Tom Cahill writes about an Irish SVD missionary, Paul Merne from Carlow, who has been living and working among the Otomi and Zapotec Indians in Mexico since 1979.
Paul Merne, from Carlow, has been a missionary in Mexico since 1979. Working as a draughtsman in Dublin Corporation before joining the Divine Word Missionaries, he had hardly ever been outside the country – or even wanted to be. However, a developing prayer life opened him up to the world and to Christianity. As he says himself: “I wanted to spread my conviction about Christianity to others who didn’t have a good formation in that area.”
Originally appointed to Indonesia, he wound up in Mexico because of visa difficulties. While waiting for an Indonesian visa he did mission animation work in Ireland, particularly in Derry, and loved every minute of it. However, when after two years there was no sign of his visa being issued, he was asked to go to Mexico instead.
Not knowing Spanish, he would, of course, have to learn it before doing anything else. He chose to study the language in Mexico and after an eight-month course he launched out into the deep among the Otomí Indians in the south of the country. He worked in a parish there and discovered that celebrating patron-saint days was a very important aspect of the people’s spirituality. Some villages might have two or three such saints, resulting in fiestas lasting three days or more. In fact, celebrating fiestas with the people was the main focus of his pastoral work. He began studying the local Indian language, eventually writing the first ever Otomi-Spanish dictionary. He also formed some groups to promote cottage industries. However while the production end of things went well, sales unfortunately didn’t.
After nine years there, in the parish of Hidalgo, he moved to Oaxaca (pronounced ‘Wohaka’) to work among the Zapotec Indians. He feels very happy living in this heavily mountainous area, eight hours from the nearest big city and nearly five hours from the nearest petrol station.
Oaxaca, which is semi-tropical, is a farming region. Paul’s parish of 5,000 people consists of nine villages, all about four hours apart from each other on foot. All the villages have electricity and water. He describes his parishioners as having many of the qualities that Irish people traditionally have valued: they are warm, hospitable, caring of others’ welfare and live a simple lifestyle. Having a strong oral tradition, they don’t read books. However, music is vitally important in their lives. Most villages, he says, would have two wind-instrument bands, essential for feasts and funerals. Every house, small or large, has a special corridor to cater for musicians. Underlining the vital role music plays in their lives, Paul adds, “People can get on without priests but not without music!”
Since arriving in Oaxaca two things in particular have struck him because of its high-emigration rate: the importance of good government policy and the need to think up ways in which the Church might have some input into policy-making.
When he arrived in Mexico, Liberation Theology was in vogue, as was the establishing of Basic Christian Communities. Not so today, however. Though “never a big thing in Mexico,” Paul says, “for the past ten years there has been a great clamp down on that.” He sees the Church now as “tremendously conservative, tight-fisted and sacramentalist”. It’s his view that, while the ordinary people go to church, they probably don’t pay much attention to what they hear.
In his parish, he says, the priests as a matter of policy try to give the people what they want. And what they want is: veneration of saints, public processions, placing candles all around the altar, even wanting Mass at 5am! But the priests there don’t complain even when people let off fireworks at the Consecration during Mass or when they come up to the celebrant for a blessing while he’s saying Mass.
There is much respect among people for the Church and for priests, he believes. Only since 1992 did reconciliation between Church and State begin. The Catholic Church is now officially recognized as a religion in Mexico, but in granting it recognition the Government had also to recognize various Christian denominations and also some cults.
He thinks that people join cults because the cults promise them all sorts of things, especially healing of one kind or another. People tend to “switch from one religion to another like lightning”, he remarks.
One of his main challenges is to try to engage young people with the Church. It is particularly difficult for two reasons: first and strange to say – because the adult Zapotec Indians who attend church do not bring their children with them as a rule; and second, because of residual anti-clericalism in schools religion cannot be thaught there. yet surprisingly, in spite of this, seminaries in Mexico are reasonably full.
He believes the strengths of a missionary society like the Divine Word Missionaries lie in its willingness and ability to take on difficult parishes, i.e., parishes with few resources. However, he thinks that we should be careful not to become diocesan clergy in all but name. We are missionary, and this should be obvious in what we do and how we do it. We should concentrate more on adult catechesis than on saturation administration of sacraments.
Speaking personally, he says that one of his great joys since going to Mexico has been the assistance he has been able to give people to get title to their land – “after 283 years waiting for it”, as he puts it. For Paul, being a missionary means loving the people you come to serve, boosting their morale if necessary, and nowadays working closely with NGOs. His house, which he shares with two other SVDs – an Indonesian and a Filipino – is very much an open house. NGO people can and do stay there as and when they wish. The local village leader has a key to the house too.
Having recently founded a natural medicine clinic, his current focus is on seeing that it becomes self-sufficient as quickly as possible. .
Article Credits
This article first appeared in Word ( November2004), a Divine Word Missionary Publication.
