These paths lead to Rome

National Catholic Reporter, June 2, 2000 by John L. Jr. Allen

Pio Laghi

Laghi, 77, was made a cardinal at the end of his career as papal nuncio in both Argentina and the United States. He was posted to Argentina from 1974 to 1980, in the middle of that country's "dirty war," a military dictatorship that lasted from 1976 to 1983. Estimates are that almost 20,000 people were killed or disappeared during those years.

Laghi spent 1980 to 1990 in the United States, and then served as prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education from 1990 until his retirement in 1999.

Laghi encouraged a policy of nonconfrontation with the military regime, and was on friendly terms with several of its leaders. One, Admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera, was an especially close friend. Laghi and Massera played tennis almost every day, and Laghi officiated at the wedding of Massera's son and baptized his grandson.

Massera was convicted in 1985 of flagrant human rights violations, though the verdict was later set aside by the Argentinean government. In October 1999 he was convicted again, this time for the disappearance of all but one member of an Argentine family during the rule of the military junta. He also faces charges of abducting babies born to women imprisoned during the dictatorship.

In a speech in Tucuman in northwestern Argentina in 1976, Laghi seemed to endorse the doctrine of national security. "The cause of the subversion is of ideological origin," Laghi said, and Argentina has a traditional ideology that spontaneously develops "antibodies against the germs." In such a situation, Laghi said, "rights must be respected as far as this is possible."

Laghi made this statement (as reported in La Nacion, June 27, 1976) in a speech to generals. In another address that day at the Tucuman airport, he returned to the theme. "Christian values are threatened by an ideology that the people reject. The church and the armed forces share responsibility. The former is an integral element in the process. It accompanies the latter, not only by its prayers but by its actions."

In 1997, Laghi was charged with complicity in the regime's crimes by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who petitioned the Italian government to prosecute Laghi. They claimed to have 20 witnesses, including two bishops, two priests and a mother superior ready to testify that Laghi silenced international protests, falsely stated to relatives that he knew nothing of the fate of victims and expelled, from the country priests and religious who protested the "disappearances" and tortures.

To date, few of those witnesses have come forward, though an Argentinean priest named Federico Richards has publicly accused Laghi of having a list of the disappeared obtained from the military and keeping silent about it. During the 1970s Richards edited a newspaper for the English-speaking community in Buenos Aires in which he published accounts of military brutalities omitted by the state-controlled media

Laghi vehemently denied the accusations as being "defamatory and void of factual content." The Vatican daily, L'Osservatore Romano, said in an unsigned editorial that the charges were unjust, dishonest and historically wrong.