P. A. Chacko
In the trouble torn Mexico, on Suday October 20, Jesuit Father Marcelo Perez fell victim to the bullets of those who found him an apostle of justice and peace.
The horror underscores the escalating violence in Chiapas state, Mexico. The Jesuit priest was attacked as he left Cuxtitali, San Cristobal de las Casas, one of the region’s key cities in Mexico after the Sunday service. Two men on motorcycles sprayed bullets on him travelling in his Ford car.
Fr. Perez was a well-known figure among the Chiapas community as a champion of “the rights and dignity of Chiapas residents and advocating for peace amid ongoing turmoil.” He belonged to the Tzotzil indigenous group and had devoted almost two decades upholding issues relate to the rights of the Tzotzil people.
He was known to have spent almost two decades fighting for the rights of the Tzotzil indigenous group, of which he was a member.
According to BBC sources, the Jesuits saw it as “part of the wave of violence that organised crime groups have unleashed in Chiapas.”
The region has been facing serious right related problems like resource exploitation, organized crime, kidnappings and cross border migrant trafficking.
It is nothing new about Jesuits facing violence, murder, elimination or persecution over centuries as they witness to the Gospel values through frontier ministries. The Church has recognised such valuable service to the marginalised and subaltern masses.
Addressing the Jesuit General Congregation in 2008, Pope Benedict XVI stated: “I encourage you to continue and to renew your mission among the poor and with the poor. Unfortunately, new causes of poverty and marginalization are not absent in a world marked by grave financial and environmental imbalances, from globalization processes prompted by selfishness rather than solidarity and by devastating and senseless armed conflicts.”
He also reaffirmed the Latin American Bishops’ statement: “The preferential option for the poor is implicit in the Christological faith in the God who became poor for us… For us, the option for the poor is not ideological but is born from the Gospel. Situations of injustice and poverty in today’s world are numerous and tragic, and if it is necessary to seek to understand them and fight their structural causes, it is also necessary to penetrate to the very heart of man, to extirpate the deep roots of evil and sin that cut him off from God, without forgetting to meet people’s most urgent needs in the spirit of Christ’s charity.”
Pope Francis, while affirming the frontier ministries Jesuits engage in, reminds us all the historic statement of Paul VI to the 32nd General Congregation in 1974: “Wherever in the Church, even in the most difficult and extreme fields, at the crossroads of ideologies, in the social trenches, there has been and there is confrontation between the burning exigencies of man and the perennial message of the Gospel, here also there have been, and there are, Jesuits.”
