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The last mass of the red bishop

2021-01-28T22:04:49.939Z


Representative of Liberation Theology, Raúl Vera hangs up the habits after 45 years. From Tlatelolco to the most recent massacre of migrants, the life of the religious is the recent history of Mexico


Raúl Vera's last homily was like him: austere and intense.

It lasted almost 45 minutes and talked about junk food, covid and poverty, the political class or organized crime.

The last Eucharist of the bishop of Saltillo ended like so many others, with a woman in a scarf and daily mass waiting for him outside the temple to ask for the extreme anointing because every day he thinks he is going to die tomorrow.

This Friday, the most threatened bishop in Mexico, 75 years old, will symbolically hang his robes.

Sunday was his last mass and tomorrow will be the transfer of powers to his successor, Hilario González.

There are bishops like Raúl Vera, who transcend his parish, the gold ring on the fourth finger of the right hand and even his scarce 163 centimeters in height.

His speech, with a strong social content against the "narco" and the "ferocity of liberalism" and in defense of migrants, prostitutes and homosexuals have made him an uncomfortable type for organized crime and an outcast within the ecclesial hierarchy.

However, he is the man the Pope calls when he wants to talk about Mexico.

Characters like Raúl Vera have the ability to traverse history.

Or be pierced by it.

Or, if not, how do you explain the afternoon of October 2, 68, when you saw ambulances go by at high speed in the direction of the Plaza de Tlatelolco?

He was 22 years old, he could not go to the protest that ended in a massacre because a teacher rescheduled an exam.

Already, at night, a colleague from UNAM told him: "Did you already know what this savage Diaz Ordaz did?"

53 years after that, history passes in front of him again.

On Saturday night, his phone was among the first to ring when the deaths of 19 people in Tamaulipas were confirmed, many of them migrants from Guatemala.

Raúl Vera, born in Acámbaro (Guanajuato) in 1945, was destined to sell liquids through factories throughout the country since he managed to study Chemistry at UNAM.

At the most, when he discovered religion, being a “pot daddy”, as he calls it, but he ended up being a common thread through the most important events in Latin America and Mexico.

Tlatelolco to the theology of liberation, the zapatista uprising, homosexual struggles, the violence of the 'narco' or the defense of immigrants in times of caravans.

Raúl Vera appears in all this.

His biography is also the recent history of the Church in Latin America.

Vera is the last soldier of Liberation Theology, a movement that is ignored by brilliant theologians such as Gustavo Bueno, Leonardo Boff, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Jon Sobrino, Ernesto Cardenal and Ignacio Ellacuría.

Or, in Mexico, Samuel Ruiz and Miguel Concha Malo.

Brave religious, of which few are still alive, who came to the Church when the masses were in Latin with their backs to the faithful and go to confession in indigenous languages, dismissed in tears by transsexuals, prostitutes and migrants.

Seniors who put the marginalized at the center, talked about ecology and were more concerned about inequality than poverty.

In that school, without social networks or YouTube, but with encyclicals and groundbreaking conferences such as Medellín (1968), Puebla (1979) or Santo Domingo (1992), Raúl Vera grew up.

"I learned an environment where the Church is not above the world, nor is it the center of the world, but rather interrelates with the world," he recalls in a long interview by Zoom with EL PAÍS.

In the formation of Raúl Vera three events appear: The Dominicans, Bolonia and the municipality of Amecameca.

The first ones crossed his path when he finished Chemical Sciences at UNAM: “The Dominicans preached the gospel to us as students who had a commitment to transform our country.

They spoke to us of the gospel, but of a living gospel ”.

When things got complicated and the repression began, the Dominicans sent him to study in Bologna (Italy).

He was 25 years old, and he fell in love with Saint Thomas Aquinas.

“Bologna was in full swing and I found a place to learn Saint Thomas in dialogue with contemporary theology and conciliar documents.

In other words, there I felt extremely protected.

There I was trained ”, he says.

Back in Mexico, his first destination is an indigenous town in the center of the country where he discovers the poor.

“It was a peasant town from the State of Mexico who gave me all their trust.

With them I learned everything.

The Dominicans had taught me the Bible and the poor to read it, ”he says.

Latin America was a boiling cauldron and politics and religion walked hand in hand.

Since his arrival at the Vatican in 2013, Pope Francis has accompanied his management of restorative winks to Liberation Theology.

John Paul II's humiliation of Ernesto Cardenal at the airport was reversed with public cuddles to the Trappist monk before his death in March.

The Pope also accelerated the beatification of Óscar Romero, killed by paramilitaries in 1980 in El Salvador, and recognized what had been happening for a long time, that T-shirts with the face of the Saint were sold in popular markets in Central America before the Vatican will open the doors.

At the same time since the arrival of the Argentine pope, institutions such as Opus Dei or Los Legionarios de Cristo, founded by the Mexican Marcial Maciel, have lost strength and grassroots movements have gained visibility.

-What do you remember about Liberation Theology?

-Look, I don't feel like a liberation theologian but a preacher of a liberating gospel.

But we had to defend ourselves from all the accommodative readings they did.

And I began by speaking of a 'Latin American theology', because with the term liberation they wanted to hang us.

-He prefers Latin American theology over Liberation Theology.

-We criticized fierce capitalism, but they wanted to introduce the cold war and, ah of course, communism

-What's left of that?

-There is a more incarnate Church in the world.

A Church that cannot flee and feel calm.

At Christmas 1994, a group of indigenous people with ski masks and wooden shotguns took the city of San Cristóbal (Chiapas) by storm and Bishop Samuel Ruiz positioned himself next to them, distancing himself from the official position of the Church, which was watching with I am suspicious of that peculiar uprising that demanded "dignity and good government."

Chiapas became the last scene of a guerrilla uprising in Latin America and the irruption of Subcomandante Marcos shook the life of the country.

Soon, Samuel Ruiz, became one of the reference voices of that iconic movement that never fired a shot.

In 1995, the Vatican appointed Raúl Vera coadjutor bishop of San Cristóbal de Las Casas to turn the situation around.

He arrived with the powers and authority to change course and, contrary to expectations, he became an ally of Zapatismo, a critic of capitalism and a promoter of indigenous social transformation.

That did not like that either in Rome and when he was to take office as titular bishop of San Cristóbal, in 2000, John Paul II sent him to Saltillo, 1,717 kilometers from there, to the other end of the country.

Don Samuel, whom he describes as an extraordinary prophet of great simplicity and training, “always told them that violence was not the way, but that of justice.

We have always been on the side of justice and we defend that it is not with repression or with paramilitaries that justice is achieved.

There must be a change and the indigenous people must be included in the Constitution as subjects of law and not with concessions as if they were minors, ”he says from Saltillo.

Since his arrival 20 years ago in the capital of Coahuila, the diminutive bishop has displayed tireless activity at the head of a church focused on the defense of Human Rights.

In the north of the country, an hour from Monterrey, he has built a shelter through which more than 100,000 Central Americans have passed;

a missing person search organization;

a pastoral LGBT +, and has promoted movements for water, territory and the rescue of the miners of Pasta de Conchos.

During the last mass of the red bishop, Raúl Vera was outraged at what had just happened with the 19 burned migrants in Tamaulipas, and exploded before his parishioners.

"How can it be that the authorities do not report," he denounced from the pulpit.

"Migrants are a big business for the organized crime mafias that operate in Mexico (...) They took money from them to pass them on, but the enemy group that does not want their rivals to earn money with them, decided to kill and incinerate them," he told the narco in his land.

For Raúl Vera, the immigration issue "is the most painful, lacerating and cruel effect of the neoliberal economic system."

“Why do people migrate?

Because he is starving, because wages are a pittance.

Because of the storms and hurricanes of climate change.

For inequality and violence.

They are the consequences of a disorderly world ”.

His last battle is to ensure that his successor does not reverse the progress made in his Human Rights office, however, the retirement of the bishop sounds like the retirement of the pastor who, when he stops speaking, brings silence to the parish, to the cathedral, to the diocese and the Church, thus in capital letters.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-01-28

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