BBC Radio 4 2016-09-22

Over 80% of Mexicans self-describe as Roman Catholic. Yet Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a priest. On Sunday evening, after Mass, two priests were abducted from Our Lady of Fatima church in Poza Rica, Southern Mexico. On Monday, their bodies were discovered at the side of the road, riddled with bullets. This now takes to 30 the number of priests murdered in Mexico over the last ten years, many of them victims of drug cartels.

As I read of the murder of these priests, I realized to my considerable discomfort that, as they were being abducted on the other side of the world, I was sitting on my sofa watching the latest series of Narcos on Netflix. Narcos is about the life and death of Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medellin Cartel in Colombia and, at the peak of his fortune in the late 1980’s, the seventh richest man in the world.

And with some of that fortune he cultivated a Robin Hood image, building schools, hospitals and even churches. Some Catholic bishops refused drug money, others knowingly accepted it. The Bishop of Pereira even argued that accepting the money meant it wouldn’t be used on “illegal activities.”

And the relationship between the church and the cartels is still more complicated at parish level. It’s been reported, for instance, that the two murdered priests knew their assailants and had been out drinking with them. As priests in a tough parish, that’s entirely possible. For indeed, it’s the job of a priest to minister to all - and that can sometimes mean you establish a strange sort of connection with some very questionable people.

When a priest was kidnapped from his Mexican seminary on Christmas Eve in 2014 his colleagues went public, reminding his abductors of “the services that we have performed for your families.” This appeal to the connection they shared made no difference. They discovered his body on Christmas day. I quite understand how many would feel emotionally and spiritually beaten by a priestly ministry in such a place.
Yet I am also reminded of the alcoholic priest in Graham Greene’s extraordinary novel, The Power and the Glory, set in Mexico in the 1940’s. It’s a novel without any vestige of false piety. The solitary, broken priest tries to exercise his ministry despite the state’s persecution of the church, and in the wake of his own considerable moral failings. This priest is not a “good man” in any conventional sense.

But Christ didn’t just come for the “good and beautiful,” as Greene puts it in one the novel’s most famous passages. He came also for “the half-hearted and the corrupt.” It’s called the grace of God. And it’s an idea that is morally extremely disturbing. For it proposes that it is on this grace, and on grace alone, that both church and cartel are equally dependent.