By Paul Jeffrey

Miami, 5 August (ENI) - With visits to Guatemala and Mexico, Pope John Paul II has made what may be his last visit to a region that he once called “the continent of hope.”

In Guatemala, where the pontiff arrived on July 29 after participating in World Youth Day ceremonies in Canada, John Paul recognized that the country–just six years after ending a three-decade long civil war–continues its struggle to find true peace.

“I fervently hope that the noble Guatemalan people, who thirst for God and for spiritual values, who are anxious for peace and reconciliation, solidarity and justice, may live and enjoy the dignity that is theirs,” the pope said in Spanish upon his arrival.

Yet John Paul was quiet about the persecution of Guatemalan church activists. A bishop and six priests have received death threats in recent weeks, human rights offices have been ransacked, and forensic anthropologists digging up massacre victims from decades past have been forced to flee the country.

Moreover, the pope made no mention of Guatemala City Auxiliary Bishop Juan Gerardi, who was beaten to death in 1998 just two days after releasing the report of a church-sponsored investigation into responsibility for massive human rights violations during the civil war. Three military officers and a priest were convicted of the killing last year.

“It seems that the pope has forgotten about Gerardi at a moment when the groups that provoked his death are more active than ever,” said Jesuit anthropologist Ricardo Falla, who has studied the war’s effect on indigenous communities. “But Gerardi’s death is not something that can be forgotten.”

John Paul went to Guatemala to canonize Pedro de San Jose Betancur, a native of the Canary Islands who came to Guatemala in the 17th Century. Rejected by seminary professors as not bright enough for the priesthood, Betancur was admitted to the Franciscans as a janitor and gardener. Yet he was soon preaching in prisons and begging money for the poor from the wealthy in Guatemala’s colonial capital. Betancur started the region’s first literacy program, and established a free hospital for the poor. He founded the Latin America’s first religious order, the Bethlemites, who today carry out educational and medical work with the poor in more than a dozen countries.

The pope said the new saint, the 463rd of John Paul’s papacy, “represents an urgent appeal to practice mercy in modern society, especially when so many are hoping for a helping hand.”

John Paul used the canonization ceremony to speak to Guatemala’s long-exploited indigenous majority.

“The pope does not forget you and, admiring the values of your cultures, encourages you to overcome with hope the sometimes difficult situations you experience,” he said. “You deserve all respect and have the right to fulfill yourselves completely, in justice, development and peace.”

Catholic leaders throughout the region are concerned that they’re losing the battle for indigenous hearts and minds to aggressive Evangelical and Protestant groups whose pastoral approach often brings them closer to indigenous communities and culture. This papal trip was an obvious attempt to get John Paul close to the indigenous and let his charisma, subdued but not defeated by age and infirmity, work its old magic. Yet everywhere he turned, the pope faced difficulties in getting close to indigenous people.

When he was lowered from his plane at Guatemala City’s airport, he was welcomed by five children dressed in indigenous clothing. Yet they weren’t real Indians, but rather the light-skinned grandchildren of the country’s vice president.

John Paul traveled to Mexico on July 31 to canonize the first indigenous saint of the Americas, yet the official church portrait of Juan Diego, to whom the Virgin of Guadalupe reportedly appeared in 1531, makes the Nahuatl former look more European than Native American.

“The image presented to Pope John Paul II is an image of a Hernan Cortes disguised as Juan Diego,” Enrique Maza, a Jesuit scholar, wrote in a Mexico City newspaper, referring to the Spaniard who conquered Mexico in 1521.

The pope ignored the lingering controversy about whether Diego really existed, though Manuel Olimon, a professor at the Pontifical University of Mexico who has repeatedly warned the Vatican that the historical record doesn’t support Diego’s existence, suggested that the Vatican will one day have to decanonize Diego just as it did St. George when the legendary dragon-slayer’s biography didn’t stand the test of time.

John Paul used the canonization ceremony to encourage Mexican society to “support the indigenous people in their legitimate aspirations.” Claiming that “Mexico needs its indigenous peoples and these peoples need Mexico,” John Paul asked the spirit of Juan Diego “to accompany the church on its pilgrimage to Mexico, so that it may be more evangelizing and more missionary each day.”

The mass in the modernistic Basilica of Guadalupe was attended by Mexican President Vicente Fox, despite a legal prohibition against government officials participating in public religious acts. Combined with Fox’s kiss of the pontiff’s ring during the arrival ceremony, the president’s behavior provoked an uproar over the constitutional requirements of church-state separation.

Fox was seated in the front of the basilica along with thousands of politicians, diplomats, and church officials. The elite crowd meant that few indigenous worshipers could fit into the sanctuary. Instead, they massed outside, watching on giant television screens as the pope talked about indigenous rights.

The following day, the pope beatified Juan Bautista and Jacinto de los Angeles, two Zapotec indigenous martyrs from the conflict-torn southern state of Oaxaca.

“With this beatification, the church emphasizes the mission to proclaim the Gospel to all peoples,” the pope said. Referring to the two Catholic martyrs, he said their elevation by the church should “encourage indigenous peoples today to appreciate their culture and languages, and above all their dignity as children of God.”

Yet the choice of martyrs left some wondering about the church’s real message. Bautista and de los Angeles were informers at the hire of Spanish authorities. In 1700, they provided information that led police to raid an indigenous ritual, one of many practices banned by colonial authorities. Enraged villagers seized the two, “dragged them, hung them and finally decapitated them, cut open their sides to pull out their hearts and gave them to the dogs,” according to a biography published by the Mexican church. In response, colonial officials mounted a punitive raid, beheading and quartering 15 villagers and staking their body parts by the roadside.

“The truth is these men were traitors, because they betrayed their indigenous brothers and sisters,” said Fortino Hernandez, a leader of the Assembly of Indigenous Migrants, a Mexico City organization.

“We indigenous don’t need another saint. Neither Juan Diego nor Jacinto de los Angeles nor Juan Bautista are going to dignify indigenous peoples. What we need is that our peoples be recognized as subjects. We need resources to dignify our daily life, to no longer be forgotten in this country,” Hernandez said.

In a pastoral letter, the country’s Catholic bishops claimed the pope’s two masses in Mexico were a “recognition of Indians as peoples,” and argued that the honored figures “can help us recapture the Indian origins and roots of our people.”

Despite such rhetoric and the best efforts of the ailing John Paul, the Catholic Church has been losing the war for religious allegiance in many indigenous communities in Mexico. Although Catholic leaders like to blame Evangelical missionaries for unfair competition, John Paul’s policies belie the church’s concern.

At least ten percent of Mexico’s 100 million people are indigenous, yet not one of the country’s 132 bishops is indigenous. Bishops are appointed by the pope.

Moreover, homegrown attempts to forge a more indigenous church have been squashed by the Vatican. In the southern state of Chiapas, for example, since 1995 the Diocese of San Cristobal de las Casas has ordained more than 340 deacons and recruited about 8,000 catechists, nearly all of them indigenous Maya, in a valiant effort to revitalize Catholic parishes in a region rapidly turning Evangelical. Yet in February the Vatican ordered a halt to new ordinations, worried about the deacons’ links to leftist Zapatista rebels and concerned that married deacons were taking over functions of the clergy.

According to political scientist Bernardo Barranco, the contradictions of John Paul’s visit to Mexico reflect contradictions within the Catholic hierarchy about how to respond to the indigenous.

“One position within the bishops is to accept the evangelization of the indigenous in an individual manner, where the person has to give up substantial aspects of their culture and beliefs in order to assimilate the new message. That’s why Juan Diego is exalted for his submission and total acceptance of the culture of Christianity,” Barranco wrote in the daily La Jornada.

The second position, held by a small minority of bishops, according to Barranco, “accepts the indigenous world’s cosmovision and culture, and believes that the Gospel and the church should inculcate themselves with openness and tolerance in this cultural complexity, and, beyond that, believes that the indigenous person is not an object, but rather a subject of this new evangelization. The communities should participate . . .[with] an indigenous clergy that leads the ceremonies and indigenous rituals.”

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