Opinion

All Francis’ enemies

If a man is known by his enemies, we’re encouraged by Pope Francis.

No sooner did the world greet its new pope than an old smear resurfaced: that he’d been complicit in the “dirty war” waged by Argentina’s military junta in the 1970s. Specifically, he’s accused of failing to protect two Jesuit priests while he served as leader of Argentina’s Jesuit community.

None of this is new. In fact, the same charge was raised to embarrass him at the outset of the 2005 papal conclave that elected Benedict. The accusation is most associated with Horacio Verbitsky, a man invariably described in the international press as a journalist, though rarely with any acknowledgment of his prior life in the terror group the Montoneros.

Even fewer note that Verbitsky’s paper backs the increasingly authoritarian government of Cristina Kirchner — the widow of former Argentine president Nestor Kirchner and an admirer of Hugo Chavez.

More revealing are the Argentines who themselves suffered from the junta — and tell a different story. In our sister paper, The Wall Street Journal, Mary Anastasia O’Grady listed some of them yesterday, defending then-Father Jorge Mario Bergoglio: Nobel Prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquival, who endured jail and torture; Alicia Oliviera, a former regime judge forced into hiding during those dark years, and Graciela Fernandez Meijide, a human-rights activist whose son was abducted by the junta when he was just a teen and never seen again.

Some of these people have serious disagreements with the pope — Fernandez Meijide, for example, is a pro-choice, pro-gay-marriage atheist — but they recognize a libel when they see one.

Which leads us to suspect that the pope’s real “crime” is that he’s popular in the slums of Buenos Aires. So when he criticizes the government, it comes with the one thing foes cannot bear: the credibility that comes from living the Gospel he preaches.

Make no mistake: The attacks on Pope Francis have little to do with concerns for what he did as Jesuit provincial in the 1970s — and everything to do with fears that his moral witness as pope may prove as damaging to the regimes of Latin America’s left as John Paul II’s was to the Berlin Wall.