The Catholic Church and Argentina’s Dirty War by Gustavo Morello, SJ. (review)

Dr. Gustavo Morello is an Argentine, a Jesuit, and a sociologist at Boston College. Morello’s background and training have prepared him to analyze the life of Catholics during Argentina’s la guerra sucia or “dirty war” (1976–83). The Argentine military seized power ostensibly to save the nation from the threat of leftist insurgents. During the self-proclaimed Process of National Reorganization, the military regime and associated paramilitary groups murdered or “disappeared” 30,000 Argentines. Military officials actually boasted of plans to kill 50,000 citizens. The regime’s barbarism was such that victims were apprehended, tortured, and then dropped, while still alive, from aircraft into the frigid South Atlantic. Five-hundred young women gave birth in military jails. The regime slaughtered the new mothers and distributed the infants to military officers and supporters of the regime. The military ruler’s perverted reasoning was that brutality was required to save Western civilization and Christianity. The military junta’s first leader, General Jorge Rafael Videla (1976–81), once declared that “all necessary persons must die to achieve the security of the country” (Stephen G. Rabe, The Killing Zone [2016], p. 148). The regime especially identified union organizers and Argentine Jews as threats to national security.

The vast majority of the military regime’s victims were, of course, Argentine Catholics. More than 100 religious workers were killed, including Enrique Angelelli, the bishop of La Rioja. Nonetheless, the Argentine Church emerged from la guerra sucia with a tarnished reputation. No church leader publicly denounced the regime’s radical evil, and priests collaborated with torturers. By comparison, heroic prelates, like Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns of Brazil and Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero of El Salvador, organized resistance to murderous anti-Communist tyrants. Morello explores these differences by examining the reactions of Argentine Catholics to the abduction in 1976 of five seminarians of the La Salette order in Córdoba. Also abducted was the director of the seminarians, Father James Weeks, a U.S. citizen. Pressured by the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires, the military subsequently released Weeks. The seminarians, who were suspected of subversion, endured torture but emerged alive, because Weeks and a nun who witnessed the abduction, Joan McCarthy, who was also a U.S. citizen, organized a campaign on their behalf. Without this intercession, the seminarians would have been murdered by the military.

The seminarians were not subversives but devoted youth who imbibed in the idealism of Vatican Council II (1962–65) and the bishops’ conference at Medellín (1968). These committed Catholics were violently opposed by “anti-secular” Catholics who rejected the concepts of the laity engaging in church work and religious workers pursuing a “preferential option for the poor.” Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI had allegedly betrayed the faith. In the view of these anti-secular Catholics, like General Luciano Benjamín Menéndez, the military commander of Córdoba, the Church’s duty was to uphold traditional hierarchical values. Religious people who worked for the poor were by definition subversive. General Menéndez has been subsequently sentenced to several life terms by Argentine courts for his crimes against humanity. Standing between these groups were the “institutional” Catholics, like Bishop Raúl Primatesta of Córdoba, who probably accepted the new directions in faith but wanted to preserve the Church’s privileged role in Argentine life. The Church should neither identify with nor be in opposition to the state. Bishop Primatesta spoke privately to General Menéndez, but he declined to denounce the general’s savagery.

Morello’s impressive study, which is based on in-depth interviewing and extensive archival work, may not explain fully the Argentine Church’s failure to defend human rights. Catholics were presumably divided in other Latin American countries. Yet, in Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, and elsewhere, Catholic leaders led the resistance to Cold War tyranny.