Speaking God's Language in a Gangster Dialect [NY Times]

[Elizabeth502]

nytimes.com/2010/07/08/world/americas/08mexico.html?_r=1&hp

 

[Rence]

Hmm. Well, while I couldn’t sit through a Mass with Father Loos and his potty mouth at the pulpit (because I don’t speak the same language I suppose ) I find it hard to criticize him for it. Look at what he’s accomplishing. He’s bringing street thugs and criminals back into the the Church on a regular basis and teaching them about the Church, challenging to lose their dependence on drugs and crime. Even though it’s unusual, I think this is just a baby step that will enable him to reach this particular culture of people. It’s worth watching this community of people, just to see how far Father Loos can take them on the path of salvation. You have to do something to catch a person’s attention before you can get them to actually listen to you and understand what you’re saying. If you can’t get someone’s attention, you message won’t be received. I hope he helps these people and straightens them out.

 

[Elizabeth502]

In Michoacán, a state in central Mexico known for its marijuana growing and methamphetamine production, a twisted version of the Bible has been adopted by a drug gang known as La Familia.

“I ask God for strength and to give me challenges to make me strong,” the homegrown scripture goes. “I ask him for wisdom and to give me problems to solve. I ask him for prosperity and to give me brain and muscles to work.”

It is signed by Nazario Moreno, La Familia’s spiritual leader, who goes by the nickname El Más Loco, or The Craziest One.

While this parish in Mexico City is trying to persuade troubled youths to give up their vices, El Más Loco has created a cult in the countryside that uses religion to justify his group’s murderous ways, whether that means killing police officers trying to interrupt its drug business or eliminating rivals by chopping off heads. That good and evil could be so dangerously out of whack has the pastors here shaking theirs.

…which is why in this case I don’t think it’s a matter of reaching a group with language; rather, it’s about symbols being exploited [by that group] for expediency, rather than substance being adopted out of sincerity.

Identifying culturally as Catholic is hardly unique to Latin America, but the article does put into perspective how much certainty the Church should place in the Catholicism south of the border. Whether it’s the issue of drug gangs, the marginalization of women sexually in that culture, or the gigantic abortion rate which proceeds from both poverty and a utilitarian view of women, the Church has a huge internal evangelization/conversion issue when it comes to Latin American Catholicism – not just Mexico but Central and South America as well.

Genuine Catholicism is not a cult, nor merely a birth identity.