Mexico's Roman Catholic church called Tuesday for government protection as its top clergyman said he received death threats from leftist activists opposed to his stance against abortion and gay civil unions.Cardinal Norberto Rivera, who also faces allegations that he protected a pedophile priest, said a group of leftists kicked and spat at his car Sunday as he left Mexico City's central cathedral after taking mass.
“They have threatened me with death. These are not just aggressions, I've received constant death threats,” Rivera said in an interview with Mexican television aired late Monday.
Rivera says he has been the victim of a hate campaign since the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, narrowly lost last year's presidential election to the conservative National Action Party, which is seen as close to the Catholic Church.
“He's been receiving sporadic (death threat) calls or e-mails for a year,” Rivera's spokesman, Father Hugo Valdemar, told Reuters Tuesday.
“I asked him to denounce it and he said he didn't consider it important, but now with the physical attack he decided to make it public.”
The PRD denied any involvement in attacks on Rivera and said in a statement it did not want to fight with the Church, which vehemently opposed recent laws in the PRD-dominated capital allowing abortion and gay civil unions.
Valdemar said Mexico City's left-wing government was failing to control the activists, and he demanded federal government protection so the church can go back to keeping the side doors of the city cathedral open during Sunday mass.
He said activists banged on the windows of Rivera's car with wooden sticks in Sunday's attack.
“It has come to the point of being totally intolerable,” he said. “If the city government doesn't have the capacity to provide this security, then the federal government should.”
Mexico is the second-largest Catholic nation after Brazil, and Rivera was seen as an outside candidate to become Pope in 2005.
He has clashed with the left over issues like abortion rights and his reputation has been hurt by allegations in a U.S. civil case that he protected a priest who sexually abused boys in Mexico and California.
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