Juan Parada and Girolamo Antonucci’s Conflict

Juan Parada and Girolamo Antonucci’s Conflict brings an institutional struggle inside the Church into the open: Antonucci insists on hierarchy, doctrinal discipline, and political caution, while Parada treats relief for suffering people as an immediate obligation that cannot wait on ecclesiastical procedure. Their antagonism surfaces in negotiations over earthquake aid and later sharpens around Parada’s ministry in Chiapas, where the argument over liberation theology becomes inseparable from a contest over the Church’s authority and reach.

Negotiating Authority and Earthquake Relief

Parada’s conflict with Antonucci first takes concrete form during negotiations over aid after the earthquake. Parada recognizes the proposed arrangement as cynical, but urgency changes his calculation: there is too much work to do, and people need help. He offers financial and material assistance on an informal basis, with conditions that the clergy be allowed to wear the cross, that aid be clearly identified as coming from the Holy Roman Catholic Church, and that the next administration begin good-faith negotiations on formal relations between church and state within thirty days of taking office. The negotiations thus concern not only resources but also the Church’s public presence and future political standing.

Antonucci objects that the promised talks would not begin until 1988, nearly three years away. Parada answers that he has done the arithmetic and asks the minister whether they have a deal. The minister agrees. That agreement makes the disagreement between the two men immediate: once the minister leaves, Antonucci rebukes Parada for superseding him in a negotiation and insists that Parada is under his authority. Parada rejects the premise. He sees Antonucci not as a superior whose command settles the matter, but as a politician sent by Rome to conduct politics. Their dispute is therefore both personal and procedural: Antonucci regards Parada’s intervention as a breach of hierarchy, while Parada regards that hierarchy as no reason to leave people in need without assistance.

The earthquake also exposes their different understandings of religious duty. Antonucci frames the disaster as an act of God that offers an opportunity to save millions of Mexican souls. Parada interrupts that reasoning with a distinction between spiritual salvation and the urgent work of keeping people alive. His response is directed beyond earthquake victims to people living in poverty: the residents of Mexico City’s slums, people on garbage dumps in Tijuana, and landless peasants in Chiapas whom he describes as little more than serfs. In his view, a promise of eventual salvation cannot substitute for attention to hunger and material deprivation in the present.

Liberation and the Meaning of Pastoral Work

The confrontation continues when Antonucci dismisses liberation theology. Parada refuses to treat the disagreement as an abstract doctrinal dispute or to yield to Antonucci’s authority. He says that he answers to God, not to Antonucci, who threatens that he could have Parada transferred to a chapel in Tierra del Fuego. The threat makes the institutional power behind Antonucci’s position plain: disagreement can carry the consequence of removal from Parada’s work. Parada’s defiance, in turn, rests on his conviction that pastoral responsibility demands engagement with the conditions in which people live.

Later, after the papal nuncio summons Parada to Mexico City to explain his grave pastoral and doctrinal errors in Chiapas, Parada recounts another exchange with Antonucci. He distinguishes his concern from the label used to condemn him: he is not interested in liberation theology as a factional designation; he cares about liberation itself. Antonucci answers that Christ’s liberation of the soul from hell and death should be sufficient, and that delivering this spiritual gospel, rather than politics, should be a priest’s principal concern. Parada argues instead that the gospel must become good news to people now, not only after they have starved. The dispute is a conflict over timing and substance: Antonucci places the Church’s central work in salvation beyond earthly suffering, while Parada insists that pastoral care must meet people before suffering has consumed them.

Chiapas, Authority, and Institutional Pressure

Parada grounds his position in what he says his ministry has accomplished in Chiapas. He points to six thousand Indigenous catechists spread through every village and teaching the gospel. Antonucci answers with a different measure of the same religious landscape: Chiapas has Mexico’s highest percentage of converts to Protestantism, and only a little more than half of Parada’s people remain Catholic, the lowest Catholic share in the country. The figures turn their disagreement into a dispute about what counts as success. Parada emphasizes a network of local teachers carrying religious instruction across the villages; Antonucci emphasizes the loss of Catholic adherents.

Parada hears in Antonucci’s concern not simply a pastoral warning but institutional anxiety about competition. He likens the worry to a struggle between Coke and Pepsi over market share. The comparison is pointed because it recasts a conflict presented in the language of doctrine as a contest for allegiance and institutional reach. It also suggests why Parada and Antonucci talk past one another: Parada presents catechists and material concern as expressions of a living mission, whereas Antonucci treats declining Catholic numbers as evidence that the mission is failing.

The disagreement has consequences beyond their exchanges. Antonucci tells Parada that the Latin Affairs Desk at the Vatican is investigating him, names Bishop Gantin, and reports that Gantin wants him removed. The threat transforms their argument over pastoral practice into a direct challenge to Parada’s position in the Church. Across both confrontations, Antonucci invokes authority and doctrinal boundaries, while Parada answers through urgency, local work, and responsibility to people in need. Their conflict remains unresolved in the evidence: the investigation and prospect of removal hang over Parada, while his defense of liberation and his work in Chiapas remain central to his understanding of his calling.