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ARGENTINA
Jubilee Year pardon asked
Bishops ask forgiveness on behalf of Catholics
Argentina’s bishops have asked forgiveness on behalf of all Argentine Catholics for sins committed by them throughout the South American country’s history, and especially during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship that took thousands of lives.
Following in the footsteps of Pope John Paul II’s historic Jubilee Year plea for pardon earlier this year on behalf of the whole Church—and similar pleas by other episcopal conferences—the bishops apologized for the Church’s failings. “We have been indulgent with totalitarian postures, hurting democracy. We have discriminated against many brothers without committing ourselves to the defense of their rights,” the bishops told thousands of the faithful attending the National Eucharistic Congress in Cordoba.
“We ask your forgiveness, O God, for the silent responsibility and the effective participation of the Church’s children in pushing aside human rights, in tortures and rapes, in intransigent ideologies, and in foolish deaths that bloodied our country,” they said.
The Church has been accused by some of not only doing nothing to stop the wave of abuses during the so-called “Dirty War” against suspected leftist rebels and their sympathizers, but actually participating in it. In 1996, the bishops offered an examination of conscience that some called lukewarm. Adolfo Perez Esquivel, a leading human rights advocate, called the 1996 apology “a laundered document, with evasive phrases and no courage.”
Among the other sins for which the bishops requested pardon were money laundering, drug trafficking, and anti-Semitism. “Many Christians, in the name of human rights, may have invited the crime of abortion, euthanasia, and cruelty, and may have promoted drug consumption, overwork, and abuse of alcohol and tobacco,” they said.
Back to Catholic World Report October 2000 Table of Contents