Religion and Politics in Contemporary Mexico Ad

Addison De Witt (1998) has suggested that if Northern Ireland presents a case of religious fanaticism dominating politics, Mexico presents one of politics dominating religious fanaticism. Mexico's popular culture is Roman Catholic, but its politics and its state are largely secular, with vast majorities demonstrating both immense respect for the Catholic Church and firm opposition to the political involvement of religious leaders or symbols (Mexican Protestants & politics, 2001). In the past ten years or so, despite Mexico's expressed desires to keep church and state separate, the two institutions have become more and more inextricably tied together in Mexico's traditional or indigenous communities. Recently, with the election of Vicente Fox as Mexico's first non-Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) president in more than 70 years, a degree of "quasi-official" approval for Roman Catholic policies and concerns has begun to emerge in Mexico (Mexican Protestants & politics, 2001). While it would be incorrect to argue that the secularization of Mexican politics and economics is about to end, it is true that during the past ten years, religious institutions in Mexico have begun to express their views and act more publicly with respect to the critical issues of poverty, inequality, globalization, and economic development.

In the early 1990s, Arthur Jones (1993) asserted that Roman Catholic officials in Mexico were reluctant to protest economic inequality and poverty bec

and control over the Mexican state would not be shared by indigenous peoples and the poor (Chiapas bishops call�, 1999). While the views of Ruiz and others sympathetic to the Zapatista cause (and the plight of many poor Mexicans from the Roman Church and the smaller Protestant sects in Mexico's rural regions) represent a sector of the Church, they were not then and are not now necessarily representative of the more conservative elements of the Church hierarchy. Sharp divisions between the rich and poor - manifested not only in terms of the population as a whole, but also manifested by the members of the Catholic Church itself - have continued to polarize Mexico's Church hierarchy and its electorate. Revolution in the Chiapas and elsewhere has been fed by poverty (Coleman & Coleman, 1994). Any number of Roman Catholic priests have joined, overtly or covertly, with the rebels - at least to the degree of providing verbal support for the rebels' cause, offering to mediate between the rebels and the government, and helping to establish lines of communication between the rebels and the government. The situation was viewed as critical by Jesuit Superior General for Mexico, Father Mario Lopez Barrio, who rebuked the Mexican governme

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