This Palm Sunday of 2026, as we remember how Our Savior humbly entered Jerusalem mounted on a donkey, Pope Leo XIV encourages us to strengthen our awareness that in Christ, King of peace, we see the crucified of humanity. His wounds reflect the injuries of so many victims of violence and oppression. “Lay down your arms, remember that you are brothers,” cried the Pontiff, rejecting all war and the hypocrisy of those who pretend to invoke God with hands full of blood.
His cry hits hard in a Mexico battered by horror and despair where Holy Week begins under a painful contrast. While the regime enthusiastically promotes religious tourism with saturated destinations, media processions, and the repeated discourse of “economic spillover,” Holy Week presents itself as a spectacle to divert attention from a national reality that reveals a Passion that does not end, thousands of disappeared whose families search without rest, communities displaced by organized crime, victims of unrelenting violence, and corruption as a way of life that elevates modern political Pharisees, surrounded by privileges, luxuries, and waste, while preaching austerity and unity, using the good people as justification for their moral misery.
The bishops of Mexico, in their message for this Holy Week 2026, offer a clear and challenging call. Commemorating the mysteries that gave us redemption is not just the remembrance of a past event; it implies “opening the heart so that Christ may transform our life and history once again because the Church also walks alongside those who suffer, alongside those who cry out for peace and justice, alongside the victims and those who ‘cannot find their loved ones’.
That is why the message of the Mexican Episcopate invites us to “stop, to look at our life with sincerity and return to God,” listening to the cry of the poor and the victims and to disarm language, to renounce words that wound and to sow “words that build communion.” In a country where insults, accusations, and polarization multiply easily, the disciples of Christ are called to speak with truth, respect, and charity, because “the cross of Christ does not divide, it reconciles.”
Evil does not have the last word. Easter reveals that life is stronger than death, love stronger than hate, and hope stronger than fear. Mexico needs men and women who live their faith with courage, coherence, and fidelity, and it invites us to make these days a time of encounter with God, of reconciliation, of returning to love, and of renewing hope with an urgent call to personal and social conversion. It is not enough with flashy processions or a tourist pause that distracts from the crisis of security and justice. It demands an end to the behaviors that sink the country into corruption and resentment.
Holy Week is not simply a period of respite from ordinary activities. Let it be, as the bishops and Pope Leo XIV ask, a time of true reconciliation, of concrete love, and of active hope. Let every Mexican decide to break with the hypocrisy that acclaimed Christ and then condemned him. Let the resurrection not remain a pious wish, but become the force that drives us to build a Mexico where evil truly does not have the last word, to disarm language and arm the heart for the true beginning of national redemption.