Breakway church in Venezuela is sympathetic to Chávez

From their makeshift chapel in a room above a schoolhouse here whose entrance is adorned with a portrait of President Hugo Chávez and revolutionary slogans from his government, the bishops of the Reformed Catholic Church of Venezuela welcomed congregants to Sunday Mass. Monsignor Simón Alvarado, 39, strummed his guitar and led the small congregation in singing hymns. Bishop Coadjutor Jon Jen Siu-García 37, preached a sermon on assisting the poor while his wife, Hiranioris Calles, 24, beamed a smile at him from where she sat on a white plastic chair. 'The church of Rome is fearful that it could lose more priests like us,' said Sui-García, the son of immigrants, a Cantonese father and Colombian mother, who settled in this gritty city on the margins of Lake Maracaibo. 'And it should be afraid, given its level of scandal over internal abuses and hypocrisy in combating poverty.' To be certain, the defection of priests and their formation last month of a breakaway church openly sympathetic to Chávez's government is raising the ire of Roman Catholic leaders in Venezuela and fueling a debate over the collision of religion and politics in one of Latin America's most secular nations. 'What they want to do is put an end to the Catholic Church, but they have not succeeded,' Archbishop Roberto Lückert, one of Chávez's most strident critics in the Venezuelan Roman Catholic hierarchy, said in comments broadcast on radio denouncing the new church.