The editorial cartoon featured in a daily newspaper the other day depicted a Catholic priest and an altar boy holding a censer normally used for burning incense during mass.
What the censer contained, however, was not incense, but another strong-smelling substance–marijuana. Under the headline, “Bad odors in the church,” the caption from the altar boy said, “It’s not incense . . . they’re little green leaves that that man who sometimes comes by to see you gave me.”
In recent days, the press has had a field day with the Roman Catholic Church as a result of comments a priest made that seemed to glorify drug lords.
Although the priest said he was misquoted, the controversy once again called into question the relationship between the church and Mexico’s notorious narcotraffickers. The church has been scrambling to douse the flames, but instead has managed to make a public relations nightmare even worse.
Last week, fed up with characterizations it labeled slanderous, the church implored the government to rein in the press.
But the government itself has joined the fray, calling for an investigation of church coffers. One church official apparently already is under investigation.
The church’s latest headache began Sept. 19 at the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City, considered the nation’s holiest shrine, during a mass in honor of victims of the city’s devastating 1985 earthquake.
In his homily, Father Jose Raul Soto Vazquez was talking about neighborly love when he used two of Mexico’s drug barons, Rafael Caro Quintero and the late Amado Carrillo Fuentes, to make his point.
Caro Quintero is serving time in a Mexican prison for the murder of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent. Carrillo was considered Mexico’s–and arguably the world’s–most powerful drug lord, responsible, authorities say, for as many as 400 drug-related killings.
As he wrapped up his homily that Friday, Soto said, “All of us, now and then, do good things or else we’d be monsters.
“I have told you time and again,” he was quoted as saying, “that there are people . . . with shady reputations like Caro Quintero, that we would all want to make the type of donations that they make, the help that he and Amado Carrillo give . . . but that does not stop them from trafficking in drugs.”
With that, the brouhaha was sealed, with headlines screaming that narcotraffickers were donating money to the church.
Soto argued he was misquoted. He said he had used Caro Quintero and Carrillo as examples to illustrate that even the worst sinners are capable of good. Sinners, he said, must be embraced to convert them.
Soto said he had heard of their good deeds through the press, but some people, the faithful included, did not believe it.
Adriana Azuara, 21, a student interviewed outside a downtown subway station Friday afternoon, offered a typical response.
“It’s sad that the church is no longer interested in helping people out of the goodness of its heart,” said Azuara, who is Catholic. “The church seems to only be interested in money.”
The problem for the church is that its reputation has been tainted before.
In May 1993, after Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo was shot to death at the airport in Guadalajara, authorities said he had been caught in a crossfire between two rival drug cartels. Recently, however, the former director of the Judicial Federal Police, Juan Pablo de Tavira, linked Posadas to narcotraffickers.
Church officials categorically deny the allegations, demanding that De Tavira offer proof. So far he has not complied.
In July, following the death of Carrillo after plastic surgery in Mexico City, the church suffered another embarrassment.
Reporters who converged on Carrillo’s home in Culiacan in the western state of Sinaloa heard tales from parish priests about the good work he did for the community. Carrillo reportedly went so far as to finance the building of a church at the behest of a local priest.
“I can’t retire,” he reportedly told the priest. “I have to keep going. I have to support thousands of families.”
Telephone calls to church officials in Sinaloa were not returned.
In an effort to put the controversy to rest, Gerardo Lopez Becerra, the spokesman for the archdiocese in Mexico City, offered an extensive interview to the Tribune last week. But he contradicted himself.
Lopez denied that the church accepted donations from drug traffickers, but in the same breath acknowledged that in a country with 81 dioceses and 90 million-plus people, it is impossible to say where donations came from. “The church makes an attempt to live sanitarily,” he said, but “the church is vulnerable like all institutions. Our guarantee is that God guards the mission of the church.”
Asked specifically about church connections to Carrillo in Sinaloa, Lopez said he could not respond.
He added, however, that generally in impoverished rural areas, as is the case in Mexico, narcotraffickers and priests grow up together and establish long-term relationships. If they do make donations, Lopez said, the drug lords want to ingratiate themselves with society while also trying to clear their consciences with God.
“Giving money to the church will not save him,” Lopez said. “Only by redeeming himself can he be saved.”
The Interior Ministry, meanwhile, has asked the attorney general’s office to investigate the church’s books. The church has said it welcomes such a probe, insisting it is not qualified to do police work.
