Pope Francis appointed this weekend Cardinal Baltazar Porras, emeritus archbishop of Caracas, as the pontifical legate for the International Eucharistic Congress to be celebrated in Quito, Ecuador, between September 8 and 15 of this year.
Those kinds of appointments are often perfunctory. But this one came at an unusual time: Venezuela is in turmoil, as citizens claim President Nicolás Maduro committed election fraud — thousands of Venezuelans have been arrested, and more than two dozen have been killed.
Porras, for his part, is well-known in Venezuela as a staunch opponent of Maduro’s regime, and has been particularly outspoken in recent weeks.
The cardinal is also-well known across Latin America as one of the key authors of the Aparecida document and a close advisor of Pope Francis.
While retired from diocesan ministry, the 79-year-old remains a member of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, and the Dicasteries for the Clergy; Laity, Family and Life; and Culture and Education.
So, who is Porras and how did he become the clerical enemy #1 of the Maduro regime, and a close collaborator of Pope Francis?
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Porras, who will turn 80 in October, was born in 1944 in Caracas and ordained a priest at just 23 years old in 1967. In 1983, he was named auxiliary bishop of the archdiocese of Mérida, in the Andean region of Venezuela. In 1991, he would become the Archbishop of the same see.
He served as the president of the Venezuelan Bishops’ Conference between 1999 and 2006 and Vice President of the CELAM (The Council of Latin American Bishops’ Conference) between 2007 and 2011.
During this time, Porras first met and became friends with then Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio during the Synod of America in 1997, and went on to work together in CELAM — the conference of Latin American bishops.
Along with then-Cardinal Bergoglio, Porras was an important player in the 2007 conference session which produced the Aparecida document, which Pope Francis has frequently reference as a major insight into his own thinking and which many claim the formed the inspiration for his exhortation Evangelii gaudium.
While widely being considered a theological moderate, Porras has also become one of the strongest defenders of Francis’ pontificate in Latin America.
In a 2023 interview, the cardinal said that conservative groups attacked “the Pope’s interests and looked for arguments to disqualify him. Likewise, powerful lobbies who want to impose a change of perspective and laws that favor aspects regarding marriage, family, and sex tend to ridicule him.”
On November 19, 2016, Pope Francis created Porras a cardinal, naming him apostolic administrator of Caracas, the primatial and largest see in Venezuela, in 2018. While apostolic administrators are usually temporary appointments, but in Porras’ case, it was a little different.
The concordat which has regulated the relations between the Venezuelan government and the Holy See since the 1960s provides that episcopal appointments in Venezuela need the approval of the Venezuelan executive. In practice, this has meant that the current president — considered an illegitimate dictator by many — Nicolás Maduro can veto episcopal candidates in the country.
Despite tensions between the Venezuelan government and the Church, Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, largely refrained from blocking Church appointments. Maduro, by contrast, has allegedly invoked the concordat on major appointments, both with Porras and with Archbishop Víctor Hugo Basabe, another major critic of the regime, in the Archdiocese of Barquisimeto.
Because the concordat does not treat ad hoc or temporary appointments, which remain solely under the discretion of the Holy See, when the Venezuelan government refused to greenlight their permanent appointments, both bishops were instead named temporary heads of their archdioceses, in which capacity they went on to serve for years.
Both would receive permanent appointments in 2023 though Basabe was moved to become Archbishop of Coro, a smaller see than Barquisimeto. Porras, meanwhile, was confirmed in Caracas, but at the age of 78.
His resignation from office was accepted by the pope less than a year later.
Porras and Chavismo
In his early years as a bishop, Porras maintained a low public profile, although he was known to have some left-wing sympathies.
However, he quickly became one of the staunchest critics of Hugo Chávez after his rise to power in 1999.
On April 11, 2002, amid widespread protests in the country, a shootout occurred when an opposition protest met a pro-government protest near the presidential palace, leaving 19 dead. Officers of the Armed Forces requested Hugo Chávez to resign that night.
Porras later said that Chávez called him in to be a guarantor of his life as he was being sent to prison, while Chávez accused him of being part of the attempted coup. Their relationship worsened after that incident.
In 2004, Porras supported a recall attempt against Chávez, with the president saying the bishop “had the Devil inside of his cassock.” When Chávez shut down RCTV in 2007, one of the largest private TV channels in the country, Porras compared him to Hitler and Mussolini. In 2011, he warned the Chávez government was sliding into “totalitarianism.”
In 2017, Porras said that the Maduro regime in Venezuela “had all the characteristics of the Marxist and Cuban systems” and said it was a system that “produces misery, death, hunger, and loss of freedoms.”
Most recently, in a 2023 homily after being appointed archbishop, he asked to respect all human rights in the country from “conception to natural death” and said he dreamt of a country where “all abuses and torture disappeared, and where justice is quick and impartial.”
After the homily, Diosdado Cabello, the number two of the Venezuelan regime, called Porras a ‘vulture’ and complained that bishops should not serve without being elected.
Cabello is accused by the U.S. Department of State of leading a drug trafficking organization ranging all over Latin America and has been sanctioned by the US government and the European Union.
After Nicolás Maduro allegedly committed fraud in the recent presidential election, Porras wrote a letter to the Venezuelan bishops in which he decried the fraud and the subsequent repression of protests and called the bishops to support “civic resistance” against the regime.
Because of that, the pope’s nod to Porras for the Eucharistic Congress in Quito could be taken as a sign of Vatican support for the cardinal’s efforts to call for reform — and suggest regime change — in Venezuela.
And in that context, Catholic human rights advocates will be listening carefully to what the cardinal has to say at the Eucharistic Congress in Ecuador, a global stage for the Catholic Church.
