It isn’t often that I agree with James Carroll. In fact, I don’t think I ever have before now. Carroll brings up the old story of Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga of Honduras and certain comments he made about the Scandal. Last year, the cardinal dismissed the Scandal as persecution of the Church and a calculated attempt to attack the Church for supporting the Palestinian cause. (There’s a faint whiff of anti-Semitism in there, as if “the Jews” control the media in the US.)
“It certainly makes me think that in a moment in which all the attention of the mass media was focused on the Middle East, all the many injustices done against the Palestinian people, the print media and the TV in the United States became obsessed with sexual scandals that happened 40 years ago, 30 years ago. Why? I think it’s also for these motives: What is the church that has received Arafat the most times and has most often confirmed the necessity of the creation of a Palestinian state? What is the church that does not accept that Jerusalem should be the indivisible capital of the State of Israel, but that it should be the capital of the three great monotheistic religions?”
