Backers of Venezuela's controversial President Hugo Chavez have launched a self styled Reformed Catholic Church."The church of Rome is fearful that it could lose more priests like us," said Bishop Coadjutor Jon Jen Sui-García, 37, the son of immigrants, a Cantonese father and Colombian mother, who settled in this gritty city on the margins of Lake Maracaibo, the International Herald Tribune reports.
"And it should be afraid, given its level of scandal over internal abuses and hypocrisy in combating poverty."
At a makeshift chapel above a Chavez adorned schoolhouse, Bishop Siu-Garcia and other bishops welcomed people and led the small congregation in singing hymns.
As Bishop Siu-García, preached a sermon on assisting the poor, his wife, Hiranioris Calles, 24, beamed a smile at him from where she sat on a white plastic chair.
To be certain, the defection of priests and their formation last month of a breakaway church openly sympathetic to Chávez's government is raising the ire of Roman Catholic leaders in Venezuela and fueling a debate over the collision of religion and politics in one of Latin America's most secular nations.
"What they want to do is put an end to the Catholic Church, but they have not succeeded," Archbishop Roberto Lückert, one of Chávez's most strident critics in the Venezuelan Roman Catholic hierarchy, said in comments broadcast on radio denouncing the new church.
"They get dressed up as priests, conduct baptisms and confirmations, all paid for by the government, while the people go hungry," Lückert said of the new church, which in its own defence claims to draw its ideas from a fusion of Anglican and Roman Catholic traditions.
The leaders of the Reformed Catholic Church also adamantly deny that they receive funding from the government. And while they insist their church has no political affiliation, they profess profound solidarity with Chávez, who has repeatedly clashed with Roman Catholic leaders since rising to power a decade ago.
"I share the revolutionary project of President Chávez, since it is a socialist and humanist project for the masses," said Enrique Albornoz, a former Lutheran minister who is principal bishop, or top leader, of the Reformed Catholic Church, which has about 2,000 members here and in other oil towns in Zulia, Venezuela's largest state.
"Chávez is carrying out the work of God, and I hope our priests here do the same," said Janeth Vicuola, 54, a housewife who attends the services of the Reformed Catholic Church. "The old Catholic Church claims to work on behalf of the needy, but what have they done for us in all these centuries?"
But the Anglican Communion has refused to recognise the Reformed Catholic Church, despite its embrace of Anglican traditions.Instead, the fledging new church secured the endorsement of a splinter group, the Conservative Anglican Church of North America, which disagrees with the liberalism of the Episcopal Church, the Anglican body in the United States that approved its first openly gay bishop in 2003.
"We do not extend the privilege of inclusion lightly," said A. Dale Climie, an Archbishop for the Conservative Anglican Church who is based outside of Houston. "The Roman Catholic authorities decided the best way to belittle them is to claim some sort of link to Chávez."
Seizing on the confusion over the breakaway church, Roman Catholic leaders have stepped up their denunciations of the organisation. Cardinal Jorge Urosa, the Catholic Archbishop of Caracas, denounced it as "a kind of chicken soup, a tossed salad, something that will not have any internal coherence."
The leaders of the Reformed Catholic Church praise Chávez's anti-poverty programs but refrain from discussing why poverty remains so rampant in Venezuela at a time of record oil prices. And they smile when asked about some of Chávez's own religious thinking, like his assertion that Jesus was the first true socialist.
"'We never said we're the church of Chávez," said Sui-García. "But we just happen to share many of the same ideas as our president."
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