Newly created Cardinal Monsengwo celebrates a mass at Stade des Martyrs on Dec. 5, 2010.

According to the press release, said to come from someone close to the Independent National Electoral Commission, the Archbishop of Kinshasa either lied or should check his sources because the numbers he provided to challenge the results “do not conform to the truth.”

The source points to the fact that Cardinal Monsengwo's claim that Etienne Tshisekedi mysteriously lost 64,000 votes, after supposedly being credited with 5,927,728 votes  on Dec. 6 but only 5,863,745 on Dec. 9, is a big lie because on Dec. 6, the INEC credited Mr. Tshisekedi with 5,693,528 votes, not 5,927,728, in its partial results. In fact, Mr Tshisekedi had won 171,247 more votes on Dec. 9, after being credited with 5,864,775 votes by the INEC in its final results.

The source also notes that the report by the Carter Center on the Nov. 28 elections in DR Congo, on which Cardinal Monsengwo based some of his criticism, although pointing to irregularities during and after the elections, also says that its “assessment does not propose that the final order of candidates is necessarily different than announced” by the electoral commission, a fact that the cardinal chose to ignore in his statement.

It is also important to note that Cardinal Monsengwo was not speaking on behalf of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, which has said that it will not publish its own results although it had more observers than any other group during the elections.

Some newspapers in Kinshasa suggested that the cardinal was wrong to take the side of the opposition, which he has done many times before and is certainly not a friend of President Joseph Kabila.

Forum des As wrote on Wednesday that the cardinal was trying to “settle old scores” and might be nostalgic of the nineties, when he enjoyed a lot of political clout and was a major player in national politics. Le Potentiel wrote on Tuesday that the cardinal was “pouring oil on fire”, even as tensions are already running high across DR Congo after the publication of the results of the presidential election.

Now that his statement has been shown to contain lies, will Cardinal Monsengwo feel “morally obligated” to admit that he lied and seek forgiveness from the “whole Congolese population”? Only God knows, but history will tell.

As people used to say centuries ago in Rome, errare humanum est (to err is human).