Argentina's best-known investigative reporter, Horacio Verbitsky, accuses the pontiff, who is also known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, of allowing two priests who served under him to be kidnapped. The pope, as well as some human rights activists, disputes that account, contending he actually tried to get them freed.
Even as millions rejoice at the first Catholic pontiff from Latin America, troubling questions persist over the role Pope Francis played during Argentina's notorious Dirty War.
In 1976, right-wing military leaders overthrew that country's elected government and installed Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla as dictator. Coup leaders then launched a campaign of secret kidnappings, torture and murder of suspected leftists and opposition figures. Estimates of the dead range up to 30,000.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio, then head of that country's Jesuit order, has long been accused by Argentina's best-known investigative reporter, Horacio Verbitsky, of being complicit in the military's kidnapping and torture of two priests who served under him.
Verbitsky's claim is rejected by some human rights leaders, including Adolfo Perez Esquivel, who won the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize for documenting the junta's atrocities.
"Perhaps he (Bergoglio) didn't have the courage of other priests, but he never collaborated with the dictatorship," Esquivel said.
Verbitsky stood by his claim during an interview Thursday from his home in Argentina.
RELATED: LUPICA: GIVE POPE SHOT AT FORWARD THINKING
According to Verbitsky, Bergoglio tried to convince the priests, Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics, to stop their work among the poor before they were seized in 1979.
"They refused to do it, so he (Bergoglio) ... let the military know that they were no longer inside the protection of the Jesuits, and they were kidnapped," Verbitsky said.
Yorio is dead now, and Jalics lives in a monastery in Germany and has never made public statements. But Verbitsky interviewed both men, and he says both "accuse (Bergoglio) for this deed."
Even more damning, Verbitsky said, are documents he obtained in recent years from Argentina's foreign ministry. One states that the two priests were jailed at a naval base because of "information provided by Father Jorge Mario Bergoglio, provincial superior of the Jesuits."
Cardinal Bergoglio insisted in 2010 that he actually tried to get the two priests freed and even appealed directly to former dictator Videla.
But it is not so easy to dismiss Verbitsky's claims.
RELATED: CRITICS CLAIM FRANCIS DID NOT DO ENOUGH TO END 'DIRTY WAR'
He is, after all, the reporter who first published in 1994 the riveting confessions of a conscience-stricken naval officer that he and his fellow officers not only tortured dissidents, but drugged them, striped them naked and dropped them from airplanes into the ocean so their bodies would never be found.
"We did terrible things ... worse than the Nazis," the officer confessed to Verbitsky.
Since then, a series of trials in Argentina has brought several of the murderers to justice, including Gen. Videla, who is serving a 50-year sentence.
Videla claimed last year from prison that Argentine church leaders and even the Vatican's ambassador in that country "advised" the military on how best to deal with arrested dissidents.
Most embarrasing is the case of Rev. Christian von Wernich, a former Buenos Aires police chaplain who was sentenced in 2007 to life in prison for his involvement in seven murders, 42 kidnappings and 32 instances of torture..
Bergoglio was head of the bishops council of Argentina when von Wernich was put on trial. Even though the convicted priest's immediate superior claimed he would be dealt with "according to canon law," von Wernich was still celebrating Mass in prison years later and has never been defrocked.
It was not until 2012, a year after Cardinal Bergoglio resigned as head of the bishops council, that Argentina's church leaders finally issued a formal apology for their errors during the Dirty War.
