Robert Parry: ‘Dirty War’ Questions for Pope Francis

[JDPriestly]

15. Bergoglio is of Italian descent. He became a priest in 1969.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/03/13/sorry-jorge-mario-bergoglio-is-not-the-first-non-european-pope/

(I have heard that he is of Italian descent from several sources.)

Bergoglio was born in 1936. He was four-five in 1941 when WWII began. Judging from the Wikipedia article which describes him as a native of Argentina, He would not have been in Fascist Italy or NAZI Germany. Of course, we don't know and probably never will know what his parents thought during WWII.

Let's hope they were not unusual enough for us to ever find out.

But, there is this . . .

On 15 April 2005, a human rights lawyer filed a criminal complaint against Bergoglio, as superior in the Society of Jesus of Argentina, accusing him of involvement in the kidnapping by the Navy in May 1976 (during the Dirty War) of two Jesuit priests.[20] The priests, Orlando Yorio and Franz Jalics, were found alive five months later, drugged and semi-naked. Yorio accused Bergoglio of effectively handing them over to the death squads by declining to tell the regime that he endorsed their work. Jalics refused to discuss it after moving into seclusion in a German monastery.[21] Horacio Verbitsky, an Argentine investigative journalist and former montonero, wrote a book about this and other related events titled El Silencio: de Paulo VI a Bergoglio: las relaciones secretas de la Iglesia con la ESMA.[22] Verbitsky also writes that the Argentine Navy with the help of Cardinal Bergoglio hid the dictatorship's political prisoners in Bergoglio's holiday home from a visiting delegation of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission.[23]

According to the book, after their release, Yorio accused the then-Provincial of his Jesuit order San Miguel, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, to have denounced him. Father General Pedro Arrupe in Rome was informed by letter or during the abduction, both he and Orlando Yorio were excluded from the Jesuit Order.[24]

Bergoglio told his authorized biographer, Sergio Rubin, that after the priests' imprisonment, he worked behind the scenes for their release; Bergoglio's intercession with dictator Jorge Rafael Videla on their behalf may have saved their lives.[25] "The cardinal could not justify why these two priests were in a state of helplessness and exposed," according to Luis Zamora, who said that Bergoglio's testimony "demonstrates the role of the Church during the last military dictatorship."[26]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Francis