A Tribute to Alfonso Cardinal Lopez Trujillo

From the Human Life International e-Newsletter:

“A Life in the Service of Life”
(Used with permission of The Wanderer.)

When Pope John Paul II established the Pontifical Council for the Family on May 13th of 1985—the morning of the very day he was shot in St. Peter’s Square—he may not have understood how countercultural this Council would be, nor how effective. Alfonso Cardinal Lopez Trujillo assumed the mantle of leadership for the Council in 1990 and hit the ground running on his new mission. Because of his experience defending the Church in his home country of Colombia, where he was threatened with death numerous times by terrorists, he was perfectly suited to be the custodian of the Church’s splendid treasury of teachings on life, marriage and family in a worldwide ministry.

In Cardinal Lopez, the Church had a warrior for all that was true and good. For many years he was involved in the fight against liberation theology in Latin America which was a systematic attempt to adapt the authentic Gospel message of freedom in Christ to pernicious Marxist doctrines. As President of the Latin American Episcopal Conference (CELAM) in 1979, he invited Pope John Paul II to make his very first foreign trip to the CELAM conference in Mexico to help forestall what many considered to be an imminent schism in Latin America due to the bishops’ overall endorsement of liberation theology....

He will be missed...