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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | April 2005 
Reactions Mixed on Naming of New Pope
 Laurence Iliff - Dallas Morning News
| | President Fox extended a permanent invitation to Pope Benedict XVI. |
President Vicente Fox and other Latin American leaders congratulated the Roman Catholic Church on its selection of a new pope Tuesday, but some church analysts expressed disappointment.
Fox told reporters in Nogales, Sonora, where he was visiting: "We now have a new pope, a new leader of the Catholic Church, Benedict XVI. ... Before you all, I wish to send him a warm greeting from the people of Mexico. I wish him the best with the enormous challenge he has ahead."
Fox also extended an invitation for a papal visit to Mexico, which has the largest number of Catholics in the world after Brazil. The United States is third.
Latin American media described the new pope as a dogmatic hardliner best known as the Vatican official most responsible for dismantling "liberation theology" within the church, particularly in Central America, where it was associated with leftist revolutionary movements.
In Mexico, church analyst Bernardo Barranco said the choice of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger is a bad one for Latin America, where 40 percent of Roman Catholics live, because of his apparent lack of interest in the Third World generally.
"Of all the cardinals, he is one of the most distant from Latin America," said Barranco, vice president of the Center for Religious Studies in Mexico. "He is a very Eurocentric figure."
Likewise, the new pope apparently possesses little of the warmth that Latin Americans found in John Paul II.
"Ratzinger is a very cold, intellectual, academic figure," said Barranco. "Adios, charisma."
Several church leaders from Latin American, including Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and Claudio Hummes, archbishop of Sao Paulo, Brazil, had been mentioned as possible candidates for pope.
For Roderic Ai Camp, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College who has written a book on the Mexican church, the new pope shares many of the conservative religious beliefs found in Mexico and Latin America.
What is less clear is the new pontiff's attitude toward economic and social issues, where even conservative Latin clergy have been outspoken, Camp said.
On the streets of Mexico City, Catholics were somewhat split.
"I don't agree with the choice of someone that old," said Araceli Blanco, 28, of the new pope, who is 78. "I think it should have been someone younger who could continue the work of John Paul II."
Óscar Marín Martínez, a 52 year-old teacher, said the closeness between the former pope and the new one should provide some continuity.
"It seems like (Benedict XVI) was very close to the last pope and has the same ideas. I hope he continues the work of John Paul II in uniting religions," he said.
Prior to Ratzinger's election as Benedict XVI, Inocencio Gómez, a leader of a Catholic Indian lay group in the southern state of Chiapas, told Spanish news service EFE that he and other indigenous Mexicans hoped the next leader of the Catholic Church would promote the "evangelization of fairness and non-discrimination" in Latin America.
"We expect that the new pope will announce and denounce, forcefully, the fact that Mexico's Indians remain subjected by the yoke of exploitation at the hands of landholders and other powerful interests," said Gómez.
Gómez, a member of the Faith and Liberation group that works in various parishes in Chiapas, said the next pope should also "put into practice" the teachings of the Second Vatican Council and calls from John Paul II for evangelization based on the cultures of communities and not on the imposition of foreign customs.
"In short, we need John Paul II's successor to emphasize an 'Indian theology' that acknowledges our values and leads us to spiritual and social liberation," Gómez said. |
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