Catemaco abortion

The Vatican, which is a tiny little country in Italy and supposedly the seat of worldwide catholic hierarchy, is again messing with Mexico, after keeping its mouth shut for several hundred years. Previous Vatican adherents constructed most of those lovely churches across Mexico and none of the roads and in later years were subject to extermination campaigns.

The issue at present is abortion, which as usual avoids the male oriented issue of genocidal masturbation.

Mexico over the last 20 years has made fantastic progress in its efforts to control its population explosion, including unsanctioned monthly infertility injections, standard birth control information and a plethora of other prophylactics.

In the meantime, Mexico has also constructed a bunch of roads.

At present, in the Mexican legislature, a proposal to legitimatize abortion is being discussed, and that is thoroughly upsetting Vatican adherents, who only recently saw pro - homosexual laws being enacted in Mexico. The Vatican is now on the war path.

Jibbletits of Catemaco

Beautiful downtown Catemaco has its share of jibbletits, and many were celebrating the recent enactment of the first legal acceptance of homosexual unions in Mexico, after 100's of years of homophobic repressions.

There is still a worldwide problem about how to properly address communities outside of the heterosexual mainstream. Usually they are classified as GLBT or GBLT, jibbletit, a brown paper sack for gay, bisexual, lesbian and transexual content.

Mexican laws specifies that a union of a pair of people be done in a civil court. The new law, at present only effective in Mexico City, also gives the rights of a civil union to unmarried couples, which is probably the more worthwhile but less newsworthy aspect of the law.

The religious elements in Mexico, of course, are having a fit.

Catemaco Days of the Dead

The Days of the Dead (Dia de los muertos), November 1 & 2, are again creeping upon beautiful downtown Catemaco, Veracruz. And as usual, local newspapers lament the conditions of their community graveyards.

The Day of the Dead is a unique Mexican holiday combining aspects of Halloween (All Saints Day) and Thanksgiving. Its origins may be in observations of the Aztec “Lady of the the Dead (Miccailhuitontli), or simply a celebration of when everyone knows the weather seasons change in Mexico.

The holiday, (two of them, neither one is legal), is particularly popular in Southern Mexico, and provides countless tourists with photos in Oaxaca.

Broadly, the holiday consist of families welcoming their dead back into their homes with small altars decorated with photos of the dead and religious bricabrac, visiting and decorating the graves of their close kin, and having a smorgasbord for living family members related to or acquainted with the dead ones.

Dozens of flower sellers usually clutter the streets leading to a cemetery, and their flowers and the above ground sepulchres popular in Mexico, create some great photo opportunities.

Bakeries go ballistic on this holiday and create various shapes of breads for the living, including “Pan de Muerto”, bread stuffed with representative figures of the dead, “El Muñeco”, bread shaped like a corpse, and “La Cara”, a confection topped with fruits. All of these breads are outrageously delicious and contribute to the obesity epidemic in Mexico and among resident gringos.

After the holidays, the graveyards are usually ill maintained, mosquito infested junk yards, devoid of most respect for neither the dead nor the living.

Catholic Catemaco

On early Sunday morning hundreds were leaving beautiful downtown Catemaco to attend canonization ceremonies in Xalapa, Veracruz.

Rafael Guizar y Valencia, who became a saint yesterday, was known in life for his piety and kindness to the poor. Born in 1878, he cared for the wounded and dying in Mexico’s 1910-17 revolution. Ordained bishop for Veracruz State while in Cuba in 1919, he was variously driven out of his diocese and exiled, including a 2 year stay in Texas during Mexico’s late 1920’s bloody catholic rebellion.

In 1931 the Governor of Veracruz ordered Guízar’s arrest and execution. After the bishop appeared at the governor’s mansion and challenged the governor to carry out the execution himself, the governor backed down.
He died in 1938 and was reburied at the Xalapa, Veracruz cathedral in 1951. His popularity continued rising through 1995, when he was beatified (first step to sainthood).
Catholicism requires two attributable miracles for a saint to get his halo. Restored fertility of a sterile woman and remission of an invitro hare lip clinched Saint Rafael Guizar y Valencia’s title. In addition a posthumous excavation in 1951 allegedly found his body preserved.

He joins Mexico’s other 27 saints, including Saint Felipe de Jesus, a Mexican monk who was crucified in Japan; the possibly never existent Saint Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, alleged to have socialized with the “Virgin of Guadalupe”, Mexico’s revered patroness, and 25 saints appointed wholesale by Pope John Paul II who canonized 482 people and beatified 1,338 – more than all his predecessors over the past 500 years combined.

Although app. 85% of the population of Mexico is officially Catholic, less than half are considered practicing Catholics.

The church is in crisis. Many Mexican Indians are abandoning it to become evangelical Protestants. The church cannot even recruit enough Mexican men to serve as priests and its moral influence is waning, similar to what is occuring north of the Rio Grande.

The Catholic church had been one of Mexico’s prime blood suckers from conquest to the Mexican Revolution, resulting in an extreme antclerical constitution in 1917. After that Revolution, another war started in Mexico, the so-called Cristero War of rebelling catholics (1926-1929), in which the government closed churches, forbade the people to worship, and killed priests caught giving mass. Thereafter during the PRI’s long authoritarian rule, church and state were kept strictly separated.

Only after a constitutional change in 1992 did Mexico establish diplomatic relations with the Vatican. Nowadays relations between the two are at an all-time high, with Vicente Fox the first openly practicing Catholic president of Mexico, and the previous Pope having made 5 trips to Mexico.

Mexican’s catholicsm has helped convert most southern US States into bastions of their faith. So now “missionary” can be used interchangeably with “illegal alien”. Even a Santo Pollero (Saint Illegal Alien Smuggler), has been added to the “missionary” litany.

¡San Rafael Guízar y Valencia, ruega por nosotros!

References:
Mexico celebrates 25 new saints.
Toribio Romo - Mexico’s Benefactor of Illegal Aliens.

More Catemaco rain stories

Unofficially beautiful downtown Catemaco, Veracruz was drenched with 255 mm (more than 10 inches of rain 2 days ago, and it has not stopped.

The weather must have been just like that when missionaries from Puebla stopped by to visit in the early 1700’s.

Those poor wet friars left behind a statue that has turned Catemaco into a pilgrimage center for thousand of aficionados of “Our Lady of Mount Carmel”, (the “Virgen del Carmen”) who is very attractively housed in one of only 27 basilicas in Mexico.

Photo Essay: History of the Catemaco Basilica and the Virgen del Carmen

Catemaco Milagro Tree

I was not that long ago when someone saw the face of the “holy catholic virgin mother” in a tortilla in Caleria, near Catemaco. That tortilla is now enshrined after having been visited by 1000´s of faithful.

Hurricane Stan produced a new miracle.

The storm knocked down a fairly massive mango tree in a real pretty area of Catemaco, in the suburb of Tepetapan, on the shores of the Rio Grande de Catemaco.
So, as is usual, the neighborhood busied itself with the Tuxtlas favorite tool, a chainsaw!, chopping the tree to fire wood size pieces and leaving a 15 foot stump.

Then the tree, which had been lying on its side, allegedly “miraculously” raised itself.

So all the tortilla people started a new pilgrimage. If you want to see the tree, you better hurry. Apparently many visitors want to take a piece of the tree home with them.