Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company January 22, 1999 Pope Is Returning to Mexico With New Target: Capitalism By ALESSANDRA STANLEY ROME -- When Pope John Paul II held a recent working lunch to prepare for his visit to Mexico, which begins on Friday, one Vatican official present said that the 78-year-old pope spoke with deep nostalgia about his first papal trip there 20 years ago. This is not surprising. This is John Paul's fourth visit to Mexico, but that first voyage in January 1979 was a rare moment in history: a youthful-looking, untested pope was greeted by millions of Roman Catholics with an outpouring of hope and excitement even the Vatican had not expected. And that trip, in which he spoke out sternly against the leftist liberation theology then polarizing the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America, unveiled the Polish-born pope's unwavering stance against communism of any kind. As he returns to prepare the Americas for the third millennium, the pope finds himself once again battling an ideology that he feels oppresses much of humanity, only this time it is capitalism. "The human race is facing forms of slavery which are new and more subtle than those of the past," the pope warned in an apostolic letter last month, while talking about an unbridled free-market system. "And for far too many people, freedom remains a word without meaning." Much of the world has changed since that ground-breaking first trip. Communism has all but collapsed across the globe. Revolutionary liberation theology is almost, if not quite, extinct. The Mexican constitution was then so fiercely anti-clerical that priests were banned from wearing collars in public. The Mexican government changed its laws to allow religious freedom in 1991 and opened diplomatic relations with the Vatican the following year. The pope himself is also strikingly different: Then vigorous and bursting with health, John Paul II is now frail, stooped and shaky with the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. One thing has not changed: In what has proved the bane of the twilight years of his papacy, the problems of Third World poverty that he so boldly emphasized in Mexico two decades ago, have not improved. His trips to Mexico City and St. Louis have a dual purpose: He wants to re-energize Catholics and their bishops to pursue what he calls the new evangelization, his desire to deepen the church's relationship with its followers and also broaden it by seeking new converts. But he also wants to rattle the conscience of the free market. "International institutions, national governments and the centers controlling the world economy must all undertake brave plans and projects to ensure a more just sharing of the goods of the world," the pope said in an address on Tuesday. It is a theme he is certain to repeat throughout his visit. Having watched the collapse of communism, the pope now wants a new political system for the 21st century, where the free market is reined in by humanitarian concerns. His frequent calls for Third World debt relief and income redistribution are all part of a larger vision of a better world order. The pope has said the church cannot present a new economic model for the world, but he offers the church's social teaching "as an indispensable and ideal orientation" for governments to follow. Some view his message as a kind of Christian liberation theology. "After all the promises, suddenly nobody seems to care about the poor anymore," said Rev. Lorenzo Albacete, a theology professor at St. Joseph's seminary in Yonkers, who accompanied the pope to Cuba last year. "Neo-liberalism has made the poor invisible, and the church down there is the only one, badly or not, that is holding up their cause. In Latin America, it's not liberation theology, but it may be post-liberation theology." Officially, the pope is not visiting Mexico and the United States. He goes to Mexico to deliver an "apostolic exhortation," a reply to the bishops of North and South America, who together held a synod in Rome in 1997, one of the largest meetings of bishops since the ecumenical council Vatican II. To address their concerns -- on matters including economic justice, Third World debt, the shortage of priests and the growth of evangelical Protestant movements, as well as abortion and the death penalty -- the pope plans to spend four days in Mexico City, then travel to St. Louis for a 36-hour visit. The Vatican pointedly refers to the pope's trip as a visit to America, lumping the two continents together. The wording is a reflection of the Vatican's long and Eurocentric view of history from the arrival of Christianity in the New World 500 years ago. Addressing the synod, the pope asked the bishops to "consider the continent as a whole, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, without introducing a separation between the north, the center or the south, so as not to risk a contrast between them." It is also a sign that the pope wants to ingrain in North American Catholics a stronger sense of solidarity with their brothers and sisters in the South. "He wants to get North American church out of its English-language bunker and start thinking of itself as one Catholic Church in the Western hemisphere," George Weigel, a Catholic theologian whose biography of John Paul II is due to be published in October. "And he wants Latin American Catholics to think of themselves not as victims but as agents of their own history." And of their future. The pope has been planning how to usher in the third millennium ever since he was elected. Disappointed by what he sees as the secularism and alienation that runs through Europe, he looks to the more than 780 million Catholics of North and South America as the main source of expansion in the third millennium. The pope's call for a new Catholic evangelization, however, has been muted by widespread indifference in rich countries and the spread of evangelical Protestant churches in poor ones. When the pope addressed Mexican bishops during a visit in 1990, he told them that they were partly to blame that the church was losing ground to fundamentalist groups, saying they had left many Mexicans "deplorably vulnerable" to proselytizing by Protestant denominations. This was a leitmotif of the synod, where many Latin American bishops complained about the "invasion" of Protestant sects, whose financing mostly comes from North America. And that challenge from Christian rivals is as vexing to the Vatican as the spread of liberation theology was 20 years ago. It was at a bishops' conference in Puebla during his 1979 trip that the pope warned against liberation theology. By the end of the 1980s, Marxist-leaning priests and bishops in Latin America had been removed, and the movement lost much of its support among the clergy. The inequities still rampant under the free market system have raised the consciousness of many in the church hierarchy, however. They may abhor the doctrine of liberation theology, but church leaders in Mexico and throughout Latin American have adopted some of the language. "When Marxism fell, we thought everything would be resolved, but instead, no," said Archbishop Javier Lozano Barragan of Mexico, a Vatican official who attended the Puebla meeting. "Now we have a neo-liberalism on which the poor get poorer and the hungry are marginalized. There has to be something besides the free market." But the pope is returning at a time when the role of the church as a champion of the poor and oppressed in Mexico is being challenged in Chiapas, a southern state in Mexico, where leftist guerrillas are battling government forces. Catholic priests serving Indian populations have come under attack by the government. Some, like Bishop Samuel Ruiz Garcia, who until last year served as a mediator in peace talks between the government and the rebels, are accused by government officials of being supporters of the rebels. A group of conservative activists and landowners in Chiapas sent a public letter to the pope on Tuesday asking him to remove Ruiz. Some Vatican officials believe that Ruiz has gone too far. Mexicans will be anxiously awaiting to hear whether the pope will address the problem of Chiapas while visiting the country. While the pope is in St. Louis, many Americans will be riveted by the pope's meeting with President Clinton. The Vatican, which has studiously avoided any comment on the impeachment trial clouding Clinton's presidency, views the visit as a courtesy call from one head of state to another. "They never asked, never commented," said Lindy Boggs, the U.S. ambassador to the Holy See. But the U.S. news media are likely to give greater weight to the iconography of a handshake between one of the world's most respected moral leaders and a president who is on trial on charges that he lied under oath about an extramarital affair.