Vatican Is Committed to Seeking Peaceful Solution to Venezuela Crisis

Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin said that he and Pope Francis are ‘seeking to help all’ for ‘the good of the people.’

(photo: Anyul Rivas via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).)

VATICAN CITY — After violence followed a controversial vote in Venezuela this weekend, the Vatican secretary of state has encouraged the country’s citizens to find a “peaceful and democratic” way out of the crisis.

The violence comes on the heels of a vote for an assembly charged by the country’s socialist president, Nicolas Maduro, with writing a new constitution.

According to ANSA news agency, Cardinal Pietro Parolin said that he and Pope Francis are “very committed” to seeking a peaceful solution to the crisis in Venezuela. The Vatican has been “seeking to help all, indiscriminately, and calling each person to fulfill their own responsibility.”

“The criteria should be only the good of the people,” he said. “The dead are too many.”

Cardinal Parolin said that “it is necessary to find a peaceful and democratic way to get out of this situation, and the only way is always the same: We must find, talk, but seriously, to find a way to solution.”

His statements come only days after July 30 nationwide elections, which approved a constitutional assembly to reform the country’s 1999 constitution. However, some reports and members of Venezuela’s opposition have disputed the fairness of the elections, which were boycotted by the opposition.

Although the government claims that more than 8 million voters attended, the Democratic Unity Table, an organization monitoring the election, reported that only 2.4 million votes, making up 12% of eligible voters, were cast, of which a quarter would have voted “No.”

Two opposition leaders, Leopoldo López and Antonio Ledezma, were re-arrested following the vote.

Furthermore, in the days leading up to and following the election, uprisings and protests swept through the country. Conflicts between protesters and the country’s Bolivarian National Guard have resulted in the deaths of at least 15 people, including two minors.

According to critic of the Maduro regime Attorney General Luisa Ortega Díaz, “10 people lost their lives surrounding Sunday’s vicious election, totaling 121 deaths since the protests began in April.”

The constitutional revisions have been rejected by the Venezuelan bishops for being not only “unconstitutional, but also unnecessary, inconvenient and harmful for the Venezuelan people.”

In their message July 27, the bishops said that Maduro’s initiative “has not been convened by the people, has unacceptable commissions, and only the partisans of the ruling party will be represented there.”

“It will be a biased instrument that will not solve, but will aggravate, the acute problems of high cost of living, the shortage of food and medicines that [results in the] suffer[ing of] the people, and deepen and worsen the deep political crisis we currently face.”