Saturday, March 01, 2014
25 Protestant Families in Mexico have Water and Electricity Cut Off by Catholic Village Authorities: When will we be one?
Persecution.org posted an article about a situation in southern Mexico in which protestant families in a village are being ostracized by fellow villagers and have had their water and electricity cut off, because they will not participate in and contribute financially to traditional Catholic festivities. This happened also in 2010 and was reported on.
I don't know if this is a situation in which the Catholic villagers are acting on their own out of ill-will toward protestants, or with the blessing of the Roman Catholic Church authorities in their area. What I want to know in the interests of unity in the Body of Christ is: don't these Catholic villagers have priests that teach them about the love of God, and love for neighbor? Do the priests, and villagers, understand that Christ said Christians would be known by their love for one another? Do they recognize that protestants are part of the Body of Christ, and do the protestants recognize this also?
I do, of course, know that some people that claim to be Christians really are not. I hope and pray that the ones who truly are believers in this village, on both sides, will be moved to show Christ's love to one another, so that the unity Christ prayed for will be realized in our time, and those that are not believers will see this and be saved. 
The photo above: Graves of a Catholic woman and her Protestant husband, who were not allowed to be buried together. Roermond, NL, 1888
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7 comments:
You asked: "What I want to know in the interests of unity in the Body of Christ is: don't these Catholic villagers have priests that teach them about the love of God, and love for neighbor?"
In my experience of Catholic parishes in the U.S., I would say that most have priests who preach about loving God and your neighbor, but there are definitely some whose emphasis is elsewhere. I would, broadly, assume that the same is true for Mexico: that many priests there do preach about love for your neighbors, but that some don't. Mexican Catholic culture has some pretty significant differences from American Catholic culture, though, so maybe it's different there. Maybe they all preach about the dangers of joining drug cartels or something. On a broad, theological level, the Catholic Church *has* declared that Protestants are members of the Body of Christ (during Vatican II), but how much this thinking has penetrated individual Catholics varies a lot: on one end of the spectrum are Catholics who can't tell the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant, and on the other end are Catholics who still see Protestants as the enemy.
There is an interesting contrast for me between this post and your one on the "Son of God" movie. Here you say that when a group of Catholics put their own faith, their own denomination, above treating another with kindness, that they are in the wrong. And you're absolutely right about that: cutting off someone's water for not paying a religious festival tax is uncharitable and unreasonable. But the blogger that you linked to, Last Hiker, also put his faith above treating others with kindness. Granted, blasting someone on the internet is a much milder issue than cutting off their water, not entirely comparable. But neither was the author being charitable. I'm not trying to defend the film—I haven't seen it, so I have no idea if it's any good or not. The author has every right to complain about it if he thinks there are doctrinal issues with it. But he didn't watch the movie himself before condemning it publicly; he didn't give the makers any benefit of the doubt in interpreting their questionable statements; he didn't attempt to understand their point of view or what they meant by what they said, before writing them off. He might be right about what he said, but he wasn't kind. In that, he was not completely unlike the Mexican Catholics who put what was important to their faith above giving others basic consideration—although, again, totally different scale there, so I'm not trying to make it sound like what he did is just as bad as what they did or anything like that. Just noticing the contrast and parallels.
Anna,
You are right about the contrast between this post and the Son of God post. While I was reading the blog about the Son of God movie or maybe after I read it, it did occur to me that the author was being uncharitable in her tone, and also probably doesn't know all the facts about the film or the people that produced it. I posted that without thinking too much about it, and it is more like my old attitude than my new perspective. I'm glad you brought it up, because not only is it hard to be consistent in good attitudes, bad attitudes of judgement, ignorance, hatred, and pride are still rampant in the church today. I see it every day.
I think I will post an update on that earlier post to reflect this discussion. :)
Also, I'd like to add that I've been realizing that there is a wide range in God's people, in their perspectives, backgrounds, and the things that influence them. Some of these things are probably not good, but that doesn't mean God isn't using these people for His glory and that they are not believers. I may not agree with Roma Downey's new age connections, if this is even accurate, but they may not preclude her from being my sister in Christ, as I once believed. So, this is another reason for not being so quick to post things like the blog about the Son of God movie.
Anna,
I have posted an update on the blog post about the Son of God movie, with a link to a different review. :)
Ah, the author is a her? I tried to look around the blog for some indication of which pronoun to use, but I didn't see any immediate signs, so I defaulted to 'him'. :)
I agree with you about not being too quick to rule out New Age-y people as necessarily not being Christians. I get the impression that New Age thinking is pretty popular in the area where I live, so some of the Christians I meet have been influenced by that. It's easy to get worried about their salvation, but I find I need to back off and let God worry about that, and only just relate to them as a person. (This actually goes for all people... Christian or not.)
I didn't remember why I thought the blog author was a woman, but went back to look. She mentions watching the Bible series with her husband in the article, towards the beginning.
So she did! I read past that too fast.
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