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!
