NEW YORK CITY (NY)
New York Times
May 22, 2018
By Sam Roberts
[See also the 9/8/01 letter from Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos to Bishop Pican.]
Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, a vigorous conservative voice in the Vatican and influential figure in the Latin American church who drew attention for seemingly playing down the church’s sexual abuse scandal, died on Friday in Rome. He was 88.
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Before a worldwide reckoning with sexual abuse within the clergy erupted in Boston in 2002, Cardinal Castrillón had suggested as early as 2000 that such abuse was generally an unavoidable fact of life, and that it was being unfairly focused on by lawyers and the media. Was it not contradictory, he asked at a meeting requested by English-speaking bishops, for people to be so outraged by sexual abuse when society also promotes sexual liberation?
A decade later, it was revealed that he had sent a letter in 2001, with the approval of Pope John Paul II, praising a French bishop for facing prison rather than delivering a pedophile priest to civil courts. The priest was later sentenced to 18 years’ imprisonment, and the bishop received a three-month suspended sentence.
Cardinal Castrillón also opposed the zero-tolerance standard toward abusive priests embraced by bishops in the United States because, he said, it disregarded a fundamental principle of forgiveness. He described the rapport between a bishop and his priests as “not professional but a sacramental relationship which forges very special bonds of spiritual paternity.”
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