WORLD NEWS
Links between some high-ranking Roman Catholic clergymen
and the military regime that kidnapped and killed up to 30,000 leftists between
1976 and 1983 tarnished the Church's reputation in Argentina and the wounds have
yet to heal.
Critics of Bergoglio, the Jesuit former archbishop of Buenos
Aires, say he failed to protect priests who challenged the dictatorship, and
that he has said too little about the complicity of the Church during military
rule.
That is reason enough for some human rights activists to question
the moral credentials of Pope Francis, or Francisco as he will be known in the
Spanish-speaking world.
"He has never said anything about the genocidal
priests ... We've really never heard him say anything," said Taty Almeida, one
of the leaders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who marched for years before
the presidential palace to demand information on their missing
children.
Bergoglio's harshest critics go much further.
"He turned
priests in during the dictatorship," said Horacio Verbitsky, a journalist and
author close to President Cristina Fernandez, with whom Bergoglio has a prickly
relationship.
According to Verbitsky's book "The Silence," Bergoglio
withdrew his order's protection of two Jesuit priests after they refused to quit
visiting the slums, paving the way for their capture.
"I used to have the
same opinion of him that most people have, of a humble, intelligent man
dedicated to the poor ... but then I discovered everything that is contained in
my books, in my research," he added.
Verbitsky's accusations, based on
the testimony of one of the two Jesuits who were kidnapped, are controversial,
however.
Bergoglio, who led the Jesuit order in Argentina at the time,
gave evidence at a major human rights trial that he asked junta leaders Jorge
Rafael Videla and Emilio Massera to free the two priests, who were kidnapped and
held for five months. And defenders of the new pope say he helped many
dissidents flee.
"What Bergoglio tried to do was help where he could,"
said Adolfo Perez Esquivel, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for defending human
rights during the dictatorship
"It's true that he didn't do what very few
bishops did in terms of defending the human rights cause, but it's not right to
accuse him of being an accomplice," Perez Esquivel told Reuters. "Bergoglio
never turned anyone in, neither was he an accomplice of the
dictatorship."
STRAIGHT TALKER
In more recent years, Bergoglio's
thinly veiled criticisms of those in power have been a constant of his
leadership of Argentina's Roman Catholics and his willingness to speak out has
made him some enemies.
"He's a real straight talker. He doesn't beat
around the bush, so to speak," said Mercedes Zamuner, an assistant at a chapel
where Bergoglio used to give Mass in Buenos Aires.
"When it's been
necessary, he's said really tough things directed at certain
quarters."
At the height of a devastating economic crisis in 2001-02 that
plunged millions into poverty, Bergoglio's criticism of those in power was
blunt.
Former President Eduardo Duhalde sat stony-faced as Bergoglio
delivered an unusually harsh homily in 2002 as the crisis raged outside the
cathedral gates.
"Let's not tolerate the sad spectacle of those who no
longer know how to lie and contradict themselves to hold onto their privileges,
their rapaciousness, and their ill-earned wealth," Bergoglio said in the
televised sermon.
The former cardinal, the first Jesuit to become pope,
was born into a large middle-class Buenos Aires family, his father an Italian
immigrant railway worker and his mother a housewife.
People who know him
say he shares two national passions - soccer and tango - and is endowed with the
common touch, though he never worked in the ramshackle slums that encircle most
of Argentina's large cities.
"Bergoglio is willing to mingle with the
people; he has washed the feet of AIDS sufferers, of pregnant women ... he
blessed the trash collectors," Eduardo de la Serna, an Argentine priest who
works with the poor, told Pagina 12 newspaper.
In the run-of-the-mill
Flores neighbourhood where Bergoglio grew up, his former home has been knocked
down, but he is well-known among neighbours who remember him from
childhood.
"When we were 12 he wrote me a letter saying that if he didn't
marry me, he'd become a priest," said Amalia Damonte, 76, a childhood friend and
neighbour who still lives there.
At a nearby Church school where
Bergoglio attended nursery and had his first communion, he played football on
Sundays, a 90-year-old nun recalled.
Bergoglio's passion for the game has
continued and he is a card-carrying member of leading Buenos Aires team San
Lorenzo, who are nicknamed The Saints.
"He says he lives in a permanent
state of suffering for San Lorenzo," said fellow fan Oscar Lucchini, although he
added that Bergoglio did not attend games.
Known for travelling by bus
and shunning the luxuries of high Church office, Bergoglio lived in a one-room
apartment next to the cathedral and is said to wear worn-out shoes.
"When
he arrives in Rome he takes the bus from the airport," said Francesca
Ambrogetti, who co-authored a biography of Bergoglio that was published in 2010
after carrying out a series of interviews with him over three years.
"On
one occasion, a driver from the Argentine Embassy in the Vatican asked Bergoglio
if he'd please let him drive him because if he didn't he'd get told off," she
said.
"He showed us his office once. It was incredibly luxurious (but) he
turned it into a store room and received people in a really simple office
instead."
ROCKY RELATIONSHIP
Bergoglio has had a rocky
relationship with Argentina's left-leaning president, Cristina Fernandez, and
her late husband and predecessor Nestor Kirchner.
In the midst of a
chaotic uprising by farmers in 2008, the Church infuriated Fernandez's
government with a call for "a noble gesture and constructive
dialogue."
It was not the first time Bergoglio was accused of taking
sides by the Kirchners, whose idiosyncratic blend of leftist rhetoric,
unorthodox economic policy and the championing of human rights has kept them in
power since 2003.
Kirchner avoided Bergoglio by shunning a traditional
Mass in Buenos Aires cathedral to mark an important national anniversary and has
often directed harsh words toward the clergy.
"God is for everyone. But
the Devil reaches everyone too - those of us who wear trousers and those of us
who wear cassocks," Kirchner said in 2006.
Bergoglio once complained that
Kirchner "sees me as the head of the opposition, and I'm not a politician,"
according to 2007 comments by Joaquin Pina, bishop emeritus of Puerto Iguazu in
northern Argentina.
Bergoglio's relationship with Fernandez hit a fresh
low when Congress passed a law in 2010 making Argentina the first Latin American
country to approve gay marriage.
Fernandez offered her congratulations to
Bergoglio during a speech on Wednesday and is expected to attend his inaugural
Mass next week.
The Kirchners are not the only ones to have found
themselves on the wrong end of Bergoglio's unflinching approach.
In 2011,
after a long economic boom, he took aim at Buenos Aires' city government over
the persistent exploitation of illegal immigrants in clandestine
sweatshops.
"This city has failed and continues to fail in freeing us of
this structural slavery," he said.
Some think Bergoglio's bold approach
will prove an asset as he takes the reins of a troubled Church shaken by
scandal.
An admirer of his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI, Bergoglio must
overcome crises caused by child abuse by priests and the leak of secret papal
documents that uncovered corruption and rivalry inside the Church.
"You
get the sense of someone who has the capacity to defend what needs to be
defended with great intensity," his biographer Ambrogetti said.
CHILD
ABUSE
Bergoglio became a priest at 32, nearly a decade after losing the
use of one lung due to respiratory illness and quitting his chemistry studies.
Despite his late start, he was leading the local Jesuit community within four
years, holding the post of provincial of the Argentine Jesuits from 1973 to
1979.
He then held several academic posts and pursued further study in
Germany. He was appointed auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires in 1992 and
archbishop in 1998.
A solemn man, deeply attached to centuries-old Roman
Catholic traditions, he is not expected to stray far from Church doctrine on
divisive matters of sexuality, divorce and abortion, but he is seen bringing a
more pastoral touch.
"He has always stayed close to priests who got
married. He even told us that he had married some (former) priests," Ambrogetti
said.
Bergoglio once branded priests who refuse to baptize children born
outside marriage as "hypocrites."
Argentina has not faced as many
high-profile scandals of priests sexually abusing children, meaning Bergoglio
has not been forced to take a public position on the issue like his peers in
other countries.
"He mentioned that in cases of paedophile priests he
considers it a perversion that predates ordination and that 'you need to be very
careful when choosing candidates for the priesthood,'" Ambrogetti
said.
Almeida, from the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, urged Bergoglio to
make his position on abuse cases clear now that he is in the Vatican.
"I
really hope he now has the power in his hands to clarify and investigate these
things," she said, linking the sex abuse scandals to the Church's role in the
dirty war.
In Bergoglio's former neighbourhood in Buenos Aires, his
childhood friend Damonte said she shared the high hopes of millions of Latin
Americans celebrating the election of the region's first pope.
"He is a
good man, the son of a working-class family," she said, standing on her
flower-filled front porch. "I hope he can achieve all the good that he holds in
his heart."
