CHILE
National Catholic Reporter
Austen Ivereigh | Jul. 7, 2015
SANTIAGO, CHILE Back home among his own in Latin America this week, Pope Francis is evangelizing from the peripheries, challenging the world from the standpoint of the disenfranchised and the marginalized.
Yet to a small diocese 500 miles south of the Chilean capital, Santiago, the pope’s gestures and words ring somewhat hollow. The priests and laypeople of Osorno, a remote town not far north from Puerto Montt, remain reluctant to criticize Francis openly, preferring to believe he has been badly informed. But there is no doubting their anger and bewilderment at the way their local church has been steamrollered and their appeals ignored.
This week, three delegates of the Organization of Lay People of the diocese, which has just 23 parishes, are traveling to Santa Cruz, Bolivia, in the hope of presenting a letter to Pope Francis during the World Meeting of Popular Movements, which Francis is to address Thursday.
They have been protesting since January, when it became clear that the Vatican would press ahead with the installation of Juan Barros Madrid as Osorno’s new bishop, a move as unpopular with Chile’s other bishops as it was with the clergy and laypeople of the diocese.
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