Gay Rights – Not In favor (not a surprise)
He staunchly opposes gay marriage. His stance is immoral but not really a surprise, being a homophobic bigot is more or less a mandatory requirement for the job. TIME reported back in 2010 his declaration that being gay equates to being sub-human …
Rome’s misogynous declaration, tossed into its new guidelines on reporting clerical sexual abuse, did more than just highlight the church’s hoary horror at the idea of female priests — or its penchant of late for sticking its papal slippers in its mouth every chance it gets. It also pointed up an increasingly spiteful rhetoric of bigotry. When Argentina in mid-July legalized gay marriage, the country’s Catholic bishops weren’t content to simply denounce the legislation; they used the occasion to argue for the subhumanity of homosexual men and lesbians, the way many white Southern preachers weren’t ashamed to degrade African Americans during the civil rights movement. Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio not only called the new law “a scheme to destroy God’s plan”; he termed it “a real and dire anthropological throwback,” as if homosexuality were evolutionarily inferior to heterosexuality.
Adoption = Child Abuse
Yes seriously, he really thinks this is true if those doing the adoption happen to be a gay couple. The National Catholic Reporter observes …
In 2010 he asserted that gay adoption is a form of discrimination against children, earning a public rebuke from Argentina’s President, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
Kidnapping and collaboration with the military dictatorship
Not as the victim, but as one of the accused. The NY Tims reported back in 2005 …
A human rights lawyer has filed a criminal complaint against an Argentine cardinal mentioned as a possible contender to become pope, accusing him of involvement in the 1976 kidnappings of two priests.
Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s spokesman Saturday called the allegation “old slander.”
The complaint filed in a court in the Argentine capital on Friday accused Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, of involvement in the abduction of two Jesuit priests by the military dictatorship, reported the newspaper Clarin. The complaint does not specify the nature of Bergoglio’s alleged involvement.
There is also more about this in a 2011 Guardian article that reports …
it has been clear for years that the upper reaches of the Argentinian church contained many “lost sheep in the wilderness”, men who had communed and supported the unspeakably brutal western-supported military dictatorship that seized power in that country in 1976 and battened on it for years. Not only did the generals slaughter thousands unjustly, often dropping them out of aeroplanes over the River Plate and selling off their orphan children to the highest bidder, they also murdered at least two bishops and many priests. Yet even the execution of other men of the cloth did nothing to shake the support of senior clerics, including representatives of the Holy See, for the criminality of their leader General Jorge Rafael Videla and his minions …
…The extent of the church’s complicity in the dark deeds was excellently set out by Horacio Verbitsky, one of Argentina’s most notable journalists, in his book El Silencio (Silence). He recounts how the Argentinian navy hid from a visiting delegation of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission the dictatorship’s political prisoners on an island linked to senior clerics …
I also note with interest how this old 2011 article has been suddenly whitewashed, and was modified yesterday (I wonder why), but worry not, the Daily Mail also has details here.
Blackmail and Threats
Yep, he is into this as well. In the Aparecida Document, a joint statement of the bishops of Latin America, he wrote …
“We should commit ourselves to ‘eucharistic coherence’, that is, we should be conscious that people cannot receive Holy Communion and at the same time act or speak against the commandments, in particular when abortion, euthanasia, and other serious crimes against life and family are facilitated. This responsibility applies particularly to legislators, governors, and health professionals.”
Basically, he is pushing for a policy that says to politicians, doctors and nurses that they must adhere to the immoral party line or face being booted out. To those that do not believe, that is laughable, but to those that truly believe, that is a real threat and includes a considerable degree of fear being deployed as a weapon. A belief in hell is being leveraged to manipulate.
Initial Conclusions
So there you have it then, the race between a group of elderly men wearing dresses has finished and we can now see who gets to wear the magic red slippers and be chief of all those that believe in hocus pocus.
Oh OK then, one parting shot … if all the Cardinals were praying for guidance from God to help pick a new Pope, shouldn’t the vote have been unanimous the first time?
… and one last bit of tongue-in-cheek pondering, will this Argentinian plan to make a visit to the Malvinas?