Truly, wonders never cease. . .
We have a Jesuit Pope. . .named Francis. . .from Latin America.
And I, Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP. . .am linking to the NCR and commending an article written by Fr. Tom Reese, SJ.
Next, pigs will begin to fly. Trees will sprout gold coins. And B.O. will use the word "God" when quoting the Declaration of Independence.
But none of that is especially important. What IS important is the media's current attempt to smear our new Holy Father with false accusations that he helped the right-wing military dictatorship in Argentina during the Dirty War.
Fr. Reese parses the media disinformation and gets at the truth.
Read it carefully. You will undoubtedly hear more about this fantasy as F1's ministry as Peter begins to bear fruit.
_________________ Follow HancAquam or Subscribe and DONATE! ----->
Good, but Fr. Reese doesn't seem to be familiar with Liberation Theology, which makes heretical claims like "theology is born from the poor" and not from Christ, "the struggle confers to the faith its supernatural meaning" not unlike Rahner and not the other waya round, etc. Anyone embracing it is placing his and others' souls in jeopardy. And any zealous Christian would have the duty to rebuff it.
ReplyDeleteMoreover, the Argentinian newspaper which slammed pope Francis with this calumny, Página 12, is the unofficial spokesman of president Kirchner, who Card. Bergoglio criticized severely and in public, and the reporter, Verbitsky, is a former Marxist terrorist and murderer.
BTW, the Jesuits have a long tradition in protecting the victims of the princes of this world in Latin America, which they evangelized and where they founded dozens of cities, like Sao Paulo. After the Madrid Treaty between Portugal and Spain in 1750, the missions that the Jesuits founded were raided and indians were killed by the thousands, as can be seen in the film "The Mission", and led to their suppression when the pope caved to the pressure by these monarchs.
My guess is that Fr. Reese understands LibTheo just fine. . .and doesn't find it objectionable.
DeleteIt was the OP's on the canon law faculty in Salamanca who convinced the Holy Father at the time to declare the indigenous people's of the New World "human."
Salamanca, always popping up as a cauldron of godly studies and of a doctor of the Church, St. John of the Cross!
DeleteBelieve it or not, I hadn't read the linked article yet when I wrote my previous comment, but lo and behold, what did Fr. Reese write...? "There are disagreements over whether he did as much as he should have for them, but such debates always occur in these circumstances."
DeleteToldja...
I agree with Augustine. The article may be shed some light about the specific accusations but engages on already rebutted mystifications regarding Liberation Theology and that historical period in Latin America.
The thing to bear in mind is that these "collaboration" accusations won't cut it and Argentina's political situation 30 years ago is unlikely to remain a worldwide hot subject for much long, so what already seems to begin replacing them is that sort of generic "he didn't do everything he could" insinuation, which in MSM lingo just means "He wasn't the Commie sympathizer we wish he had been", which of course no faithful Catholic could possibly ever be.
ReplyDeleteI can speak only about my country and not Argentina but here the very small subset of Catholics that assumed an ostensibly collaborative position of the level alleged fell into disgrace around the late 70s when the military regimes began to wane politically and anti-Communism became unfashionable and degenerated into fringe rad-trad-like groups that either disappeared or got fractured and were reduced to irrelevance. The possibility of someone from that background managing to rise to Achbishop and then Pope, even at the time, let alone 20, 30 years later is just preposterous. I don't think the situation in Argentina could have been much different.
Except when one recalls that the Kirchners worked in banks which financed the military junta. That her lackeys go about accusing pope Francis of having done what they did is one of Lenin's text-book tactics. Make no mistake: to be accused by a gang of wealthy leftists in power is quite an endorsement of the innocence of pope Francis'.
DeleteI imagined that in Argentina, just like here, "opposition" politicians of yore turn left for profit, no news about that, but I didn't know about the Kirchners' "changing sides" too. That kind of promiscuity is probably why the military regime reportedly left Argentina in shambles, without the economic growth of Brazil and Chile.
DeleteThe Wall Street Journal had a column on how and why people are trying to smear Pope Francis. I think it was on the page before the last 2 pages of the first section, top column, sometime in the last week. I can't find it on their website, but I did find a VIDEO with the same title. I'll paste it in, but I don't know if it's behind a pay wall. The link goes directly to the video and it will start playing.
ReplyDeletehttp://live.wsj.com/video/opinion-smearing-the-pope/B942577A-53F4-4B77-9B69-CF19A35B6AAD.html?KEYWORDS=pope+francis#!B942577A-53F4-4B77-9B69-CF19A35B6AAD
Marie
Marie
DeleteAre you referring to this?
The problem with opening WSJ links is the stinkin' paywall, that can be circumvented by highlighting and copying the article title and opening it through Google. The first result usually opens it fully; go figure...
And that was a great one. Excerpt that says it all:
Delete"None of this matters to those trying to turn Argentina into the next Venezuela. What embitters them is that Father Bergoglio believed that Marxism (and the related "liberation theology") was antithetical to Christianity and refused to embrace it in the 1970s. That put him in the way of those inside the Jesuit order at the time who believed in revolution. It also put him at odds with the Montoneros, who were maiming, kidnapping and killing civilians in order to terrorize the population. Many of those criminals are still around and hold fast to their revolutionary dreams.
For them, the new pope remains a meddlesome priest. In the slums where the populist Mrs. Kirchner claims to be a champion of the poor, Francis is truly beloved because he lives the gospel. From the pulpit, with the Kirchners in the pews, he famously complained of self-absorbed politicians. He didn't name names, but the shoe fit. Nestór Kirchner, the late president and Cristina's husband, responded by naming him "the head of the opposition.""
You mean that a former Montonero like Verbitsky, the journalist who accused pope Francis? You don't say...
DeleteThank you MatheusFT for finding it. That's exactly the editorial I read.
ReplyDeleteMarie