Maduro says cardinal ‘plotted’ against Venezuelan canonisations

The Archdiocese of Caracas cancelled a large thanksgiving Mass for the canonisations, while Cardinal Baltazar Porras said the authorities prevented him from travelling to western Venezuela.

Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro accused a cardinal of “conspiring” to prevent the canonisation of St José Gregorio Hernández.

A doctor known as “the physician of the poor”, Hernández was canonised on 19 October alongside a second Venezuelan, Sr Carmen Rendiles, who founded a religious order as well as several convents and schools.

Speaking on television the next day, Maduro attacked Cardinal Baltazar Porras, Archbishop Emeritus of Caracas. “Many people in the higher echelons of the curia conspired against José Gregorio,” he claimed. “Some priests, like Baltazar Porras, have devoted their lives to plotting against José Gregorio.”

“But Baltazar Porras has been defeated by God, by the people,” added Maduro, who watched the canonisation Mass at the Vatican from the house-museum of Hernández in Caracas. “And now Jose Gregorio is a saint despite you and yours.”

Shortly after, the Archdiocese of Caracas cancelled a large thanksgiving Mass for the canonisations in the capital planned for 25 October. The archdiocese said this was due to security concerns because the number of people applying for tickets to attend the liturgy in the city’s baseball stadium exceeded the 40,000-person capacity. It urged parishes to celebrate thanksgiving Masses locally instead.

Cardinal Porras then alleged he had been “prevented” from celebrating a Mass of thanksgiving for the canonisations in Isnotú, the birthplace of St José Gregorio Hernández.

“First of all, the bishops’ conference received a call from the vice minister for religious worship saying it would be inconvenient if I came to Isnotú as they had been notified of disturbances which were due to take place there,” said Porras.

Informed that the flight he had planned to take to the area in western Venezuela had been suspended, Porras then decided to take a private flight to the region.

“When we were in the air, the pilots were informed that they had to make a stopover [en route] because strong winds in the airport meant it was going to be shut. We did so but began to realise something odd was happening,” the archbishop continued.

“We managed to find out the airport [we were heading to] was not closed and various flights were landing there. But the airport where we had stopped over was surrounded by a number of soldiers, armed to the teeth.”

He decided to continue his travels by road, only to be forbidden to do so by the authorities. He eventually asked for permission to return to Caracas.

Porras had publicly condemned Venezuela’s communist regime ahead of the canonisations, demanding freedom for political prisoners at an event in the Pontifical Lateran University on 17 October.

“We are living in a situation which is morally unacceptable,” he said, and alluded to a decline in “citizen liberty”, the growth of poverty and militarisation as “a form of government that incites violence, introducing this into daily life”. He also decried “corruption” and a lack of respect “for the will of the people” under the government Maduro has led since 2013.

“All these factors [have] made for a panorama which failed to aid pacific co-existence,” Porras said.

That evening, a Venezuelan journalist was assaulted by a member of the Venezuelan government’s delegation to the canonisations. Edgar Beltrán of the US-based outlet The Pillar was interrupted and pushed aside by an official while asking Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra, the Venezuelan-born sostituto at the Secretariat of State, about the possible politicisation of the canonisations.

The official, later identified as Ricardo Cisneros, told Beltrán he could not ask questions about the government. When he persisted, Cisneros grabbed Beltrán’s recording device.

AIGAV, the International Association of Journalists Accredited to the Vatican described the incident as an unacceptable infringement of press freedom. “We strongly condemn this act of violence against a colleague who was simply doing his job,” it said in a statement.

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