Posted on 02/25/2018 5:09:15 PM PST by ebb tide
In 1968, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was a novice in the Society of Jesus. And now that he is pope he is making no mystery of what he thinks about the “social upheaval,” his own words, of that year which has become legendary. Some of it is already known to the ambassadors accredited to the Holy See, who in the discourse that Francis addressed to them at the beginning of this year had thrown back into their faces precisely what the pope maintains to be the perverse effects of ’68.
It was the first time that Bergoglio had his say over that year, and he got right to the point.
From ’68 onward, he said, the “human rights” proclaimed twenty years earlier by the United Nations, “first of all that of life,” have been ever more violated with impunity: “I think primarily of innocent children discarded even before they are born.”
But not only that. He denounced the fact that since then inroads have been made by “new rights” that are in contrast with the socio-cultural traditions of various countries, and in spite of this have been imposed by force, in a sort of “ideological colonization by the stronger and the wealthier, to the detriment of the poorer and the most vulnerable.”
Against the “right” to abortion Francis was perfectly clear, while on the second complaint, that of “ideological colonization,” he was more cryptic.
But to understand what he meant there, all it takes is to go to the passage of the encyclical "Laudato si'" in which he condemns “international pressure which make economic assistance contingent on certain policies of ‘reproductive health.’”
Or to his broadsides against “so-called gender theory,” which “seeks to cancel out sexual difference because it no longer knows how to confront it,” and therefore is nothing but the miserable byproduct “of frustration and resignation,” and in spite of this is also imposed by rich countries on poor countries.
This is ’68 according to pope Bergoglio. Who neither during that year nor in those after it ever joined demonstrations or sit-ins at universities and factories, but in any case lived out a typically Jesuit and Argentine revolution of his own, for the sake of oppressed people and against the oppressive establishment, gathering from this nothing less than his current judgment on ’68 as a “revolution betrayed,” because in spite of the presumed “new rights,” or rather precisely by virtue of them, it is obvious to him that the poor continue to be oppressed by the rich.
In Argentina, the student and labor uprisings flared up shortly after those in Paris or Los Angeles, in 1969, the year in which Bergoglio celebrated his first Mass, and immediately the militias joined the fray, the Montoneros, who in 1970, when he took his vows, kidnapped and executed former president Pedro Aramburu.
Precociously appointed novice master, the then 34-year-old Bergoglio completely espoused the cause of bringing back Juan Domingo Perón, who in those years was in exile in Madrid. He became the spiritual director of of the young Peronists of the Guardia de Hierro, who had a powerful presence at the Jesuit Universidad del Salvador. And he continued this militancy after his surprise appointment as provincial superior of the Jesuits of Argentina in 1973, the same year in which Perón returned to the country and won his triumphant reelection.
Bergoglio was among the writers of the “Modelo nacional,” the political testament that Perón wanted to leave after his death. And for all of this he drew the ferocious hostility of a good half of the Argentine Jesuits, more leftist than he, especially after he surrendered the Universidad del Salvador, which was put up for sale in order to stabilize the finances of the Society of Jesus, to none other than his friends of the Guardia de Hierro.
It was in those years that the future pope developed the “myth” - his word - of the people as protagonist of history. A word that by its nature is innocent and a bearer of innocence, a people with the innate right to “tierra, techo, trabajo” and that he sees as overlapping with the “santo pueblo fiel de Dios.”
The political program of Francis’s pontificate has its roots precisely in this other personal ’68 of his, the revolution betrayed by the rich and powerful but the torch of which he again wants to lift up high.
(English translation by Matthew Sherry, Ballwin, Missouri, U.S.A.)
And here I thought being Catholic meant not believing in starting your own churches.
Huh. Learn something new every day. :)
Roof. Exactly what you think it means, a roof above your head. Land, Home, Job.
Thanks, makes sense. Roof fits better than ceiling.
And Bergoglio purports that Land, Home, Job are innate rights someone must give to you if you don’t happen to have them. He explained this in his speech in Bolivia, and other times.
Pope Francis is not much of a systematic thinker. That seems to be a challenge for him. Perhaps under the influence of Peronism (also at a distance from systematic thought) he doesn’t seem convinced that normal human economic activity -— “free enterprise” — is a morally respectable thing.
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