Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras -- Honduran Archbishop Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga is a linguist, scientist and saxophone player -- and a widely respected moderate cardinal in a region known for producing radical priests.
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As perhaps the top candidate to become Latin America's first pope, he also is one of the few contenders to openly welcome his inclusion on the list of front-runners.
"Only the Holy Spirit knows who the successor is to His Sanctity, although it makes me happy that I'm mentioned so the world knows good things exist in Honduras," Rodriguez Maradiaga, 62, told reporters after celebrating Mass in Tegucigalpa earlier this month.
While he has spoken out against free-market policies and in defense of millions living in abject poverty in Central America, he is an opponent of the "liberation theology" that once supported leftist rebellions and sought to bend the rules of orthodoxy to bring the church closer to Indian groups and the poor.
Rodriguez Maradiaga is the first cardinal appointed from his small country of 6.8 million people and only the second ever from Central America.
That could dim his papal prospects, said religion expert Roderic Ai Camp, a professor at Claremont McKenna College in California.
"It's very unlikely that someone representing that small a country, unless he's viewed truly as a representative of the whole Latin American constituency, would have much of a chance," Ai Camp said.
The cardinal does have regional ties. He served as president of the Latin American bishops' conference in the late 1990s, using the forum to denounce foreign debt payments forced on the region's countries because they "restrict possibilities for development."
"Meanwhile, the corrupt elite of those nations continue enriching themselves at the cost of their own people," he said.
He has served on several commissions studying ways to eliminate corruption and in the late 1990s headed a committee that oversaw transition of the Honduran police from military to civilian control.
He also took up environmental causes, leading a protest march in 2002 against a Canadian mining company for allegedly damaging the environment, said Danilo Aceituno, director of Honduran Catholic Radio and a friend of the cardinal.
In church matters, the cardinal has had to grapple with a phenomenon threatening Catholicism throughout Latin America: the steady inroads made by evangelical Protestant churches, which some perceive as being more involved in the daily lives of their parishioners then the hierarchical Catholic Church.
Rodriguez Maradiaga angered Honduran evangelicals several years ago with his suggestion that some Protestant denominations were making "an industry" out of church collections and tithes. His charge reflected Vatican irritation at the evangelicals' growing influence in the region.
Although less rigidly conservative than some Latin American officials appointed by John Paul II, the cardinal has repeatedly spoken out against abortion and the destruction of embryos in scientific work. However, he once suggested it would be praiseworthy to manipulate the genetic code "to alleviate illnesses."
"The challenge for the new pope will be the ethical-medical discussions about genetic manipulation and the attempt to clone a human being," he told reporters.
Rodriguez Maradiaga opposes gay marriage and the ordination of women priests, and recently backed the pope's rejection of euthanasia when, he said, "the world witnessed the grotesque spectacle of seeing Terri Schiavo die." He was referring to the Florida woman who died last month after the removal of a feeding tube that had kept her alive since she suffered brain damage in 1990.
Like John Paul, the cardinal is a man "very open to other religions," said the Rev. Jesus Orlando Erazo, 52, a Catholic priest in neighboring El Salvador, where Rodriguez Maradiaga studied. "He has opened an inter-religion dialogue as John Paul II did. ... He doesn't shut off dialogue with other beliefs."
The archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Rodriguez Maradiaga was named a cardinal by John Paul in February 2001. Born into an upper middle-class family, he said he first thought of becoming a priest at 10.
As a young man, he studied mathematics, physics and natural sciences in El Salvador, and later earned degrees in theology from the Lateran Pontifical University in Rome, as well as a degree in clinical psychology in Austria.
He speaks or has studied Spanish, English, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Latin and Greek. He has taught chemistry, physics and music, and plays several musical instruments, with a special enthusiasm for the saxophone.
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Associated Press reporters Marcos Aleman in San Salvador, El Salvador, and Morgan Lee in Mexico City contributed to this report.
