Pope Francis faces the wrath of right-wing conservatives after reinstating a priest who joined the revolutionary, left-wing government of Nicaragua's Sandinistas and once served as president of the UN general assembly.
Pope John Paul II suspended Fr Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann from his ministry in 1985, as part of a broader crackdown on adherents of liberation theology – a school of thought he criticised for importing Marxist values into the church.
The edict meant Fr D’Escoto was, among other things, forbidden to say Mass.
A brief statement from the Maryknoll religious order, to which the 81-year-old priest belongs, announced that Francis had lifted the suspension on August 1st. “I am happy to be able to celebrate Mass again,” Fr D’Escoto was reported as saying from the Nicaraguan capital of Managua. “I am really pleased.”
Celebrate Mass
A few months ago he wrote to the pope asking to “be able to celebrate the Holy Eucharist before dying”.
Bishop Enrico dal Covolo, rector of the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome, told the Italian daily La Stampa that Pope Francis's response did not mean he had taken a political stance and should be understood in the context of his emphasis on the importance of mercy.
However, the right-wing American website Truth Revolt said: “The decision will likely anger most conservative Catholics.” Indeed: a comment posted to another conservative site, Free Republic, branded it “a terrible decision and a slap in the face to all true and faithful Catholics”.
After the Sandinistas overthrew the pro-US regime of Anastasio Somoza in 1979, D’Escoto became foreign minister in Daniel Ortega’s government, a post he held until 1990. From 2008-9, he served as president of the UN general assembly.
In the 1980s the Sandinistas accused the CIA of trying to assassinate him with a bottle of poisoned Benedictine liqueur. Fr D’Escoto once referred to former US president Ronald Reagan as “the butcher of my people” and only last year told US president Barack Obama in a letter that the US was “hooked on wars of aggression” and “possessed by the demons of greed and domination”.
Francis’s relationship with the liberation theologists is complex.
As head of the Jesuit order in Argentina in the 1970s he supported John Paul’s policies and has even been accused of complicity in the kidnapping of two left- leaning priests during the country’s “dirty war”, an accusation his aides have always denied.– (Guardian service)