A Latin-American cardinal tipped as the next pope has launched an extraordinary attack on the United States media by comparing its coverage of church sex scandals to persecution by Nero, Hitler and Stalin.
Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga — considered a rising star at the Vatican — accused American newspapers and broadcasters of an anti-Catholic ”fury” in the way they reported revelations that the church allowed paedophile priests to abuse children.
In an interview with an Italian Catholic magazine, 30 Giorni, he branded Ted Turner, the founder of CNN and the vice-chairperson of AOL Time Warner, as ”openly anti-Catholic”.
”Not to mention newspapers like The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe, which were protagonists of what I do not hesitate to define as a persecution against the church,” Rodriquez Maradiaga said.
Excerpts of the interview were made available in advance of publication this week.
The magazine will be coming out in the week that American bishops meet in Dallas to draw up disciplinary measures for abusers — a meeting The New York Times has described as possibly the most important in the history of the American church.
Rodriguez Maradiaga said the media was venting anger at the Catholic Church’s support for a Palestinian homeland and for its hostility to abortion, euthanasia and the death penalty.
He said abusers and clerics who protected abusers should be punished, but defended Cardinal Bernard Law, whose botched handling of the issue of paedophile priests in Boston triggered the crisis.
Law was, he said, the victim of questioning ”with methods that recall the dark days of Stalinist trials of churchmen of Eastern Europe”.
Since other cases had been revealed in other dioceses, the press had acted with ”a fury which reminds me of the times of Diocletian and Nero and more recently, Stalin and Hitler”.
A Honduran polyglot who negotiated peace deals with rebels, worked with the poor and has degrees in philosophy and theology, Rodriquez Maradiaga (59) has been tipped to succeed Pope John Paul II partly on the basis of his reputation for being media savvy.
Many expect the next pope to be from the developing world and Latin America will have one of the biggest voting blocs in the conclave.
The cardinal’s strident vocabulary is likely to end his honeymoon with the US media, but it may do him no harm among those cardinals who want a more robust response to recent criticism of the church.
- Meanwhile, reports Oliver Burkeman in New York, the sexual-abuse scandal brought down another bishop on Tuesday, less than 48 hours before senior US clergy were due to consider a new ”zero tolerance” policy against priests who molest children.
The Vatican announced on Tuesday morning that the pope had accepted the resignation of Bishop Kendrick Williams of Lexington, Kentucky, who has been accused of abusing an altar boy in 1981 and two other boys during the 1980s.
He had been on voluntary leave and the Vatican said he stepped down under church laws that urge priests to resign if ”illness or some other grave reason” stops them fulfilling their responsibilities.
The 65-year-old bishop had denied a claim made by a former altar boy, James Bennett, in a lawsuit filed against the archdiocese of Louisville, that he was the ”Father Williams” who Bennett says molested him in a Louisville church.
”I do not want my resignation to give any credence to the allegations made against me,” the outgoing bishop said in a statement. ”I offered my resignation to the Holy Father, stating that I believe that by my stepping down, the diocese can rid itself of the cloud [that] hangs over it and me at this time.”
The archdiocese faces 86 more lawsuits accusing priests of sexual abuse of children.
The US Conference of Catholic Bishops met in Dallas on Wednesday to consider proposals requiring the defrocking of any priest with more than one incident of abuse in his past.
The Kentucky resignation follows those of Rembert Weakland, Archbishop of Milwaukee, and Anthony O’Connell, Bishop of Palm Beach. The bishop had admitted abusing a seminary student, while the archbishop acknowledged paying $450 000 to settle a claim against him, though the Vatican gave age as the reason for his departure.
Meanwhile, in New York the Bishop of Brooklyn, Thomas Daily, was questioned over decisions he took as a Boston church official about the career of John Geoghan, the former priest shuttled around city parishes despite many claims of abuse against him — and whose conviction started the current crisis. To date the church has removed 218 priests from their positions, but at least 34 known offenders remain in church jobs.