Tag: Mexico City

  • ¿Santidad laical?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

  • ¿Quiénes heredarán la tierra robada y gentrificada?Lucky Madlo Sibiya (South Africa, 1942), Untitled

    Who will inherit the stolen and gentrified land?

    By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez OP

     

    The wars of yesterday and today are brutal rituals of territorial control as a space of privilege for a powerful group over the rest of the beings that inhabit it.

    Modern expansionism, which began in the late 15th century with interoceanic voyages financed by European kingdoms that became nascent empires, was an enterprise of control of routes and territories that expanded throughout the world in a brutal manner as an unprecedented colonization project. libido dominandi The conquistador found in this "civilizing" enterprise his perfect justification in the religious armor that accompanied the wars of conquest: those lands had to be conquered in the name of God.

    This is happening today in Palestine because of the greed of the Israeli state and the powers that support it to seize the territory of the Palestinian people, both Muslim and Christian. Such colonizing libido fuels the unbridled fury of Jewish settlers eager to seize more and more land in the West Bank and Gaza. This perverse logic leads a people who were victims of Nazism to now commit genocide against a brother nation.

    A similar, but even more perverse, greed fuels the transnational war industry for the benefit of corporations that enrich themselves exponentially by creating armed conflicts to fuel the war machine that generates trillions of dollars in profits each year around the world. In this case, it involves the control of financial and industrial territories to feed the arms industry in every corner of the planet.

    Israeli Zionism and Christian Zionism are two sides of the same coin. They write another disastrous page in the history of the greed for land as property, cynically manipulating the biblical promise of the land. Since the 19th century, this Zionism born in the United Kingdom was the one that paved the way for the later creation of the State of Israel, under the pretext of the Shoah. That same Zionism, in its version of perverse political messianism represented by the State of Israel, has now invented a criminal scenario with a Muslim enemy to be defeated in order to impose its military power in the Middle East, annihilating the Palestinian people and humiliating neighboring peoples, through the blatant manipulation of the Bible, as Mitri Raheb has shown in his essential book Decolonizing Palestine. The Bible, the land, the peopleThe Israeli machinery of drones, tons of missiles and millions of bots or automated accounts flooding social networks, has been spreading fake news throughout the virtual world that has left the entire world stunned, producing a “collective cognitive dissonance,” as analyzed in Brazil by João Cezar de Castro Rocha based on Leon Festinger's theory.

     

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    And, strange as it may seem, the ongoing gentrification in many cities around the world, from Barcelona to Mexico City, is another expression of that same colonizer's will to dominate, now in its gentle version. hipster. Only this time, it's not about conquering territories to govern them through military occupation armies with the aura of an imperialist religious flag. I'm referring to the digital nomadic colonizers who take advantage of the power of their currencies, emboldened by their dreams of white and technological primacy, to inhabit residential neighborhoods in vibrant cities at a much lower cost than they would have in their countries of origin. Thus, these hipster herds nurture their cosmopolitan illusions enclosed in their urban bubbles, without coming into close contact with the population of the place they inhabit, but rather displacing them or subordinating them to their tastes and interests. This phenomenon represents the most recent and perverse version of settler colonialism that displaces previous inhabitants from their land.

    For the past five years, I've spent a period of time each year in Mexico City's Hipódromo Condesa neighborhood, where the Dominicans have for almost a hundred years animated a parish that was a religious center for the Mexican middle class with aspirations for urban modernity, though not so much religious ones. Every year I return, I'm surprised to see that the former residents have left, selling their homes, converting them into Airbnbs, or outright opening hipster-trendy businesses, ranging from vegan restaurants and light ice cream shops to bistros with Mexican fusion menus. But what has surprised me most is the proliferation of businesses specializing in angels, candles, Tarot readings, physical therapy, Bikram yoga, and other types of yoga, as well as countless spas with massage menus ranging from reflexology to tantric, not to mention, of course, Reiki mixed with "ancestral" techniques from the heart of Mexico.

    On the other hand, the Catholic parishes in that area of the city collapsed financially due to the lack of alms, but above all, their traditional religious population was aging. To the surprise of many religious ministers, in recent decades, La Condesa has become a laboratory for new religious expressions, as Hugo Suárez has documented (Images of Faith. Audiovisual Sociology of the Condesa neighborhood), a sociologist from Guadalajara, in a recent comparative study of the religious practices of residents of Condesa and Ajusco in Mexico City, one a hipster neighborhood and the other a working-class one. To complete this quick overview, it's important to note that in recent years, there has been an upswing in the number of believers in Catholic churches, especially in South America, characterized by a traditional Catholicism of intense and highly moralizing individual piety. This is an unexpected effect of gentrification in those parts.

     

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    What criteria could help us understand the meaning spiritual From these old and new territorial control processes? Could humanity's religions pull from the vault of their memories some precious talisman that sheds light on us?

    The second beatitude of Matthew's Sermon on the Mount captures the poetic message of Christ as He preached in Galilee in a provocative way. This beatitude literally says: "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth" (Matthew 5:5). The Greek word for the meek is πραΰς (praus). This term is associated with those who resist the powers that want to push them aside because they are considered redundant in the community. In Galilee in Jesus' time, these meek They were those who resisted the Roman power of taxes or military occupation.

    It is not, first and foremost, a question of understanding the meek as peaceful people according to the traditional reading of this text. Rather, it refers to those who resist violence without making a fuss, appearing invisible to the eyes of the world, because they deploy what today we might call strategies of resistance as survivors of many forms of violence.

    On the streets of our cities, we see some of these people out of the corner of our eyes, passing by us like shadows lying on a sidewalk, or living in cardboard houses under a bridge, or even lurking in the garbage looking for a piece of bread, a cigarette butt, or a can of beer with a drink to take. They are the disposables of consumer society, the ones surplus to requirements in a shopping mall, and whom we might bump into by chance or carelessness when entering the subway or when rolling down our car window at a stoplight at any urban intersection. When we approach these peripheries very close to us, we discover that, despite the subhumanization that surrounds them, these people organize, care for, and support one another.

    The promise of the land that Jesus announces to the meek It is subversive because it does not refer to the people of Israel, as imperial Davidic theology had previously intended and repeats today with its genocidal narrative. It is not about “possessing the land,” much less exploiting it, but about inherit it, that is, to receive it as a gift from the Abba who “makes his sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45). Jesus thus subverts the dominant narrative of his time, which consisted of distributing land according to religious strata that marked the economic and social scale, with the Temple playing a central role in Jerusalem as the religious capital of Judea.

    Therefore, the Galilean's greatest audacity lay in saying that the "meek" will inherit the earth, thus opening the promise of the earth to the most vulnerable in society. A world reversed from that produced by gentrification.

    To conclude these reflections, let us allow the Colombian poet José Eustasio Rivera to whisper that uncertain hope of those who resist colonization because they sense that, at the heart of their resistance, they are beginning to inherit the land:

     

    XIV

     

    I am a son of the mountain! For its coolest place
    I search, always singing, for the resounding hive;
    and in the silent caves my throat fills
    of nectarean honeycombs and of stone almonds.

    As I leave the waves, I fall asleep with pleasure
    on the dead leaves that my dog gleans;
    and through the branches, on my brown face
    the afternoon sun sets its moving arabesque.

    Inspired by a dream of distant tenderness,
    I caress the flowers; I crown myself with vines,
    and I embrace the trunks with deep emotion;

    that later, when I concentrate my thoughts alone,
    I seek the prize of the mountain, and in my spirit I find,
    the flowering shoot of a sweet illusion.

     

    Promised land, Bogotá, 1921.

     

    eSwatini, July 12, 2025

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