Sympathetic to Chávez, a New Church Draws Fire

Missionary Bishop Simón Alvarado, 39, strummed a 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, smiled at him from her seat on a white plastic chair.

“The church of Rome is fearful that it could lose more priests like us,” Bishop Siu-García said. He is the son of immigrants, a Cantonese father and Colombian mother, who settled in this gritty city on the edge of Lake Maracaibo. “And it should be afraid, given its level of scandal over internal abuses and hypocrisy in combating poverty.”

The defection of a handful of priests and their formation of the Reformed Catholic Church, a breakaway church openly sympathetic to Mr. Chávez’s government yet oddly allied with conservative Anglicans from Texas, has raised the ire of Roman Catholic leaders in Venezuela. Since its founding in June, the infant church has fueled a fresh debate over the interplay 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 Luckert, one of Mr. Chávez’s most strident critics in Venezuela’s Roman Catholic hierarchy, said in a radio broadcast denouncing the new church.

He was scathing in his criticism of the church. “They get dressed up as priests, conduct baptisms and confirmations — all paid for by the government — while the people go hungry,” he said.

The leaders of the Reformed Catholic Church, however, say their new church represents a fusion of the best of Anglican and Roman Catholic traditions. And though they adamantly deny receiving financing from Mr. Chávez’s government and insist that their church has no political affiliation, they do profess solidarity with Mr. Chávez, who has repeatedly clashed with the Roman Catholic hierarchy since rising to power a decade ago.

“I share the revolutionary project of President Chávez, since it is a socialist and humanist project for the masses,” said Enrique Albornoz, a former Lutheran minister who is principal bishop, the top leader, of the Reformed Catholic Church. The church says it has about 2,000 members in Cabimas and in other oil towns in Zulia, Venezuela’s most populous state.

At first glance, Zulia might seem an unlikely origin for such a breakaway church, imbued as the new church is with liberation theology, the school of thought that shook the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America in the 1960s by advocating political activism to bring justice to the poor.