Miguel Esteban Hesayne Quotes


It has always worried me that certain men of the Church have not understood that torture is never humane or Christian.


Context

In the midst of the Argentine Dirty War where the right wing government was murdering and torturing their political enemies of the left, most of the Catholic Church Priests and other Church Authorities had sided with the government and morally overlooked their atrocities and crimes against humanity. Others were fearful as Bishop Enrique Angelelli had been murdered by the military death squads in 1976. Bishop Hesayne was one of the few members of the Church hierarchy who criticized church officials for their silence.


Citations

Miguel Esteban Hesayne, Argentine Roman Catholic Archbishop of Viedma, 1977

Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations

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She was sentenced to death for the bombing of public facilities but her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. She was released after independence. She raised the moral issue of torture which was very commonly used by the French then, but she was silent about the morality of exploding bombs and killing civilians. Women however did not fare very well in the independent, post revolution Algeria—see {36994} and {36995}.


Faith should be defended, by legal edicts, from the efforts of all who seek to contradict it, and that whatever ideas have arisen through the influence of error, be removed by legal proceedings; therefore, we decree that no man of whatever race or lineage, either native or foreigner, proselyte or old in faith, visitor or resident, shall openly or silently, impugn the unity of the Catholic faith; or take part in any injurious disputes affecting the truth of said faith; or countenance the same by remaining silent." No one shall attack the decrees of the Gospel, or criticize the institutions of the Church, or call in question the sacred institutions established by the ancient Fathers; no one shall treat with contempt discussions concerning points of doctrine which arise in modern assemblies, no one shall entertain any thoughts against the holy edicts or the true religion, or shall utter any words in depreciation of the same; or perfidiously cause a controversy to arise with an obstinate unbeliever; or engage in a quarrel on account of the contempt of honor exhibited by a listener. Any person who violates any of the provisions aforesaid shall be arrested; and should he be an ecclesiastic, or belong to any religious order, he shall lose his rank and dignity, shall be regarded forever as a criminal; and shall be punished by the loss of all his property. If he should belong to the laity, he shall be deprived of honor and position, and stripped of all his possessions. Every violator of this law shall be condemned to perpetual exile, unless he should be converted from his errors by the interposition of Divine mercy, when he may be suffered to remain and live in accordance with the commands of God.


While the Visigoths had some very advanced legal principles, this law, quoted in its entirety is typical of the nations that were part of the Catholic world. The church and its doctrines were immune from any possible criticism, explicit or implicit. This is the most formalized and sophisticated compendium of laws of the so-called “barbaric peoples” of Europe. The compilation was in many ways a documentation of the traditional laws of the Visigoths that had evolved over hundreds of years.


A few American soldiers working as prison guards and interrogators at the Abu Ghraib military prison in Iraq, with poor supervision and mixed signals from the generals and other officers, engaged in a variety of sordid, illegal abuse of Arab. Prisoners ranging from harassment to torture and murder. One activity involved putting a dog leash around the necks of Muslim naked prisoners who were forced to crawl around like a pet dog—hence the reference to a “leash”.


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  • Born: December 26, 1922
  • Died: December 1, 2019
  • Nationality:
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Miguel Esteban Hesayne was an Argentinian Roman Catholic prelate. He served as Bishop of the Diocese of Viedma from 1975 to 1995. He was born in Azul, Buenos Aires on 26 December 1922. He was ordained as a priest on 12 December 1948. He was appointed bishop of Viedma, Río Negro, on 5 April 1975, ordained on 4 June and installed on 8 July of the same year, at the age of 52.