SIMOJOVEL: At a recent service in the remote southern Mexican community of Simojovel, Catholic and Mayan symbolism mingled at the altar as the deacon \u2014 his wife beside him \u2014 read the gospel in his native Tsotsil and recalled Pope Francis\u2019 teachings: work together for human rights, justice and Mother Earth.
\nThe scene in the small church in Mexico\u2019s poorest state, Chiapas, conveyed much of the message Francis delivered during his 2016 trip to the region and his other visits to far-flung locales, including the Amazon, Congo and the jungles of Papua New Guinea.
\nIt also illustrated what the world\u2019s Indigenous Catholics don\u2019t want to lose with the death of the first pontiff from the Southern Hemisphere: their relatively newfound voice in an institution that once debated whether \u201cIndians\u201d had souls while backing European powers as they plundered the Americas and Africa.
\n\u201cWe ask God that the work (Francis) did for us not be in vain,\u201d Deacon Juan P\u00e9rez G\u00f3mez told his small congregation. \u201cWe ask you to choose a new pope, a new servant, who hopefully Lord thinks the same way.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
SIMOJOVEL: At a recent service in the remote southern Mexican community of Simojovel, Catholic and Mayan symbolism mingled at the altar as the deacon \u2014 his wife beside him \u2014 read the gospel in his native Tsotsil and recalled Pope Francis\u2019 teachings: work together for human rights, justice and Mother Earth. The scene in the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":80608,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80593"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":80609,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80593\/revisions\/80609"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}