Unfazed by danger and power, Guatemalan cardinal keeps up fight for migrants and the poor

HUEHUETENANGO – As greater than 100 males carrying an elaborate float of Jesus halted prior to him, Cardinal Álvaro Ramazzini misplaced no time in calling for social justice — the hallmark of the Catholic bishop’s decades-long frontline ministry.

“Let’s hope that this procession may revive in the heart the willingness to discover Jesus Christ present in the person who suffers,” Ramazzini mentioned in an impromptu speech, pointing to the dozens of aged and disabled lining a side road in Guatemala City’s oldest group. “If we don’t have that ability, don’t tell me you’re Christian — I won’t believe that.”

Elevated by Pope Francis to the best hierarchy of the Catholic Church, Ramazzini has persisted his unflinching center of attention on the poor, the Indigenous and the migrant. That has garnered him nice affection from the marginalized and many threats of violence, together with rumors of an arrest warrant, as his local Guatemala struggles through political turmoil and stays a hotspot of migration to the United States.

At the procession right through the Easter season, he didn’t mince phrases for Guatemala’s executive. He denounced the loss of social safety provisions for the aged that left many feeling like “indigent beggars,” prior to hanging on the go with the flow a plaque honoring the eldercare volunteers at whose invitation he had pushed six hours from his diocese.

Many of the aged whom volunteers had taken of their wheelchairs and walkers to the processional path may just infrequently consider their eyes after they noticed the 76-year-old cardinal saunter down the side road to mingle with them, mentioned workforce organizer Teresita Samayoa Bautista.

“This is to evangelize with actions,” she mentioned. “To me, he was the voice of a people who can’t speak and are suffering. Just like Jesus would do. This is what you call commitment to a people, no matter if they’re religious or not.”

In a contemporary interview with The Associated Press in his modest place of job in Huehuetenango, Ramazzini mentioned experiencing Guatemala’s demanding situations, from the civil struggle onward, cemented his dedication to translating religion into motion.

“Here’s how we will be judged at life’s end, right? ’I was hungry, you didn’t give something to eat. I was thirsty, you didn’t give me something to drink. I was in prison, and you didn’t visit me,’” Ramazzini mentioned, quoting from the Gospel. “I try, as far as my human weaknesses and my limitations allow, to make this what guides my life.”

Out of greater than 400,000 Catholic clergymen in the global, there are most effective 128 cardinal electors – the function Ramazzini assumed in 2019 — charged with serving the pope as his primary counselors in governing the church, and electing the subsequent one.

That opens doorways throughout continents “at levels to which many Guatemalans have no access,” Ramazzini mentioned. He tries to leverage his conferences with church and political leaders “to convey the concerns and needs of the people I serve with every day.”

For maximum of the 50-plus years since his ordination, Ramazzini has been bishop in San Marcos and then Huehuetenango. These mountainous, predominantly Indigenous areas have been hard-hit by Guatemala’s civil struggle, which most effective led to 1996, and have struggled with excessive poverty and drug-trafficking since, pushing masses of hundreds of native youths to migrate to the United States.

Outspoken in the protection of Indigenous teams, herbal assets, and democratic rights, Ramazzini has additionally been advocating for what he calls a “strictly and essentially human” way to migration. Last fall, he changed into president of the Latin American Bishops Conference’s migration community.

Ramazzini argues that so long as folks can’t in finding jobs that pay them sufficient to make sure they and their households can live to tell the tale, they’re going to proceed to embark on unhealthy trips — the place pervasive legal networks prey on them en path and their rights are infrequently safe when they arrive at their vacation spot.

And whilst the United States has no downside permitting in the likes of Argentine soccer star Lionel Messi, who not too long ago moved to Miami, the cardinal added, “For the hundreds of migrants who are working day and night, day and night to support the U.S. economy … for them nothing, the migration situation cannot be fixed.”

Supporting migrants on either side of the border is as a lot a concern for Ramazzini as for his counterpart in the United States, Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso, Texas, who has a refuge actually in the yard of his diocesan headquarters and chairs the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ migration committee.

“You’d be hard-pressed to find another leader in the church or otherwise in Central America who is more trusted by the poor than he,” mentioned Seitz of Ramazzini, with whom he’s been operating for a couple of years to search out techniques for the church to handle the root reasons of migration.

Not that the church in Huehuetenango has the monetary assets to vary the dire scenario — there isn’t sufficient cash to create jobs that will stay folks in nation and even “to guarantee that people don’t miss three meals a day,” Ramazzini mentioned.

Nonprofits that paintings in the area, equivalent to Global Refuge (previously referred to as Lutheran Immigrant and Refugee Service) and Pop No’j, which makes a speciality of Indigenous teams, say that each and every hamlet has despatched migrants north on account of poverty and the attract of U.S. jobs. Staggering smuggling money owed imply maximum of those that are deported most effective check out once more, lest they lose the small land plots households put up as collateral and want to develop what little they devour.

Even a few of the volunteers in the Catholic diocesan migrant ministry have not too long ago migrated themselves, mentioned the Rev. Fredirick Gandiny, who leads the program from his parish in Santa Ana Huista, a village lower than a dozen miles from the border with Mexico.

The ministry’s primary challenge has change into helping youngsters and empowering girls who have a tendency to be excluded from decision-making, even supposing they’re the overwhelming majority of the ones left of their communities.

But migrant ministry may also be unhealthy as a result of networks of smugglers perform all alongside the border, Gandiny mentioned, in order that they depend on “the grace of God.”

During the civil struggle, Ramazzini gained dying threats and wanted bodyguards. Late closing 12 months, right through a sequence of makes an attempt by Guatemalan prosecutors to forestall revolutionary President-elect Bernardo Arévalo from taking place of job, the cardinal heard he could be charged and detained.

The nation’s bishops convention had suggested admire for the electoral procedure. Ramazzini mentioned he wrote a private letter to the attorney general, asking if she was once appearing in a fashion coherent along with her Catholic religion, however didn’t obtain a reaction.

Having ministered to prisoners in Huehuetenango’s prison, Ramazzini has frightened about the stipulations he’d face if he ended up in the back of bars like others who fought against corruption.

“So yes, I imagined myself a bit like that, right? Without freedom. But well, these are the risks,” Ramazzini mentioned. “One knows that life is in the hands of God.”

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