“These are the facts: Orlando Yorio and I were not reported by Father Bergoglio,” Father Franz Jalics said in the statement posted on a German Jesuit Web site, mentioning the other priest who was kidnapped with him in 1976. The statement was dated Wednesday. “It is thus wrong to claim that our capture was initiated by Father Bergoglio.”
But the statement by Father Jalics did not address a contention by Father Yorio, who died in 2000, that Father Bergoglio had sought to undermine their work in a Buenos Aires slum, taking steps that may have left them vulnerable to the military. Father Bergoglio was head of the Jesuit order in Argentina at the time of their kidnapping.
Father Jalics wrote that the new statement was meant to clarify a previous online statement posted shortly after Francis was chosen as pope last week, in which he did not address Francis’ role in the events around the kidnapping.
Francis and many other church leaders in Argentina have been criticized for failing to speak out publicly against the military dictatorship’s campaign of human rights abuses, which lasted from 1976 to 1983. He testified in a court case stemming from the priests’ kidnapping that he had met privately with top military officers to ask for the priests’ release.
Father Jalics and Father Yorio were living among the poor in a Buenos Aires slum, an activity the dictatorship viewed as suspicious. They were kidnapped and held in a secret prison, blindfolded, and shackled hand and foot, for five months, before they were let go.
Father Yorio in 1977 wrote a detailed account of the kidnapping, in which he questioned Father Bergoglio’s actions. He wrote that Father Bergoglio made negative reports about their activities to local bishops and claimed they were in the slums without his permission.
He said Father Bergoglio urged them to leave the Jesuit order and then had them expelled from the order just days before the kidnapping. It was not possible to verify Father Yorio’s account, and experts in church procedures questioned whether the order’s rules would have allowed Father Bergoglio to expel a priest. Father Yorio’s sister, Graciela Yorio, said in an interview last week that Father Bergoglio had left the two priests “totally unprotected,” which she said made them an easier target for the military.
In his statement, Father Jalics said that false information had circulated in the church accusing the two priests of belonging to a guerrilla group fighting the government, but he did not link Father Bergoglio to that rumor campaign.
“Before, I too tended to believe that we were the victims of having been reported,” Father Jalics said in the statement. “By the late ’90s, however, it became clear to me after many conversations that this assumption was unfounded.”
Chris Cottrell and Nicholas Kulish contributed reporting from Berlin.