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 Méndez 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 Méndez 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 Grégoire 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 Chávez 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, Méndez 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.