THE FUNERAL OF BISHOP SAMUEL RUIZ GARCIA

 

We look like tourists but we are more than that. We are training as International Support Workers at Loyalist College.  The ISW program "is a one-year, post graduate certificate program, intended to provide competent staff and volunteers to work in international development organizations, anywhere in the world." We want to go behind the beauty of Chiapas and the brilliant variety of costume and custom.

Our professors, Gary Warren and Kate Rogers, know the terrain here in San Cristobal de las Casas, colonial city in the mountains. Our plane schedule, forcing an overnight in Tuxtla Guttierez, the capital of Chiapas State, meant that we arrived at the tail end of a historic celebration -- the funeral rites of Bishop Samuel Ruiz Garcia, nicknamed Tatic (Father) by the Maya people of his diocese.

The former bishop of this diocese, who retired at 75 and died at 86, incarnated the spirit of the great defender of indigenous peoples and first bishop of Chiapas (1543-1547). That Bishop, Bartolome de Las Casas, whose name is attached to the city we are presently in, is renowned as one of the founders of international law and an early promoter of human rights. He was beatified in the year 2000.

Bishop Ruiz took his position on the world stage when he acted as the mediator between the Zapatistas and the Mexican Government in January of 1994. We are told that some 5000 people, many of them from the Maya groups surrounding San Cristobal de las Casas, attended the funeral. With my computer I go to Radio Zapatista and listen to podcasts of the words spoken at the Bishop's funeral.

The strongest words spoken at the funeral appear to be those of the bishop's nephew, Patricio Murphy Ruiz, who criticized government and some media chains for having attempted to damage the image of the bishop. The lie was that the bishop promoted violent means, that he was a communist. His nephew pointed out that Samuel Ruiz was a man of action, who ate with the campesinos and defended them and the priests and religious who worked in their Maya communities. He is know for having assisted the Maya people to be agents of their own future, commissioned 20,000 catechists and ordained over 350 married deacons. As his nephew said, he was not a bishop who ate caviar and had his photograph taken with drug traffickers.

As we make our way through the crowds on the public square, el Zocalo, in front of the cathedral, our eyes are drawn to the hand drawn postings attached to the cathedral wall -- written in Spanish saying 'Tatic we will miss you.'