Guardian corrects column about Argentine Dirty War, removes references to Pope Francis. [View all]

[BlueCheese]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/jan/04/argenitina-videla-bergoglio-repentance

Summary: Guardian retracts 2011 accusations, widely read on DU, about Pope Francis' role in Argentine Dirty War.

In the few days after the new pope was elected, I saw many references to a 2011 column in the highly respected UK newspaper The Guardian. The columnist described accusations, supposedly by the Argentinian journalist Horacio Verbitsky, about the Catholic church's role in the Argentine Dirty War, and that of Pope Francis in particular. There were likely hundreds of posts in threads or subthreads started by this column.

It turns out the Guardian has now corrected that column. Apparently the columnist misinterpreted Verbitsky's book, failed to check who was Archbishop at the time, or made some other error. In any case these accusations against Francis have been retracted. I've seen references to this correction in a few other threads. But given the very wide distribution the original claim received, I thought it important that the correction get a thread of its own too.

Here's the correction:

This article was amended on 14 March 2013. The original article, published in 2011, wrongly suggested that Argentinian journalist Horacio Verbitsky claimed that Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio connived with the Argentinian navy to hide political prisoners on an island called El Silencio during an inspection by human rights monitors. Although Verbitsky makes other allegations about Bergoglio's complicity in human rights abuses, he does not make this claim. The original article also wrongly described El Silencio as Bergoglio's "holiday home". This has been corrected.