Maya and Catholic Cultures in Crisis

28. A Bishop’s Evolving Worldview

28 A Bishop’s Evolving Worldview Samuel Ruíz García was consecrated the bishop of the San Cristóbal Diocese on January 25, 1960, and remained until 1999, when he reached the mandatory retirement age for bishops. He died in January, 2011. In forty years of wrestling with the problems of Catholicism and the Maya, the bishop pioneered significant changes in the relationship between the non-Western Maya tradition and a Western-oriented Catholicism. This chapter sketches his evolution from a conservative Tridentine Catholic to a promoter of an inculturated Maya Christianity with a theology based on the wisdom of the ancestors and synthesized in the life and teachings of Jesus. His evolution gives further insight into the evolution of religious worldviews and of how they can break out of their ethnocentrisms and degenerations stimulated by cross-cultural experiences. The introductory A Bishop’s Evolving Worldview · 409 photograph shows the bishop in 1963, a few years after being consecrated a bishop. Chapters 2 and 6 pointed out the necessary link between Maya subsistence and worldview. Although the Maya began questioning the covenant, chapters 8, 12, and 27 indicated that aspects of the traditional worldview continued to function in the background, even as the Maya accepted Tridentine Catholicism and later Action Catholicism. In addition to liberation from the subsistence crisis by social justice, liberation for some Maya and for some pastoral agents also meant cultural liberation, freeing the traditional Maya worldview from the depreciation and ignorance of it by the Catholic Church and others. The traditional worldview included the wisdom of the ancestors, the values and spirituality learned in the family circle, which had guided the Maya moral sense for centuries. Vatican II began to recognize this problem, which carries the label “inculturation.” It saw the essential Christian message as either already expressed or as capable of being expressed in other cultural forms. This chapter traces Don Samuel’s personal evolution to becoming an ardent advocate of a Maya Christianity. The Starting Points of His Evolution Don Samuel’s parents were from families of agricultural workers in an area of intense conservative Catholicism, the state of Guanajuato in central Mexico (Fazio 1994: 9–11, 23–55). As young adults, they traveled separately to the United States to labor in the fields of Utah and California as “wetbacks.” They met while attending church services, and were married in California. They returned to Mexico, to the town of Irapuato in Guanajuato , where Samuel Ruíz García was born in 1924. Mexico during Don Samuel’s youth of the 1930s witnessed numerous political insurrections and government attacks on the Catholic Church. Maclovio Ruíz, Samuel’s father, took an active part in the local church as a director of Catholic Action and as president of the Knights of Columbus. In response to Calles’s violent persecution, Catholics formed defense organizations that included an armed guerrilla band, the Cristeros. Maclovio was about to join them in the mountains but was dissuaded at the last moment by the insistence of his wife. Since the government had closed all Catholic schools, Samuel was schooled at home by his parents. His father had a fifth-grade education, and his mother’s schooling had stopped after the third grade. But both were avid readers and continued to educate themselves . Don Samuel’s sister recalls the family’s religious formation. “The 410 · Part VIII. The Search for a Revitalized Maya Worldview atmosphere in which we grew up in Irapuato was very Christian. Every day we went to mass together. My father read the Bible to us; my mother was a catechist in our neighborhood even during the times of persecution. My father was a director of Catholic Action and my mother was head of the women’s section. Samuel also was a catechist. I believe that it was the religious life lived in our home that led to his decision to enter the seminary” (Ruíz García 2003: 146). At the age of fifteen, Samuel enrolled in the seminary in nearby León. He excelled in his studies, and in 1947 was selected to pursue his theological studies in Rome at the Gregorian University and the Biblical Institute. He returned to the seminary in León as a professor of theology and sacred scripture. Soon, he was made the Dean of Studies, and in his thirtieth year, 1954, he became the rector (president) of the...