MEXICO
National Catholic Reporter
by John L Allen Jr on Mar. 22, 2012 All Things Catholic
Pope Benedict XVI arrives today in León, Mexico, to kick off the 23rd foreign trip of his papacy but his first to Spanish-speaking Latin America. (He visited Brazil in 2007.) Benedict will spend the weekend in Mexico, then move Monday to Cuba before returning to Rome late Wednesday.
At one level, this is a tale of two different trips.
The pope’s swing in Mexico will likely amount to a celebration of popular Catholicism, with about 3 million exuberant faithful expected to turn out. It also comes just ahead of national elections in July, raising fears of manipulation of the trip for political ends, especially given perceptions that the Mexican church is aligned in favor of the conservative National Action Party. However, Mexican Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragán, a retired Vatican official who will accompany the pope, recently insisted that trying to see the trip through the prism of electoral politics “would be like forcing the ocean into an oyster.” …
In Mexico, Benedict also faces the shadow of the scandals associated with the late Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, who has become a global symbol of the clerical sexual abuse crisis. Jesuit Fr. Federico Lombardi said this week Benedict will not meet with victims of Maciel in Mexico, because such an encounter had not been requested by the local bishops. On Saturday in León, one of Maciel’s victims is scheduled present a new book critical of the church’s response to the Maciel case, titled “The Will Not to Know.”
Given that context, even a modest show of popular enthusiasm for Benedict XVI, as well as anything he says or does that’s at all relevant or engaging, may be enough to label the trip a success.
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