Francis’s Visit to Mexico Comes as Country Struggles With Many Ills
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Version 0 of 1. MEXICO CITY — For more than a century, the Mexican government has treated the Catholic Church with a deep suspicion, if not outright hostility. Battles have literally been fought between church and state, while anticlerical laws stayed on the books until just a couple of decades ago. But gauging by the Mexican government’s enthusiasm ahead of Pope Francis’ visit, the popular leader’s arrival may do more than offer salvation for the masses. It might also provide a much-needed boost to the government’s flagging credibility — or so it hopes. To welcome the pope when he arrives on Friday night, the first lady produced a song in his honor. For the first time, the president will welcome a pope in the National Palace. Francis will receive a key to Mexico City, which placed a giant billboard along the airport highway that perhaps most accurately sums up the sentiment: “Pope Francis, Mexico City is your home.” While Pope John Paul II remains a revered figure in Mexico, having visited the nation five times during his papacy, the new pontiff offers a profile that few Latin American governments can resist: a Spanish speaker beloved by many. But the pope’s itinerary also poses a major risk to the government, highlighting at each turn some of the state’s most obvious challenges and failings — poverty, inequality, corruption and rampant violence. The pope could even combine all these themes at once if he decides to meet with the families of 43 missing students, whose mysterious disappearance has become a byword for government incompetence and complicity with criminality. “The Mexico of drug trafficking, the Mexico of the cartels, is not the Mexico that our mother loves,” Francis said last week, alluding to the Virgin Mary. “I would urge you to fight, day by day, against corruption, against trafficking, against war, against disunity, against organized crime, against human trafficking.” Few doubt that Francis will receive anything less than an ecstatic reception across Mexico, but his six-day visit here is hardly free of risk for him, either. Mexico is a veritable canvas on which Francis can play to his strengths, providing the full menu of themes central to his papacy. But as the first Latin American pope, he faces public expectations that somehow his visit might stir change, and he will have to navigate the dangers of appearing too close to a government marked by public mistrust. The Mexico trip also comes as Francis is entering a potentially defining period of his papacy. As soon as March, Francis is expected to release his long-awaited vision on the theme of family amid speculation that he might soften the church’s approach on issues like homosexuality and whether divorced and remarried Catholics should be allowed to receive Communion. Later, Francis could unveil his blueprint for overhauling the Roman Curia, the Vatican‘s bureaucratic structure. “He begins the year with great prestige but certainly 2016 and 2017 will be a watershed in his papacy,” said Marco Politi, a Vatican analyst in Rome and the author of “Pope Francis Among the Wolves.” “There is a great, great part of the hierarchy, and the bishops, who are not sharing his views about family.” Some of this tension, including the pope’s indelible focus on the poor, exists right here in Mexico. “When Pope Francis urges the Church to be more courageous, to have much more of an evangelical attitude, one of sensitivity and solidarity with the poorest sectors of society, the Mexican hierarchy feels very uncomfortable,” said Bernardo Barranco, a sociologist in Mexico who specializes in religion. “It breaks the comfort zone they have grown so accustomed to.” The pope’s itinerary spans many of the social and geographic divides that define Mexico. He will visit the nation’s poorest region, Chiapas, to underscore the plight of indigenous communities and their place in the Roman Catholic Church. In Ciudad Juárez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Tex., he will express his solidarity with migrants and implicitly criticize American immigration policy. He will visit slums and the violence-wracked state of Michoacán, where he will most likely expand his critique of poverty, corruption and drug cartels. His arrival in Mexico could also confront him with politically charged social issues like contraception and abortion, especially as the mosquito-borne Zika virus in the region is endangering pregnant women and reopening the debate in Catholic-dominated countries about birth control and abortion. Mexican officials are moving to protect Francis with aerial antimosquito spraying before he visits Chiapas and Michoacán, regions where the virus has been active. Today, roughly 84 percent of Mexicans identify themselves as Catholic. The Mexican state was fiercely secular for much of the last century, with a litany of anticlerical statutes, including prohibitions against land ownership by the church. Most of those statutes have since been repealed, and Pope John Paul II played a critical role in building closer ties to the government. His statue now rises beside the Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City. But historians say that only recently has the Mexican church sought to more overtly engage with the problems of society — and to do so with the blessing of the government. “The expectation of persecution has inhibited lots of outward efforts by the church over the years,” said Jorge Eugenio Traslosheros Hernández, a history professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, who has studied Mexican Catholicism. “That is changing, and now the pope comes and hopefully he can help catalyze change. Without the participation of every citizen in Mexico, we will never fix this crisis.” Many ordinary Mexicans are deeply frustrated with the government, with crime and violence features of daily life and the economy cleaved by inequality. Corruption from the top levels of government down to the police on the streets has engendered deep public cynicism. President Enrique Peña Nieto is suffering from the worst poll ratings in the last quarter century, and many people hope Francis will publicly rebuke the government. Last week, Desde la Fe, the official newspaper of the Archdiocese of Mexico, published a stinging editorial warning the government that Pope Francis “will see with his own eyes how bad the situation is.” The editorial added: “We Mexicans, we want peace, and we need the truth, not the numerical bureaucracy. Mission has not been accomplished.” That last line was an explicit reference to Mr. Peña Nieto’s remark after Mexican security forces captured Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the infamous drug cartel leader known as El Chapo. But Francis is more likely to be far subtler. During his trip last July to South America, and on his subsequent trip to Cuba and the United States, Francis never directly criticized a national leader. Instead, he often used speeches — whether in Congress or before a group of social activists in Bolivia — to articulate his concerns about capitalism, climate change or other issues. “The pope is not going to go and rebuke anyone,” said the Rev. Armando Flores Navarro, rector of the Mexican College in Rome, which houses visiting Mexican priests. Francis has expressed great interest in visiting the most famous symbol of Mexican Catholicism, the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe. In his remarks to the Mexican news agency, Francis said he was coming to Mexico “as a pilgrim” and would “look at the Mexican people to give something to me.” Then, wryly, he added: “Stay calm. I will not pass around the little basket but rather I will seek the wealth of faith you have.” Yet beyond faith, the consensus is that Mexico’s ills represent a problem that Pope Francis is uniquely qualified to address. “This trip suits him like a ring to a finger,” said Luis Barrera, a Catholic priest and member of the Mexican Episcopal Conference, the leadership organization of the country’s Catholic Church. “Here he will see poverty, inequality, immigration, ethnic minorities, violence — things he has seen separately in his many trips around the world. “Here, he will find everything.” |