The Catholic Church and Argentina's Dirty War

On August 3rd, 1976, in Córdoba, Argentina's second largest city, Father James Week and five seminarians from the Missionaries of La Salette were kidnapped. A mob burst into the house they shared, claiming to be police looking for subversive fighters. The seminarians were jailed and tortured for two months before eventually being exiled to the United States. The perpetrators were part of the Argentine military government that took power under President General Jorge Videla in 1976, ostensibly to fight Communism in the name of Christian Civilization. Videla claimed to lead a Catholic government, yet the government killed and persecuted many Catholics as part of Argentina's infamous Dirty War. Critics claim that the Church did nothing to alleviate the situation, even serving as an accomplice to the dictators. Leaders of the Church have claimed they did not fully know what was going on, and that they tried to help when they could. Jesuit Father Gustavo Morello draws on interviews with victims of forced disappearance, documents from the state and the Church, field observation, and participant observation in order to provide a deeper view of the relationship between Catholicism and state terrorism during Argentina's Dirty War.

Father Gustavo Morello, S.J., an Argentine Jesuit is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boston College. His main area of research has been on two Latin American topics: the relationship between religion and political violence and secularization. Professor Morello’s most recent book explored these complicated links by examining why in 1970s Argentina, honest religious people didn’t protest against massive violations of human rights. After an exhaustive analysis of the existing literature, he did a case study analysis on political violence using Argentina’s Dirty War as a focus. This study focused on a group of persons who were kidnapped and tortured in 1976, and the reactions of Catholics to this particular event and to similar instances of political violence across the country. He discovered that the reactions of Catholics to political violence were varied, and were primarily caused not by their theological background but by a broad range of positions taken toward secularization and modernization. In the process of writing this book, Morello developed so much expertise on the 1976 incident that the prosecutor asked him to testify in court when the perpetrators were finally brought to trial in May of 2015. Morellos’ participation in this interview on Subject Matters is especially timely in light of the Petrine Ministry of the current Bishop of Rome, also an Argentine Jesuit, who experienced much of what Father Morello has uncovered in his extensive research.