Egypt's pope sharply criticizes president

CAIRO (AP) — Egypt's Coptic Christian pope delivered an unprecedented direct criticism of the Islamist president Tuesday after a mob attack on the church's main cathedral, saying he had failed to protect the building and warning that the country is collapsing.

The comments by Pope Tawadros II and the cathedral attack itself illustrate a new reality in Egypt, where institutions long seen as above the fray are being dragged into the country's intense polarization and political violence.

Egypt has become increasingly divided between two camps, with President Mohammed Morsi and Islamist allies on one side and an opposition made up of moderate Muslims, Christians and liberals on the other, a schism essentially over the country's political future after decades of dictatorship. Opponents accuse Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood of seeking to monopolize power, while Morsi's allies say the opposition is trying to destabilize the country to derail the elected leadership.

Traditionally, a number of state icons were considered untouchable politically — nationalist pillars vital for the state's stability and so too important to be criticized or mired in disputes. But one by one, they have been sucked into the country's divisions, whether under pressure to take sides or outright plunged into controversy.

The military was pulled into politics early on when it took power following the February 2011 ouster of autocrat Hosni Mubarak and ruled for nearly 17 months. The courts became the center of controversy last year, with repeated confrontations between Morsi's administration and members of the judiciary.

Now, not only the Coptic Church but also the country's most eminent Islamic institution, Al-Azhar, are getting caught up in the turmoil.

Tawadros' remarks Tuesday in a telephone interview with the private ONTV network were his first direct criticism of Morsi since he was enthroned in November as the spiritual leader of Egypt's Orthodox Coptic Christians. Christians make up an estimated 10 percent of Egypt's 90 million people.

Tawadros said Morsi had promised him in a telephone conversation to do everything to protect the St Mark Cathedral, which also serves as the papal seat.

"But in reality he did not," Tawadros said. When asked to explain, he said: It "comes under the category of negligence and poor assessment of events." He did not make clear whether he was accusing Morsi himself of negligence or whether he was addressing the president's government.

In violence Sunday, an angry mob of Muslims threw firebombs and rocks at the Coptic cathedral in Cairo, leaving two people dead. One of the two was identified as a Christian.

The attack followed a funeral service for four Christians killed in sectarian clashes in a town north of Cairo, which also left a Muslim dead, the deadliest sectarian violence since Morsi came to office as Egypt's first freely elected president.

Tawadros warned, "This is a society that is collapsing. Society is collapsing every day."

"The church has been a national symbol for 2,000 years," he said. "It has not been subjected to anything like this even during the darkest ages ... There has been no positive and clear action from the state, but there is a God. The church does not ask for anyone's protection, only from God."

Morsi strongly condemned the recent violence and said that he considered any attack on the cathedral to be an attack on him personally. He also ordered an investigation into the violence and revived a state body called the National Council for Justice and Equality mandated to promote equality between Egyptians regardless of their religious and ethnic background.

On Tuesday, four of his top aides visited the cathedral to offer their condolences for the victims of the violence.

A presidential statement issued late Tuesday reasserted Morsi's commitment to protect the Coptic church and to bring to justice those behind the violence. It described the president's order to revive the council as a "serious initial step."

Also in an earlier statement, the office of Morsi's assistant for foreign relations underlined that the presidency rejects violence "in all forms and under any pretext" and that "all Egyptians are citizens who should enjoy all rights and are equal before the law." It said the presidency has ordered authorities to "to exert their utmost efforts to contain the situation and protect the lives and property of citizens."

Speaking to reporters in Washington, U.S. State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell urged Morsi to make good on his promise of a full investigation and to make public the findings.

"The failure to prosecute perpetrators of sectarian crimes has contributed to an environment of impunity in Egypt, and so we are concerned," he said.

Still, Tawadros was critical of the promises of investigation and the revival of the justice and equality body. "Enough already of formations, committees and groups and whatever else," he said. "We want action not words and, let me say this, there are many names and committees but there is no action on the ground."

Long before the weekend's deadly sectarian violence, Tawadros has gone on record saying he was unhappy with the Islamist-backed constitution that was rushed to passage in a referendum in December.

But his criticism Tuesday was a powerful departure from the church's longstanding policy of avoiding confrontations with the government of the day. Pointedly, Tawadros added his praise of the sheik of Al-Azhar — another institution struggling to stay immune from the country's political battles — saying the sheik was the first to call him and express support amid Sunday's violence.

Al-Azhar, the centuries-old seat of Sunni Muslim learning, was hit by the turmoil last week. Students from Al-Azhar University stormed the office of the sheik of Al-Azhar, Grand Imam Ahmed el-Tayeb, angry over a case of food poisoning in the university that sickened dozens. El-Tayeb was forced to remove the university's president.

Some Al-Azhar clerics and opponents of Islamists charged that the Muslim Brotherhood was behind the protests, trying to embarrass el-Tayeb. Some in Al-Azhar, which is touted as a center for religious moderation, believe the Brotherhood or more hardline Islamists want to replace el-Tayeb to install one of their own in the post.

In an interview with ONTV this week, an aide to el-Tayeb, Mahmoud Azab, suggested the protest seemed "politicized," adding, "We hope that is not the case... We hope that the path of Al-Azhar toward unifying the Egyptian people will not be obstructed" — though he later issued a statement insisting his comments were not directed at any group.

In a statement Saturday, the Brotherhood denied any role in the protest, blaming "counter-revolution forces who control certain media outlets" for spreading the idea to create tensions between the group and el-Tayeb.

"Our relationship is good, and our respect for the institution of Al-Azhar and its imam is immense," it said.

But the questions swirling around so many institutions at once have fueled the sense of instability among many Egyptians, on top of the country's mounting economic woes and the struggle to end lawlessness on the streets that has been pervasive since Mubarak's fall.

Some of Morsi's opponents have called on the military to step back in to a direct role in politics. The generals have said nothing publicly on such calls, but its leaders have made it clear on several occasions they were the ultimate guarantors of the nation's stability and would not hesitate to intervene if things go out of control.

Morsi's tussles with the judiciary — including a recent court order annulling his installation of a new top prosecutor late last year — have deeply divided the country. Opponents accuse Morsi of trying to undermine the courts, a claim the presidency denies, while Morsi supporters often depict some in the judiciary as counter-revolutionaries trying to stop his agenda.

In its statement Saturday, the Brotherhood blasted what it called "libel, slander and misinformation" that it said were aimed at causing divisions between the group and the military or judiciary.

"We have great faith in the wisdom of Egypt's national and religious institutions, and that they cannot be fooled by counter-revolutionary conspiracies that plot against the homeland and the people who have known the Brotherhood for decades," it said.

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AP correspondent Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this report.

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Vatican criticizes campaign against pope

VATICAN CITY (AP) — The honeymoon that Pope Francis has enjoyed since his remarkable election hit a bump Friday, with the Vatican lashing out at what it called a defamatory and "anti-clerical left-wing" media campaign questioning his actions during Argentina's murderous military dictatorship.

On Day 2 of the Francis pontificate, the Vatican denounced news reports in Argentina and beyond resurrecting allegations that the former Jorge Mario Bergoglio failed to openly confront the junta responsible for kidnapping and killing thousands of people in a "dirty war" to eliminate leftist opponents.

Bergoglio, like most Argentines, didn't publicly confront the dictators who ruled from 1976-83, while he was the leader of the country's Jesuits. And human rights activists differ on how much blame he personally deserves.

Top church leaders had endorsed the junta and some priests even worked alongside torturers inside secret prisons. Nobody has produced any evidence suggesting Bergoglio had anything to do with such crimes. But many activists are angry that as archbishop of Buenos Aires for more than a decade, he didn't do more to support investigations into the atrocities.

On Thursday, the old ghosts resurfaced.

A group of 44 former military and police officers on trial for torture, rape and murder in a concentration camp in Cordoba province in the 1970s wore the yellow-and-white ribbons of the papal flag in Francis' honor. Many Argentine newspapers ran the photo Friday.

The Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi noted that Argentine courts had never accused Bergoglio of any crime, that he had denied all accusations against him and that on the contrary "there have been many declarations demonstrating how much Bergoglio did to protect many persons at the time."

He said the accusations against the new pope were made long ago "by anti-clerical left-wing elements to attack the church. They must be firmly rejected."

The harsh denunciation was typical of a Vatican that often reacts defensively when it feels under attack, even though its response served to give the story legs for another day.

It interrupted the generally positive reception Francis has enjoyed since his election as pope on Wednesday, when even his choice of footwear — his old black shoes rather than the typical papal red — was noted as a sign of his simplicity and humility.

There was one clearly unscripted moment Friday, when the 76-year-old Francis stumbled briefly during an audience with the cardinals, but he quickly recovered. And for the second day in a row, Francis slipped out of the Vatican walls, this time to visit an ailing Argentine cardinal, Jorge Mejia, who suffered a heart attack Wednesday and was in the hospital.

This upbeat narrative of a people's pope who named himself after the nature-loving St. Francis of Assisi has clashed with accusations stemming from Bergoglio's past.

The worst allegation is that as the military junta took over in 1976, he withdrew support for two Jesuit priests whose work in the slums of Buenos Aires had put them in direct contact with the leftist guerrilla movement advocating armed revolution. The priests were then kidnapped and interrogated inside a clandestine torture center at the Navy Mechanics School.

Bergoglio said he had told the priests — Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics — to give up their slum work for their own safety, and they refused. Yorio later accused Bergoglio of effectively delivering them to the death squads by declining to publicly endorse their work. Yorio died in Uruguay in 2000.

Jalics, who had maintained silence about the events, issued a statement Friday saying he spoke with Bergoglio years later and the two celebrated Mass together and hugged "solemnly."

"I am reconciled to the events and consider the matter to be closed," he said.

Bergoglio told his official biographer, Sergio Rubin, in 2010, that he had gone to extraordinary, behind-the-scenes lengths to save the men.

The Jesuit leader persuaded the family priest of feared dictator Jorge Videla to call in sick so Bergoglio could say Mass instead and take the opportunity to successfully appeal for their release, Rubin wrote.

Lombardi said the airing of the accusations following Francis' election was "characterized by a campaign that's often slanderous and defamatory."

Earlier this week, Lombardi issued a similar denunciation of an advocacy group for victims of sexual abuse, accusing it of using the media spotlight on the conclave to try to publicize old accusations against cardinals. The accusations, Lombardi said, are baseless and the cardinals deserve everyone's "esteem."

The accusations against Bergoglio were fanned by Horacio Verbitzky, an investigative journalist who was a leftist militant in the 1970s and is now closely aligned with the government. He has written extensively about the accusations in Argentina's Pagina12 newspaper, a left-wing daily known for advocacy journalism.

Adolfo Perez Esquivel, who won the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize for documenting the junta's atrocities, said this week that "Bergoglio was no accomplice of the dictatorship."

"Perhaps he didn't have the courage of other priests, but he never collaborated with the dictatorship," Esquivel said on Buenos Aires' Radio de la Red.

Argentine political analyst Ignacio Fidanza concurred.

"What they're demanding is that during the dictatorship he should have planted himself in the Plaza de Mayo and shouted against it," he told The Associated Press. "It was probably more effective to speak in silence, since it was an extreme situation."

Human rights investigators in Argentina have been unable to make any other cases against Bergoglio from the junta years, other than the allegations concerning the two Jesuits and that he failed to help a family find their murdered daughter's illegally adopted baby.

But activists are also angry that as leader of the Argentine church, he has never acknowledged or apologized for what they describe as the church's active institutional support of the military government, said Gaston Chillier, who tracks the country's human rights cases as director of the Center for Legal and Social Studies.

The church was so deeply in league with the dictators that when the Inter-American Human Rights Commission came for an inspection in 1979, the Argentine navy moved many detainees to an island owned by the diocese during the visit.

"He is responsible during Argentina's period of democracy for continuing a cover-up," Chillier told the AP. "His knowledge of these cases clearly shows that he cannot deny the torture and the systematic theft of babies."

Bergoglio testified in 2010 that he didn't know anything about baby thefts until well after the dictatorship.

Since Bergoglio became archbishop in 1998, his church has issued several apologies for failing to do more to protect people from violence that came from both the right and the left. The latest, in October 2012, was the most forceful, and it also, for the first time, asked Catholics to come forward with whatever evidence they may have to support Argentina's human rights trials.

But Chillier says Bergoglio could have done more to make the church help identify children and the bodies of detainees as well as identify those responsible for atrocities.

"It's one thing to acknowledge what you failed to do, but another entirely to apologize for what you actually did," Chillier said.

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Warren and Almudena Calatrava contributed from Buenos Aires. David Rising in Berlin contributed.

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Follow Nicole Winfield at www.twitter.com/nwinfield

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