Columns

Amid a challenging week for Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto, as a salto of critical reports crowded media headlines here and internationally, there was a conversation between two Mexican newsmen that was refreshing.  Veteran Mexican newsmen, they well knew what they were talking about. Meaning that they had face-to-face experience with the history of Peña Nieto’s political and personal life, and of the aromatic history of his political party, the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI).  And because they are experienced political investigators, they clearly recognized the often veiled nuances of political malfeasance, no matter how distractingly adorned.  Yet they had some rather differing opinions.

As both non-believers and fervent Catholics look on, the Mexican Catholic Church, which throughout its jagged history has tended to side with dictatorial elites, is having twitchy days since its new leader, Jesuit Pope Francis, was elected.  

Even non-Catholic Mexicans have been asking: Why wasn’t a Mexican given a look when the prelates in Rome decided the new pope had to be a non-European?  Does the new Jesuit pope, Francis, realize that from the moment he was selected a no-holds-barred war commenced between him and Rome’s Vatican/Curia?

During that just-past “crazy” March — from the Mexican saying, Febrero loco, Marzo mas poco —‘Nando Diaz Mendez had an unusual occurrence in the small covered corral of his chilly mountainside ranch.  Two of his mares dropped foals within five days of one another. The blocky dun, always fat, surprised him. She was early. But now, as government-monopoly gasoline becomes so “dear,” the foal was a welcome surprise. Horses, especially valued during the rainy season, now represented a year-round economic bounty despite “painful” prices of supplemental livestock feed.

The bowl hasn’t changed much since the Neolithic era, 4,000-10,000 years ago, said Julie Lasky, the deputy editor of the New York Times’ House & Garden section March 27.  She was reporting that a small white ceramic bowl carved with the lotus blossoms had just fetched more than 2.2 million dollars at auction at Sotheby’s in New York. That was ten times more than the famed auction house expected. (But present day peoples have a habit of devaluing bowls generally, no matter how useful and striking they are.)

For the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics – and for Latin America’s 483 million Catholics – Semana Santa (Holy Week) has been a surprising time of provocative and perhaps uncharted change.   The new pope is not only the first non-European to become heir to the throne of St. Peter in more than 1,000 years, he is the first pope from the Americas, the first pope from Latin America, and the first to take the name Francisco (Francis), after the humble, much revered Francis of Assisi, the founder of the Franciscan Order.