Pope suggests 'better to be atheist than hypocritical Catholic'

[tenorly]

2. I'm pretty sure he meant it solely as a dig against Opus Dei types

with whom it should be noted, he's had struggles since the days of the last dictatorship in Argentina in the late 1970s.

One of his closest friends and most lasting influences on him was his supervisor in the lab he worked in as a young man: a woman named Esther Ballestrino who was both a Socialist and an Atheist - and outspokenly so.

Bellestrino went on to be one of the co-founders of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo - the renowned activist group initially formed to demand the return of family members illegally detained by the dictatorship, and which later became the foremost advocates for prosecutions against Dirty War perpetrators.

She herself was detained and killed - thrown alive from an Air Force transport plane onto the Río de la Plata bay - in 1977.