Mexican Church Takes a Closer Look at Donors

nytimes.com

Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

A plaque on a church in Pachuca, Mexico, recognizes the major donor who built it, a leader of the Zetas crime syndicate.

PACHUCA, Mexico — The large orange chapel here, with its towering cross, would be just another Roman Catholic church if not for a bronze plaque announcing that it was “donated by Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano” — better known as “the executioner,” commander of the ruthless crime syndicate called the Zetas.

The nameplate goes on to quote Psalm 143: “Lord, hear my prayer, answer my plea.” But Mexican Catholics are the ones struggling with how to respond.

Ever since the chapel’s financing spawned a government investigation four months ago, the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico has been trying to confront its historic ties to drug traffickers. Long dependent on gifts, but often less than discriminating about where they come from, the church is grappling with its role as thousands die in turf wars among rich, and sometimes generous, criminals.

“The chapel put the entire church in Mexico on alert,” said the Rev. Hugo Valdemar, a spokesman for the country’s largest archdiocese, in Mexico City. “As a result, our public posture has changed, and become much tougher.”

The church has indeed gone further than before, with public pledges to reject “narcolimosnas,” or “narco alms,” and priests linked to traffickers. A handful of outspoken bishops have also stepped up condemnations of both the cartels and the government’s militaristic efforts to stop them.

But at the local level, the codependency of the church and the cartels often endures. Here in the middle-class neighborhood of Pachuca where Mr. Lazcano is said to have grown up, priests still say Mass at the chapel every Sunday, arguing that the church is not responsible for determining whether the Zetas’ leader has any connection to the building that bears his name.

Catholic officials have said there are other chapels that they believe were built with drug money, in what some describe as money laundering for the soul. And yet, according to Father Valdemar — who works closely with Mexico’s conference of bishops — the church has no formal strategy for how to deal with the cartels in their midst and no plan to develop guidelines for priests struggling with munificent killers.

The Rev. Joseph Palacios, a sociology professor at Georgetown University and a Catholic priest who has written extensively about the Mexican church, said more must be done.

“This is an endemic problem,” Father Palacios said. “If they just issue statements and don’t analyze the roots of the situation, they aren’t going to change anything.”

The church’s challenge is partly historic. Mexico’s 1917 Constitution separated church and state far beyond what can be found in the United States. It forbade churches of all denominations from operating primary and secondary schools, nationalized ownership of all church buildings and barred priests and other religious leaders from voting or criticizing the government, even in private.

The restrictions were lifted in 1992, but religious scholars say the church had become impoverished by that time, reliant on the wealthy and with a mentality of “no mete en la política” — don’t get into politics.

For years, that culture of nonconfrontation and need has allowed narco alms to be an open secret, according to experts like George W. Grayson, the author of “Mexico: Narco-Violence and a Failed State?” After a Catholic cardinal was assassinated by a drug gang in 1993 (in what may or may not have been a case of mistaken identity), sociologists outlined a “religious economy” in which priests administered sacraments in exchange for exorbitant donations.

The Rev. Robert Coogan, 58, a Brooklyn-born Catholic prison chaplain in Saltillo, said that dubious donations had become an engrained feature of the country’s religious life. He cited several instances in which Zetas offered him 6 to 10 times as much as the typical small donation for a baptism.

While he said he refused — and now insists on providing sacraments free — Father Coogan explained that for some priests, danger and poverty had made it easy to say, “Hey, the guy who owns the factory, he’s a bastard, but we take his money, so why not take the drug money?”

This is especially true, he said, in a country where riches are often produced by corruption and in areas where violence has pushed legitimate donors to flee. “The church in Mexico is impoverished,” Father Coogan said.