From Xico

Catholicism in the Most Catholic State in Mexico

I've realized certain things about faith and religion and myself over the years.  And about my husband and the same issues.  I seem to have a faith gene or seed or something, and my husband doesn't, unless a scientific approach can be considered religious.  I've stamped my foot at his cool demeaner as he pronounces something superstitious.  He's not into scientism like Richard Dawkins: he's truly rational, truly looking for material evidence, truly willing to change his mind if he finds reason to.

I on the other hand have this sense of something beyond my ability to perceive it (them?).  So he will label something a superstition and I will say it's not superstition.  For instance, he will say that people crossing themselves as the pass a church or a tiny capilla is superstition.  I'll say, not exactly, I don't think.  I think its respect, maybe habit, too, but not truly superstition.

We both agree that often religion, or at least religious organizations, can serve a lot of purposes besides being centers of any kind faith,  although they can enfold the faithful, too.  In the US right now, nuns, many of whom I know are truly faithful, are under attack by the Roman Catholic bishops, some of whose faith I would doubt.  I wouldn't doubt their sense of entitlement to power.

All this is to say that the Catholic Church and Catholicism are like any human constructs: the are broad umbrellas even if only a few people are under those umbrellas, as in the case of one Catholic household, or if there are multitudes as in the case of the whole Church. A panopoly of belief and non belief exists within the institution.  Faith itself doesn't need a church I don't think. And there can be faith that there is true evil as well as good, and that there are forces of indifference, unconcerned with the consequences of that the may wreak.

With this in mind, I have, as I've said before, found myself intrigued by religion, and especially Catholicism, in its many manifestations here in Mexico.  And of course you must remember that I write as an outsider.  

My husband commented on my post about Catholicism in Mexico that he didn't really think, for instance, that Semana Santa was about going shopping or going to the beach for everyone, or even most people.  I do have to say that I agree with him.  It is that for a lot of people who are urban, educated, and rich. And some of them may combine shopping with religious observances. The beach is also a mid-Semana Santa treat for those of considerably more faith.

I am going to break things down a bit in looking at Mexican Catholicism. Otherwise I'd drown. I thought I'd start with what some USAers might assume is typical of Mexican Catholicism: that found in Guanajuato where the Pope made his state visit a month or so ago, the state which claims a population that is 95% Catholic, the highest rate in the country.  

My husband and I visited the city of Guanajuato about ten years ago to take a two week intensive Spanish course: hardly time enough to know it more than superficially, but enough to find it quite delightful.  It's a very pretty small city, busy, filled with people, and things to see from silver mines to a mummy museum and (to my husband's delight) a mathematics center, from beautiful churches to colorful winding streets folded into the steep hills.

We stayed with a family just outside the center in a house probably built in the 1960s or so. They were used to having foreign students as long-term guests and were cordial and at ease with us and so made us comfortable with them.  They also had an enormous cross with a crucified and really bloody Jesus hanging over their bed which made a somewhat chilling impression on me. But religion didn't come up as a topic of discussion that I recall.  They talked about the high cost of electricity, of taxes, of their grown children and ours.  We watched some television together, including The Learning Channel in Spanish.

After our classes which were held in classes in rooms built one on top of each other leaning against an old wall and building, Jim and I walked all over and we took a fair number of pictures, none of which we can find at this point.  We can't even remember if we used a digital camera or our old SLRs.

All of this is to tell you that I am going to talk about Catholicism in Guanajuato by way of Carlos Fuentes's book, Las Buenas Consciencias, or The Good Conscience as it is usuall titled in the English translation.  After failing to find our pictures or pictures of Guanajuato at the beginning of the 20th century in any organized place on Google, I decided to just post some photos from the web to give you an idea of what it looks like, at least today.  The some of the real places mentioned in Las Buenas Consciencias still exist.

Much of the book takes place in the house of Jaime Caballos, the protaganist, and his father, aunt and uncle.  The house is fictional, but it sits on a street across a small plaza in front of the Church of San Roque, a real church, which is the family's parish.

Below is a map of what is now downtown Guanajuato. You can get a slightly larger version by clicking on the map.  You'll also get tools for decorating the map.

 At the center left you see a reddish dot identified as Iglesia San Roque.  In front is the little plaza.  One imagines that Jaime and his family lived perhaps on Calle San Roque or one of the other streets that is directly across from the church.  The Universiy is in the upper center part of the map, the Teatro Juarez which is across from a beautiful park is slightly to the right, and slightly towards the bottom.  Pictures of these places are below.  The aquaduct is not on the map and it isn't mentioned in the book as I recall, but we did see it and were impressed.  If I remember it was further from downtown than the house we stayed in.  I just liked the photo.

 

The church of San Roque

 

 

Plaza in front of San Roque with and without a fiesta.

 

Calle San Roque.  Jaime's family was bourgeois and prosperous.  Perhaps they lived in a house like that at the right.

Another view of Calle San Roque from the top

Guanajuato at night

 

The University of Guanajuato

The aquaducto

Teatro Juarez which sits across from a lovely park.

Las Buenas Conciencias is set in this lovely place.  But it is not a lovely novel, although it is an excellent and complicated one.

 

 

 

A Little Bit More about La Luz del Mundo (Light of the World)...but just a bit

I mentioned the sect known as La Luz del Mundo a few posts ago.  Here is a link to the group's home page.

I also mentioned that at the top of what seems to be the equivalent of the steeple in our area (Xalapa, Coatepec  and Xico all have temples) there appears to be a kind of abstracted symbol of a flame.  Below is the top of the temple in Xalapa:

The central temple, the headquarters, is in Guadajara.  It is indeed an incredible building:

I had assumed that there would be uniformity among the various temples, but there really isn't.  You can look through the website and find a huge variety of styles.

I still remain baffled at its attraction for people with its rigidity about women, its insistence they not wear pants, that they wear headcovers, that they be denied access to high church offices and the fairly public charges against more than one church leader of sexual abuse, not to say rape.  Why not just stay Catholic?  Seems easier.

Anyway, I will move onto Guanajuato quite soon.  I found myself with an octupus on my hands, given the amount of information, opinion, creativity, etc. etc. surrounding and included in both the city itself and in Fuentes's novel, Las Buenas Conciencias.

 

 

The Pope vs. Light of the World (Luz del Mundo): A Diversion

The Pope's visit not just to Mexico but most to the most traditionally and densely Catholic part of Mexico and one of the most conservative (in a kind of middle-class way) is something I was going to note in my blog awhile ago, but  my life got in the way a little bit.

So the press paid a lot of attention to the political implications: was the Pope trying to boost the appeal of the PAN party, that kind of thing. President Felipe Calderón and former president Vicente Fox (both PAN) obviously turned up (PAN has pretty strong Catholic roots).  The three current candidates for president also turned up, and so did Carlos Slim. Vendors sold Pope Benedict T-shirts, flags and rosaries.  A little attention was paid to the fact that people outside the very densely Catholic part of Mexico didn't show all that much interest.  And there was a puff of smoke over the fact that La Luz del Mundo had scheduled a giant conference on evangelization for the very same weekend in the very same town (Silao) as the pope's mass.  La Luz people said their event was planned long in advance although some media reported that La Luz had done it on purpose to interfere. Harrumph.  Luz has also been associated with the PRI party in that area.  I would say that both Luz and the Catholic hierarchy under Benedict have some pretty shady history and have done some sleazy things, to put it mildly. Hoping for a hearing with the pope during his visit, a group of people reported to be victims of child abuse by Catholic priests in Mexico asked to meet with him and were ignored, for instance. Just today, there is a big story in the NY Times about ties between the Vatican, big banking and the media. Luz parishioners didn't seem to do anything like that over the weekend or ever, but it has has very peculiar rules regarding women, some of its leaders have been charged with sexual abuse and rape, and the Mexican government has considered it possibly susceptible to mass suicide.  Just telling you.

Anyway, the Catholicism I will be talking about in my next post and maybe a few more existed and still exists in this area of Mexico.

More on Mexican Religion: On the Varieties and Numbers of

[Note: I've been creeping up to and running from the topic of Catholicism and religion in Mexico for quite some time, trying to get it right and, probably, in the process, digging myself into a hole. I finally decided that I would start with some very basic facts (see below) and then move on to look R Catholicism in the lives of the characters in Carlos Fuentes's book, Las Buenas Conciencias.  And then on May 15th, ten days ago, Carlos Fuentes, died.  He wasn't young, and I didn't know him personally,  but it seemed like a personal loss.  I was introduced to Fuentes's work in maybe 2000 during literature classes at UNAM-San Antonio.  His cosmopolitanism, which included much familiarity with the US probably had something to do with his accessibility for all of us there.  He also came to speak at the University of Texas-San Antonio and talked about his education as a youngster in Washington, DC in a school where children of diplomats from many countries were students. He talked about how one teacher made a point of having the students talk about their various countries and traditions.  He felt this had a good effect on all of them. Mexican he was, but also a citizen of the world who could lead his readers across boundaries of culture and belief and could reveal the souls, the animas of all kinds of human beings. He wrote not simply with passion, but could convey in a few words a panoply of color and emotion: could, sentence after sentence, build complex images and stories that wove together the love and cruelty, the pain and selfishness and bravery of human beings.  He was a truly great writer.

And I want to add that my very good friend Carole Stivers took that course with me.  I miss her a very great deal.  She died last spring.

**********

Not too long ago I wrote about everyday Mexican Catholicism as I saw it here where we live.  Even though we have good Mexican friends and have shared much with a few of them, there are many Mexicos, and of course, many ways of being Mexican.  And each Mexican, as is each human being, is a world unto himself.

I have mentioned before that when I was in my Master's Degree program in social work, our final and best course in family therapy (in anything at the school, really) was given by Arthur Mandelbaum, a visiting professor from the Menninger Clinic.  Instead of urging more academic tomes on us, he urged us to read novels. GOOD novels by authors who were captivated by and could portray the intricacies and intimacies and depth of human beings and their relationships.  He said that none of us could learn well the variety of people and cultures we would come in contact with from either personal experience or from research findings.  We could come much closer through novels.  

So here I will give you some statistics on Mexican religion, and then I will go on  to the main topic to prove Mandelbaum's point at the same time I want to give you a flavor of a Catholicism that existed in one time and place.  Most of this comes from a Wikipedia article, but there are many, many resources available, should you wish to pursue them.

You may be surprised to learn that Mexico does not have an official religion -- no, Catholicism is not an official religion.  The Constitution of 1917, adopted during the Mexican Revolution, was the strong start of the separation of church and state.  While Christmas and Easter and Good Friday are national holidays and schools take vacations for them, that's about it for government participation.  In 1992, religions were offered more freedom to do certain things: own some property, have more priests, let priests have the right to vote.  My first awareness of the sanctity of Semana Santa, or Holy Week, came while we lived in San Antonio.  Rich Mexicans arrived in droves to shop in the fancy malls.  After moving here to Mexico, we realized that for many, Semana Santa could loosely be translated as "time to head for the beach".  

Statistics.

82.7% of Mexicans claim to be Roman Catholics.  This is down from 96% in 1970.

About 9% of the population is Protestant.  Major sects include Jehovah´s Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists and Church of Latter Day Saints.  The largest group are Pentecostals and Charismatics (Neo-Pentecostals). There are also Anglicans (of which I am sort of one -- a kind of half-hearted US Episcopalian).

Then there is La Luz del Mundo -- The Light of the World, a Mexican-born Charismatic Christian movement.  There are churches here in Xalapa, Coatepec and Xico.  They are recognizable by the sort of flamelike symbol atop the steeple.    I find it interesting that women are definitely not equal to men in the heirarchy or roles of the church. Furthermore, they are not permitted to wear pants or makeup Men and women are separated during services, etc.  It has a strict, not to say rigid, moral order on the one hand, and has been accused of exploiting and violating women on the other.  It is apparently growing rapidly and claims more than a million members in Mexico.  It is growing not only southward in Latin America, but also northward, with a large number of participants in Houston. http://houstonhistorymagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/la-luz.pdf gives a good description of the church in general and in Houston in particular.  La Luz del Mundo claims more members than any church in Mexico outside the Catholic Church.

There are also Jews (since 1521), Muslims, Buddhists, and members of the Bahá'i faith.

As I've suggested before, Catholicism is woven in many ways into much of the culture and history of Mexico.  However, according to the Wikipedia article, the number of irreligious and atheist citizens is growing faster than the number of Catholics: 5.2% a year vs. 1.7% a year.  Many irreligious citizens are still counted as Catholic, and many still maintain ties of a cultural and spiritual sort with the faith, but church attendance is definitely down.  Where attending daily mass used to be the norm, at least in some parts of Mexico, it is now down to about 3% (Wikipedia again) and only 44% attend church weekly, or claim to.  Churches especially in cities can appear largely empty on ordinary Sundays, but huge numbers of people still participate in days like Los Dias de los Muertos and other religious festivals.

It appears that the spectrum of religious practice is broadening, with the extremes of protestant pentacostalism and atheism stretching it out.  But it is extremely important to remember that there are always, always, elements of syncretism, especially in poorer and more rural areas. In fact, there are still areas where fairly pure indigenous religions are followed.

Next post, I will give a bit of background on Guanajuato, the city, and after that move into Las Buenas Consciencias.

 

 

 

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Bishops Play Church Queens as Pawns - NYTimes.com

When I was a student at Barnard College in the 1960s, I was a lost soul until I took medieval history as a junior. The professor, Norman Cantor, brought medieval Europe to life.  Not only that, he brought medieval Muslim countries to life, teaching us that without the Muslims, we would indeed have been greatly impoverished.  But much as I would like to tell you about those Muslims whom the Christians attacked in the Crusades, here I would like to talk about Catholicism. 

I was a Latin major at the beginning of Professor Cantor's course, not because I wanted to be but because I had so many credits in Latin I could do it easily.  And my mother thought it was thrillling to have a daughter who knew Latin (but that's another story).  Halfway through Cantor's course, I switched to being a history major with a concentration in medieval history (I'd already taken medieval Latin) with Professor Cantor as my advisor.  What a nerd I sound like!  I got one of three As in a class of 150 in both terms.  

Why did I love it?  Certainly Norman Cantor did not inspire crushes: a large, soft man whose jaw hung.  But somehow he saw something in me and encouraged me.  Neurotic as I was, at the end of the second semester, I couldn't finish my paper on Peter Abelard.  I took an incomplete.  I went to Maine to my second summer as a camp counselor and that summer as a unit leader, in charge of a whole age group which meant three cabins under my wing. I brought my term paper in a box.  After all the campers  had gone to sleep, I'd pour through my notes and drafts.  I'd cut and paste and tear apart -- electric typewriters I don't think even existed.  It wasn't just that I was neurotic: it was that Abelard was so interesting, and so were his times, and so was the church.  In the end, I sort of ordered the stuff in the box and sent it off to Professor Cantor who had become my advisor.

I got an A in the course.

And in my senior year, I found myself in a graduate medieval history seminar.  It was a small group and it included three priests.  The three priests and I would go to the West End Cafe for beer after class.  They were wonderful men, much like the nuns described not just in Maureen Dowd's cited above column but in other places as well. They were committed to social justice  as were many nuns and priests of that era.  They thought the idea of unmarried priests, among other ideas, was silly, but since they'd sworn to it, they felt they had committed to it.  

At the end of the seminar and at the end of my senior  year, we had a party at my parents' apartment.  During the party, Professor Cantor asked if he could talk to my parents privately, and the three of them retreated to my parents' bedroom (New York apartments could be small).  As they told me after everyone left, Professor Cantor (who was Jewish and assumed I was) told my mother (who was Episcopalian) and my father (who indeed was Jewish) that he was afraid I was, because of my love of medieval church history and my friendship with the priests, being tempted to become a Catholic.

Was I? Yes and no.  Throughout my life, I have been drawn to the Catholic Church, but every time I step too close, I feel the flames not of  hell (well maybe of hell), but certainly of all-too-human rigidity, of anti-womanhood, of the grip of men who are cruel and self-righteous, etc. etc. etc.  I remember people like the Sister Annes and those devoted to teaching at places like Our Lady of the Lakes University, the nuns of St. Bridget of Ireland, the priests in Latin America involved in Liberation Theology.  But I can't take the step.  There are too many Pope Benedicts, too many ambitious men who follow him, too many abusers allowed to go free, TOO MANY MEN PERSECUTING DEVOTED AMERICAN NUNS. (See link to Maureen Dowd's column.)

I cannot believe what Pope Benedict, that old snake, is doing to American nuns.  Why?  Why? Why? The Catholic Church STILL enfolds so many great human beings.  When will it be free?

 

"Does it Matter Whether God Exists'"

Yes and no, I guess is what Gary Gutting would say.  This article pretty much describes where I would stand (though with even less talk of God -- how many different shapes, forms, lack of forms, etc. etc. could God or god take?  It is definitely worth reading.

Which reminds me, I have been trying in my chaotic way to put together something about the Pope's visit to Mexico, reaction to it, and what the reaction in the US press reveals about US beliefs about Mexico.  MAYBE I'll finish it over the weekend.

December in Our Colonia: The Feast of La Virgen de Guadalupe Approaches

A frente frio, a cold front, is scheduled to slide across our area today. This one is to be fairly gentle with little rain and temperatures in the fifties and sixties. The rough one is not due till Sunday, the Feast Day of Our Virgen de Guadalupe. When I came out of the bedroom early this morning, Acamalín, the little mountain directly across from our house was enshrouded in fog, invisible. The sky towards the east was a deep rose color. The fog has pulled away, but has left a shawl of puffy gray around the mountain’s midsection. Even as I write, it, too, is vanishing, the rose has paled to pink washed with white and now to white stippled with gray.

In our Colonia, this is a mysterious, noisy, and for me, edgy time of year when reality seems to let in strange drifts from uncommon realms. The nights and sometimes the days are filled with the boom, the blast of cohetes, rockets, going off in spurts and clusters, in cadenced cycles and at random. There is sometimes sense to when they are set off. Sometimes they announce that people are to gather, for instance to leave for the Shrine of La Virgen in Mexico City to gather holy flame for our own Capilla; sometimes a burst of noise marks the time they return. Some call people to gather to construct the arcos which will be borne in processions to the entrances of our main church and our capilla of the Virgen tomorrow night.

As night falls, processions begin.  There are some with people dressed as old men, sometimes they are old men. They jump and dance strange, twisting steps pulling their knees high. They gird their waists with cowbells which clank with their movements. In others, young men and boys dressed in elaborate clown costumes stomp and turn down the streets, the bells on their ankles  jingling rhythmically. Neighbors sometimes join in. Strings and clusters of explosions accompany the processions, sometimes exloding en masse from carts people pull alongside. The big rockets, when they fly up near our house, and sometimes they do right outside our wall, terrify me.  How can we not be under attack?. The dogs and Louie the cat and I huddle together in bed. Tomorrow will be the big procession of the arcos. My friend Tere will let us know when to be ready. I will try hard to get up my nerve to go out among my friends and neighbors and the strange, fearsome fireworks.

The Bishop of Chiapas on Reasons for Catholic Clergy's Sexual Abuse of Minors and Reactions to his Statements

There is a clearer, more functional and successful separation of church and state in Mexico than there is in the United States.  At Mex Files, R. Grabman has some background on this as well as some Mexican clerical reaction in addition to what I post below.  

Via La Republica de Peru online, the following report from Alberto Nájar, BBC Mexico.

"Felipe Arimendi, Bishop of San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, in the southern Mexico, said that liberal sexuality made the formation of priests difficult, expecially in their relations with minors.

"'Sexual liberality* in the world in general has diminished the moral forces with which we try to educate young men in seminaries.  In the face of so much eroticism, it is not eaxy to remain faithful both in respect to celibacy and in respect to children," said Arizmendi.

"The bisops's commentary unleashed angry reactions, especially in some media.  Also, it provoked an answer from the Ministry of Education.

"The journalist Carlos Puig, host of the first edition of the news broadcast Hoy por Hoy, asked on the air 'What could a child of eight have to do with eroticism, Sr. Obispo?'

"The polemic did not end in a religious environment, because Bishop Arimendi also said that textbooks distributed by the Ministry of Eucation in primary schools also promoted sexual liberality.

"The minister [of education] responded: 'Our books try to teach boys and girls to be responsible for the consequences of their actions, and for this, they require information.'"

"Sexual abuse of minors are a part of a sensitive issue in Mexico, especially because of the case of  the founder of the order Legionnaires of Christ, Marcial Maciel."

+++

 Maciel provides a particularly sleazy link back to the Pope and his response to sexual abuse.

According to Wikipedia, Maciel was accused with reason of sexually assaulting various young seminarians starting in the 1950s, of drug abuse, and of plagiarism.  He also had at least two children, housing the mother of one of them in luxury in Madrid. While it seems likely Pope Benedict disapproved of him, he halted proceedings against him (supposedly because of his age), and only invited him to step down from his offices so he could lead a "reserved life of prayer and penitence".  The pope gave no further  explanation.

Finally, as I've noted before, without much fanfare or conflict, Mexican public schools offer modern sex education, including the use of condoms, etc. 

*Arimendi used the word liberalidad  I have translated as liberality in the sense of  favoring personal freedom, but in fact it normally means, according to translations I've found, something like a gratuity, a gift in the sense of something that doesn't have to be repaid, or an unjustified expense.  I'm not really sure how el obispo intended it. 

Mexican Church Does Facebook, etc.

Mexican Catholicism is many-faceted, many-splendored, maddeningly obtuse and incredibly progressive. It can unite communities for good and for ill. It can be a force of love, or bitterly harsh. It can be completed and comfortably melded with the indigenous beliefs of tiny communities or as papist as the church in Rome.It can be and do all these things, or some of them, or none of them, depending on where you are and whom you are talking with. It is embedded in the being of most Mexicans.  Sometimes things Catholic in Mexico can move me to tears, as standing in the Iglesia de Maria Magdalena did in Xico last weekend.

Today the Conference of Mexican Bishops announced that it was "launching an interactive projective for cell telephones through which they would download interactive materials like prayers and rosaries to attract the faithful and to capture new followers."

According to the article in El Universal by Noemí Gutiérrez, "This effort is going to be part of the use of new technologies as part of the campaign called, 'Family, I know what you are' which will begin this Sunday on a national level.  The program will not judge who makes up the families.

"Oscar Sotelo [Church spokesman] said that it is a social reality that families have changed and all kinds of different kinds can be found which are headed by a grandmother, an uncle or s0me other family member....

"When asked  how the church and program would support families in which the members are homosexuals, he made clear that the catholic Church does not discriminate nor reject.  'We will not judge those who make up the family.'

"Sotelo and Cardona recognized that the Catholic Church arrived late in the era of technology and now there are few dioceses which have multimedia equipment like the archdocese of Mexico which has its own internet page (Siamae) and a weekly information newsletter, "From the Faith."

"Father Omar Sotelo further said that during the next meeting of the CEM in November,....a proposal to create an Episcopal Pastoral commission of Information to promote the use of these technolgies.

"At the beginning, he explained, they would use networks like Twitter and Facebook in the short term, and they envision the prompt creation of a network for the church itself."

----

So you can check out promotional announcements of the program here or here if you are curious to learn more.

Easter and Passover, Bernard Avishai and James Carroll

Here is a link to a wonderful article by Bernard Avishai written in response to the NY Times review of James Carroll's newest book, "Practicing Catholic." 

Both Avishai and Carroll are sometimes considered too critical of their faiths and are sometimes asked why, if they don't like them, they stay.  Both men for me personify moral courage and great humanity and decency.  The Avishai article is his Easter and Passover gift.  

Both men demonstrate by who they are and what they say the value of staying within society and being willing to do so with one's integrity intact. 

All of this is difficult to address.  In our age of the demands of social science to define concepts in clear words and back them up with data, Avishai and Carroll, by their words and deeds, appeal to those best parts of us anchored  in the shadows of our being which we find it all too easy to ignore, to our detriment.