Firebrand Padre of the Poor

Father Maximo Gomez was just 10, the son of a proud and principled peasant, when his father was murdered by a rich man’s son.

His father had built a fence for a wealthy rancher in their rural village in Jalisco state. But when the time came to pay, the rancher sent his son to the peasant with far less than the agreed-upon price. “My father said: ‘No. Pay me as we agreed, because we agreed as men. Or just rob me of everything.’ ”

With that, Father Maximo recalled, his father turned away and the rancher’s son shot him in the back.

As the man lay dying, he called in his oldest sons and nephews and made them swear, one by one, that they would not take revenge. Young Maximo and a cousin were the only two who did not take the oath.

A month later, the cousin tracked the rancher’s son to Mexico City. “You killed my uncle,” the cousin told him, according to Father Maximo. “Now, if you’re a man, draw.”

“And right there he finished him,” the priest said.

That was in 1942. Today Father Maximo, 64, is a firebrand liberation theologist, one of Mexico’s most outspoken priests. He is a self-proclaimed enemy of the rich and a renegade from the country’s largely pro-government and submissive--albeit changing--Roman Catholic Church, which represents the faith of nearly 90% of Mexico’s 90 million people.

And Father Maximo’s beliefs are helping to frame a critical debate over the role of priests and their church in a nation where, unlike in much of Latin America, the political elite has barred them from affairs of state for more than 150 years. Although hardly a household name, Father Maximo is becoming a catalyst in that debate at a time when the church is reexamining its role here, some analysts say.

In the aftermath of recent attacks by a new guerrilla force, the priest has emerged as a voice on the radical fringe of the debate over Mexican liberation theology. He is a religious supporter of armed rebellion who, some in the government and church believe, has sought revenge against the rich ever since his father’s murder.

Father Maximo, who insists he believes that vengeance is wrong, openly sympathizes with the armed Popular Revolutionary Army. The group, known by its Spanish initials EPR, has killed police officers and soldiers throughout southern Mexico since it first appeared in June at a Mass that Father Maximo attended not far from his parish in Atoyac de Alvarez, in the southern state of Guerrero.

Government investigators suspect that the frail, bespectacled priest is directly linked to the rebel force. Recalling an earlier era when Mexican priests were persecuted for political activism, Father Maximo said prosecutors recently subpoenaed him for questioning about the EPR, which he calls “an army of the people.”

Officials say they base their suspicions partly on the role Father Maximo played in a 1995 kidnapping that they believe was staged by the EPR. The kidnappers selected the priest to deliver the $30-million ransom that freed banking magnate Alfredo Harp Helu in Mexico City in June, 1994.

In a recent interview at his sleepy parish about an hour’s drive from Acapulco, Father Maximo spoke freely about the kidnapping, his sympathies for the EPR and the ideas that have distanced him from the church hierarchy. But he firmly denied ties to the rebels and insisted that he did not know Harp Helu or his kidnappers. His involvement “was just to save a life,” he said.

As for the identity of the EPR guerrillas, Father Maximo said only, “It is a group of peasants who can no longer tolerate the misery and the repression to which the government has subjected them.”

In the recently rekindled debate about how far the church can venture into political affairs, many in the Mexican clergy and independent religious analysts said they view Father Maximo as an aberration. He is one of a handful of highly politicized priests who have had little influence on the church’s conservative mainstream--although, the analysts added, that conservatism may be on the brink of change.

“The Father Maximos are colorful but not very important,” said Jose Alvarez Icaza, a social and religious activist who has served on two papal ecumenical councils. “There are a few priests like him out there. . . . But these are the exceptions.”

Victor Ramos Cortes, director of religious and social studies at the University of Guadalajara, agreed: “I don’t think this wing of the church is very broad.

“But . . . it is worth discussing. . . . He has a strong presence in the mountains [of southern Mexico], and there are people who believe in him.”

Ramos and many other religious analysts say Father Maximo and his ideas represent one possible future for Mexico’s Catholic Church. Already, they say, even some in the conservative church hierarchy have been uncommonly outspoken and critical of government policy in recent months as public support and confidence in the nation’s political institutions continue to erode.

“If the political organizations break down, it is possible that the church will become the last place to turn for the defense of the right to a decent life and even freedom of expression,” Ramos said.

It was the lack of such freedom within the church, Father Maximo said, that caused the bishop of Acapulco to pressure him to give up the equivalent of a license to practice as a parish priest. Although he still officially is a priest, his parish now is independent from the mainstream Catholic Church.

“In reference to his position as a priest, he is independent,” said Father Angel Martinez, spokesman for the archbishop of Acapulco, whose diocese includes Atoyac de Alvarez. “He has his own church, which is independent from the Acapulco diocese.”

Ramos added, “His behavior disturbed the bishop, but Father Maximo believed he should continue following his own conscience.”

On liberation theology--a modern interpretation of Christ’s biblical legacy that sanctions political activism or even rebellion to liberate the poor--Father Maximo said: “The concept is known here in Mexico, but it’s not practiced. It’s not practiced because it’s dangerous--dangerous for the well-to-do, for the higher-ups.

“Because of fear, because of repression . . . the priests cannot act as they should act because taking the liberation of the people seriously rejects the ecclesiastic government and the civilian government.”

Archdiocese spokesman Father Angel disagreed. “There are priests who are still part of the official church who also follow the beliefs of liberation theology,” he said. “But those who make up the official church are not promoters of violence.”

Father Maximo has worked for 33 years in the rural parishes of Guerrero, one of Mexico’s poorest states, where rich local bosses have lorded over the peasants for decades, as the wealthy rancher did with the priest’s father.

The analysts said Father Maximo’s views also must be seen as a part of the political history of Mexican Catholicism in the centuries after the Spanish conquerors imposed it on native Indians in the 1500s--sowing the seeds of a revolution that came centuries later.

The Revolution of Independence was sparked by a parish priest, Miguel Hidalgo, who used a Sept. 16, 1810, sermon to call for rebellion against the Spaniards.

In the mid-1800s, however, there was a severe backlash against the church, led by populist Benito Juarez, an Indian who later became known as the father of modern Mexico. As president in the 1860s, Juarez curbed the church’s wealth and power by nationalizing its property, closing convents, secularizing cemeteries and suppressing many religious festivals.

The 1917 constitution went further, banning priests from voting, owning property, discussing politics and wearing cassocks in public.

In the decades that followed, there have been brief insurrections led by the clergy, most notably the 1926 War of the Cristeros, waged by guerrilla priests and peasants in five western states. The government responded by hanging priests and massacring peasants.

The easing of those curbs on the church has been slow and recent. Carlos Salinas de Gortari began loosening them during his presidency, in the early 1990s, when he permitted bishops to wear religious garb in public. And Mexico’s largest opposition force, the conservative National Action Party, or PAN, has identified itself strongly with the church. But most of Mexico’s 20th century political leaders have shunned the clergy.

In contrast with recent hints of increasing political activism at the church’s grass roots, Ramos said, Mexico’s ranking clergy largely have been cowed into the role of government collaborators and the group’s “acritical faction” has been dominant--particularly so after the 1978 arrival of the Vatican’s conservative ambassador to Mexico, Msgr. Girolamo Prigione.

“In the 18 years since he has been here, about 70% of the bishops have been named,” Ramos said, likening the process to a U.S. president nominating Supreme Court justices. “He has had a very important influence in picking the bishops, who are, generally speaking, acritical.

“In the majority of these cases, the bishops tend to collaborate with public officials. . . . There are those who collaborate in an acritical way, those who collaborate with a critical stance but with reserve, and those who are constantly criticizing the political structure.

“Those who collaborate in an acritical way dominate.”

Father Maximo agreed. But in his view, the church’s modern history and structure has made it an undemocratic institution with insufficient space for true liberation theology, although he has been trying to fight back.

“I think there are many priests in Mexico who share this view of liberation theology, but they’re not given to speak it, to say it or to act it out,” he said. “There are various priests like this. In every state. I have graduates--I have been rector at the seminary in Acapulco three times--and I have alumni that I know think this way but cannot say it nor practice it.”

There is even a bishop in Mexico who has been labeled a liberation theologist--and worse--by hard-line clergy and politicians. In the state of Chiapas, Bishop Samuel Ruiz incurred the wrath of conservatives when he openly sympathized with the Zapatista National Liberation Army and served as a liaison between the government and those armed rebels, who staged an uprising Jan. 1, 1994.

Many church officials and independent religious analysts, in fact, cite Ruiz as an example of the democratic space that only recently has been growing within the church hierarchy.

“Now, in the mid-1990s, I do see a timid reawakening among people within the church structure who are concerned about a social transformation,” Ramos said.

He cited the uprising in Chiapas as an example of what may well happen in the future elsewhere in Mexico, where crime, corruption and insecurity have sharply eroded public trust in government during the 21 months since Mexico’s economy plunged into crisis.

“In Chiapas, there were no effective [political] parties and no functioning institutions,” Ramos said. “What happened? Well, it was the church that, in some way, had to work as an organizer and a promoter of the well-being of the people.”

And that, Father Maximo said, is the future he hopes for in the Mexican church. In the meantime, he said, reflecting on his life and his ideas in the garden of his renegade church, he is content to follow his own path.

To explain it, as he sat peacefully in soiled pants, cracked sandals and a wrinkled shirt, he told the story of his father’s murder and concluded, “My father always taught me to rebel against injustice.”