Et tu, Francesco?

Well, from the Borgias on down, the Catholic Church, as an institution with government, finances and secrets, has been nothing if not pragmatic.

The publication Business Insider appears to bear this out in an article by Geoffrey Ingersoll. While Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio appears to be a sincere, humble, scholarly Jesuit, at the same time, his role as a leader of the Church during the era of the Argentinian military junta of the 1970s, may give one pause and bring Pope Francis's "honeymoon" to a quick end. Perhaps as part of his humility, we will hear him address this issue in the coming weeks. Perhaps, for the reportedly media shy, contemplative, humble scholar and servant of G-d, assuming this role at the head of the Roman Catholic Church, with all its challenges and problems, and needs for reform, will serve as a form of penance and absolution. But whether the conservative Argentine will even see the need to address this potentially dark bit of personal and Argentine history remains to be seen.
--Anthony Napoli, Deep in the Heart of Brooklyn

From the Business Insider by Geoffrey Ingersoll:

Bergoglio Has Ties To A Dark Period For The Catholic Church

New Pope Francis isn't a Hitler Youth like the last guy, but he has his own troubled history. Francis I along with the whole Argentine Catholic Church have faced criticism for their silence or complicity during the post-1976 military dictatorship — a failure for which the Church apologized in 2012.

Known as the Dirty War, this period saw a brutal battle between the ruling military elite and leftist guerrilla fighters, in which up to 30,000 Argentines were "disappeared" and others were raped or killed.

Argentine journalist Horacio Verbitsky chronicled how the Church and Bergoglio were involved in this dark era. As described by Hugh O'Shaughnessy of The Guardian in 2011:

Verbitsky] recounts how the Argentine navy with the connivance of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now the Jesuit archbishop of Buenos Aires, hid from a visiting delegation of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission the dictatorship's political prisoners. Bergoglio was hiding them in nothing less than his holiday home in an island called El Silencio in the River Plate. The most shaming thing for the church is that in such circumstances Bergoglio's name was allowed to go forward in the ballot to chose the successor of John Paul II. What scandal would not have ensued if the first pope ever to be elected from the continent of America had been revealed as an accessory to murder and false imprisonment.

Bergoglio contended to writer Sergio Rubin that he hid these people to keep them from the violent military junta, not the Human Rights Commission — even as his Jesuit order and Church leaders publicly endorsed the dictatorship.

He later said the endorsement was one of political pragmatism, which is understandable in the face of certain death, if not exactly righteous, according to the AP.

Read more here