During Argentina’s Dirty War — an attempt by the government to fight communism by eliminating subversives —15,000 people were killed, 8,000 were jailed and some 6,000 were exiled. The Catholic Church and Argentina’s Dirty War (Oxford University Press, 2015), a new book by Boston College sociologist Gustavo Morello, SJ, explores the complex relationship of the Catholic Church and the political violence. Fr. Morello, who is a native of Argentina, focuses on the 1976 kidnapping, detainment and torture of American priest James Weeks and five seminarians by the Argentine military government as a means of understanding the broader issues of religion and politics that took place in that Latin American country. More from BC News