Posted on 11/19/2007 7:12:48 PM PST by Pyro7480
MEXICO CITY, NOV. 19, 2007 (Zenit.org).- The cathedral of Mexico City closed its doors last weekend, after more than 100 political protesters disrupted Sunday Mass.
The decision was announced the same day by Armando Martínez, the president of the College of the Catholic Lawyers of Mexico, who said that the cathedral will not open again until the government can guarantee the security of the faithful and priests.
During the midday Mass at the cathedral Sunday, a group of members of the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) interrupted the liturgy chanting slogans supporting Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the 2006 presidential candidate who lost by a slim margin to Felipe Calderón. López Obrador contested the results, raising allegations of electoral fraud, and proclaimed himself the "legitimate president" of Mexico.
The protesters also threatened the faithful, the priests and Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera, archbishop of Mexico City, who was in Rome on Sunday.
"These are acts of aggression that we should not allow," said Martínez, who said the main concern is for the safety of the faithful present in the cathedral, as well as the cardinal, bishops and priests.
The demonstrators said they were provoked by church bells that chimed for an unusually long time, disrupting a rally in the central Zocolo square at which López Obrador was speaking. The dean of the cathedral, Rubén Ávila, told the newspaper El Universal that the bells rang for the normal time for a Sunday Mass.
In a statement released by Hugo Valdemar Romero, director of communication for the Archdiocese of Mexico, he called the event a "condemnable and cowardly act of terror, unequivocal expression of religious intolerance and of the hatred toward the Catholic Church."
This is disgraceful. Are they really knocking over the altar rail in that picture?
The single most consistent fact of history is that leftist governments/political movements are ALWAYS the biggest enemies of the Church.
Ah yes, the friends of Liberation Theology showing their true colors.
Reminds me of the Marxists shooting nuns during the Spanish Civil War and the PAVN executing priests and nuns in Hue during the Tet Offensive.
“The demonstrators said they were provoked by church bells that chimed for an unusually long time, disrupting a rally in the central Zocolo square at which López Obrador was speaking.”
The modernist always hated church bells.
These leftest are acting like many leftest in this FR. They jump in to other’s discussions and try to take over. Nothing new for leftest.
My first thought too. Padre Pro pray for them.
Mexico scares me, the poor have been oppressed for too long and something will give sooner or later.
The problems of Mexico are complicated, but one of its biggest ones is precisely that it is technically a Socialist state, and of course we all know there is only one group that benefits from that: the Government and its “friends.”
That said, I would bet that none of the people in that picture are poor. They’re probably well-off Mexican university students, a group that has consistently been one of the most dangerous in Mexico. Of course, their most notable riots were several years ago when the Mexican government tried to cut off the stipends they receive...
Good points, livius. Mexico’s poor are not the greatest threat to peace, or to the Church ... as in most places, it’s Mexico’s useless intellectuals that are using the “poor” as a front.
Knights of Columbus Martyrs of Mexico, pray for your country! Viva Cristo Rey!
That reminds me, I was going to order several gross of those cards for my parish. (How a midwestern WASP like me ended up in Hispanic Ministry is one of life’s mysteries ...)
I’d better do it before the computer crashes again. Thank you, Bill Gates, for these operating system “improvements”!
If that picture is accurate then the protesters are doing a little more than just disrupting Mass, aren’t they? Shouldn’t the article mention that they also vandalized the Church? Oh, this makes me so angry!
I am not suprised. The radical left CANNOT stand the Church. But in the end God and the Church triumph because the enemy ALWAYS LOSES.
Our Lady of Guadelupe, pray for Mexico!
Yes, it’s important to remember that Mexicans are not coming here because of “overpopulation,” but because the political and economic system of Mexico is preposterously counterproductive. Mexico is a large, lightly populated country, overall, just as the United States is.
Yep, and the USA is now having to deal with the problems associated with a socialist state such as Mexico.
In other words, corruption.
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