UNITED KINGDOM
Mail on Sunday
[with photos of documents]
Special report: The damning documents that show new Pope DID betray tortured priests to the junta
By Sharon Churcher and Tom Worden
PUBLISHED:18:56 EST, 16 March 2013
Damning evidence that Pope Francis may have betrayed two priests who were kidnapped and tortured by Argentina’s brutal military junta can be revealed today.
The Mail on Sunday has seen documents which appear to show the new Pope secretly collaborated with the country’s dictatorship when he was head of the Jesuits there – using his real name Jorge Bergoglio – during the Dirty War that started in the Seventies.
One of the documents is a 27-page report by Orlando Yorio, one of the kidnapped priests, in which he accuses the current pontiff of secretly spreading dangerous rumours about him and a colleague while personally promising them support and protection.
A second document is a confidential government memo written in 1979 which appears to reveal Bergoglio informed junta officials that Father Yorio and Father Francisco Jalics were suspected of collaborating with guerrillas and that Jalics was accused of encouraging dissent among a congregation of nuns.
Bergoglio, 76, who was chosen as the new Pope on Wednesday, has been accused of effectively handing the priests over to the regime’s death squads by failing to quash rumours they were dissidents.
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