Category: Contemporary violence

Julián Pablo, Apophatic Christ, oil on canvas, 2014

The Emperor or the Shadows

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez OP

The story goes that 1,700 years ago, Constantine I, Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, tired of the quarrels among his Christian subjects, called them to settle their differences over the identity of the founder of their movement, Jesus the Galilean, executed in the year 30 of the Common Era in a distant province of the Roman Empire.

Three centuries had passed since a group of women disciples testified that they had seen Rabbi Jesus again, after his bloody murder on the outskirts of Jerusalem, returning with his wounded but luminous body, reuniting with them in a garden or on the beach, rereading together the stories of their ancestors with new eyes, their hearts burning as they remembered his sayings and gestures around a bit of bread or fish shared with him.

At least five generations of Christian communities, scattered throughout Asia Minor on the fringes of the Roman Empire, had passed until the moment when the emperor took that initiative. These communities had followed the path opened by some of Jesus' closest friends, such as Peter and James, or those who had only heard of him, such as Paul of Tarsus. Each one told his story of a life change, after having welcomed into his heart the teachings of Rabbi Jesus, so ancient and so new in the lineage of his Hebrew ancestors, about the generous love of his Abba and the strength of his Ruah or Spirit given to those who follow him.

Throughout those years, lived by the first Christian communities in the diaspora, some didn't fully understand who the Galilean was. For all, he was an exceptional person who had marked their lives in unusual ways, sometimes experiencing his extraordinary power through miraculous acts that made him appear as an angel, not a human. Other times, the memory of his words and deeds left them with a new life lesson, like the great rabbi of the one God, whose absence left them orphaned. A good man, a prophet, an angel of God, an extraordinary being. But they couldn't quite work out who Jesus was.

Long ago, second- and third-generation Christians, who kept alive the memory of Jesus' beloved disciple in Ephesus, for example, preserved poems that sang of Jesus' life as the divine Logos who "existed from the beginning with God and was God" (Jn 1:1). Other inspired hymns had been collected by Paul of Tarsus, Priscilla, Lydia, and Phoebe during their time in communities in Asia Minor, later including them in letters, rituals, and Gospels to celebrate Jesus as "the one who did not boast about his status as God," in Paul's letter to the community of Philippi (Phil 2:6), or as "the firstborn from the dead," in his letter to the community of Colossae (Col 1:18). Those early second- and third-generation Christian communities recognized Jesus as the Son of Man, the firstborn of the dead, the Alpha and Omega of the new creation, as well as many other titles that expressed the human and messianic condition of the Nazarene.

Until the time came, at the beginning of the 4th century of the Common Era, when some experts in the Hebrew Scriptures and in the letters and stories of Jesus' friends - most of them monks and bishops from North Africa and Asia Minor, including some from Hispania, that distant Roman province - began to write treatises unleashing a polemic to name the novelty of the Galilean's being. Most of these learned masters in the philosophy of the time chose Greek words to name that intimate communion of Jesus with his heavenly Abba, among which stood out that of homoousious or “of the same being”, to designate that Jesus shares from all eternity the same “substance” or being as his Abba.

And so was born the declaration of the bishops gathered in Nicaea, convened by the Emperor Constantine in 325, which gave rise to the Creed of the Church that we still profess every Sunday at the Eucharist: “I believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, born of the Father before all ages: God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, in the same way.” substance that the Father, through whom all things were made.”

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Although this expression is a treasure in the memory of the primitive community that is already part of the DNA of the Christian faith, over the centuries in the Mediterranean basin this expression was clothed with an imperial aura to designate the divine being as the "power" of God the creator and of his Son. Pantocrator or almighty.

These divine names later justified a model of Eurocentric imperial Christianity that was imposed on other cultures and other ways of approaching the divine mystery that were colonized, most of the time destroyed, in the name of that idea of a God-substance that is the principle and foundation of the civilizing order that expanded throughout the globe, claiming to be the most complete form of human culture.

But today it is necessary to recover those voices denied by imperial Christianity as part of the symphony of the faith of the peoples. How can we express with new words and symbols the faith of the people of God that celebrates the intimacy of the divine Ruah that Jesus shares with his Abba? Returning to the ancient faith of the Church that confesses that Jesus is a true human being and true God, we can reread his humanity through the lens of the desire that constitutes us as beings in relationship, in order to experience and understand that which unites Jesus with his Abba: both share the same loving desire to give life to the other, which is another way of stammering the strength or dynamis divine which is the Holy Spirit.

In this way, confessing that Christ lives the same desire as his Abba, opening space for a third person who is precisely the divine Ruah, also touches us intimately, including every creature in the cosmos, to be wrapped in the loving embrace of Trinitarian life. A dance that is an incessant gift of loving superabundance, accompanying the entire creation.

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This same loving desire animates the kenosis or self-emptying of the divine Word that the Christian faith affirms is the heart of redemption. Through the Incarnation, God "migrates" from full being to the realm of non-being to rescue those who live "in darkness and in the shadow of death," as the elderly Zechariah, one of the anawin or poor of Yahweh, celebrating his son John who would precede the steps of the Messiah.

Because Jesus shares in the same desire as his Abba, as the Messiah of God, he crosses the abyss to go from the light to the shadows of the shadows of the shadows. To share in the same being as his Abba means, on the path of cosmic and human redemption, to descend to the Sheol or place of the ancestors, as an act of radical solidarity with the entire creation and with the victims of violent history in order to, from non-being, bring forth life as a messianic insurrection.

He Apophatic Christ The extraordinary canvas by Julián Pablo, which accompanies today's reflection, painted in his studio at the Santo Domingo Convent in Mexico City a decade ago, emerges like a flash of light amidst the shadows, precisely from the realm of non-being, as an affirmation of life amidst death. This painting is a contemporary visual representation of the mystery of redemption "in the negative," that is, from the reverse side of violent history, where God brings about universal redemption.

May the commemoration of the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea be a propitious occasion for us to cross the abyss and encounter those who today cry out for life from the realms of non-being produced by systemic violence. These survivors, with dignified rage and eschatological imagination, participate in the divine-human communion as an anticipation of the new world that has come from God, and they call upon the entire human species to celebrate God-with-us.

Puebla de los Ángeles, August 3, 2025

August 3, 2025
Iván Gardea, Lynching, Cuernavaca, 2020

Ecclesiastical violence: a Girardian reading

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

A few days ago we learned about the Father Alberto Anguiano García resigned from the rectorship of the Pontifical University of Mexico, in the second year of his second term as rector, as a protest against the “workplace harassment and institutional violence” he suffered at the hands of the Vatican Curia and the authorities of that ecclesiastical university, which has been in existence for barely forty years.

The reasons given by the rector for his unilateral removal from office, an act that led to his resignation, are revealing, as they reveal a systemic problem in ecclesiastical institutions, which frequently act as if they had their own jurisdiction, impervious to civil jurisdiction, with labor rights at stake, as well as to public opinion in modern societies.

While, like every educational institution in Mexico, the UPM is subject to civil law regarding labor and education, the procedures in this case reveal a systemic violence that must be addressed in order to dismantle and make way for other methods of action, in keeping with the Gospel and the freedom of individuals, especially when it concerns the common good that education represents. Even more urgently, we must reflect and act when it concerns a religious institution destined to communicate the contents of Christian revelation and the tradition that constantly arises from it. Ultimately, this is a matter of addressing the credibility crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in these dire days.

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I met Father Alberto as a student at the University of Madrid thirty years ago, when he was pursuing a postgraduate degree in theology in 1995, during a course I taught on Emmanuel Levinas and his concept of revelation rooted in the Hebrew tradition and in dialogue with "the philosophy spoken in Greek." He was the most brilliant student of those generations, not only for his high academic standing, but also for his theological ability to update the theological knowledge of the great Christian tradition in the midst of contemporary questions arising from science, psychoanalysis, and the challenges of secular culture.

Already as rector, his first term began in 2021 It was marked by a clear project to modernize the university, both in its curricula and in the urgent strategic planning to open up to new disciplines in the civil world and not be limited solely to the clerical sphere. Ecclesiastical faculties had to overcome their ostracism and enter into dialogue with other civil disciplines. Furthermore, according to the diagnosis, it was essential to promote institutional efficiency that would make a domestic institution viable in its vision, uses, and customs, to make it a credible interlocutor in the academic and ecclesial context, both nationally and internationally.

But internal resistance seems to have created a climate of aversion to these reforms which, due to the typical rivalry of any group protecting its interests, deployed a mechanism of expulsion against its main promoter. In order to maintain the unanimity of "all against one," proceeding like a true mimetic contagion, a typical scapegoat process was brewing. It was thought that by expelling the person singled out as the source of the collective evil from the group, the evil would be expelled from the institution, which would regain its tranquility once purified of its poison. As we can see in the engraving by Iván Gardea that accompanies this reflection (The Plot of Engraving), the talented Mexican engraver managed to masterfully capture this mechanism of rivalry, contagion and collective lynching to delineate with the force of his strokes the mimetic desire that gives rise to human culture based on sacrifices since we have historical memory as a human species.

Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how the crisis is resolved, we know that the victimizing mechanism is the satanic lie that hides "things hidden since the foundation of the world," as René Girard said (Things hidden since the foundation of the world) quoting the Gospel of Matthew: “That it might be fulfilled which was spoken through the prophet, saying, I will open my mouth in parables, and will utter things hidden since the foundation of the world” (Matthew 13:35). The parables of the Reign of God that Jesus told in Galilee evoked ways to overcome the violence that lurks in the human heart precisely as a mimetic desire that engenders rivalry and fratricide. If the community involved does not internally dismantle the mechanism of rivalry and hatred, the poison will continue to infect its internal relationships and will continue to create new processes of self-protection, unanimity of all against one, expulsion and lies, producing new victims.

From this fund anthropological that appears as a cause systemic Of the institutional violence suffered by Father Alberto, what is important now is to emphasize the need for accountability from ecclesiastical institutions, both internally and externally. Moving forward, a process of collective healing of memory will be necessary, with justice and truth first for the victims, and with accountability for the perpetrators.

Unfortunately, given the prevailing clericalism, as a structure systemic which is perpetuated precisely by making victims invisible, it is necessary to bring this institutional distortion into the public sphere so that paths of memory can emerge, with justice and truth, that restore the scant credibility of a university institution founded in 1982 to serve the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico and Mexican society as a whole.

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The institutional complicity that led to Father Alberto's expulsion is similar to other instances of clerical violence in today's world.

Such systemic clerical violence can be traced to similar crises, such as that of the Roman Catholic Church in Chile, which has produced victims of sexual abuse committed by clergy against adult women and minors for half a century. They have been subjected for decades to systemic psychological, sexual, and spiritual violence, which has left its mark on the victims and has protected the perpetrators of these crimes from impunity, protected by what Rita Segato (The war against women) called it "the masculinity pact." There's talk of reparation, but it revictimizes the victims and leaves no substantial changes in institutional life such as schools, religious congregations, parishes, and dioceses.

A brilliant doctoral thesis in progress on this topic, prepared by Soledad del Villar Tagle (Abuses in the Church. Concilium. International Journal of Theology, (402)), will document with compelling testimonies and a rigorous interdisciplinary analysis, this abuse of clerical power that requires, of course, restorative justice for victims and survivors, along with a new theology of the Church. This feminist theology from women survivors of sexual and spiritual abuse by clergy will shed light on promoting the necessary changes to overcome this systemic violence characteristic of patriarchy, in its version of clericalism, as a religious expression of the war against women.

The feminist theology that emerges from the abuse crisis proposes a spirituality that springs from the wounds of Christ's wounded social body, going beyond pious considerations that venerate the wounds of the Crucified One but render invisible the victims of yesterday and today, desecrated in their bodies, minds, and souls by this systemic clerical violence.

Pope Francis' invitation to live a Holy Year in 2025 (Do not confuse. Bull of Invocation of the Ordinary Jubilee of the Year 2025) in order to learn to be pilgrims of hope in times of despair, addresses the Roman Catholic Church. Throughout the year, Pope Leo XIV has continued this initiative, particularly calling young people to be part of this journey of conversion to sow hope in today's world.

But these calls will only make sense if they are rooted in attentive listening to survivors of any systemic violence, including ecclesiastical violence, which unfortunately continues to wield its predatory power as a religious caste of clericalism, unsustainable in our times.

Mexico City, July 26, 2025

July 26, 2025
Jane Tully Heath, Still Life. National Gallery of South Africa, 1998

Voices from the southern tip of Africa

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

Nora is a migrant woman from eSwatini, the former kingdom of Swaziland, which was a British protectorate until 1968 for the "legalized" exploitation of minerals, and later became a post-colonial kingdom. She had to flee her homeland after leaving her husband, who humiliated her. Due to the tradition of the Swazi people, once she separated, her family abandoned her to her fate, and she would be unable to remarry if she ever wanted to return to her homeland. Her only option would be to return to her husband and ask for his forgiveness. Nora represents hundreds of thousands of refugees in South Africa fleeing a variety of forms of violence; in her case, it wasn't war or famine, but what they call "domestic violence" here. In our brief but intense conversation, I told her something I learned from the African-American poet and musician Mykki Blanco (Queer black french dance empowerment feat. poetry by Mykki Blanco) about how queer communities live vulnerability with dignity and hope, beginning each day singing: “I am strong because I have no choice, but I am fragile.” Nora cries inconsolably because, in addition to the pain of having lost her baby a few months ago, her sorrow is even deeper because she hasn't been able to bury her in her homeland, as is the custom of the Suasi people. In the middle of our conversation, I share some bread with her, and she sobs in thanks. I tell her to take it on behalf of the people of Mexico, who also know about this and other forms of violence. And I say goodbye with a hug, telling her that something good will come from that open wound in her heart, especially if it opens to the wounds of other women, who for thousands of years have woven networks of mutual care.

A different story in today's world, coming from refugees who, in the shadows of the shadows of the shadows, reinvent their lives.

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During that same visit to the Suasi kingdom, ruled by a king with many wives and numerous children, a custom persisted that left me speechless. Women must serve food by kneeling before their husbands while serving at the table. A middle-aged woman I met during a meal, a spiritual leader in the community that hosted us, told us that sometimes she herself has to play this role when visiting her husband's family, because if she betrayed this custom, it would be perceived as contempt and would exclude her from the family. During our conversation, I noticed that another younger woman remained silent, smiling skeptically, but without saying a word. And then another diner commented that there is a social movement in the Suasi nation seeking to transition to a republic, to overcome these and other customs that denigrate people, but it has suffered repression. At that same table, I perceived three different perspectives on domestic traditions. Perspectives that are also political and spiritual. Everyone survives as best they can, and there are some forms of resistance that persist without changing the age-old patriarchy, while others resist by overcoming fear and dreaming of other "possible worlds." I then think of our America and its resistances of yesterday and today.

The next day, when I presented my talk on collective healing and possible hope in times of catastrophe to a large and diverse audience, I carried the stories I had heard the day before in my mind and heart. But, in order to avoid passing judgment on a reality I don't understand and only grasped in glimpses, I mentioned the importance of listening to those who live in the shadows today to discover their power, moving from being victims to survivors, as a key criterion for collective healing.

The silence I perceived in the audience regarding the public naming of these acts of violence revealed to me a degree of fear, perhaps prudence and ancient wisdom to resist, but creating paths to freedom in secret. The public comments were general. Then, in private, some attendees pointed out to me that the Suasi people know what they face and what they want for their nation. Others came forward at the end to share personal stories of grievance due to sexual discrimination, like micro-stories of vulnerability and resistance.

Some seeds of hope planted in a small kingdom in the far south of Africa.

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After a month-long stay in South Africa and Swaziland, visiting six cities in both countries, I gradually discovered another face of Mother Africa. Many years earlier, I had visited countries in the north of the continent, with a different demographic profile and social challenges more closely linked to religious violence than interethnic violence. A couple of years ago in Kenya, I met for the first time Black Africans with a living memory of the burden of modern slavery created by European colonial metropolises that built wealthy and powerful empires through genocide and cultural plunder, such as that carried out by the Belgian empire in the Congo.

But these subjugated peoples fought to free themselves in the 20th century until they achieved political independence, but not autonomy from the coloniality of power-knowledge-being that the great Peruvian Aníbal Quijano analyzed (Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism and Latin America). Unfortunately, many post-colonial states remain subject, as is the case with the rest of the countries in the Global South, to the economic colonialism of the powers in power in their extractive capitalist form.

Thus, in the far south of the African continent, listening to and conversing with heterogeneous groups of people of various ages, made up of Black, white, and "people of color"—as they call what we in Mexico call mestizos, who are a minority in these lands—I have many stories to continue telling in my travel notes. These are communities that still suffer the scourge of segregation, even after their independence. In South Africa, for example, the communities I visited are aware of the challenge of moving from the process that overthrew apartheid to one day achieving nations of coexistence with an independent and pluralistic state.

Internal migration within the subcontinent today is massive, driven by wars, famine, and social, ideological, and religious repression, not to mention gender-based violence against queer people, whose lives remain criminalized. As Achille Mbembe recalled a few years ago in Cologne (Bodies and Borders) when talking about deglobalizationThe challenge of the Africanization of the world lies, among other factors, in helping the planet's youngest population transition to democratic, just, and egalitarian societies.

In my opinion, one of the long-range challenges that Mother Africa gives us today lies in exploring new ways to unite the spiritual tradition of the ancestors and the wisdom of Ubuntu as proposed by Professor Jacob Mokhutso (Ubuntu is under siege: a reflection on the challenges of South Africa then and now) with the predominant Western world. It is about creating other modernities that make room for a ecology of knowledge, according to Boaventura de Sousa Santos's classic decolonial expression. In the midst of these resistances, new forms of Christianity and Islam, Judaism and Hinduism, ancestral religions and queer spiritualities will emerge, beyond their current ideological avatars that produce the annihilation of the different other, such as the Zionism we discussed earlier.

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Following a similar route, next August the Zapatista communities (Call for the meeting of resistances and rebellions "Some parts of the whole") from Chiapas, in southeastern Mexico, call us together to tell each other stories of rebellion against the crumbling hegemonic world system. But above all, to think together about how to build the pyramid of resistance that has homeland, heart, dignified rage, and the imagination of new katuns or cosmic temporality of the Mayan world.

There I will undoubtedly find a challenging moment to continue “weaving voices for the common home”, as we dreamed of with Pablo Reyna, inspired by the vibrant thought of Gustavo Esteva (Weaving voices). Since then, we began to explore the process of decolonizing the university, thanks to the action promoted in those years by David Fernández at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City.

And next September, I'll tell you other stories from an intercultural and interreligious meeting to be held in Guadalajara. This time, it was organized by a group of colleagues from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas who are working with collectives in resistance and hope amidst contexts of systemic violence against women, people in forced migration, families of missing persons, and indigenous peoples in defense of Mother Earth. The name of the event, “Re-exists: The Spirit connecting peripheries”, summarizes our way of contributing to sowing seeds and reaping fruits of resistance that have been nourished by a powerful spiritual and political background as spiritualities of the peoples.

As I conclude this series on the South African journey, I once again thank you, Mother Africa, for continuing to give birth to new worlds.

Mexico City, July 19, 2025

July 19, 2025

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