DECRYING the violence that Mexicans are enduring, the Vatican has suggested excommunication as a possible punishment for drug traffickers whose war with the Government has led to the deaths of thousands of people in the past year. But the Catholic Church's most severe form of rebuke probably would have little effect on traffickers and killers who lack a religious conscience, the Vatican's number two official, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, conceded.
Speaking to Latin American journalists before travelling to Mexico on Monday, Cardinal Bertone said it was a "duty" to fight drug gangs because their actions represent "the most hypocritical and terrible way of murdering the dignity and personality of today's youth".
"Certainly, excommunication is a very harsh deterrent that the church has used to deal with the most serious crimes in its history, from the very first centuries," Cardinal Bertone said when asked if the censure would be appropriate in this case.
Excommunication bars a Catholic from receiving sacraments and participating in public worship.
"But I should observe that excommunication is a punishment that touches only those who have some form of ecclesiastical conscience, an ecclesiastical education," he added.
The Vatican, Cardinal Bertone said, is alarmed at the "disasters" of drug-fuelled violence, kidnappings and generalised insecurity in Mexico and, increasingly, in some neighbouring countries. He called on Catholics to pray for traffickers to have a change of heart.
Cardinal Bertone, whose official title is Vatican secretary of state, which makes him a kind of prime minister to Pope Benedict, will be in Mexico for the sixth World Meeting of Families, a church conference that starts this week.
Within the "narco-culture" that surrounds the drug trade in Mexico, gangsters make use of a blend of Catholic observance mixed with superstition and even their own iconography. For example, many revere the so-called saint of the narco-traffickers, a Robin Hood-type character named Jesus Malverde.
A little more than a year ago Mexico's President, Felipe Calderon, launched a nationwide army offensive against powerful and well-armed drug gangs, but the bloodshed has only increased. More than 5000 people were killed last year.
Officially, the church hierarchy in Mexico has supported the government campaign while also urging dialogue and an end to the violence. But in some parts of the country priests have been willing to accept money from local drug lords to pay for church repairs or other community projects.
"They are very generous with the societies of their towns," Bishop Carlos Aguiar Retes, president of the Mexican Bishops Conference, said in comments last April, according to an account by the newspaper Reforma.
In some remote towns, he said, "they put up lights, communications, roads, at their own expense … Often they also build a church or a chapel."
The remarks outraged many Mexicans, and church officials later said the bishop was taken out of context. But human rights activists have long complained of complacency by many priests.
"There are seminaries, churches, who accept money not knowing where it came from," Mercedes Murillo, president of the Sinaloan Civic Front in the city of Culiacan, a major drug-trafficking centre, said in a recent interview.
"They wash their hands like Pontius Pilate."
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(Source: SMCA)