Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who would be the first Jesuit pope if chosen, has spent nearly his entire career at home in Argentina, overseeing churches and shoe-leather priests.
[. . .]
Bergoglio, 76, reportedly got the second-most votes after Joseph Ratzinger in the 2005 papal election, and he has long specialized in the kind of pastoral work that some say is an essential skill for the next pope. In a lifetime of teaching and leading priests in Latin America, which has the largest share of the world's Catholics, Bergoglio has shown a keen political sensibility as well as the kind of self-effacing humility that fellow cardinals value highly, says his official biographer, Sergio Rubin.
Bergoglio would likely encourage the church's 400,000 priests to hit the streets to capture more souls, Rubin said in an Associated Press interview. He is also most comfortable taking a low profile, and his personal style is the antithesis of Vatican splendor. "It's a very curious thing: When bishops meet, he always wants to sit in the back rows. This sense of humility is very well seen in Rome," Rubin said.
Bergoglio is known for modernizing an Argentine church that had been among the most conservative in Latin America.
[. . .] Bergoglio stands out for his austerity. As Argentina's top church official, he's never lived in the ornate church mansion in Buenos Aires, preferring a simple bed in a downtown room heated by a small stove on frigid weekends. For years, he took public transportation around the city, and cooked his own meals.
Bergoglio has slowed a bit with age and is feeling the effects of having a lung removed due to infection when he was a teenager — two strikes against him at a time when many Vatican-watchers say the next pope should be relatively young and strong. "But he's going to be very influential in the congress of cardinals, one of those who is most listened to," Rubin said.
It’s with a very heavy, but hopeful, heart that I announce Fab magazine will cease publication this spring. Our final issue will be released April 24 and will be in boxes until May 7.
The first issue of Toronto’s little gay-party-animal diary came out Pride weekend 1994, and it has been a relentless pop-culture beast ever since. Aimed knowingly and directly at a gay male audience, Fab has been on the streets of this fine city for 19 years, covering everything from politics, to social issues, to underwear trends, to fascinating new lube flavours. It's overseen the evolution of Toronto gay men and covered every type of party, play and festival.
Always with its glittering finger on the pulse, Fab has been guided by a juicy handful of editors and supported by a talented army of columnists, freelance writers, photographers and designers — each and every one committed to having a good time and letting boys across the city, and for a time across the country, know how great it is to be gay.
The realities of the print publication world have finally taken their toll on our free glossy. Pink Triangle Press has had to make some difficult decisions over the years, including closing The Body Politic back in the day. Today, the press simply can't afford to keep the magazine running. Despite the contributors, content and the amazing people that fill its pages, it's time to say farewell.
But don't think we're going out with a whisper. Fab is a unique publication and an iconic one for our community. We plan to celebrate it with a final goodbye issue, as well as a great big party. So stay tuned for details, because we'll want to see you all there — and be sure to get your hands on that final issue, 'cause those bitches will be collectors' items by Pride.
The armistice called for negotiations to begin within three months on a comprehensive political settlement for the peninsula.
And it called for all foreign troops — UN and Chinese — to be eventually withdrawn.
The Chinese did withdraw, as did the Canadians, British and most other UN forces. But the Americans, at the behest of the South Korean government they had set up, stayed. They are still there.
In violation of the armistice, the U.S. arbitrarily set the maritime boundary between the two Koreas. Between 1958 and 1991, the U.S. armed its forces in South Korea with nuclear weapons, another violation.
So when Pyongyang says, as it did this week, that the terms of that armistice have been breached by the UN side, it is not entirely inaccurate.
To assign blame for the standoff on the Korean peninsula is a mug’s game. Most historians agree that the Northern troops did invade the South in 1950. But they also agree that both North and South had been conducting raids into one another’s territory during the months before.
During the war, both sides committed unspeakable atrocities. Both lost hundreds of thousands of civilians although, thanks to UN bombing raids, the North lost markedly more.
The North has been a dictatorship since its inception. The South, while a military dictatorship for most of the post-war period, embraced democracy in 1987.
The UN side may have broken the armistice by keeping U.S. troops in the South. But the North broke the ceasefire in even more outrageous ways — from its assassination forays to its 2010 shelling of South Korean civilians.
To the judicious and fair-minded outsider it has been clear for years that the upper reaches of the Argentine church contained many "lost sheep in the wilderness", men who had communed and supported the unspeakably brutal Western-supported military dictatorship which 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.
As it happens, in the week before Christmas in the city of Córdoba Videla and some of his military and police cohorts were convicted by their country's courts of the murder of 31 people between April and October 1976, a small fraction of the killings they were responsible for. The convictions brought life sentences for some of the military. These were not to be served, as has often been the case in Argentina and neighbouring Chile, in comfy armed forces retirement homes but in common prisons. Unsurprisingly there was dancing in the city's streets when the judge announced the sentences.
What one did not hear from any senior member of the Argentine hierarchy was any expression of regret for the church's collaboration and in these crimes. 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 Argentine navy with the connivance of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now the Jesuit archbishop of Buenos Aires, hid from a visiting delegation of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission the dictatorship's political prisoners. Bergoglio was hiding them in nothing less than his holiday home in an island called El Silencio in the River Plate. The most shaming thing for the church is that in such circumstances Bergoglio's name was allowed to go forward in the ballot to chose the successor of John Paul II. What scandal would not have ensued if the first pope ever to be elected from the continent of America had been revealed as an accessory to murder and false imprisonment.
Bergoglio was the head of the Jesuits in Argentina during the military dictatorship of 1976-1983, during which the military murdered upwards of 30,000 people (as well as kidnapping hundreds of children whose parents the regime had tortured and murdered). Unlike Catholic officials in neighboring Chile and Brazil, where priests, bishops, and even cardinals spoke out against human rights abuses and defended victims of abuses, in Argentina, the Catholic Church was openly complicit in the military regime’s repression. Bergoglio was not exempt from this involvement: military officers have testified that Bergoglio helped the Argentine military regime hide political prisoners when human rights activists visited the country. And Bergoglio himself had to testify regarding the kidnapping of two priests who he stripped of their religious licenses shortly before they were kidnapped and tortured. This isn’t just a case of Bergoglio being a member of an institution that supported a brutal regime; it’s a case of Bergoglio himself having ties, direct and indirect, to that very regime. For those who hoped for a Pope who might represent a more welcoming and open path for the Catholic Church, the selection of Bergoglio has to be a let-down.
This is why the selection of Bergoglio over Scherer is disappointing. Thirteen years younger than Bergoglio, Scherer’s path was notably different. To be clear, the Catholic Church supported Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985) in its early years; however, as Ken Serbin has demonstrated, already by the late-1960s and early-1970s, high-ranking officials in the church hierarchy were secretly meeting with representatives from the dictatorship in order to try to pressure military rulers to respect human rights, even for alleged “subversives.” By the latter half of the 1970s, the Brazilian Catholic church had become one of the more vocal opponents of human rights violations under the regime, and the Archdiocese of São Paulo ultimately played a central role in secretly accessing, collecting, and publishing files on torture, murder, and repression under the dictatorship, eventually published in 1985 as Brasil: Nunca Mais (literally Brazil: Never Again; in English, Torture in Brazil). Where Bergoglio was active in a context where the Argentine Church openly supported military regimes and human rights violations, Scherer was active in a context where members of the Brazilian Church openly took a stand against such abuses and against the regime that committed them.
A few weeks ago, a student asked me if I thought the cardinals would finally pick a Latin America pope. I commented that if they were smart, they’d diversify by picking a Brazilian and democratizing a bit, but I feared they’d pick an Italian and show a refusal to reform and democratize the church. With the selection of Bergoglio, it appears they’ve chosen to split the difference, diversifying beyond Europe while continuing the conservatism that defined recent popes.
The flags are waving, the result is clear, and a drizzly little archipelago with just 2,841 people on it has made world news. But for the three Falkland islanders who voted no in the referendum, and who now find themselves marooned in a sea of 1,513 yeses, this must be a nervy time.
"Last night down at the Whalebone Arch, with the cameras and everything, everybody was saying, 'I wonder who those three people were?'" says Cathy Jacobsen, landlady at the Victory Bar in Stanley. "We said we'd all club together and get them a ticket to Argentina." She sounds about three-quarters joking.
And, in fact, this may not fairly represent those nos. The question they answered was: "Do you wish the Falkland Islands to retain their current political status as an Overseas Territory of the United Kingdom?" There could be other reasons to refuse that, besides closet Argentophilia. Nevertheless, the refusals are a stain on the result for some islanders, and no less irritating for being few in number.
Indeed Jacobsen says she is surprised that the yes vote came in below 100%, and has no idea who might have demurred – yet. "In a small community, it won't take long to find out who voted no," she says. Might they not keep it a secret? "They might, but you can't keep a secret here for long." If this sounds unfriendly, she insists the consequences will be mild. "I think people would be a bit annoyed with them, they'd say their piece, and that would be it. They might lose a few friends."
Indeed, far from being the little England of its caricature, the Falklands have absorbed a wide range of immigrants in recent years. Only around 53% of the inhabitants are natives, and most speak highly of the Chileans, Saint Helenians, Filipinos and others who have joined them. The islanders are British, after all – happy to tolerate a wide range of attitudes, should there ever be one.
Down at the West Store shopping centre, the manager of the electricals shop, Liam Short, sees things differently. He voted yes, but still expected a much larger no vote – and lost a bet because of it. "They might have done it to be different," he suggests. Just for a laugh, perhaps? "No. It wouldn't have been done for a laugh. The seriousness of this referendum was renowned down here."
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