At least the new Pope wasn’t a Nazi?
When I collaborate with murderous regimes, I also choose aliases that’re wildly ironic, like “Prince I Love You Forever, You Are Awesome And Will Be In Heaven.” Because Pope Francis is totally into irony:
By this thesis, in short, the coming of Saint Francis was like the birth of a child in a dark house, lifting its doom; a child that grows up unconscious of the tragedy and triumphs over it by his innocence. In him it is necessarily not only innocence but ignorance. It is the essence of the story that he should pluck at the green grass without knowing it grows over a murdered man or climb the apple-tree without knowing it was the gibbet of a suicide.
Except the new Pope knows where the bodies were buried, because he was complicit in their kidnapping and torturing and disposal. But I like that he’s trying to pull the wool over his flock’s eyes, because I’m into literature and that’s a pun.
UPDATE: I’m sure this means I’m racist against bald white Catholic converts to Judiasm, but NO TOUCHING!
UPDATE (DB): One of the last emails that my father sent me, it turned out, was when Benedict was elected: “We Catholics have ourselves a Nazi Pope. Sieg Heil!” I’m confident that he would welcome Francis with similar reserve.
I understand the incoming pope has actually in the past been rather into public displays of humility (commuting by bus, etcetera). Still, there’s a goddamn reason no prior pope has had the unmitigated gall to name themselves “Francis”. Dude’s going to be wearing fancy robes and living in a palace decorated with renaissance masterworks, with a museum full of priceless jewelry and a library containing unique works looted from across the western world. “Francis”, indeed.
Damn straight.
I don’t know if “living in a flat” counts as humility when the reason he couldn’t use his official residences is that he never knew when the Argentinean Navy might want to hide political prisoners there.
Hey, we don’t know if that’s true because it was in an opinion piece, so they say. Never mind that an Argentine reporter wrote a whole book about it. An Argentine? Well, that’s not real. It’s just like Breitbart!
As a Jesuit, the Francis references is probably Xavier.
Well, he is a Jesuit, and they take a vow of poverty, and knowing quite a bit about Jesuits, at least in the US, the vow is taken seriously and enforced if necessary.
Note that Jesuits (and Franciscans and a few other orders) take such vows, but diocesans–the vast majority of priests–do not.
I work in a Jesuit school. None of them have a paycheck — it is impounded and turned in to the community’s superior, who then assigns stipends and sends the rest off to various expenses.
From what I understand, it is indeed Francis Xavier. Probably indicates a focus on evangelization or expanding the reach of the Church, unless he simply sought to honor the saint.
In fact, I just learned that Jesuits–possibly alone among the orders–take a vow to not take appointments as Bishops. Apparently JPII wasn’t aware of this, as he had limited access w orders in Communist Poland, and he appointed some. But as a rule they are supposed to eschew seeking higher positions in the church.
I did know this – I already had to eat a lot of crow when I told this to the lovely Peregrina whilst I read lists of Archbishops . . . and then promptly found out that he isn’t even the only Jesuit bishop right now.
Francis of Assisi is St Francis. Francis Xavier is St Francis Xavier. If it was Francis Xavier, he’d be Francis Xavier.
Plus, the Vatican media people are saying it’s Francis as in Francis of Assisi, not Francis Xavier.
I’d always thought Xavier was his last name (certainly it’s a toponym) but I didn’t know it had been made part of his name.
(Maybe I’m too used to us calling him “Francis” when we discuss Jesuit history.)
At any rate, that seems to be the case, and I’m fine with that, though in good Jesuit tradition, I wonder if His Holiness isn’t serving two masters with that particular choice.
Yep. And for us Protestants, Francis Xavier is almost as notorious as Heinrich Himmler. He founded the Jesuits, the long arm of the counter-reformation. The fanatical black-robed monks who corrupted entire countries, and undermined the foundings of protestant kingdoms around Christendom with treasonous plots and false oaths. For our historians, Jesuits are the Catholic SS. Famed for their dedication, notorious for their atrocities.
And I know very well that this notoriety is undeserved. Jesuits are, nowadays, in the liberal wing of the Catholic Church and famed for their scholarly excellence, just as they have been since the 16th century. And the stories about their underground activities in the Protestant world of the 17th century have been grossly exaggerated. But still. A Jesuit!
Agreed with, well, pretty much all of that.
Though Francis Xavier was not the founder of the Jesuits. That title goes to Ignatius of Loyola.
I believe the Benedictines had a vow of poverty, but it applied to everyone else.
The best reason of all for the name: “Bless me, father, I ate a lizard.”
Give that the new pope is a Jesuit, he might well have the other St. Francis in mind
Not according to the papal declarations, or his speech in which he reference poverty and humility. I think you’re right, in the larger sense, but that’s not the impression he wants to give at the moment. (Hence the fact that Anderson Cooper can’t stop talking about washing the feet of AIDS patients.)
I think you’re right, in the larger sense, but that’s not the impression he wants to give at the moment.
Or it’s a two for one deal – he names himself after Francis of Assisi and Francis Xavier. (Although the Italian announcer for Vatican TV went for the Assisi reference.)
The name beats the hell out of Pius XXXIV or whatever.
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['At any rate, we'll see if the junta story pans out.']
The Italian announcer went for the Italian Francis rather than the Spanish Francis?!?!?
The papal name is pronounced differently in different countries. I suspect it will be pronounced as a Spanish name in Spanish. In Germany and Northern Europe, he will be either Franz or Fransiscus.
In Pittsburgh it will be pronounced Franco.
That AIDS patient-foot-washing story is particularly impressive given how rare AIDS was in 13th-century Assisi!
My sister’s first reaction was, “Argentina? Isn’t that where all those Nazi’s fled after the war”?
The natural successor to the Nazi Pope.
It really is perfect, isn’t it. Maybe there is a god.
Who succeeded a pope who had collaborated with the Communist dictatorship in Poland. Autocrats of a feather flock together.
It was a favored destination. Brazil and Syria were popular to.
In addition to being the expected misogynist homophobe, Frank the First was apparently quite cozy with the Argentine junta during the Dirty War, and fully supported JP II and his squashing of the liberation theology movement.
Being a Jesuit, he’s likely to be able to argue his position better than Benedict, especially since he doesn’t look like a dead ringer for Emperor Palpatine.
From that chilling Guardian piece (dated Jan. 2011):
Whoops!
There’s the Catholic Church for you, always willing to take a second chance at making a shameful mistake.
Also from the Guardian:
Fair enough. They should have added that to O’Shaughnessey’s original piece.
That said, he certainly was in a position of power during the junta and many of his brother Jesuits were tortured, to say nothing of the thousands of others who were killed. And if he didn’t do anything to help, he also clearly didn’t do anything at all. That’s the best case scenario.
While I’m prepared to believe the worst about any given pope, I’m also prepared to believe the worst about English journalism.
This was an op-ed by Hugh O’Shaughnessey who quoted widely from a book written by an Argentine journalist who spoke with one of the Jesuits who was abducted by the junta.
Shades of grey;
Actually, there were almost no quotes in that piece.
The book, of course, is in Spanish which would negate most of the need for “quotes” to an English audience. How’s “appropriated and interpreted”?
The biggest “hole” in the story is that “at the time” he wasn’t a honcho. But that’s like saying someone who hid Eichmann after WW2 isn’t guilty. Most of the people still haven’t been brought to justice in the Dirty War.
It seems to make it better that this was more recent to people? WTF?
Thanks for the hyperbole. I hadn’t gotten my daily recommended allowance prior to reading your comments.
It’s hyperbole to point out the fact that people are being bamboozled by the fact that because he wasn’t archbishop at the time of the murders means he could never have helped out those that did?
Hey, great job of assuming he DIDN’T help people, which according to NPR, he actually did.
I don’t know what he did. But you’re certain you do. Maybe a bit of humility would help, if, in fact, you know, you actually care about something other than self-righteous ranting.
More reason for skepticism toward these charges:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112656/pope-francis-and-argentinas-dirty-war-what-he-knew#
In particular:
Well, you know the routine. Say something’s a fact, move on before people look into it, and a lot of people that only heard the initial reports will think it’s true no matter what we find out later.
In English, all, from what I can tell, based on a paraphrase with no actual quote in a 2011 opinion piece in the Guardian.
“El Silencio”
A little too on-the-nose, there, Pope buddy.
“the River Plate.” I hate it when they call it that. Meh.
Still won’t set foot in mass, though!
Habemus Papam! Francis!
Apparently he’s a friend of the Tridentine mass and unflinching on abortion, contraception, sodomite “marriage” and other evil abominations!Huzzah!
What is his stance on covering up child rape?
Why do you think he didn’t stay in the official residence? All those raping priests needed a place to escape to after committing their crimes.
Probably the same as for covering up the sins of brutal dictatorships. No wonder Dagney is in love.
What would have done if the Pope wasn’t a bedwetting coward, terrified of the real world? Thumping your chest and screaming about revolution probably doesn’t work as well with the Vatican.
You know, people like you are the reason I left the Church.
This is all very well and good but doesn’t get to the real question – how does Kathryn Jean Lopez feel about him?
Has she finally had the orgasmIs she finally in the religious ecstasy she so craves?The KLo new Poperection has not been seen
I’m really glad I haven’t had lunch yet.
Wait until the white smoke comes out of her ears.
those aren’t her ears
If prophecy is to be believed he will be the LAST POPE EVAH!!!
And not a pope too soon.
No, the prophecy shows he’s an antipope. The next (and last) Pope is supposed to be Peter II
Not necessarily: there’s some thought that petrus romanus may just refer in a general sense to “pope.”
You know what the worst thing about this is? Andrew Fucking Lloyd Fucking Webber will probably write another ‘musical’.
Francis the Talking Monocrat?
Les Dogmatistes?
In some ways, he’s worse than Pope Benedict in terms of murderous complicity. Benedict could claim (implausibly) that joining the Nazi Youth was a result of ignorance and naïveté. The new guy was handing people over for torture in his official capacity as a church official.
Good to know that I can still be shocked at the lack of a floor to these assholes’ depravity.
If there’s one thing we should all learn, there’s never a floor to depravity.
He may even be worse than an anarchist…
Say what you like about the tenets of anarchy…
Let’s not overstate things here.
Not joining the Hitler Youth wasn’t really an option for Ratzinger, unless you think he whould have embraced martyrdom at age 16. Not heroic, not saintly, but ordinarily human.
Yup, just like well-known fascist philosopher Jurgen Habermas.
There were plenty of valid criticisms of Benedict, but that was always one of the lamest.
The accusation is damn close to being anti-Catholic. Ratzinger’s great-uncle was both a priest but also a functionary of the Centre Party, the Catholic party of Germany that opposed (decades later) the Nazi Party. The great-uncle served multiple terms in the Bavarian and German parliaments, so it’s not too much hyperbole to say that he was a reasonably high-level leader of the Centre.
It’s not like people around here don’t know what totalitarian regimes are like: my parents were both members of a communist youth group during their teens spent in a communist dictatorship. Not because they advocated communism – they fled the first moment they could – but because it was effectively required.
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
Not particularly anti-Catholic, but unhumane. Similar to some of the things the right says about Soros.
This.
There are SO MANY real things to harsh on Benedict about. He was conscripted into the Hitler Youth at 14 and deployed as a child soldier at 16. I’m not a fan of bashing the child conscripts of evil regimes, whether they’re from Germany or various Sub-Saharan African nations.
Would you say that a counter-argument of “he had a nice relative” is stronger or weaker than the “he was a Nazi” charge?
Context. He was 16, and one of his adult relatives had been a prominent anti-Nazi, meaning he was in a bit more danger than the average 16-year old.
There’s more context than that. He managed to make it into a seminary after all.
Can you share a story of a German male of the time who didn’t join the Hitlerjugend?
Join? No, but evidently not everybody went and in fact his seminary teacher seems to have gotten him out of it after the fact…but had to push Ratzinger to do it.
So now the criticism is that at 16 he played hooky, but not enough hooky, so therefore he’s pretty much a Nazi?
OK, gotcha.
He joined up after he entered the seminary that eventually got him out. Perhaps he could have been the exempted individual you asked for; we can’t know because he didn’t try. So T. Paine’s claim is correct, yes?
Does my dad count?
Can you share a story of a German male of the time who didn’t join the Hitlerjugend?
Fuck you, you self-involved fuck. Because I would be able to tell you about members of my family who didn’t, except for the fact that they were killed by Nazis and Nazis sympathizers.
So, again, fuck you, you sick, self-involved fuck.
So, you proved my point: not being in the Hitlerjugend wasn’t something one just did, without the good possibility of lethal consequences.
And I didn’t realized “self-involved fuck” was another way of saying “actually gives a shit about getting things right rather than glibly throwing around Nazi and fascist accusations.” Learn something new every day I guess…
So, you proved my point: not being in the Hitlerjugend wasn’t something one just did, without the good possibility of lethal consequences.
Unless you had an easy out, like being in a seminary.
Dana, I think you’re missing the fact that SEK is Jewish. His relatives were German Jews. They did not join the Hitlerjugend, nor were they allowed to join the Hitlerjugend, because they were being killed in concentration camps instead.
I was similarly offended, though I imagine your use of “German” to exclude those the Nazis wished also to exclude from Germany was unintentional.
OK Elm, thanks for the clarification. But then that makes his comment irrelevant. Any reasonable reading of the discussion–was there a way out of the compulsory membership in the Hitlerjugend–obviously didn’t pertain to Jews. By the time of the compulsory membership in the Hitler Youth (or the BDM for girls) the only Jews in Germany were in hiding or in a camp. They were forced to deal with an entirely different set of ethical dilemmas.
If his point is to set straight someone he thinks doesn’t know much about the Holocaust or is unsympathetic to the victims or unwilling to deal with the actions and implications of those actions by the victims, perpetrators and bystanders, or hasn’t thought long and hard about the ethical issues raised by the Holocaust or living in totalitarian or authoritarian societies, well…wrong target and poor aim.
As an ironic aside, much of my initial exposure to the ethical and political dilemmas raised by the Holocaust and totalitarianism came from reading a book about a Nazi who hid from justice in…Argentina.
It’s a lot more than that – most of his family seems to have been associated with Catholic political parties, though none were as prominent as his great-uncle. His father was a police officer in a small German town, which was, in that era, a relatively important political position, and was known as an anti-Nazi. So far as I know, his father was also close to the Centre Party(which remained opposed to the Nazis as long as it was functional)before the war. The Ratzinger family lost people to the Nazi anti-disability genocides.
Probably the BVP (Bavarian People’s Party) rather than the Centre Party proper, which didn’t exist in Bavaria during the Weimar Republic. The BVP’s relationship to the Centre Party was somewhat like the present day CSU’s relationship to the CDU, except more distant. The BVP was more right wing than the Centre Party proper, and often more anti-Weimar. But it was definitely not a pro-Nazi party.
The Ratzingers were involved with both the Centre and the BVP. Their politician relative was on the moderate end of both the Centre and BVP.
You do realize, by the way, that membership was compulsory after 1936 for children over 14?
He wasn’t a Nazi. He was a member of a Nazi youth group membership in which was mandatory for all boys his age.
Only a gentile could type that unironically.
Or someone who knows the history.
Does this make Jurgen Habermas a Nazi?
I don’t care. It’s almost a technicality. Fine, he’s one of the ones that just sat there while millions were murdered. Difference of degree, not kind.
Saying some pedantic shit about what party his parents were in is like saying the Reichskonkordat didn’t happen, or that somehow, it was just a few rotten apples.
So all German men were Nazis.
You know, learning about totalitarian societies might not be a bad thing. Implicating everyone in a totalitarian society for not resisting it isn’t all that far from the grotesque practice of saying “why didn’t the Jews just fight back?”
The Jews did fight back, asshole.
Should we call the police? I’m assuming someone has a gun to your head and is making you write these idiocies.
I’m not a Gentile, and I said something pretty similar above.
What the Nazis were doing was child conscription. I would consider a child who resisted that heroic. But heroism is, by definition, something beyond what most people would do. Benedict wasn’t a hero in this regard. But I don’t consider blanket condemnation of conscripted child soldiers to be a reasonable position.
Exactly. Like I said elsewhere, if such actions were easy and seldom had dire consequences, there wouldn’t have been many dictatorships.
How do we know? The blog SEK linked to has three cites for sources: one that the Guardian has backed away from, and that only includes a paraphrase but no link to actual reportage, one that’s a broken link, and one short post from a source few if any of us can assess, and which is written like it was run through Babblefish.
I’m not saying he didn’t collude with the Junta. But I’ve seen nothing that supports the allegations, at least not yet.
I think this is going to take a few days to assess, because it appears there’s damn little in English to support the charge.
He was probably a high enough ranking church official at the time (although not yet a bishop) to have some influence.
There are some claims that he failed to protect some of the victims who he might have been able to protect; there are other claims that he saved some people. Both might be true.
It seems clear that he knew what was going on and did not openly oppose it. Compare this with contemporary behavior of Catholic priests, including Jesuits, in El Salvador.
For comparison, do you have some information on which priests/how many did oppose the Junta? Or any other authoritarian regime in Latin America at the time? Sure, a few Sandinistas, and obviously (the late converting to the cause of opposition) Romero. But just how widespread was open opposition, and what happened to those who did it?
If opposition to dictatorships wasn’t extremely dangerous and rare we wouldn’t have had many dictatorships.
And as for opposition to dictatorships, the Chilean Vicariate played a key role in helping human rights victims find protection or helped family members try to track down loved ones who’d been arrested and disappeared. In Brazil, Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns was just one of many archbishops, bishops, and secular clergy who spoke out against the regime in Brazil. So there absolutely was precedent for Catholic criticisms of dictatorships, and scholarship generally demonstrates and acknowledges Argentina’s Church as one of the most complicit with regimes that violated human rights.
This. Oscar Romero paid for his opposition to the government with his life. There is a huge difference between a 16-year-old’s barely optional membership in Hitler Youth and the actions of a person holding an important public office at the time of an atrocity. There are quite enough blots on Ratzinger’s copybook without condemning him for his lack of heroism as a teenager. The new guy was In a position to do something, had precedents for doing something, but chose inaction. He is at the very least a complete coward.
Although you’re in the wrong place in te thread. The comparison with Romero (and the 6 Jesuits murdered in El Salvador) is not with Ratzinger in Hitler’s Germany, but with the present pope, who was a high-ranking church official in Argentina at a time when the junta was committing mass murder of leftists.
Actually, I misread your comment–sorry.
I am not sure if being the leader of the Argentinian Jesuits made one a high ranking official in Argentina during the junta.
I could not tell you who is the leader of the Jesuits in the US at the moment but I the order seems to have declined greatly in influence since JPII/70′s.
Of course, if the Catholic Church was going to pick a Jesuit for pope, they would find the worst one possible. Too bad as that order has some real decent people in it and does not appear to have been involved in the decades of child rape.
Quibble: Your basic point I agree with, that as orders go the Jesuits are about the best. And no, they haven’t had many abuse problems. But to be fair, Jesuits would be unlikely to have had the opportunities for abuse available to most priests. For one thing, few of them are involved in pastoral work, but instead are mostly educators at the HS or university level, where it would be harder to perpetrate and conceal the abuse. If nothing else, they would have opportunities for pedophilia, strictly defined, as they’re seldom around pre-adolescents. And there’s also the fact that unlike diocesans, Jesuits tend to have less privacy, as they don’t live alone or with only one or two other priests, but usually in communities of at least half a dozen other Jesuits, and often in communities much larger. Keeping one’s actions hidden is harder in a Jesuit house than in the rectory of the typical local parish.
Meant “they would NOT have opportunities for pedophilia…”
So it happened. Was it widespread?
And you say “Catholic criticism.” Honest, not rhetorical question: do we know he never offered any criticism? There can be a long distance between criticism and opposition.
And helping victims track down arrested & disappeared is different than public oppositions. I mean, hell, in plenty of places in Europe in WWII there was local or regional action by Catholic clergy to help victims of the Nazis. But there was almost no Catholic support for opposition, plenty of silence, and in a few places–Slovakia w Tiso, in Croatia where the Franciscans were in cahoots with the Ustashe–outright participation in fascist oppression.
So it happened. Was it widespread?
Widespread and right from the top down. The Conclave had options available if they had wanted a South American cardinal who overtly opposed dictatorships. But the whole point of crushing the Liberation Theology movement was to align the church with dictatorships.
So called-”liberation theology” is heretical evil – as much nefarious as sodomite behavior in Seminaries: they both sprang up mostly in the end of the 60s, early 70s.
That’s right, folks. Trust Chesternut’s grasp of the facts. Sodomy just “sprang up” in the ’60s, which is why it’s named after the notorious hippie commune in Sodom, NY …
Wasn’t G. Gordon Liddy somehow involved in busting up that Sodom, NY commune?
Wasn’t G. Gordon Liddy somehow involved in busting up that Sodom, NY commune?
No, you’re thinking of Roy Cohn.
@SEK
you forked-tongue viper, I wrote “sodomite behavior IN SEMINARIES” “sprang up mostly in the end of the 60s, early 70s.”
Sodomite behavior might be as old as the Fall of Man !!
Yeah, you’d have to look pretty hard to find examples of nefarious sodomite behavior among the clergy before the late 1960s.
That’s the same example someone else provided. So I’m still looking for “widespread.” And during the Junta he was far from “the top.” He had authority only over Jesuits. He didn’t become a Bishop until the 90′s.
I’ll add liberation theology to the list, but at this point it’s probably quicker if you just tell us what isn’t a Satanic/homosexualist/Marxomuslamic conspiracy.
So called-”liberation theology” is heretical evil
For all values of “heretical evil”=compliance with the actual teachings of Yeshua bar Yosef.
Lots of people thought the Church in Poland and Hungary (for just two examples) also was way too friendly with the rather nasty communist regimes of those countries.
There’s this, apparently from his own book in 2006, where he includes a memo detailing a meeting in 1976 where he and those with him made clear they would not oppose or criticize the dictatorship. (And Verbitsky’s stuff in general is pretty good at church-dictatorship ties, something other scholars have also investigated. I can’t help that it’s in Spanish.)
It seems pretty obvious he didn’t actively oppose the regime. But that’s obviously far different than abetting them in slaughter of political opponents.
The work on this is complicated, but basically, the horrors of the regime were an open secret to all society [kidnappings off the street in broad daylight, bodies washing up on the shores of the Rio de la Plata, etc.] Recent works have shown the Church as an institution was involved and abetted the dictatorship by continuing to aid and serve the dictators without speaking out. Additionally, many priests and others at the lower levels were involved in or present at torture sessions where victims died, while higher-ups regularly met with the dictatorship. This included Bergoglio. And as the Nunca Mas report that came out of Argentina’s truth commission itself put it, the clergy were guilty “with their presence, with their silence and even with justificatory words that they themselves made.” The distinction, both in Argentine society and in scholarship more generally more closely equates silence in the face of knowledge to approval of these regimes; that Bergoglio met with (and gave the eucharist to) Videla adds to his complicity; in failing to speak out, arguments of his direct and indirect ties to it I think hold up, even if he wasn’t a torturer/murderer himself.
Let’s stipulate he was involved with the regime: why do you think there’s so little about this in English? He’s not some apparatchik in a backwater diocese, he was generally considered to have been the runner-up for the Papacy in 2005.
Look, I don’t have a hard time believing he was involved. I mean, I trace my political awakening to reading Cry of the People by Penny Lernoux when i was still a teenager. I’m just wary of liberals and progressives jumping on a bandwagon on what so far has seemed fairly flimsy support. And if true, I’m baffled at how it didn’t scuttle his candidacy, because you know if there’s much to it there’s going to be digging around like crazy to find the proof that he was in bed with the Junta.
One other thought: in societies emerging from dictatorships there are often lots of false charges of complicity. I hope the folks who have done/are doing real reporting on this are taking that in to consideration.
The phrase “real reporting” has never been used in an intellectually honest context. I’m just saying…
I’m talking about looking at records, interviewing people, etc. As opposed to, for instance, the guy in the Guardian who didn’t even provide a link.
Sorry, never mind RE criticism, you already answered that.
Given that part of his job description is protecting his flock, silence equals consent in this case. If we discover that he quietly worked against the junta, that would be fair evidence in his defense. I doubt such evidence will be forthcoming.
It was a right wing junta, and so no barrier to his election. The Church has no problems with those as a rule.
I’d be more willing to accept that if the people who installed him as pope didn’t include plenty of people who would rather it had been them, and thus had motive and means to leak out details of his alleged past so as to make him toxic.
And if true, I’m baffled at how it didn’t scuttle his candidacy,
That seems akin to arguing that “No-one in the higher echelons of the catholic hierarchy could have worked to cover up child-abuse scandals because such a vile history would have scuttled their promotion.”
Again, if Cardinals were devoid of personal ambition, your theory would make perfect sense.
Feature, not a bug. Cf. Erickson (2013).
Giving Videla communion, might be one of the few decent things Bergoglio did at the time, if it provided him with the opportunity to plead for the lives of the kidnapped priests.
You seem to be forgetting that he’s infallible, Scott.
The Pope isn’t actually supposed to be infalliable. Papal infalliability only applies in the narrow situation of making a formal declaration of doctrine in certain situations. The position of Pope has been a tumultuous enough position that just saying the Pope is always right is so obviously not going to work out. The idea is more that God will not allow His church to get things too egregiously wrong.
You’re splitting hairs in, dare I say, a Talmudic fashion. That said, I’m not certain if the infallibility is retroactive. If not, I’d say the Popes need a union, because that’s the sort of perk I’d insist upon before taking what seems like a pretty lousy job otherwise.
That said, I’m not certain if the infallibility is retroactive.
It’s not. The papal office, when making papal rulings on religious doctrine, is supposed to be infallible. (And that’s new.)
Jorge the man is not, by doctrine, personally infallible.
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['That would be a second bridge too far.']
I think you could refer to Jesuitical as well as Talmudic hair-splitting.
If that’s the belief than God needs to shake things up at his company. Or at least make child rape a firing offense.
The Pope is supposedly only infallible when he speaks ex cathedra, which happens maybe once a century or so.
And has only happened once since the doctrine was laid down.
It’s also pretty narrowly defined — it’s not just that the Pope has to be speaking ex cathedra (i.e., formally in his capacity as Pope), but pretty much only on situations where he says “everyone who is Catholic has to believe this or they’re not Catholic anymore, and I mean it, this is true forever”. And it’s not that the Pope at that point has a direct brain hotline to ol’ God, but it’s that pretty much God wouldn’t allow him to say anything fundamentally wrong in that situation. The temporal vector of God’s correction would probably be something like this:
POPE LEBOWSKI: Hey guys, I just wrote this bomb-ass bull on how women should be able to be priests and so can gay dudes and so can married gay dudes, and I’m going to issue this shiz ex cathedra –
COLLEGE OF CARDINALS: [throws a bag over the Pope's head, drags him off]
HEADLINES THE NEXT DAY: “Pope Resigns Due To Sudden Mental Illness”
I’m not a big fan of the Church, but they certainly don’t think the Pope is incapable of error.
And has only happened once since the doctrine was laid down.
And on that occasion the direct revelation from God was that “Mary was physically elevated from her deathbed — in a totes literal, bodily, non-allegorical way — and carried by angels through outer space all the way to heaven, anyone doubting the physical veracity of this is in the fast queue for excommunication.”
So the cardinals had their chance to try the bag-over-the-head trick then.
Didn’t Cardinal Ratzinger, back when he was head of the CDF, try to claim that JPII’s statements on women priests were infallible? I recall that National Catholic Reporter was all over that, back when I was working a part-time job at the parish office in high school, and there wasn’t much choice of reading material lying around.
Yes I think he did – someone quoted it at one of the articles I saw yesterday. Depressing.
Guess who else besides JenBob is a fan of the new Poop?
(Source. Flavia Dzodan, who started out at Tiger Beatdown and tweets at @redlightvoices, grew up in Argentina and has been writing a lot about this.)
D’oh. That’s what I get for not scrolling down.
I for one think Pope Gob would be a great name for a pontiff.
Or Pope Buster.
I think Tony Hale’s actually a conservative Catholic … why didn’t we think of this sooner? It’s way better than Army!
Wikipedia says he went to Regent University but that’s unpossible because Hollywood would never let a conservative get a decent job, especially on a show that liberals love.
I’m remembering an event he did in Costa Mesa for a very conservative function that had me depressed for weeks, at which he said something, I don’t know, I can’t remember right, because I was one of the people shaking their head and yelling “Loose seal! Loose seal!” as they exited.
We’ve had two John Pauls. I was hoping for a George Ringo.
Well, he is a George, after all
Whether Ratzinger was ever really a Nazi, or a Hitler Youth…it’s too bad that the church couldn’t have picked a Pope who wasn’t ‘tainted’ by either one.
I’m starting to think the set of over sixty-year-olds who have amassed enough political clout to be considered for the leadership of a large global organisation without accommodating (whether wittingly or unwittingly) downright abhorrent practices is small-to-non-existent.
That’s a depressing problem. I mean, would Jesus get elected pope? I rather think not.
It’s a particularly difficult problem if your pool of possible popes is mostly or entirely European men who were in their mid-teens or older in Europe during WWII or men who were adults in almost any country of Latin America during the 50′s through to the early 90′s. Being a maryr is a career ender, and being anything less than a martyr looks bad for someone who had the opportunity to provide moral leadership but didn’t, sometimes because the options were limited to “keep your head down” or “provide moral leadership and face some combination of imprisonment, torture and murder, and possibly have retribution also meted out against those close to you.”
Provided the Church is still around in something like it’s current form 20 years from now–not a safe assumption, imo–they’ll probably have a higher percentage of potential leaders who didn’t come of age and serve the Church amidst a society controlled by a dictatorship.
Yup to all of that. Getting to the position of being ‘papabile’ is somewhat self-selecting for non-martyrdom and survival instinct…
I’m trying to think of popes who could genuinely be described, in the round, as saintly.
And on a slightly different note, reform of large monoliths very rarely comes from the top, but from the periphery. The original Francis wasn’t pope. He wasn’t even ordained.
Perhaps the pope is the Zaphod Beeblebrox of the catholic church? Would that be better or worse?
I think a fundamental problem facing the Church is they’re going to start running out of European and North American priests, and the solution isn’t sending Congolese priests to Long Island or the Imperial Valley. On that, I don’t think this pope will do anything useful. However, all indications are that he really is more “saintly” than JPII or Benedict. He is a Jesuit, so unlike the others he had pledged himself to a life of poverty, and it appears he’s lived up to his vows. And someone who knows this stuff far better than me pointed out that when he came out on the balcony he asked the people to pray for him, rather than starting out offering them a blessing. She said that’s never been done before, and people who know the Church and the Papacy thought that symbolically that was a huge deal. And choosing Francis is obviously also what Joe Biden would call a BFD. So, he almost certainly won’t deal with the doctrinal problems of the Church, but there’s reason to hope that he’ll be less imperious and radically change the priorities of the Church, and that will probably be a good thing.
It’s a particularly difficult problem if your pool of possible popes is mostly or entirely European men who were in their mid-teens or older in Europe during WWII or men who were adults in almost any country of Latin America during the 50′s through to the early 90′s.
Oh, come on. It’s simply not true to suggest that every European man born before, say, 1929 ended up as either a martyr or a collaborator.
That isn’t what’s being suggested.
It’s rather that the pool of available papal candidates from Europe (criteria including: Cardinal, aged 60-75, from a country with a large Catholic presence – because you need several other Cardinals willing to vote for you, able to take charge of a large, truculent and occasionally vicious bureaucracy) necessarily contains those who survived various kinds of nasty regime, while climbing the hierarchy of the church.
Simply because of the recent history of Europe.
Many heavily Catholic countries have had various types of vicious dictatorships in their relatively recent pasts. There was no large, heavily Catholic country in Europe that did not have either a fascist or Communist dictatorship in the course of the twentieth century. There were few large, heavily Catholic countries in South America that also did not have a fascist or military government in the twentieth century. Etc.
France, Belgium and The Netherlands were occupied, but all are/were heavily Catholic and didn’t have dictatorships.
And in the category of no dictatorships AND no occupation, you have the UK–whose Roman Catholic populations isn’t huge, but it’s still significant–plus two countries that weren’t independent countries until after WWI–Ireland–or WWII, Malta.
Agreed, but the UK/Ireland have only three members in the college of cardinals (should have been four I think, but for a Minor Whoopsie which surfaced regarding the Scottish Cardinal). No plausible voting base there.
I realise I’m treating the voting preferences of members of the college of Cardinals as if it were Eurovision, but I’m not sure it’s a terrible analogy…
the pool of available papal candidates from Europe (criteria including: Cardinal, aged 60-75, from a country with a large Catholic presence – because you need several other Cardinals willing to vote for you, able to take charge of a large, truculent and occasionally vicious bureaucracy) necessarily contains those who survived various kinds of nasty regime, while climbing the hierarchy of the church.
It’ll include them, but there’ll be lots of others. Anyone under the age of 75 wasn’t an adult during WW2 – not even “mid teens or older”. Your maths is just wrong here: if you’re 75 today you were born in 1938, and you were seven years old when WW2 ended. The pool of possible popes doesn’t contain anyone who could have been an adult during WW2, not on either side.
There weren’t “nasty” postwar regimes in that sense in Germany, France, Italy!, Ireland… most of the major European Catholic countries.
“There weren’t “nasty” postwar regimes in that sense in Germany…”
No, of course not, the Stasi were great!
You’re right that the East German regime was quite nasty, but the majority of German Catholics were from West Germany, and Catholics in East Germnay were a relatively small minority.
Sorry “in East Germany”
Oh, come on. It’s simply not true that that’s what I suggested.
“Faith is a fact. No, faith is a facet. I almost said, ‘faith is a fact.’”
?????
Woah — you are accusing, blindly and without any proof — of complicity in kidnapping and torturing ?! Don’t you have any probity?
Of course you don’t know what you are doing. May God forgive your insanity, your reckless hatred.
Or I’m basing it on the account of a respected scholar with expertise in the region to whom I link via the very words you quote. You’re not very good at trolling, are you?
P.S. When I start worrying about the opinions of other people’s imaginary deities, I’ll let you know.
Not only whose expertise is in the region, but whose dissertation is actually on South American dictatorships.
Maybe this NPR piece is wrong, but it says that Bergoglio went to some lengths to save the two kidnapped priests.
Well, it says that Bergoglio later told his official biographer that he went to extraordinary lengths to save them (i.e. drawing on his personal friendship with the dictator).
And O’Shaughnessy (and Verbitsky?) have made questionable claims.
Not saying you’re doing this necessarily, but it is funny how folk always hear the other guy’s axe grinding.
Is there anything out there that you know of to counter the allegations that he helped the junta hide political prisoners from human rights workers? That’s a different charge than the kidnapped-priests one AFAICT.
It looks like the article that claimed that charge was made now has a correction…apparently the cited book never made that charge, but it made other unspecified ones.
It would be really extraordinary if a sworn-to-poverty Jesuit owned a big house on an island somewhere, so the story seems facially questionable, and apparently has been retracted, or corrected.
No, but the order probably owns a residence for the use of the local head.
Doesn’t it strike you as odd that the Jesuits–a very liberal order in which he’s far on the conservative side–wouldn’t have scuttled the career of a guy who turned fellow Jesuits over to torturers?
The Jesuits aren’t some backwater diocesan rubes. There’s a reason they were often considered a secret society in control of world affairs, like the various Rostschild or Freemason conspiracies–they are fiercely loyal to the order and take very serioiusly the tradition of being the cosmopolitan and intellectual shock troops of the Church. If this guy has blood on his hands, it will be extraordinary that he wasn’t shanked by his fellow Jesuits before he ever had a chance to be appointed a Bishop.
And by “blood on his hands,” I meant “Jesuit blood on his hands.”
The Jesuits have been in decline for five decades now.
After he was made a bishop there probably wasn’t much the order could do to him even if they wanted to.
Guess someone will need to talk the surviving Argentinian Jesuits who were around in the 1970s
The Jesuists are managing a lot of money, as well as lands and properties all over the globe. They are declining, yes, but are still very powerful.
The Jesuits are the ones with the fanatical devoltion to the pope, to paraphrase the famous Python routine. Francis Xavier wasa big supproter of he Inquisition. The Jesuits had a very nefarious reputation back in the 17th and 18th Centuries. But, you know, that was then.
Roughly contemporaneous with the dirty war in Argentina was the similar dirty war in El Salvador. There, the Jesuits defied the death squads, and a number of them were murdered. So, being a Jesuit is not necessarily a sign of being aligned with the death squads.
“Fanatical devotion to the pope” has been outdated for some time, and definitely was not true of the during the papacies of JPII or Benedict.
BTW, nice that being a Jesuit is not “necessarily” a sign of being aligned with death squads.
Loyola had his Jesuits take a special oath of obedience to the pope–have they abandoned that?
Obedience to the Pope can be interpreted in many ways. Arrupe and JPII’s relationship was rather difficult, for one example.
Aww is big baby sad his fewwow dweeb got cwiticized by the big bad weftists? Maybe baby should suck harder on bottle?
That’s just what they are doing. But you can expect you comment to be deleted before you get a response from the host.
I’ll delete it as soon as I’m done deleting yours. Now please, do the world a favor and hold your breath until I do so.
Now that would be a eucharistic innovation.
It bleeds sometimes. Does that count as a response?
I would not be so concerned with the forgiveness of your puny thunder-god, Groveler.
I blame Satan.
Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot to do it Fox News style.
Ahem, here goes:
Some people say he was complicit in their kidnapping and torturing and disposal.
See? It’s not blind accusation because I’m just reporting what some people say.
Both sides have much to answer for in this unfortunate episode. Many on the left have been shrill and uncivil, refusing to recognize the Junta’s commitment to free trade and their important steps toward reducing Argentina’s unsustainable deficit …
Fortunately, Maggie Thatcher kicked their asses.
More guns than money or lawyering tonight counselor. I’d at least give him a fair trail and then hang him. All I’ve read tonight, both good and bad, is hearsay.
I think it unlikely that he will stray very far from either Jesuit discipline, or Catholic orthodoxy, nor do I think it rational for anyone to expect him to do so. Even his concern for the poor is rooted in conservatism, not liberalism, in either a secular or religious sense.
Give the dude a chance.
Why the fuck should I. He’s shown every sign of being a hateful, small-minded shithead. And he’s the pope.
So, you should be so lucky? Reread your statement, and tell me how you are an improvement on your assertion.
Not a cowardly self-righteous homophobe for one.
Also: not pope.
That is of course a completely different statement, and non-responsive to my post.
Whether anyone likes the orthodox Biblical interpretation of homosexuality, it has been a tenet of the Christianity, and is more explicit in the New, or Greek Testament than in the Old, or Hebrew Testament.
This is an argument for separation of church and state, wherein the state has no right to deny human and civil rights based on that same Biblical interpretation. There are more liberal churches. But the Pope, alas, is Catholic.
Why do you think I used ‘cowardly’ and ‘self-righteous’ as modifiers? Because this is like the definition of that.
And your replies remain unresponsive to my points. Changing the subject doesn’t improve that. Nor is your statement correct, anymore than “this” is the definition of “that.”
I understand what you are saying, politically, but as far as the assertion against the Pope they remain non-germane.
U mad.
Basically the idea that anyone should get a pass on bigotry because they cloak it in the garb of tradition is beneath contempt and I won’t entertain it.
No one makes you be a Catholic. No one makes you hate gay people. You do that shit because you want to.
You want to stand up for your irrational prejudices? Good for you. You’re still a shithead, but at least you stand for something. But hiding behind tradition? Nah. Fuck you and the see-through bulletproof car you rode in on.
And you lose.
:(
I am not Catholic, I support, and think I was instrumental in moving the GLBT civil rights movement forward, using the same methodology that I am using now with you.
Your arguments remain non-germane to the original post.
The Church does not hate gay people; it wants to help them carry their Cross, to refrain from jamming their jamming things into each other’s feces-laden colons and from indulging in other abominale acts that even the demons despise !!
The Church promotes life and family and self-sacrifice and logic and love !!
I seriously doubt you ‘moved the LGBT movement forward’ by being huffy and pedantic on the internet. That seems… implausible.
You would be wrong.
Chesternuts, I doubt anyone could have made your point more obnoxious or obtuse. Have you even read the Bible?
No one believes this for even a second, dummy. Go lick the load out of your diaper somewhere else.
nested reply fail
Okay, but this is a guy who’s claimed (according to the resident insane papist below) that gay marriage legalization is the literal work of Satan. I feel like maybe you can believe in the Church’s doctrine on sexuality without going around declaring that your opponents are lieutenants in Beelzebub’s army.
I would think so too. Same with calling them fascists and Nazis, or Catholics. The point of the post is that there is nothing but hearsay evidence that Francis was complicit in what he is being accused of in this thread. I merely pointed that out to my lawyers.
I bet the new pope knows what “tu quoque” means. Do you?
Of course I do. And your point? If there is an inconsistency, or ad hominem, point it out, or I shall be compelled to link to the Nizcor project, as an appeal to higher authority, (memory.)
i’m pretty sure your second sentence is what qualifies him to be pope
Reckon so.
During the so-called “Dirty War” (wasn’t much of a war, but I don’t know what else it’s called), Argentine Jews were killed and tortured at a disproportionally high rate. Anti-Semitism was rampant throughout Argentina’s military, police force, and right-wing paramilitary groups.
Argentina at this time was about as close to Nazism as any nation had been since WWII. It wouldn’t be unfair to call Francis a Nazi pope either.
¿DONDE ESTAN?
I am not sure that as Rector of the School of Philosophy and Theology at the Colegio Maximo in San Miguel, Bergoglio was an enabler of the Dirty War. He is said to have hidden several sought priests at the school.
At the time? OK. Look, dude, how do I tell you this. Most of the people involved in the dirty war still haven’t been brought to justice. The allegation is about later when he was a high level official and they were trying to locate some of the perpetrators, later.
But it remains an allegation correct. If he is to be tried here in America, the presumption of innocence, while rare these days in practice by our courts, is still the standard we should uphold ourselves, or we have become them.
Good thing the likelihood of the pope being tried in an American court for something that happened in another country is zero, making this a specious non sequitur.
Glad I didn’t raise the issue then.
The presumption of innocence is a procedural device created in order to prevent the conviction of the innocent, sort of, by inertia. But it is not a metaphysical engine of the truth.
No one is saying he pulled the trigger. They are saying that he helped those who gave the orders escape justice. All most of the people want is for the truth to come out. It wasn’t even legal to punish these people in Argentina until about 10 years ago!
You can’t begin to put this kind of thing behind you until everything comes out in the open, at least. So, great, you and your universalization of an American criminal procedural device to substitute for the truth is not going to help people find out where their family members are buried, but thanks.
I agree with you, this needs to be cleared up, in a legitimate court. But I’m also a realist about the rich and powerful, first being compelled to appear in the docket, and secondly be subjected to the same justice as the non-rich and powerful.
But assertions remain assertions. It is one thing to assert George Bush and Dick Cheney are war criminals, and quite another to get them into a court and prove the case, and follow through with the justice of any verdict.
All we little people have are persuasion, and the persuasive argument is the one that must be repeated endlessly until a critical mass of public opinion forces the rich and powerful to address the issue, and some of those rich and powerful actually believe the cause is just, and to carry the case forward against their peers.
There are other options of rhetoric, of course, but the deck is stacked against us, by a media that belongs to that class, and employs people at a handsome wage to appear stupid, if not actually being so.
Quote from Pope Francis, before he was Pope, when a bill to redefine marriage was proposed in Argentina:
It’s going to be awesome when you come down from your high and realize America is going to continue ignoring your sad cotillion of fascist losers.
And that you’re still going to die unloved.
if every “straight” family was even good, let alone perfect, he *might* have something. but they *aren’t*, and he doesn’t. he, and the rest of your ilk, ought to mind your own damn business on that and a great many other things. a vow of silence would be a good start
Trying to ruin other people’s happiness is the only joy Dagney will ever know.
Even if every “straight” family was good, he wouldn’t have something. The families headed by same-sex couples and other queer people have legitimacy in their own right, not merely as an alternative to dysfunctional non-queer families.
THIS, plus a million.
And that bill to “redefine” marriage passed, and the old bigot’s side lost. There was a clear victory of good over evil, and same-sex marriage is now legal in Argentina. As it keeps getting legalized, in more and more jurisdictions, and will keep happening in the future. That must burn, huh, your evil old hateful ideology losing out like. Sorry, but sometimes the good guys win!
At stake is the identity and survival of the family
Given that these vary widely around the globe and have changed radically over the past two millennia, no. What is at stake is the power of the church to define and control those things.
And the church really has no control over it anyway, since in many places marriage is a civil matter. Can’t get married without the marriage license- issued by the state.
You know, this might be a good place to leave this link: How to Defect from the Church.
I keep being too busy and not getting around to doing this, but I think it’s way past time I did it.
Well, now we know: if we’re going to have an African pope in the near future, he’s going to be a Hutu.
if we’re going to have an African pope in the near future, he’s going to be a
Hutuwhite European transplant.ftfy
None of the recent ones has been genocidal enough, AFAIK.
I was wishing it would be Arlinze! I’m a huge fan of the Cardinal.
This institution pumps out rules and declarations like nobody’s business. How hard would it be to add the following:
No Pope shall be:
1. a former member of the Hitler Youth
2. a former soldier serving in the Wehrmacht
3. easily implicated in murder/torture within an hour of his election
Seems as easy as blanket rules and stances against having a vagina.
My sister couldn’t even be buried in a Jewish cemetery because she has tattoos. You think these guys would be able to find someone a little more kosher.
It’s just a relief to know that this Pope will have genuine concern for the welfare of the poor in his heart as he warns them not to give in to the Prince Of Lies tempting them to wear a little rubber sleeve on their John Thomas.
You know, I think often the best way to learn about someone’s morality is to look at what they themselves identify as their moral high points. (if the answer is along the lines of “You know, I totally could have fucked that dude up, but I didn’t”, you get a pretty good idea of their morals, right?)
So, until there’s more reporting about his exact involvement with the dirty war, it seems to me that the most telling incident is his story about manuevering to substitute for the dictator’s personal priest, so he could plead for two disappeared Jesuits.
Pleading for two people’s lives is certainly laudable — after all it’s never risk-free to confront a dictator, even if you’re just begging — but it does make a difference whether the motivation is true concern for innocents, or just protecting members of your own organization. There doesn’t appear to be any evidence that Francis pleaded for any non-Jesuits. And you know, if innocents really were a driving concern, one could wonder why the dictator is being provided a personal priest in the first place.
If that was indeed Bergoglio’s high moral point, then things are going to get interesting:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/14/world/europe/new-pope-theologically-conservative-but-with-a-common-touch.html?pagewanted=all
Over two hundred comments and no one has made the “Lighten up, Francis” joke?
Try Balloon Juice for that one.
I might have known.