A week of dizzying contradiction, misdirection, party betrayal by an ex-president, diligently planted false hopes, political handouts, and of course, an immeasurable amount of condescension and poorly veiled contempt for voters. Tawdry stuff from the Catholic Church. Cheery politically designed news from a slew of national, state and municipal candidates all plying voters with money and gifts, while ignoring their more basic needs as inflation surges. But also there was Mexico’s Tourism Department seeking to balance this breathless hype with reality by giving some reassuring statistics: There was a 5.3 percent increase in the number of international visitors to Mexico between January and April. More than half of them were U.S. citizens ignoring their government’s warnings on the increase in crime, and the endless reports of violence.
But then came a report from Canada’s leading newspaper, the Globe and Mail, describing Mexico as a “country with poverty that’s no longer poor.” A winsome thesis that fit my Mexican neighbors’ long-held conviction that gringos (blancos all look the same) are crazy. If not right now, eventually.
But there was no reason for reading Canadian; home-grown lunacy much closer was lush. The former president (2000-2006) Vicente Fox, who forged a place in in Mexican history as an electoral hero toppling the authoritarian, vastly corrupt and brutal 71-year rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) spoke up. Today, it appears the pompadoured Enrique Peña Nieto will lead the PRI back into national rule. And Vicente Fox, of the conservative National Action Party (PAN), called for everyone to gather round the PRI candidate if he wins July 1. This of course undercuts his party’s present candidate, the first female member of a major Mexican party to run for president, Josefina Vazquez Mota. It mars his own accomplishment, one that many Mexicans had believed in 2000 was possible. Though Vazquez Mota may be running third in the presidential campaign, she clearly voiced the opinion of a great many Mexicans of all parties when she called Fox’s comments “completely senseless.”
More evidence indicating for many citizens that this electoral season is particularly loco is the big, full-colored billboard in Mexico City using Peña Nieto to promote adultery. I’ve lived in Mexico for four decades and change, and I’ve seen some strange and staggering things, but nothing quite like that. There is Peña Nieto, slicked hair shining ... and a smear of red lipstick on his white dress shirt ... an index finger shushing his lips in warning. Above his right shoulder are the large words, “Unfaithful to his family and committed to his country.” It’s an advertisement for an outfit that helps folks have discreet extra-marital affairs. The Mexico representative of the company told reporters that this country has quickly proved to be a thriving market: 300,000 users since November. Peña Nieto has admitted to cheating on his first wife and fathering two children with two other women.
No one has seen much from Mexico’s Catholic Church in the media. And Mexicans are following the Church’s attempt to keep its head down at this time Which is hard to do, in a time when people are talking about how middle-class Mexico has become – meaning that some Mexicans who once were poor now are members of the middle class. With inflation stripping their weekly earnings and drug thugs trying to kill them as they walk home from work, many that seem to others to be climbing the economic ladder are not overjoyed by such middle-class boasting.
At the same time, concerning the Church, their social-media savvy children keep them aware of such “scandals” as the contretemps between a rigid, conservative Vatican and United States nuns whose experience among parishioners produce conflicting conclusions. The nuns are the arm of the Church that, overall, most closely works with those parishioners being slammed by the recession – many of them Mexican immigrants in the United States. Those nuns’ experiences have to do with dedicated parishioners suffering from the historically well known difficulties of those living on thin resources. Too many children has long been a key factor in the demolishment of families, the lives of mothers and underfed, undereducated children. Such nuns actively protest and work against cuts in government programs that aid poor and working families. They do this not only by protesting such government – and anti-government – political moves. They also create, staff and resourcefully supply homeless shelters, food pantries, and health care facilities. Those of us, products of Catholic elementary and high schools staffed by nuns, often resented their religiously shaped discipline (ruler on the hands ... and hands off the girls). Much later, almost as often, many of us would have occasion to be thankful that we had an armory of discipline – no matter how slight, or how well hidden at the back of memory – to suddenly employ at truly tough moments. That is more than many can say about priests. (Luckily, I do not fall into that category, having benefitted from the tutelage of a thoughtful priest.) Frequently such ancient, forgotten, misplaced, ignored lessons are so surprising they are shocking. Happily so.Here, the Mexican Catholic Church is keeping its head down and trying to persuade parishioners to do the same.
Among churchly folk in the United States there is a broad group of people who know book and verse of the Bible. Yet it and the U.S. Constitution, which they say they cherish, are two documents that seemingly were learned by rote and with hasty pride. But they don’t seem to understand what kind of man, what kind of being, Jesus was, and are confused, untutored regarding the Founders of the United States.
Many religious scholars believe Mary Magdalene was the first person Christ spoke to when he was resurrected, saying, “Woman, why are you weeping ...” The guys at the Vatican seem to forget that the first word he said was, “Woman ...”
Rick Santorum and and Wisconsin Representative Paul D. Ryan (both Catholics), have said things that make them seem proud members of this category. But the Bible is a tough book to parse well. There are a lot of Catholics who don’t get what Jesus was up to, simply because they’ve read it too often without thinking hard about what it’s saying. That is a long and time consuming discussion.
Perhaps James Madison, often called “The Father of the Constitution,” goes more directly to the core of an equally basic division troubling the country today. Kevin Gutsman, a professor of history at Western Connecticut State University and author of the recently released “James Madison and the Making of the Constitution,” doesn’t buy the socially splintering idea that the founders wanted to glue the Constitution and the Bible together. The people that created the United States, such historians note, had just escaped all that sort of thinking by declaring independence from England.
This book is a multi-layered study that examines Madison’s complexity, his many contradictions. But he had unambiguous ideas about church and state. Gutsman has pondered long and hard about what a number of people have been saying about Madison. Santorum was one of these. Gutsman looks at his comments on church and state in relation to what Madison said about the subject. Santorum went so far in his unease as to say that John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech endorsing an “absolute separation between church and state made him want to throw up.” He missed a succinct and wise argument gracefully put. Part of that wisdom invoked Madison.
“The chief craftsman of America’s tradition of church and state separation,” Madison, a Virginian, at 25, separated church and state in Virginia’s Statute for Religious Freedom. His belief was that never again in America should Virginia whip Baptists or Massachusetts hang Quakers. Speaking plainly: “The Church should form no part of the State.”