COLOMBIA
The Association of Catholic Priests (Ireland)
Fr. Alfonso Llano Escobar, S.J. had learned the hard way that it doesn’t pay to critique your boss’s writings. Fr. Llano, whose weekly column Un alto en el camino (“A stop along the road”) had appeared in the major Colombian newspaper El Tiempo for 30 years, has been told that his writing career has come to an end.
In a message to the editorial board of the newspaper, Fr. Llano wrote that “Father Adolfo Nicolás, the superior general of the Jesuits, has ordered Father Alfonso Llano to consider his apostolic vocation as a writer to be over, has deprived him of his freedom of speech, and is demanding that he not even say goodbye and that he keep absolute silence.”
The priest columnist earned his silencing for a November 24th column in which he offered his views on Pope Benedict XVI’s new book, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, and specifically on the doctrine of the virginity of Mary. The column focuses on internal debate about the subject within the theological community and is worth translating in its entirety:
The Infancy of Jesus. That’s the title of the third volume of the trilogy on Jesus of Nazareth by theologian Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI. It has been published in nine languages, including Spanish, and will be published in a first global edition of one million copies. With a series of articles in the press and interviews on radio and television, I would like to guide readers of this book by the Pope, which offers a special difficulty — the virginity of Mary — which will give theologians and the media a lot to talk about.
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