A man set fire to the altar of the Our Lady of Guadalupe parish in the town of Tilapan, in the diocese of San Andrés Tuxtla, to the south of the Mexican state of Veracruz. After what happened, the local bishop, Mons. José Luis Canto Sosa, presided over a disagreement Mass.
On Thursday, August 21, the man identified as Miguel “N”, with the naked torso and with a machete in his right hand, set fire to the main altar of the church, as seen in different videos on social networks.
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According to the Mexican newspaper The daythe subject also set fire to some religious images and assaulted two collaborators of the Church.
After the call to 911, the Municipal Police arrested man. The reasons that led him to set fire in the church are still unknown.
DISAGRAVIO AND CONSECRATION MASS
Fr. Teódulo Morales Meza, spokesman for the Diocese of San Andrés Tuxtla, published on Friday 22 use in which he informs about the “repair and consecration of the altar of the parish of Our Lady of Guadalupe de Tilapan”, held at 6 pm on Friday, to “restore the holiness of the place and reaffirm the devotion of the community.”
The priest highlighted the participation of “the entire parish community of Tilapan, who joined in prayer and recollection. As a significant symbol of purification and renewal, the Mass began outside the temple, since the parish remained closed” from the incident to before the Eucharist yesterday.
“This act emphasized the importance of repair and the new consecration of the altar as the center of the spiritual life of the parish,” added the diocesan spokesman.
Fr. Morales also stressed that “the repair and consecration mass is a special liturgical rite that seeks to atone for any desecration or sacrilege committed against a sacred place. Through prayers, blessings and the anointing of the altar with sacred oils, it seeks to restore the dignity of space and reaffirm its purpose as a place of encounter with God.”
Indeed, the canon 1211 of the Code of Canon Law, the law that regulates the Catholic Church worldwide, establishes that “the sacred places are violated by severely injury actions made in them with scandal for the faithful.”
When this occurs in places like churches or cemeteries, the bishop of the place determines that they have threatened “the holiness of the place” and therefore “it is not lawful to exercise the cult in them until the damage is repaired with a penitential rite according to the norm of liturgical books.”
Walter Sánchez Silva
I am husband since 2008. With my wife we have three children here and one who went to heaven in 2023, before birth. Since I joined ACI Press in 2005, I have had the opportunity to cover various events of the Catholic Church. Among them, the World Youth Days in Colonia, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro and the apostolic trips of Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico and Pope Francis to South Korea. I have been sent to the Vatican to cover the family’s synods, in 2015; of the Amazon, in 2019 and that of Sinodality, in 2023. I follow the situation of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, which suffers the persecution of the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, as well as the ecclesial news in the region.