Catholic World News News Feature

Honduran Cardinal Attacks US Media As Stalinist, Anti-Catholic June 07, 2002

ROME, Jun 7, 02 (CWNews.com) - Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga has told the Italian Catholic magazine 30 Days that the US media coverage of the clergy sex abuse scandal is anti-Catholic and motivated by hatred of the Church.

Cardinal Rodriguez Maradiaga, the archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, specifically named Ted Turner, vice-chairman of AOL Time Warner and founder of the CNN news network, as being "openly anti-Catholic." He added, "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."

He said the tactics of the American media include "a fury which reminds me of the times of Diocletian and Nero and more recently, Stalin and Hitler." Diocletian and Nero were Roman emperors known for the persecution of the early Church.

The cardinal did tell the magazine that bishops and priests who had erred should be brought before church tribunals and civil courts. "There should be no witch hunts around the Church," he said.

He even defended Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, where the current scandal of sex abuse exploded in January and who has been accused of shuffling abusive priests from parish to parish. Cardinal Rodriguez Maradiaga called Law a friend of Latin America and said the cardinal had been "questioned with methods that recall the dark days of Stalinist trials of churchmen of Eastern Europe." He added: "What is happening now, for example to Cardinal Law, is a scandal."