Open-Air Mass Is Also Political Statement

It was a sight not seen in perhaps 140 years: an open-air Mass by the Roman Catholic Church attended by hundreds of thousands in the heart of the nation, the sprawling plaza known as the Zocalo.

The celebration Saturday was yet another sign that the long and bloody hostility between the government and church in Mexico has broken down, and that the church is playing a more public role.

That role also has affected Mexico’s tightly contested presidential race. The church has been increasingly vocal in calling for democratic reforms, and politicians have openly courted church supporters.

In a March 25 pastoral letter, Mexico’s bishops called for “a reformulation of the whole political system,” including constitutional reforms. “We Mexicans are living not only in an epoch of change, but of a true change of epochs,” the bishops said.

That change has not been comfortable for all, particularly as the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI, fights to continue its 71-year hold on power.

Church and state have sparred in the press over just how far priests can go to influence politics under a 1992 reform that ended many of the draconian laws imposed on the church. Those restrictions, starting in 1855, were part of a movement to separate church from state that at times erupted into bloodshed. Among the laws was an 1873 ban on outdoor religious ceremonies. The Zocalo has not seen an open-air Mass since even before that ban was imposed.

In the election campaign, leading opposition candidate Vicente Fox has pushed the limits of the church’s new role--once by displaying a banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico’s patron saint, at a campaign rally.

And Fox recently distributed pamphlets quoting the pastoral letter’s comment that “a fuller democratic culture supposes the real possibility” of alternating parties in power.