ARGENTINA
Irish Times
Hugh O’Shaughnessy
Sat, Apr 6, 2013
Deep divisions between the conservative Argentine province of the Jesuits, for long headed by Fr Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, and other Jesuit provinces in the west, are detailed in report in today’s Tablet , the British Catholic weekly, by Fr Michael Campbell-Johnston SJ, a former provincial of the British Jesuits.
Fr Campbell-Johnston spent many years as a priest in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. The church there was persecuted by a western-supported military dictatorship – responsible for the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980, six Jesuits, two US nuns and many other Christian leaders.
Jesuit provincial
He recounts how, during a visit to the order’s social institutes in Latin America in 1977, he met Fr Bergoglio. The Argentinian had been Jesuit provincial for Argentina for four years.
“At the time,” Fr Campbell- Johnston says, “there were an estimated 6,000 political prisoners in Argentina and another 20,000 desaparecidos , people who had been ‘disappeared’.”
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