Vatican Seeks to Curb Mexico's Indian Deacons
The New York Times
March 12, 2002
Vatican Seeks to Curb Mexico's
Indian Deacons
Lynsey Addario/Saba for The New York TimesParishoners in the
city of Jetjá filed into a Catholic church for a ceremony
for peace led by the local deacons.
Lynsey Addario/Saba, for The New York TimesJerónimo
Gómez, a deacon in Jetjá, prayed over dinner at
his home. The Vatican has ordered the diocese in the area to
stop ordaining deacons.
JETJÁ, Mexico - Jerónimo Gómez is not the
average aspiring priest.
As a child in the 1950's he learned Spanish from missionaries
who visited this isolated Indian village and taught him to recite
the story of Jacob and Esau. Today he is married and the father
of 10 children, and his wife shares many of his religious duties.
He acknowledges that he has "provided support" to the
leftist Zapatista rebels who emerged eight years ago in these
mountains in the state of Chiapas and declared war against the
government of Mexico.
Once, frustrated by what he saw as the unjust treatment of the
Indians, he held a local bureaucrat hostage overnight to press
the government to resolve a dispute over the prices farmers were
paid for coffee. The detainee slept comfortably in a hammock
and was fed homemade bread, Mr. Gómez insists.
But for 20 years Mr. Gómez has served as a Roman Catholic
deacon, an ordained position. He lives with the hope that the
church will one day accept married men with limited education
into the priesthood.
Until that day, he does much of the work of a priest, performing
baptisms and weddings and holding religious services, although
he does not consecrate Communion or hear confession.
Mr. Gómez, a Tzeltal Indian who is 52, has helped the
Catholic Church reach into the deepest corners of a region so
cut off from the world by poverty, racism and impenetrable geography
that many of the people live without electricity, health care
or paved roads.
Almost every Sunday, in hundreds of remote hamlets and in various
Indian languages, Roman Catholic worship services are led by
some 400 deacons like Mr. Gómez, the overwhelming majority
of them Indians.
They are the biggest group of deacons in any diocese in the world,
outnumbering the priests 5 to 1. Putting aside work in their
own corn and coffee fields, the deacons serve, and in many cases
lead, communities that priests must struggle to visit once a
year.
But their special brand of evangelism, infused with the tenets
of liberation theology as well as pre-Columbian symbols and songs,
has not escaped the notice of Rome. For years the Vatican has
made clear that it does not like what it sees. Now it has taken
the first steps to shut the deacons' work down.
At the beginning of February, Vatican officials ordered the Diocese
of San Cristóbal de las Casas to stop ordaining deacons
for at least a five- year period of evaluation.
In a letter to Bishop Felipe Arizmendi, the Vatican expressed
concern that the growing number of deacons broke with traditional
church hierarchy. Not 10 new priests have been ordained in the
diocese in the last 40 years, and few of them speak the Mayan
dialects used throughout the region.
The Vatican also expressed worries that the loosely defined responsibilities
of the deacons and their wives deviated from church doctrine
and could set a bad example for indigenous parishes around the
world. "I feel like an expulsado," Mr. Gómez
said when told about the Vatican's letter, using a Mexican word
for the tens of thousands of people across this state who have
been forced to flee their homes by violent conflicts over religion,
land or money. "How can men make judgments about the work
of other men from so far away? They do not have God's eyes."
Bishop Arizmendi, known for his moderate views, called for understanding.
In an interview, he said he did not see the Vatican's decision
as a condemnation of the deacons. It was meant, he said, to redeem
the priesthood.
"The church is not supposed to be based on deacons,"
he said. "Deacons are supposed to be collaborators."
When asked to explain why, he added, "That is the church
that Jesus built."
What is called the Native Church of San Cristóbal de las
Casas was built by its former bishop, Samuel Ruiz, who has been
mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work
to end the political violence in Chiapas.
An advocate of liberation theology, he was determined to stop
the expansion of Protestant sects that have made Chiapas the
least Catholic state in the nation. He led the diocese for almost
half of the last century before retiring two years ago at the
mandatory age of 75.
He was regularly at odds with the Vatican during the final years
of his work. There were allegations that the bishop's corps of
deacons, along with some 8,000 predominantly Indian catechists,
had evolved into a political machine that supported the Zapatista
rebel uprising. In 1994 the Zapatistas' ragtag Indian army violently
seized several important towns across the state before government
troops forced it to retreat.
The Vatican's order against the deacons is viewed by some analysts
as the latest move in a quiet campaign to dismantle the church
that Bishop Ruiz built.
The letter, signed by Cardinal Jorge A. Medina Estévez
of the Congregation of Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments,
mentions Bishop Ruiz by name.
"If you continue augmenting the number of permanent deacons,"
the letter to Bishop Arizmendi says, "the perceived danger
is that the initiatives sustained by Monsignor Samuel Ruiz will
be affirmed, impeding the normalization of ecclesiastic life
in the diocese and sending an implicit message of support from
the Holy See to other ecclesiastical groups for an `alternative'
church model that could seem convenient for `cultural situations
and particular ethnic groups.' "
Bernardo Barranco of the Mexican research institute CIDE said
the order was an example of the church's "incongruent"
relationship with native people around the world. News about
it spread across Chiapas during the same week that Pope John
Paul II confirmed that he would visit Mexico this summer to canonize
the church's first Indian saint, Juan Diego.
In the wake of the church modernization in the 1960's after the
Second Vatican Council, many sectors of the church undertook
to incorporate some of the customs and cosmologies of native
peoples around the world, particularly in Latin America, Asia
and Africa. Pope John Paul II has moved the church back toward
a more traditional order.
The rules of Rome seemed to mystify some of the people here in
Jetjá, a ramshackle community of some 800 coffee farmers,
where the wives of deacons are considered deacons too, even though
the church does not allow women deacons.
Juanita Gómez, wife of Deacon Gómez, helps her
husband baptize and teach the Bible. When deacons die, their
wives, some of whom call themselves deaconesses, assume certain
ceremonial duties during worship.
Mr. Gómez, who believes that God's will is revealed in
dreams, said his wife's dreams had confirmed his calling to the
lay ministry. She dreamed that two beautiful women had carried
her to the front of a church and urged her to go inside.
When asked about his hope to become a priest, Mr. Gómez's
smile turned mischievous and he lowered his voice, in case the
Vatican had God's ear. "In my dreams," he said, "I
have already become a bishop."