ARGENTINA
Chiesa
Instead of challenging the powers head-on, the then-archbishop of Buenos Aires wrote a fiery letter to cloistered nuns. It was his way of “conducting politics.” The account of a direct witness of that battle
by Sandro Magister
ROME, November 15, 2013 – Pope Francis said so loud and clear in his agenda-setting interview with “La Civiltà Cattolica.” The public battles over questions like abortion or homosexual marriage are not priorities for him.
This does not change the fact that the upcoming synod will be dedicated precisely to the issue of the family. And therefore to questions that are today among the most fiercely combated on the political terrain as well.
But there is also uncertainty among the bishops. In Italy, in the United States, in Spain – the countries where in recent years the public efforts of the episcopates over questions of life and the family have been the most combative – there are those who are pushing for greater detachment from political exertion. Following the example – it is claimed – of the pope. …
Well then, what example did Bergoglio give, when as archbishop of Buenos Aires he found himself grappling with the approval of a law that permits persons of the same sex to contract marriage and adopt children?
It was 2010 when that law was approved in Argentina. Cardinal Bergoglio took a position against it in a form that he had studied thoroughly. Not with public declarations that would directly challenge the political powers, but with two internal letters to the Church: the first to the nuns of four Carmelite monasteries of Buenos Aires, and the second to a leader of the Argentine Catholic laity.
The twofold move by Cardinal Bergoglio naturally had a substantial impact on the political terrain as well. But the explanation that was given to it was that the cardinal intended with the two letters not to “conduct politics” but simply “to recall the teaching of the Church to all those who proclaim themselves to be Catholic, asking them to act accordingly.”
This justification of the activity of Cardinal Bergoglio was presented in the Argentine parliament by a Catholic senator very closely connected to him, Liliana Negre, a member of the Peronist party and the first president of the Global Action Network of Legislators and Governors for Life and the Family.
Liliana Negre has recounted chapter and verse how the approval of that law came about in Argentina, in a book about Pope Francis published in the United States, with the testimonies of twenty persons who knew him very closely, Jesuits and others.
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