Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Pope Francis - Inconvenience of the Resurrection of that nasty Liberation Theology stuff thrown over the cliff by Reagan, Thatcher and Wojtyla - History of Silence


An old fashioned style do nothing Holy Card Pope?


In the back of the Attention Deficit brain of the dumbed down since Reagan mindset, there lies that CIA secret war on Terror (of Terror?) in Central and South America that never officially took place (Iran Contra – Wink Nod) that us proud fair-minded when it comes to rich white heterosexual people only, freedom luvin Americans are proud of when we see the flag and play the national anthem kind of thing.

And then there is that nasty gritty Allende/Kissinger Junta Coup de Tat Chile Sauce stuff that has to get reduced to ten second sound bites and spoon fed to us by Brian Williams on NBC nightly national news every night.

Well they elected a genuine Argentine as pope, but that’s is okay. His dad and granddad were born in Italy, (he is white, sort of, for an Italian, Wink Nod). 

And the RC church is now goin to recruit all them lost millions of sheep of South American Pentecostals back from all that Pentecostal demon stuff once Pope Francis gets up a head of steam into his estimated five to six year reign of power to turn around the Cold Gray Lady of the Vatican and it's bureaucratic Gay Porn loving bureaucracy, around to the concept that Jesus loved the po' folks or at least tried to put up with their smelly po' folks way of doing things, "takers" on welfare kind of thing and all that.

And there are those who say that Cardinal Bergoglio actually saved some people from the Gestapo Junta and he deserves to be made a saint too like Saint Pius XII that saved all them Jew folks in WWII.

And then again there is reality.


Blase Bonpane, who served as a Maryknoll father in Guatemala until he was expelled by the right-wing military in 1967, was among the priests and nuns who believed in the teachings of liberation theology, which held that the Catholic Church must address the plight and marginalization of the poor. 

 Bonpane, now director of the Office of the Americas and host of “World Focus” on Pacifica Radio, expressed grave concerns about the silence of the new Pope Francis, who as Father Jorge Mario Bergoglio did not speak out publicly against the Argentine junta as it conducted a “dirty war” killing some 30,000 people, including 150 Catholic priests. Bonpane was interviewed by Dennis J. Bernstein.

DB: Talk to us about the new pope Francis, who has been portrayed widely as a pope of the people, who rides the bus, love sports and has a lot of sympathy for the poor How would you describe his background and his relationship, if any, to the Argentine “dirty wars.”

 BB: I would say that he is a populist conservative. But we have a problem that is structural within the church, and that is that the church has generally been subsidiary to the state and has generally gone along with the state in its history since the Council of Nicea in 325 AD.

 There seems to be no exception in Argentina where most of the reports we received during the “dirty wars” were of the clerics not speaking out as they should have. And many of them opposing individual priests that were liberation theologians. In certain cases this led to the arrest of priests, such as Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalic who were kidnapped and practically killed by the Junta.

 Afterward, Orlando Yorio spoke about the situation of surviving months of imprisonment. He felt it was because the church had said he was a liberation theologian and they didn’t want to approve of him and his work in the slums of Buenos Aires. So yes, there are many accusations, most of them in the book The Silence, which refers to just that, the fact that silence is complicity and in some cases there is direct participation of clerics together with the junta.


[Junta leader Jorge Rafael] Videla could go to holy communion anytime and would be well received by the higher church in Argentina. This is tragic. But look at the situation in the U.S. Are our bishops speaking out against Guantanamo and that people are being held there? Are they speaking out on behalf of Bradley Manning? No. There’s a silence here as well.

 There is a history of silence. The Church supported Franco in Spain. We have the terrible situation with [Pope] Pius XII and his relationship to the Germans in the period of the Third Reich. It’s not unusual. It’s been a subservient church in many ways. The new pope has not been comfortable with liberation theology. It is possible to speak on behalf of the poor without supporting the real fundamental changes that are present with liberation theology.