Has Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos Been Slandered?

Father Z takes a good look at an article John Allen did on this at John Allen’s piece on “stampede” away from Card. Castrillón

I am not making any judgements yet on this because I am still not sure what went on here. In fact the news reports and in facts statements from the parties involved seem in flux to me.

In the Cardinal's defense his statement was not reported in context or in fact the whole statement was not even reported.

This site also looks at the issue at Has Cardinal Castrillon been treated fairly? Here we see the more of the statement:

Here is the paragraph which followed the offending words. The complete letter is available in French at the magazine Golias and in English on Wikipedia:

For the relationship between priests and their bishop is not professional but a sacramental relationship which forges very special bonds of spiritual paternity. The matter was amply taken up again by the last Council, by the 1971 Synod of Bishops and that of 1991. The bishop has other means of acting, as the Conference of French Bishops recently restated; but a bishop cannot be required to make the denunciation himself. In all civilised legal systems it is acknowledged that close relations have the possibility of not testifying against a direct relative.
“The bishop has other ways of acting”: in other words, Castrillon was not saying that bishops should conceal the crimes of priests, but that they themselves should not hand the offender over to the authorities. He would probably encourage the victim or the victim’s families to report the crime.

Is this a realistic policy? Perhaps experience has showed that it is not, especially with recidivist paedophiles. Perhaps, too, victims are psychologically incapable of denouncing their tormenter. Perhaps some bishops would not be courageous enough to engineer a denunciation by a third party. But that single sentence should not be used to smear a man courageous and zealous enough to seek the conversion of Colombia’s vilest drug lord.

Now that put things in a different viewpoint. You might disagree with that but I think here we are getting to what was the Cardinals and perhaps even John Paul the II's concern. That is the issue in the background here dealing with perhaps with repressive Govts.

As Allen points out in his piece:
prelates such as Castrillón are also old enough to remember what happened in regimes hostile to the church—whether police states of Latin America, or Communist governments in Eastern Europe—where clergy were encouraged to inform on one another in order to weaken the church from within, and where refusal to do so was considered a mark of heroic virtue. (Bishops from former Soviet states and from Latin America have sometimes warned against an uncritical embrace of "mandatory reporter" requirements for exactly that reason—it’s a sort of Anglo-Saxon delusion, they say, to believe one can always trust the police and the courts.).

Now the communist days seem like a million years ago but they were really not. Needless to say in Vietnam and CHINA they are still going on full force. Further things in Central and South American that show that the situation have not changed at all in some places.

So we have two concerns here. People like the cardinal quite recall the bad ole days. It is not ancient history to them. It is not clear what John Paul knew about this letter or what he thought. One can see though him recalling the days when the Communist agents from the KGB to their Eastern European counterparts very much encouraged Priest to be in fact on their PAYROLL.
So we do need to be careful at always looking at the worldwide Church and its experience.

I have a feeling this was what was at issue and not so much issues of confession(It is not clear to me if that was a real issue at all in the French case that is at dispute).

However it does give us pause to look at the entire context perhaps before rushing to all sort of judgments.

There is a need for more information.