Caracas – As promised, Venezuela’s leftist government rolled out the red carpet Thursday to welcome home from the Vatican this nation’s new cardinal, a reception officials hope will mark a clean break from years of bitter recriminations between the local Catholic hierarchy and the “revolutionary” administration.
President Hugo Chavez was on hand at Simon Bolivar International Airport to receive with full honors the archbishop of Caracas, Jorge Urosa, who was named a cardinal last week by Pope Benedict XVI.
In his remarks, Chavez called for a “national public dialogue, without hidden agendas … without manipulations of any kind or any sector, with goodwill up front.”
It must be a “permanent” dialogue, Chavez added, asking that it be considered an “option that cannot be waived, … (independent) of the vision of each.”
After reading several biblical passages touching on peace and brotherhood, among them a portion of the story of Cain and Abel, Chavez emphasized the difference between “being a Christian and living in Christendom” and applauded the Catholic orientation toward “preferential consideration for the poor, to achieve justice and peace.”
“It’s not anything other than that that we’re doing in Venezuela and we’re committed to deepening it,” he said.
The cardinal said that he took the government’s welcome “as a sign of esteem for the Church and the bishops.”
Regarding the national dialogue, Urosa remarked that the priests should be “factors of unity and understanding, of seeking solutions to common problems.”
“I am grateful for this reception, which is a sign of the esteem that the president and the government have for the pope’s act” of naming him cardinal, Urosa added.
For the Chavez government, Urosa’s appointment as head of the Catholic Church in Venezuela confirms what it calls the Vatican’s “turn” from a policy of confrontation and exchanging insults to one of dialogue and easing of tensions with the Chavez administration.
Urosa spent the weeks before his trip to the Vatican in meetings with government officials and representatives of the opposition, a process “that was beneficial for the state, for the government and also for the national community and for the Catholic Church itself,” Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel said.
Rangel, as he did a month ago when Urosa’s appointment was made public, reiterated that it was “an error on the part of the Venezuelan church during the years 2001, 2002 and 2003 to have increased tensions in church-state and government relations.”
“President Chavez’s government does not want a docile church. We want it to have a profile and, more than that, that it be an important interlocutor in everything having to do with social policy, economic (policy), culture, a message of dialogue and understanding between Venezuelans,” Rangel said.
In January, government officials and Venezuela’s Roman Catholic hierarchy said the two sides had overcome their differences and would move forward in a spirit of dialogue and mutual respect.
The upbeat comments came after a meeting here between delegations led by Chavez and the head of the Catholic bishops conference, Ubaldo Santana, who said the talks took place in an atmosphere of “dialogue and openness.”
Church-state relations here have been rocky since Chavez took office in 1999, reaching a nadir in April 2002, when Cardinal Ignacio Velasco – now deceased – gave his imprimatur to an abortive coup against Chavez by signing a decree issued by junta leader Pedro Carmona that abolished Venezuela’s Congress and Supreme Court.
Hours before Velasco’s July 2003 funeral, supporters of Chavez disrupted his wake, setting off fireworks outside the Caracas cathedral where the ceremony was underway.
The president’s supporters chanted pro-government slogans and sang “another weakling bites the dust,” using Chavez’s pejorative term for his opponents.
The demonstrators also carried posters of Velasco’s image with superimposed horns and a tail.
Velasco had called Chavez, an ex-army colonel and former failed coup plotter before being elected president in late 1998, a “tyrant,” among other things.
The prelate had also sparked a controversy in December 1999, when heavy rains resulted in landslides that killed some 20,000 people. During a sermon, he indicated that the tragedy could have been “punishment from God” for what he called Chavez’s arrogance.
Last year, Chavez and the local Catholic hierarchy seemed to have embarked on a rapprochement after the Vatican’s 2005 appointments of Giacinto Berloco as papal nuncio in Venezuela and Urosa as archbishop of Caracas.
But on Jan. 14, Cardinal Rosalio Castillo used the occasion of a massive outdoor Mass in the western city of Barquisimeto to say that the nation was threatened by authoritarianism, official corruption and the “absence of justice.”
Chavez responded the following day on his weekly television and radio program, saying that Castillo’s comments constituted both “a provocation” and the beginning of a “new plan to destabilize Venezuela.”
Urosa moved quickly to distance the rest of the hierarchy from the cardinal’s statements, which he said were “inappropriate” and did not represent the views of the bishops conference, the supreme body of the local Catholic Church.
