Catholics and the torture chamber

Image Credit: “Plaza de Mayo y la muerte de Néstor Kirchner” by Guillermo Tomoyose. CC BY-NC2.0 via Flickr.

June 5th 2015
By Gustavo Morello
Gustavo Morello is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boston College. He is the author of The Catholic Church and Argentina’s Dirty War, which is also available on Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO). Read the introduction on OSO now, which is freely-available until the end of July.

Argentina, 1976. On the afternoon of 3 August, Fr. James Weeks went to his room to take a nap while the five seminarians of the La Salette congregation living with him went to attend classes. Joan McCarthy, an American nun who was visiting them, stayed by the fireplace, knitting a scarf. They would have dinner together and discuss the next mission in Jujuy, a Northwestern province of Argentina, where McCarthy worked. Suddenly, a loud noise came from the door. Before McCarthy could reach it, a mob burst into the house. Around ten men spread all over the house, claiming to be the police, looking for weapons, guerrilla hideouts, and ‘subversive fighters.’ When the seminarians arrived, they and Weeks were blindfolded and taken to an unknown location. The seminarians ‘disappeared’ for a few days, then were jailed and tortured for two months, before finally 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. The military dictatorship claimed to be a Catholic government, yet no other military or civilian government killed and persecuted as many Catholics as did General Jorge Videla’s dictatorship. By the end of the dictatorship, more than 100 Catholic social actors had been killed. The most astonishing fact was—and to some extent, still is—the silence of the Catholic hierarchy while the government witch-hunted ‘subversives’ among the Catholic flock.

Since the 2013 election of Francis I, the first Latin American pope, the role that the Catholic Church played in the 1970s has been revisited. Most of the newspapers articles, scholar statements, and Church press releases are based on a simplification of the situation. For instance, according to critics, the Catholic Church did nothing and was even an accomplice of the dictators; the Church, on the other hand, claims it didn’t know what was going on and had tried to help when possible. Moreover it is assumed that Argentina’s historical context is similar to other Latin American countries; however, unlike large countries such as Chile and Brazil, political violence seems to have been an acceptable means of political participation in Argentina, as both the guerrillas and military government received popular support for their fight.

As a public scholar, I want to contribute to the understanding of the Argentine context and the role of ‘Catholics religious workers’ under state terror. Most of the current literature uses theological positions to explain the behavior of Catholics. Contrary to this, I explore how religious transformations (secularization) under particular conditions explain the roles of different ‘Catholic religious workers’—laypersons, seminarians, nuns, priests, and bishops working as identified members of the Catholic Church—during Argentina’s Dirty War. By placing these ‘religious workers’ in their proper social context, I aim to fill a void in the current academic literature.



Argentine military general Jorge Rafael Videla at a military parade in Buenos Aires, 1978.” CC 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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