New Pope and the Shame of Argentina

UPDATE #2  Andrew Sullivan, famed Catholic, still has questions about the Pope and torture, based on interview with author Verbitsky.  Even uses the word "Inquisition."

UPDATE #1:  The Guardian has deleted a key paragraph and run a major correction at bottom of very popular story from 2011 that it re-posted yesterday (see first link below).   Here's the correction:

The original article, published in 2011, wrongly suggested that Argentinian journalist Horacio Verbitsky claimed that Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio connived with the Argentinian navy to hide political prisoners on an island called El Silencio during an inspection by human rights monitors. Although Verbitsky makes other allegations about Bergoglio's complicity in human right abuses, he does not make this claim. The original article also wrongly described El Silencio as Bergoglio's "holiday home". This has been corrected

Earlier:  Writer for The Guardian wrote angry piece couple of years back.  Hiding folks from visiting human rights commission?  I don't know yet full story or his (maybe) offsetting good deeds (see AP report for some of that).  But those of us of a certain age certainly recall "the disappeared" very well.  So just an excerpt:

What one did not hear from any senior member of the Argentine hierarchy was any expression of regret for the church's collaboration and in these crimes. The extent of the church's complicity in the dark deeds was excellently set out by Horacio Verbitsky, one of Argentina's most notable journalists, in his book El Silencio (Silence). He recounts how the Argentine navy with the connivance of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now the Jesuit archbishop of Buenos Aires, hid from a visiting delegation of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission the dictatorship's political prisoners. Bergoglio was hiding them in nothing less than his holiday home in an island called El Silencio in the River Plate. The most shaming thing for the church is that in such circumstances Bergoglio's name was allowed to go forward in the ballot to chose the successor of John Paul II. What scandal would not have ensued if the first pope ever to be elected from the continent of America had been revealed as an accessory to murder and false imprisonment.

Another source here on how the Argentina bishops, unlike counterparts in Brazil, collaborated with instead of denouncing the dictators.

Greg Mitchell’s book So Wrong For So Long, on the media and the Iraq war, was published last week in an expanded edition for the first time as an e-book.