Maya tribes snubbed as Pope names world's first Indian saint

Pope John Paul II will fly into a row when he arrives in Mexico tonight. Indigenous Catholics might be expected to be ecstatic that the Pope will canonise their brown-skinned saint, Juan Diego, and beatify two Indian martyrs this week.

Yet some devout Catholic Mayas in southern Mexico say the Vatican has let them down, and hint that, as long as contemporary Indians are discouraged from spreading the faith unless they are fully-fledged priests, the Pope's gesture of recognising the world's first Indian saint rings hollow.

A recent Vatican ruling limits the number of deacons who can bring Catholic rituals to remote hamlets in Chiapas. Undaunted by arduous journeys over unpaved roads, the deacons reach places such as Talomhuitz, where few locals understand priestly Spanish.

These family men, who normally collaborate with the clergy, have become a powerful home-grown corps of substitute clerics not easily regulated by the Vatican. They dole out communion wafers consecrated by a distant parish priest but cannot hear confession.

While the 82-year-old pontiff honours an Aztec herdsman, who is purported to have conversed with the Virgin of Guadalupe's apparition on a Mexican hillside in 1531, the church has snubbed 341 modern Indian volunteers who put their farm work aside to perform baptisms and marriages and hold Sunday services in obscure Mayan languages.

In Chiapas state, where liberation theology had a last gasp in the mid-Nineties in tandem with a peasant uprising, the predominantly Indian deacons outnumber priests by four to one. Most claim their calling was revealed to them in a dream.

Bernardino Hernandez Gonzalez, a deacon candidate whose ordination will be denied, or at best postponed, after 15 years of service, said: "No one takes an Indian seriously, even if he is a saint. But it's about time Juan Diego had his day; it's been 500 years."

Few Mayas will journey to Mexico City's basilica for the papal mass tomorrow, although those who do will be placed conspicuously in the front rows. Juan Diego's 16th-century peasant's cloak, imprinted with the sacred image of a haloed Mary standing in a rose bed, is on display above an airport-style conveyor belt that keeps the throngs of worshippers moving.

Many scholars suggest that old Juan Diego was a brazen invention of the friars, meant to attract native converts after the conquest.

Mayan Catholic leaders are planning a protest pilgrimage to San Cristobal de las Casas next month, airing the grievances of 200 devout candidates who will be denied deaconships after years of apprenticeship.

Analysts suggest the Vatican's decree is designed to dismantle the lay network built in the Chiapas hinterland by the radical Bishop Samuel Ruiz, now retired. Several hundred of Bishop Ruiz's deacons, aided by nearly 8,000 overwhelmingly Indian catechists, have tried to counter the groundswell of Protestant conversions since 1995. But many were accused of sympathising with Zapatista rebels who set up autonomous townships in the highlands and jungles of Mexico's poorest state, and of being more loyal to the outspoken "Red Bishop" in San Cristobal than to Rome. Seminary-trained priests are perceived as more malleable, and can be transferred far from the community if they step out of line.

In a letter to Bishop Felipe Arizmendi, Bishop Ruiz's successor, the Vatican warned in February that the vaguely defined duties of these deacons and their wives sidestepped Rome's traditional hierarchy, deviated from church doctrine, and set a worrying precedent for other indigenous parishes around the globe.

The clash between the Mayan deacons and Rome focuses on a revival of heritage of the Maya overlaid on the standard Mass. Felipe Vasquez, a veteran deacon, says: "We want to rescue our culture." A stumbling block is celibacy. Mayas view it as an aberration, and insist "true men" marry and sire children.

Bishop Arizmendi says the five-year suspension on ordaining new deacons was not meant as a clampdown but to encourage more Indians into the priesthood. There are only two indigenous clerics in a diocese of 800,000 Mayas.

"I personally went to Rome to talk about this issue," he adds. "The work of the deacons is greatly appreciated, but it is hoped the deacons themselves will help promote the priestly vocation among their sons."

When pressed about the possibility that Catholic priests might one day be allowed to marry, particularly since the church has been rocked by child sex abuse revelations, the bishop was adamant. "We cannot feed hopes that can't be satisfied," he says.