Pope Launches Fence-Mending Tour of Mexico

Urging Mexicans to seek tolerance and justice in adversity, Pope John Paul II began a fence-mending mission here Sunday to a Roman Catholic country where church and state have feuded since colonial times.

President Carlos Salinas de Gortari greeted John Paul in an address that was gracious evidence of the new thaw between the Vatican and the government of a nation whose people are strongly Catholic but whose constitution is harshly anticlerical.

“Throughout the world, your name is identified with concord among men and among nations. Respect and dialogue unite us,” Salinas told the Pope. “Welcome to this land, which with generosity calls you Mexico’s friend and the pilgrim of peace.”

John Paul’s public bienvenido was a giant street party. As they did to mark the first foreign trip of his pontificate in 1979, Mexicans turned out by the hundreds of thousands to greet their Pope. Television commentators spoke of “millions” lining the streets on an afternoon of cruel and cloying smog. A Mexican network called it the biggest fiesta in the history of a city which, with a population of 18 million, is the world’s largest.

The visit that brought joy to huge and festive crowds also meant quick profits for unabashed capitalists selling John Paul’s fatherly visage on everything from key rings to beach towels to papal comic books.

The 69-year-old pontiff launched his eight-day visit with an appeal to the 82 million Mexicans to “build a society that is more just, fraternal and hospitable. Attempting to overcome old confrontations, it is necessary to foster a growing solidarity among all Mexicans.”

Spiritual values, John Paul told airport well-wishers and a national television audience, could help Mexicans “to become promoters of a greater social justice, a greater respect for the dignity of man and his rights, of relations ruled by dialogue and understanding instead of the temptation to rupture and conflict.”

After more than a century, the Vatican and Mexico resumed official ties in February when Salinas named a permanent personal representative--an ambassador in everything but name--to the Holy See.

Official hostility to the church is rooted in what the victors of the 1910 Mexican Revolution considered its alliance with reactionary political forces and its unconscionable wealth in a country where the majority was as poor then as it is today.

Ambitious, aloof and interventionist, the church sided with Spain during Mexico’s drive for independence, and by the mid-19th Century owned half of the lands in the country.

Mexico’s frankly anti-church 1917 constitution has no parallel in this hemisphere in its severity. In fact, the Pope technically broke Mexican law Sunday by wearing his white cassock in public.

Such restrictive laws are now typically honored in the breach. A church that claims the fidelity of 95% of all Mexicans is lobbying to have these laws eliminated, against the opposition of many Catholics themselves, who, citing history, distrust the Mexican church’s ability to stay out of politics.

The religious highlight of the Pope’s opening day came in ceremonies beatifying five Mexican Catholics at the National Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe. There, John Paul took implicit note of a stagnant decade that has brought widespread economic distress for Mexico and widened an alarming gap between the few rich and the many poor.

Mexicans, the Pope said, must “overcome difficulties and continue building a new society ruled by justice, truth and fraternity.”

Reiterating calls for social justice and human rights that are hallmarks of his travels, John Paul told the huge crowd before the basilica at Guadalupe:

“You cannot remain indifferent to the suffering of your brothers--before poverty, corruption, the outrages against truth and human rights.”

After more than six decades of one-party rule in Mexico, the relative positions of church and state are to some degree reversed.

In February, Mexican Jesuit priests, in a human rights report for 1989, noted scores of murders, kidnapings and torture by police, armed forces and loyalists of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party and accused the government of widespread fraud in state elections.

On Sunday, though, politics took a back seat to a 16th-Century Indian known to Mexican history and legend as Juan Diego.

Some Mexican historians doubt that he ever lived, but Juan Diego was the star of beatification ceremonies at Guadalupe. Said to have been one of the earliest converts to Christianity in the New World, Juan Diego reportedly saw a dark-skinned Madonna in an apparition on a hillside on Dec. 9, 1531. She asked that a shrine be built on the site.

When Juan Diego brought roses to a disbelieving Spanish bishop at the Madonna’s instruction, the story goes, her image appeared to have been stamped on the serape (blanket) in which he wrapped them. She would become Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe, the patroness of Latin America. Sunday, John Paul confirmed centuries of reverence for Juan Diego as Mary’s messenger, beatifying him.

At the same ceremony he also beatified three Indian boys, Cristobal, Antonio and Juan, who are among the first New World Christians martyred for their faith in the 16th Century, as well as a 19th-Century Mexican priest, Jose Maria de Yermo y Parres, whom the Pope praised as “the Apostle of Charity.”

The 47th foreign trip of his reign brought John Paul back to Latin America, which is home to about 40% of the world’s Catholics, for the first time in two years.

“This trip is to confirm to Mexicans and Latin Americans that they have not lost the heart of the Pope,” a relaxed, bantering John Paul told reporters aboard his plane.

En route to South of the Border, the 13-hour papal flight from Rome crossed the American heartland. Inbound from Canada, it crossed the Great Lakes and, high above banks of clouds, it flew a Chicago-Texas route into Mexico.

As the plane entered American airspace, John Paul radioed greetings to President Bush “and all your fellow citizens.”

“I pray that your nation, in the traditions of liberty and justice on which it was founded, will continue to be the hospitable land in which many people, including those of Mexican origin, have been given the opportunity of starting a new life,” said the papal message.

Looking relaxed and glad to be on the road again, the Pope told reporters that a long-expected trip to Cuba would not, as the Vatican announced two weeks ago, come before year’s end.

The trip has been agreed to by Cuban bishops, the Cuban government and the Holy See, John Paul said, but “it seems that this project will not mature before the end of this year.”