Church and dictatorship in Argentina: The bishops' struggle for documentary integrity
Description
The hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Argentina has been widely denounced for its alleged complicity with the military dictatorship's 'Dirty War' against subversion following the 1976 coup that overthrew the government of Isabel Peron. Criticism of the church's lack of courage began almost immediately, when relatives of the detained and disappeared were frustrated by the bishops' reluctance to intercede on behalf of the victims of systematic human rights abuse A majority of scholars and journalists investigating the period presume the church's guilt without fully examining available documentary materials. What little evidence most writers offer is almost always more circumstantial than documentary The church's official pronouncements form the analytical core of the dissertation. Text-critical and thematic analysis reveals not only the social and political uses of the documents but also helps place them within the context of the larger body of literature on the period. The ecclesiastical documents are themselves the subject of much controversy. Some argue that their primary role during the dictatorship was to provide a 'discourse of support' for the military's Proceso de Reorganizacion Nacional. Moreover, critics accused the hierarchy of masking the church's moral weakness behind carefully timed publications that tried to put the church in more favorable light. This study analyses the integrity of those documents and evaluates their usefulness for research by asking whether the bishops are really talking about what they say they are talking about