June 3, 2024Catholic News AgencyNews Briefs0Print
ACI Prensa Staff, Jun 3, 2024 / 19:45 pm (CNA).
In a historic election, Claudia Sheinbaum will be the first woman to become president of Mexico, succeeding incumbent Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose “legacy” she promised to “save” at the close of her campaign on May 29.Who is she, what does she think, and what is her relationship with the Catholic Church?
Sheinbaum, the candidate of the Let’s Keep Making History political alliance consisting of the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), the Labor Party (PT), and the Green Ecologist Party of Mexico (PVEM), obtained a solid majority of the votes in the country’s three-candidate June 2 presidential election.
The director of the National Electoral Institute (INE), Guadalupe Taddei, reported in the early hours of June 3 that according to the results from the rapid count, Sheinbaum led her principal rival, Xóchitl Gálvez, by between 30 and 34 points. Gálvez ran under the Strength and Heart coalition comprised of the National Action Party (PAN), Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).
The rapid count showed Sheinbaum obtaining between 58% and 60% of the votes while Gálvez ran far behind with between 26% and 28%. Jorge Álvarez Maynez, the candidate of the Citizen Movement party, won between 9% and 10% of the votes. Sheinbaum willtake office on Oct. 1.
López Obrador congratulated the candidate on X for her victory, calling it a glorious day that Mexico has elected its first woman president.
Who is Claudia Sheinbaum?
Born on June 24, 1962, in Mexico City, Sheinbaum comes from a Jewish family of Lithuanian and Bulgarian origin.
According to various national media, her paternal grandparents are Ashkenazi Jews who emigrated from Lithuania to Mexico in the 1920s. The parents of her mother, Annie Pardo, are Sephardic Jews who arrived from Bulgaria in the 1940s, fleeing Nazi persecution.
In a statement to the Spanish edition of The New York Times in 2020, Sheinbaum referred to her distance from Jewish religious practices: “Of course I know where I come from, but my parents were always atheists … I never belonged to the Jewish community and we grew up somewhat distanced from that.”
Sheinbaum is a mother of two children and since November 2023, she has been married to Jesús María Tarriba, a financial industry consultant.
She graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where she studied physics. She also studied at the University of California-Berkeley.
In 2018, she became the first woman elected as the head of Mexico City’s government, a position that catapulted her as the favorite for the 2024 elections.
Sheinbaum’s principles
In line with the principles of her party, MORENA, founded by López Obrador, Sheinbaum is committed to a progressive agenda that promotes, among other things, abortion and gender ideology.
MORENA defines itself as an “anti-neoliberal and left-wing” political movement that is committed to “the fulfillment of its general obligations regarding human rights as well as with a gender perspective and taking into account intersectionality.”
At the beginning of her campaign, the candidate announced 100 commitments that she would fulfill if elected president, including that she would guarantee “access to health for women throughout their life cycle, especially with regards to sexual and reproductive health.”
In different publications of international institutions such as the World Health Organization (WHO), “sexual and reproductive health” as well as “sexual and reproductive rights” usually include so-called “safe abortion.”
In 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which had legalized abortion throughout the country, Sheinbaum declared that “it would be a setback” if the neighboring country were to make abortion, which she called a “right,” illegal. In response, her then-secretary of health, Oliva López Arellano, touted Mexico City as a safe haven for foreigners who wanted to have an abortion.
That year, when so-called hom*osexual “marriage” was passed in Guerrero and Tamaulipas states, Sheinbaum celebrated: “Today the entire country makes progress in equal rights with the passage of marriage equality in Guerrero and Tamaulipas. I celebrate this demonstration of the will of the people and the search for justice for all men and women by both state congresses. Love is love.”
In addition, the former head of the Mexico City government publicly condemned conversion therapy for hom*osexual people, considering it “from the inquisition” and saying that these are measures “that don’t belong in a city of rights.”
On Dec. 12, 2023, the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Sheinbaum shared on X an image along with commentary stating her strong desire “to strengthen the rights of sexually diverse people.”
“My dream is to continue to fight for sexually diverse people as I did in Mexico City,” she said.
Sheinbaum’s relationship with the Catholic Church
Both Sheinbaum and her top rival, Xóchitl Gálvez, met in February in individual private audiences with Pope Francis.
Sheinbaum announced through her social media that her meeting “was an exceptional hour that I will never forget, with a simple and warm way that shows his greatness.”
“In addition to being the highest representative of the Catholic Church, the religion of the vast majority of my people, I have profound admiration for his humanist thinking,” the candidate added.
In addition, while she was campaigning, Sheinbaum met twice with the country’s bishops.
The first meeting was in March to sign the National Commitment for Peace, an initiative proposed by the Catholic Church to address the growing violence in the nation. The second meeting was in April in connection with the 116th Plenary Assembly of the Mexican Bishops’ Conference.
On the latter occasion, the candidate expressed her “desire to maintain good relations with the churches and, especially with the Catholic Church, with which she agrees on many points, especially with the thinking of Pope Francis.”
In the final weeks of the election campaign, rumors circulated that, if she won the election, Sheinbaum would close Catholic churches, including the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City.
On her YouTube channel, Sheinbaum denied the rumors: “They say — just imagine the lie — that we’re going to close the churches when we win the presidency. We’re going to win the presidency and we’re not going to close any church, any temple. Our respect to all the denominations, all the religions of our people. It’s false that we are going to close any church.”
López Obrador’s ‘legacy’ on abortion, gender ideology
During the six-year term of outgoing president López Obrador, through measures advanced mainly by legislators aligned with his movement, abortion has been decriminalized for up to 12 weeks of gestation in the states of Oaxaca, Hidalgo, Veracruz, Baja California, Colima, Guerrero, Baja California South, Quintana Roo, and Aguascalientes. In Sinaloa, abortion was decriminalized up to 13 weeks of pregnancy.
In Mexico City — formerly the Federal District — abortion was decriminalized for up to 12 weeks’ gestation in 2007, when Marcelo Ebrard headed the Mexico City government. Ebrard is currently a member of MORENA and until recently served as the López Obrador administration’s minister of foreign relations.
On May 17, 2019, five months after taking office, López Obrador instituted what he called the “national day for the fight against hom*ophobia, lesbophobia, transphobia, and biphobia.”
In May 2020, López Obrador’s then-secretary of the interior, Olga Sánchez Cordero, encouraged the legal recognition of “the name and gender” of a child or adolescent who identifies as “trans.”
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
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Pope Francis presided over Mass for Palm Sunday 2023 in St. Peter’s Square on April 2. Below is the full text of his homily:
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46). This is the cry that today’s liturgy has us repeat in the responsorial psalm (cf. Ps 22:2), the only cry that Jesus makes from the cross in the Gospel we have heard. Those words bring us to the very heart of Christ’s passion, the culmination of the sufferings he endured for our salvation. “Why have you forsaken me?”
The sufferings of Jesus were so man, and whenever we listen to the account of the Passion, they pierce our hearts. There were sufferings of the body: we think of the slaps and beatings, flogging and the crowning with thorns, and in the end, the cruelty of the crucifixion. There were also sufferings of the soul: the betrayal of Judas, the denials of Peter, the condemnation of the religious and civil authorities, the mockery of the guards, the jeering at the foot of the cross, the rejection of the crowd, utter failure and the flight of the disciples.
Yet, amid all these sorrows, Jesus remained certain of one thing: the closeness of the Father. Now, however, the unthinkable has taken place. Before dying, he cries out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus’ abandonment.
This is the most searing of all sufferings, the suffering of the spirit. At his most tragic hour, Jesus experiences abandonment by God. Prior to that moment, he had never called the Father by his generic name, “God,” never. [He uses] Father. To convey the impact of this, the Gospel also reports his words in Aramaic. These are the only words of Jesus from the cross that have come down to us in the original language. The event is real, and the Lord’s abasem*nt extreme: It is the abandonment of his Father, the abandonment of God.
We find it hard even to grasp what great suffering he embraced out of love for us. It is not easy to understand. He sees the gates of heaven close, he finds himself at the bitter edge, the shipwreck of life, the collapse of certainty. And he cries out: “Why?” A “why” that embraces every other “why” ever spoken. But why, God, why?
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In the Bible, the word “forsake” is powerful. We hear it at moments of extreme pain: love that fails, or is rejected or betrayed; children who are rejected and aborted; situations of repudiation, the lot of widows and orphans; broken marriages, forms of social exclusion, injustice and oppression; the solitude of sickness. In a word, in the drastic severing of the bonds that unite us to others. There he tells us this word: abandonment. Christ brought all of this to the cross; upon his shoulders, he bore the sins of the world. And at the supreme moment, Jesus, the only begotten, beloved Son of the Father, experienced a situation utterly alien to his very being: the abandonment, the distance of God.
But, why did it have to come to this? For us. There is no other answer: Us. Brothers and sisters, today, this is not a show. Each of us has listened to the abandonment of Jesus, say to each other — each of us say to each other — “For me. This abandonment is the price he paid for me.”
He became one of us to the very end, in order to be completely and definitively one with us. He experienced abandonment in order not to leave us prey to despair, in order to stay at our side forever. Dear brother, dear sister, he did this for me, for you, because whenever you or I or anyone else seems pinned to the wall — and we have seen someone pinned to the wall — you see someone lost in a blind alley, plunged into the abyss of abandonment, sucked into a whirlwind of many “whys” without answer, there can still be some hope: Him, for you, for me.
It is not the end, because Jesus was there and even now, he is at your side. He has endured the distance of abandonment in order to take up into his love every possible distance that we can feel. So that each of us might say: in my failings — each of you has fallen many times — and I can say in my failings, in my desolation, whenever I feel betrayed or I have betrayed someone, when I feel cast aside or I have cast aside others or when I feel forsaken or have forsaken others, we think that Jesus was abandoned, betrayed, cast aside. And there we find him.
When I feel lost and confused, when I feel that I can’t go on, he is with me, he is there. In the thousand fits of ‘why’ and with many ‘whys’ without answer, he is there.
That is how the Lord saves us, from within our questioning “why?” From within that questioning, he opens the horizon of hope that does not disappoint. On the cross, even as he felt utter abandonment, Jesus refused to yield to despair, this limit; instead, he prayed and trusted. He cried out his “why?” in the words of the Psalm (22:2), and commended himself into the hands of the Father, despite the distance he felt (cf. Lk 23:46) or did not feel because he felt abandoned. In the hour of his abandonment, Jesus continued to trust. Even more: at the hour of abandonment, he continued to love his disciples who had fled, leaving him alone, and in the abandonment he forgave those who crucified him (v. 34). Here we see the abyss of our evil immersed in a greater love, with the result that our isolation becomes fellowship.
Brothers and sisters, a love like this, embracing us totally and to the very end, a love of Jesus like this, has the capacity to turn our stony hearts into hearts of flesh, and make them capable of mercy, tenderness and compassion. It is the style of God, this closeness, with passion and tenderness. God is like this. Christ, in his abandonment, stirs us to seek him and to love him and those who are themselves abandoned. For in them we see not only people in need, but Jesus himself, but him, he is with them, abandoned: Jesus, who saved us by descending to the depths of our human condition. He is like one of them: abandoned unto death. I think back to some weeks ago, that man, called homeless, a German man who died under the colonnade alone, abandoned. He is Jesus for each of us. Many people need our closeness, many abandoned people. I too need Jesus to caress me, to be close to me. Each of us need to find him in the abandoned, in the alone.
He wants us to care for our brothers and sisters who resemble him most, those experiencing extreme suffering and solitude. They are not only those people, but today, brothers and sisters, there are entire peoples who are exploited and abandoned; the poor live on our streets and we look the other way, we turn around; there are migrants who are no longer faces but numbers; prisoners are disowned; people written off as problems. But there are also many Christs, there are many, many Christs, people who are abandoned, invisible, hidden, discarded with white gloves: unborn children, the elderly who live alone — the elderly who live alone could also maybe be your dad, your mom, your grandpa, grandma, abandoned in geriatrics — the sick whom no one visits, the disabled who are ignored, and the young burdened by great interior emptiness, with no one prepared to listen to their cry of pain and who find another way toward suicide. The abandoned of today, the Christs of today.
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