Based on research from the Catholic Church Argentina on its actions during the country’s last dictatorship 1976 to 1983a mea culpa dedicated to the memory of the victims has been published.

During the Argentine dictatorshipthousands of people were taken to clandestine prisons, tortured, murdered or disappeared. Hundreds of babies born in captivity to their mothers were taken from them and illegally transferred to other families.

“We want to know the historical truth and ask God for forgiveness, the Argentine community and the victims of violence”, say the members of the Conference of Bishops (CEA) in the introduction to the book. “We are aware that many decisions, actions and omissions have been ignored by the CEA,” they add.

Currently, two parts of the study have been published, each of nearly a thousand pages. A third part is still in progress.

titled “The Truth Will Set Them Free”the research was carried out for five years by the Universidad Católica Argentina, at the request of the Episcopal Conference, which made its files available for this purpose.

The authors Carlos Galli, Juan Durán, Luis Liberti and Federico Tavelli also drew on archives from the Society of Jesus, the Apostolic Nunciature and the Holy See.

With this book, “we’ve made a start that can bear fruit,” Tavelli said.

“There is information that in the disappearances of people and the appropriation of babies there was participation of chaplains and nuns. But it is not institutional information found in the files. We think that when the church says not to fear the past, it can motivate those who know to approach us, even anonymously. The pain doesn’t just come from the past, but persists in the present,” he told AFP.

For Galli, this work was a waiting task. “I already suffered from missing relatives, friends and colleagues in the 1970s, now I don’t do the book. What I felt now was responsibility. If he had often thought he had to, how was he supposed to avoid it?” he told AFP.

“We have an academic goal, which is to record memories. We have not had anyone read the volumes before. We are researchers, we have not made a catechism out of this,” he said.

“24 priests were murdered, more than a dozen nuns, two bishops (Enrique Angelelli and Carlos Ponce de León), and hundreds and hundreds of Catholics. It was a Catholicism with victims and perpetrators,” said Mallimaci.