World News
Brief news item about victims led priest to tackle issue of 'femicide'
Published: May 30, 2012
ORANGE, Calif. (CNS) -- Father Rafael Luevano's life has never been the same, he says, since he spotted that small story in the newspaper almost 20 years ago. "At the breakfast table one morning back in 1993, I read the briefest of newspaper accounts reporting on the discovery of what would be merely the first of the hundreds of women's bodies that would be found in the desert on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez in northern Mexico. In that instant my life changed." Thus begins the priest's new book, "Woman-Killing in Juarez: Theodicy at the Border," published by Orbis Books in March. A slim volume of research into the unknown numbers of women who have disappeared and been murdered on the border near El Paso, Texas, the book is no true-crime thriller, notes the priest, who is in residence at Holy Family Cathedral in Orange. "It's about the problem of suffering, and God's relationship to that suffering -- and, particularly, innocent suffering," he said. "The problem of innocent suffering in Mexico remains a pressing problem -- as it does for all of us." In theology, "theodicy" is the discipline that seeks to explain how the existence of evil in the world can be reconciled with God's justice and goodness.
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