Jorge Mario Bergoglio — now Francis I — once told followers at a Mass for veterans of the conflict to “go and kiss this land which is ours.”
Bergoglio succeeded Benedict XVI on Wednesday night, but the spotlight is already on his background in the country and his role in the violent military coup of 1976 reports The Huffginton Post.
In a service for relatives of fallen soldiers in 2009, he allegedly told followers “Go and kiss this land which is ours, and seems to us far away.There are angels who will accompany you, who are sons, husbands and fathers of yours, who fell there, in an almost religious movement, of kissing with their blood the native soil.”
At a 30th anniversary Mass last year for veterans of the 1982 conflict, he is reported to have said: “We come to pray for those who have fallen, sons of the country who went out to defend their mother country, to reclaim that which is theirs and was usurped from them.
“The Homeland cannot exclude from its memory, anyone who was called; it has to take charge of so many hearts with scars, and say thank you to them, to those who stayed on the island or those submerged in the water, to all of them.”
Questions have also been raised about his involvement in the kidnappings of two Jesuit priests in 1976, who had refused to stop their work in poor neighborhoods. Bergoglio was a high-ranking official in the Society of Jesus of Argentina when a military junta was installed in the South American country.
According to the Los Angeles Times, priests Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics were kidnapped in May of that year by the navy. surfacing five months later, drugged and seminude, in a field.
A 2005 lawsuit accused Bergoglio of unspecified involvement in the abductions but a spokesman for Bergoglio called the claims “old slander.”
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