Day 2 - Guajuanato
Motorcade and Courtesy Call
on President Calderon
The Pope's official day began with a late afternoon drive to Guajuanato city from Leon, where at a spot just outside the city, he transferred from a car for the ride in the Popemobile to the center of the city. The newsphotos do not capture the turnout nor the excitement of the crowds as the Popemobile went through the city and its destination - the federal building Casa de Condel Rul off the Plaza de la Paz fronting teh Basilica of Our Lady of Light in Guajuanato city.
At Casa de Conde Rul, he was welcomed by the mayor who presented him with the keys to the city, preceding the Holy Father's formal courtesy call on President Felipe Calderon.
After the meeting with President Calderon,the latter led the Pope to a balcony overlooking the Plaza de la Paz so the Pope could address the crowd.
The New York Times, of course, chooses to interpret the Pope's visit as politically motivated in favor of President Calderon and his party' candidate in the coming presidential elections, and doesn't lack for envious local pols toquote in support of its silly hypothesis.
In Pope’s Mexico visit,
the pastoral is political
By DAMIEN CAVE
LEÓN, Mexico, March 24 — Pope Benedict XVI met with President Felipe Calderón on Saturday evening in what was described by the Vatican as a courtesy visit in the middle of a purely pastoral trip to Mexico and Cuba.
But his comments beforehand, about violence in Mexico and communism in Cuba, made it clear that the Pope did not intend to ignore his potential political influence. Especially here in Mexico, political observers have been arguing for months that the timing of his arrival — 14 weeks before the presidential election — makes the visit a political endeavor with a partisan goal: to bolster President Calderón’s conservative National Action Party, known as the PAN, as campaign season kicks into high gear.
“It’s not a pastoral visit, it’s an electoral visit for the PAN,” said Homero Aridjis, Mexico’s most famous poet. “Benedict isn’t going to cities like Ciudad Juárez,” the gritty border metropolis that has been traumatized by violence. “If it was a spiritual visit, he would go to the places that really need his presence and his ministry.” [Poet shmoet! What a sleazepot!]
It may not be quite that simple. Pope Benedict XVI is 84, and no pope before him has traveled so far from Rome so late in life. The Pope also addressed Mexico’s struggle against violence on the plane trip here from Rome, where he blamed the “idolatry of money” for drawing young people into lives of crime.
In a brief speech at the airport here, he also said he was praying for “those who suffer because of old and new rivalries, resentments and all forms of violence.”
And yet, the Pope’s approach — framing Mexico’s violence as a personal moral failing — perfectly matches that of President Calderón, a devout Catholic. [DUH! It's Calderon's position that matches that of the Pope - the Church, really - not the other way around!]
That message, experts say, will help shift the debate away from policy, and complaints about how the Calderón administration has managed the fight against drug cartels that has led to 50,000 deaths since late 2006.
President Calderón has done his part as well. As he introduced the Pope at the airport on Friday, he distanced his government from responsibility for problems like corruption by stressing that Mexico was enduring “difficult and decisive moments,” and “moments of great tribulation” as organized crime and “evil” sought to ruin the country.
The result so far is that while all three presidential candidates have said they would attend the papal Mass on Sunday in León,
the Pope’s timing, comments and choice of location — a conservative, Catholic stronghold — have made clear that the Vatican’s natural partner is Mr. Calderón’s party. [I can hear Cave's editors telling him, "Write us a story that will 'sex up' this boring pastoral visit", and Cave gladly obliges marshalling any silly argument he can think of to support the politicla hypothesis.]
“The party closest to the Vatican, the Pope and Catholic religion, is the PAN,” said Gabriel Guerra, a political analyst and consultant whose clients have included all three of Mexico’s major political parties. “They would have the most to benefit.”
Experts say the Church also has a vested interest in keeping the PAN in power. The party was founded by conservative Catholics, and since it won the presidency in 2000, ending 71 years of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, PAN officials and Catholic leaders have come to rely on each other for conservative support on social issues. The church has also found the PAN to be helpful in its push for greater freedom to add religious education to public schools.
But that tightening bond also carries political risks. Mexicans are used to a strict separation of church and state: “Don’t mess with politics” is a standard refrain even among the very religious.
Perhaps conscious of those risks, Mr. Calderón did not kiss the Pope’s ring when they met, the standard papal greeting for Catholics, choosing a less submissive bow. [No, dumbo! It's not at all standard any more! An individual can choose to do it or not.]
In the final days of the trip, the dance between the Pope and the PAN is likely to continue at arm’s length, with occasional steps in alignment.
“If it looks like the PAN is too close to the Pope, especially given its history and where the Pope is going, it can look like an overreach,” said the Rev. Joseph Palacios, a sociology professor at Georgetown University whose research has focused on the Mexican church. “That’s the irony. If the Church looks like it’s really involved in politics, it loses a high degree of credibility and trust.” In all this pompous speculation and pontification, why has no one ever mentioned that the Church has never, since Mexico's anti-clerical mania reached the extremes it did in the 1920s all the way to the early 1990s, sought to influence Mexican elections in any way? I do not know if John Paul II in any of his five visits to Mexico was similarly accused, but clearly, this entire story is spun out of sheer and idle speculation -plausible perhaps to some, but totally unfounded. IT'S REALLY THE MSM THAT IS SEEKING TO POLITICIZE THE POPE'S TRIP AND BEING ABLE TO EXPLOIT IT THAT WAY.]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 25/03/2012 10:00]