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 Editorials | At Issue | April 2005 
Mexico's Catholics at a Crossroads
 Kenneth Emmond - El Universal Online
| Mexico's Cardinal Norberto Rivera has been offering increasingly bold political opinions from the pulpit.
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The passing of Pope John Paul II signals a crossroads for world Catholicism, and thoughtful Mexican Catholics must be wondering what the new pope selected at the Vatican conclave in the next few days will bring them.
Catholics and non-Catholics alike are in awe at the personal courage shown in the life of Karol Wojtyla, from the time he was a vigorous young priest in Nazi- and Soviet-dominated Poland until his final days as Pope John Paul II when he campaigned for peace in the face of personal illness and pain.
Many were the triumphs of the man and his church, from his contribution to the defeat of the Soviet empire, to his reaching out to Islam and Christianity's "elder brothers," the Jews.
John Paul's work provides a strong base for his successor to build on, but he also leaves a challenge and an opportunity to make the church more relevant to the lives of its one billion followers.
With his charisma and the adoration he received from crowds on his world travels, in many ways John-Paul was a "macro pope." During his 26 years as the church's spiritual leader he traveled to more than 120 countries promoting peace, faith, and goodwill, and extending the hand of friendship to those outside the faith.
But neither politicians nor churchmen can be all things to all people all the time, and within the church much remains to be done.
While the pope was spreading goodwill around the globe, church membership was shrinking, nowhere more dramatically than in Latin America.
Mexico is a microcosm of this development.
Since 2000 Cardinal Norberto Rivera, with the approval of President Vicente Fox, a devout Catholic, has been offering increasingly bold political opinions from the pulpit about what the constitutionally secular government should or should not be doing. His comments have touched many areas of government activity, territory where the church has not ventured for nearly a century.
Meanwhile, the size of his flock has been steadily dwindling.
The most obvious reason for this is the church's inability to recruit enough priests to minister to the spiritual needs of its members.
Recruitment into the priesthood has fallen so sharply that in many nations the average age of priests is above 60 years. In some rural areas of southern Mexico, priests are spread so thinly that they can visit a parish only once every few weeks.
Meanwhile, small evangelical groups who bring enthusiasm, fervor, and a caring attitude, often delivered with sparse resources, have been filling the spiritual vacuum.
Their membership is growing at the expense of the Catholic Church, which has served Mexico's large and small communities since the Conquest nearly five centuries ago.
Aggravating this problem is micro-management from Rome, where decision-makers cannot be fully aware of the local situation. In Chiapas, the shortfall of priests was alleviated by training local deacons to perform church services and minister to the sick — that is, until 2002, when Rome ordered church leaders to stop the practice.
Surely one leading cause of the shortage of priests is the vow of celibacy they must take. It has not always been so: priests were allowed to marry until the 10th century, and changing this policy, though discussed, was not seriously considered under John Paul II.
Another reason is that half of the members of the church — the women — are disqualified from the priesthood because of their sex.
If the membership of the Catholic Church is a representative cross-section of humanity, a significant minority of its members face a powerful temptation to leave as a result of its continuing denunciation of homosexuals.
The church remains firm in condemning homosexual practices as sinful despite convincing medical research showing that sexual orientation is determined biologically and not as a matter of choice. Many Catholics see this as inappropriate and — given the existence of gay priests and revelations of sex scandals within the clergy — obtuse if not hypocritical.
The church's unflinching position against birth control measures and its opposition to the use of condoms have created more feelings of guilt than changes in human behavior. This, and the advice of priests to physically and mentally abused women that family unity is more important than their welfare or safety, is driving people away from the church, albeit in many cases reluctantly.
The door was opened to change during the Second Vatican Council during the papacy of John XXIII in the 1960s. Since then, the church has backed away from the collegial dialog proposed at the time.
With a new pope, the church will have a new opportunity to address these issues in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council - or to continue the conservative internal practices followed under John Paul II.
If it chooses the latter course, it is hard to see how it can attract new members and keep existing ones. In a world where church and state are accepted as separate entities, its members must be its source of regeneration and new growth.
Ideally, the new pope will consolidate the ecumenical gains made by John Paul while bringing a new, creative focus to the internal problems.
Kenneth Emmond is a freelance journalist and economist who has lived in Mexico since 1995. Kemmond00@yahoo.com |
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