The Catholic church, maintaining its cultural hegemony not only in Argentina but the region entirely, worked alongside the regime(s) in defense of its own authority and control, albeit nonetheless being highly regulated. The church actively supported the military hierarchy, even participating in torture, as seen by Christian von Wernich. Von Wernich served as Police chaplain during the dictatorship and was described during the 2007 trial as “present at torture sessions in clandestine detention centers”. Seemingly, he “extracted confessions to help the military root out perceived enemies, while at the same time offering comforting words and hope to family members searching for loved ones who had been kidnapped by the government”. In total, von Wernich was accused of involvement in seven murders, and 42 cases of kidnapping and torture. Yet von Wernich was no lone case, and seemingly, thirty or so priests could have been similarly charged. Even among high-ranking clerics, cooperation was common. Archbishop Adolfo Servando Tortolo of Paraná in Entre Ríos in Northern Argentina, and Monseñor Emilio Teodoro Grasselli, secretary to the archbishop of Buenos Aires, seemingly gave no support to relatives of the disappeared, even perhaps “acting as a source of information to the military”. Jorge Videla, one the leading members of the Junta as presidente de facto between 1979 and 1981, even admitted in a public confession of his “sins” in his life sentence, testified on open collaboration with the church during the “dirty war” and that “the church aided us with the situation of the disappeared”, notably in managing the situation, and who offered “its good duties, and before families who had the certainty that they would not make use politically of the information, told them not to look for their son because he was dead”.
Videla himself remarked that his relationship with the church was “excellent, very cordial, sincere, and open”. Argentine journalist Horacio Verbitsky has particularly charted Church relations to the military leadership, culminating in his work El Silencio, published for the first time in 2005 and which featured various testimonies involving clerical relations to the military ESMA (Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada), effectively a prison and torture center and even persecutions of the clergy themselves based on “dangerous thought” and possible “Izquierdista” and “Peronista” ideology.
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