Why not?
Who do you think’ll be standing by cheering while the fascists do their dirty work?
Argentina’s disappeared: Father Christian, the priest who did the devil’s work
Christian Von Wernich’s story is one of the darkest chapters of the ‘Dirty War’. He was the priest who heard the confessions of political prisoners, passed them on to the police, and then stood by as the detainees were tortured. David Usborne reports on the day justice was done.
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The document, which has recently been republished, opened with these words: “Many of the events described in this report will be hard to believe. This is because the men and women of our nation have only heard of such horror in reports from distant places.”
Rights groups put the toll at close to 30,000. Victims were smuggled out of their homes at night with hoods over their heads and taken to police cells for interrogation and often torture. Usually their loved ones never saw them again and – in one of the more infamous symbols of the horror – many were taken in aircraft, drugged and dumped into the waters of the River Plate or the Atlantic.
[…].
While some prosecutions were pursued shortly after the restoration of democracy in the early 1980s the process later faltered as subsequent civilian governments, including those of Carlos Menem and Raul Alfonsin, pardoned officers and urged the country simply to move on.
Clearly, it is moving on now, but not towards collective amnesia. The leftist government of Nestor Kirchner, elected four years ago, decided quickly to heed the mothers and other rights groups. An earlier amnesty was lifted after being ruled unconstitutional. One man who found his protection removed was Von Wernich, who had fled and gone into hiding in a coastal town of Chile. A group of rights activists and journalists exposed his whereabouts, and he was returned to Argentina.
Von Wernich, 69, white-haired, glaring and unrepentant to the end, is the first priest to be found guilty for “Dirty War” crimes. It was not his trial alone, therefore. For many in Argentina and indeed across Latin America, it was the Catholic Church that was on trial in La Plata. The failure of the church in Argentina – or at least some of its priests – to protect the innocent contrasts starkly with the roles the church played under dictatorships in Brazil and Chile. There, the priesthood resisted and condemned. In Argentina, it collaborated.
The revulsion felt by most in Argentina towards Von Wernich is not hard to fathom. The portrait painted by prosecutors and backed up by a parade of sometimes tearful witnesses was of a man who used his position to betray those who trusted him.
He was found guilty, not only of being present at sessions of torture, but something more shocking. He would extract confessions from those detained, sometimes in the presence of police officers, and pass on the information – often including the names of fellow leftists – to interrogators. What should have been private conversations with God became intelligence that was used for more arrests, more torture and more killings.
Von Wernich’s defence lawyers treated the trial as a sham, bringing no witnesses of their own and engaging in only minimal cross-examination of those brought by the prosecution. As the conviction was handed down, Von Wernich remained expressionless, jotting down notes and speaking briefly to his lawyers. When he was led to a van bound for prison, the crowd on the street erupted again in cheers.More…
As it did in Germany, and in Rwanda, where its priests and nuns not only enabled genocide but committed it with their own hands the organised clergy is part of the problem, not the solution. Anyone who thinks organised religion is a force for good and that church representatives are holy is out of their tiny friggin’ mind.
When it comes down to preserving their own power and upholding the status quo, they’ll happily torture, maim and murder right along with the rest.
