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Flashbacks




Via the BBC:

Friday, February 19, 1999 Published at 14:38 GMT
World: Europe
Vaitican confirms it has intervened on Pinochet's behalf

The Vatican has confirmed that it intervened on behalf of the detained former Chilean military ruler, Augusto Pinochet, over moves to extradite him to Spain.

A spokesman, Joaquin Navarro, said the Vatican made its appeal at the request of the Chilean government and that it was confidential.

On Thursday the British government disclosed it had received a written representation from a senior Vatican official about General Pinochet's arrest. One senior opposition politician, Lord Lamont, who is pressing for General Pinochet's release, said he thought Pope John Paul recognised -as he put it - the General's great contribution in protecting freedom during the Cold War. The eighty-three year old General Pinochet is waiting to hear whether his appeal against extradition, on charges of genocide, will be upheld.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service

Oh yes... General Pinochet was a great protector of freedom. And maybe Timmy Russert and Pat "Franco Way" Buchanan all the other expensive show ponies and chipper Sunday scrub-a-dubs of media make-believe-land will chime in with a big shout out for the great protector Pinochet. Because, ya know, JP2 (and Saint Ronald Reagan) woulda' wanted it that-a-Way. Yeeks.

April 22, 2000, National Catholic Weekly:

Archbishop: Jesuit Murder Case Is Closed

Archbishop Fernando Saenz Lacalle of San Salvador recommended the Society of Jesus accept that there will not be a fresh investigation into the 1989 murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her teenage daughter. “If the laws say that the case cannot now be reopened, then that must be respected,” Archbishop Saenz told reporters on April 9. “There are laws of the country that are made for everyone.... In order to impart justice, there must be equality” before the law, he added. Spokesmen for the Salvadoran attorney general have practically ruled out the possibility of reopening the murder inquiry, as requested in late March by the Society of Jesus, on the basis that a 10-year statute of limitations and a 7-year-old amnesty law apply to the case. The Society of Jesus, at the request of Jesuit-run Central American University in San Salvador, formally petitioned the authorities to investigate six former army officers and ex-President Alfredo Cristiani for their part in ordering the murders of the priests, all of whom were prominent members of the university.

May 6, 2000 The National Catholic Weekly:

Salvadoran Prelate Asks Pardon for U.S. Churchwomen’s Killers

Archbishop Fernando Saenz Lacalle of San Salvador supported the request for the pardon of two ex-soldiers in jail for the 1980 killing of three U.S. nuns and a lay worker. “Let us show mercy and pity. They [the jailed soldiers] have shown repentance, and that is the correct conduct,” Archbishop Saenz told reporters after Easter Mass on April 23 in the capital. The two men were originally sentenced together with three other soldiers to 30 years’ imprisonment for the rapes and murders of the two Maryknoll sisters, Ita Ford and Maura Clark, an Ursuline sister, Dorothy Kazel and a lay missionary, Jean Donovan. Their three colleagues were released from jail two years ago under judicial procedures that allowed early releases for good behavior, but the two remained in jail because the judge ruled they had been involved in prison riots and therefore were disqualified.

2004 - Via the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley California. On the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero:

(The Archbishop, Fernando Saenz Lacalle, is an Honorary Brigadier General of the Salvadoran Army. He has close ties to the Arena political party, the party that allegedly contracted Romero’s assassination 24 years ago. Arena’s candidate, by the way, won the Presidential election a week ago Sunday.)

Archbishop Fernando Saenz Lacalle of San Salvador - Opus Dei. Via the Denver Catholic Register, Oct. 2002:

The pope also has named Opus Dei bishops to head dioceses in Spain, Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Austria. San Salvador Archbishop Fernando Saenz Lacalle is an Opus Dei member who, according to the Opus Dei press center in Rome, also was a confessor to one of his predecessors, slain Archbishop Oscar A. Romero.

[...]

In 1998, the pope raised Opus Dei's University of the Holy Cross in Rome to the status of a pontifical university after just 14 academic years, a move widely seen as a sign of favor. It has rapidly established itself among the five other pontifical universities as a state-of-the-art facility and has grown to about 1,700 students at the undergraduate, master's and doctoral levels.

Some of the university's professors also serve as consultors to Vatican offices and have been called on to help address sensitive Church issues.

Remember all this while listening to the cheery smiling yes-men, panting lap-dogs and obedient horseshit shovelers of cable tee-vee "journalism" critique JP2's "historic" legacy.

More to read
Billmon - April 07, 2005: Culture of Death

Bellatrys/Nothing New Under The Sun, April 03, 2005:
A harlot but our mother - Ecclesia Agonistes