The Bishops and the "Dirty War"
COX, ROBERT
The Bishops and the 'Dirty War' Witness to the Truth: The Complicity of Church and Dictatorship in Argentina By Emilio F. Mignone Translated by Phillip Berryman Foreword by Adolfo Perez...
...But he also uncovered another dimension of the Church—signs of hope: the martyrology of victims of the dictatorship who lived out their commitment to the poorest and neediest of the people...
...Indeed, one rather gets the feeling that he should have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for dedicating his life to Argentina's desaparecidos and doing more than anyone else to ensure that his country will never go through such an orgy of hate again...
...Wear a miter...
...I also thought he was grossly unfair in his assessment of the role played by the papal nuncio, Monsignor Pio Laghi, during the miniholocaust the military visited on their native land during the sinister proceso of 1976-83...
...Certainly Mignone fails to acknowledge Laghi's efforts to ease Argentina's pain...
...However, he does not draw a connection between the Vatican's outspoken stance and the information that must have been relayed to it from Buenos Aires by the papal nuncio and his secretary...
...Mignone does pay tribute to Pope Paul VI and John Paul II for denouncing the military junta and insisting that it put an end to the slaughter...
...The Bishops and the 'Dirty War' Witness to the Truth: The Complicity of Church and Dictatorship in Argentina By Emilio F. Mignone Translated by Phillip Berryman Foreword by Adolfo Perez Esquivel Orbis...
...In an especially interesting chapter Mignone digs into Argentine history to discover why the Church behaved as it did, and he comes up with constructive proposals for setting it on a sounder course...
...Mignone believes those lives could have been saved if the bishops' response to the policy of institutionalized murder had been something more than pastoral letters full of generalities, letters "written in the conditional mood and weighted down with balancing questions that make it sound like the bishops are apologizing...
...With the Argentine middle and upper classes frightened by the climate of political extremism and violence, the military's dehumanizing propaganda made its campaign of state terrorism seem rational, even respectable to many...
...He does not describe the murders, abductions and torture perpetrated by the various guerrilla groups operating in Argentina during the years in question, and thus fails to place the record of the military junta that seized power in March 1976 in perspective...
...The sadistic necrophiliacs who led the "Red fascist" Peronist Montoneros, the more coherent but equally ruthless Marxist-Leninist People's Revolutionary Army, plus a plethora of smaller terrorist bands with initialized names goaded the Armed Forces into a barbarous frenzy...
...The powerful image of Cardinal Aramburu using the pulpit of the Metropolitan Cathedral to denounce this criminal activity—like Saint Ambrose in Milan before Theodosius—could have stopped the genocide...
...author, "Argentina: Laboratory of Terrorism " A recruitment poster for the Argentine Roman Catholic Church during the country's most recent period of military rule might have read: "Have a spiritual experience—become a bishop...
...At least that seemed to me to about sum up Emilio Mignone's account of his loss of faith in and ultimate revulsion toward the Argentine Catholic hierarchy when I first read it in the original Spanish version published two years ago in Argentina...
...Yet the soul-searing quality of Mignone's book, its sense of suffering and of outraged religious faith make it difficult to fault him for one-sidedness...
...The Argentine who did win the Peace Prize in 1980 for his role in this struggle, Adolfo Perez Esquivel —originally nominated as part of a strategy to force the military to release him from jail, wherehe was being held without charges—has contributed the Foreword to Witness to the Truth...
...The bishops knew what was happening, says Mignone...
...Moreover, "they were quite aware that private and personal efforts led nowhere...
...162 pp...
...I was in regular contact with the nuncio during the critical period and am convinced that he shared the author's frustration with the bishops'silence...
...With determination and regret, he took the arduous task of researching and compiling documents, statements, and testimony pertaining to the Argentine [Catholic] hierarchy...
...Such was the very grave responsibility of the Catholic bishops of Argentina...
...Of Mignone and his relationship to the Catholic Church Perez Esquivel says: "This book was written by a man of faith who lives the spirit of the gospel...
...These were published "in the midst of the terror unleashed by the regime, when agents of the military and the security forces were carrying out hundreds of murders, abductions and tortures every day...
...Together with his brave secretary, the late Monsignor Kevin Mullen, Laghi did everything in his power to convince the military to stop the abductions and illegal arrests, and to account forthemissing...
...And conspire with the Army to torture and kill people...
...But upon rereading the book in English translation I feel that my first reaction was hasty...
...Reviewed by Robert Cox Former editor, Buenos Aires "Herald...
...Although Mignone's indictment of the Argentine bishops rings true, I still think he is unjustly critical of the papal nuncio, Pio Laghi...
...It was, in fact, Mignone who took on the responsibility the Catholic prelates by and large shirked...
...My impression then was that his judgment of the bishops was simply too harsh...
...Vacation in Rome...
...18.95...
...Mignone—Secretary of Education during the late 1960s in the regime of General Juan Carlos Ongania— has given us in Witness to the Truth an important, thought-provoking document that records his search for his "disappeared" daughter Monica, a worker with a Church group in a Buenos Aires shantytown...
...If at this moment the bishops' conference had reacted vigorously, directly pointing an accusatory finger at those responsible, tens of thousands of lives would have been saved...
...He quotes Archbishop Vicente Zaspe, one of the seemingly few bishops who were deeply disturbed by the Church's failure to speak out, as saying that "some years from now the Church is going to be pilloried for this...
...As he did, a human rights movement grew up around him...
...Argentina's Catholic hierarchy may not deserve the mauling it has received from the Leftwing press since the end of military rule, but it cannot in good faith ignore the truth as witnessed by Mignone...
...Those were prophetic words...
...It is his "j'accuse"—not solely for the loss of Monica, who was 24 when she was taken from the family apartment in a fashionable neighborhood of Buenos Aires by a group of heavily armed men in unidentifiable uniforms and never heard from again, but for the 10,000-30,000 Argentines who were put through a Calvary of torture by the Argentine military and then rubbed out of existence...
...Initially almost alone, he both pointed the needed accusatory finger and set out to record atrocities that few in Argentina dared to name...
...There is, to be sure, alack of balance to Mignone's testimony...
Vol. 71 • November 1988 • No. 19
