At this writing, two generations of Argentinians have grown up without having lived through Argentina’s “Dirty War,” which pitted a far-right-wing military dictatorship against anyone it considered subversive: from genuine Marxist guerillas and members of trade unions to Catholic “church ladies” who had petitioned the government to reveal what happened to members of their families who had been arrested and then just disappeared.

To this day, there is no accurate count of how many people fell victim to the regime. A rough calculation is 19,000 shot down in the streets, 30,000 “disappeared” and presumed dead — among them approximately 500 children — untold thousands imprisoned and perhaps as many as 2 million Argentinians who went into exile.

At the same time, there is no accurate count of how many escaped, thanks to the courage of men and women who risked their own lives to save them — sometimes complete strangers. It reminds us of the heroic men and women in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II, who saved the lives of countless Jews, Slavs, Russians, Gypsies and other targets of the Third Reich.

In fact, the title of the book Bergoglio’s List is inspired by the title of Schindler’s List, which told the story of Oskar Schindler, one of the most celebrated saviors of World War II.

When the war began, Schindler was no saint: He was a chronic womanizer who cheated on his wife, he was a war profiteer, and he cultivated the friendship of Nazi generals and concentration-camp commandants. Yet, at some point, through the mysterious working of Almighty God, his long-dormant Catholic conscience was awakened, and he made it his personal responsibility to save the lives of approximately 1,000 Jewish men, women and children.

Bergoglio’s List is the story of how then-Father Jorge Mario Bergoglio (now Pope Francis) risked his life to save the lives of at least 100 people identified as “enemies” of the Argentinian military junta. And it appears that there were dozens more whom he was able to warn before the authorities could arrest them.

It takes incredible courage to stand up to evil on a grand scale, and that is precisely what the junta was. In 1976, armed forces launched a coup d’etat that toppled the government of President Isabelita Peron. The governors of the various provinces and judges across the land were driven out of office, and Congress and the Supreme Court were dissolved. The constitution was abolished; labor unions were banned; newspapers and other media outlets were censored by the government; and any form of political dissent was outlawed.

The viciousness of the junta’s campaign against its opponents — and the government identified many opponents, whether real or imagined — is difficult to comprehend. The junta created a climate of terror. People were picked up on the streets and dragged away to detention centers, where they were brutally tortured to extract confessions from them and were forced to incriminate others. Then these prisoners “disappeared” — especially horrific was the government’s practice of loading prisoners onto helicopters and executing them by throwing them out over the ocean.

Father Bergoglio, at the time superior of the Jesuits in Argentina, detested the viciousness of the regime and began helping anyone who appealed to him for protection. One of the people on his “list” was Gonzalo Mosca, a labor organizer who was staunchly anti-clerical. He had hoped he could lose himself in the vast suburbs of Buenos Aires, but the military hunted him down. When the caretaker of his apartment building warned him that the military was closing in and ready to kill him, Mosca turned to the only person he felt he could trust, his brother, who was a Jesuit priest. Father Mosca called his philosophy professor from his days in the seminary, Father Bergoglio.

At a predetermined location, Father Bergoglio picked up Gonzalo Mosca and drove him to the Jesuit College of San Miguel, where he was hidden for four days while Father Bergoglio organized an escape route that called for a brief air flight, a boat trip into Brazil, a stay with the Brazilian Jesuits and finally a flight to Europe and safety. Recalling what Father Bergoglio did for him, Mosca has said, “I don’t know of other people who would have done the same thing. I don’t know if anyone else would have saved me without knowing me at all.”

There was also Alicia Oliveira, Argentina’s first female criminal court judge. The junta forced her from office and then began to hound her. This mother of three young children suddenly found herself on the run, unable to visit her family and unable to console her terrified children. Father Bergoglio arranged meetings between Oliveira and her children in a disused corridor of the College of San Miguel. As the situation became increasingly dangerous for her, Father Bergoglio found a unique way for her and several other victims to escape the country — stowing them in the cargo hold of a commercial vessel carrying fruit to Uruguay.

After the junta collapsed, former members of the regime and some of their sympathizers tried to destroy Father Bergoglio’s reputation by suggesting he had been a double agent, occasionally smuggling people wanted by the regime out of the country but more often cooperating with the regime in its roundup of priests, intellectuals and others who opposed the junta. Pope St. John Paul II had seen the same smear tactics applied in his native Poland under the Communists: In fact, publicly tarring the reputation of political opponents was common practice in the Soviet empire.

Prominent Argentinians, themselves victims of the regime, have come forward to defend Bergoglio, however. Adolfo Maria Perez Esquival, a civil-rights activist who had been active in opposing the junta and later won the Nobel Peace Prize, has stated categorically: “There were clergymen who were accomplices of the dictatorship [but] Bergoglio was not one of them.” Graciela Fernandez Meijide, who served on the National Commission to investigate the fate of the disappeared persons, concurs with Perez Esquival: “There is no evidence that Bergoglio collaborated with the dictatorship. I know this personally.”

However, once something wicked has been published about a prominent figure, no matter how untrue, it is difficult to convince the public that the charge was a lie. Yet the testimony of such renowned targets of the dictatorship as Perez Esquival and Fernandez Meijide goes a long way to dispel the “black legend” of Father Bergoglio the clandestine collaborator.

In Bergoglio’s List, Nello Scavo has collected wonderful, inspiring stories of Father Bergoglio’s courage, and he records the gratitude and astonishment that the people he helped continue to express, even after all these years, for the dangerous risks he ran for their sake. I don’t want, however, to steal anymore of Scavo’s thunder; so I’ll stop summarizing these stories here in order that you may enjoy reading them in Scavo’s work, as I have.

Since his election to the papacy on March 13, 2013, Pope Francis has been celebrated in the media for the simplicity of his way of life, for his down-to-earth manner with all types of people, for his eagerness to see what is best in others, even in Catholics who perhaps are not living the faith as fully as one would hope, and for his off-the-cuff style of speaking (which, to be honest, has sometimes led to some confusion among the Catholic faithful).

The overall impression in the media could be that Francis is a “soft” pope, what used to be called touchy-feely. This is one reason, however, why the firsthand, eyewitness accounts collected in Bergoglio’s List are so important: They reveal another side of Pope Francis — a man of tremendous courage and moral certainty, who was willing to lay down his life to save the victims of a savage regime.

Thomas Craughwell is the author of St. Peter’s Bones.

 

 

INFORMATION
Bergoglio’s List, by Nello Scavo, is available from TAN/Saint Benedict Press.