"A Joyful Place"

Aztec emperors used to vacation in Cuernavaca. Hernando Cortes claimed it for his own and built a palace and cathedral there. Tourists, expatriates, and weekenders who drive the 50 miles from Mexico City know it lovingly as the town of "eternal spring"; bougainvillea spills over its ancient walls and flowering jacarandas tower above its sparkling blue swimming pools. But for all its reputation as a garden hideaway for the international set, the flower that blooms most remarkably in Cuernavaca these days is a vigorous new variety of Roman Catholicism. Its most dedicated gardener is Cuernavaca's bishop, the Most Rev. Sergio Mendez Arceo.

To some church conservatives, the flowering of Cuernavaca Catholicism has seemed something of a wild growth. A promising experiment in psychoanalysis at a Benedictine monastery in Cuernavaca (TIME, Dec. 2, 1966) ended in a Vatican ban of the practice and the disbanding of the monastery. More recently, Rome forbade the enrollment of priests in Monsignor Ivan Illich's Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC) in Cuernavaca, a school that prepares North Americans and Europeans for work in Latin America with heavy doses of political and social orientation. Still, while these two pioneering experiments remain important factors in Cuernavaca's Catholic life and have influenced it enormously over the years, they are only part of the deep-ranging revitalization of the diocese's Christian life that has characterized the episcopate of Mendez Arceo.

When Don Sergio, 61, became bishop of Cuernavaca in 1952, he did not enter the job as an innovator. Then, shortly after his consecration, he spent some time at Father Gregoire Lemercier's fledgling Benedictine monastery in the Cuernavaca suburbs, where he was impressed with both the pastoral uses of the monks' experimental worship services and the strikingly different religious art that complemented them. The bishop asked the monastery's principal artist, Fray Gabriel Chavez de la Mora, to help him refurbish the city's 400-year-old cathedral. Gloomy Victorian clutter was stripped away, revealing priceless 17th century murals, and the neoclassic high altar was replaced by a simple modernistic sanctuary designed by De la Mora. The result is a stunning example of religious architecture.

More recently, Mendez Arceo embellished the cathedral with a different kind of innovation, this time borrowed from CIDOC--a "Pan-American" Mass, complete with traditional Latin American rhythms, bespangled mariachi, strumming guitars and wailing trumpets. The cathedral is packed every Sunday for the two "mariachi Masses," and many in the crowd are young men, an unusual sight in Latin American churches. After Mass, the bishop mingles with the crowd outside, chatting in one or another of five languages with foreign visitors, and pausing occasionally to give a parishioner a warm abrazo.

Homespun Cotton. "I take ideas from others," says Mendez Arceo. "I must enrich myself from others." But he adds touches of his own. For liturgical ceremonies, he wears only homespun cotton vestments and carries a plain wooden shepherd's crook; otherwise he just wears a baggy black clerical suit on his 6-ft. 2 in. frame, unembellished by either a pectoral cross or episcopal ring. His book-cluttered residence is staffed only by volunteer students; nearby nuns send in his meals. He spends much of the time each week rocketing around the dusty roads of his diocese in a little Opel, saying Mass in homes of poor villagers. Mendez Arceo even calls himself a Zapatista, after the area's favorite native son, Peasant Revolutionary Emiliano Zapata.

Don Sergio's enthusiasm spills over to his priests. Regional groups of priests meet voluntarily every week to discuss sermon topics and common solutions to pressing problems; all of the diocese's 100 priests meet twice monthly to discuss similar issues with Mendez Arceo himself. The meetings are characteristically free: last spring some of the priests publicly criticized the Mexican hierarchy for dragging its feet on putting into practice the reforms of Vatican II.

The bishop himself--usually an affable, conciliatory man who speaks kindly of his conservative peers--can also be outspoken. At Vatican II, he defended psychoanalysis, in obvious sympathy with Lemercier's monastery. Last May he journeyed to Rome to plead the case for CIDOC and former Monsignor Illich, who had resigned the active ministry after an inquisitorial Vatican proceeding (TIME, Feb. 14). The ban has since been modified, and priests and nuns may study at Illich's center as long as their superiors monitor their progress.

No Idleness. Somehow, everyone stays a part of the Catholic community in Cuernavaca. Gregoire Lemercier and most of his monks are now laymen, operating a psychoanalytic center near the old monastery grounds. Their elegant religious art is still sold on the cathedral grounds, and Lemercier, now married, is still close to the bishop. Ivan Illich's center, legally a secular institution, is now secular in mood as well, and currently has a record enrollment of more than 600, including many non-Catholics. Mendez Arceo still speaks warmly and publicly of Illich's "participation in Cuernavaca's Christian community."

A clue to the success of Don Sergio's all-embracing pastorate may lie in the work of a protege, Father William Bryce Wasson. Wasson missed ordination in the U.S. because of poor health, came to Cuernavaca to recuperate, and was ordained by Mendez Arceo. Today he presides over a remarkable orphanage that Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm recently praised as "really rare--an institution that has happy orphans." The secret, says Fromm, is that each of Wasson's 900 orphans knows "he will not be expelled or abandoned for any reason"--yet at the same time he is "expected to contribute, not to fall into idleness."

There is no idleness in Don Sergio's diocese either--nor any dread of sudden expulsion. It is rather, says Leroy Hoinacki, a former Illich colleague now at U.C.L.A., "a symbol and a source of inspiration. It is a joyful place, with no fear, no suspicion. Any young priest, sister or layman who has hopes of being a Christian, especially within the structure, looks to Cuernavaca and Don Sergio. They are living the Gospel as it should be lived." German Catholic Theologian Johannes Metz agrees. Don Sergio's benign but active leadership, says Metz--who is dedicating a new book on church reform to the bishop --provides a model of diocesan government that could profitably be emulated throughout the Catholic Church.

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