The San Patricio Church massacre was the murder of three priests and two seminarians of the Pallottine order on July 4, 1976, during the Dirty War, at St. Patrick's Church, located in the Belgrano neighborhood in the City of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The victims were priests Alfredo Leaden, Alfredo Kelly, and Pedro Duffau and seminarians Salvador Barbeito and Emilio Barletti. The murders were ordered by an Argentine Navy admiral.
The crime
At approximately 1:00 a.m. on, three youths, Luis Pinasco, Guillermo Silva, and Julio Víctor Martínez, watched as two cars parked in front of the church of San Patricio. As the son of a soldier, Martínez thought it might be part of an assassination attempt on his father, so he went to Police Station No. 37 to make a complaint. Minutes later, a police car arrived on the scene and officer Miguel Ángel Romano spoke with people who were suspects in the case. At 2:00 in the morning Silva and Pinasco saw a group of people with rifles get out of the cars and enter the church. The next morning, at the time of the first Mass, a group of worshippers waiting in front of the church found the door closed. Surprised by the situation, the young Fernando Savino, organist of the parish decided to enter through a window and found on the first floor the bodies of the five religious riddled with bullets, and lined up face down in a huge puddle of blood on a red carpet. The murderers had written with chalk on a door: They also wrote on a carpet: The initials "M.S.T.M." stand for Movimiento de Sacerdotes para el Tercer Mundo, while the first sentence about "Federal Security" refers to the bomb attack the Montoneros had set off two days before in the dining room of the Argentine Federal Police headquarters, killing 20 people. On the body of Salvador Barbeito the murderers put a drawing by Quino, taken from one of the rooms, in which Mafalda appears pointing to a policeman's baton saying: «Este es el palito de abollar ideologías». The next day, the newspaper La Nación published a story about the slaughter which included the text of a communiqué from Area Command I of the Army that read: Testimony before the CONADEP Commission in 1984 indicated that the San Patricio Church murders were carried out by the military on the orders of Rear Admiral Ruben Chamorro, head of Navy Petty-Officers School of Mechanics.
Cause for beatification
The superior general of the Pallottine fathers in Argentina, Bishop Seamus Freeman sought out his fellow Jesuit superior general Fr. Jorge Bergoglio for assistance. He met with Bergoglio a second time in Rome to follow up. With the support of Pope Francis the cause for their beatification has begun.
