Pope Contender: Cardinal Dario Castrillon of Colombia
Apr 17, 2005
In Colombia, a country where dozens of priests have been killed for their straightforward talk, Cardinal Dario Castrillon has a reputation for courage and outspokenness.
(Associated Press, April 16th, 2005 ) Over the years, he has called on a Colombian president whose election campaign was financed by drug traffickers to step down, branded lawmakers bribed by traffickers a national disgrace and urged voters to reject another presidential candidate because he supported the right to divorce.
Castrillon, the 75-year-old head of the Vatican’s office for priests, is among several Latin American cardinals considered a contender to become pope. In Pereira, a city in the coffee-growing region where he spent 22 years as a bishop, he is remembered as fearless in actions as well as words.
He would walk at night through the streets of the mountain town with a huge cup of hot coffee and bread for beggars and mentally ill people who slept on the sidewalks, recalled Monsignor Francisco Arias.
From his pulpit, Castrillon accused Pereira police of killing prostitutes, street kids and beggars in a lethal “social cleansing” program.
“After he denounced them in his sermon, the killings stopped and the Pereira police chief left town,” Arias said.
In Colombia, mired in a 40-year guerrilla war and plagued by drug trafficking, such blunt talk can bring an assassin’s bullet. An archbishop, a bishop, at least 50 priests and three nuns have been murdered in Colombia in the past 20 years.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel Prize-winning Colombian author, said the silver-haired, bespectacled Castrillon is a priest who is not afraid to do battle for what he believes is right.
“Since he was ordained when he was 23, he understood his priesthood as a militia of social justice,” Garcia Marquez wrote in a 1999 magazine article.
Summoned by Pope John Paul II in 1996 to head the Congregation for the Clergy, Castrillon follows the orthodox line of the church on moral issues such as abortion and euthanasia. Sexual abuse by priests has been a more sensitive subject.
At a 2002 Vatican news conference, Castrillon blamed a culture of “pan-sexuality and sexual licentiousness” for some priests committing pedophilia and said formulas must be found to punish abusers that do not conflict with “fundamental principles of the church,” leading some critics to wonder whether the Vatican was taking the matter seriously enough.
Pope Contender: Cardinal Dario Castrillon of Colombia