Cardinal Felipe Arizmendi, bishop emeritus of San Cristóbal de Las Casas and head of the Doctrine of Faith at the Mexican Episcopal Conference (CEM), offers readers of Exaudi his weekly article.
FACTS
If you mistreat or kill a dog, a cat or another animal, you are insulted, punished with a fine and even jail; but if you consciously abort a baby in gestation, some applaud you, celebrate it as a triumph and legislators have changed the laws so that it is not a crime. Even more, they defend it as a “right.” In some countries, it is permitted to kill newborns whose parents tried to abort them and for whatever reason were unsuccessful. Is this growing or decreasing in humanity?
The new President of the United States is against abortion, which is to be applauded, but he denies migrants the possibility of working in his country, as if they were all dangerous criminals. Certainly, criminals cannot be left free there or here; but the vast majority are good citizens and hard workers. The same President pursues drug traffickers in our countries, whom our government should not defend, but supports arms manufacturers in his country, weapons that the traffickers buy from businessmen there and that give them “power” to manufacture all kinds of drugs and get them to consumers there. He pursues the traffickers, but supports those who get rich by selling them weapons. Is that consistent?
The criterion is being imposed that it is the same to be a man or a woman, that everyone can choose what they want to be, regardless of their genital conformation, and that marital alliances can be formed between man and man and woman with woman. That they live together as friends or partners and that they share much of their lives, no one criticizes them or prevents them from doing so; but that this relationship is validated as a marriage, is another thing. Is this legal freedom a recognition of what the human being is, man and woman, or an anthropological confusion, physically and emotionally?
Indigenous people, the poor, those with a lower social position, those with a different skin color, the terminally ill, the elderly, prisoners, the mentally handicapped are looked down upon, and on the contrary, the rich are overvalued, those with a more attractive body figure, those who dress more elegantly, those who have studied specialties at foreign universities, as if for that reason alone they were more valuable as people. Isn’t that a distorted anthropological evaluation?
ENLIGHTENMENT
The Mexican bishops, in the Global Pastoral Project 2031+2033, affirm:
“We are concerned about the arrival of this new culture that blurs and mutilates the human figure, and it is here where we find the heart of the profound transformation that is taking place and what we identify and call the fundamental cultural core: the denial of the primacy of the human being! That is, we find ourselves facing a profound anthropological-cultural crisis” (PGP 20).
“Having contemplated reality with the eyes of shepherds, we note that at the center of the transformation that this change of era has brought us there is a profound anthropological-cultural crisis, with many faces and expressions. Therefore, with more strength and conviction than ever, we now want to affirm, with the heart and mind of shepherds, that for us the mystery of man is only clarified in the mystery of the incarnate Word. Because Adam, the first man, was a figure of the one who was to come, that is, Christ our Lord. Christ, the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and reveals to him the sublimity of his vocation (GS 22)” (PGP 87).
“We need to re-encounter the God of Jesus Christ, we need to return to the Gospel. Because only from there can we understand who we are and what we are called to as the Redeemed Church. The so-called anthropological-cultural crisis asks us to rethink our schemes of evangelization for the concrete human being whom we are called to serve; to recover a healthy vision of the human being, we must do so from the contemplation of the mystery of Christ the Redeemer. Encountering the God of Jesus Christ will allow us to contemplate in Him an image of man who recognizes the original goodness with which we were created, in freedom and for good. But it will also allow us to contemplate our internally fractured being, our difficulties in maintaining inner balance, interpersonal conflicts, human sin which today has multiple manifestations and the radical ambiguity of human life which has the face of a crisis of hope” (PGP 102).
ACTIONS
In this same document, the bishops, in the option for a Church that announces and builds human dignity, propose: “To highlight, in the ecclesial spaces of evangelization and catechesis, a Christian anthropological formation in an integral and systematic way, presenting clearly the person of Jesus Christ, as a model of man (of the human person), from a kerygmatic perspective” (PGP 173, a).
