New Pope 2013: English Translation for Pope Francis’s Book, Sainthood Process for Slain Argentinean Priests
Followers of Pope Francis would soon be able to read one of his books in English. Image Books said the pope's On Heaven and Earth: Pope Francis on Faith, Family and the Church in the 21stt Century, will be released in the U.S. and Canada on May 7.
He wrote in Spanish the book, which was published in 2010, when he was still known as Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Archbishop of Buenos Aires.
Rabbi Abraham Skorka, rector of the Latin American Rabbinical Seminary in Buenos Aires, co-authored the book which is series of conversation on diverse topics such as God, atheism, abortion, the Holocaust, same-sex marriage, fundamentalism and globalisation.
The book is the pope's way of improving relations between faiths. The book is one of the 11 that he wrote in the Spanish language.
With Pope Francis now the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, it may help speed up the canonization of two Argentinean Catholic priests and a layman who were killed during the military reign in the Latin American country. Canonization is the first step toward sainthood in the Catholic faith.
He supported the canonization process in May 2011 when he was still the head of the Argentinean Conference of Bishops which initiated an investigation into the lives of Frs. Carlos de Dios Munas, 30, and Gabriel Longueville, 45, and layman Wenceslao Pedernera, 39. The three were murdered in 1976 at the beginning of Argentina's military dirty war against the left. Their bodies were found on July 18, 1976, bullet ridden and with apparent signs of torture.
The two priests were working with poor urban settlers under La Rioja Bishop Enrique Angelelli.
A week after the discovery of the two priests' corps, Mr Pedernera, who was working in the cooperativist movement, was kidnapped and shot to death in front of his family in Sanogasta, La Rioja Province. The bishop was also killed on Aug 4, 1976.
There are accusations that then Cardinal Bergoglio did not do enough to protect priests during the military regime in Argentina. In response to accusations that he was part of the 1976 kidnapping and torture of two other Jesuit priests, the Vatican cited the cardinal's testimony at a 2010 trial.
The pope has also been accused of declining to meet with the victims of Fr Julio Cesar Grassi from the Buenos Aires diocese who was meted a 15-year sentence in 2009 for molesting a pre-teen boy under the priest's care, but the latter is free on conditional release.
As head of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis inherited from Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI the task of finding a solution to the numerous sex abuse cases involving clergy.
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