It is a painful memory for the young Mexican — four hours locked up in the jail cell at the age of 14. His crime? Playing football.
“It was forbidden,” Cirilo Ceferino recalls.
He is now aged 21, but the memories flood back as Ceferino surveys the ruins of two schools that members of the Virgin of the Rosary, a fringe religious cult, recently destroyed and set on fire.
Photo: AFP
Ceferino no longer lives in the village of Nuevo Jerusalen — “New Jerusalem” — population 4,000, but goes there regularly to visit his parents.
Founded in 1973, the Virgin of the Rosary, a nominally Catholic cult that the Vatican does not recognize, shuns sports because they require wearing “indecent” clothes.
Men wear long pants and long-sleeved shirts, while women wear long dresses with bright colors and head scarves. Make-up is banned.
At the village entrance a sign lays out the dress code: “Women wearing short skirts or low-cut dresses and without sleeves are forbidden to enter.” Also banned: “Men with long hair who are dressed dishonestly.”
Modern items like cellphones, televisions and radios are forbidden, as well as alcohol and non-religious music. There was no electricity until 2000.
There is a roll call at each of the three daily religious services, and followers must dedicate one day a week to work for the community. Locals raise corn, sugar cane and beans for a living.
The village, located in Michoacan state, about 430km west of Mexico City, has been an offbeat tourist attraction for years.
However, that changed on July 6 when community leader Rosa Gomez, allegedly acting after receiving a vision from the Virgin Mary, ordered a state-run pre-school and elementary school in the town to be destroyed.
The schools were used by the children of about 300 “dissidents” that split with the hyper-conservative majority in 2006, seeking closer contact with the outside world and eager to give their children a state-recognized education.
About 100 community members armed with pikes and mallets heeded Gomez’s call, smashing down the building walls then setting the remains on fire.
Gomez, who goes by the name of Mother Catalina, is the daughter of the late “Pope” Nabor, the founder of Nuevo Jerusalen.
“The Virgin of the Rosary visited me, she wants us to destroy the schools because that is where the devil lives,” Gomez told local reporters at the time.
On a recent visit, one of the sect’s priests who gave his name only as Father Luis said that the villagers acted spontaneously because they did not want the schools.
“There had been protests ... the government did not want to resolve the problem, so it reached the point that the people said, ‘If they do not pay attention to us’ ... ” Father Luis said, trailing off.
Two followers in their sixties, who identified themselves as Santos and Jacinto, said it was the Virgin who did not want the schools.
“There’s already a parish school,” Santos said, referring to the cult’s education center, which is not officially recognized by Mexican authorities.
Nuevo Jerusalen was founded when a peasant named Gabina Romero claimed the Virgin of the Rosary appeared to her with a message for Nabor Cardenas, a priest in a neighboring parish, to found a village of penitents in order to save the world from a pending doom.
Cardenas became “Pope Nabor” and Romero became “Mother Salome,” a clairvoyant who claimed she regularly received messages from the Virgin.
The Catholic Church swiftly excommunicated both of them, but the village nevertheless attracted believers from across Mexico.
One of Nuevo Jerusalen’s attractions is its “cathedral,” a building that can be accessed only with special permission, where followers take turns leading a 24-hour vigil.
“Here, we sing day and night because the Virgin is alive and we cannot leave her alone,” Father Luis explained.
However, over the years rifts have appeared in the community.
Some were caused by rivalries between the clairvoyants who succeeded Romero, with some claiming to have spoken to former Mexican president Lazaro Cardenas, who died in 1970, and Pope Paul VI, who died in 1978.
Others simply could not take the strict community rules.
Those who left the cult but stayed in the village, such as Emiliano Juarez, say conservative New Jerusalem residents want to impose their will by force.
“The schools were a problem for them because the things taught there undermined their abuses,” Juarez said.
The ultimate goal, Juarez said, is to kick the dissidents out.
For Father Luis, it is very simple.
“There are rules here and anyone who lives in this town has to follow them,” he said. “If you don’t agree, you can leave. The goal of coming here is because you want to change.”
The dissidents complain that state authorities have taken a hands-off approach. Juarez said that years of complaining about sect abuses have gone unheeded.
Local officials have been mediating between the two groups and Michoacan Governor Fausto Vallejo told reporters an investigation is underway to punish the culprits for the school burning, but no arrests have been made yet.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees
RSS