Honduran bishop to run for office because politics 'screwed the poor'

[rug]

Oct. 11, 2011
Paul Jeffrey, Catholic News Service

JESUS DE OTORO, Honduras – The "Red Bishop" of Honduras says he will run for president of the Central American nation if he gets permission from Pope Benedict XVI.

Bishop Luis Santos Villeda of Santa Rosa de Copan will celebrate his 75th birthday in November and plans to immediately submit his resignation to the Vatican, as required by canon law. Once his resignation is accepted and he is freed from the responsibilities of bishop, Bishop Santos says, he will run for president as a candidate of a progressive faction of the Liberal Party, whose last president, Manuel Zelaya, was deposed in a 2009 coup.

"I don't aspire to be president of Honduras. This isn't my idea," Bishop Santos told Catholic News Service.

He said he was first asked by Liberal Party leaders in the 1990s, and again in 2009, to become a candidate, but both times he declined.

http://ncronline.org/news/honduran-bishop-run-office-because-politics-screwed-poor

[msongs]

1. Catholic church has been screwing the poor for nearly 2000 years since if you

didn't give your money to it you would be condemned to hell and excommunicated and cut off from social supports

[rug]

3. What comic book did you get that from?

Jack Chick?

[Deep13]

5. That's actually mostly true.

Tithing in most Christian countries was legally enforceable before the reformation.

[TexasProgresive]

2. He has to be laizied as well

Ordained clergy are forbidden from seeking public office by canon law

1042.2/ a person who exercises an office or administration forbidden to clerics according to the norm of cann. ⇒ 285 and ⇒ 286 for which he must render an account, until he becomes free by having relinquished the office or administration and rendered the account;

Can. 285 §1. Clerics are to refrain completely from all those things which are unbecoming to their state, according to the prescripts of particular law.

§2. Clerics are to avoid those things which, although not unbecoming, are nevertheless foreign to the clerical state.

§3. Clerics are forbidden to assume public offices which entail a participation in the exercise of civil power.

[Deep13]

4. That's a good reason.

Hopefully if elected he will help unscrew the poor without supporting repressive religious laws.