Samuel Ruiz

Samuel Ruiz García (3 November 1924 – 24 January 2011) was a Mexican Catholic prelate who served as bishop of the Diocese of San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, from 1959 until 1999.

Ruiz is best known for his role as mediator during the conflict between the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), a Mexican political party which had held power for over seventy years, and whose policies were often disadvantageous to the indigenous populations of Chiapas.

Samuel Ruiz García was the first of five children, born on 3 November 1924 in Guanajuato, Mexico, to Guadalupe García, who worked as a maid for upper-class families, and Maclovio Ruiz Mejía, an agricultural worker.

Ruiz grew up as a Catholic in a modest family during the Cristero War, a time in which the Church was being persecuted and many were killed or assassinated in Mexico by the anti-Catholic ruling government.

At the age of fifteen, Ruiz completed high school and seminary at León in Guanajuato.

In 1949 he was ordained to the priesthood.

After receiving his doctorate in philosophy and theology from Gregorian University, Ruiz returned to Guanajuato where he taught at the León seminary.

He continued his studies at the Jesuit Gregorian University in Rome where he focused on Sacred Scripture, earning his doctorate in 1952.

Inspired by Liberation Theology, which swept through the Catholic Church in Latin America after the 1960s, Ruiz's diocese helped some hundreds of thousands of indigenous Maya people in Chiapas who were among Mexico's poorest marginalized communities.

In 1960, Ruiz was consecrated bishop of the Diocese of San Cristóbal de las Casas of Chiapas Mexico, where he remained until he retired in 2000.

San Cristóbal de las Cases is made up mostly of the highlands of Chiapas, comprising largely poor, indigenous communities who speak a variety of Mayan languages.

In his early years as bishop, Ruiz subscribed to traditional views of the Church and evangelization.

Ruiz's first pastoral letter acknowledged the dangers of communism developing in Mexico, reading "Behind a creed that flaunts a banner of social justice, communism has been sneaking in falsehoods, hypocrisy, deceit, and calumny.” Earlier methods of evangelization within the diocese were largely top-down practices that focused on Western methods of social change. Often catechists communicated messages of passivity to the indigenous communities rather than fostering consciousness-raising, which was consistent with government policy at the time, often in the name of "development" and “civilizing” the Indians.

Not long after arriving in San Cristóbal, Ruiz set out on a mule to tour his diocese, visiting every town and village over which he held jurisdiction.

During his travels, he discovered the incredible poverty and marginalization that communities in his diocese were inflicted with, realizing what the true reality was for many indigenous communities in Chiapas.

In 1962, the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) convened, focusing on the social responsibility of Christians and on opening the Church to theological development and dialogue.

Vatican II encouraged that sermons be translated and read to communities in their local languages and that the Church be more involved in addressing social problems, such as those occurring in Central and South America.

For Ruiz, his participation in the Second Vatican Council allowed time for reflection on the decisions and actions carried out under his administration, which brought him a long way from the somewhat naïve enthusiasm which he'd had during his first years as bishop.

It was Vatican II which inspired Ruiz to translate scripture into local indigenous languages and into practice, with an emphasis on inculturation.

In 1967, Bishop Ruiz became the president of the Mexican Bishop's Committee on Indigenous Peoples (CEPI), and in 1968 he was named the president of the Department of Missions of The Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM), also called the Medellín Conference.

Out of this conference, held in Medellín, Colombia, in 1968, emerged a consensus that the root of poverty and oppression in Latin America was a systemic problem, one which grew out of the ethic of expansion and development by United States imperialism.

Ruiz found some convergence between the bishops' growing concern for the poor and disenfranchised and Marxist approaches to class analysis, which emphasized that the great conflict between "capital" and “labor” had its origins in the exploitation of workers by "the entrepreneurs following the principle of maximum profit," Such analysis also found support in dependency theory, the idea that the economies of certain countries are conditioned by the development or expansion of another economy to which the former is subjected.

Many in the Catholic Church condemned these ideas as communism, claiming that they undermined the Church's mission and reduced the Gospel to a purely earthly one.

The United States and Latin American governments also responded with threatening hostility.

The United States supported Latin American militaries in their methods of assassinating those who subscribed to liberation theology and conducting low-intensity warfare against guerrilla groups.

The diocese of San Cristóbal de las Casas (Chiapas), under Samuel Ruiz's direction, began to redefine evangelization methods and to abandon the traditional approach of Europeanizing indigenous peoples, instead incarnating the gospel in the local culture of each community.

Catechists no longer delivered the Word of God to the communities with which they worked, but incorporated the Gospel within the cultural traditions and day-to-day lives of the indigenous.

This meant committing themselves to learning the culture and languages of Chiapas, organizing services and discussions in indigenous languages, and inculturating local customs that could be integrated into the Word of God.

By doing so, and by translating the Bible into indigenous languages, this work allowed for the poor of San Cristóbal to begin identifying parallels between their own experiences of oppression with those in Biblical passages, most notably the Exodus.

Rather than focusing only on the religious affairs that they had once been restricted to, catechists began fostering discussion of economic and political matters that impacted people's daily lives.

Passivity was replaced by these new methods of catechists, and through the development of base communities, which built the framework for reflection and collective action.

Indigenous poor no longer accepted the "low wages they earned on plantations, the lack of security in their land titles, the corruption of government agencies, and the abuses of merchants and landowners", instead using "their religious faith and interpretation of the Bible to create concrete solutions to immediate problems".

This was a position which he held until 1972 when elections for secretary general chose Archbishop Alfonso López Trujillo, who proceeded to replace progressive department heads, such as Ruiz, with his own conservative allies.

In 1989, Bishop Ruiz founded the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Rights Center to push back against increasing violence against indigenous and campesino activists in his diocese.

This theology of liberation, however, appeared threatening to government structures and those with political and economic power, and in some cases oppression of rural and urban poor in Mexico and other areas of Latin America grew worse.

His 1993 pastoral letter reflects this experience, in which Ruiz comments on the past actions taken by him and his diocese, admitting that they were culturally destructive and explaining that "We only had our own ethnocentric criteria to judge customs. Without realizing it, we were on the side of those who oppressed the indigenous".

Ruiz began to slowly identify and challenge the structures of oppression, questioning the structure of the government and military, as well as figures within the church who were furthering these systems.

He encouraged indigenous communities to take charge of their own lives, and openly voiced that the poor of Chiapas were victims of structural oppression and institutionalized violence.

Gradually, Ruiz underwent a series of conversion experiences, leading him to take up the cause of the Mayan indigenous population in his diocese and to develop an inculturated approach to indigenous Catholicism and evangelization.

Ruiz "learned to speak four Mayan languages."