RELIGION-MEXICO: Christian Base Communities Weak but Still Alive

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Jan 29 2002 (IPS) - “Ecclesiastic base communities”, grassroots Catholic Church lay-groups in Latin America accused of supporting guerrillas in the civil conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s, are facing tough times today in Mexico, although their promoters say they are merely undergoing a transition.

Observers say the base communities, in which “progressive” Roman Catholic priests and small groups of lay people in mainly impoverished urban and rural settings meet to read the scriptures, pray, discuss social problems and sometimes become engaged in community issues, represent an even smaller minority current within the Church than in the past few decades.

The end of the Cold War, the emergence of democratically elected governments in Latin America and a strengthening of conservative factions within the Church have “orphaned” the base communities, say clergy.

“What we are seeing is a transition, but I admit that we no longer have the strength we had before, and that many bishops look at us with suspicion and even fear,” Julio Aretia, a Jesuit priest who promotes Christian base communities in the Mexican capital, told IPS.

There are currently less than 5,000 such groups in this Latin American country of 100 million, compared to more than 10,000 at the peak of the liberation theology movement.

Liberation theology, which emerged in the mid-1960s, stressed a “preferential option for the poor,” criticised the existence of massive poverty and denounced unjust social structures.

Mexico and Brazil, the two countries with the largest number of Roman Catholics in the world, were once the strongholds of the base communities.

But the theoretical reference points of such groups – liberation theology, the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), which put the plight of the world’s poor at the centre of the Church’s agenda, and two key conferences of bishops in Latin America, in Medellin, Colombia in 1968 and Puebla, Mexico in 1979 – have been pushed into the background within the Church under Pope John Paul II.

Since the beginning of John Paul’s pontificate in 1978, the pope has systematically appointed conservative new bishops in the region, and progressive clergy following the tenets of liberation theology and fighting for social justice have been clamped down on hard by the Vatican.

One of liberation theology’s leading thinkers, influential Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff, was even silenced by the Church, which led him to resign from the priesthood in 1992, although he continued publishing his books and working as a “lay priest” in poor communities.

Today, “a considerable part of our Church does not believe in the base communities. Most of them never believed in them, and looked at them with suspicion,” said priest Pedro Trigo, director of the Jesuits’ Centre for Social Research and Action in Venezuela.

“We have to say that most of the Church in Latin America has turned its back on Medellin, Puebla” and the Second Vatican Council, said Trigo.

The Second Vatican Council, called by Pope John XXIII in 1962 and concluded by his successor Paul VI in 1965, stated that the future lies in the people’s pressing call for greater justice, in their desire for peace, in their thirst, conscious or unconscious, for a more elevated life.

Following that line of reflection, the Episcopal Conference of Medellin, which was attended by Paul VI, concluded that it was necessary to encourage all efforts by the people to create their own base organisations to vindicate and consolidate their rights and search for true justice.

The base communities are a “leaven in society” through which the faithful make their communities a sign of the presence of God in the world, the bishops stated in Medellin.

In the wake of the new dictates, base communities boomed, becoming engines of social and political change in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. In isolated cases, like in Nicaragua and El Salvador, some groups even had ties to leftist guerrilla organisations.

But despite the fact that the base communities were overwhelmingly groups in which people met to read the scriptures and discuss what was going on, from a Christian perspective, a number of members of the communities were arrested, tortured or forcibly “disappeared” simply because they demanded an end to dictatorships or called for social justice.

Now “the dictatorships are gone and the world has changed, but poverty is still here and the ecclesiastic base communities remain the best example of a living Church that is close to the people and promotes justice,” said Trigo.

The base communities get people to reflect on their social reality, and their promoters believe that citizens should actively participate in democracy, said the priest.

“I think many bishops today are afraid of liberation theology, but I believe that is due to their ignorance,” he added.

Aretia, a parish priest in a neighbourhood on the southside of the capital, added that the base communities were experiencing a “transition process” rather than a crisis, and predicted that “they will soon receive new oxygen.”

The last time representatives of the base communities in Mexico came together was in October 2000. They plan to do so again in 2004, to agree on strategies for growth and expansion.

But some of their leading advocates, like Samuel Ruiz, the former bishop of the impoverished, conflict-ridden southern Mexican state of Chiapas, are no longer around to provide support to the communities, and most of the local Church hierarchy has no interest at all in seeing them survive.