As the young leader of Argentina’s Jesuits, the man who is now Pope Francis helped scores of dissidents escape from the country’s brutal military junta, which tortured and killed thousands of its own citizens, a new report revealed.
Francis – then a 30-something priest known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio – had been accused by critics of turning a blind eye to the atrocities carried out by the military regime, which ruled from 1976 to 1983.
But a pair of new books and a probe by the Associated Press that included interviews with people whose lives he helped save – risking his own neck in the process – have concluded that the future pope’s efforts were nothing short of heroic.
One of those extolling the pope is Gonzalo Mosca, a 27-year-old radical on the run who was wanted in Uruguay and fled to Argentina, where he narrowly escaped a military raid on his hideout.
“I thought that they would kill me at any moment,” Mosca recalled of his encounter with the junta.
With nowhere to turn, he called his brother, a Jesuit priest, who put him in touch with Father Bergoglio.
Bergoglio answered his call, and rode with him for nearly 20 miles to the Colegio Maximo in suburban San Miguel.
“He gave me instructions: ‘If they stop us, tell them you’re going to a spiritual retreat,’ and ‘Try to keep yourself a bit hidden,'” Mosca told the AP.
The terrified Mosca said he could hardly breathe until they had passed through the seminary’s heavy iron doors, but Bergoglio was very calm.
“He made me wonder if he really understood the trouble he was getting into. If they grabbed us together, they would have marched us both off,” said Mosca, who stayed hidden in the seminary for days, until Bergoglio got him an airplane ticket to Brazil.
Soldiers prowled inside the walled gardens, sniffing for fugitives.
But a full raid on the spiritual center was out of the question since Argentina’s dictators had cloaked themselves in the mantle of Roman Catholic nationalism – and because the church’s leaders supported the government.
And a constant flow of people masked Bergoglio’s scheming from an air force outpost next door.
Several new books assert that Bergoglio’s often-criticized public silence at the time enabled him to save more people.
“Bergoglio’s List,” by Vatican reporter Nello Scavo, is already being developed into a movie, its title playing on the “Schindler’s List” film about the Nazi businessman whose subterfuge saved hundreds of Jewish prisoners during the Holocaust.
Marcelo Larraquy, author of “Pray for Him,” told the AP that Bergoglio saved “20 or 30” people.
Scavo said about 100 owe him their lives.
Both authors say the full number will likely never be known, largely because Bergoglio remains so circumspect.
Like many Argentines, Bergoglio “remained silent in the face of atrocity,” but he was determined to thwart the death squads when he could, said Larraquy, who heads up investigations for the Argentine newspaper Clarin.
“He used back channels, did not complain in public and, meanwhile, he was saving people who sought refuge in the Colegio,” he said.
“He locked them up in the compound, gave them help and food, and set up a logistical network to get them out of the country,” Larraquy added. “But his condition for giving them refuge was that they had to give up all political activism.”
New ways of thinking were running through the lower ranks of Latin America’s Catholic Church in the 1970s, influenced by Vatican II reforms announced in 1965.
Many lay workers and clergy embraced “liberation theology,” which promoted social justice for the poor.
Many were politically active and some were Marxist, but others were simply committed social workers.
The right-wing military made few distinctions.
Priests as well as Catholic lay workers began to disappear at the hands of death squads.
Sitting in a seminary garden whose tranquility was broken only by the gurgling of a fountain and leaves rustling in the breeze, theologian Juan Carlos Scannone told the AP of the terror he felt decades ago.
Scannone said he was targeted because he promoted a non-Marxist “theology of the people” and worked with slum-dwellers in the city’s “misery villages.”
He said Bergoglio not only defended him against criticism within the church, but personally delivered his writings for publication even when the military was trying to find him.
“It was risky,” Scannone said. “Bergoglio told me never to go out alone, that I take someone along so that there would be witnesses if I disappeared.”
Scannone said he “wrote a lot about the philosophy of liberation and the theology of liberation, which at the time was a naughty word … Bergoglio would read it and tell me, ‘Don’t mail this from San Miguel, because it could be censored,’ and he would mail them from Buenos Aires with no return address.”
Bergoglio also intervened, at the request of outspoken Bishop Enrique Angelelli, to save three seminarians after Catholic lay workers were killed in western La Rioja province in 1976.
The seminarians were being followed by the same death squads and accused of being “contaminated with Marxist ideas.”
No one else would take them.
Bergoglio was able to rescue Mario La Civita, Enrique Martinez and Raul Gonzalez just as Angelelli was assassinated in August 1976.
“I watched him save lives,” La Civita recalled. “It was a difficult time because two or three soldiers were always walking around in the back of the compound. Bergoglio had a strategy of generating confidence in them so that they wouldn’t think he had people hidden.”
But Bergoglio couldn’t save everyone he tried to help.
Esther Ballestrino de Careaga, a communist who had been Bergoglio’s boss in a laboratory before he became a priest, pleaded with him to hide the Marxist literature in her house after her daughter was kidnapped and son-in-law disappeared.
“Those were the books that Bergoglio fought [against], but he carried them away anyway,” Larraquy said.
A short while later, she co-founded the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, publicly demanding that the junta account for the missing.
Soon, she disappeared.
But there still those who believe he could have done more by speaking out at the time.
“Bergoglio contributed by helping the persecuted. Still, he didn’t participate at the time in the fight against the military dictatorship in defense of human rights,” said Adolfo Perez Esquivel, whose human rights work in Argentina won him the Nobel Peace Prize.
With Post Wires