Pope John Paul II declared Saturday that the Mexican government should not consider the Roman Catholic church a constitutional enemy, but rather an ally in the fight for a more moral society. ``In a state of law, the full and effective recognition of religious freedom should be the fruit and guarantee of civil liberties,'' John Paul told Mexico's bishops in his strongest call yet for legal recognition of the church. Despite being overwhelmingly Catholic, Mexico has harsh restrictions on church activity that date to 1859. The church was for many years considered a reactionary force by the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party, but the rules, which include bans on a church role in education and participation in political life, have been winked at in recent years. ``A theme that certainly concerns us, as pastors of the church in Mexico, is the present civil legislation about religious material,'' the pope said. ``The church in Mexico wants to be considered and treated not as something strange, nor as an enemy that must be confronted and fought, but as an ally of all that is good, noble and beautiful,'' John Paul said. He made his remarks in an address dedicating a new headquarters for the Roman Catholic Episcopal Conference of Mexico in this industrial suburb 15 miles north of Mexico City. The pope said the church could help the Mexican government by strengthening family life and giving young people _ the majority of the population _ deeper moral values. John Paul also expressed ``profound satisfaction for the climate of greater understanding'' with the government, illustrated by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari's recent naming of a personal envoy to the Vatican. The move was seen as a step toward re-establishing diplomatic relations broken in 1926. John Paul also reviewed for the bishops many of the themes that he had already touched on during his stay in Mexico. He said the bankruptcy of communism showed the futility of building a society without God, but he also criticized capitalism for its materialism. He said family life should be strengthened with faith, attacked artificial birth control and praised the bishops' work in dealing with workers who migrate to ``El Norte'' _ the United States _ ``full of illusions about making progress that corresponds to their own expectations.'' Later, the Polish-born pope attacked the mixing of Marxism and Catholicism in so-called ``liberation theology'' before both the bishops and in a later address to an audience of 10,000 priests, nuns, seminarians and students at Christopher Columbus College, a Catholic instituion in Mexico City. Referring to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, he said it was ``incomprehensible that some sons of the church in these lands (Mexico) persist in presenting as viable models whose disaster is obvious in other parts of the world.'' In a final address to a gathering of 1,500 members of Mexico's intellectual and cultural community at the National Library, the pontiff took up the theme again, saying that while communism had been discredited, the culture of materialism in the West has not yet ``assured a civilization that dignifies man.'' Earlier in the day, during a visit to the central Mexican farming region of Zacatecas, the pope expressed sympathy for the hundreds of thousands of workers who migrate to the United States each year. ``I want to remember also those who, for different circumstances, have had to emigrate from this land, obliged to seek their living elsewhere,'' the pontiff told a flag-waving crowd of over 200,000 spread across a rocky, red-clay mountainside. ``The Lord also suffered the injustice of having to abandon his land.'' John Paul spoke in a region of north-central Mexico once known for silver mines but now dominated by farms and grinding poverty. In recent years the state of Zacatecas has become one of the centers of illegal migration to the United States. The pope told hundreds of thousands of people gathered for a Mass on a rocky, red-clay mountainside outside Zacatecas that manual work had dignity. He denounced exploitation and said workers needed ``adequate forms of association to defend your rights,'' referring to unions. The pope was scheduled to leave Mexico Sunday morning, stopping briefly on the Caribbean island of Curacao before reaching Rome on Monday. It was John Paul's 47th trip outside Italy since becoming pope and his 10th pilgrimage to Latin America.
