Africa's Latin champion
Jun 11, 2005
Cardinal Rodríguez of Honduras was in England last week to lobby for more aid for Africa – because ‘charity has to be global’. Isabel de Bertodano went to meet him.
(The Tablet, 04/06/2005) Given that Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, Archbishop of Tegucigalpa, comes from one of Central America’s poorest nations, you might think he has more than enough to keep him busy in Honduras without concerning himself with poverty in Africa. But he was in London last week to lobby the British Government on the need to support Make Poverty History, the campaign to improve aid to the continent and alleviate the staggering debts of the African countries. But to the Cardinal, it was entirely natural that he, a Latin American, should become involved in campaigning for Africa. He sees the continents and their problems as inextricably linked and believes that they depend on each other for their future.
“We are one world, so charity has to be global,” he said. “As soon as the G8 leaders can concentrate on alleviating poverty it will come out that there is also terrible poverty in Latin America.”
In common with Chancellor Gordon Brown, Prime Minister Tony Blair and many others, Cardinal Rodríguez has been infected with a sense of urgency, which convinces him that this year is critical in the effort to change the situation of poverty in Africa, and particularly to try to influence the gathering of the wealthiest countries of the world at the G8 summit in Scotland on 2 July.
“This time it’s different, I’m convinced,” he said. “I’m convinced. We have a big chance now. G8 is a big opportunity.”
Although his attention is currently focused on Africa, the Cardinal has also single-handedly raised international awareness about Honduras in the past few years. It is hard to think of another Honduran that anyone outside Latin America has heard of. Yet a lot of people in Europe are talking about the energetic, intelligent, media-friendly Cardinal Rodríguez, particularly since he was strongly tipped as papabile and a possible successor to Pope John Paul II.
This is the first time that there has been a Honduran cardinal, and having held their breath in excitement following the death of John Paul, his compatriots could barely disguise their disappointment when Cardinal Rodríguez was not elected pope. Welcoming Benedict XVI, the Honduran President, Ricardo Maduro, told his people that they should be proud that Cardinal Rodríguez had at least been mentioned as a possible successor to Pope John Paul II. However, the respected television journalist Joaquín López was not so magnanimous, commenting that the Vatican would now continue to look towards Latin America only when it needed vocations. “They have very little interest in us,” he was quoted as saying bitterly, in the daily newspaper La Prensa.
However, according to Cardinal Rodríguez, Hondurans had been graceful about the election of Benedict XVI. “Of course in Latin America they were expecting a Latin American pope, but immediately they just were very happy,” he said. “I saw it when I came back to Honduras, how people were very enthusiastic.”
Incidentally, Hondurans needn’t abandon hope. At 62, Cardinal Rodríguez is still very young in terms of the papacy and Paddy Power, the online betting shop, which is already taking bets on who will be Pope next time around, puts the odds on Cardinal Rodríguez at 7-1, only just behind frontrunner Cardinal Angelo Scola.
I met Cardinal Rodríguez, who was in England for less than 48 hours last week, at the offices of the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (Cafod) in south London, where interviews with The Tablet, followed by The Times, were the first in a full day of back-to-back media appointments.
“It’s okay, I enjoy it,” he said when I commiserated with him that he was too busy to squeeze in some sightseeing in London. “It’s my way of preaching.”
He is a short man with the kind of broad face and narrow eyes that indicate the spice of ancestral indigenous Indian blood in his veins. His English, while not perfect, is very fluent, and his voice has a soft lilt, making each word sound as though it is slightly dissolved around the edges. He uses the word “beautiful” a lot – even to describe his meeting with Gordon Brown.
The Conclave and his time in Rome during April were also a “beautiful experience”, and the Cardinal said that he could never have imagined that so many people would come to the Vatican for the event. In particular, he said that he had appreciated the chance to get to know his fellow cardinals in the days running up to the Conclave.
“Our own meetings in the mornings were very enriching because we could talk with great liberty and I can tell you that all the problems and concerns came out,” he said. “So it was a very satisfying experience of friendship, a mutual knowing of each other.”
Most of the cardinals, he said, could speak either English or Italian, so the language barriers were minimal. However, he mentioned one cardinal whom he described as coming from the former eastern bloc who could speak neither, but was fluent in Latin. He was probably referring to Cardinal Joseph Glemp from Poland, who is known to love Latin. “It was delightful to talk to him,” he said. “But for us it was a little difficult to remember Latin after so many years.”
So valuable did the cardinals find the time they spent together at the Vatican that he said they have now suggested an annual consistory to build on the experience.
“This would not be to hear lectures or to talk about documents but to talk among ourselves of the problems of the Church,” said Cardinal Rodríguez. “And also we have the responsibility to be the advisers of the Pope and so this is a concrete way to enable him to hear what we think.”
The Cardinal is a well-known advocate of decentralisation of power in the Church and in interviews during the lifetime of John Paul II he said that one of the priorities for the new papacy should be collegiality. Now he is confident that Benedict XVI will also consider it a priority.
“I think he’ll be positive on this,” he said. The Pope’s professed commitment to the Second Vatican Council reassured him. “Of course we need to talk about synods as well, and I know some of my colleagues who had the opportunity to talk to the Pope up to now have been talking about changing the synods to make them more collegial,” he said.
He had met the Pope on various occasions when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger and had a very positive impression of him.
“He is not what the media thinks. He is humble, he is very warm in his mood and in his relationships,” he said.
He has yet to have a private audience with Pope Benedict, but says that he will discuss Latin America with him at the first chance.
Cardinal Rodríguez combines just the right quantities of brainy authority, spiritual intangibility and streetwise shrewdness necessary to inspire respect for a modern Church leader. He knows that he is in a unique position to influence the progress of his country and continent and is determined to use that advantage.
He becomes more animated as he speaks about Latin America, pushing his large glasses closer to his eyes as though straining to see the problems more clearly. What particularly concerned him, he said, was the threat to democracy on the continent. Bolivia, Venezuela and Colombia were all beset by trouble. Central America’s governments were for the most part ineffectual.
“When you see the map, you see that all except one nation [Cuba] in Latin America is a democracy but these are democracies in an intensive care unit because all of them are so weak and fragile,” said Cardinal Rodríguez. “People prefer a better economy than to be free of dictatorships. It is a pity, starting the century with this kind of thinking.”
The biggest exports from Latin America, he said, were drugs and people. The continent was either losing its young people to the drugs they were consuming or to its northern neighbour.
He is critical of the Government in his own country for not doing more to improve the situation for the poor and failing to invest in education, health and prisons, describing the latter as “hells”. The subject of youth gangs in Honduras troubles him and he understands that the issue is complicated.
“Most of these poor kids come from a destroyed family or a family that never existed,” he said. “Gangs are a source of identity for many of them and they feel they belong and have leadership. The leaders are very strong, they are like dictators.”
Having spent time in Honduras researching the gang situation, I was interested to know whether he thought the Government had the right approach to the problem. His answer was unequivocal.
“No, unfortunately not,” he said. “Of course Romulo [Bishop Emiliani] is trying to do his work but he has not enough resources and money.”
The Cardinal’s defence of human rights and the impoverished calls to mind Archbishop Oscar Romero, Central America’s most celebrated modern martyr, who was assassinated 25 years ago for his outspokenness about inequality in El Salvador.
On 2 April Cardinal Rodríguez was due to lead a memorial Mass in the capital city of San Salvador, the climax of two weeks of remembrance around the anniversary of Romero’s death, but the Pope’s death on the same day meant he had to leave for Rome. He was enthusiastic about suggestions that Romero should be beatified, saying that it could help El Salvador smooth over its past.
“There are two opposite sides,” he explained. “One which considers Romero a saint, the other which considers him a demon. One of the fruits of the twenty-fifth anniversary is that some of the El Salvador newspapers which never published anything about Romero were being very positive and I believe when these wounds are healed that will be the time because a saint is a cause of unity among people.”
As Cardinal Rodríguez bade me goodbye and sat down to await his next appointment, I was left wondering whether Honduras should not breathe a sigh of relief that, for now at least, it has not lost its most promising son to the throne of St Peter.
Africa's Latin champion