Due to violence, Mexican diocese avoids Christmas Masses at high-risk times

Villahermosa, Mexico, Dec 9, 2017 / 06:08 am (ACI Prensa).- A diocese in one of Mexico’s most violence-ridden states has indicated it will avoid scheduling Masses for Christmas and its octave at “high risk” times. It has also asked the state’s police to protect parishioners.

“With respect to the problem of insecurity, for the most part the established schedule has been kept, but we are trying to avoid scheduling certain times that could be high risk,” Fr. José Luis Compeán Rueda, vicar general of the Diocese of Tabasco, said at a Dec. 3 press conference in Villahermosa, capital of the Mexican state of Tabasco.

El Heraldo de Tabasco reported that Fr. Compean said he had met with the head of Tabasco’s Department of Public Safety, Jorge Aguirre Carbajal, to talk about the problem of the lack of public safety and said that “they will take appropriate steps as needed.”

“We hope the different state or municipal authorities will take corresponding measures to provide protection, not exclusively to the Church, but to all of society,” he said.

Fr. Compeán noted that during the year end festivities crime increases because people are getting paid Christmas bonuses and buying Christmas presents.

A September report prepared by the Tabasco Citizens’ Observatory revealed that in 2017 Tabasco occupied first place in the nation in kidnappings per capita.

“The State of Tabasco held first place in five categories of crime: kidnapping, aggravated robbery, robbery of businesses, holdups of passersby and livestock rustling” the director of Analysis and Statistics of the Tabasco Citizens’ Observatory, Julia Arrivillaga, told Televisa.

The Catholic Multimedia Center released a report in August showing that Tabasco is one of the most dangerous states for priests, and that Mexico is the most violent country for priests in Latin America.

 

This article was originally published by our sister agency, ACI Prensa. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.


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1 Comment

  1. Mexico’s murder rate is 16.75 per 100,000 with no death penalty while China’s murder rate is .74 per 100,000 with a quickly carried out death penalty. Both countries have multiple millions of poor unlike Europe where mild affluence helps greatly against murder.
    The Vatican should be examining Mexico, Brazil and half of the Central American countries whose very high murder rates might warrant the rare use of the death penalty according to the catechism’s rare use concept. I say that with a smile. Follow up by the Vatican on rare use does not have one case since the catechism was written revised in 1997….because we are imaging in this issue. We’re signaling liberal values to the Nobel jury. If the Vatican cared about the lives involved, it would have completed a serious deterrence study by now….and looked into the five non death penalty Catholic countries which are in the top ten worst murder rates of the world. There is no research by Catholic offices in this area because we all know…we were never serious about rare but necessary use. We knew that when three Popes publicly sought abolition which makes rare use impossible. It’s the fib within the catechism. It was signaling from the get go. This week in non death penalty New Jersey, an Ecuadorian father was shot in the head before his wife and child for not having money for two robbers in Irvington. The family had just come from a prayer group at St. Leo’s parish. Two friends of mine were murdered in NJ when I was young within a block from my house in two different years and one felon got out in five years for being 16 when murdering Kathleen. He then bragged about it in the wrong Irish bar…which closed it’s front door and removed all his teeth the ufc way. He was very lucky since years later they shot a boxer to death for adultery with a gang members wife. Where you don’t have the death penalty by the law giver, you have it in the bars and streets eventually. Catholic Brazil has it by police now and then while forbidding it by the state.

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