Cardinal Cipriani: Spanish Anti-Church Blog Commits Character Assassination
The article compensates for a lack of facts with a flood of slander. The author is Renzo Gómez Vega.
Predictably, he calls Cipriani "ultra-conservative". Gómez complains that the cardinal "always caused controversy" [with anti-Church propagandists like Gómez].
According to Gómez, a layman has claimed that in 1983, when he was a teenager, he was touched and kissed by Cipriani "during the sacrament of confession".
In 1983, Cipriani was a simple priest of Opus Dei, where confessions are made in closed confessionals. The accusation is therefore unlikely.
Gómez claims that Cardinal Cipriani's accuser was "harassed" by relatives and acquaintances linked to Opus Dei in order to force him to retract.
Cardinal Cipriani has strongly denied the allegations, and the Vatican has never bothered to investigate. By legal standards he must be considered innocent. Yet Gómez calls him a 'sexual predator'.
The article makes it clear why Gómez hates the Cardinal, and it's not because of 'sexual abuse'.
He accuses him of not having supported or having supported (Gómez's formulation is confused) Gabino Miranda Melgarejo, then auxiliary bishop of Ayacucho. He was accused of sexual abuse and later laicised but never convicted in a secular court. Cardinal Cipriani behaved impeccably in this controversy.
Gómez accuses Cardinal Cipriani of being "close to [former Peruvian president Alberto] Fujimori" and loses all credibility by claiming that Cipriani "justified rape" on Radio Programas del Perú, where Cipriani was on air for two decades.
Gómez is angry at the Cardinal because he was the main promoter of the March for Life, which Gómez berates for opposing the killing of babies and protecting the family.
Gómez also denies the human dignity of human beings conceived in rape.
He quotes an apt statement by Cipriani on abortion: "If you don't agree with life, end your own. But let's give the child that is already in the womb a pleasant, welcoming environment".
Gómez is angry because the Cardinal promoted a referendum against the 'legalisation' of homosexual pseudo-marriages and the free distribution of contraceptive pills.
He is angry because the Cardinal criticised gender propaganda in the school curriculum and said of transvestite ideology: "If we continue in this delusion that everything is possible, let's feed the children excrement instead of a piece of meat". Ordinary people understood him.
Gómez claims that in August 2015 Cipriani was allegedly sacked from the newspaper El Comercio for 'plagiarising' entire paragraphs by quoting Paul VI and Benedict XVI in his opinion columns. This is like saying that Pontius 'plagiarised' from Pilate.
Furious, Gómez repeats the accusations of the extremist organisation that Cipriani, as auxiliary bishop of Ayacucho, sided with the military forces and not with the terrorists.
The terrorists belonged to Sendero Luminoso (ideology: Marxism-Leninism-Maoism) and Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru (ideology: Marxism-Leninism-Guevarism).
Gómez is angry that Cardinal Cipriani has criticised the "National Coordinator for Human Rights", a coalition of [hypocritical] left-wing organisations.
The cardinal said of them in 1994: "I have stood up for the poor and for those who have massacred this city. And in all that commotion I didn't see anyone from the Coordinating Committee for Human Rights".
Angry Gómez is condemned by the mayor of Lima, Rafael López Aliaga, who said: "It is unfair to accuse a person and not give them the right to defend themselves."
Picture: Juan Luis Cipriani © wikicommons, CC BY-SA, #newsHcvxjrdiew