Private letter from the Pope to Maduro | Il Corriere della …

The Italian right-wing newspaper Il Corriere della Sera yesterday published a letter from Francisco addressed to "His Excellency Mr. Nicolás Maduro" dated February 7, 2019. This is the Pope's response to the President's various requests for mediation from Venezuela. The letter was neither confirmed nor denied by the Acting Vatican spokesman, Alessandro Gisotti, who badured that it was a "private letter".

Although with soft tones, Francisco does not give much. There were others "trying to find a way out of the Venezuelan crisis," Bergoglio writes. "Unfortunately, they were all interrupted because what was agreed at the meetings was not followed by concrete actions to implement the agreements," the Pontifex observes. "The words seemed to delegitimize the good intentions that had been written," recounted Corriere de la Sera, an Italian media body that lost years ago a complaint by former president Cristina Kirchner for having accused her to go luxury shopping in Rome. I never realized it.

The warning can be read when, immediately afterwards, he claims to have always been in favor of mediation. "However, it is not a dialogue," he said, "but rather what happens when the various parties to the conflict place the common good above any other interest and work for unity and peace ". Francisco recalls the role played by the Holy See and the bishops of Venezuela "as guarantor and at the request of the parties", in a phase that began at the end of 2016. This was an effort to to resurrect the crisis "in a peaceful and institutional way", through negotiation between the government and the table of democratic unity; and with a series of conditions to be fulfilled, set out in a letter from Cardinal Pietro Parolin dated December 1, 2016.

Francisco recalls, in this letter, "that the Holy See has clearly indicated the conditions for a possible dialogue". And he put forward "a series of demands that he considered indispensable for the dialogue to develop fruitfully and effectively". According to the newspaper Il Corriere della Sera, the pope reports that today, these demands and "others that have been added as a result of the changing situation" are no longer necessary than ever. For example, he adds, "what is expressed in the letter sent to the National Constituent Assembly". In his remarks, he echoes the increasingly open resistance of the Venezuelan Bishops' Conference to Maduro, his methods and threats. And the requirement that "any form of bloodshed be avoided".

The newspaper adds that the disappointment also comes from the way in which these attempts were thwarted by the mute resistance of the Maduro regime and by the reality of a divided and confused Venezuelan opposition. The reference to Parolin's letter serves to align, even without mentioning, the insults that Maduro's "hard" circle directed against the Vatican's demands for genuine negotiations to take off.