Cardinal troubles in Nicaragua
Pope John Paul II won't be able to bless Cardinal Obando y Bravo's new cathedral in Managua next month, because illness has forced the postponement of the pope's visit to Nicaragua.
The cathedral, pet project of the owner of the US Domino Pizza chain, the UNO government, the UNO mayor of Managua and Cardinal Obando, wouldn't have been finished anyway.
The pope would have had to bless a building site, because the building contractor has refused to provide an incentive and raise the workers' low wages, and engineers assigned to the project by Managua Mayor Arnoldo Alemán have used building materials on their own houses.
Managuans ask why they need a new cathedral when there are thousands of homeless, and people living in cardboard shanties, many within sight of the opulent edifice. Across from the cathedral site, children as young as four wash car windscreens at the traffic lights to earn a few cordobas for a meal.
Apart from these troubles, Obando has had to again deny receiving CIA money. During the trial in the US of Clair George, a CIA spy master caught up in the Iran-contra prosecutions, Alan Fiers, former head of the CIA's Central American task force, testified that George had illegally approved money for an anti-government organisation inside Nicaragua during 1985-86.
According to the August 1 New York Times and Washington Post, that organisation was the Catholic hierarchy. On August 2 Obando maintained that the charges were the product of a calumnious campaign against the church. He added that he couldn't answer for other Nicaraguan bishops.
On the other side of Nicaragua's Catholic Church, Maryknoll priest Miguel D'Escoto, former foreign minister in the Sandinista government, is being pressured by the US-based Maryknoll Society. Maryknoll Superior General Kenneth Thesing visited here in March and reportedly gave D'Escoto three options: leave Central America, resign from Maryknoll, or be expelled from the order.
In a March 24 letter to Thesing, D'Escoto rejected the ultimatum, charging that Maryknoll was responding to pressure from the Vatican, which in turn was responding to pressure from the US government. A Maryknoll spokesperson told a Toronto newspaper that "everything is on hold" regarding the Nicaraguan priest.
[Adapted by Stephen Marks from the August CEPAD Report, publication of the Evangelical Churches in Nicaragua.]