Salesian Cardinal overseeing destruction of Honduran church says Viganò “hurting faith”

LifeSiteNews reports:

Cardinal Maradiaga rebukes papal critics: McCarrick abuse scandal ‘of a private order’

The scandal of ex-Cardinal McCarrick’s homosexual abuse of young priests and seminarians and Pope Francis’ alleged cover-up are “of a private order,” and a merely “administrative affair,” according to one of the Pope’s top advisers, Cardinal Andrés Rodriguez Maradiaga. He made these remarks in a recent interview in one of the most revealing statements to date on the Viganò testimony.

In an interview published on Wednesday evening by Religion Digital, the religious portal of the Spanish-language news site Periodista Digital, Maradiaga once again strongly criticized Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò for having gone public about McCarrick’s sexual predations and the protection the Cardinal received from the highest spheres in the Vatican, especially since Pope Francis was elected to the See of Peter and trusted the American prelate to help him choose new cardinals for the Church in the USA.

Asked to comment about Viganò’s call on the Pope to resign, Maradiaga answered:

It does not seem correct to me to transform something that is of the private order into bombshell headlines exploding all over the world and whose shrapnel is hurting the faith of many. I think this case of an administrative nature should have been made public in accordance with more serene and objective criteria, not with the negative charge of deeply bitter expressions.

Leave aside, just for the moment, just for the moment!--that Maradaiga is part of the worst cover-up in the Catholic Church in living memory. Leave aside--just for the moment!--that when his good seminarians complained about rampant sodomy and sodomy-enabling behavior at their seminary, he attacked them as "gossipers."

Leave that aside for now, and just look what has happened to the Honduran Catholic Church during the time Maradiaga has been in charge. We've reported on this before. In 2014 the Pew Organization did a major study on the religious demography in Latin America. Pew reported:

“the period between 1970 and 2014 is marked by significant declines in the percentages of Catholics in nearly all of the (Latin American) countries surveyed – ranging from a 47-point drop in Honduras to a 5-point decrease in Paraguay."

Get that? "a 47-point drop."  Since 1970, Catholics have fallen from 94% to 46% of the population of Honduras. Maradiaga has been a bishop in Tegucigalpa, Honduras' capitol, since 1978, and the Archbishop of Tegucigalpa and hence the Metropolitan of the whole country since 1993--25 years. Now he professes to believe that Archbishop Viganò's telling the truth "is hurting the faith of many."