EXCLUSIVE | Mexican Catholic activist: Mexico, turn back to God

CatholicVote asked Catholic actor and political activist Eduardo Verástegui to offer an exclusive reflection for our readers on the roots of the unprecedented violence now convulsing Mexico following the killing of drug lord Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes. What follows is his personal assessment of the deeper moral, political, and cultural forces driving the crisis.  

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article about one of our most courageous saints, a very young and very brave one, who happily gave his life shouting “¡Viva Cristo Rey!” under the Masonic and military government of the founder of the National Revolutionary Party (today the PRI), Plutarco Elías Calles.

The PRI that governed for around 70 years has changed. I would like to say it evolved, but on the contrary, it went backward. It changed clothes, stopped wearing its traditional red and put on a slightly different color. But it kept the “perfect dictatorship,” appointing successors by mandate, just as Manuel López Obrador (the former Mexican President) did with (today’s president) Claudia Sheinbaum.

And it maintains that same anticatholicism of always, that anticatholicism that makes them furiously shout “SECULAR STATE!” while, on their side, they promote shamanism, paganism, and witchcraft, as if that were not also a profession of faith, but to the devil.

Father Eduardo Hayen Cuarón pointed this out clearly when Sheinbaum assumed command: She began her government with a pagan witchcraft ritual, using the excuse that it was just honoring an “indigenous tradition.” And thus they spent their time appropriating the “indigenous” as if there were no Catholics among indigenous people. As if this land and this homeland had not been built and sown with indigenous hands faithful to Christ.

Everything that is happening to us, as another Mexican priest, Father Juan Razo García rightly says, is the consequence of our sins. All our sins. We are a country that unfortunately allows the devil to continue rejoicing when deaths of Mexicans are still being offered on steel trays, killed in the wombs of their mothers. This should remind us that our battle must be every day more fierce, dedicated, constant, and insistent. The children of God MUST NOT be touched.

Could it be that, since we parted so far from God as a country, we are suffering this level of violence? Could it be that because of abortion, the historical denial of our faith, and the constant attack on Christian practice, we are seeing Mexico bleed?

If the current president celebrates International Women’s Day only taking into account and placing as example the few indigenous women that still have pagan practices opposed to the Catholic faith, while ignoring the vast majority of indigenous Catholic women, what is left for the rest of Mexican women, proudly Christian and mestizo?

We are harvesting the hatred toward the faith that has been sown, the empty “Guadalupanism” as a mere cultural thing, without genuine love for Our Lady nor for her Son, but as a merely symbolic nationalist icon. This is not real faith, this is worth nothing. 

If we love her, it is because through her we arrived at Our Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior. Our Mother suffers seeing her children die at the hands of crime, a satanic crime that also proclaims the worship of a demon: the “Santa Muerte” (Holy Death). Mexico deserves much more than that.

The news reports that 30 drug traffickers and 25 members of the National Guard died in the attempt to capture “El Mencho” alive. Is it fair for the honorable blood of our military men to run because of power-hungry narco-terrorism? No, it is not.

If we ask ourselves why this is happening, consider that the answer may be more spiritual than political. It happens because people separated their spiritual life from their vote, because they moved away from God, because they sought in the world what they can only find in Heaven. And we can now see where that has led us.

But dear ones, it is not too late.

This tragedy has occurred in Lent, a time that invites us to repent and draw closer to God. As the president of CatholicVote, Kelsey Reinhardt, said recently when visiting Mexico: “The news should not lead us to despair, but to prayer.” Now is a good time to approach the sacrament of Confession, to tell Christ that we repent from the heart and that we want to live near Him.

There is no better moment than now to go to the Blessed Sacrament and pray for Mexico, to return to the arms of our Mother, Our Lady of Guadalupe, so that she may lead us to the presence of her Son.

That is the way. Let’s do it together and proclaim: CHRIST IS KING!