The truth shall piss you off…

It used to be said of Mexico’s relations with the Vatican that “The State is blind and the Church is deaf,” meaning that as long as the two power centers in the country didn’t openly confront each other, they were basically free to pretend the other didn’t exist.  Times have changed.  Starting with Vatican II, when the Church accepted its responsibility to take a activist role in social policy, and with the Mexican State’s  tolerance (or acquiescence) to the power of the Roman Catholic Church going back to constitutional changes in the 1990s, even the PRI … formerly a stalwart anti-clerical party, has become keenly attuned to whatever emanates from Rome.

Or at least when it fits their own agenda.

With Francis… not just a Pope, but an ARGENTINE… having dissed the Mexican government with his warning to an Argentine anti-drug addiction group about the dangers of “Mexicanization” in his own country (meaning, one supposes, making narcotics dealers unofficial partners in governance), the PRI — which everyone in Mexico believes to have made narcotics dealers unofficial partners in governance … along with PAN and the PRD — has been rather put out.

Seeing the widespread perception of the Mexican government being in cahoots with narcos (newly minted cardinal Alberto Suárez Inda basically said, “everybody in Europe, including the Pope, sees it that way”), the administration forgot to just close its eyes, and complained that the Church was too loud.  Calling in the Papal Nuncio the Foreign Secretary sent off the dreaded diplomatic “stiffly worded note” to His Holiness. 

Who, in essence, said, “yeah, right, whatever”.