Card. Medina Attacks Chile’s Government
Sept 12, 2004
The ongoing war of words between Chile’s centre-left Government and a top Chilean curial cardinal in Rome has flared up again. The latest incident came in the wake of President Ricardo Lagos’s recent audience with Pope John Paul II.
(The Tablet 25 May 2002) The President’s meeting with the Pope that day did not “change anything”, reporters waiting in St Peter’s Square on 16 May were informed by Cardinal Jorge Medina Estévez, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. Indeed, the cardinal went on, the Holy See remained “extremely disappointed” with the Chilean Government, which has clashed with the Church over its policy of legalising divorce and the morning-after pill.
Back in Chile, the Archbishop of Santiago, Cardinal Francisco Javier Errázuriz, stepped in to downplay Cardinal Medina’s comments, which stole the headlines from Lagos’s cordial discussions with the Pope. Medina Estévez, he said, had not deliberately sought out the journalists. But Cardinal Errázuriz acknowledged that Cardinal Medina could have declined to answer their questions.
“The important issue here is Lagos’s meeting with the Holy Father rather than a conversation in the square”, Cardinal Errázuriz said. “The importance of the Holy Father cannot be compared to that of a cardinal or bishop or priest.”
Chile’s bishops’ conference had already written to ask Cardinal Medina, who is a citizen of the Vatican, not to comment publicly on internal Chilean issues. Archbishop Errázuriz was forced to intervene last year after Medina controversially suggested that the Pope had refused to meet Lagos because of the President’s liberal views on life issues.
Card. Medina Attacks Chile’s Government