The Government's Relations with the Church

Anyone who has been following, step by step, this government’s relations with the Church fails to understand many things. Last week our Cardinal Urosa was once again the target of insults from the Minister of the Interior, who told him to swap his cassock for a yellow one, after the Cardinal had spoken frankly in an interview with Carlos Croes on Televen.

It is regrettable that those who govern this country think they are giving orders in a barracks. It is a kind of “do what I say and keep quiet; be careful not to say anything that doesn’t suit me.” But there is a big difference between that lack of maturity and disrespecting the highest leader of our Church, because, although some don’t want to see it, or understand it!, we, our Holy Venezuelan Catholic Church (with its exemplary bishops, priests, men and women religious, lay people and so on), will not allow our highest Church authorities to go on being insulted and mistreated, much less disrespected.

If you want dialogue with the Church, it is not enough to have your photo taken with the Pope. The problem goes much deeper. Dialogue means listening to people and not insulting them if they say something different from what we believe.

On the other hand, reading Carlos Croes’s interview, I am very worried by something the Cardinal mentions there: the repeated break-ins at the Bishops’ Conference (CEV) offices (right after the dialogue began), in which what was mainly stolen was information. That worries me because years of work were taken. The members of our Church have a huge amount of work, and now even more, because the minister has entrusted them with the difficult task of helping to disarm criminals. I have never seen that in any country in the world! But, as always, our exemplary pastors will help with that task even if they have to sleep two hours a night.

The only good thing about all that information being stolen is that if they were looking for something strange, they won’t find it. They will find lots of pastoral material, that’s for sure. God and the Virgin grant that they come across the Ten Commandments, read them and understand them well, but most importantly put them into practice, above all the commandments not to lie and not to slander people. Or at least that they read the first one, which is very easy and contains almost everything: “Love God above all things (not money, not power) and your neighbor (and your neighbor is every Venezuelan and every person in the whole world) as yourself.”

And always, always remember that whoever picks a fight with the Church and its highest leaders, who have become true leaders of peace with tremendous credibility (and who have a crowd of people ready to defend them), is playing with fire. So think before you speak. We teach children that from a very young age: you have to control fits of anger, all the more so when you know things are not being done well and the people of Venezuela are more tired every day of this government’s injustice and incompetence in every sense.

I keep praying for you. I hope God hears me.