5. Pope Francis

[Guest Guest]

Well as long as he lasts longer than John Paul I, he'll be doing alright...

 

Clock's ticking, we might want to revive this post on 17 April!

[maryportfuncity 10,635]

Just a thought; we never did resolve that question of who might replace Clive Dunn, did we?

[msc 18,431]

Just a thought; we never did resolve that question of who might replace Clive Dunn, did we?

 

The DL conclave never came back to us on that one.

[Davey Jones' Locker 1,324]

Chavez 'swung papal race from Heaven'

 

[Death Impends 7,953]

It'll be interesting to follow how Francis does. The Dirty War stuff is definitely troublesome, I do hope a clear answer is found on that. However the fact he's humble is appealing and I hope he acts upon his expressed disdain for the church's current structure.

[Perfect Passing 277]

Papal Francis the 1st, either die or resign, our Davey Jones' Locker is on your case! (See Pope Benedict XVI thread)

 

Good work DJL, I knew when the conclave met yesterday that it would'nt be long before your Catholic Church knowledge kicked into overdrive.

 

Do you live in the Vatican or what?

[Davey Jones' Locker 1,324]

It'll be interesting to follow how Francis does. The Dirty War stuff is definitely troublesome, I do hope a clear answer is found on that. However the fact he's humble is appealing and I hope he acts upon his expressed disdain for the church's current structure.

 

Agreed. The allegations don't look good though. Here are some more details on them from the Guardian's latest article:

 

"Despite his low global profile, however, he has not escaped personal controversy or scrutiny. Eight years ago the ghosts of Argentina's dirty war – during which 30,000 suspected leftists were kidnapped and killed – returned to haunt him when he was accused of complicity in the kidnapping in 1976 of two liberal Jesuit priests.

 

According to El Silencio (Silence) a 2005 book written by the Argentinian journalist Horacio Verbitsky, Bergoglio withdrew his order's protection of the two men after they refused to stop visiting the slums, which ultimately paved the way for their capture. Verbitsky's book is based on statements by Orlando Yorio, one of the kidnapped Jesuits, before he died of natural causes in 2000. Both of the abducted clergymen survived five months of imprisonment. The book also claims that senior Buenos Aires clerics were implicated in an attempt by the navy to hide political prisoners from human rights inspectors.

 

Bergoglio has denied all the allegations and insisted that he helped many dissidents during the dictatorship. But his denials have failed to satisfy many in a country still struggling to come to terms with the atrocities committed in its recent past. "History condemns him," Fortunato Mallimacci, the former dean of social sciences at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, once said. "It shows him to be opposed to all innovation in the church and above all, during the dictatorship, it shows he was very cosy with the military.""

 

Source: http://www.guardian....io-pope-francis

 

"Eduardo de la Serna, coordinator of a left-wing group of priests who focus on the plight of the poor, told Radio del Plate that he was neither surprised nor pleased at the decision. "Bergoglio is a man of power and he knows how position himself among powerful people," he said. "I still have many doubts about his role regarding the Jesuits who went missing under the dictatorship.""

 

Source: http://www.guardian....entina-reaction

 

 

Also, "Estela de la Cuadra, aunt of one of Argentina's stolen babies, whose mother Alicia co-founded the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo: "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. 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.""

 

Source: http://www.guardian....y-him-about-him

[Davey Jones' Locker 1,324]

Papal Francis the 1st, either die or resign, our Davey Jones' Locker is on your case! (See Pope Benedict XVI thread)

 

Good work DJL, I knew when the conclave met yesterday that it would'nt be long before your Catholic Church knowledge kicked into overdrive.

 

Do you live in the Vatican or what?

 

LOL - all common knowledge published on the web. I don't let the bastards get away with anything.

[Death Impends 7,953]

Those allegations indeed look worrying, all the more reason that a concrete answer should be known.

[Godot 149]

Why couldn't he be called something like Gary or Reg? I'd quite like to see a Pope Gary.

[Davey Jones' Locker 1,324]

Some more info I just found online:

 

 

"Jorge [bergoglio] is a Jesuit, whose single most important virtue is obedience, not love or forgiveness or hope or intelligence. In the "Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius," which all Jesuits must explicitly follow, one of the most famous lines is" "We should always be prepared so as never to err to believe that what I see as white is black, if the hierarchic Church defines it thus.""

 

 

*****

 

 

"From the first the Jesuits were the soldiery of the Catholic church; their leader bore the title of general, and a military discipline was laid down in Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, which set the rules for the order.

 

The Jesuits have always been a center of controversy. To their hostile critics, the Jesuits have seemed unscrupulous soldiers of the pope, indulging in dirty fighting if such tactics seemed likely to bring victory. They have been accused of preaching and practicing the doctrine that the end justifies the means and also of pursuing worldly power and success.

 

[snip]

 

As realists they particularly sought to influence the politically powerful and to mold the young men who would later become leaders. Their schools rapidly acquired great fame, not only for the soundness of their Catholic doctrines, but also for their humanistic classical teaching and their insistence on good manners, adequate food, and exercise.

 

While the Society of Jesus was the chief new instrument of the Catholic Reformation, an old instrument of the church was also employed—the Inquisition... Both papal and Spanish inquisitions were medieval courts that used medieval methods of torture, and both were employed against the Protestants in the sixteenth century.

 

Protestant tradition sometimes makes both the Inquisition and the Jesuits appear as the promoters of a widespread reign of terror. Certainly the Jesuits and their allies made full use of the many pressures and persuasions any highly organized society can bring to bear on nonconformists. And the Inquisition did perpetrate horrors against former Halibuts in Spain and against Catholics-turned-Protestants in the Low Countries."

 

Source: http://bigsiteofhist...ant-reformation

 

:( :(

[Davey Jones' Locker 1,324]

The Australian mainstream media is starting to look into his past now:

 

Cloud of Dirty War Hangs Over Pope Francis

 

 

This independent website has some interesting comments as well:

 

"I’m from Argentina and this election is really disgusting. The local Justice is investigating Mr. Bergoglio because of his active involvement in the last military dictatorship (CIA backed up). But let me be clear on this thing: In my country there were not a ‘dirty war’, in fact, it was not a war, it was a systematic plan created in Washington to install neoliberalism accross Latin American. I feel very sad whenever I read or hear a progressive american thinker talking about ‘dirty war’."

 

Here is yet another article on it:

 

****

"From 1973 to 1979, a period that overlapped with military dictatorship lasting from 1976 to 1983, Francis served as the top Argentine Jesuit official. During that time, the Catholic Church remained silent in the face of widespread human rights violations during the country's so-called "Dirty War," an effort by the military government to root out dissent by torture, murder, and disappearances. In several cases, Catholic priests collaborated with the government and were even in the room as prisoners were tortured. In February, an Argentine court ruled that the Catholic church hierarchy, of which Francis was arguably a member, had "closed its eyes" to the killing of progressive priests. In 2005, human rights lawyers filed a case against then-Cardinal Bergoglio alleging that he had been complicit in the kidnapping of two Jesuit priests.

 

[snip]

 

... one can easily read Francis' record in two different ways:

 

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 [sergio] 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 [human rights attorney Myriam] 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."

 

***

 

Source: http://blog.foreignp...ck_to_haunt_him

 

Perhaps the tag line for this thread should be "Dirty War's Dirty Pope Six Feet Under the Dirt."

[Davey Jones' Locker 1,324]

Back on topic, here is some more speculation on what might have caused them to remove his lung.

 

Another article also speculates on what might have been wrong with him and also lists the dangers that might lie in the future for an elderly person with only one lung:

 

*****

 

"Asked whether a person can survive with one lung, Schaffner said, “Easily.” – lungs are redundant, so people who have one removed are able to live normal lives.

 

“Many people have gone on to live perfectly normal lives, even to engage in tennis, hiking and jogging with one lung,” Schaffner said. “It’s like being able to live with only one kidney.”

 

But if Pope Francis gets a disease, he only has one lung to spare.

 

As people age, they become more vulnerable to lung infections, such as pneumonia and bronchitis, according to the National Institutes of Health. People older than 65 are especially likely to develop such infections. Their risk increases if they have preexisting conditions such as a weakened immune system or heart disease.

 

“Pneumonia is, in fact, one of the more common respiratory conditions as you age,” said pulmonologist Dr. Greg Martin, who teaches at Emory University and specializes in critical care. “As a matter of fact, it’s one of the more common causes of death.”

 

Martin said there’s very little data about the prognosis of people with one lung and these infections because having one lung is so rare. But he suspects it would be a complicating factor. People with decreased lung capacity, such as those with emphysema, have a more difficult time recovering from lung infections because they don’t have “reserve” healthy lung capacity to help them breathe while the infection heals.

 

“For someone like him, one lung is a potential complication,” he said. “If someone has reduced lung capacity – one lung, underlying lung disease – they’re more susceptible to more severe pneumonia and more serious complications from pneumonia.”"

 

*****

[philheybrookbay 439]

http://pbs.twimg.com/media/BFQvnrxCAAE9zVE.png

 

So thats where Jim Bowen disappeared to then.

[Body Snatcher 44 107]

Those allegations indeed look worrying, all the more reason that a concrete answer should be known.

 

Hmmm...perhaps they did it to take the heat off the other "BIG PROBLEM" afflicting the church at the moment. A guy who is connected with a potential war crime in a distant, backward land is better PR than a guy connected with child sexual abuse from within the church itself.

 

Personally I'd like to see a hot blooded Irish pope.

[Rotten Ali 600]

Just wondering if the Vatican is now into subliminal brand advertising...

 

Frankie & Benny's.

[Bibliogryphon 9,567]

Bad anagram Karma

 

Pope Francis the First = Stiff Penis Rape Torch

 

Apologies

[the_engineer 1,415]

Just a thought; we never did resolve that question of who might replace Clive Dunn, did we?

 

The DL conclave never came back to us on that one.

 

No white smoke yet.

 

http://pbs.twimg.com...nrxCAAE9zVE.png

 

So thats where Jim Bowen disappeared to then.

 

 

 

You can't beat a bit of jesus.

[RIP Wee Jum 1,559]

[Guest tcalvar]

With this pope already seeming to be more modest and in the past calling members of the powerful catholic curia hypocrits, I wonder if he will end up murdered...I mean dying suddenly like JPI?

[Phantom 2,531]

With this pope already seeming to be more modest and in the past calling members of the powerful catholic curia hypocrits, I wonder if he will end up murdered...I mean dying suddenly like JPI?

 

You mean dying in a way like violently stabbing himself in the stomach whilst combing his hair?

[Windsor 2,233]

He's apparently giving Cardinal Scola a tour of the Papal Apartments: "Lets take a look at what you could've won..."

 

 

[BadEgg 38]

Apparently the Argie Pope was 75th on the list but he was the first who past the CRB check (apologies if already posted)

[Banshees Scream 110]

Earthquake in Rome .. Benedict resigns? Pope Francis takes a slip on the stairs. Will he resign too? Maybe they all will resign from now on. Pope Francis will be more appealing to the world .. a pope the world will understand for a few years.

[Davey Jones' Locker 1,324]

It'll be interesting to follow how Francis does. The Dirty War stuff is definitely troublesome, I do hope a clear answer is found on that. However the fact he's humble is appealing and I hope he acts upon his expressed disdain for the church's current structure.

 

Agreed. The allegations don't look good though. Here are some more details on them from the Guardian's latest article:

 

"Despite his low global profile, however, he has not escaped personal controversy or scrutiny. Eight years ago the ghosts of Argentina's dirty war – during which 30,000 suspected leftists were kidnapped and killed – returned to haunt him when he was accused of complicity in the kidnapping in 1976 of two liberal Jesuit priests.

 

According to El Silencio (Silence) a 2005 book written by the Argentinian journalist Horacio Verbitsky, Bergoglio withdrew his order's protection of the two men after they refused to stop visiting the slums, which ultimately paved the way for their capture. Verbitsky's book is based on statements by Orlando Yorio, one of the kidnapped Jesuits, before he died of natural causes in 2000. Both of the abducted clergymen survived five months of imprisonment. The book also claims that senior Buenos Aires clerics were implicated in an attempt by the navy to hide political prisoners from human rights inspectors.

 

Bergoglio has denied all the allegations and insisted that he helped many dissidents during the dictatorship. But his denials have failed to satisfy many in a country still struggling to come to terms with the atrocities committed in its recent past. "History condemns him," Fortunato Mallimacci, the former dean of social sciences at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, once said. "It shows him to be opposed to all innovation in the church and above all, during the dictatorship, it shows he was very cosy with the military.""

 

Source: http://www.guardian....io-pope-francis

 

"Eduardo de la Serna, coordinator of a left-wing group of priests who focus on the plight of the poor, told Radio del Plate that he was neither surprised nor pleased at the decision. "Bergoglio is a man of power and he knows how position himself among powerful people," he said. "I still have many doubts about his role regarding the Jesuits who went missing under the dictatorship.""

 

Source: http://www.guardian....entina-reaction

 

 

Also, "Estela de la Cuadra, aunt of one of Argentina's stolen babies, whose mother Alicia co-founded the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo: "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. 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.""

 

Source: http://www.guardian....y-him-about-him

 

Just to be fair and show both the sides of the story, the Vatican has denied any wrongdoing on the new Pope's part. ""There has never been a credible, concrete accusation against him," said Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi, adding he had never been charged."

 

BBC report: http://www.bbc.co.uk...europe-21802684

 

Excerpt:

 

"I warned them [the two kidnapped priests] to be very careful. They were too exposed to the paranoia of the witch hunt. Because they stayed in the barrio, Yorio and Jalics were kidnapped.''

 

Both priests were held inside the feared Navy Mechanics School prison. Finally, drugged and blindfolded, they were left in a field by a helicopter.

 

Orlando Yorio, who reportedly accused Fr Bergoglio of effectively delivering them to the death squads by declining to publicly endorse their work, is now dead.

 

AP news agency quoted Francisco Jalics as saying on Friday: "It was only years later that we had the opportunity to talk with Fr Bergoglio... to discuss the events.

 

"Following that, we celebrated Mass publicly together and hugged solemnly. I am reconciled to the events and consider the matter to be closed."

 

Adolfo Perez Esquivel, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for defending human rights during the dictatorship, believes Fr Bergoglio "tried to... help where he could" under the junta.

 

"It's true that he didn't do what very few bishops did in terms of defending the human rights cause, but it's not right to accuse him of being an accomplice," he told Reuters.

 

"Bergoglio never turned anyone in, neither was he an accomplice of the dictatorship," Mr Esquivel said."