DESCRIPTION:
Pope’s visit, blown up to super large proportions, a media inculcated impression that God’s representative on planet Earth is blessing America as its investors in profitable use of US Armed Forces go on destroying nations and peoples. Article not intended merely to unmask the Pope we are being hyped about, but to show the Papacy has long been an instrument of the wealthy who brutally misrule most of humanity
TEXT:
The twenty-four hour week long electronic and print media saturation coverage of the visit of Pope Francis to a United States of Protestant and Evangelical Christianity majority brings various suspicious to mind.
Though that was a long time ago, that John F. Kennedy overcame anti-Catholic sentiment to become president thanks largely to the wealth and connections of his father, is not the world wondering about being subjected to unconstrained media projected adulation that borders on adoration of Catholic Pope Francis during his dramatically highlighted V. I. P. tour of Washington, New York and Philadelphia, during which he addressed a joint session of Congress, met with the President, spoke before the UN General Assembly, at Madison Square Garden, in Central Park and Philadelphia.
Let’s think. First thing that comes to mind is that the simultaneous visit of President Xi Jingping of a China threatening American deep-pockets world hegemony is being nicely overshadowed and receiving less attention than otherwise. Xi Jingping recently called for a de-Americanization of the world; not easy, with the world satellite powered TV sources of information owned and controlled as they are by American investors in the use of US -NATO military power and US controlled International Financial Institutions.
Worth noting also is the inconvenient shutting down of sections of Manhattan for the in all seriousness announced precautions for the safety of the Pope’s life drummed up ever deeper fear of an ISIS that was really created by CIA and its overseas branches in allied nations to attack US NATO designated enemies Syria (where Assad refuses to resign as demanded), Shiite in Iraq and Iran and Muslims throughout the Middle East. (Although this reality hit the front pages of even London tabloids many months ago, the charade sails on).
Thirdly, the Pope’s visit blown up to super large proportions makes for a media inculcated impression that God’s representative on planet Earth is blessing America while its investors in the profitable use of US Armed Forces go on destroying nations and peoples in the formerly outright colonially occupied and plundered nations, most of which were originally wealthier and more highly cultured and scientifically advanced than their savage European conquerors.
Media holding up high this Catholic Pope as a paragon of virtue with God-like authority and a reputation purer than snow, has to serve well as a form of rehabilitation of the Papacy itself for the quite substantial amount of people who know of the horrific role of the church during the early centuries of European genocidal subjugation, plunder, enslavement and destruction of cultures and civilizations under the pretense of saving souls in the name of the God of the Christians, a role Popes have continued to play during the recolonialism or neocolonization of world led by an elite of speculating investors on Wall Street.
The career of Jorge Bergoglio, who has been paraded all week before the TV viewing world audience as and angelic Pope Francis, an awesome figure, often as not in the usual regal headdress Popes wore during the Dark Ages of European history, contains nothing outright criminal like the careers of the Popes of the Inquisition, however it does seem to reflect some proclivity not to interfere while the exploited poor are murderously persecuted. Your Archival Research Peoples Historian did a quick Internet search: ‘Pope and Videla,’ and chose for his readers from the first thirty entries that popped up. (General Jorge Rafael Videla was President and dictator of Argentina during the so called ‘Dirty War’ that took place from roughly 1974 to 1983, though it should well be dated from 1969, when military and security forces and right-wing death squads in the form of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance.) Jorge Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, held the top leadership position in the powerful Society of Jesus in Argentina from 1973 to 1979.
The Truth Behind Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Pope Francis …
www.globalresearch.ca/the-truth-behind-pope…the…/5327049
Mar 16, 2013 – The Truth Behind Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Pope Francis: Breaking the Silence …
Photo: Pope Francis with Leader of military junta General Jorge Videla.
“Argentina between 1976 and 1983 was wracked by a “dirty war” in which successive military regimes hunted down, tortured and “disappeared” tens of thousands of citizens. …
The dictatorship that followed consigned thousands of Argentineans into military detention. Most were tortured; a few were released, many were eventually murdered. These “disappeared” numbered in all around 30,000.
”
Jorge Rafael Videla Dead: Did Pope Francis Sit Idly By During Argentine’s ‘Dirty War’? By Ana Maria Defillo, MIC
Sep 17, 2015 – http://mic.com/articles/42815/jorge-rafael-videla-dead-did-pope-francis-sit-idly-by-during-argentine-s-dirty-war
“Former Argentine military dictator Jorge Rafael Videla recently died in prison while serving a life sentence for his crimes against humanity.
Former Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla was announced dead on Friday. At 87, he died while serving life in prison for the abhorrent human rights abuses he conducted during the span of his ruthless military dictatorship from 1976-1983.
Gen. Videla became president after overthrowing Isabel Martínez de Perón, in a coup d’etat. His dictatorship, referred to as the “Dirty War,” is responsible for up to 30,000 disappearances, killings and tortures of subversives. Babies born into “dissident” families were stolen to give to military families.
… most of the controversy is based on his inaction towards the junta military as the leader of Argentina’s Jesuits during the Dirty War.
Federico Finchelstein, an Argentine historian at the New School for Social Research in New York, told the New York Times that “The combination of action and inaction by the church was instrumental in enabling the mass atrocities committed by the junta … Those like Francis that remained in silence during the repression also played by default a central role,” he said. “It was this combination of endorsement and either strategic or willful indifference that created the proper conditions for the state killings.”
Professor Finchelstein makes a valid point. In a region where church leaders have been vocal against military juntas in the past, it is very troubling that Pope Francis remained silent during such atrocities. It also doesn’t help his case that as “the head of the Argentine Conference of Bishops from 2005 to 2011, Francis resisted issuing a formal apology for the church’s actions during the Dirty War.”
Regardless of the politics behind these accusations, there is a bigger, more disturbing question we should be asking. Why wouldn’t a church leader step in or at least speak out while thousands of innocent lives were being kidnapped, tortured, and killed? His [the Pope’s] duty as a leader of the church is to represent the teachings of Christ, right? Would Jesus sit idly by while such atrocities are taking place? … to think that someone who watched thousands of people die could be chosen as the head of the Roman Catholic Church.”
Did Pope Francis Have a Part in Argentina’s “Dirty War
Time Magazine, 3/14/2013
The New Pope and Argentina’s ‘Disappeared’ of the Dirty War
Cover Story: Pope of the Americas)
“Since he was anointed cardinal by Pope John Paul II in Rome in 2000, Jorge Bergoglio has had to contend with repeated allegations over his actions — and inaction — in the years of what is called the ‘Dirty War.’ Those claims have resurfaced now that he has become Pope Francis, the first Pontiff from the New World.
The general criticism against him has been that raised against most prominent personalities of the period of junta rule: that he perhaps did not do enough at the time to try to stop the generals, that he did not speak out publicly about the thousands of desaparecidos — the disappeared who vanished without a trace and whose mothers protested for answers in a plaza in Buenos Aires.
Bergoglio, as quoted in his own defense in the Time article, rather seems to show himself as an insider of the dictatorship.
“I never believed [the two priests] were involved in subversive activies,” Bergoglio said. “But because of their work with some priests in the slums they were exposed to the paranoia of the witch hunt.” Bergoglio said he moved fast to save their lives. “That same night when I heard of the kidnappings I started to move. I saw Videla twice and I saw Massera. In one of my attempts to meet Videla I found out who the military chaplain was who gave mass to Videla and convinced him to call in sick and managed to be named to replace him.” Bergoglio said that after the mass he managed to speak to Videla about the case, which would not have been an easy task at the time, given the climate of fear that reigned over these issues in Argentina then.”
Pope Francis and Argentina’s Dirty War: Nine Questions He Needs to Answer
By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News
22 March 13
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/295-164/16604-pope-francis-and-argentinas-dirty-war-nine-questions-he-needs-to-answer
“Dogged journalists from Argentina and around the world have raised concern about the election of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio to become Pope Francis. Was he, they ask, complicit with the Argentine military that kidnapped, tortured, raped, killed, and “disappeared” tens of thousands of people starting even before the coup of March 1976? The victims included two bishops and as many as 150 priests and nuns, and the atrocities reached the absolute horror of stealing newborn babies from their mothers and throwing living prisoners from helicopters and airplanes into the South Atlantic. …
Vatican spokesmen dismiss it as old smears spread by the anti-clerical left. We have heard this spin before, over … the Church’s complicity with the Nazi Holocaust … Pope Francis needs to do better than that. If he wants to put the dirty war behind him, he needs to provide full and convincing answers to nine deeply disturbing questions.
1. Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla, the imprisoned leader of the military junta, credits Papal Nuncio Pío Laghi, Archbishop Raul Francisco Primatesta, and other Church leaders with advising the military junta and helping handle the situation of the disappeared. “In some cases,” the former dictator told Argentina’s Revista El Sur, “the Church offered its good offices and told the relatives to give up searching for their child because he [or she] was dead.” But the Church only did this, said Videla, “if it was certain that the relatives would not use the information politically” against the junta. How, Your Holiness, do you explain such close collaboration?
2. Church officials in Argentina have repeatedly asked forgiveness for their failure to speak out against the junta’s human rights violations, and Bergoglio personally called for the Church to do public penance for the sins of the dirty war. The Church obviously lacked courage and moral clarity, but it was far from silent. It publicly supported the military junta. Cardinal Archbishop Juan Carlos Aramburu gave communion and his blessing to the newly installed dictator, Gen. Videla. Bishop José Miquel Medina, the head chaplain of the armed forces, and other church leaders justified torture, while providing chaplains to help the torturers overcome their moral qualms. In his visit to Buenos Aires in April 1982, Pope John II publicly embraced Videla’s successor General Leopoldo Galtieri and refused to meet with the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who were demanding justice for their disappeared relatives. When, Your Holiness, will the Church face up to the depth of its complicity?
3. In 2007, an Argentine court convicted Father Christian von Wernich, a police chaplain, for his complicity in seven murders, 42 abductions, and 31 cases of torture. According to BBC News, several former prisoners testified that he used his position as a priest to win their confidence and then passed what they told him to police torturers and killers. The former prisoners said that he attended several torture sessions and told the torturers that they were doing God’s work. Von Wernich is now serving a life sentence. As archbishop, Bergoglio ruled against giving holy communion to politicians and health care workers who facilitate abortion, while allowing von Wernich to remain a priest and provide communion to his fellow prisoners. Does Your Holiness truly believe that Church doctrine on abortion and contraception is more important to uphold than prohibitions against torture and mass murder?
4. In a case directly involving Bergoglio when he was the top Jesuit in Argentina, the army kidnapped, drugged, tortured, and held captive two of his subordinates who had been living and doing social work in a Buenos Aires slum. The army held Fathers Orlando Yorio and the Hungarian-born Franz “Francisco” Jalics blindfolded and in chains for five months and then dumped them half-naked and drugged into a field on the outskirts of the city. Soon after, Father Yorio sent the Jesuit hierarchy in Rome a first-hand report in which he accused Bergoglio of promising to speak to people from the armed forces and assure them that the two priests were not working with the left-wing guerrillas. But, wrote Yorio, Bergoglio spread rumors that we were. “We began to suspect his honesty,” wrote Yorio, who reportedly forgave Bergoglio, but never withdrew his charges. Would Your Holiness release the late Father Yorio’s full report and your detailed response to it?
5. Father Jalics made similar charges and has never withdrawn them. Now at a monastery in Germany, he says he has forgiven Bergoglio and does not want to comment on the new pontiff’s role in what happened. Would Your Holiness ask him, in the name of truth, to testify about what he knows?
6. In 1979, Father Jalics was living in Germany and asked Bergoglio to help him get his passport renewed. Bergoglio made the formal request, but The Guardian has published a typed note from the foreign ministry archives that “appears to prove that Bergoglio said one thing and did the opposite.” The note records that Jalics and Yorio “lived in small communities that the Jesuit Superior [Bergoglio] disbanded in February 1976. They refused to obey, requesting that they be removed from the order.” According to the note, the information came from Bergoglio, who recommended that the foreign ministry not renew Jalics’ passport. How, Your Holiness, do you respond to this damning evidence?
7. Horacio Verbitsky, one of Argentina’s best-known investigative journalists, uncovered the above document and interviewed many of the dissident voices within the Church, presenting their evidence in his left-leaning Peronist daily Pagina 12 and his best-selling “El Silencio: De Paulo VI a Bergoglio.” He is also a direct participant in the story, having shown the courage after the coup to take up arms in the guerrilla war against the military dictator …Would Your Holiness ask your defenders to stop trying to kill the messenger and deal with the specific evidence Verbitsky offers?
8. Pope Francis has long talked of making the poor central to the Church, encouraging Christian charity toward them and criticizing inadequate government and even IMF policies. But, in line with John Paul II and Benedict XVI, he worked to suppress Liberation Theology, which called for helping the poor to organize to fight for their own rights. This appears to have been an underlying issue in his treatment of Fathers Yorio and Jalics and in the heated divisions within Argentina’s Catholic Church. Will Your Holiness now reopen the debate and allow defenders of Liberation Theology to speak freely within the Church?
9. Horacio Verbitsky and other critics are quick to credit Bergoglio with helping many of the junta’s opponents and even hiding them from arrest. “I know people he helped,” said Father Yorio’s brother Rodolfo. “That’s exactly what reveals his two faces, and his closeness to the military powers. He was a master at ambiguity.” Over the years, Your Holiness, you have been a reluctant, vague, and often evasive witness about your role – and the role of your fellow priests – in the dirty war. Would you now, in the spirit of truth and reconciliation, give independent journalists and historians access to Church archives, which – along with in-depth interviews and already available government archives – will allow them to set the record straight?”
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, author Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he writes on international affairs.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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It was reported: “Pope Francis urges Catholics in Europe to house refugees.” Good, but what about the refugees themselves fleeing from CIA created and funded ISIS and other CIA funded and organized terrorists invading Syrian over three years because its elected President Assad refuses to step down as demanded by Wall Street’s beholden President Obama? Searching the Internet does not bring up Pope Francis speaking out regarding a fifteen year occupation in Afghanistan by a US coalition that includes every single Caucasian populated nation in the world; likewise nothing by Pope Francis regarding the US bombing of dirt poor Yemen and Somalia for years.
As indicated in the title, this history article is not intended to merely unmask the Pope we are presently being hyped about, but rather to show that the Papacy has long been an instrument of the wealthy who rule misrule us and have brutally misruled most of humanity for many centuries.
Pope Francis, the first ‘Latin American’ Pope was preceded by Benedict XVI, who in his youth was a member of the Hitler Youth; one would not necessarily hold that against him, but for all the proper silence he maintained regarding the US led colonial powers covert invasion and bombing destruction of a small African country by its former colonial owners after it had risen from the poorest colonially exploited nation in Africa to have become by UN designation the 53rd Highest Quality of Life Indexed nation in the world, higher than nine European nations, including Russia.
If one goolges Benedict’s predecessor ‘Pope John Paul II re’ any of the illegal, murderous and certainly unChristian employ of US military forces during his reign from end of 1978 through April 2005, it will be extraordinary if much can be found of the first Polish Pope criticizing, for example, President Carter helping with aid the Indonesian genocide in East Timor; Carter giving his permission for Gwangju Massacre in Korea to go forward; the Carter ordered CIA backed Islamic terrorist civil war in Afghanistan mid 1979, against a popular women liberating Socialist government in Kabul; the funding of Osama bin-Ladin; the Reagan ordered paratroop landing and air and naval bombing invasion of tiny Grenada; the El Salvador genocide of hundreds of thousands; the US organized/funded Nicaragua Contra massacres; the US Panama invasion – death toll one thousand; the US slow destruction of Somalia begun under Clinton; Afghanistan invaded, occupied, 2001; Venezuela Chavez government overthrow backed in 2002.
Before the Iraq invasion began in 2003, the Pope John Paul II “opposed” it, but in May of 2004, while the invasion of Iraq was taking the lives the tens of thousands and the bizarre overthrow and kidnapping of President Aristide of Haiti had taken place, Pope John Paul II accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom from a jovial, ‘why me worry’appearing President George Bush Jr.
It seems a good indication of the priorities of Popes that while Pius XII excommunicated all those who might vote ‘the wrong way’ in the election of 1948, when the Communist Party of Italy, having led the fight against the Fascists, was expected to win the 1948 election, in 1964, the strongest words the well loved and later sainted John XXIII could muster up during the Cuban missile crisis that threatened the possible extinguishing of life on Earth was a plea to the American and Soviet leaders.
Your author was unable to document any reaction of John XXIII’s predecessor John Paul VI to the blatant US involvement in the brutal overthrows of popular governments in Brazil and Bolivia, nor the deadly US invasion and occupation of the Dominican Republic or the massacre of a half million ‘communists’ in Indonesia in which CIA was implicated, during his six years as Pontiff.
Three Popes, Pius XII, John XXIII and Paul VI and six US Presidents, unmistakably beholden to the leadership of powerful Wall Street profiteers of World War Two, oversaw the crucifixion of the population of the soft-spoken Buddhists farming population of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, which the Vichy French fascist colonial occupation army had run for the Japanese to the loss of a million starved to death due to commandeered rice crops to feed the Japanese army.
This article closes with a review tenure of the second Pope mentioned in its title, Pius XII.
The Vatican & the Holocaust:
Pope Pius XII & the Holocaustfrom the Jewish Virtual Library
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/pius.html
“Cries for Help
Throughout the Holocaust, Pius XII was consistently besieged with pleas for help on behalf of the Jews.
In the spring of 1940, the Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Isaac Herzog, asked the papal Secretary of State, Cardinal Luigi Maglione to intercede to keep Jews in Spain from being deported to Germany. He later made a similar request for Jews in Lithuania. The papacy did nothing.(5)
Within the Pope’s own church, Cardinal Theodor Innitzer of Vienna told Pius XII about Jewish deportations in 1941. In 1942, the Slovakian charge d’affaires, a position under the supervision of the Pope, reported to Rome that Slovakian Jews were being systematically deported and sent to death camps.(6)
In October 1941, the Assistant Chief of the U.S. delegation to the Vatican, Harold Tittman, asked the Pope to condemn the atrocities. The response came that the Holy See wanted to remain “neutral,” and that condemning the atrocities would have a negative influence on Catholics in German-held lands.(7)
In late August 1942, after more than 200,000 Ukrainian Jews had been killed, Ukrainian Metropolitan Andrej Septyckyj wrote a long letter to the Pope, referring to the German government as a regime of terror and corruption, more diabolical than that of the Bolsheviks. The Pope replied by quoting verses from Psalms and advising Septyckyj to “bear adversity with serene patience.”(8)
On September 18, 1942, Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, wrote, “The massacres of the Jews reach frightening proportions and forms.”(9) Yet, that same month when Myron Taylor, U.S. representative to the Vatican, warned the Pope that his silence was endangering his moral prestige, the Secretary of State responded on the Pope’s behalf that it was impossible to verify rumors about crimes committed against the Jews.(10)
Wladislaw Raczkiewicz, president of the Polish government-in-exile, appealed to the Pope in January 1943 to publicly denounce Nazi violence. Bishop Preysing of Berlin did the same, at least twice. Pius XII refused.(11)
Papal Reasons & Responses
The Pope finally gave a reason for his consistent refusals to make a public statement in December 1942. The Allied governments issued a declaration, “German Policy of Extermination of the Jewish Race,” which stated that there would be retribution for the perpetrators of Jewish murders. When Tittman asked Secretary of State Maglione if the Pope could issue a similar proclamation, Maglione said the papacy was “unable to denounce publicly particular atrocities.”(12) One reason for this position was that the staunchly anti-communist Pope felt he could not denounce the Nazis without including the Communists.”
Pope Pius dutifully was silent on the US post WW II War invasion of a Korea the US had recognized as territory of Imperial Japan during the forty years from the administration of Teddy Roosevelt through all four of Franklin Roosevelt in return for Japanese recognition of the Philippines as US territory. Likewise silent on the overthrow of a democratic all peninsula Korean government allowed by the departing Japanese, replacing it first with a US Military government and then installing the mass murdering dictator Singman Rhee (whose name is never mentioned in today’s South Korea), and the eventual genocidal bombing flat of Korea South and North by US bombers with the UN flag painted on their fuselage.
Required Reading for those interested in the main theme of this article.
The Vatican in World Politics, twice Book-of-the-Month and going through 57 editions, one of the best-selling books of all time. It has been translated into most major languages including Chinese, Russian and most recently, Korean – and on pdf.
http://www.whale.to/c/VWP.pdf
Author Avro Manhattan was the world’s foremost authority on Roman Catholicism in politics. A resident of London, during World War II he operated a radio station called “Radio Freedom” broadcasting to occupied Europe. He was the author of over 20 books. He was a Great Briton who risked his life daily to expose some of the darkest secrets of the Papacy. His books were #1 on the Forbidden Index for the past 50 years!!
A short biography of Baron Avro Manhattan
Born April 6, 1914, in Milan, Italy, of American and Swiss/Dutch parents. He was educated at the Sorbonne in Paris and the London School of Economics. He was jailed in Italy for refusing to serve in the Fascist dictator Mussolini’s army. While imprisoned in the Alps he wrote his first book on astronomy.
During the war, Mr. Manhattan operated a radio station called Radio Freedom broadcasting to the partisans in occupied Europe. For this service he was made a Knight of Malta. His aristocratic roots meant that he was a Knight of the House of Savoy as well as a Knight Templar and a Knight of the Order of Mercedes.
He was a member of the Royal Society of Literature and the British Interplanetary Society.
Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents in 67 countries; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India, Sweden and the US; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong’s Window Magazine 1993; Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents, Kerala, India; Minority Perspective, UK; Einartysken, Sweden: Saker Vineyard, Germany; Dissident Voice; Ta Kung Pao; Uruknet; Voice of Detroit; Mathaba; Ethiopian Review; Palestine Chronicle; India Times; MalaysiaSun; China Daily; South China Morning Post; Come Home America; CubaNews; TurkishNews; HistoryNews Network; Vermont Citizen News have published his articles; 300 of which are available at: click http://www.opednews.com/author/author1723.html ; Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; article China Daily, 1989. Is coordinator of the Howard Zinn co-founded King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign: (King Condemned US Wars) http://kingcondemneduswars.blogspot.com/ and website historian of the Ramsey Clark co-founded Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign http://prosecuteuscrimesagainsthumanitynow.blogspot.com/ featuring a country by country history of US crimes and laws pertaining.
