Guatemala's new evangelists

Natural History, May, 1998 by Rachel Cobb

I hear of a Catholic priest who is doing remarkable work in the area. One morning, on my way to Cotzal to look for him, I drive through Pulay, a model village, and hear cries and shouts coming from inside a small wooden Pentecostal church. I park, pry open the creaky wooden door, and edge inside. About a dozen men and women stand close to the altar of the Complete Evangelical Church of God, singing, praying, and crying. Women, who on the street would be demure and reserved, are jumping up and down, stamping, their feet, and rhythmically bouncing their heads from side to side, shouting, "O Senor! O Senor!" One or two drop to the dirt floor in spasms, saliva dripping from their mouths. They clap as fast as possible, and I try to join in, feeling that my silence in this commotion is somehow noticeable.

Later that afternoon, after making an appointment with the Catholic priest in Cotzal, I return to talk to members of Pulay's Pentecostal congregation. Their six-hour prayer session is now over, and inside the unlit church, the pastor and two church elders sit next to the altar. I sit below in the first pew. I find myself answering, rather than asking, questions. I tell them I was raised in the Episcopal Church, thinking that puts me safely between Catholicism and Evangelical Protestantism. I explain that the Episcopal Church is a breakoff of the Catholic Church, older than the Pentecostal branches of Protestantism. No, they tell me, theirs is the first church, the church of God, founded fifty years after the death of Christ. Do I make the sign of the cross during services, they want to know. Yes, I answer. Smiling in satisfaction, the pastor turns to the others and mumbles something in Ixil that I can't understand, until I hear the word catolica. Evangelical Protestants always seem to want to pin down my background in the first few minutes.

The next day, in the courtyard of the newly restored Catholic church in Cotzal, I meet Father Federico. Born in Germany, he has a brisk air, strong blue eyes, white hair, and a narrow beard that squares his jawline. He is gentle when he speaks to the Mayan men and women who work in his church, and I get the feeling that he is loved. Father Federico has worked here since 1989. He says that although a thousand people now attend Sunday Mass, when he arrived Catholics were "praying secretly or meeting in their homes." The Church had pulled out of the region, in 1980, after several priests and other clergy and catechists were killed.

In response to the desperate poverty of the Ixil Maya, priests who were in the region earlier, in conjunction with Catholic Action (a pastoral movement to foster greater orthodoxy among Catholics), had been moved to help organize health-care providers and start agricultural and craft cooperatives. Some called for resistance to social injustices, along the lines of what became known as liberation theology. They also spoke out against the army's increasingly ruthless counterinsurgency tactics. Army suspicion began to fall indiscriminately on priests, catechists, and association leaders, even on ordinary Catholics. In July 1980, after escaping an assassination attempt, Juan Gerardi, the bishop of Santa Cruz del Quiche, left his diocese and traveled to the Vatican to report on the violence. And that August, the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, two of whose priests were murdered, issued a statement saying that they "left the area in solidarity with the bishop and in protest against five years of massacres by the army." While some Evangelical missionaries and leaders also lost their lives, by and large, they did not challenge authority.