Caracas, Venezuela, Aug 7, 2007 / 10:13 am
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez continued his attacks on the bishops of the country this week, calling them “frantic defenders of the past, of injustice, immorality, and the powerful,” and claiming they are “shamefully attacking the truth.”
During a television program, Chavez said he believed in Christ and His “social thought,” using Fidel Castro as the embodiment of a leader using Christian principles as the foundation for a Socialist philosophy. “The Church,” he continued, “is something else. The Church became something else especially after the era of the first Christians. One only has to recall that the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church blessed the genocide in Latin America and Africa. That Church cannot be the Church of Christ,” he stated.
The Venezuelan leader went on to denounce the Church for allegedly supporting dictatorships in Argentina, Uruguay and other countries, “with death squads and thousands of disappeared.” He also repeated his claim that the Church in Venezuela supported the coup attempt of 2002, “despite the fact that there has not been a government in the last 100 years as committed to the poor as this one,” he claimed.
Several days ago, Archbishop Baltazar Porras of Merida responded to Chavez’s claims, noting that the president asked the bishops for help in April of 2002. “The only thing we did,” he said, “was respond to a call by the president himself in order to carry out a priestly and humanitarian duty to protect his life and the lives of those who were with him, and now he wants to make it look like the Church was part of the plot against him,” the archbishop said.