From the separation of ownership to recouping evils, Pope Francis rebuked the elites. Speaking to politicians meeting at the National Palace, he said that "every time we seek the path of privilege or benefit of a few to the detriment of the common good", the door is opened to corruption, drug trafficking, cultural exclusion, violence, human trafficking, kidnapping and death. Did he know something, or was he speaking by guesswork?
He reprimanded the bishops for their division and neglect. Speaking in the Metropolitan Cathedral, he said:
"The Church does not need the dark in order to work. Look, in order that your way of looking may not be covered by the shadows of the fog of worldliness. Do not be corrupted by trivial materialism or by the seductive illusions of under the table agreements. Do not put your trust in the 'chariots and horses' of the current pharaohs."The Pope went to the National Palace and President Enrique Peña took Communion in the Basilica of Guadalupe. For many the secular State was smashed. For others a dogma fell apart—an ideological curtain that has shrouded decades of hypocrisy about shameful relations between politicians and bishops.
For some, things were put in their place. For anyone it should be an opportunity for redefining the State's relations with the Churches, of refining not just legally but in terms of governing and coexistence the margins of tolerance for those who believe and those who do not believe, for those who pray and those who are silent, for those who plead and those who demand. Let's have respect. For everyone. Without favoritism or deceit.
In the last century, in the genesis of the One-Party [Party of the Institutional Revolution, PRI] system, it was religious persecution together with political persecution. The regime persecuted and murdered priests and Cristero campesinos [traditional peasant famers who rebelled against post-Revolution suppression of the Catholic Church]. For decades, it also built up the systematic persecution and elimination of political dissidents. The law of the -ierro. (Encierro, entierro o destierro) [Prison, burial or exile].
Last Saturday at the Cathedral, Francis said:
"I know the long and painful history that you have gone through, not without spilling much blood, not without impetuous and heartrending convulsions, not without violence and misunderstandings."The long and painful history was hybridized with painful coexistence. Bishops and government officials took on silence and complicity, which they have solidified in devastated regions. The exceptions prove the rule, but the debt to victims of disappearances, the appeasement in parishes and even dioceses with crime bosses who pay millions to build churches and chapels. This history is marked by officials bribed to let them do and kill; the complicity of the cardinal and bureaucrats in the area of injustices, in the plundering of land, resources, possessions.
Francis makes the appeal "not to underestimate" the challenge of drug trafficking in this country where a Cardinal was once killed by drug traffickers protected by government officials, while an Apostolic Nuncio offered his hand to those accused of murdering the Cardinal. He blessed them and did not report them to the authorities.
One of the signs of the relationship of the Catholic Church and the Mexican State is the closeness that they maintain with the appearance of distance. But a modern relationship cannot come with lurches of opportunism.
The country receiving the Pope is diverse, multicultural, multi-religious, but above all, wounded, needy, with symptoms of having had its fill.
Government officials and bishops cower before Francis's words. With the Pope's admonitions for renewal, they do not put on sackcloth. To the contrary, they are distant, harsh, and they make the Pope's visit into a scene of ostentation. A terrible and offensive political opportunism varnishes the tours, masses, sermons. Francis asks them for humility; government officials steamroll and squander.
The politicians pray, and the bishops caucus. But both, it seems, recoup their evils; in a similar crisis of distance, solitude, lack of understanding of those they govern. Well, something like this is what the Pope told them.