SERESURE
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Seminario Regional del Sureste (known as its abbreviation SERESURE or simply the Seminary of the Southeast) was a training center for future Latin-American Catholic priests with a tendency toward liberation theology and ended up being the principal hotbed for this group of Catholics who sought the integration of priests into the modern world by helping the poor, the indigenous, and the dispossessed, opposing the clerical tradition of finding alliances in pre-existing circles of power.[1][2] In SERESURE, which was located in the city of Tehuacán in Puebla, Mexico, various Catholic prelates and priests were trained, not just from Mexico, but from all of Latin America.[1][3] The seminary was founded in 1969 by the initiative of several bishops toward the southeastern and pacific sections of the country, and stayed open until 1990, the year in which it was closed for good on the orders of Noberto Rivera Carrera, who considered it a Marxist institution opposed to the dogmatic teachings of the Catholic Church.[2][4]
Major bishops involved in the founding of the seminary were Liberationist theologians, such as the Bishop of Cuernavaca Sergio Méndez Arceo, the Bishop of Tehuantepec Arturo Lona Reyes, the Archbishop of Oaxaca Bortolomé Carrasco Briseño and the Bishop of San Cristóbal de Las Casas Samuel Ruiz. All of these figures faced persecution from the nuncio Girolamo Prigione which had helped motivate SERESURE's formation.[5]
Close relations with the indigenous population
In its 21 years of existence, SERESURE trained almost 750 students in 18 dioceses and two religious orders (the Dominicans and the Jesuits). Of these 750,488 were later ordained as priests. The dioceses that managed to obtain freshly ordained priest from this seminary were largely in the Pacific South region (Chiapas and Oaxaca), in which the dioceses of Tehuacán, Acapulco, Ciudad Altamirano, and Quetzaltenango, Guatemala were integrated. The seminary hosted seven major conferences about indigenous pastoralism, where many indigenous people of various ethnic groups in Mexico participated, allowing liberationists to encounter indigenous beliefs, culture, and theology, a topic that was also taught in the seminary.[6] There were also a group of indigenous seminarians that held meetings apart from others in order to formulate a theology that agreed more with their cultural customs.[7]