On Monday afternoon, during the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, St. Peter's Basilica will be filled with the colors and sounds of Latin American Catholicism.
Benedict XVI will preside over the mass commemorating the bicentennial of the emancipation process that occurred between 1808 and 1824 and culminated in the proclamations of independence of the countries of Latin America.
Under the dome frescoed by Michelangelo, the liturgical songs of the "Creole Mass" by Argentinian composer Ariel Ramirez will resound. At the beginning of the celebration, the banners of all the Latin American nations - held by young flag carriers – will process across the nave of the Vatican Basilica to pay homage to the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, placed at the foot of the altar.
In the measured rhythms of the Vatican citadel today, the celebration planned for Monday is a singular and anomalous event for many reasons. It is the first time that a Pope will solemnly celebrate the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe in the basilica built over the tomb of the apostle Peter.
Also unusual - especially with regard to the Ratzingerian sensibility - is the papal celebration of a Eucharistic liturgy that is expressly correlated to the commemoration of a world historical event.
A large group of bishops who have come from overseas (including at least 7 cardinals) will be participating in the liturgy, along with ministers and ambassadors from the Latin American nations.
One of the cardinals -- probably Nicolàs de Jesus Lòpez Rodrìguez, Archbishop of Santo Domingo and Primate of the Americas -- will address to Our Lady of Guadalupe a prayer composed especially for the occasion.
The celebration signals an evident update of the Ratzingerian agenda regarding the dynamics on the continent that is home to 43% of the world’s Catholics. The apostolic See, on the highest levels, appears to be seeking propitious occasions to reconnect with the vibrant and diverse Latin American brand of Catholicism. During the mass, Benedict may also give the official announcement of his next trip to Cuba and Mexico, set for the end of March.
Implicitly, Tuesday's celebration represents a tacit purificatio memoriae on a controversial point in the history of relations between the Roman papacy and Latin American Catholicism.
The current successor of Peter offers his tribute to those processes of liberation that, two hundred years ago during their gradual implementation, were actually anathematized by the Pope of the time.
Under pressure and blackmail from the European "Catholic monarchs" who in 1773 had suppressed the Society of Jesus, Pius VII submitted to the will of the Spanish monarchy and the Holy Alliance which had freed him from the Napoleonic prison. With the encyclical Etsi longissimo terrarum (1816), he urged the South Americans to obey the King of Spain, Fernando VII of Bourbon.
His successor, Leo XII, with the brief Etsi aim diu of 1824, reiterated the Papal condemnation of the insurgents, advocating for the return of Spanish supremacy over the faraway land, at a time when the wars of emancipation were about to conclude in favor of the South American patriots. Priests and members of religious orders played a key role in the struggles for Latin American emancipation.
The Mexican "Fathers of the Country," Miguel Hidalgo and Josè Maria Morelos, were accused of masonic conspiracies, but were also known to all as devotees of Our Lady of Guadalupe. They were condemned for heresy and apostasy by ecclesiastical courts before being executed by Spanish royalist troops.
As Guzmàn Carriquiry Lecour, Secretary of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, noted in his lucid essay on Latin American independence (published in Italy by Rubbettino), in those difficult times for the papacy - which had lost contact with local Churches - the slow response in reading the "signs of the times" brought Latin American Catholicism a long and dramatic transition.
In the decades subsequent to the proclamations of independence, the ecclesiastical network of those countries -- dioceses, parishes, convents, seminaries -- appeared to be in a general state of disassembly. Continuity in the spreading of the Gospel and the sacramental practice risked being interrupted. But all was saved by the miracle of faith, communicated from mother to son, by grandfather to grandson, the power of simple prayer, and the patronal feasts kept alive by popular piety.
Little by little, the papacy – resisting Spanish protests and blackmail, and giving precedence to the pastoral criteria in the power agreement with the Ancien Regime – began to decisively support the gradual reconstitution of the episcopate in the new countries liberated from submission to the European monarchies.
"The successors of Saint Peter were always our fathers, but the war left us orphans...these pastors, worthy of the Church and of the Republic, are our sacred ties to heaven and earth." These words were spoken by libertador Simon Bolivar in his famous "Bogotà Toast," on the appointment of bishops to several large cities of South America, effected by the Pope in 1827 (which provoked angry protests from Fernando VII).
Two hundred years later, without fanfare or clamor, without belated mea culpas or self-congratulation, Benedict XVI looks to this event of the past, which could also help to discern the "signs" of these convulsive times in Latin America, which present the Church with new and unsettling scenarios.
With the mass for the bicentennial of Latin American independence, the Bishop of Rome implicitly confirms that the most basic concern for service to sensus fidelium and for the concrete needs of souls are the only criteria that can bring the apostolic See political lucidity and foresight in evaluating the convulsive events of history.