The New Cardinal's First Mass

Many believe that the appointment of Juan Luis Cipriani as cardinal was due to the Vatican's misinformation regarding his ties to the Fujimori regime and his openly anti-human rights stance. "That is not the case," says an ecclesiastical analyst. "The conservative wing of the Vatican wants to break every progressive tendency in the Peruvian Church, as it did in Holland, El Salvador, and Nicaragua." Within days of Cipriani's appointment, another member of Opus Dei was named bishop, this time of Chuquibamba, to join the prelates of Chiclayo, Arequipa, Cañete, Abancay, and Huancavelica. Like Cipriani, the bishops of the last two dioceses remained silent in the face of the most atrocious human rights violations in the 1980s.