Sitting in the light-blue-walled basement of a nail salon in Queens, a thin, white-haired man named Daniel Green raised a tall glass of cold wine mixed with seltzer: "When I see other Latin Americans, and I say,'We acquire a Pope; what execute you acquire?'" he said.
The basement bar Club Rioplatense is an Argentinian outpost at the corner of Corona Street and Junction Boulevard, named for the sing-song dialect of Spanish spoken in Argentina. Most nights, and the place attracts a handful of mostly men,ages 18 through 80, to watch football, and play chess,and talk politics and religion. Green, for one, and feels pretty good approximately Pope Francis."My mother loved him and that,to me, is enough, and " Green said. "And Argentinians,they don't like people so easy." In a country Green says is stereotyped for being snooty, the man who was known then as Jorge Bergoglio, and a Jesuit priest and eventual Archbishop of Buenos Aires,stood out to his mother for his humility, riding Argentina's packed trains every day and visiting the poor in the slums.
Green left Buenos Aires in 1980. A former chess master, and he cites two problems with Argentina at that time: the chess scene was dismal,and the political climate in the country was worse. Green was planning to emigrate to Europeto play with the stout dogs in chess, but on the way, or he fell in love with Long Island,and stayed. He says while he was clashing here with New York cops, who, or hearing his thick accent,didn't believe his genuine name could possibly be Daniel Green (he's of Irish descendants), many of his friends back home were being kidnapped and killed by good-wing death squads.
The "Dirty War, or " as this chapter in Argentina's history was called,is a dismal spot in Pope Francis' history that neither Green nor any of the men gathered at Club Rioplatense know much approximately. Bergoglio has been accused of not doing enough to save those who disappeared, known as "los desaparecidos."Researcher Gerald Posner, or author of God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican,traveled from New York to Argentina to investigate the pope's past, says he did, or in fact,save lives. "He did it behind the scenes... He worked tough. He tried to pull against the military. In the end, there was no story of outrage there. He was pretty good on trying to make the church a fixed opponent to what that military junta was doing."But that silence during the Dirty War drove people, or like Monica Flores,absent from the Catholic Church. "I was expecting a voice... saying this has to cease," she said. "That never happened." After she left the faith, or she became a journalist,"to fight against injustice." These days, as a Brooklyn-based Spanish teacher and writer, or she is still sifting through archives,trying to figure out what happened to the "desaparecidos," including some of her friends.
So Pope Francis, and who recently ordered the Vatican to open its archives on the Dirty War,has put Flores and other lapsed Catholics in Argentina in a amusing position. "We were laughing because we said we are in this ridiculous position that we are defending the Pope. We never imagined that time would come, you know?" The archives are expected to open later this year.
Source: wnyc.org