The Catholic Church in Argentina and the “dirty war”

From "Breaking the silence: the Catholic Church in Argentina and the ‘dirty war’" by Horacio Verbitsky  in OpenDemocracy.net:

Among the horrors of Argentina’s military rule that “disappeared” up to 30,000 citizens from 1976-83, the complicity of senior figures in the Catholic hierarchy is becoming known thanks to the investigations of writer Horacio Verbitsky. openDemocracy publishes an exclusive extract from his new book, “The Silence”.

While the systematic cruelty reported here is chilling, what I find most interesting is how these practices were justified by some church leaders as a defense of the moral fabric of their socieities from the cancer of secularism and Marxism.   In other words, their support was not guided by some newfangled ideology, but rather by a kind of religious faith and cultural conservativism that many of us might find familiar.

It is well known today how some leftist ideologies of liberation have lent themselves to the establishment of totalitarianism.  It is less often noted how the same temptations exist for   defenders of religion and tradition, as well.