SAN CRISTOBAL DE LAS CASAS, Mexico - Four months after Pope John Paul II canonized a Mexican Indian, a top Vatican official arrived here Saturday to continue the Catholic Church's outreach to a population being lured away by the Protestant faith.
"I have come to demonstrate the church's affection for the Indian population," Giovanni Battista Re, of the Vatican's Congregation for Bishops, said before meeting with San Cristobal Bishop Felipe Arizmendi and members of Arizmendi's largely Indian diocese.
Battista Re is the third cardinal from the Vatican this year to visit the southern state of Chiapas, a region heavily populated by Indians and where Roman Catholics are a minority in some districts.
Battista Re said he came to Mexico to inaugurate an annual conference of Mexico's Roman Catholic bishops and to visit his good friend Arizmendi.
The trip is for "purely religious motives," he said.
On July 31 and Aug. 1, respectively, the pope declared Mexican Indian Juan Diego the first Indian saint in the Americas and beatified two other Mexican Indians. Beatification is the last formal step before possible sainthood.
The acts came during an 11-day papal pilgrimage to the Americas aimed at reinforcing the church's appeal to Indians to counter Protestant gains.
Arizmendi himself has said that while the canonization of Juan Diego was "a recognition of the dignity of the Indians," it would take more than that to keep Indians in the Catholic Church — including letting them preach and work in the church.
But the Vatican stepped in to limit Arizmendi's aggressive program of training Indian deacons, apparently concerned that the deacons were not supervised closely enough by priests and that married deacons were almost taking on the functions of priests.
None of Mexico's 132 Roman Catholic bishops is Indian. The priests that serve Indian populations are spread thin and tend to be outsiders.
While relatively few priests speak Indian languages, Protestant groups have spent decades translating the Bible into obscure Indian languages.
Battista declined to comment on the deacon issue or on the now-seemingly dormant rebellion by Zapatista rebels, who rose up briefly against the government in 1994 in the name of Indian rights.
Leaders of the Zapatista National Liberation Army disappeared from the public eye after August 2001, when Congress passed a heavily watered-down version of an Indian rights bill that the Zapatistas opposed.
Battista was scheduled on Sunday to visit the highlands Indian village of Oxchuc.