800 official reports of extortion against priests in Mexico during 2022

From 2018 to date, 7 Catholic priests have been murdered and there has been an increase in the kidnapping of religious, as well as the “collection of “derecho de piso” by organized crime so that Catholic churches can remain open.

(Excélsior).- According to the Report on the Incidence of Violence against Ministers, Religious and Laity of the Catholic Church in Mexico, prepared by the Centro Católico Multimedia (CCM), the country is for 14 consecutive years one of the most dangerous to exercise priesthood.

The study indicates that in 2022, about 800 extortions, threats and threats against priests in the Mexican Republic were registered, mainly the motives of these crimes are linked to fraud and illicit appropriation of resources of the victims necessary for the exercise of their ministry.

In 2022, the statements of the same bishops who were impeded in their right of movement by organized crime checkpoints in different states of the country were highlighted.

The details were provided by Cardinal José Francisco Robles Ortega, archbishop of Guadalajara, Sigifredo Noriega Barceló, bishop of Zacatecas, and Rafael Sandoval Sandoval, bishop of Autlán, who stated that they had been detained and that the cartels operating in the north of Jalisco and Zacatecas demanded a fee from the parish priests.

The fees could amount to half of the collections that are collected, a product of patron saint festivities that are a main source of resources for many parishes and Catholic communities in the country,” says the MCC study.

According to the work carried out by the priest Omar Sotelo Aguilar director of the MCC and Guillermo Gazanini Espinosa, coordinator of the research unit of the MCC, “it is regrettable that there are no specific results in the corresponding inquiries“.

From 2018 to 2022, around 24 weekly aggressions to temples and Catholic congregations were registered. Among these are recorded common robberies, attacks for purposes of desecration, and direct aggressions to priests and leaders of Catholic communities, in addition to murders perpetrated against clergymen for various causes predominantly those derived from their pastoral actions followed by robbery or other causes of a personal nature.

Excélsior published yesterday that José Dorian Piña Hernández, a seminarian in his third year of Theology at the Diocesan Seminary of Zacatecas, was shot and killed.

According to the MCC report, in 2022, the priest, Jose Guadalupe Rivas, disappeared on the afternoon of Sunday, May 15, and was found dead on a ranch near Hacienda Santa Veronica in Tecate, Baja California. He was president of the Casa del Migrante located in the El Descanso neighborhood in Tecate, which he had joined in 2021.

And this year, the best-known case was that of the Jesuit priests Javier Campos Morales and Joaquín César Mora Salazar, murdered inside a parish on June 20 in Cerocahui, a town in the Sierra Tarahumara in Chihuahua.

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