Word: comunidades
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Dates: during 1979-1979
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They are variously involved with the needs and wishes of Latin America's largest class, the desperately poor, the uneducated, the politically unorganized. In fetid Netzahualcdyotl, a slum of 2.6 million people that grows like a tumor on the outskirts of Mexico City, several comunidades have cooperated to help protest rising bus fares and appalling health conditions. Human feces lie in the streets. Contaminated water adds to the filth and contributes to a death rate of more than 50% among children less than four years of age. Before Pope John Paul II's visit to Mexico in January...
Winning such acceptance from Latin America's bishops has been no easy achievement. Often, says Bishop Anibal Maricevich Fleitas of Concepcidn, Paraguay, the comunidades have seemed a threat to more traditional Catholics because they want the bishops to be "brothers and servants of the poor." This stance, he adds, also makes them "like pepper thrown in the eyes of the government." In fact, scores or perhaps hundreds of comunidad leaders, both priests and laymen, have been imprisoned, tortured and even killed because of their "conscientization," awakening a sense of grievance, among poor people...
Even so, many priests and bishops in Brazil balked when a lay comunidad member in 1976 announced that "the days when the priest was the main one" were over. Others in Latin American Christendom are likely to be troubled by a declaration at weekly Mass by Volta Redonda's French priest Jacques Duquesne that "faith should not be seen as the burden of the Cross, but rather as faith in a better world." Such apparent doctrinal distortions may have been what prompted Pope John Paul II during his Mexican trip to urge the Latin American clergy to be "priests...