....continued
They were snatched by troops and taken to the same dreaded Navy concentration camp as Mónica, the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA), where they were tortured.
Mignone claimed that Father Bergoglio collaborated with the junta’s commanders in chief – Jorge Videla and Emilio Massera – in their kidnap. The generals were committed, he said, to ‘fulfilling the dirty task of cleaning the courtyard of the Church’ from Left-wing influence, adding: ‘Sometimes the green light was given by the bishops themselves.’
In 1999, I reported on this controversy in an article in the Buenos Aires daily Pagina 12 in which I sympathised with our new Archbishop and cast doubt on the charges against him. One of my best friends, a human rights lawyer, had told me that Father Bergoglio warned the priests of the risk they were running before they were kidnapped. Moreover, after Father Bergoglio learned that they were being held at ESMA, he confronted Admiral Massera, according to my friend, and demanded their freedom.
Controversy: Pope Francis (seen greeting Cardinal Angelo Sodano) was accused of complicity with the junta that kidnapped, tortured and murdered 30,000 dissidents during the 'Dirty War'
Five months after their abduction, they were finally drugged, put on a helicopter and dumped in a field on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.
Shortly after my article was published, I was contacted by both Father Yorio and an intermediary for the Archbishop. Father Yorio was upset. He denied Bergoglio had warned him and Jalics that they were in danger.
‘I do not have any reason to think he did anything for our release, but much to the contrary,’ he said.
Bergoglio had expelled him from his theology post at a Jesuit school, he said, and spread rumours ‘that I was a Communist, a subversive guerrilla who was after women – rumours that immediately came to the attention of the social sectors that ran the power and repression machinery’.
In an era when the junta was trying to ‘cleanse’ the nation of liberation theology, this was tantamount to a death sentence.
‘Francisco Jalics warned several Jesuits in writing of the danger I was being exposed to by the Company [of Jesus], highlighting Bergoglio as responsible,’ Father Yorio said.
From the Bavarian monastery where he took refuge after being freed, Father Jalics also talked to me, on condition that I did not identify him as a source. He told me that Father Bergoglio identified him and Yorio as Leftist guerrillas.
Archbishop Bergoglio expressed his desire to set the record straight and, through an intermediary, he asked me to meet him in spring 1999 for an ‘off-the-record’ interview.
Horacio Verbitsky originally reported that Father Bergoglio had warned the priests of the risk they were running before they were kidnapped
He was wearing a simple suit with a dog collar. A lock of grey hair fell over his forehead that made him look younger than 62. He reminded me of Fred Astaire. He said that I couldn’t quote him, but I could report that a priest who was profoundly close to his thinking denied Yorio’s charges.
He said he never accused Yorio or Jalics of conspiring with the guerrillas, and after he learned that the priests were being held at ESMA, he met twice with Videla and Massera to demand their release. He depicted himself as a hero.
I gave his side of the story in my second piece and for a time we had a friendly relationship. He sent me pieces of information, including a reference to a court record that showed that the house where 60 kidnapped political prisoners were hidden from human rights investigators in 1979 was the weekend home of the then Archbishop of Buenos Aires.
His story began to unravel when I began my research for a sequel to a book I had published in 1995, The Flight: Confessions Of An Argentine Dirty Warrior, in which a former Navy officer, Captain Adolfo Scilingo, told how dissidents were killed by being thrown into the sea when still alive. Scilingo said this method had been approved by the Church hierarchy because they considered it a Christian form of death.
When one of the priests was released, he claimed that Bergoglio (pictured) had not warned him of any danger. but expelled him from his post at a Jesuit school and spread rumours that he was a Communist
In 2000, a year after Yorio’s death, his family gave me a 27-page letter in which he accused Bergoglio of collaborating with his kidnappers.
On March 29, 2005, I was at the foreign affairs ministry archives, going through box after box of records. One document contained the final proof that Bergoglio collaborated in surrendering the priests to the regime. It began with a note bearing the letterhead of the Society of Jesus, with the stamp and the signature of Father Bergoglio, dated December 4, 1979.
Father Jalics, who was living in Germany, wanted to renew his passport. To avoid him having to make ‘an expensive trip’ back to Argentina, Bergoglio asked for the renewal to be carried out from Buenos Aires. On a second sheet in the folder, the Director of Catholic Worship of the Foreign Ministry, Anselmo Orcoyen, advised his bosses to reject the request ‘in view of the petitioner’s history.’
He wrote that Father Jalics had been accused of causing a ‘conflict of obedience in female religious congregations’ and that he had been held at ESMA after being ‘accused with Father Yorio of suspected contacts with the guerrillas’.
On a third page, Orcoyen wrote that this information came from Father Bergoglio. The documents close the case, in my opinion, on Bergoglio’s attitude to the junta. He publicly asked for a favour for his priest, Father Jalics, but behind his back accused him of activities that could cause his death.
Everyone can judge for themselves from my investigation about whether Bergoglio is a godly man.
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