Pope Francis

[Magda Hassan]

Wikileaks and the new Pope

16.03.2013

Wikileaks: Involvement of Pope with a weakened dictatorship with criticism of Kirchner

A paper on the subject was prepared by the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires in October 2007.

Opera Mundi

The involvement of the then Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio with the crimes committed by the Argentine dictatorship weakened their criticism of the political and economic decisions of the Kirchner government, according to the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires. The revelation about the new Pope, who chose the name Francis to use in his pontificate, was made by the website Wikileaks in 2011, based on an original telegram dated October 11, 2007.

A few months earlier, in May 2007, the government of Nestor Kirchner was widely criticized within Argentina and the president did not know if he should seek reelection or cast his wife, Senator Cristina Kirchner then, as a candidate. The idea was to wait as long as possible and only advertise the application in July of that year.

Strikes by teachers in the province of Santa Cruz caused the resignation of the provincial governor on May 9. A corruption scandal involving several ministers and public tensions with the Catholic Church were some of the challenges of Kirchner. A second telegram from the U.S. embassy leaked by Wikileaks, is that one of the most vocal critics of the government was that of Cardinal Bergoglio.

Relations between the Kirchner government and the Church worsened when former Bishop Joaquin Pina prevented Carlos Rovira, Kirchner governor of the province of Missiones, wanted to make a change in the law approving successive reelection. The proposal was defeated by more than 13 percentage points. Kirchner, at the time, came to declare that "God has no party" and therefore the Church should not meddle in politics.

Bergoglio said the Church should not get involved with such official politics, but supported the campaign led by Pina. The then-cardinal also expressed concern about the "weakening of democratic institutions in Argentina" and the growing concentration of power in the hands of Kirchner. During the teachers' strike in Santa Cruz, a bishop further aggravated the crisis between the government and the Church saying that Kirchner treated as "enemies" those who thought differently from the government.

Relationship with dictatorship

Born in 1936, Bergoglio was 40 when the Argentine military forcibly deposed the government of Isabel Perón and established a military dictatorship. Cardinal Bergoglio, like many religious figures of similar age, is accused of not having worked to prevent the deaths of more than 30,000 Argentines - many of them leftists - between the years 1976 and 1983.

Bergoglio would have especially failed in not protecting the lives of two colleagues from the Jesuit order who were opponents of the Argentine dictatorship. Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics were taken to the School of Mechanical Armada (ESMA) on May 23, 1976, where they were imprisoned and tortured by the bodies of the repressive government of Jorge Videla, as told in the book "The Silence" by journalist Horacio Verbitsky.

More on the subject:

The Pope was summoned to testify about the disappearance of priests.

In the Prophecy of St. Malachy: Benedict's successor already has a name and will be the last Pope.

The "Prophecy of the Popes" is attributed to St. Malachy, an Irish archbishop who was canonized a saint in 1190. In his predication, dated 1139, Malachy prophesied that there would be 112 more popes before Judgment Day. Benedict is supposedly the 111th Pope.The Argentine cardinal accused of collaborating with the dictatorship is the new Pope.


Translated from the Portuguese version by:

Lisa Karpova
Pravda.Ru

[Magda Hassan]

Don't forget that the original Nicaragua Contras were set up by an Argentine intelligence unit.

Pope Francis, CIA and Death Squads'

March 16, 2013

Exclusive: In the 1970s, Father Jorge Bergoglio faced a moment of truth: Would he stand up to Argentina's military neo-Nazis "disappearing" thousands including priests, or keep his mouth shut and his career on track? Like many other Church leaders, Pope Francis took the safe route, Robert Parry reports.
By Robert Parry
The election of Argentine Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio as Pope Francis brings back into focus the troubling role of the Catholic hierarchy in blessing much of the brutal repression that swept Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, killing and torturing tens of thousands of people including priests and nuns accused of sympathizing with leftists.
The Vatican's fiercely defensive reaction to the reemergence of these questions as they relate to the new Pope also is reminiscent of the pattern of deceptive denials that became another hallmark of that era when propaganda was viewed as an integral part of the "anticommunist" struggles, which were often supported financially and militarily by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
Pope John Paul II reprimanding Father Ernesto Cardenal at Managua Airport for Cardenal's support of "liberation theology" and his work with the Sandinista government.

It appears that Bergoglio, who was head of the Jesuit order in Buenos Aires during Argentina's grim "dirty war," mostly tended to his bureaucratic rise within the Church as Argentine security forces "disappeared" some 30,000 people for torture and murder from 1976 to 1983, including 150 Catholic priests suspected of believing in "liberation theology."
Much as Pope Pius XII didn't directly challenge the Nazis during the Holocaust, Father Bergoglio avoided any direct confrontation with the neo-Nazis who were terrorizing Argentina. Pope Francis's defenders today, like apologists for Pope Pius, claim he did intervene quietly to save some individuals.
But no one asserts that Bergoglio stood up publicly against the "anticommunist" terror, as some other Church leaders did in Latin America, most notably El Salvador's Archbishop Oscar Romero who then became a victim of right-wing assassins in 1980.
Indeed, the predominant role of the Church hierarchy from the Vatican to the bishops in the individual countries was to give political cover to the slaughter and to offer little protection to the priests and nuns who advocated "liberation theology," i.e. the belief that Jesus did not just favor charity to the poor but wanted a just society that shared wealth and power with the poor.
In Latin America with its calcified class structure of a few oligarchs at one end and many peasants at the other, that meant reforms, such as land redistribution, literacy programs, health clinics, union rights, etc. But those changes were fiercely opposed by the local oligarchs and the multinational corporations that profited from the cheap labor and inequitable land distribution.
So, any reformers of any stripe were readily labeled "communists" and were made the targets of vicious security forces, often trained and indoctrinated by "anticommunist" military officers at the U.S.-run School of the Americas. The primary role of the Catholic hierarchy was to urge the people to stay calm and support the traditional system.
It is noteworthy that the orchestrated praise for Pope Francis in the U.S. news media has been to hail Bergoglio's supposed "humble" personality and his "commitment to the poor." However, Bergoglio's approach fits with the Church's attitude for centuries, to give "charity" to the poor while doing little to change their cruel circumstances as Church grandees hobnob with the rich and powerful.
Another Pope Favorite
Pope John Paul II, another favorite of the U.S. news media, shared this classic outlook. He emphasized conservative social issues, telling the faithful to forgo contraceptives, treating women as second-class Catholics and condemning homosexuality. He promoted charity for the poor and sometimes criticized excesses of capitalism, but he disdained leftist governments that sought serious economic reforms.
Elected in 1978, as right-wing "death squads" were gaining momentum across Latin America, John Paul II offered little protection to left-leaning priests and nuns who were targeted. He rebuffed Archbishop Romero's plea to condemn El Salvador's right-wing regime and its human rights violations. He stood by as priests were butchered and nuns were raped and killed.
Instead of leading the charge for real economic and political change in Latin America, John Paul II denounced "liberation theology." During a 1983 trip to Nicaragua then ruled by the leftist Sandinistas the Pope condemned what he called the "popular Church" and would not let Ernesto Cardenal, a priest and a minister in the Sandinista government, kiss the papal ring. He also elevated clerics like Bergoglio who didn't protest right-wing repression.
John Paul II appears to have gone even further, allowing the Catholic Church in Nicaragua to be used by the CIA and Ronald Reagan's administration to finance and organize internal disruptions while the violent Nicaraguan Contras terrorized northern Nicaraguan towns with raids notorious for rape, torture and extrajudicial executions.
The Contras were originally organized by an Argentine intelligence unit that emerged from the country's domestic "dirty war" and was taking its "anticommunist" crusade of terror across borders. After Reagan took office in 1981, he authorized the CIA to join with Argentine intelligence in expanding the Contras and their counterrevolutionary war.
A key part of Reagan's Contra strategy was to persuade the American people and Congress that the Sandinistas represented a repressive communist dictatorship that persecuted the Catholic Church, aimed to create a "totalitarian dungeon," and thus deserved violent overthrow.
A special office inside the National Security Council, headed by longtime CIA disinformation specialist Walter Raymond Jr., pushed these propaganda "themes" domestically. Raymond's campaign exploited examples of tensions between the Catholic hierarchy and the Sandinista government as well as with La Prensa, the leading opposition newspaper.
To make the propaganda work with Americans, it was important to conceal the fact that elements of the Catholic hierarchy and La Prensa were being financed by the CIA and were coordinating with the Reagan administration's destabilization strategies. [See Robert Parry's Lost History.]
Evidence of Payments
In 1988, I discovered evidence of this reality while working as a correspondent for Newsweek magazine. At the time, the Iran-Contra scandal had undermined the case for spending more U.S. money to arm the Contras. But the Reagan administration continued to beat the propaganda drums by highlighting the supposed persecution of Nicaragua's internal opposition.
To fend off U.S. hostility, which also included a harsh economic embargo, the Sandinistas announced increased political freedoms. But that represented only a new opportunity for Washington to orchestrate more political disruptions, which would either destabilize the government further or force a crackdown that could then be cited in seeking more Contra aid.
Putting the Sandinistas in this "inside-outside" vise had always been part of the CIA strategy, but with a crumbling economy and more U.S. money pouring into the opposition groups, the gambit was beginning to work.
Yet, it was crucial to the plan that the CIA's covert relationship with Nicaragua's internal opposition remain secret, not so much from the Sandinistas, who had detailed intelligence about this thoroughly penetrated operation, but from the American people. The U.S. public would get outraged at Sandinista reprisals against these "independent" groups only if the CIA's hand were kept hidden.
A rich opportunity for the Reagan administration presented itself in summer 1988 when a new spasm of Contra ambushes killed 17 Nicaraguans and the anti-Sandinista internal opposition staged a violent demonstration in the town of Nandaime, a protest that Sandinista police dispersed with tear gas.
Reacting to the renewed violence, the Sandinistas closed down La Prensa and the Catholic Church's radio station both prime vehicles for anti-Sandinista propaganda. The Nicaraguan government also expelled U.S. Ambassador Richard Melton and seven other U.S. Embassy personnel for allegedly coordinating the disorders.
Major U.S. news outlets, which had accepted their role as treating the Sandinistas as "designated enemies" of the United States, roared in outrage, and the U.S. Congress condemned the moves by a margin of 94-4 in the Senate and 385-18 in the House.
Melton then testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee first in secret and then in public, struggling to hide the open secret in Washington that Nicaragua's internal opposition, like the Contras, was getting covert help from the U.S. government.
When asked by a senator in public session about covert American funding to the opposition, Melton dissembled awkwardly: "As to other activities that might be conducted, that's they were discussed that would be discussed yesterday in the closed hearing."
When pressed by Sen. Howard Metzenbaum on whether the embassy provided "encouragement financial or otherwise of dissident elements," Melton responded stiffly: "The ambassador in any post is the principal representative of the U.S. government. And in that capacity, fulfills those functions." He then declined to discuss "activities of an intelligence nature" in open session.
On the Payroll
In other words, yes, the U.S. government was covertly organizing and funding the activities of the supposedly "independent" internal opposition in Nicaragua. And, according to more than a dozen sources that I interviewed inside the Contra movement or close to U.S. intelligence, the Reagan administration had funneled CIA money to virtually every segment of the internal opposition, from the Catholic Church to La Prensa to business and labor groups to political parties.
"We've always had the internal opposition on the CIA payroll," one U.S. government official said. The CIA's budget line for Nicaraguan political action separate from Contra military operations was about $10 million a year, my sources said. I learned that the CIA had been using the Church and Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo to funnel money into Nicaragua.
Obando was a plodding but somewhat complex character. In the 1970s, he had criticized the repression of the Somoza dictatorship and expressed some sympathy for the young Sandinista revolutionaries who were trying to bring social and economic changes to Nicaragua.
However, after the murder of El Salvador's Archbishop Romero in 1980 and Pope John Paul II's repudiation of "liberation theology," Obando shifted clumsily into the anti-Sandinista camp, attacking the "people's church" and accusing the Sandinistas of "godless communism."
On May 25, 1985, he was rewarded when the Pope named him Cardinal for Central America. Then, despite mounting evidence of Contra atrocities, Obando traveled to the United States in January 1986 and threw his support behind a renewal on military aid to the Contras.
All this made a lot more sense after factoring in that Obando had essentially been put onto the CIA's payroll. The CIA funding for Nicaragua's Catholic Church was originally unearthed in 1985 by the congressional intelligence oversight committees, which then insisted that the money be cut off to avoid compromising Obando further.
But the funding was simply transferred to another secret operation headed by White House aide Oliver North. In fall 1985, North earmarked $100,000 of his privately raised money to go to Obando for his anti-Sandinista activities, I learned from my sources.
I was also told that the CIA's support for Obando and the Catholic hierarchy went through a maze of cut-outs in Europe, apparently to give Obando deniability. But one well-placed Nicaraguan exile said he had spoken with Obando about the money and the Cardinal had expressed fear that his past receipt of CIA funding would come out.
What to Do?
Discovering this CIA funding of Nicaragua's Catholic Church presented professional problems for me at Newsweek, where my senior editors were already making clear that they sympathized with the Reagan administration's muscular foreign policy and felt that the Iran-Contra scandal had gone too far in undermining U.S. interests.
But what was the right thing for an American journalist to do with this information? Here was a case in which the U.S. government was misleading the American public by pretending that the Sandinistas were cracking down on the Catholic Church and the internal opposition without any justification. Plus, this U.S. propaganda was being used to make the case in Congress for an expanded war in which thousands of Nicaraguans were dying.
However, if Newsweek ran the story, it would put CIA assets, including Cardinal Obando, in a dicey situation, possibly even life-threatening. So, when I presented the information to my bureau chief, Evan Thomas, I made no recommendation on whether we should publish or not. I just laid out the facts as I had ascertained them. To my surprise, Thomas was eager to go forward.
Newsweek contacted its Central America correspondent Joseph Contreras, who outlined our questions to Obando's aides and prepared a list of questions to present to the Cardinal personally. However, when Contreras went to Obando's home in a posh suburb of Managua, the Cardinal literally evaded the issue.
As Contreras later recounted in a cable back to Newsweek in the United States, he was approaching the front gate when it suddenly swung open and the Cardinal, sitting in the front seat of his burgundy Toyota Land Cruiser, blew past.
As Contreras made eye contact and waved the letter, Obando's driver gunned the engine. Contreras jumped into his car and hastily followed. Contreras guessed correctly that Obando had turned left at one intersection and headed north toward Managua.
Contreras caught up to the Cardinal's vehicle at the first stop-light. The driver apparently spotted the reporter and, when the light changed, sped away, veering from lane to lane. The Land Cruiser again disappeared from view, but at the next intersection, Contreras turned right and spotted the car pulled over, with its occupants presumably hoping that Contreras had turned left.
Quickly, the Cardinal's vehicle pulled onto the road and now sped back toward Obando's house. Contreras gave up the chase, fearing that any further pursuit might appear to be harassment. Several days later, having regained his composure, the Cardinal finally met with Contreras and denied receiving any CIA money. But Contreras told me that Obando's denial was unconvincing.
Newsweek drafted a version of the story, making it appear as if we weren't sure of the facts about Obando and the money. When I saw a "readback" of the article, I went into Thomas's office and said that if Newsweek didn't trust my reporting, we shouldn't run the story at all. He said that wasn't the case; it was just that the senior editors felt more comfortable with a vaguely worded story.
Hot Water
We ended up in hot water with the Reagan administration and right-wing media attack groups anyway. Accuracy in Media lambasted me, in particular, for going with such a sensitive story without being sure of the facts (which, of course, I was).
Thomas was summoned to the State Department where Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams heaped more criticism on me though not denying the facts of our story. Newsweek also agreed, in the face of right-wing pressure, to subject me and the article to an internal investigation, which quietly reconfirmed the facts of the story.
Despite this corroboration, the incident damaged my relations with senior Newsweek editors, particularly executive editor Maynard Parker who saw himself as part of the New York/Washington foreign policy establishment and was deeply hostile to the Iran-Contra scandal, which I had helped expose.
As for Obando, the Sandinistas did nothing to punish him for his collaboration with the CIA and he gradually evolved more into a figure of reconciliation than confrontation. However, the hyper-secretive Vatican has refused to open its archives for any serious research into its relationship with the CIA and other Western intelligence services.
Whenever allegations do arise about the Catholic Church's hierarchy winking and nodding at the kinds of human rights atrocities that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s, the Vatican PR department lashes out with sternly worded denials.
That practice is playing out again in the days after the election of Pope Francis I. Rather than a serious and reflective assessment of the actions (and inactions) of Cardinal Bergoglio, Cardinal Obando, Pope John Paul II and other Church leaders during those dark days of torture and murder, the Vatican simply denounces all allegations as "slander," "calumny" and politically motivated lies.

http://consortiumnews.com/2013/03/16/pop...th-squads/

[Magda Hassan]

Evita, the Swiss and the Nazis

March 16, 2013

From the Archive: Jorge Bergoglio's election to be Pope Francis has revived troubling questions about the Catholic Church's role in the Argentine "dirty war" and other right-wing repression in Latin America of the 1970s and '80s. But the history goes back to ties to the Nazis, as the late Georg Hodel wrote in 1999.
By Georg Hodel (Originally published Jan. 7, 1999)
On June 6, 1947, Argentina's first lady Eva Peron left for a glittering tour of Europe. The glamorous ex-actress was feted in Spain, kissed the ring of Pope Pius XII at the Vatican and hobnobbed with the rich-and-famous in the mountains of Switzerland.
Eva Peron, known as "Evita" by her adoring followers, was superficially on a trip to strengthen diplomatic, business and cultural ties between Argentina and important leaders of Europe. But there was a parallel mission behind the high-profile trip, one that has contributed to a half century of violent extremism in Latin America.

Argentine First Lady Eva Peron during a 1947 trip to Europe.

According to records emerging from Swiss archives and the investigations of Nazi hunters, an unpublicized side of Evita's world tour was coordinating the network for helping Nazis relocate in Argentina. This new evidence of Evita's cozy ties with prominent Nazis corroborates the long-held suspicion that she and her husband, Gen. Juan Peron, laid the groundwork for a bloody resurgence of fascism across Latin America in the 1970s and '80s.
Besides blemishing the Evita legend, the evidence threatens to inflict more damage on Switzerland's image for plucky neutrality. The international banking center is still staggering from disclosures about its wartime collaboration with Adolf Hitler and Swiss profiteering off his Jewish victims. The archival records indicate that Switzerland's assistance to Hitler's henchmen didn't stop with the collapse of the Third Reich.
And the old Swiss-Argentine-Nazi connection reaches to the present in another way. Spanish "superjudge" Baltasar Garzon sought to open other Swiss records on bank accounts controlled by Argentine military officers who led the so-called "Dirty War" that killed and "disappeared" tens of thousands of Argentines between 1976-83.
During World War II, Gen. Peron a populist military leader made no secret of his sympathies for Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany. Even as the Third Reich crumbled in the spring of 1945, Peron remained a pro-fascist stalwart, making available more than 1,000 blank passports for Nazi collaborators fleeing Europe.
With Europe in chaos and the Allies near victory, tens of thousands of ranking Nazis dropped out of sight, tried to mix in with common refugees and began plotting escapes from Europe to Argentina across clandestine "ratlines."
At the Argentine end of that voyage was Rodolfo Freude. He also was Juan Peron's private secretary, one of Evita's principal benefactors and the chief of Argentine internal security. Freude's father, Ludwig, played another key role. As managing director of the Banco Aleman Transatlantico in Buenos Aires, he led the pro-Nazi German community in Argentina and acted as trustee for hundreds of millions of German Reichsmarks that the Fuehrer's top aides sent to Argentina near the war's end.
Finding New Homes
By 1946, the first wave of defeated fascists was settling into new Argentine homes. The country also was rife with rumors that the thankful Nazis had begun to repay Peron by bankrolling his campaign for the presidency, which he won with his stunning wife at his side.
In 1947, Peron was living in Argentina's presidential palace and was hearing pleas from thousands of other Nazis desperate to flee Europe. The stage was set for one of the most troubling boatlifts in human history. The archival records reveal that Eva Peron stepped forward to serve as Gen. Peron's personal emissary to this Nazi underground. Already, Evita was an Argentine legend.
Born in 1919 as an illegitimate child, she became a prostitute to survive and to get acting roles. As she climbed the social ladder lover by lover, she built up deep resentments toward the traditional elites. As a mistress to other army officers, she caught the eye of handsome military strongman Juan Peron. After a public love affair, they married in 1945.
As Peron's second wife, Evita fashioned herself as the "queen of the poor," the protector of those she called "mis descamisados" "my shirtless ones." She created a foundation to help the poor buy items from toys to houses.
But her charity extended, too, to her husband's Nazi allies. In June 1947, Evita left for post-war Europe. A secret purpose of her first major overseas trip apparently was pulling together the many loose ends of the Nazi relocation.
Evita's first stop on her European tour was Spain, where Generalissimo Francisco Franco her husband's model and mentor greeted her with all the dignified folderol of a head of state. A fascist who favored the Axis powers but maintained official neutrality in the war, Franco had survived to provide a haven for the Third Reich's dispossessed. Franco's Spain was an important early hide-out for Nazis who slipped through the grasp of the Allies and needed a place to stay before continuing on to more permanent homes in Latin America or the Middle East.
While in Spain, Evita reportedly met secretly with Nazis who were part of the entourage of Otto Skorzeny, the dashing Austrian commando leader known as Scarface because of a dueling scar across his left cheek. Though under Allied detention in 1947, Skorzeny already was the purported leader of the clandestine organization, Die Spinne or The Spider, which used millions of dollars looted from the Reichsbank to smuggle Nazis from Europe to Argentina.
After escaping in 1948, Skorzeny set up the legendary ODESSA organization which tapped into other hidden Nazi funds to help ex-SS men rebuild their lives and the fascist movement in South America.
Meeting Pius XII
Evita's next stop was equally fitting. The charismatic beauty traveled to Rome for an audience with Pope Pius XII, a Vatican meeting that lasted longer than the usual kiss on the ring.
At the time, the Vatican was acting as a crucial way station doling out forged documents for fascist fugitives. Pope Pius himself was considered sympathetic to the tough anti-communism of the fascists although he had kept a discreet public distance from Hitler.
A top-secret State Department report from May 1947 a month before Evita's trip had termed the Vatican "the largest single organization involved in the illegal movement of emigrants," including many Nazis. Leading ex-Nazis later publicly thanked the Vatican for its vital assistance. [For details, see Martin A. Lee's The Beast Reawakens.]
As for the Evita-Pius audience, former Justice Department Nazi-hunter John Loftus has charged that the First Lady of the Pampas and His Holiness discussed the care and feeding of the Nazi faithful in Argentina.
After her Roman holiday, Evita hoped to meet Great Britain's Queen Elizabeth. But the British government balked out of fear that the presence of Peron's wife might provoke an embarrassing debate over Argentina's pro-Nazi leanings and the royal family's own pre-war cuddling up to Hitler.
Instead, Evita diverted to Rapallo, a town near Genoa on the Italian Rivera. There, she was the guest of Alberto Dodero, owner of an Argentine shipping fleet known for transporting some of the world's most unsavory cargo.
On June 19, 1947, in the midst of Evita's trip, the first of Dodero's ships, the "Santa Fe," arrived in Buenos Aires and disgorged hundreds of Nazis onto the docks of their new country. Over the next few years, Dodero's boats would carry thousands of Nazis to South America, including some of Hitler's vilest war criminals, the likes of Mengele and Eichmann, according to Argentine historian Jorge Camarasa.
On Aug. 4, 1947, Evita and her entourage headed north to the stately city of Geneva, a center for international finance. There, she participated in more meetings with key figures from the Nazi escape apparatus.
A Swiss diplomat named Jacques-Albert Cuttat welcomed the onetime torch singer. The meeting was a reunion of sorts, since Evita had known Cuttat when he worked at the Swiss Legation in Argentina from 1938 to 1946.
Swiss Bank Accounts
Documents from Argentina's Central Bank showed that during the war, the Swiss Central Bank and a dozen Swiss private banks maintained suspicious gold accounts in Argentina. Among the account holders was Jacques-Albert Cuttat.
The Swiss files accused Cuttat of conducting unauthorized private business and maintaining questionable wartime contacts with known Nazis. In spite of those allegations, the Swiss government promoted Cuttat to chief of protocol of the Swiss Foreign Service, after his return from Argentina to Switzerland.
In that capacity, Cuttat escorted Eva Peron to meetings with senior Swiss officials. The pair went to see Foreign Minister Max Petitpierre and Philipp Etter, the Swiss president. Etter extended a warm welcome to Evita, even accompanying her the next day on a visit to the city of Lucerne, "the doorway to the Swiss Alps."
After her "official" duties had ended, Evita dropped out of public view. Supposedly, she joined some friends for rest and recreation in the mountains of St. Moritz. But the documents recounting her Swiss tour revealed that she continued making business contacts that would advance both Argentine commerce and the relocation of Hitler's henchmen. She was a guest of the "Instituto Suizo-Argentino" at a private reception at the Hotel "Baur au Lac" in Zurich, the banking capital of Switzerland's German-speaking sector.
There, Professor William Dunkel, the president of the Institute, addressed an audience of more than 200 Swiss bankers and businessmen plus Eva Peron on the wonderful opportunities about to blossom in Argentina. Swiss archival documents explained what was behind the enthusiasm. Peron's ambassador to Switzerland, Benito Llambi, had undertaken a secret mission to create a sort of emigration service to coordinate the escape of the Nazis, particularly those with scientific skills.
Already, Llambi had conducted secret talks with Henry Guisan Jr., a Swiss agent whose clients included a German engineer who had worked for Wernher von Braun's missile team. Guisan offered Llambi the blueprints of German "V2″ and "V3″ rockets.
Guisan himself emigrated to Argentina, where he established several firms that specialized in the procurement of war materiel. His ex-wife later told investigators, "I had to attend business associates of my former husband I'd rather not shake hands with. When they started to talk business I had to leave the room. I only remember that millions were at stake."
The Second Nazi Emigration
Intelligence files of the Bern Police Department show that the secret Nazi emigration office was located at Marktgasse 49 in downtown Bern, the Swiss capital. The operation was directed by three Argentines Carlos Fuldner, Herbert Helfferich and Dr. Georg Weiss. A police report described them as "110 percent Nazis."
The leader of the team, Carlos Fuldner, was the son of German immigrants to Argentina who had returned to Germany to study. In 1931, Fuldner joined the SS and later was recruited into German foreign intelligence.
At war's end, Fuldner fled to Madrid with a planeload of stolen art, according to a U.S. State Department report. He then moved to Bern where he posed as a representative of the Argentinean Civil Air Transport Authority. Fuldner was in place to assist the first wave of Nazi emigres.
One of the first Nazis to reach Buenos Aires via the "ratlines" was Erich Priebke, an SS officer accused of a mass execution of Italian civilians. Another was Croat Ustashi leader Ante Pavelic. They were followed by concentration camp commander Joseph Schwamberger and the sadistic Auschwitz doctor, Joseph Mengele.
Later, on June 14, 1951, the emigrant ship, "Giovanna C," carried Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann to Argentina where he posed as a technician under a false name. Fuldner found Eichmann a job at Mercedes-Benz. (Israel intelligence agents captured Eichmann in May 1960 and spirited him to Israel to stand trial for mass murder. He was convicted, sentenced to death and hanged in 1962.)
Though Evita's precise role in organizing the Nazi "ratlines" remains a bit fuzzy, her European tour connected the dots of the key figures in the escape network. She also helped clear the way for more formal arrangements in the Swiss-Argentine-Nazi collaboration.
Additional evidence is contained in postwar diplomatic correspondence between Switzerland and Argentina. The documents reveal that the head of the Swiss Federal Police, Heinrich Rothmund, and the former Swiss intelligence officer Paul Schaufelberger participated in the activities of the illegal Argentine emigration service in Bern.
For instance, one urgent telegram from Bern to the Swiss Legation in Rome stated: "The (Swiss) Police Department wants to send 16 refugees to Argentina with the emigration ship that leaves Genoa March 26 [1948]. Stop. All of them carry Swiss ID cards and have return visa. Stop."
Scientific Help
Besides political sympathies, the Peron government saw an economic pay-off in smuggling German scientists to work in Argentine factories and armaments plants. The first combat jet introduced into South America the "Pulque" was built in Argentina by the German aircraft designer Kurt Tank of the firm, Focke-Wulf. His engineers and test pilots arrived via the illegal emigration service in Bern.
But other Nazi scientists who reached the protected shores of Argentina were simply sadists. One physician, Dr. Carl Vaernet, had conducted surgical experiments on homosexuals at the Buchenwald concentration camp. Vaernet castrated the men and then inserted metal sex glands that inflicted agonizing deaths on some of his patients. [See Lee's The Beast Reawakens.]
For the Swiss, the motives for their cozy Nazi-Argentine relationships were political and financial, both during and after the war. Ignacio Klich, spokesman for an independent commission investigating Nazi-Argentine collaboration, said he believes the wartime business between Nazi Germany and Argentina was handled routinely by Swiss fiduciaries.
That suspicion was confirmed by Swiss files released to the U.S. Senate as well as papers from the Swiss Office of Compensation and correspondence between the Swiss Foreign Ministry and the Swiss legation in Buenos Aires.
One target of the commission's investigation is Johann Wehrli, a private banker from Zurich. During World War II, one of Wehrli's sons opened a branch office in Buenos Aires which, investigators suspect, was used to funnel Nazi assets into Argentina. The money allegedly included loot from Jews and other Nazi victims. (Later, the giant Union Bank of Switzerland absorbed the Wehrli bank.)
Swiss defenders argue that tiny Switzerland had little choice but to work with the powerful fascist governments on its borders during the war. But the post-war assistance appears harder to justify, when the most obvious motive was money.
According to a secret report written by a U.S. Army major in 1948, the Swiss government made a hefty profit by providing Germans with the phony documents needed to flee to Argentina. The one-page memo quoted a confidential informant with contacts in the Swiss and Dutch governments as saying, "The Swiss government was not only anxious to get rid of German nationals, legally or illegally within their borders, but further that they made a considerable profit in getting rid of them."
The informant said German nationals paid Swiss officials as much as 200,000 Swiss francs for temporary residence documents necessary to board flights out of Switzerland. (The sum was worth about $50,000 at the time.) Moreover, that memo and other documents suggest that KLM Royal Dutch Airlines may have illegally flown suspected Nazis to safety in Argentina, while Swissair acted as a booking agent.
The Beloved Evita
Back in Argentina, the rave reviews for Evita's European trip cemented her reputation as a superstar. It also brought her immense wealth lavished on her by grateful Nazis. Her husband was re-elected president in 1951, by which time large numbers of Nazis were firmly ensconced in Argentina's military-industrial apparatus.
Evita Peron died of cancer in 1953, touching off despair among her followers. The fearful military buried her secretly in an unannounced location to prevent her grave from becoming a national shrine.
Meanwhile, a feverish hunt began for her personal fortune. Evita's brother and guardian of her image, Juan Duarte, traveled to Switzerland in search of her hidden assets. After his return to Argentina, Duarte was found dead in his apartment. Despite her husband's control of the police or maybe because of it the authorities never established whether Duarte was murdered or had committed suicide.
In 1955, Juan Peron was overthrown and fled to exile in Spain where he lived as a guest of Franco. Peron apparently accessed some of Evita's secret Swiss accounts because he sustained a luxurious lifestyle. The money also may have greased Peron's brief return to power in 1973. Peron died in 1974, leaving behind the mystery of Evita's Nazi fortune. In 1976, the army overthrew Peron's vice president, his last wife, Isabel.
Paradoxically, the cult of Evita flourished still. The idolatry blinded her followers to the consequences of her flirtation with the Nazis.
Those aging fascists accomplished much of what the ODESSA strategists had hoped. The Nazis in Argentina kept Hitler's torch burning, won new converts in the region's militaries, and passed on the advanced science of torture and "death squad" operations.
Hundreds of left-wing Peronist students and unionists were among the victims of the neo-fascist Argentine junta that launched the Dirty War in 1976.
The Butcher of Lyon
When the junta started its "war without borders" against the Left elsewhere in Latin America, it used Nazis as storm troopers. Among them was Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo's Butcher of Lyon who had settled in Bolivia with the help of the "ratline" network.
In 1980, Barbie helped organize a brutal putsch against the democratically elected government in Bolivia. Drug lords and an international coalition of neo-fascists bankrolled the putsch. A key supporting role was played by the World Anti-Communist League, led by World War II fascist war criminal Ryoichi Sasakawa of Japan and the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.
Barbie sought assistance from Argentine intelligence. One of the first Argentine officers to arrive, Lt. Alfred Mario Mingolla, later described Barbie's role to German journalist Kai Hermann.
"Before our departure, we received a dossier on [Barbie]," Mingolla said. "There it stated that he was of great use to Argentina because he played an important role in all of Latin America in the fight against communism."
Just like in the good old days, the Butcher of Lyon worked with a younger generation of Italian neo-fascists. Barbie started a secret lodge called "Thule," where he lectured his followers underneath swastikas by candlelight.
On July 17, 1980, Barbie, his neo-fascists and rightist officers from the Bolivian army ousted the center-left government. Barbie's team hunted down and slaughtered government officials and labor leaders, while Argentine specialists flew in to demonstrate the latest torture techniques.
Because the putsch gave Bolivian drug lords free reign of the country, the operation became known as the Cocaine Coup. With the assistance of Barbie and his neo-fascists, Bolivia became a protected source of cocaine for the emerging Medellin cartel. Two years later, Barbie was captured and extradited to France where he died in prison. [For more details, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]
Most of the other old Nazis are dead, too. But the violent extremism that the Perons transplanted into South America in the 1940s long haunted the region.
In the 1980s, the Argentine military extended its operations to Central America where it collaborated with Ronald Reagan's CIA in organizing paramilitary forces, such as the Nicaraguan Contras and Honduran "death squads."
Even today, as right-wing dictators in Latin America are called to account for past atrocities, fledgling democracies must move cautiously and keep a wary eye on rightists in the region's potent militaries. The ghosts of Evita's Nazis are never far away.
http://consortiumnews.com/2013/03/16/evi...the-nazis/

[Jan Klimkowski]

Robert Parry tells it like it was.

And is.

On the Payroll
In other words, yes, the U.S. government was covertly organizing and funding the activities of the supposedly "independent" internal opposition in Nicaragua. And, according to more than a dozen sources that I interviewed inside the Contra movement or close to U.S. intelligence, the Reagan administration had funneled CIA money to virtually every segment of the internal opposition, from the Catholic Church to La Prensa to business and labor groups to political parties.
"We've always had the internal opposition on the CIA payroll," one U.S. government official said. The CIA's budget line for Nicaraguan political action separate from Contra military operations was about $10 million a year, my sources said. I learned that the CIA had been using the Church and Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo to funnel money into Nicaragua.
Obando was a plodding but somewhat complex character. In the 1970s, he had criticized the repression of the Somoza dictatorship and expressed some sympathy for the young Sandinista revolutionaries who were trying to bring social and economic changes to Nicaragua.
However, after the murder of El Salvador's Archbishop Romero in 1980 and Pope John Paul II's repudiation of "liberation theology," Obando shifted clumsily into the anti-Sandinista camp, attacking the "people's church" and accusing the Sandinistas of "godless communism."
On May 25, 1985, he was rewarded when the Pope named him Cardinal for Central America. Then, despite mounting evidence of Contra atrocities, Obando traveled to the United States in January 1986 and threw his support behind a renewal on military aid to the Contras.
All this made a lot more sense after factoring in that Obando had essentially been put onto the CIA's payroll. The CIA funding for Nicaragua's Catholic Church was originally unearthed in 1985 by the congressional intelligence oversight committees, which then insisted that the money be cut off to avoid compromising Obando further.
But the funding was simply transferred to another secret operation headed by White House aide Oliver North. In fall 1985, North earmarked $100,000 of his privately raised money to go to Obando for his anti-Sandinista activities, I learned from my sources.
I was also told that the CIA's support for Obando and the Catholic hierarchy went through a maze of cut-outs in Europe, apparently to give Obando deniability. But one well-placed Nicaraguan exile said he had spoken with Obando about the money and the Cardinal had expressed fear that his past receipt of CIA funding would come out.

Again, Bergoglio is either a moral coward or complicit.

In either case, he is not fit to be the custodian of the gospel of Jesus, to be Pope.

Archbishop Oscar Romero was a priest with moral courage, and told the truth:

In less than three years, more than fifty priests have been attacked, threatened, calumniated. Six are already martyrs -- they were murdered. Some have been tortured and others expelled [from the country]. Nuns have also been persecuted. The archdiocesan radio station and educational institutions that are Catholic or of a Christian inspiration have been attacked, threatened, intimidated, even bombed. Several parish communities have been raided. If all this has happened to persons who are the most evident representatives of the Church, you can guess what has happened to ordinary Christians, to the campesinos, catechists, lay ministers, and to the ecclesial base communities. There have been threats, arrests, tortures, murders, numbering in the hundreds and thousands. . . . But it is important to note why [the Church] has been persecuted. Not any and every priest has been persecuted, not any and every institution has been attacked. That part of the church has been attacked and persecuted that put itself on the side of the people and went to the people's defense. Here again we find the same key to understanding the persecution of the church: the poor.

Óscar Romero, Speech at the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium, Feb. 2, 1980

For telling the truth and siding with the poor in a very real sense, Archbishop Oscar Romero was murdered by a team led by one of America's favourite fascists, Roberto D'Aubuisson

D'Aubuisson was known as "Blowtorch Bob", due to the sadistic glee with which he used a blowtorch whilst torturing (official language "interrogating") anyone with a functioning moral conscience.

Archbishop Oscar Romero may have been fit to be the custodian of the gospel of Jesus Christ. To be Pope.

But that was never going to happen.

Instead, the Catholic Church in latin America sold out the "liberation theology" priests and sided with the United Fruit Company & its successors against the poor.

Here's an appropriate song:

[Jan Klimkowski]

Here is the story of how a truly brave priest, who cared for his flock, for the poor, lived the last years of his life.

On March 23rd, 1980, one day before his murder, he (Romero) called for revolutionary defeatism among the Salvadorian military, asking soldiers in the National Guard, the police and the military to refuse to obey orders. "Brothers, you are from the same people; you kill your fellow peasant . . . No soldier is obliged to obey an order that is contrary to the will of God…In the name of God then, in the name of this suffering people I ask you, I beg you, I command you in the name of God: stop the repression!"

Romero was murdered for daring to care and to speak.

If the Vatican and MSM want to claim that Pope Bergoglio is a priest of the poor, let's compare his actions to those of Archbishop Oscar Romero.

The Assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero

"When the church hears the cry of the oppressed it cannot but denounce the social structures that give rise to and perpetuate the misery from which the cry arises." Oscar Romero

"A church that suffers no persecution but enjoys the privileges and support of the things of the earth beware! is not the true church of Jesus Christ. A preaching that does not point out sin is not the preaching of the gospel. A preaching that makes sinners feel good, so that they are secured in their sinful state, betrays the gospel's call." Oscar Romero

"The church would betray its own love for God and its fidelity to the gospel if it stopped being . . . a defender of the rights of the poor . . . a humanizer of every legitimate struggle to achieve a more just society . . . that prepares the way for the true reign of God in history." Oscar Romero

One of the catalysts for escalation of the war was the famous assassination of Óscar Arnulfo Romero, two weeks after José Napoleón Duarte became the leader of junta. The fourth Archbishop of San Salvador, Romero was initially appointed as Archbishop on February 23, 1977. He was a predictable and orthodox bookworm, elected as a compromise candidate by conservative fellow bishops. He had a reputation for a pious and timid approach, which caused some dissent among priests espousing liberation theology, who felt his appointment would undermine the Catholic clergy's commitment to the poor. The people of El Salvador never expected him to come out on their side. The Salvadorian Civil War would soon have a deep impact on Romero, however.

On March 12th, 1977, Rutilio Grande García, a Jesuit priest and a very close friend of Romero's, was assassinated along with Manuel Solorzano, 72, and Nelson Rutilio Lemus, 16, by machine gun fire. It was well-known that landowners saw Grande's work among the peasants as a threat to their power, as he was a leading champion of the poor, a promoter of liberation theology and had been deeply involved in creating groups among the campesinos. He had been targeted for stating that the big landowners' dogs ate better the campesino children whose fathers worked in their fields.

After the killing of Father Grande, Romero went to the church to view the three bodies and spent many hours praying and hearing the stories of the suffering farmers. Romero stated, "When I looked at Rutilio lying there dead I thought, If they have killed him for doing what he did, then I too have to walk the same path.'"

The next morning, Romero announced that he had changed his stance toward the government as Archbishop he would no longer attend any state functions or meet with the president. The murder of Grande would never be investigated by the government, despite Romero's repeated pleas to do so. From that time on, Romero's rhetoric became more revolutionary, speaking out against poverty, social injustice, assassinations and torture by government forces. "Those who work on the side of the poor suffer the same fate as the poor," he said. He stopped the building of a cathedral, and said it would not resume until the war was over and the hungry were fed. He met Pope John Paul II and criticized his support of the military government despite its wholesale massacres and violations of human rights.

On March 14, 1977, Romero publically stated in two newspapers that his view of the murders was that Father Rutilio Grande was killed for political reasons, for raising the spirit of the people. The following Sunday, Romero canceled Masses throughout the archdiocese in protest. He instead held Mass in one small cathedral in San Salvador, where he was joined by 150 priests and over 100,000 people, who listened eagerly to Romero's calls to end the violence. Romero soon earned a reputation as the "bishop of the poor."

"In 1980 the war claimed the lives of 3,000 per month, with cadavers clogging the streams, and tortured bodies thrown in garbage dumps and the streets of the capitol weekly. With one exception, all the Salvadoran bishops turned their backs on him, going so far as to send a secret document to Rome reporting him, accusing him of being politicized' and of seeking popularity." (10)

In an attempt to defend the Salvadorian people, he called for international intervention to prevent murders by security forces. Romero also criticized the United States for sending the junta aid, and wrote to Jimmy Carter in February of 1980, saying that further aid would "undoubtedly sharpen the injustice and the repression inflicted on the organized people, whose struggle has often been for their most basic human rights." He added, ""You say that you are Christian. If you are really Christian, please stop sending military aid to the military here, because they use it only to kill my people." The President ignored his plea and continued to pour 1.5 million dollars of aid a day into El Salvador for years, as did his successors. His letter never received a response.

"I have often been threatened with death," he had told a Guatemalan reporter two weeks before his assassination. "If they kill me, I shall arise in the Salvadoran people. If the threats come to be fulfilled, from this moment I offer my blood to God for the redemption and resurrection of El Salvador. Let my blood be a seed of freedom and the sign that hope will soon be reality."

"Romero had the only uncensored voice in San Salvador, a small radio station. It broadcast the names of people who were missing. It would happen that a man would be taken off and never heard from again, and his family would ask a priest for help in tracing him. These things soon wound up in the archbishop's lap. He wanted answers, why people were arrested and what was happening to them." (8).

Romero associated daily with hundreds of the poor, traveled the countryside and assisted the suffering. Many times he drove out to a garbage dump where bodies were often taken by government death squads after torture and execution. He would dig through the garbage to find the bodies, often accompanied by friends or family members. "These days I walk the roads gathering up dead friends, listening to widows and orphans, and trying to spread hope," he said.

Weeks after writing the letter to Jimmy Carter, Romero leaped headfirst into the fire on March 23rd, 1980, one day before his murder, he called for revolutionary defeatism among the Salvadorian military, asking soldiers in the National Guard, the police and the military to refuse to obey orders. "Brothers, you are from the same people; you kill your fellow peasant . . . No soldier is obliged to obey an order that is contrary to the will of God…In the name of God then, in the name of this suffering people I ask you, I beg you, I command you in the name of God: stop the repression!"

Photo appeared in El País on 7 November 2009 with the information that the state of El Salvador recognized its responsibility in the crime.

On March 24th, 1980, one day after his sermon calling on the soldiers to not obey the military, Romero was giving Mass in a small chapel located in a hospital called "La Divina Providencia" for a funeral of someone who been murdered a week before. The chapel was full as always because of his newfound popularity. While raising the chalice at the end of the Eucharistic rite, a gunman shot him through the heart with a sniper rifle. His blood covered the altar and he fell, gasping for breath in front of the terrified crowd. He was dead within minutes.

According to sources, just before the bullets fell Romero, he uttered the words, "One must not love oneself so much, as to avoid getting involved in the risks of life that history demands of us, and those that fend off danger will lose their lives."

Days before his murder Archbishop Romero told a reporter, "You can tell the people that if they succeed in killing me, that I forgive and bless those who do it. Hopefully, they will realize they are wasting their time. A bishop will die, but the church of God, which is the people, will never perish." He added, "I do not believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will be resurrected in the Salvadoran people."

It is widely believed that the killers were members of a death squad trained by the United States. In an official report by the United Nations in 1993, it was announced that an army Major by the name of Roberto D'Aubuisson, a School of the Americas graduate with counterinsurgency intelligence experience, had ordered the killing of Romero. Captain Álvaro Rafael Saravia, who participated in the assassination, said the effort was led by D'Aubuisson. D'Aubuisson had publically spoken of the need to "take care" of the Archbishop, a statement which he made in the context of publically speaking of the need to kill 200,000 or 300,000 to restore order to El Salvador.

Years later, in the National Security Archive, scholars obtained a declassified document about a conversation with Roberto D'Aubuisson in which he bragged about planning the killing of Archbishop Romero, and in which he mentions a lottery between the members of his death squads in which the "winners" would be the ones to kill Romero. D'Aubuisson would found his own far-right party, the Nationalist Republic Alliance or ARENA, not long after the murder of Romero. ARENA would dominate the political scene in El Salvador until 1989.

Romero's funeral was attended by 250,000 mourners, and was called the largest demonstration in El Salvador's history. It was fired upon by army forces. Some who attended were shot down in front of the cathedral by snipers from the rooftops. Romero is considered the unofficial patron saint of the Americas and El Salvador. He is often referred to as "San Romero" or "Saint Romero" in El Salvador and throughout the world.

Despite this title, the Catholic Church has been reluctant to recognize the murdered priest, although they have beatified many less-deserving figures, as an essay by Dr. Michael Parenti points out:

"John Paul also beatified Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac, the leading Croatian cleric who welcomed the Nazi and fascist Ustashi takeover of Croatia during World War II. Stepinac sat in the Ustashi parliament, appeared at numerous public events with top ranking Nazis and Ustashi, and openly supported the Croatian fascist regime that exterminated hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Roma ("gypsies").

In John Paul's celestial pantheon, reactionaries had a better chance at canonization than reformers. Consider his treatment of Archbishop Oscar Romero who spoke against the injustices and oppressions suffered by the impoverished populace of El Salvador and for this was assassinated by a right-wing death squad. John Paul never denounced the killing or its perpetrators, calling it only tragic.' In fact, just weeks before Romero was murdered, high-ranking officials of the Arena party, the legal arm of the death squads, sent a well-received delegation to the Vatican to complain of Romero's public statements on behalf of the poor.

Romero was thought by many poor Salvadorans to be something of a saint, but John Paul attempted to ban any discussion of his beatification for fifty years. Popular pressure from El Salvador caused the Vatican to cut the delay to twenty-five years. […] In either case, Romero was consigned to the slow track." (9)

[Magda Hassan]

Here is the story of how a truly brave priest, who cared for his flock, for the poor, lived the last years of his life.

On March 23rd, 1980, one day before his murder, he (Romero) called for revolutionary defeatism among the Salvadorian military, asking soldiers in the National Guard, the police and the military to refuse to obey orders. "Brothers, you are from the same people; you kill your fellow peasant . . . No soldier is obliged to obey an order that is contrary to the will of God…In the name of God then, in the name of this suffering people I ask you, I beg you, I command you in the name of God: stop the repression!"

Romero was murdered for daring to care and to speak.

If the Vatican and MSM want to claim that Pope Bergoglio is a priest of the poor, let's compare his actions to those of Archbishop Oscar Romero.

Just seeing the use of Bergoglio's name in the same sentence as the beautiful Oscar Romero is jarring. The pope is not fit to wash Oscar Romero's feet.

[Magda Hassan]

Is Pope Francis a Fraud?

After a right-wing coup crushed the reforms of Vatican II, one scholar says the last two popes are illegitimate.







Pope Francis waves upon arrival for a private audience with members of the media at the Paul VI hall at the Vatican, on March 16, 2013. The pontiff has called for "a poor Church for the poor", saying he chose his papal name because St Francis of Assisi wa



March 16, 2013 |

It's easy maybe too easy for people with progressive political views to dismiss the Roman Catholic Church as a vile anachronism, a nightmarish patriarchy of aging pedophiles, woman-haters, homophobes and/or closet cases that can offer nothing of value to the contemporary world. [Sounds about right M.H.] When it comes to the church hierarchy, and especially the Roman Curia, the corrupt and labyrinthine Vatican bureaucracy that makes the Soviet-era Kremlin look like a model of transparency, that point of view seems more than justified.

But the church is not just the hierarchy, and as the spectacle of the last several days has demonstrated, there are millions or billions of people around the world Catholics and non-Catholics alike who wish the newly elected Pope Francis well and yearn to see in him the possibility of hope and renewal for this ancient, powerful and heavily tarnished institution that claims direct succession from the apostles of Jesus. As the first Latin American pope and the first Jesuit pope, Francis represents a break with tradition in several ways. Both the name he has chosen and his personal modesty and humility are meant to recall St. Francis of Assisi, one of the most adored figures in the Christian tradition, and no doubt also St. Francis de Sales, a 17th-century mystic, author and ascetic known for his devotion to the poor.
But the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio emerges from a Jesuit order that has been largely purged of its independent-minded or left-leaning intellectuals, and his reputation at home in Latin America is decidedly mixed. While Francis seems to be an appealing personality in some ways albeit one with a shadowy relationship with the former military dictatorship in Argentina, along with a record on gay rights that borders on hate speech it's difficult to imagine that he can or will do anything to arrest the church's long slide into cultural irrelevance and neo-medieval isolation. His papacy, I suspect, comes near the end of a thousand-year history of the Vatican's global rise to power, ambiguous flourishing and rapid decline. It also comes after 40 years of internal counterrevolution under the previous two popes, during which a group of hardcore right-wing cardinals have consolidated power in the Curia and stamped out nearly all traces of the 1960s liberal reform agenda of Pope John XXIII and Vatican II.A handful of intellectuals, both inside and outside the church, quietly believe that means Pope Francis isn't a legitimate pope at all.
I'm a "legacy Catholic," or ancestral Catholic, rather than the genuine article; my parents were both previously married and declined to come crawling back and undergo the necessary humiliation. Then again, as the former Dominican priest, radical theologian and bestselling author Matthew Fox told me in a recent phone conversation, a large number of the 1.2 billion believers the church claims are "disaffiliated Catholics, ex-Catholics, Catholics with one foot in and one foot out." Like many of those people, I'm not immune to all the emotion and adulation being poured onto the new pope just because I think it's misplaced. More than anything else, that passion is the enduring, if confusing, legacy of Vatican II, the historic reform council of 196265 that promised all sorts of big changes within Catholicism that never quite came to pass.
As Fox and many other Catholic and ex-Catholic dissidents see it, Vatican II marked the moment when the church had the chance to reinvent itself as a flexible moral and spiritual force in a rapidly changing world. Indeed, it briefly seemed to do just that and it's important to understand that Bergoglio, like Joseph Ratzinger and Karol Wojtyla before him, was part of the right-wing counterrevolution within the church that aggressively rolled back those changes, crushed dissident thought and reasserted the absolute power of the pope and his hierarchy. Pope Francis is a longtime ally of Communion and Liberation, a fiercely conservative Catholic organization that insists on "total fidelity and communion" with the church leadership and is devoted, among other things, to battling European socialism and Latin American liberation theology. In Italian politics, CL has been closely tied to the party of Silvio Berlusconi, and its founder was an intimate friend of Cardinal Ratzinger before he became Benedict XVI.
If you engaged with the Catholic church in any way between the mid-1960s and the late 1970s, you witnessed the limited effects of Vatican II on the ground: the Mass was in English and could partly be understood (more's the pity); many dioceses were afflicted with faintly groovy young priests and nuns who played folk guitar; fish was no longer mandatory for Friday night's dinner (an innovation resisted to this day by many older Catholics). But Vatican II was intended at least by Pope John XXIII, who convened it, and the group of theologians who wrote and rewrote its central documents to cover a lot more ground than Mrs. Paul's fish sticks and "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore."
Vatican II offered the promise of a church that communicated openly with the modern world. It specifically repudiated the church's history of anti-Semitism and vowed to pursue dialogue with non-Catholics and non-Christians of many stripes. It held out the possibility of a new dogmatic flexibility in which the church would assert the truth of the Christian Gospels while permitting freedom of conscience on a wide range of issues. Millions of learned words have been written on what was and was not addressed or implied in the ambiguous Latin prose crafted by the bishops and scholars of Vatican II, but it might be fair to sum it all up this way: No specific promises were made about changing church policy on priestly celibacy or the role of women or the moral status of homosexuality or the decentralization of Vatican power. But it was implied or understood by many participants and observers that those issues were potentially on the table, and at least you wouldn't be punished or excommunicated for discussing them.
There was an ideological counterattack against Vatican II almost immediately, with Cardinal Ratzinger as its intellectual leader, and that became the dominant current in the church hierarchy after the ascension of John Paul II in 1978. Fox believes that the last two popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, departed so far from both the letter and spirit of Vatican II which should have been viewed as the authoritative teachings of the church that they should be considered "schismatic," or illegitimate. "In the Catholic tradition, a council trumps a pope," he says. "A pope does not trump a council." (In the great tradition of Catholic intellectuals, he cites precedence in the Council of Constance, convened in 1414, which fired three warring popes and appointed a new one.) "What's happened since John Paul II is that he and Ratzinger have turned back all the basic principles of Vatican II. I would include the principle of freedom of conscience, the principle that theologians have a right to think. They brought the Inquisition back, there's no question about it."
Fox's 2012 book "The Pope's War: Why Ratzinger's Secret Crusade Has Imperiled the Church and How It Can Be Saved" contains a list of 105 prominent Catholic theologians who have been silenced or expelled under the last two popes, including many influential figures of the Vatican II period and its aftermath. Fox himself is on the list; he was silenced by then-Cardinal Ratzinger in 1988 after publishing his New Age-flavored bestseller "The Coming of the Cosmic Christ" and expelled from the Dominican order five years later. (I noted during our conversation that Fox, who is now an Episcopal priest, consistently refers to the most recent pope his particular nemesis as "Ratzinger" rather than Benedict XVI.) This climate of inquisition, Fox says, "runs totally contrary to the entire attitude and teaching of Vatican II. In the Vatican councils, they defined the church as the people, not as the hierarchy. Under these last two popes, it's all about the hierarchy."
Fox insists that he's not alone in believing that the authoritarian reign of the last two popes represents a kind of illegitimate intra-Catholic coup d'état. He says he got the idea from the late Edward Schillebeeckx, a prominent liberal Dutch theologian and Dominican priest who managed to remain inside the church, at a private lunch in the late 1990s. "He told me, I and many other European theologians feel that the present papacy' that would have been John Paul II is in schism.' My response was very American. I said immediately, What are we gonna do about it?' I'll never forget his look, which without saying anything said, These Americans are so crazy. They think you can do something!'"
Fox argues, in essence, that the Schillebeeckx doctrine means the official church no longer exists or, to put it another way, that the power of the church has been diffused and now belongs to everyone. "What it means is that every cardinal, priest and bishop anointed in the last 42 years is illegitimate. What that means to the Catholic in the pew is, Hey, there's no one looking over your shoulder!' If you're trying to live out the principles of Vatican II, combined of course with the Gospels, that's what the church is. The church is the people."
That's a lovely argument as well as a distinctively Catholic one, I would say and ex-Catholics and dissidents who already agree with Fox will no doubt find it unassailable. But those Catholics who'd like to go to Mass on Sunday and simply wish the church could be a bit less antiquated and noxious may not find it satisfying. Fox imagines a grassroots-based, decades-long popular uprising within the church, one that would install female priests and openly gay priests and married priests, would reclaim the spirit of Vatican II and ultimately render the repellent and backward hierarchy irrelevant. That's a lovely idea too, but in the meantime we have the realities of political power, and a new pope with a soft spot for dictatorship and a hatred of gays at the reins of a decaying right-wing junta with especially fancy uniforms. Fox's friend Schillebeeckx saw this coming more than 20 years ago, when he wrote that many conservatives of the John Paul II era were pushing toward a shrinking, outdated and increasingly isolated "monolith church … a ghetto church, a church of the little flock, the holy remnant."
When I asked Fox whether he actually held out hope for Pope Francis, he briefly tried to be diplomatic, saying he was praying for the new pontiff and wished him well. Then he said, "But remember that all those cardinals that voted for him were appointed by John Paul II and Ratzinger" and therefore, from Fox's point of view, are not legitimate cardinals at all. "They're all cut from the same cloth. Can he break out of that history, that background? That would take a major miracle."
http://www.alternet.org/pope-francis-fra...paging=off

[Danny Jarman]

Here is the story of how a truly brave priest, who cared for his flock, for the poor, lived the last years of his life.

On March 23rd, 1980, one day before his murder, he (Romero) called for revolutionary defeatism among the Salvadorian military, asking soldiers in the National Guard, the police and the military to refuse to obey orders. "Brothers, you are from the same people; you kill your fellow peasant . . . No soldier is obliged to obey an order that is contrary to the will of God…In the name of God then, in the name of this suffering people I ask you, I beg you, I command you in the name of God: stop the repression!"

Romero was murdered for daring to care and to speak.

If the Vatican and MSM want to claim that Pope Bergoglio is a priest of the poor, let's compare his actions to those of Archbishop Oscar Romero.

The Assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero

"When the church hears the cry of the oppressed it cannot but denounce the social structures that give rise to and perpetuate the misery from which the cry arises." Oscar Romero

"A church that suffers no persecution but enjoys the privileges and support of the things of the earth beware! is not the true church of Jesus Christ. A preaching that does not point out sin is not the preaching of the gospel. A preaching that makes sinners feel good, so that they are secured in their sinful state, betrays the gospel's call." Oscar Romero

"The church would betray its own love for God and its fidelity to the gospel if it stopped being . . . a defender of the rights of the poor . . . a humanizer of every legitimate struggle to achieve a more just society . . . that prepares the way for the true reign of God in history." Oscar Romero

One of the catalysts for escalation of the war was the famous assassination of Óscar Arnulfo Romero, two weeks after José Napoleón Duarte became the leader of junta. The fourth Archbishop of San Salvador, Romero was initially appointed as Archbishop on February 23, 1977. He was a predictable and orthodox bookworm, elected as a compromise candidate by conservative fellow bishops. He had a reputation for a pious and timid approach, which caused some dissent among priests espousing liberation theology, who felt his appointment would undermine the Catholic clergy's commitment to the poor. The people of El Salvador never expected him to come out on their side. The Salvadorian Civil War would soon have a deep impact on Romero, however.

On March 12th, 1977, Rutilio Grande García, a Jesuit priest and a very close friend of Romero's, was assassinated along with Manuel Solorzano, 72, and Nelson Rutilio Lemus, 16, by machine gun fire. It was well-known that landowners saw Grande's work among the peasants as a threat to their power, as he was a leading champion of the poor, a promoter of liberation theology and had been deeply involved in creating groups among the campesinos. He had been targeted for stating that the big landowners' dogs ate better the campesino children whose fathers worked in their fields.

After the killing of Father Grande, Romero went to the church to view the three bodies and spent many hours praying and hearing the stories of the suffering farmers. Romero stated, "When I looked at Rutilio lying there dead I thought, If they have killed him for doing what he did, then I too have to walk the same path.'"

The next morning, Romero announced that he had changed his stance toward the government as Archbishop he would no longer attend any state functions or meet with the president. The murder of Grande would never be investigated by the government, despite Romero's repeated pleas to do so. From that time on, Romero's rhetoric became more revolutionary, speaking out against poverty, social injustice, assassinations and torture by government forces. "Those who work on the side of the poor suffer the same fate as the poor," he said. He stopped the building of a cathedral, and said it would not resume until the war was over and the hungry were fed. He met Pope John Paul II and criticized his support of the military government despite its wholesale massacres and violations of human rights.

On March 14, 1977, Romero publically stated in two newspapers that his view of the murders was that Father Rutilio Grande was killed for political reasons, for raising the spirit of the people. The following Sunday, Romero canceled Masses throughout the archdiocese in protest. He instead held Mass in one small cathedral in San Salvador, where he was joined by 150 priests and over 100,000 people, who listened eagerly to Romero's calls to end the violence. Romero soon earned a reputation as the "bishop of the poor."

"In 1980 the war claimed the lives of 3,000 per month, with cadavers clogging the streams, and tortured bodies thrown in garbage dumps and the streets of the capitol weekly. With one exception, all the Salvadoran bishops turned their backs on him, going so far as to send a secret document to Rome reporting him, accusing him of being politicized' and of seeking popularity." (10)

In an attempt to defend the Salvadorian people, he called for international intervention to prevent murders by security forces. Romero also criticized the United States for sending the junta aid, and wrote to Jimmy Carter in February of 1980, saying that further aid would "undoubtedly sharpen the injustice and the repression inflicted on the organized people, whose struggle has often been for their most basic human rights." He added, ""You say that you are Christian. If you are really Christian, please stop sending military aid to the military here, because they use it only to kill my people." The President ignored his plea and continued to pour 1.5 million dollars of aid a day into El Salvador for years, as did his successors. His letter never received a response.

"I have often been threatened with death," he had told a Guatemalan reporter two weeks before his assassination. "If they kill me, I shall arise in the Salvadoran people. If the threats come to be fulfilled, from this moment I offer my blood to God for the redemption and resurrection of El Salvador. Let my blood be a seed of freedom and the sign that hope will soon be reality."

"Romero had the only uncensored voice in San Salvador, a small radio station. It broadcast the names of people who were missing. It would happen that a man would be taken off and never heard from again, and his family would ask a priest for help in tracing him. These things soon wound up in the archbishop's lap. He wanted answers, why people were arrested and what was happening to them." (8).

Romero associated daily with hundreds of the poor, traveled the countryside and assisted the suffering. Many times he drove out to a garbage dump where bodies were often taken by government death squads after torture and execution. He would dig through the garbage to find the bodies, often accompanied by friends or family members. "These days I walk the roads gathering up dead friends, listening to widows and orphans, and trying to spread hope," he said.

Weeks after writing the letter to Jimmy Carter, Romero leaped headfirst into the fire on March 23rd, 1980, one day before his murder, he called for revolutionary defeatism among the Salvadorian military, asking soldiers in the National Guard, the police and the military to refuse to obey orders. "Brothers, you are from the same people; you kill your fellow peasant . . . No soldier is obliged to obey an order that is contrary to the will of God…In the name of God then, in the name of this suffering people I ask you, I beg you, I command you in the name of God: stop the repression!"

Photo appeared in El País on 7 November 2009 with the information that the state of El Salvador recognized its responsibility in the crime.

On March 24th, 1980, one day after his sermon calling on the soldiers to not obey the military, Romero was giving Mass in a small chapel located in a hospital called "La Divina Providencia" for a funeral of someone who been murdered a week before. The chapel was full as always because of his newfound popularity. While raising the chalice at the end of the Eucharistic rite, a gunman shot him through the heart with a sniper rifle. His blood covered the altar and he fell, gasping for breath in front of the terrified crowd. He was dead within minutes.

According to sources, just before the bullets fell Romero, he uttered the words, "One must not love oneself so much, as to avoid getting involved in the risks of life that history demands of us, and those that fend off danger will lose their lives."

Days before his murder Archbishop Romero told a reporter, "You can tell the people that if they succeed in killing me, that I forgive and bless those who do it. Hopefully, they will realize they are wasting their time. A bishop will die, but the church of God, which is the people, will never perish." He added, "I do not believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will be resurrected in the Salvadoran people."

It is widely believed that the killers were members of a death squad trained by the United States. In an official report by the United Nations in 1993, it was announced that an army Major by the name of Roberto D'Aubuisson, a School of the Americas graduate with counterinsurgency intelligence experience, had ordered the killing of Romero. Captain Álvaro Rafael Saravia, who participated in the assassination, said the effort was led by D'Aubuisson. D'Aubuisson had publically spoken of the need to "take care" of the Archbishop, a statement which he made in the context of publically speaking of the need to kill 200,000 or 300,000 to restore order to El Salvador.

Years later, in the National Security Archive, scholars obtained a declassified document about a conversation with Roberto D'Aubuisson in which he bragged about planning the killing of Archbishop Romero, and in which he mentions a lottery between the members of his death squads in which the "winners" would be the ones to kill Romero. D'Aubuisson would found his own far-right party, the Nationalist Republic Alliance or ARENA, not long after the murder of Romero. ARENA would dominate the political scene in El Salvador until 1989.

Romero's funeral was attended by 250,000 mourners, and was called the largest demonstration in El Salvador's history. It was fired upon by army forces. Some who attended were shot down in front of the cathedral by snipers from the rooftops. Romero is considered the unofficial patron saint of the Americas and El Salvador. He is often referred to as "San Romero" or "Saint Romero" in El Salvador and throughout the world.

Despite this title, the Catholic Church has been reluctant to recognize the murdered priest, although they have beatified many less-deserving figures, as an essay by Dr. Michael Parenti points out:

"John Paul also beatified Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac, the leading Croatian cleric who welcomed the Nazi and fascist Ustashi takeover of Croatia during World War II. Stepinac sat in the Ustashi parliament, appeared at numerous public events with top ranking Nazis and Ustashi, and openly supported the Croatian fascist regime that exterminated hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Roma ("gypsies").

In John Paul's celestial pantheon, reactionaries had a better chance at canonization than reformers. Consider his treatment of Archbishop Oscar Romero who spoke against the injustices and oppressions suffered by the impoverished populace of El Salvador and for this was assassinated by a right-wing death squad. John Paul never denounced the killing or its perpetrators, calling it only tragic.' In fact, just weeks before Romero was murdered, high-ranking officials of the Arena party, the legal arm of the death squads, sent a well-received delegation to the Vatican to complain of Romero's public statements on behalf of the poor.

Romero was thought by many poor Salvadorans to be something of a saint, but John Paul attempted to ban any discussion of his beatification for fifty years. Popular pressure from El Salvador caused the Vatican to cut the delay to twenty-five years. […] In either case, Romero was consigned to the slow track." (9)

Thanks for this! I never knew about Romero.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Thanks for this! I never knew about Romero.

And that's the way the Unholy Alliance would like to keep it....

[Jan Klimkowski]

Argentina and Italy.

Two countries with tangled ratlines from WW2 to the Dirty War, from false flags to holy bankers.

Including P2.

Just sayin'.....

Partial list of P2 members:

Silvio Berlusconi, businessman, future founder of the Forza Italia political party and Prime Minister of Italy.[24][25]
Michele Sindona, banker linked to the Mafia.[26]
Roberto Calvi, so-called "banker of God", allegedly killed by the Mafia.[26][27]
Umberto Ortolani, leading P2-member.[28]
Franco Di Bella, director of Corriere della Sera.[14][25] Di Bella had commissioned a long interview with Gelli, who openly talked of his plans for a "democratic renaissance" in Italyincluding control over the media. The interview was carried out by the television talk show host Maurizio Costanzo, who would also be exposed as a member of P2.[15]
Angelo Rizzoli Jr., owner of Corriere della Sera, today cinema producer.[25]
Bruno Tassan Din, general director of Corriere della Sera.[25]
General Vito Miceli, chief of the SIOS (Servizio Informazioni), Italian Army Intelligence's Service from 1969 and SID's head from October 18, 1970 to 1974. Arrested in 1975 on charges of "conspiracy against the state" concerning investigations about Rosa dei venti, a state-infiltrated group involved in the strategy of tension, he later became an Italian Social Movement (MSI) member.[29][30]
Federico Umberto D'Amato, leader of an intelligence cell (Ufficio affari riservati) in the Italian Minister of Interior.[31][32]
General Giuseppe Santovito, head of the military intelligence service SISMI (19781981).[11][29]
Admiral Giovanni Torrisi, Chief of the General Staff of the Army.[11][29]
General Giulio Grassini, head of the intelligence service SISDE (19771981).[11][29]
General Pietro Musumeci, deputy director of Italy's military intelligence service, SISMI.[29]
General Franco Picchiotti.[29]
General Giovambattista Palumbo.[29]
General Raffaele Giudice, commander of the Guardia di Finanza (19741978).[29] Appointed by Giulio Andreotti, Giudice conspired with oil magnate Bruno Musselli and others in a lucrative tax fraud of as much as $2.2 billion.[11][33]
General Orazio Giannini, commander of the Guardia di Finanza (19801981).[29] On the day the list was discovered Giannini phoned the official in charge of the operation, and told him (according the official's testimony to the parliamentary commission): "You better know that you've found some lists. I'm in those lists be careful, because so too are all the highest echelons (I understood 'of the state') ... Watch out, the Force will be overwhelmed by this."[7]
Carmine Pecorelli, a controversial journalist assassinated on March 20, 1979. He had drawn connections in a May 1978 article between the kidnapping of Aldo Moro and Operation Gladio.[34]
Maurizio Costanzo, popular television talk show host of Mediaset programmes (Mediaset is Berlusconi's commercial television network).[15]
Pietro Longo, secretary of the Italian Democratic Socialist Party (PSDI).[35]
Fabrizio Cicchitto, member of the Italian Socialist Party, who later joined Berlusconi's centre-right party Forza Italia.[11]
Federico Carlos Barttfeld (Argentina), ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1991 to 1995,[5] under-secretary of state in Néstor Kirchner's government, relieved of his functions in 2003 following allegations of involvement in the Dirty War.[36]
Emilio Massera (Argentina), a member of the military junta led by Jorge Rafael Videla in Buenos Aires from 1976 to 1978.[5][37]
José López Rega (Argentina), Argentinian minister of Social Welfare in Perón's government, founder of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance ("Triple A").[5]
Aldo Alasia, (Argentina) [38]
Cesar De la Vega, (Argentina) [39]
Raúl Alberto Lastiri, (Argentina) President from 13 July 1973 until 12 October 1973[37]
Alberto Vignes, (Argentina) minister of Argentina[37]
Carlos Alberto Corti, (Argentina) admiral from Argentina[37]