On January 24, 2011 the Indigenous people of Mexico and neighboring Guatemala lost one of their greatest advocates in Bishop Samuel García Ruiz.
For over 40 years Bishop Ruiz accompanied and struggled alongside of
Mayans in the Chiapas region, promoting his message of nonviolence and
the full humanity of indigenous peoples.
His advocacy for the indigenous not only made him a controversial
figure among the wealthy Mexican landowners in Chiapas and throughout
the country, but also led to strained relations with the Vatican.
He was
accused of having leftist political tendencies and for being too open
to the comingling of Mayan and Roman Catholic religious practices.
In
fact, the Bishop’s theology and the practices of his local church were
under investigation by the Vatican (the results were never released)
and when he reached the mandatory age of retirement at 75, no special
extensions were given to him.
Not only has the Church of Mexico lost
one of its prophetic voices, but so has the global Church as a whole.
Bishop Ruiz, who attended every session of the Vatican II Council and
was present in the 1968 gathering of Latin American bishops in Medellín,
Columbia, represents a generation of priests that truly heeded the call
of the Council to immerse the Church within the modern world.
He
represents a generation of priests who embodied the teachings of the
Gospel deeply engaged in its context, the horrific suffering of
Indigenous peoples at the hands of wealthy landowners.
Born in 1925 in Guanajuato, Mexico and ordained at age 24 after
studying at the Gregorian University in Rome, Bishop Ruiz led the
Diocese of San Cristobal de las Casas from 1959 to 2000. In the 1990s he
served as mediator in an attempt to end the conflict between the
Mexican government and the indigenous Zapatista National Liberation Army
in Chiapas.
Though he was asked to step down as mediator for supposedly favoring
the Zapatistas, the tentative truce between the two groups has been
sustained since 1998. He is remembered as an advocate for the Indigenous
who not only promoted their full humanity, but also respected their
religious traditions and culture.
To the Indigenous he was known as the Jtatic
(“Bishop of the Poor”) in the Tzotzil Mayan language. While often
caricatured as a “red bishop” who preached a communist message of class
struggle that supported the armed Zapatistas, Bishop Ruiz consistently
espoused a vision of nonviolence and peaceful mediation.
In 1999 he
founded the Father Bartolome de las Casas Human Rights Centre and his
life as a whole reminds us that the Latin American Church has been and
still is the Church of the Poor.
Bishops Ruiz’s death marks the passing of yet another priest who
embodied the grassroots Christian action at the heart of liberation
theology.
Since the 1990s eulogies to liberation theology have abounded,
claiming that the Christian praxis in solidarity with the poor that
lies at its heart has failed.
I think often we academics make such
grandiose critical claims, as we are taught to do, and forget the flesh
and blood individuals whose lives have been transformed and who deeply
mourn the passing of religious leaders such as Ruiz; he not only lived
with the poor, he learned their language (four Mayan dialects), and
placed their struggles on an international arena.
And yet I hope that
ten years from now his advocacy will not be remembered as a relic of the
past—a Church that once was—and instead that there’ll be an active
remembrance and embodiment of his non-violent commitment to the
Indigenous poor and his respect for their culture and religion.
SIC: RD/INT'L