VATICAN, Jul 11, 02 (CWNews.com) -- For the second time in recent weeks, a prominent Latin American cardinal has said that the media focus on a sex-abuse scandal in the United States is a form of "persecution" against the Catholic Church.
In an interview with the Italian magazine 30 Giorni, Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera of Mexico City charged that US reporters are engaged in "an orchestrated plan for striking at the prestige of the Church." The Mexican cardinal strongly supported the similar complaints, made in an interview with the same Catholic monthly, by the Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga.
In light of the negative press coverage of American prelates such as Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law, the Mexican cardinal said, "those of us who are closest to the United States have a special responsibility to protest."
Cardinal Rivera said that the "ferocious persecution" in America follows a familiar pattern, in which enemies of Catholicism use the misdeeds of some priests as a pretext for attacking the Church in general. "This is what happened in the early centuries of Christian history-- with Nero, for example," he said. "This is what happened in the past century with the persecutions in Mexico, in Spain, in Nazi Germany, and in Communist countries."