The Seminario Regional del Sureste (known as its abbreviation SERESURE or simply the Seminary of the Southeast) was a training center for future Latin-American Catholic priests with a tendency toward Liberation Theology and ended up being the principal hotbed for this group of Catholics who sought the integration of priests into the modern world by helping the poor, the indigenous, and the dispossessed, opposing the clerical tradition of finding alliances in pre-existing circles of power.
[1][3] The seminary was founded in 1969 by the initiative of several bishops toward the southeastern and pacific sections of the country, and stayed open until 1990, the year in which it was closed for good on the orders of Noberto Rivera Carrera, who considered it a Marxist institution opposed to the dogmatic teachings of the Catholic Church.
[4][7] The ensuing policies which diverged from previously common study programs and fieldwork to focus rote classroom work like other seminaries provoked the mobilization of seminarians and teachers like, who made a peaceful pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Tehuacán where they began a day of prayer and fasting in its atrium until the doors were closed on them.
As a result of these actions that would end up having national ramifications, Rivera Carrera fired a slew of teachers and nearly every bishop took themselves and their most prominent seminaries to other dioceses.
[7][8] Annual meetings of the priests who had left the seminary at the time of its demise continued until at least 2009, led by the bishop emeritus of Tehuantepec, Arturo Lona, in Tehuacán.