Category: Memory, victims and justice

Carlos Mendoza | Re-exists 2025 | Opening Ritual 23 IX 25

A compost flower Or about re-existences in the midst of catastrophe

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

At the end of September, more than eighty people from survivor groups around the world gathered for a meeting of mutual listening, deepened by attentive dialogues with university students and nourished by provocations from artist groups. We were received with the magnificent hospitality of the Jorge Manzano Chair from ITESO that became home for a few days.

We began by celebrating the resistances that transform what seems like waste through love, inspired during the opening ceremony by the renowned Catalan singer Lídia Pujol who whispered that “from the compost that is rottenness, the flower can emerge” (Babel). She had discovered this wisdom in the poetry of her 12th-century countryman Ramon Llull, who recounted that “having found a friend who was dying without love, when he asked him why he was dying without love, he replied that no one had made him know about love or had taught him to be a lover.”

Angelica, from the lands of Malaysia, scattered grains of rice and Himalayan salt as an offering during the inaugural ritual, during which we prepared to listen attentively to the otherness that welcomes us as Mother Earth and inhabits us as Divinity that animates us with its ineffable breath of life.

Five tables, each with representatives from six collectives, divided into Spanish and English language groups, were the place where we listened to each other each morning, exchanging experiences to awaken, heal, and embrace each other, drawing on the inner vulnerability of each person and collective. Each table had two listeners, who identified the similarities and differences between the experiences described, thus weaving together a mutual accompaniment of solidarity and hope to confront the local and global horror we were describing. Raúl, a young Mayan popular educator through hip hop in Chiapas, commented that "no one had ever sat at a table to listen to my knowledge." Nancy, a Latina feminist theologian from the United States, along with Bosque, a biologist and environmental-spiritual activist from Cuernavaca, were tasked, like other members of academia and organized civil society present at the meeting, with cultivating this attentive listening to weave a common narrative amidst the differences of each experience and context.

Thus, we respectfully explored the sacred ground of resistance and re-existence. First, by approaching the horror, which we named according to the stories each person told. Sofía, for example, shared her experience as a young Ecuadorian migrant lawyer in Barcelona, where for several years she has worked with undocumented domestic workers in a feminist "coalition" that led them to form a union to strengthen them in the fight for their rights as migrant women while allowing them to develop artisanal skills to support their cause. Sofía's reflection echoed that of Alex, a graphic designer and popular artist who accompanies the Ecclesial Base Communities of El Salvador in the face of President Bukele's state of emergency. Now in its fourth year under an authoritarian leader, this regime of exception produces a filthy life for poor youth in the Salvadoran peripheries accused of criminality to whitewash a regime that has been colluding with criminal mafias for years. The resistance of both groups, in Catalonia and El Salvador, exuded an "interiority" that inspires them in their daily struggles. Christian spirituality in the Salvadoran case and feminist sorority in the Catalan case.

But it wasn't just about sharing the spoken word; it was about exploring other languages through workshops on body language and sound expression, or through the Jauja dance in the Peruvian Andean highlands as a path of resistance for a people, thus discovering other modes of communication between the seeking mothers and the healing companions who came from South Dakota or Malaysia. These other languages allowed us to overcome language barriers and helped us create powerful nonverbal communication bonds.

And to tie knots in the fabric of the threads intertwined in each day, the performances, like the one prepared with much love and talent by a Portland collective to celebrate the water that makes us up, thus helping us feel that we are water. To the rhythm of hip hop and rap as an alternative urban art proposal, the Mayan collectives of Chiapas that educate children threatened by drug cartels in the outskirts of cities in the mountains of southeastern Mexico, turned out to be a balm to heal wounds still open from other violence. Like that narrated by Vero looking for her son Diego, missing for ten years, or the violence against girls in Pakistan that Sabine recounted in her Support work in working-class neighborhoods of Faisalabad, in the Punjab region of PakistanThanks to this rapper performance, we all joined in the dance, while drawing symbols on the mural painted by Yara as part of a performance also dedicated to the water being killed in the planet's rivers, lakes, and seas.

We concluded each day with a harvest moment, where the popular narrative of Blessed Mixture, formed by young people from the Ecclesial Base Communities of Our America, helped us celebrate what we heard and shared through symbols, songs, and rituals. The guiding figures were the bees, a symbol of Mother Earth's resilience, which we welcomed with a wax candle produced by them, burning their flame in the palm of our hand to feel the pain of endangered species. This gesture was accompanied by a drop of honey poured into the other hand to give us a taste of their sweetness as survivors.

Then came the little house of Acteal, which was placed in the center of the circle of participants to remind us of the martyrdom of some human bees. pacifist collective of Las Abejas linked to the Zapatista bases, opting for the path of active non-violence in their shared struggle with justice and dignity for the indigenous peoples, suffered the murder of 45 of its members, among them four pregnant women, who were massacred on December 22, 1997 in Chiapas in the community hermitage while they were praying for peace, a crime perpetrated by paramilitaries with the complicity of the federal army (Acteal Massacre, Chiapas. Serious human rights violations by the Mexican State in 1997). His memory continues to sting like a splinter that hurts the lives of the indigenous peoples who seek other possible worlds.

We closed those moments of harvest by making kites with messages of peace for women violated by patriarchy and for the Palestinian people resisting the ongoing genocide by the Israeli state. These artifacts helped us direct our hearts and gaze toward a future with dignity and hope for the people in resistance.

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The visit to the community of El Salto, in the suburbs of Guadalajara, led us to cross the abysmal line of the ongoing ecocide that the environmental collective that received us on the “Tour of Horror” (A Leap of Life) describes itself as “an industrial paradise with an environmental hell.” The Lerma-Santiago River basin, which runs 708 kilometers across western Mexico, is an open wound for Mexican territory and for the animal and plant species and people who inhabit it. Since the post-war industrial boom of the last century, polluting industry has spread across this vast region like a social and environmental virus. To date, more than 90 highly toxic pollutants have been identified, many of them carcinogenic, of which only a few, more visible, are treated with a couple of treatment plants. Sofía and Pedro, young environmentalists from the area, tell us that the transnational corporations established in this basin, such as Nestlé, Toyota, IBM, and many others, claim to be green companies today, when in reality, their local parts suppliers are the ones producing the most pollution because they do not comply with current national and international regulations.15 transnational corporations pollute the Santiago River, according to an international report.). ITESO is part of a network of universities in the region that study the water problem (Industry and nature in conflict: will there be a
future for water in Lerma-Chapala?) in constant collaboration with the collectives of residents and environmentalists who seek to save the watershed with its inhabitants of diverse species.

Among the members of the group welcoming us is Emmanuel, a little boy of barely ten years old. Wearing cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, he leads his mother's hand as they show us the polluted wetlands, filled with the fetid odor of the city's sewage and the invasive species that inhabit them, such as tilapia, a contaminated fish sold in many markets across the country. The ecological present for this little boy from Guadalajara is catastrophic, but a possible future is beginning to emerge with community organizing.

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One of the morning rituals was presided over by Cecelia Firethunder, a Lakota grandmother who told us about her people's long journey of healing their wounds in resistance in the United States. Her experience as a child in a sunflower field that welcomed her in a dance of dignity and strength when she faced discrimination at school has continued to inspire her ever since, as she accompanies her people in awakening from centuries-old segregation, to heal their wounded memories by recovering their language, their knowledge, and their ancestral rituals. It is then possible to walk forward creating new ways of eating, like the initiative shared by her compatriot Nick Hernández to recover lands and methods of communal organization and indigenous Lakota agriculture (Makoce. Agricultural Development) in the heart of the Indian reservations, which have been territories controlled by the US government for two hundred and fifty years.

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From the compost that is rotten, the flower can emerge, as Lídia Pujol said.

But for that moment to arrive in our time of environmental collapse, it is necessary to first recycle the waste produced by extractive, racist, and patriarchal capitalism to recover the organic essence of the resistance of communities of survivors, including Mother Earth.

At the end of the meeting, we each returned to our places of origin and life choices, certain that as long as there is resistance, there will be hope, because there, in the midst of catastrophe, the lilies of re-existence sprout.

Guadalajara, September 28, 2025

October 10, 2025
The Spirit connecting the peripheries

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

Since the end of the last century, humanity's religions have updated their mission, realizing the growing poverty and injustice in the world, accompanied by wars promoted by corrupt leaders, where religion was used as a weapon of exclusion and violence.

The Parliament of the World's Religions with the project of a global ethic (Toward a Global Ethic: An Initial Declaration) where the contribution of the Swiss theologian Hans Küng stood out, or the Earth Charter Promoted by, among others, the Brazilian Leonardo Boff, along with several spiritual leaders, they sounded the alarm to mobilize religions to stop the spiral of hatred that is spreading across the planet, turning to the sources of human interiority that religions have cultivated for millennia as a source of peace.

However, many of these initiatives, while they managed to raise awareness among their leaders and communities as well as in the media of the urgent task of building peace with justice and truth, did not always listen to the knowledge and spirituality of people and communities in their daily struggles to defend human life, rivers, forests and mineral, plant and animal species that inhabit the face of the earth but are threatened by the sixth mass extinction underway (What is the sixth mass extinction and what can we do about it?).

Second and third generation liberation theologies, as we have already analyzed in the Mexican context (Liberation Theology in Mexico: Creative Reception of the Second Vatican Council), have shifted the perspective by placing the victims of global violence themselves at the center as "knowers," that is, experts in humanity thanks to the resilience that has transformed into resistance. Above all, it must be emphasized that, from this experience of vulnerability, these survivors have recognized themselves as privileged interlocutors of Divinity. Indeed, the victims seek to re-exist with new modes of communal organization, agroecological work, and diverse spiritualities. These practices emerge precisely from the people and communities themselves who are threatened by systems of domination.

Feminist ecotheology, developed by Ivonne Gebara (Ecofeminism: A Latin American Perspective) in Brazil and Marilú Rojas (The relevance of ecofeminist theology and its political impact on current femicide and ecocide) in Mexico, took a radical turn in thinking about the interconnections between the faith of excluded women, their violated bodies and territories, as well as their ancestral knowledge of care and resistance as the beginning of a world change where a new face of divine Sophia is revealed.

Thus, an increasingly clear awareness emerged among religions and social movements to listen to those who live on the peripheries of the world of wealth and privilege, to explore how "another world is possible" from those social and religious margins.

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Since 2015, a group of university students, along with artists and social movements in defense of the territory in Mexico – with the advice of Gustavo Esteva (Center for Intercultural Meetings and Dialogues) and Boaventura de Sousa Santos with his Conversations of the World With several authors from the epistemic South such as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui – we began to explore ways to decolonize the university and learn to “weave voices for the common home” (Weaving voices). Thus, we learned the demands of attentive listening to those living on the peripheries, who are not only victims but individuals and collectives who create processes of awakening, healing, and embodying together, and thus weave together knowledge that expresses their ways of life, community organization, and their profound spirituality of life.

In 2019, we continued this path by analyzing various voices of decolonial theology at a conference (Congress on resistance and spiritualities) organized jointly by the Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City, the international journal of theology Concilium, and the Dominican University Cultural Center of Mexico to explore together the common features of resistance to systemic violence and the spiritualities that arise from it.

In 2023, a group of university colleagues, with the support of Mexican civil society organizations and ITESO, the Jesuit University of Guadalajara in Mexico, managed to bring together more than thirty groups from Latin America (Re-Exists! The spirit crossing peripheries) with the aim of understanding the new forms of life, subjectivity, and communality that individuals and communities of survivors are weaving together. We sought a way to glimpse hope amidst the horror of clandestine graves in Mexico, discrimination based on gender, race, and social status, the devastation of Mother Earth, as well as to explore the rituals that emerge from these practices of resistance. graphic memory of that congress, with his documentary that includes some interviews, can give an idea of what we experienced at that meeting.

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Now comes the time for the next phase of Re-exist that will emphasize the connections survivors make and the strength that animates them.

This time, it is a meeting-festival with two novel and challenging features: interculturality as a way of existence and thought, to "rethink as a species," according to the call of the scientific community, closely linked to interreligious dialogue as the only viable way to approach the sacred.

We propose to explore together the paths of re-existence in this hour of collapse of the modern civilizational model, where the genocide in Gaza has put humanity in jeopardy and becomes a touchstone for human civilization.

Through three steps we will explore the wake up in the face of the horror that each collective has faced. We will continue analyzing the heal as personal and collective actions of memory, truth and justice that allow victims to rebuild their lives. Then we will be able to access the moment of support each other with new forms of communality.

Collectives of women from India facing patriarchal violence in the Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian religions will enter into mutual accompaniment with mothers of the disappeared in Mexico. Caretakers of Mother Earth from the Jesuit mission of Bachajón in Chiapas will dialogue with leaders of the Lakota people who work on collective memory to heal from the colonial past, while recovering their ancestral forms of agriculture through traditional diets, the cultivation of local plants, and the rediscovery of rituals such as the Inipi or ritual bathing which is a creation of communality, or the buffalo dance as one of the main symbols of the sacredness of earth and sky.

Stay tuned on social media Re-exists 2025 where brief informative capsules, interviews, and graphic memories of these moments will be published, which we hope will be like glimpses of life that resists and re-exists, because the strength of the survivors is animated by the divine Ruah that flutters over chaos to bring forth life in the midst of death.

Guadalajara, September 20, 2025

September 20, 2025
Kite designed by Francisco Toledo on handmade paper from Vista Hermosa Art Paper

Lay holiness?

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

This weekend two young Roman Catholics will be canonized by Pope Leo XIV (Canonization of Carlo Acutis and Pier Giorgio Frassati). Pier Giorgio Frassatti, an Italian Dominican layman who lived in the first quarter of the 20th century. The other, Carlo Acutis, the so-called “first millennial saint.” Each reveals not only l'air du temps of each century, but rather raise the question of the model of Church that we urgently need to present in our times of global catastrophe.

Since the end of the 19th century, the Roman Catholic Church, especially in Europe, has sought to listen to the working class and maintain contact with the population produced by the Industrial Revolution. The social teaching of the papal magisterium—since Pope Leo XIII and his Encyclical Letter Rerum Novarum until the current pontiff Leo XIV, who chose his name for that reason, displayed an urban pastoral approach typical of the time to walk with that suffering sector of the people of God.

Catholic Action would be a lay response, supported by groups of bishops in countries such as Belgium and France, to such challenges. The worker priests (Worker Priests: The Church's Commitment to the Working World) were another praiseworthy page in this history, where it is worth remembering the accompaniment of the Dominican theologian Marie-Dominique Chenu and the subsequent infamous suppression of the movement by Pope Pius XII. The influence of Catholic Action would reach Latin America with its see-judge-act methodology, later inspiring liberation theology in Peru, Brazil and other countries in the region, as Agenor Brighenti has carefully studied in recent years (The ver-julgar-agir method).

One hundred years ago, a young Dominican layman from Piedmont (Pier Giorgio Frassati OP), close to the miners in his land and a mountaineer by passion, was the fruit of that ecclesial sensitivity of the time that would bear fruit in later decades in pastoral experiences in the rest of Europe and Latin America, with the pastoral movements of insertion in popular environments, especially the working world and indigenous peoples. Son of a famous journalist who was the owner of The StampPier Giorgio Frassati used to combine his political activism in the Italian Popular Party with readings of Thomas Aquinas and Catherine of Siena, accompanied by climbs in the Alps with a club of friends and days of Eucharistic adoration in which he unfolded his interior life. A figure of his time, Pier Giorgio is today claimed by the Roman Catholic Church as a youthful lay saint, whose life ended abruptly at the age of 24 due to fulminant poliomyelitis probably contracted through his apostolate to the poor of Turin, leaving a spiritual imprint on the pastoral youth movements of a century ago.

The other young lay saint is Carlo Acutis, an Italian born in London, devoted to the Eucharist and very active on social media. He lived as a teenager focused on spreading the word about Eucharistic miracles and Marian apparitions. After his death from leukemia at the age of fifteen, he became a symbol for today's "Catholic influencers," but with a more devotional tone than the social and political one like his fellow canonizer. A few months ago, I received Carlo's relics along with the youth ministry group of the Parish of Santa Rosa de Lima in Mexico City, founded by the Dominican friars almost a hundred years ago. This was an initiative of the Archdiocese of Mexico to commemorate the Jubilee of Youth (A faith that never ages: Rome, 25 years after the Jubilee of Youth with John Paul II) convened by Pope Francis and carried out by Pope Leo XIV. I was struck by the low attendance of young people from this hipster area of the city, with the presence of some devout young people with very pious traits and little social sensitivity. The rosary prayer prepared by the local youth group in the tradition of Dominican spirituality meditated on the sorrowful mysteries of Christ's passion, associating them with the cry of today's youth in this neighborhood of Mexico City: gentrification, insecurity, violence against women, unemployment, and drug abuse as wounds of Christ's body today. It was an attempt to connect the tradition of the rosary with the lives of people today. The small community of older adults gathered there prayed in amazement, following the lead of the young people, and then returned to their traditional devotions, meditating on Christ's life in his passion and death. At the end, a few young people from other parishes gave a brief workshop on the millennial saint, urging the use of social media as a new place to proclaim Christ and promote the adoration of the Eucharist in communities, along with the values of the Gospel.

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I had already encountered this new generation of young traditionalist Catholics in Europe and the United States, among lay people, Dominicans, and Jesuits, among the religious orders and congregations recognized as promoters of the conciliar renewal of Vatican II. Their interests seem retrograde to me at first, although later I try to get closer to those generations and discover in them an inner beauty, mixed with naiveté and fear of getting lost in the labyrinth of pluralism. They seek identities that give them certainty. Religiously, they love the ancient Latin culture of medieval Christianity, above all, less so that of the Greek patristic era. They are enraptured by Gregorian chant and the Summa of Theology of Thomas Aquinas and other medieval masters, but without understanding their method open to conversation with pagan philosophers, nor following scholastic logical thought. They are fascinated by conspicuous signs of belief, such as the religious habit, the liturgical veil, and receiving communion by kneeling with great devotion, but clumsily because they do so as if they were newborn giraffes.

Despite their intense devotion, they are indifferent to social issues as a spiritual and theological context. Talking about Gaza in a sermon seems like ideology to them. Not to mention inviting unmarried couples to the Eucharistic table, much less welcoming the community of sexual diversity at Mass. They deem such practices a deviation from Church doctrine. These younger generations of Catholic laypeople seek to return to the doctrinal Church, like that of the Council of Trent and Vatican I, without fully understanding the meaning of the conciliar spirit that inspired Pope Benedict XVI to convene Vatican II.

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And I wonder then what models of Church are urgently needed today for a laboratory city like Mexico City and so many others around the world. It's about responding to a range of youth identities where it's a challenge to create spaces to invite them to look at one another, almost impossible to welcome them in a single liturgical celebration. I remember that my generation still dreamed of "taking Paradise by storm" through a commitment to justice and peace, with universal human rights as a sign of the new times. This led us to a university ministry at the CUC in the 1980s focused on a liberating Church.

Something that seems outdated in this era of deglobalization and the expansion of war ministries, military drone invasions, and the cynicism of capitalism in its expansionist phase of obscene forced colonization. The perverse use of religion, as we see today in Palestine with the Israeli government and its allies around the world justifying their genocidal actions in the Bible, seems to leave young Catholics today indifferent, absent from the protests in the streets and squares of the world against this manipulation of faith.

What secular saints does humanity need today amidst the ruins of our civilization? Frassati or Acutis. The young mountaineer close to the miners or the saint. millennial of Eucharistic adoration as a “highway to heaven.”

I think neither one nor the other, because both were children of their time. Today I see a new generation of young people passionate about Christ as Messiah and universal brother, whom they recognize for his exceptional inclusive love of the just and sinners that arises from their intimate experience of communion with his AbbaYoung people who are simultaneously touched by the teachings of the Dalai Lama and Tich Nath Han, or by the Zen meditation masters they have encountered at retreats in diverse spiritual traditions.

Young lay people who live holiness in their eroticized and loving bodies, unafraid to explore different modes of femininity and masculinity, of biological or adoptive fatherhood and motherhood, wrapped in the love of Christ and passionate about serving his wounded body.

Millennials who are not tasteless influencers who reproduce on social media the same things they heard in their parish groups, but who invent "blessed blends" of narrative theologies close to the discarded, crossing the peripheries, weaving bonds of life, empathy and political-spiritual solidarity. Lay holiness as the new generation of young people from the Ecclesial Base Communities of Latin America and the Caribbean (Blessed Mixture. Narrative Theology of Our America) that reinvents that old method of see-judge-act with a narrative theology on the peripheries of society, with compassionate imagination, following in the footsteps of Jesus of Nazareth and his messianic community.

Perhaps today, as daughters and sons of uncertain times, lay holiness is experiencing a collapse of religious institutions and the invention of other ways of worshipping the loving presence of Divinity, not only in the temple, but also in the community that, animated by its faith, seeks to save a polluted river or a dying lake. Youth communities climb the volcanoes of Mesoamerica or the Andean mountain range, with its endangered glaciers, as paths to ecological spirituality.

Initiatives that seek to worship Christ in his wounded body today.

Lay holiness which, after all, is the life of the Ruah divine who makes all things new from the rubble of the crumbling world.

Mexico City, September 6, 2025

September 6, 2025

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