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Pope Francis Has History of Anti-Gay Decisions
Pope
Francis waves to the crowd from the central balcony of St. Peter’s
Basilica at the Vatican (Source:AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)
Francis waves to the crowd from the central balcony of St. Peter’s
Basilica at the Vatican (Source:AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)
VATICAN
CITY -- In unadorned white robes, the first pope from the Americas sets
a tone of simplicity and pastoral humility in a church desperate to
move past the tarnished era of abuse scandals and internal Vatican
upheavals.
The choice of Argentine Cardinal Jorge
Bergoglio -- who took the name Francis -- reflected a series of
history-making decisions by fellow cardinals who seemed determined to
offer a message of renewal to a church under pressures on many fronts.
The
76-year-old archbishop of Buenos Aries -- the first from Latin America
and the first from the Jesuit order -- bowed to the crowds in St.
Peter’s Square and asked for their blessing in a hint of the austere
style he cultivated while modernizing the Argentina’s conservative
Catholic church.
In taking the name Francis, he
drew connections to the 13th century St. Francis of Assisi, who saw his
calling as trying to rebuild the church in a time of turmoil. It also
evokes images of Francis Xavier, one of the 16th century founders of the
Jesuit order that is known for its scholarship and outreach.
Francis,
the son of middle-class Italian immigrants, is known as a humble man
who denied himself the luxuries that previous Buenos Aires cardinals
enjoyed. He came close to becoming pope last time, reportedly gaining
the second-highest vote total in several rounds of voting before he
bowed out of the running in the conclave that elected Pope Benedict XVI.
Groups
of supporters waved Argentine flags in St. Peter’s Square as Francis,
wearing simple white robes, made his first public appearance as pope.
"Ladies
and Gentlemen, good evening," he said before making a reference to his
roots in Latin America, which accounts for about 40 percent of the
world’s Roman Catholics.
Bergoglio often rode the
bus to work, cooked his own meals and regularly visited the slums that
ring Argentina’s capital. He considers social outreach, rather than
doctrinal battles, to be the essential business of the church.
He accused fellow church leaders of hypocrisy and forgetting that Jesus Christ bathed lepers and ate with prostitutes.
"Jesus
teaches us another way: Go out. Go out and share your testimony. Go out
and interact with your brothers. Go out and share. Go out and ask.
Become the Word in body as well as spirit," Bergoglio told Argentina’s
priests last year.
Bergoglio’s legacy as cardinal
includes his efforts to repair the reputation of a church that lost
many followers by failing to openly challenge Argentina’s murderous
1976-83 dictatorship. He also worked to recover the church’s traditional
political influence in society, but his outspoken criticism of
President Cristina Kirchner couldn’t stop her from imposing socially
liberal measures that are anathema to the church, from gay marriage and
adoption to free contraceptives for all.
"In our
ecclesiastical region there are priests who don’t baptize the children
of single mothers because they weren’t conceived in the sanctity of
marriage," Bergoglio told his priests. "These are today’s hypocrites.
Those who clericalize the Church. Those who separate the people of God
from salvation. And this poor girl who, rather than returning the child
to sender, had the courage to carry it into the world, must wander from
parish to parish so that it’s baptized!"
This
sort of pastoral work, aimed at capturing more souls and building the
flock, is an essential skill for any religious leader in the modern era,
said Bergoglio’s authorized biographer, Sergio Rubin.
Bergoglio
himself felt most comfortable taking a very low profile, and his
personal style has been the antithesis of Vatican splendor.
"It’s
a very curious thing: When bishops meet, he always wants to sit in the
back rows. This sense of humility is very well seen in Rome," Rubin said
before the 2013 conclave to choose Benedict’s successor.
Bergoglio’s
influence seemed to stop at the presidential palace door after Nestor
Kirchner and then his wife, Cristina Fernandez, took over the
Argentina’s government.
His church had no say
when the Argentine Supreme Court expanded access to legal abortions in
rape cases, and when Bergoglio argued that gay adoptions discriminate
against children, Fernandez compared his tone to "medieval times and the
Inquisition."
This kind of demonization is
unfair, says Rubin, who obtained an extremely rare interview of
Bergoglio for his biography, the "The Jesuit."
"Is
Bergoglio a progressive -- a liberation theologist even? No. He’s no
third-world priest. Does he criticize the International Monetary Fund,
and neoliberalism? Yes. Does he spend a great deal of time in the slums?
Yes," Rubin said.
His
church had no say when the Argentine Supreme Court expanded access to
legal abortions in rape cases, and when Bergoglio argued that gay
adoptions discriminate against children, Fernandez compared his tone to
"medieval times and the Inquisition.&q
church had no say when the Argentine Supreme Court expanded access to
legal abortions in rape cases, and when Bergoglio argued that gay
adoptions discriminate against children, Fernandez compared his tone to
"medieval times and the Inquisition.&q
Bergoglio
has stood out for his austerity. Even after he became Argentina’s top
church official in 2001, he never lived in the ornate church mansion
where Pope John Paul II stayed when visiting the country, preferring a
simple bed in a downtown building, heated by a small stove on frigid
weekends. For years, he took public transportation around the city, and
cooked his own meals.
Bergoglio almost never
granted media interviews, limiting himself to speeches from the pulpit,
and was reluctant to contradict his critics, even when he knew their
allegations against him were false, said Rubin.
That
attitude was burnished as human rights activists tried to force him to
answer uncomfortable questions about what church officials knew and did
about the dictatorship’s abuses after the 1976 coup.
Many
Argentines remain angry over the church’s acknowledged failure to
openly confront a regime that was kidnapping and killing thousands of
people as it sought to eliminate "subversive elements" in society. It’s
one reason why more than two-thirds of Argentines describe themselves as
Catholic, but fewer than 10 percent regularly attend mass.
Under
Bergoglio’s leadership, Argentina’s bishops issued a collective apology
in October 2012 for the church’s failures to protect its flock. But the
statement blamed the era’s violence in roughly equal measure on both
the junta and its enemies.
"Bergoglio has been
very critical of human rights violations during the dictatorship, but he
has always also criticized the leftist guerrillas; he doesn’t forget
that side," Rubin said.
The bishops also said "we
exhort those who have information about the location of stolen babies,
or who know where bodies were secretly buried, that they realize they
are morally obligated to inform the pertinent authorities."
That
statement came far too late for some activists, who accused Bergoglio
of being more concerned about the church’s image than about aiding the
many human rights investigations of the Kirchners’ era.
Bergoglio
twice invoked his right under Argentine law to refuse to appear in open
court, and when he eventually did testify in 2010, his answers were
evasive, human rights attorney Myriam Bregman said.
At
least two cases directly involved Bergoglio. One examined the torture
of two of his Jesuit priests -- Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics --
who were kidnapped in 1976 from the slums where they advocated
liberation theology. Yorio accused Bergoglio of effectively handing them
over to the death squads by declining to tell the regime that he
endorsed their work. Jalics refused to discuss it after moving into
seclusion in a German monastery.
Both men were
freed after Bergoglio took extraordinary, behind-the-scenes action to
save them -- including persuading dictator Jorge Videla’s family priest
to call in sick so that he could say Mass in the junta leader’s home,
where he privately appealed for mercy. His intervention likely saved
their lives, but Bergoglio never shared the details until Rubin
interviewed him for the 2010 biography.
Bergoglio
-- who ran Argentina’s Jesuit order during the dictatorship -- told
Rubin that he regularly hid people on church property during the
dictatorship, and once gave his identity papers to a man with similar
features, enabling him to escape across the border. But all this was
done in secret, at a time when church leaders publicly endorsed the
junta and called on Catholics to restore their "love for country"
despite the terror in the streets.
Rubin said
failing to challenge the dictators was simply pragmatic at a time when
so many people were getting killed, and attributed Bergoglio’s later
reluctance to share his side of the story as a reflection of his
humility.
But Bregman said Bergoglio’s own
statements proved church officials knew from early on that the junta was
torturing and killing its citizens, and yet publicly endorsed the
dictators. "The dictatorship could not have operated this way without
this key support," she said.
Bergoglio also was
accused of turning his back on a family that lost five relatives to
state terror, including a young woman who was 5-months’ pregnant before
she was kidnapped and killed in 1977. The De la Cuadra family appealed
to the leader of the Jesuits in Rome, who urged Bergoglio to help them;
Bergoglio then assigned a monsignor to the case. Months passed before
the monsignor came back with a written note from a colonel: It revealed
that the woman had given birth in captivity to a girl who was given to a
family "too important" for the adoption to be reversed.
Despite
this written evidence in a case he was personally involved with,
Bergoglio testified in 2010 that he didn’t know about any stolen babies
until well after the dictatorship was over.
"Bergoglio
has a very cowardly attitude when it comes to something so terrible as
the theft of babies. He says he didn’t know anything about it until
1985," said the baby’s aunt, Estela de la Cuadra, whose mother Alicia
co-founded the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo in 1977 in hopes of
identifying these babies. "He doesn’t face this reality and it doesn’t
bother him. The question is how to save his name, save himself. But he
can’t keep these allegations from reaching the public. The people know
how he is."
Initially trained as a chemist,
Bergoglio taught literature, psychology, philosophy and theology before
taking over as Buenos Aires archbishop in 1998. He became cardinal in
2001, when the economy was collapsing, and won respect for blaming
unrestrained capitalism for impoverishing millions of Argentines.
Later,
there was little love lost between Bergoglio and Fernandez. Their
relations became so frigid that the president stopped attending his
annual "Te Deum" address, when church leaders traditionally tell
political leaders what’s wrong with society.
During
the dictatorship era, other church leaders only feebly mentioned a need
to respect human rights. When Bergoglio spoke to the powerful, he was
much more forceful. In his 2012 address, he said Argentina was being
harmed by demagoguery, totalitarianism, corruption and efforts to secure
unlimited power. The message resonated in a country whose president was
ruling by decree, where political scandals rarely were punished and
where top ministers openly lobbied for Fernandez to rule indefinitely.
******************************************************************
After Admitting to Gay Affairs, U.K. Cardinal Slammed for Hypocrisy
Cardinal Keith O’Brien (Source:AP Photo/Scott Campbell)
In
a highly unusual move, the spokesman for the Catholic Church in
Scotland has accused his own church of hypocrisy a week after Cardinal
Keith O’Brien apologized for having inappropriate sexual relationships
with other priests.
As reported in national British newspaper The Daily Mail , church spokesperson Peter Kearney, director of the Socttish Catholic
media office, criticized the church for having failed to support
individuals struggling with their sexual orientation. Priests who have
come forward as having been solicited by O’Brien say church officials
basically told them to shut their mouths.
O’Brien was forced to resign just before the College of Cardinal was set to meet in Rome to vote on a new pope after he admitted he had sexual relations with priests.
Kearney
cited incoming Archbishop Philip Tartaglia, who replaced O’Brien, of
tacitly supporting his accusations. "I think hypocrisy, as Archbishop
Tartaglia described it, is the stinging charge but it’s probably the
most accurate charge to make, under these circumstances," Kearney said.
Kearney
did add, however, in defense of O’Brien, that "we are all ’flawed,
fallible human beings.’ Everyone fails in one way or another, or at one
time or another."
As
if to prove the old adage that the guilty dog barks the loudest,
O’Brien was a force against all things gay. Not only was he the Catholic
Church’s most outspoken opponent of same-sex marriage (which looks to
become law in Great Britain soon); he compared homosexuality to drug
addiction, alcoholism and homelessness.
"If
there’s an area where the Church hasn’t been seen - frankly because it’s
not present - it’s in that area of compassionate, pastoral outreach to
people who are struggling with same-sex attraction, or they’re confused
about it and would love the chance to talk to someone in a
compassionate, pastoral context," O’Brien once said, in what now appears
to be a textbook case of self-denial. "If you’ve got a drug, or alcohol
problem, or homelessness, then we seem to be able to step in and offer
you support, help and options. But when it comes to human sexuality, it
just isn’t there at the moment."
O’Brien "lost everything because he was a hypocrite," Amy Philips wrote in British national newspaper the Daily Mirror . "And a nasty one, too. Almost exactly a year ago Keith O’Brien went
on the radio and said if gay marriage were to be legalized, ’further
aberrations would take place and society would be degenerating even
further than it already has into immorality.’"
"Whatever
the details of O’Brien’s actions, they appear to reflect a nauseatingly
familiar pattern within the church’s ranks," noted Mary Elizabeth
Williams in Salon .
Williams
said O’Brien pointed up the "coercion, secrecy and abuse of power"
endemic in the church’s highest ranks. "They reveal the sad and
sickening hypocrisy of the men within the church who’d use their
influence to attack others and thwart the progress of human rights, all
while indulging their own desires."
