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| Provincial Sup. Bergoglio and novice Mom Debussy |
Miguel Ignacio Mom Debussy is an Argentine citizen - it is unclear what he does for a living now, but he is a descendant of the most powerful landowning family (the Pueyrredon family) in a historically agrarian country. What he is famous for, however, is for what he was: a Jesuit for 14 years, and a priest for a couple of years, and very close to Fr. Jorge Mario Bergoglio during most of that time, apparently even working as a kind of secretary/driver. He left the priesthood, and the Society, officially in 1990, and now says he is "agnostic" - and obviously does not like his former friend.
He granted an extensive interview to Italian website Linkiesta - wanting to be clearly critical, but providing instead precious and good information on the new pope. The main focus of the interview is on how Fr. Bergoglio acted during the last Argentine dictatorship, mostly in the line of "he could/should have done more".*** Mom Debussy mentions many aspects that indicate a general distrust of Bergoglio in the Society in Argentina. But one of his most relevant answers is the following:
What was the position Bergoglio had then regarding Liberation Theology?
Completely against it. In fact, as Theology students, we had never studied a single book by, for instance, Gustavo Gutiérrez, one of the founders of Liberation Theology, of by [Leonardo] Boff, or by Paulo Freire, with his studies on an education that is not a cultural "dependency" [of the "imperialistic powers"]. In Philosophy, we had read little, very little, of Heidegger and Kierkegaard, one single chapter of Thus Spoke Zarathustra... Not to mention Marx, Engels, Sartre, Foucault, the Post-Moderns, etc. Nothing that could contradict Catholic doctrine or dogmas. All that under strict orders of Jorge Bergoglio.
***Rorate note: Right in the middle of the upheaval that agitated Argentina in the 1960s and 1970s, with great violence from both sides - initiated first by Communist and Liberation-theology-inspired terrorist organizations-, a Church that had once been deeply traditional but was now battered by the winds of Vatican II and the Medellín Conference was apparently falling apart. Very few managed to keep their calm, and that certainly seems to have been the case of the Provincial Superior of the Jesuits in 1973-1979, Fr. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, though it was not the case of many of his colleagues in the Society of Jesus, who still criticize him for never having "criticized or opposed the government" (see). He did not, and that is actually to his great merit.
