio said he met privately with military commanders, including coup leader Emilio Massera to inquire about the missing Jesuits. ‘Look Massera: I want them to appear,’ Bergoglio said he told him in a tense encounter before abruptly walking out of the room.”

An object lesson, perhaps, in the dangers of relying too heavily on just one media source – even one as generally reliable as The Guardian.

Pope Francis I is undoubtedly a doctrinal conservative. On the issues of abortion, contraception, homosexuality and gay marriage he is unlikely to deviate from the illiberal judgments of his predecessors.

But we should not forget that the same Catholic Church which pronounced against contraception in Humanae Vitae is the same Catholic Church which gave the world Rerum Novarum. It was the latter papal encyclical on “The Rights and Duties of Capital and Labour” which laid the foundations of Catholic Christian Socialism.

Cardinal Bergoglio’s adoption of the name Francis – after St Francis of Assisi – is also cause for hope.

As the poet, James K. Baxter, recalled:

When Francis threw his coat away
And stood under the palace light
Naked in the Bishop’s sight
To marry Lady Poverty
In folly and virginity,
The angels laughed

Perhaps the sinful silence of Archbishop Bergoglio may yet be redeemed by Pope Francis I’s “preferential option for the poor”?

Reports of the gates of hell’s encroachment upon St Peter’s rock have been greatly exaggerated.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.