Report finds Mexico one of the most dangerous places to be a priest
Mexico is one of the most dangerous nations in the world to be a Catholic priest, a new report has found.
The period 2018-24 saw the murders of 10 priests and a seminarian, according to the Catholic Multimedia Centre (CCM), whose report published on 9 December covered the six-year presidency of Andrés López Obrador. In the same period, it said, seven bishops and seven priests had survived attacks, some involving kidnappings, gun-wounds and robbery.
The CCM said that every week 26 churches in Mexico are profaned or attacked, the second most in any Latin American nation.
In addition, nearly 900 incidents were reported where Catholics were subject to extorsion or death threats, while criminals sent clergy severed pigs’ heads alongside demands for “protection” money.
“Never before in the history of Mexico has violence reached [such] worrying levels which afflict all social sectors,” noted Guillermo Gazanini Espinoza and Fr Sergio Omar Sotelo Aguilar SSP, the authors of Violence against priests, religious and institutions of the Catholic Church in Mexico.
The violence in certain regions and cities had “totally destabilised the country’s economy, social, political and even religious life”, they said.
“In Mexico, pastoral agents, lay people, priests and ministers of other Churches have assumed the role the authorities have declined,” the report added, explaining: “A void in power and the dismantling of the state of law triggers a need for someone to take on what the state has stopped doing,” due to its “incapacity” or else “collusion with evil doers and crime” in a “combination of corruption and impunity”.
The CCM cited the murder on 20 October of Fr Marcelo Pérez Pérez, a human rights champion in the Diocese of San Cristóbal de las Casas in the southern state of Chiapas.
Pablo Vargas, from the charity Christian Solidarity Worldwide, said religious leaders working with the marginalised who attacked corruption were “often identified by organised criminal groups as problems to be silenced or eliminated altogether”.
He urged President, Claudia Sheinbaum to implement measures to protect religious leaders. The Times reported recently that 2,700 Mexicans had been murdered since Sheinbaum assumed the presidency on October 1.
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