12/24/00

	Cardinal George speaks at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City. Photos for Catholic New World/Carlos Porraz

Chicago y Mexico: fraternidad y colaboración

Over two hundred pilgrims from Chicago celebrated the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Dec. 12, at the basilica in Mexico City, near the spot where the Blessed Virgin appeared to a Mexican named Juan Diego in 1531. She told him that she was his mother and the mother of his people, who should come to her in all their sorrows and difficulties. The Mexican people have been coming to her ever since. In recent years, Catholics on this continent who are not Mexican have also been coming to her. Chicagoans came to her this year on her feast day. She is another point of unity among people of this hemisphere who worship her divine Son.

The Mass celebrated in the basilica on Dec. 12 was the high point of four days of visits to places in Mexico City and of conversations with persons in charge of the Archdiocese of Mexico City. We visited a new college-level seminary which will educate seminarians from this country who want to come to know better the church and culture of Mexico. Some of us stayed at the Major Seminary of Mexico City, founded three hundred and eleven years ago by Pope Innocent XII and King Charles II of Spain to form priests to serve in Mexico.

Because Catholic Charities of Chicago and Caritas Mexico cooperate in international adoptions, I blessed and opened officially a house which will care for children who are waiting in Mexico for families here to adopt them. These will not be, for the most part, newly born infants but children from one to ten years of age, many of them with some disability. They are looking for what Catholic Charities calls a “Forever Family”, parents and sisters and brothers who will welcome them into their home here as members of their family.

At a parish in Mexico City, we visited a medical clinic which serves people who, for one reason or another, fall out of the state medical system. Mexico City receives many “immigrants” from other parts of Mexico. Some of them are Indians, members of one of the 60-some tribes who constitute the indigenous peoples of Mexico. Three of them, from three different groups, spoke of the trauma experienced by the native people coming to work in a great city. They compared it to living in a machine. The rhythms of nature determined their way of life before they migrated to the city, and the cultural adaptation demanded of them to work in Mexico City crushes many of them. I have heard similar stories from American Indians here.

Department heads and others from our Pastoral Center and Catholic Charities spent time talking with their counterparts in the Chancery Office of the Archdiocese of Mexico and Caritas Mexico. These conversations opened up areas of cooperation, especially in catechesis and formation for ministry. I am most grateful to all those from our Archdiocese who took the time to get to know officials of the Archdiocese of Mexico City and to lay a foundation for future “fraternity and collaboration”. As much as cooperation in any particular work or ministry, the personal relations formed during this trip will enable us to accompany our sister Church in Mexico and will keep them a continual presence in our life here.

While the development of a deeper relationship between the Church in Mexico City and our Archdiocese here preoccupied us during the trip, the relationship between the government of Mexico and the Church there was a constant backdrop to our visit. For the first time in Mexican history, the Church is neither united to the State nor persecuted by the State. During most of this past century, the Mexican constitution forbade the Church to own property, deprived priests of the right to vote and other civil rights, forbade Church employees to participate in the government’s social security program and made it illegal for any foreign priest to enter Mexico.

Because of changes in the Mexican constitution and because of the recent election of a president who is openly a believer, the Church in Mexico has to learn how to be a public Church in a free society. Cardinal Norberto Rivera, Archbishop of Mexico, and I reflected together on this situation, and I watched him make his way among reporters who were also learning how to report on the Church. We were joined by government officials at a luncheon with business leaders discussing poverty in Mexico; and a member of the Mexican government joined us at table for our farewell banquet. What the new government of Mexico is talking about is something discussed here during the last electoral campaign: how should the government use Church agencies to serve the poor. This is always a controversial topic, but we’ve been doing it in this country for two hundred years; they’ve not done it in Mexico for a century.

I am most grateful to Cardinal Rivera and his people in Mexico City for the marvelous welcome they gave us. I am equally grateful to Father Esequiel Sanchez and Father Michael Boland and all those in Chicago who worked so hard to plan this pilgrimage. Most of all, I am grateful to Our Lady of Guadalupe for her love for all her children in Mexico and the United States and throughout the Americas. As we prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus, her Son and our Lord, let us pray that the faith that makes us one with her and one another may transform our lives now and prepare us for a new life in the coming year, a life filled with gratitude and love. She is with us in all our sorrows and difficulties; she is our mother. God bless you.

Sincerely yours in Christ,

Francis Cardinal George, OMI
Archbishop of Chicago

Back to Archive 2000