DENVER (CO)
Crux
November 8, 2018
By Inés San Martín
Near the end of a troubling year in Pope Francis’s home country, the bishops of Argentina have expressed their support for the pontiff, claiming the Church and its leader have never been under attack, both at home and abroad as they are right now.
Bishop Oscar Ojea, president of the Argentine bishops’ conference, said these attacks even come from inside the institution. Speaking about the country’s general situation, he warned that the “social and economic crisis hitting the entire Argentine people is beginning to erode trust in political leadership, increasing a social bad mood, the anger and intolerance which makes coexistence very tough.”
“We’re closing an extremely difficult year,” Ojea said. “Many events that we’ve lived in recent months have provoked perplexity, and at the same time present us with great pastoral challenges that need to be illuminated by the light of the Gospel.”
“They’re complex and conflictual situations, that hide a message we still have to discover,” he said, before ticking off developments such as a national debate for the legalization of abortion, where even Catholic schools and communities had people supporting an abortion legalization bill that, in the end, didn’t get a greenlight in Congress.
Following that, there was an organized, en masse apostacy, with thousands of Argentinians officially renouncing their Catholic faith; allegations of clerical sexual abuse that “increase the pain at the deepest part of the Church’s heart; attacks against the person of the pope, from inside and outside the Church, which leads to a scarce transmission of his message.”
[Though Ojea didn’t specify it, he was likely referring to sensational accusations from a former papal ambassador in the U.S. that Pope Francis knew about sexual misconduct concerns regarding ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick in 2013 and covered them up.]
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