CHAPTER 13

The Difficult Path Toward a Nation of Brothers

If there is one homily that is repeated in the documents of the Argentine bishops of the last few decades, it is the one referring to national reconciliation following the political violence that plunged the country into mourning until the return to democracy in 1983. Military coups, terrorist attacks by groups at both extremes of the ideological spectrum, and an atrocious policy of repression originating from the very heart of the state during the last military dictatorship left deep wounds. Wounds that continue to damage the consciousness of the Argentine people and that raise serious questions about those responsible, many of whom remain protected by impunity. Wounds that continue to be a source of sorrow for the relatives of the victims, thousands of parents who have nowhere to go to mourn for their children, because they are still “disappeared.” Wounds that have scarred those who suffered illegal detention, torture, and lengthy exiles forever.

The role of the Church during those years, and, in particular, during the so-called National Reorganization Process led by successive military juntas, sparked controversy, since accusations of weakness—and even complicity on the part of certain members of the clergy—in the face of systematic violations of human rights have never been in short supply.

In this context, the concept of national reconciliation—based on truth, justice, and forgiveness—brandished by the bishops aroused mixed interpretations. There were those who believed it was a front for an offensive to avoid too much scrutiny of the past and to bring an end to the judicial review (therefore suggesting support for any law on the cessation of legal action that might come into force), thus, importantly, guaranteeing impunity to the soldiers who were involved. In contrast, others saw this sermon as a contribution to the peace process, in particular during the moments when the newly reinstated democracy was laboriously taking its first steps.

So how should the sermon in favor of reconciliation be interpreted? What are the real meaning and scope of Christian forgiveness? How does it complement judicial punishment? Should forgiveness be granted to someone who doesn’t repent? Does it imply some form of atonement on the part of the forgiven as a matter of course? In short, is it realistic to think that a reconciled country is possible, or is a reconciled country just a utopia and must it be left to time to heal the wounds? Finally, did the Church rise to the occasion sufficiently during the military dictatorship to become, over the course of the years, a credible voice for national reconciliation?

We believed it was essential to broach this subject.

The Gospel states that you have to love your enemy—Bible scholars clarify that this should be interpreted as “wishing him well”—and to forgive seventy times seven times. Aren’t these rather utopian premises that, in some way, are contrary to human nature?

Jesus is tremendous on this point: He doesn’t weaken, and He leads by example. When He was treated so badly—a false conviction, the worst kind of torture, and those responsible washed their hands of the situation—He exclaimed, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.” He managed to find an excuse and so was able to forgive them. With regard to the sentence “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink,” there has recently been a very good translation into Spanish. Until now, we used to read: “For in so doing you will heap coals of fire on his head.” The idea of heaping coals of fire on someone’s head didn’t sound quite right to me. The new translation changes it to: “For in this way his face will burn with shame.” This, in some way, indicates a strategy: arriving at such a human response, one that is such a credit to us—being ashamed of something bad we’ve done. Someone with no sense of shame has lost the final safeguard that limits the extent of his awful behavior; he’s rotten to the core. Jesus is very clear on this. Note! He doesn’t say, “Forget about it.”

People often say, “I forgive, but I don’t forget.”

I can’t forget the things people have done to me, but I can look at them through different eyes, even though I may have suffered. We mature with the passing of the years; as Juan Perón would say, we “recoup,” we become wiser and more patient. And when the wound has more or less healed, we gain distance. This is an attitude that God asks of us: forgiveness from the heart. It means I don’t hold what you did to me against you; it has been transformed to create part of the balance of losses and gains. Perhaps I’m not going to forget about it, but I’m not going to hold it against you. Or, rather, I’m not going to harbor a grudge.

So it’s not a case of wiping the slate clean and starting afresh, but really only of starting afresh.

There’s no clean slate. Once again, it’s not possible to forget. In any case, I calm my heart and ask God to forgive the person who wronged me. Note: It’s very difficult to forgive without reference to God, because people have the capacity to forgive only if they have the personal experience of being forgiven. And, generally, we have this experience with God. Of course, sometimes, forgiveness can be granted humanly. But only someone who has had to ask forgiveness at least once is capable of granting forgiveness. For me there are three words that define people and constitute a compendium of attitudes—incidentally, I don’t know whether I can claim to have them myself—and they are: permission, thanks, and forgiveness. The person who doesn’t think to ask permission barges through life, going ahead with his own agenda without bothering about other people, as if other people didn’t exist. In contrast, the person who asks for permission is more humble, more open, more conciliatory.

What can be said of a person who never says “Thanks” or who feels in his heart that he has nothing for which he should be grateful to anybody? There is that very eloquent Spanish saying, “Manners make the man.” Gratitude is a flower that blossoms in noble souls. And, finally, there are people who think it unnecessary to ask forgiveness for anything. They suffer the worst sin: the sin of pride. And let me say it again, only someone who has had to ask forgiveness and who has experienced forgiveness can forgive. For this reason, anyone who doesn’t ask for forgiveness is lacking something in his day-to-day life. Either he was not given a chance to learn properly or he has been taught badly by life.

But is it possible to forgive someone who doesn’t show remorse for the wrong he’s committed? And who, in the words of the catechism, shows no willingness to somehow atone for the wrong he’s done?

In the homily for a Corpus Christi Mass, I said something that scandalized some people, perhaps because they thought I was making some kind of apology for all the bad things that had happened to us and trivially calling for people to start a new chapter. It was when I referred to people who curse the past and don’t forgive; more than that, I mentioned those who use the past to gain revenge. Basically, I asserted that we have to bless the past with remorse, forgiveness, and atonement. And forgiveness has to go hand in hand with the other two concepts. If someone wrongs me, I have to forgive him, but that forgiveness is received by the other person only when he shows remorse and atones. You can’t say, “I forgive you, and so nothing happened here.” What would have happened at the Nuremberg trials if they had adopted this attitude toward the Nazi leaders? Many of them atoned via execution; for others, it was prison. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not in favor of the death penalty, but it was the law at the time and it was the atonement that society demanded in accordance with the prevailing law.

So forgiveness isn’t a one-way act, dependent solely on the will of the person who forgives.

I have to be prepared to grant forgiveness, and it becomes effective only when the person to whom it is granted is ready to receive it. And they can receive it when they feel remorse and want to atone for what they did. Otherwise—to use a soccer term—the forgiven person remains offsides. Granting someone forgiveness is one thing; having the capacity to receive it is quite another.

If I hit my mother and then ask her to forgive me while I know that I’d beat her again if she did something else I didn’t like, she might grant me forgiveness, but I won’t receive it, because my heart will be closed. In other words, in order to receive forgiveness, you have to be ready for it. This is why that famous expression of “weeping for one’s sins” appears in the accounts of great conversions in the stories of the saints, to describe an act so Christian as weeping for the sins that have been committed, which implies remorse and the intent to atone for them.

But when the offenses are extremely serious, when terrible crimes are committed, isn’t a mechanism of denial, and, to a certain extent, justification, triggered by the argument “I had no other choice but to commit them”?

I think this is true with the smallest offenses, not just with the biggest ones. I’ve experienced—and I’ve discussed this with my confessor—moments of intense internal enlightenment when I realized the extent of the failings in my life and the sins for which I hadn’t atoned. I observed my actions with different eyes, and I was terrified. If I felt panic in these instances of bright light between one period of darkness and another, when I became aware of the social consequences of what I’d done, or stopped doing, I can easily imagine that there are people who, when faced with massive mistakes, employ a mechanism of denial or all kinds of arguments so as not to die of distress.

At any rate, the problem in Argentina is that “it was nobody . . .”

In this context, it’s important to acknowledge the protagonists of the turbulent events of the first few decades of our national history, who owned up when they killed one another. For example, “I shot this man.” Signed “Lavalle.” During the political violence that took place during the latter part of the twentieth century, almost nobody admitted responsibility for anything, and if anyone did, they didn’t always give any indication of remorse or an intention to atone for what they’d done. During the last military dictatorship—whose human rights violations, as we bishops said, are made much more serious by the fact that they were committed by the state—things got so bad that thousands of people were “disappeared.” If the wrong isn’t acknowledged, isn’t that an extreme, hideous form of not taking responsibility?

Some people have attitudes of revenge. Do you think that the role of, for example, Hebe de Bonafini, the president of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, is helpful in the search for reconciliation?

We have to put ourselves in the place of a mother whose children were kidnapped and who never heard any more about them. They were flesh of her flesh; she didn’t even know how long they were imprisoned, how many sessions of torture with electric shocks and violent beatings they suffered, or how they were killed. I imagine these women searching desperately for their children and coming up against the cynicism of the authorities, who humiliated them and sent them from pillar to post. How can we not understand what they’re feeling?

Was the Church a staunch defender of human rights during those years?

In order to answer this question, we have to keep in mind that, like wider society, the Church—which consists of all baptized Catholics—came to realize what was happening gradually. Nobody was fully aware of what was happening at the start. In my own case, I must admit that I started out with a lot of limitations when it came to interpreting certain events: when Juan Perón returned to the country in 1973 and the Ezeiza massacre took place, I didn’t understand what was going on at all. Nor when Héctor Cámpora resigned the presidency. At that point, I didn’t have enough political information to understand all that.

However, we were becoming increasingly aware of the guerrillas, of their intention to gain a foothold in Tucumán, and of the terrorist attacks, which involved civilian victims who had nothing to do with politics and young people carrying out their military service. Then President Isabel Martínez de Perón issued her decree (which ordered “the annihilation of subversive activity”). At that point, we began to realize that things were serious. At the same time, it seemed like the whole world began “knocking on the barracks doors.” Almost everyone, including the vast majority of political parties, supported the 1976 coup. If I’m not mistaken, the only ones who didn’t were the Revolutionary Communist Party, although it’s also true that nobody, or very few people, had any idea what would follow. We have to be realistic about this; nobody should wash their hands of it. I hope that the political parties and other organizations will ask forgiveness like the Church did (the bishops undertook an examination of conscience in 1996 and, in 2000, carried out a mea culpa as part of the Jubilee).

There are those who maintain that the Church was well aware of what was happening during the dictatorship.

I reiterate that at the beginning, little or nothing was known; we became aware gradually. I myself, as a priest, knew that something serious was happening and that there were a lot of prisoners, but I realized it was more than that only later on. Society as a whole recently became fully aware of events during the trial of the military commanders. Of course, certain bishops realized the kinds of methods that were being used on the prisoners before others did. It’s true that there were some more perceptive pastors who took great risks. Monsignor Vicente Zazpe, the archbishop of Santa Fe, was one of the first to realize the sort of thing the dictatorship was doing following the kidnapping and savage torture of Adán Noé Campagnolo, who, until the coup, had been mayor of the provincial capital.

There were others, too, such as Miguel Hesayne, Jorge Novak, and Jaime de Nevares, who immediately began to take strong stances in defense of human rights. There were others who did a lot but spoke out less. And, finally, there were a few who were naive or lazy. On the other hand, sometimes, subconsciously, an individual doesn’t want to see things that could become unpleasant, doesn’t want to accept that they’re really true. It happens with parents whose child is a drug addict or a gambler or has some other vice. It’s a very human response. I truly found it difficult to see until they started to bring people to me and I had to hide the first one.

We’ll talk more about that later. It’s often said that the bishops favored discreet efforts over public declarations out of fear that the latter would cause an increase in the rate of executions. Was this a formal strategy? Didn’t the Church end up a silent accomplice?

It’s true that the Church did, in part, follow this strategy. However, in spite of the discreet nature of the Church’s efforts, the bishops’ declarations left no room for doubt. And anyone can read them, because they were compiled in a book, which we unveiled on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of our document The Church and the National Community. The third chapter, “The Church and Human Rights,” contains the main ones. And contrary to the suggestions of certain ill-intentioned journalists, they’re complete, with no omissions. The Church spoke out. Furthermore, there’s a pastoral letter dated May 15, 1976, which reflects the concerns the bishops were already experiencing, and another from April 1977, which warns about torture. There were also others dating from Isabel Perón’s presidency. In any case, some of the thoughts expressed are doubtful in tone because, as I said, the Church really didn’t know what was happening. But events like the massacre of the Pallottine priests and seminarians gave increasing force to their statements.

Whenever the Church spoke out in the following years about the need to achieve reconciliation, there was never any shortage of people who believed they saw an endorsement of impunity behind its message. What do you think?

Absolutely not. I want to make myself clear: justice must run its course. It’s true that after great global upheavals, after massive wars, the sociopolitical mechanism of amnesty always comes into play. After the Second World War, amnesties were granted in various countries, but there were also trials for those responsible. France had to deal with Pétain and his collaborationists, and it acted generously. While de Gaulle was harsh, he was afraid of treating them unjustly, since, at the time, it was very difficult to judge whether or not it would be a good thing for France to collaborate with the Nazis. They didn’t kill Pétain, but sent him to French Guiana. De Gaulle wanted to remove all thirty-five bishops with links to Pétain from office. Then Angelo Roncalli (later Pope John XXIII), the apostolic nuncio in Paris, arrived on the scene and three or four of them ended up retiring. I think a distinction was made between ambiguous situations, the result of fear, and criminal situations. While the former are understandable, the latter are not. Pétain acted as he did in the belief that it was the patriotic thing to do. But he was mistaken, even though his intentions were good. If that had not been the case, he would have swung for it, because the French don’t beat around the bush.

Such topics often draw comparison with the case of John Paul II, who forgave the man who tried to assassinate him, but justice still ran its course.

Of course. Mehmet Ali trial still took place. The pope forgave him, but he was still found guilty and remained in jail until he served his term, when he was deported to Turkey, where he was jailed again for crimes he had committed in his own country. This case clearly demonstrates what I was saying before with regard to an individual being able to grant forgiveness from the heart, but there also being a need for remorse and atonement on the part of the other person. In the version of events I know, which I believe to be true, when the pope went to visit him in jail, at no point did Ali show any sign of remorse. On the contrary, he said to the pope, “I don’t understand why you didn’t die . . . my trigger never fails.”

In any case, doesn’t the search for true reconciliation imply that something must be given up? Doesn’t it demand magnanimous gestures?

We always have to give things up. Something has to be given up for a state of reconciliation to be reached. Everyone has to do it. But it’s important to be careful that it’s not something that affects the essence of justice. Perhaps the person who must grant forgiveness is asked to give up their resentment. Resentment is bitterness. And living with bitterness is like drinking urine, like eating your own feces; it suggests that you don’t want to leave the pigsty.

Pain, on the other hand, is a different kind of sore, an open field. Resentment is like a house where squatters live piled one atop another with no view of the sky. While pain is also like a house where there are a lot of people living on top of one another, but you can still see the sky. In other words, pain is open to prayer, to affection, to the company of a friend, to a thousand things that give an individual dignity. Pain is a healthier condition. That’s what experience has taught me.

The mother of Michelle Bachelet, the president of Chile, has said that she once met her torturer in an elevator, that she forgave him and experienced a great sense of peace.

Forgiving someone always does good—it is part of what you were asking me about in your previous question: the virtue of magnanimity. A magnanimous person is always happy. A pusillanimous person, with a crumpled heart, never achieves happiness.

Is forgiveness the thing that makes men and women most like God?

Love is what brings us closest to God. Forgiveness makes us resemble Him by virtue of being an act of love.