AMERICA / MEXICO - Bishops ask for "co-responsibility" in school education while the number of Catholics decreases

Mexico City (Agenzia Fides) - The Episcopal Conference of Mexico (CEM) has expressed its dissatisfaction with the improvised way in which the Secretariat of Education is reviewing the free basic level texts for the 2021-2022 school year . "This review - underlines the CEM through a press release - is carried out through consultations and sui generis commissions, in a short time and without scientific, legal and institutional rigor, when it comes to a very delicate issue: the contents aimed at the basic level learning of children".
In this statement sent to Fides, the Bishops underline that the participation of society in education, provided for by the recent amendment to article 3 of the Constitution, has not been implemented, and there has not been an institutional dialogue, when what should prevail is the best interest of the child.
Similarly, the Bishops recall that the situation in which education is found in the country requires a global, articulated, generous and consensual response, considering the impact suffered by the pandemic and the growing dropout from school, which today reaches 5 million Mexicans, according to data from the Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática (INEGI).
Finally, to solve the problem of education in Mexico, the CEM called for joint responsibility in tasks, as well as the design of protocols that recognize the different cultural realities of school communities and that promote participation and self-regulation, giving priority to right of primary children to be educated.
The Bishops' declaration is released in a special context, a few days after the publication of the results of the INEGI (Global Survey 2020) and with the opening of the Plenary Assembly of the CEM. At the opening of the Assembly, the reflection proposed by Archbishop Franco Coppola, Apostolic Nuncio, focused on the most delicate point of INEGI's final report: the sharp decrease in the number of Catholics in Mexico.
"When we are before him (God), the Lord of the harvest, he will ask us to account for the many talents he has entrusted to us: a Catholic people, faithful and devoted to Saint Mary of Guadalupe. But we have not lost one of the hundred sheep ... but a quarter of the sheep!" he stressed, participating in the inauguration of the 110th Ordinary Assembly of Mexican Bishops.
"The decrease in the Catholic population in this Guadalupana land is extremely worrying. Now we are seeing, with greater clarity, how much - in the last decades - the formation in the faith has not reached everyone; nor has it succeeded, as perhaps we think or as we would have liked, to deeply involve the baptized", said the Archbishop.
The 2020 census data showed a 5% reduction of Catholics in the Mexican population due to the advance of secularism and Protestantism. The INEGI report indicates that 77.7% of the Mexican population declares itself Catholic in 2020, compared to 82.7% in 2010.
Mgr. Coppola invited the Mexican Bishops to reflect on the fact that "traditional" methods do not work today, in any field of evangelization.
The Catholic population amounted to 97.8 million people in 2020, compared to 84 million in 2010. But the census also recorded 14.09 million Protestants or Evangelicals, which is equivalent to 11.2% of the population and an increase of about 4 million people compared to 7.5% ten years ago.
The Catholic Church found it "even more surprising" that there are now 10.2 million Mexicans "without religion", 8.1 percent of the population, almost double compared to 10 years ago.
Likewise, for the first time, INEGI documented 3.1 million people "believers but without religious affiliation", 2.5 percent of the total. (CE) (Agenzia Fides, 15/4/2021)

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