The council approved using vernacular languages in Mass instead of Latin, promoted cooperation with other faiths and signaled a shift toward tolerating the diverse ways Catholics expressed their faith around the world. One of the resulting documents, “Ad gentes,” promoted missionary activity among unconverted peoples. However, it recognized that all cultures contained “seeds” of Christianity and that cultural diversity in the church would strengthen the body of the Catholic Church as a whole.

Almost immediately, Indigenous Catholics throughout Latin America began organizing to make these possibilities real.

In Mexico, a group of young priests and seminarians organized the Movement of Indigenous Priests. Spearheaded by a young Indigenous priest, Eleazar López Hernández, they pushed back against the notion that men entering the priesthood had to choose between their Indigenous and priestly identities.

At the core of their demands was the insistence that multiple Catholicisms could exist within the same Catholic Church. For instance, in 1971, López Hernández testified about the importance of having Indigenous priests in Indigenous communities. These Catholics, he argued, deserved clergy who spoke their language, could participate meaningfully in traditional rituals, understood their roots, and who could honor Indigenous spirituality in addition to Catholicism’s message of salvation.

Their demands inspired new Catholic institutions. In 1969, several dioceses founded the Regional Seminary of the Southeast, called SERESURE. The seminary’s explicit mission was to train priests to work in poor Indigenous areas, and it became a hub for Indigenous Catholicism. SERESURE developed an innovative structure that drew on Indigenous traditions of governing their communities by assembly, challenging strictly hierarchical church practices.

Yet SERESURE was shuttered in 1989 over allegations of incorrect doctrine, Marxism and supporting armed revolutionary movements. There was some truth to the first two allegations, but the third had little basis in truth.

It spoke, however, to the types of work some church agents were doing with Indigenous people in the region. Young priests, religious sisters and lay Catholics were fanning out to work with communities living in desperate poverty, trying to both provide economic opportunity and preserve local cultures and languages. This poverty had given birth to armed movements in Mexico, Guatemala and beyond during the Cold War.

For many of these Catholics, salvation did not only mean going to heaven, but building a more just world.

By the early 1990s, conflicts between the Vatican and Indigenous peoples had bled into the public sphere.

John Paul II increased attention to Indigenous Catholics with his visits to southern Mexico. During his papacy, however, the Vatican celebrated 1992 as the 500th anniversary of bringing Christianity to the New World.

...continued