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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | April 2005 
Priests Make Efforts To Help Rural Poor
 Reed Johnson - Los Angeles Times
| | Priests face staff shortages and can only travel to isolated communities once or twice a month. |
Huaxtla, Morelos - As the sound of a church bell drifts over the tin-roofed shanties and bonedry hills, summoning the faithful, Padre Humberto Coronel scans the horizon, hoping to spot at least one parishioner. Several minutes pass, and not a single person approaches the humble concrete chapel where Coronel or one of his Catholic co-workers comes every two weeks to celebrate Mass.
"There's no one here," Coronel murmurs, shaking his head as he squints into the fierce afternoon sun.
But just as the priest and his colleague, Padre Omar Pérez, are about to get back in their Jeep Liberty and drive off to visit another hamlet, a village leader who is a devout Catholic strolls up to greet the priests and invite them to his uncle's home for lunch.
Coronel is relieved. For another week, at least, he has maintained some spiritual connection with his far-flung and economically embattled flock.
"These are communities that have been a little abandoned," says Coronel, who for the past three years has presided over one of the poorest and most isolated parishes in the south-central state of Morelos, two hours south of Mexico City.
"It's a little sad for us that we can't attend to all the people we want to."
OVERWHELMING ODDS
Like many Roman Catholic priests across Mexico, Coronel faces a struggle to retain longtime worshipers and attract new ones in a country where being desperately poor is often a life sentence. In recent years, thousands of young people have fled this area to seek work in the United States. Some villages have turned into virtual ghost towns.
Those who have remained in the region's insular and scattered communities each containing a few dozen or, at most, two or three hundred people must scratch out a living from the unforgiving soil by farming corn. They must also cope with dangerous roads, tattered schools, a severe lack of potable water, spotty medical services and the devastating erosion caused by summer rains.
To the priests who minister to them, the Vatican seems a world away. Yet the way the church addresses poverty in its most marginal parishes was shaped a generation ago when Pope John Paul II reined in a clerical movement called "liberation theology" that sought to empower the poor through self-awareness, grass-roots organization and denunciation of political elites that favored the rich.
LIBERATION THEOLOGY
Wary of the movement's flirtation with leftist politics, particularly in Latin America, the Polish pope installed bishops who clamped down on churchled social activism. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI last week, was John Paul's enforcer, using the Vatican doctrinal office he headed to silence the movement's leading theologians.
Many priests and faithful committed to liberation theology abandoned the church, costing it energy and momentum in the fight against poverty.
Today, the church works more quietly for the poor.
Searching for ways to help their parishioners, Coronel and Pérez are experimenting with forms of community organizing championed by liberation theologians without openly challenging the rich.
They are trying to develop regional, home-based micro-businesses such as small bakeries. They are working with the Autonomous University of Morelos to help rural communities better manage the local environment, which includes the massive Sierra de Huautla bioreserve.
But much of the time the two priests simply drive, looking for parishioners in search of spiritual assistance.
"Liberation theology rescued the dignity of man," Coronel says. But today, he adds, the mission of the church is simply to cater to the needs of marginalized Mexicans and reinforce its traditional pastoral mission.
Operating out of St. Michael Archangel Church in Jojutla, Coronel, Pérez and the parish's third priest, Padre Celso Guerrero Aviles, must tend to an urban constituency of about 45,000 Catholics and a rural constituency of about 5,000 scattered across eight hamlets, each with its own "capilla," or small chapel.
"Here it's not the pope," Pérez says. "Here it is us." They find Catholics looking for a kind of common-sense guidance and practical help in coping with life's daily struggles, says Cecilia Delgado, 26, who assists the priests on several of the parish's social programs.
On a recent weekday, that pastoral mission sent Coronel, Pérez and Delgado off to check up on a number of the small concrete and adobe capillas and the devoted sacristanas who keep them cleaned and maintained.
Stop No. 1 was San José de Pala, where the chapel caretaker lives next door with her husband and her 1-1/2-year-old son, Kevin.
The caretaker says she was won over by Coronel's personal style a welcome contrast, she says, to his grouchy priestly predecessor.
Coronel laughs. Even he allows that the old priest had a "difficult personality" for example, not liking it when the mestizo population would bring folk beliefs or the local indigenous culture into church.
"I try to respect them and their traditions," says Coronel, the son of farmers. "They don't come to Mass often, but they respect God and they fear God." Steering the Liberty up twisting mountain roads, the group makes its way through tiny towns: Quilamula, with its pretty pink chapel right off the main square; Huautla, whose population nose-dived to barely 1,000 people after a local silver mine closed; and Xochipala, where Asunción Xaltipa, 52, tends the Church of the Holy Family on the hill above her hamlet.
"There is my parish," Coronel says, as he gestures out the window at the expanse of hazy hills.
The last official stop of the day is Huaxtla, a dusty speck of 68 people on the edge of a small dam. They don't make big demands of God. They pray for him to take care of their cow. They ask him to make the corn grow high. On a good day here, the collection plate yields about 20 pesos (US2).
"It's hard to celebrate Mass with 10 people," Coronel admits, sounding tired at the end of a long, hot day.
Nonetheless, his parishioners have faith that Padre Coronel will be back again in two weeks, and that on a lonely hillside in the heart of Mexico, a bell will sound again. |
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