Read this--and weep. Will someone please tell us what the Argentine bishops of the Catholic Church--my Church, our Church--were doing during this nightmare? And, what does it say that this "Christian" nation was capable--and that these "Christians" were capable- of such horror?
New York Times
January 13, 2008
Lost Children, Lost Truths
By Roger Cohen
BUENOS AIRES
As journalists, we like to think we do some good from time to time.
For 20 years, I’ve believed I helped two Argentine children emerge from
the savagery of dictatorship, find their true family and secure better
lives. Now I wonder. Here’s a story of truth and justice — or neither.
When the military junta that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983
seized pregnant women, it made a practice of waiting to kill them until
their babies were born. The infants were then taken by childless
military or police couples while the mothers were “disappeared.”
I was incensed in the aftermath of the dictatorship, finding myself
often in rooms filled with the animal sobbing of the bereaved. But
there was something about having a young woman give birth, only to
slaughter her and steal her child, that took the Argentine state’s
depravity — and my anger — to a new level.
It was too early back in the mid-1980s to know the extent of the
generals’ crimes: the 30,000 disappeared and corpse-dumping flights out
to sea. But new details were emerging. One, a suggestion that twin boys
had been abducted from a murdered woman by an Argentine police officer
named Samuel Miara, sent me in 1987 to the Paraguayan capital,
Asunción.
Miara and his wife, Beatriz, had fled to Gen. Alfredo Stroessner’s
little dominion after the Argentine junta fell. Tips questioning the
twins’ parenthood had reached the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo
human-rights group.
I was in touch with the family of Liliana Ross, a medical student
abducted on Dec. 12, 1976, never to be seen again. Liliana had been
pregnant and, through an appalled midwife (later murdered), word had
reached her husband, Adalberto Rossetti, that twin boys named Gustavo
and Martin were born to her on April 22, 1977, in Los Olmos prison,
before being taken by the Miaras.
The scene in Asunción is still vivid to me: two blond boys playing
soccer, the smell of mowed grass, a big German shepherd barking. And
there was Miara, a swarthy man, smoking. Why would he talk to me, for
my questions to him were in essence these:
“Are you the guy who’s stolen a couple of children after their
mother was killed by the Argentine Army? Are these boys, whom you call
Gonzalo and Matías Miara, really Gustavo and Martin Rossetti?”
Yet he invited me in. A troubled conscience can be a journalist’s
friend. Miara railed against “leftists” and showed me photographs of
his wife in early pregnancy. (But none in late.)
The Wall Street Journal published my story — and things started to
move. The Miaras were extradited in 1989. DNA tests proved the children
were not theirs. Argentine justice moves slowly, but Samuel Miara was
convicted of the boys’ kidnapping in 1991 and again, on appeal, in
1995. He went to jail.
I heard echoes of this. But I’d moved on. Justice delivered, I
thought, a good deed done. Until I returned here this week, seeking the
30-year-old twins, and found more acrimony than reconciliation.
The boys were not the children of Rossetti and Ross. DNA tests
proved they were born to another “disappeared” student, María Tolosa.
She was grabbed with her husband, Juan Reggiardo, in February 1977, and
gave birth to twins at Los Olmos prison on May 16, 1977. She and her
husband were later murdered.
Rosa Roisinblit, whose own pregnant daughter was abducted in 1978
and killed after giving birth, told me the twins — now called Gonzalo
and Matías Reggiardo Tolosa — had sought in vain for a stable home in
the 1990s. They clung to Beatriz Miara. A spell with an uncle, Eduardo
Tolosa, proved disastrous. They were placed with a “substitute family.”
“These children were booty of war and, somehow, the kidnappers
abetted the parents’ murder,” Roisinblit, the vice president of the
Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, told me. “Yet the boys clung to the
monsters.”
I couldn’t find the twins. One is said to carry a photo of his
biological mother, the other to be inseparable from the “mother” who
raised him. By all accounts, they never talk to the press. The justice
I’d helped deliver had consisted, for them, of one broken home after
another.
But they had the truth, or something closer to it than a peaceful
Paraguayan yard reeking of repressed crime. We journalists are
intruders who move on. Was this intrusion worth it? For the dead, and
for Argentina, I say yes. For the twins, I don’t know.
Truth or justice? Every society emerging from terror must choose.
But truth is messier, and justice less adequate than we acknowledge.
Life resides in half-tones newspapers render with difficulty, rather
than in absolutes.
Miara is facing new charges of crimes against humanity in various
prison camps. His trial is expected this year. As for the other twins,
those born to Liliana Ross, they, like hundreds of other children of
the disappeared, have never been found.
Saturday, January 12, 2008
An MOJ reader sent this along, thinking--rightly--that other MOJ readers would be interested.
State Files to Join Episcopal Case
Attorney
General Says Constitutional Issues Are at Stake
By Michelle Boorstein
Washington Post Staff
Writer
Saturday, January 12, 2008
The attorney general of Virginia has filed a motion to intervene in the court battle
between the Episcopal Church and 11 breakaway congregations, arguing that he is
obliged to defend the constitutionality of a state statute at the center of the
trial.
The case in Fairfax County Circuit Court is over whether the conservative
congregations, which left the national church over disputes related to the
interpretation of Scripture and the acceptance of homosexuality, can keep the
land and buildings. After voting to leave in 2006 and 2007, the congregations
filed court papers saying they had -- under a Civil War-era Virginia law --
legally "divided" from the national church and thus were keeping the
property.
But the Episcopal Church and the Virginia Diocese, its local branch, argue
that there has been no legal "division" -- rather that a minority of dissidents
opted to leave, and therefore have no rights to the land or buildings. Church
lawyers also say it would be unconstitutional for the state to determine when a
hierarchical church -- such as the Episcopal Church -- has had a fundamental
division, that such a judgment is a religious matter. Meddling would be a
violation of church-state separation, diocesan lawyers say.
On Thursday, Attorney General Robert F. McDonnell (R) filed a motion to
intervene in the case, which was heard in November. A decision is pending.
"The Constitution permits multiple methods of resolving church property
disputes," McDonnell argues, and does not require the state to defer to
denominational leaders.
Civil lawyers had mixed reaction to that, with some saying it was highly
unusual for the state to get involved in a civil case when it was still at the
circuit court level rather than waiting for a judge to rule.
McDonnell spokesman J. Tucker Martin cited several federal
appeals-court-level cases -- also involving challenges to the constitutionality
of Virginia statutes -- and said the attorney general was not taking sides in
how the case should ultimately be decided.
"Certainly there is nothing improper about the attorney general weighing in,
but it does strike me as a little out of the ordinary for them to get involved
in a circuit-court-level case," said N. Thomas Connally, a McLean lawyer who specializes in real estate.
Patrick Getlein, spokesman for the Virginia Diocese, declined to comment,
noting that Judge Randy Bellows asked both sides to reply next week on the
state's request to become a party in the case.
Jim Oakes, a leader of the cluster of breakaway Virginia churches, said
yesterday in a statement that the attorney general's brief "validates the
position of our parishes and directly refutes arguments that were made by the
Episcopal Church and the Diocese of Virginia."
McDonnell's office has another connection to this issue -- his deputy, former
state senator William C. Mims (R), who has been a member of another Episcopal
church that broke away from the national church over the same issues of how to
understand Scripture as it pertains to homosexuality. Mims prompted controversy
and much debate in 2005 when he -- as a senator -- proposed a bill that would
have explicitly allowed congregants who leave their denominations to keep their
land. The measure failed, and opponents said it was an inappropriate insertion
of government into church affairs.
Mims did not return a message, and Martin said he was unavailable for
comment.
Thanks, Michael, for the interesting questions about Protestants. I'll leave the spiritual-discipline question for now. In response to Richard's post about the article on liturgy and life/moral issues, and Michael's question whether "Protestants (or subsets of Protestants) have similar fault lines to those described in Richard's post":
First, I'm not sure exactly what the article is claiming about the connection between traditional Catholic morality and liturgical devotion. Is the correlation only with the particular wish to receive Communion kneeling and on the tongue? Or is the correlation with a broader desire for mystery and grandeur in the liturgy -- which would implicate a bunch of features, like the often very un-mysterious "praise music," that the article doesn't mention?
Beyond that, and assuming that the article correctly describes a Catholic fault line, I think that Protestantism is more complicated and has one big dynamic cutting the opposite way that means -- in contrast to Richard's observation -- pro-life attitudes don't correlate with a deep sense of mystery and "sacredness" in liturgy.
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