Latin America: The Church Militant - Norman Gall · Latin America: The Church Militant Norman Gall If the Christian believes in the fertility of peace for achieving justice, he believes

Commentary

Latin America: The Church Militant

Norman Gall

If the Christian believes in the fertility of peacefor achieving justice, he believes also that justiceis an unavoidable condition for peace. He doesnot overlook the fact that Latin America findsitself in a situation of injustice that could becalled institutionalized violence, because thepresent structures violate fundamental rights.This is a situation that demands wholesale,audacious, urgent, and profoundly renewingtransformations. We should not be surprised ifin Latin America what Pope Paul VI calledthe "temptation to violence" is born. One mustnot abuse the patience of a people who enduresfor years a condition that those with a greaterawareness of human rights would hardly accept.

-Document on Peace,Second General Conference of CELAMI

NMedellin, Colombia, 1968

ONE OF THE great religious dramas ofour time is currently being enacted

throughout the length and breadth of atinAmerica, which contains more than one-third ofthe world's Catholic population. In the dozen orso years since John XXIII proclaimed his aggior-namento, the Roman Catholic Church in LatinAmerica has been increasingly assuming a role notunlike that of the ancient Hebrew prophets inpointing to the injustices and disorders of society;at the same time, it has been experiencing an in-ternal ferment that has affected all levels of its hi-erarchical structure. To be sure, dissent and disar-ray-what John's successor, the more cautiousPaul VI, has called "inner rebellion" and "self-demolition"-are apparent everywhere in theChurch, but in Latin America they have assumeda particular relevance. There, the papal social en-cyclicals are being put to ideological use as guidesfor a fundamental reorganization of society; andthe dogmatic definition by Vatican II of theChurch as "the People of God"-the effect ofwhich was to limit the traditional predominanceof the clerical hierarchy-has paved the way for ademocratization of Church life in nearly all itsforms. Moreover, in I,atin America the Churchhas been generating a "theology of rev-olution"-disseminated in pastoral letters andbishops' orations, in the writings of theologians,and in official pronotmcements-which condemns

in no uncertain terms the "institutionalized vio-lence" of a society that confines from one-third toone-half of its population to backwardness andmarginality.

Indeed, the formal Church hierarchy, in manyinstances, is the main voice of this new concernwith social problems, and this, too, is a "revolu-tionary" development. The Iatin American bish-ops, who heretofore were known for their conserv-atism, have become increasingly radical in rhe-toric. This development is reflected in the docu-ments issued by CELAM (ILatin American Bish-ops' (Council), which began life in 1955 as arather conservative body but which, under the in-fluence of Pope John's encyclicals, Pacem in Ter-ris and Mater et Magistra, and of Vatican II, hasbeen transformed into a progressive body, pron-ouincing itself on such questions as economic inte-gration, agrarian reform, university problems, andviolence. Of course, ideological divisions still re-main within some of the Latin American hier-archies, but pressures from both priests and lay-men have had a modifying effect on all but themost rigid attitudes. Thus, while Chile and theBrazilian Northeast have been the main centers ofclerical innovation in recent years, the progressivecurrents within Catholicism have become a majorfactor in the politics of virtually every LatinAmerican republic. In smaller countries like Bo-livia, Guatemala, Paraguay, the Dominican Re-public, and Cuba, the aggiornamento has beenlargely in the hands of foreign missionaries, mostlySpaniards and North Americans, many of whomhave been acting much more boldly, politicallyspeaking, than they would have been permitted toact at home.

The changes within Catholicism over the pastdecade have been so swift and varied that someobservers feel that something akin to the Protes-tant Reformation, with its elements of both socialand religious revolution, is presently taking place.The Chilean Jesuit magazine Mensaje, the mostwidely read and respected Church publication inLatin America, has editorially compared thechanges in the Church today with the historic roleof Martin Iuther:

In Vatican II, the Roman Catholic Churchrecognizes as its patrimony many of the pointsmade by Luther in his time: the primacy ofthe Word of God in the Scripture; the realityof a living tradition and not merely mechanicaland verbal; the role of servant of the Word andof men that corresponds to the Teacher; the

25

NORMAN GALL, currently on a Guggenheim Fellowship inCaracas, is working on a book on Latin America. Mr. Gall'slast previous article, "The Legacy of Che Guevara," ap-peared in our issue of December 1967.

26/COMMENTARY APRIL 1970

prophetic and priestly function of the laity andthe "equality of all [hierarchy and laity] withreference to dignity and common mission"; theassertion of the liberty with reality of the Spiritthat animates all in the People of God, givingthem charisma; the subordination of ceremonyand institution to the faith of Christians....

Like the Lutheran Reformation of the 16thcentury, the present aggiornamento of the RomanCatholic Church has been rooted liturgically in ashift from Latin into the vernacular language andin the assumption by "the People of God" of acentral role in the simpler and more direct cele-bration of the ritual. To obtain a sense of howpowerful the traditional fusion between socialand religious elements of rebellion can be, onemight look beyond the contemporary examples ofGandhi and Martin Luther King to Luther's owntime; in the decades before the great Peasants'War of 1525, the German peasantry was chafingagainst the new taxes imposed to support theswelling bureaucracies of the German principali-ties, and against the hardships caused, in thattime of growth of towns and trade, by the need topay in cash instead of kind. This peasant unrestfound vindication in the Reformation, accordingto Professor Roland Bainton, since "Luther's free-dom of the Christian man was purely religiousbut could very readily be given a social turn....Luther certainly had blasted usury and in 1524came out with another tract on the subject, inwhich he scored also the subterfuge of annuities.. . .His attitude on monasticism likewise suitedpeasant covetousness for the spoliation of clois-ters. The peasants with good reason felt them-selves strongly drawn to Luther."* Luther was aminer's son, and miners in the world's revolution-ary traditions have served in many instances asleaders in the transformation of the peasantryinto a social force. This association between socialand religious protest has continued since Luther'stime, and is abundantly evident in Latin Americatoday.

I

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH has been atthe heart of political controversy

throughout most of Latin America's history, andthis conflict has left it weak. Until the 19th cen-tury, the Church was an arm not only of theSpanish conquest but of the colonial governmentas well. Under the Patronato Real (Royal Patron-age) granted by Popes Alexander VI and JuliusII, the Spanish.monarchy was given total controlof the Church in the New World, except in mat-ters of doctrine and religious discipline, in ex-change for a promise by Ferdinand and Isabellato spread the faith in the unknown lands comingunder their temporal power. A series of papal

* Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther, p. 209.

bulls issued between 1493 and 1508 in effect gavethe Spanish crown the power to collect tithes andto nominate bishops, priests, and abbots; further,no cleric could go to the Indies and no monastery,church, or hospital could be built without specificroyal authorization. No papal bull or decreecould be circulated or enforced in the New Worldwithout prior approval of the Council of the In-dies. Thus the life of the Church became thor-oughly intertwined with the political interests ofthe crown. (By the early 17th century one-tenthof the population of Lima, for example, consistedof priests, friars, canons, and nuns, with nineteenchurches and monasteries serving a population of26,500. In the Vice-royalty of New Spain-Mexico-the Church became the principal lend-ing institution, controlling roughly half the col-ony's landed wealth through either outright own-ership or heavy mortgages.)

At the same time that thousands ofmissionary-priests, especially Jesuits and Francis-cans, were penetrating deep into the back coun-try, advancing the frontier and the king's controlinto mountains and jungles, religious life in manybig-city monasteries was becoming engulfed inconcubinage, fraud, speculation, and commerce.The New World was so vast, and the means of col-onization so slim, that Western ways, especiallyChristianity, could form at best a thin and patchyveneer on local customs. Since few Europeanwomen accompanied the early colonizers, concu-binage and miscegenation became everywhere thenorm, to the degree that even today roughly halfof all births in most countries of Latin Americaare illegitimate. The ritual and symbols of Ca-tholicism were grafted onto the surfaces of a thou-sand different bodies of traditional belief; the re-sulting hybrid practices are still in evidence today.On the altiplano of Peru and Bolivia, for exam-ple, the image of the Virgin Mary is fused in theminds of the Quechua and Aymara Indians withthat of their traditional earth goddess, the PachaMama, to whom animal victims are burned in rit-ual sacrifice. In Haiti, the traditional Africanvodun dances are tinged with recognizable ele-ments of the Catholic Mass, while the loa or spir-its worshiped in the ritual derive from the localdeities of Dahomey and the Congo. Among thehighland rnunicipios of Guatemala, where insome Indian villages the Mayan calendar is still inuse, the Catholic Church is merely one of severalholy places in the neighborhood to which brujos(sorcerers) come with small groups of worshipersto perform rites to a local deity. And in Brazil,formal Catholicism is colored by survivals of WestAfrican folk religions, especially the Gge-Nag6cult of the Yoruba people of Nigeria, preservedfor centuries by the descendants of Negro slaves.

The prelates of the New World presided se-renely over this mosaic of practice and belief untilthe breakup of the Spanish empire toward theend of the 18th century. Until then the privileges

LATIN AMERICA: THE CHURCH MILITANT/27

of the Church in Mexico, for example, were notless than those of the French clergy before 1789,although when the Society of Jesus was expelledfrom the Spanish empire in 1767 its 128 planta-tions in New Spain were expropriated by theCrown. By the time of the Napoleonic Wars, Free-masonry spread from England, France, and Spainto the American possessions. In the Spanish colo-nies not only did Freemasonry help lay thegroundwork for independence, but-althoughpriests were members of many lodges-it also setthe pattern of Church-State conflict for the nexthundred years. In the period immediately follow-ing independence, twenty-eight of thirty-eight epis-copal sees in Latin America were vacated be-cause of the exile or voluntary departure oftheir bishops. The successors of these bishops nowplunged into republican politics, encouraged by apapacy desperately engaged in Church-State con-troversy all over Europe.

Following the pattern of the times, a series ofLiberal-Conservative conflicts began in LatinAmerica over such questions as clerical control ofeducation, confiscation of Church property, the le-gality of divorce, immunity of the clergy fromcriminal prosecution, and the prohibition oftithes. These conflicts, which were often ulti-mately decided by bitter civil war, usually re-sulted in a severe drubbing of clerical interests. InMexico, for example, the Church's fortunes de-clined to such a degree that today it is left with-out property (it does not even own its churchesand cathedrals) and without the right to conductpublic processions; Mexican priests are legallyprohibited from wearing clerical garb in thestreets. In Paraguay, Dr. Jos6 Gaspar RodriguezFrancia, who ruled as dictator for the first thirtyyears following independence, "took all theChurch's property into his own hands, deprived itof all ceremonials which were wont to impress thepopulace ... and in the end made himself head ofthe Church after the example of Henry VIII ofEngland...."* In Guatemala, under a Liberaldictatorship lasting from 1871 to 1885, the Jesuitsand the Archbishop of Guatemala City were ex-pelled, Church lands were seized, convents andmonasteries closed, cemeteries secularized, andpriests forbidden to wear collars and cassocks out-side of church. (Most of these provisions remainedin effect until 1954.) The same thing occurred inVenezuela under Antonio Guzman Blanco's longdictatorship (1870-88). And in Colombia, the con-flict generated by more than a century of recur-rent Liberal-Conservative religious strife was cli-maxed by the violencia of 1948-58, when Conserv-ative gangs dressed as police brought Liberal peas-ants before the local priest, who made them kiss acrucifix and swear allegiance to the Conservativeparty; later these "professions of faith" were an-

* From J. Lloyd Mecham, Church and State in LatinAmerica, p. 191.

nounced in the provincial press. Today, only fourof the twenty-one Latin American republics-Colombia, Peru, Argentina, and the DominicanRepublic-preserve the "protected" status of theChurch that prevailed during the Spanish empire.

HE DECADES of fanaticism and holy warwere followed by the modernization

of politics (in most cases this has taken place onlywithin the past fifty years), a period marked bythe abandonment of Church-State controversy infavor of debate by a new generation of politicalparties over "the social question." This develop-ment corresponded to a change in the life of theChurch itself. Until Pius XI and Mussolini con-cluded the Lateran Pacts in 1929, successive Popeshad remained in seclusion as self-styled "prisonersin the Vatican," in piqued response to the loss ofthe papal lands, in 1870, to Garibaldi's ar-mies-the Papacy's final prostration in Europeanpolitics. (Italian troops marched into Rome justas the First Vatican Ecumenical Council, still insession, had finished proclaiming the doctrine ofPapal Infallibility.) For almost sixty years follow-ing, Catholics were forbidden under papal injunc-tion from participating in Italian politics; the in-terdiction was abrogated when Mussolini andPius XI agreed to the creation of an independentVatican State with the Pope's absolute sovereigntyover a 100-acre enclave within Rome. During thattime little attention was paid to Pope Leo XIII'sgreat social encyclical, Rerum Novarum, which in1891 called the world's attention to workers'rights and sketched one of the clearest outlinesever formulated of social democracy as practicedtoday in Western Europe and the United States.For most of the seventy years between ,RerumNovarum and the proclamation in 1961 of JohnXXIII's Mater et Magistra, the Catholic hierarchyin Latin America remained largely silent on socialquestions. In 1937 the Archbishop of Lima, Msgr.Pedro Pascual Farfan, was still able to say: "Pov-erty is the most certain road to eternal felicity.Only the state which succeeds in making the poorappreciate the spiritual treasures of poverty cansolve its social problems."

The social awakening of Catholicism in LatinAmerica began to pick up speed in themid-1950's with the start of a new era in hemi-spheric affairs, one in which electoral democracyshowed signs of replacing dictatorship as the polit-ical norm. The Church has played an active rolein this process. The angry opposition of Argenti-na's conservative hierarchy led to the fall of JuanDomingo Per6n (1945-55), despite his announce-ment in 1945 that "my social policy will be in-spired by the papal encyclicals," and despite thealliance between Per6n and the Church thatlasted through most of the dictatorship. FollowingPer6n's fall, clerical opposition helped pave theway for the overthrow of other dictators, includ-ing Gustavo Rojas Pinilla of Colombia (1957),


Marcos Prez Jimenez of Venezuela (1958), Ful-gencio Batista of Cuba (1959), and Rafael Tru-jillo of the Dominican Republic (1961). TheChurch's hand in these developments was indi-cated in October 1959, when a new Papal Nuncio,Msgr. Lino Zanini, arrived in Ciudad Trujillo, tothe shock and surprise of Per6n, then living inexile there as Trujillo's guest. Per6n rememberedthat Zanini had come to Buenos Aires as PapalNuncio shortly before his own fall from power;Per6n made immediate preparations to leave thecountry, and in his farewell visit to his host cau-tioned: "It was that man who caused my downfall.Wherever that man puts his foot, he causes dis-turbances. Watch yourself carefully." Fourmonths later, following a wave of arrests after aplot against Trujillo was discovered, Zanini prod-ded the Dominican bishops into issuing two pas-toral letters attacking the dictatorship, as a resultof which the Nuncio was expelled. Before his de-parture, in discussing Trujillo's violent reactionto the pastoral letters, Zanini told a high Domini-can official: "That man doesn't know whom he'sgetting mixed up with. Everyone who has opposedme has died." Fifteen months later Trujillo wasassassinated.* By that time, Pope John had issuedMater et Magistra and had summoned the world'sCatholic bishops to the Second Vatican Ecumeni-cal Council.

II

THE NEW TREND in the Church towarddisengagement from-if not active

opposition to-the conservative power structure ismost evident in Brazil, which, with its ninety-fivemillion people, is the world's largest and most pop-ulous Catholic nation. There the Roman Catho-lic hierarchy is engaged with the six-year-old mili-tary dictatorship in the gravest Church-State con-flict of the hemisphere. The factionalism of theBrazilian hierarchy notwithstanding-there aresome two hundred bishops with widely varyingpoints of view-the Church, over the past sixyears, has become the main focus of opposition tothe country's military-dominated government.Leading prelates and the former Papal Nuncio,Msgr. Sebastiao Baggio, have been accused fre-quently of Communist sympathies by army gener-als and other government supporters. Manypriests and bishops have come under severe at-tack as a result of a campaign by a right-wing or-ganization called the "Society for the Defense ofTradition, Family, and Property," which enjoysgovernment and military support. In December1968 President Costa e Silva disbanded the Brazil-ian Congress because it refused to waive the par-liamentary immunity of a young deputy (a for-mer Catholic Action student leader) who hadoffended the army; he called particular attentionto "the anti-government campaign in the schools,with participation of the so-called progressive

clergy and of certain organs of communication indeforming the facts, which demonstrate the exis-tence of a revolutionary movement."

Typical of the Church-State conflict of recentyears in Brazil was the incident involving DomValdir Calheiros, bishop of the steel-making cityof Volta Redonda, near Rio de Janeiro. Althoughhe developed a personal following among youngerpriests in his previous position as auxiliary bishopof Copacabana in Rio, Dom Valdir is known as aquiet, even-minded cleric with more of a pastoralthan a social-revolutionary bent. In December1967 four students (two of whom were living inthe bishop's house) borrowed his station-wagonand used it to hand out leaflets denouncing thegovernment. A few hours later, four soldiers brand-ishing machine-guns broke into the bishop's home,ransacked it for more "subversive material," andthreatened Dom Valdir with arrest.t The bishopresponded by printing a list of Brazil's "seven capi-tal sins," which included low wages, unemploy-ment, discrimination, hunger, and disease. Afterthe army seized all copies of the handbills andjailed two priests who were distributing them, theBrazilian Bishops' Conference issued a public pro-test which, characteristically, emphasized social is-sues. Citing the "painful picture" of social inequal-ity and injustice inherited by Brazil, the bishopsstressed that "we must do our duty toward formingthe conscience of our congregation, so they shallrise to an apostolic activity producing the necessarychanges.... The preparing of laymen to accom-plish this mission with courage, according to theinsistent appeals of the Pope, is not a subversiveactivity. On the contrary, it is a contribution totrue peace, which is unobtainable without a justsocial order.... We are conscious that a large partof our population regards the Church as one oftheir last hopes. We are anguished by the limitedmeans at our disposal. It is not within our provinceto make certain decisions, which are urgent andunavoidable.... We do not have the resources toreduce poverty. But we are willing to cooperate,chiefly through laymen, in projects of humandevelopment, so that in a short time all paternal-istic aid may be replaced."**

Partly as a result of statements like this one, thebishops have served to fill the political vacuumcreated by the rise of a right-wing military dicta-torship and by the failure and near-disappearanceof the country's traditional politicians. (The po-litical role of an intelligent and publicly-activeBrazilian bishop may be compared with that of akey U.S. Senator, except that the latter is elected

* This story is told in Robert D. Crassweller's excellentbiography, Trujillo: The Life and Times of a CaribbeanDictator, pp. 382-83.

t On December 4, 1969, Dom Valdir was indicted forsubversion by a military court after he had charged thata labor leader at the government steel mill in Volta Redondahad been tortured during interrogation.

** From "Bispos Ap6iam Padres contra Acao Militar," inCorreio da Manha, Rio de Janeiro, December 1, 1967.


for six years while a bishop is appointed for lifeand is removable only by the Pope.) Althoughfewer than forty of Brazil's two-hundred bishopsare spokesmen for the most "advanced" Churchviews, the progressive bishops include in theirranks many of the more educated clerics and havetherefore, despite their small numbers, been ableto exert a powerful influence over the broad, un-committed majority; they have exercised a similarinfluence in the councils of CELAM, whose cur-rent President is a Brazilian, Dom Avelar Brandaoof Teresina.

The rhetorical radicalism of the Brazilian hier-archy reached a peak of sorts in the pastoral let-ters of 1962-63, issued just prior to the 1964 mili-tary coup that ousted President Joao Goulart. Atthat time both the lay and clerical Catholic lead-ership reflected, in addition to the instruction ofPope John's social encyclicals, the teaching ofFrench Catholic philosophers like Jacques Mari-tain, whose humanisme integral profoundly in-fluenced the writings of Alceu Amoroso Lima,Brazil's foremost Catholic thinker and for manyyears the leader of Catholic Action. The youngergeneration of Brazilian Catholics also developed astrong interest in the personalist philosophy of Em-manuel Mounier, founder and editor of theFrench journal Esprit, who, like Maritain, elabor-ated upon and to some extent influenced the so-cial teaching of the Church. At the same time, theBrazilian hierarchy was being swept along by thepowerful and radical lay movements that becamea major force in the somewhat chaotic socialeffervescence of the Goulart years (1961-64). Thisradical thrust was concentrated in the elite youthsections of Catholic Action-known by their ini-tials: JUC (university students), JEC (secondarystudents), and JOC (young workers)-whichwere strongly influenced by the young, progressivepriests (many of them French, Dutch, and Ger-man missionaries) who served as their advisers.Many of these young people came under the intel-lectual persuasion of a Brazilian Jesuit theolo-gian, Padre Henrique C. de Lima Vaz, who hasproduced widely-read commentaries on Hegel andMarx as well as on Pope John's encyclicals. In1968 the Catholic university movement, JUC, de-cided to enter student politics; prior to 1964 thelast four presidents of the National StudentUnion (UNE) were Catholic Action leaders,working with the Communists in a coalition inwhich the Catholics were the stronger and moreradical partner.

Emanuel de Kadt, a British sociologist studyingBrazilian Catholicism, reported that during theearly 60's "most bishops were simply over-whelmed by the political and social happenings,leaving the hierarchy divided and unable to comedown forcefully on one side or the other. It hadsomething to do with the fear, quite widespreadamong Catholics, of being left behind in the over-all trend toward reform. As a result, even some of

the less wholeheartedly progressive Catholic lead-ers were willing to let a section of the Church getimplicated in the wider radical movement. Theyregretted, certainly more than the young peoplethemselves, the ideological weakness of thosejumping on the bandwagon. These middle-of-theroad churchmen gave warning of the dangers ofnaivete, but had few, if any, positive and con-cretely helpful suggestions."* In 1962, after themilitant Catholic Action leaders were finallywarned by the bishops that their more aggressivepolitical activities were compromising the Churchas a whole, a new political organization, AaoPopular, was formed with many of its militantsretaining membership in their respective CatholicAction groups. After the 1964 coup, many Cath-olics involved in UNE and Acao Popular, includ-ing priests, were imprisoned or forced to leave thecountry. The military regime's inquiry into sub-version in UNE produced an indictment of 712students and two priests, Padre Vaz and Frei Mat-teus Rocha, former head of the Dominican Order.Padre Francisco Lage, a priest accused of organiz-ing labor unions and advising Agao Popular, wassentenced to twenty-eight years in jail and then al-lowed to escape to Mexico.

INCE 1964 the principal theater of theChurch-State conflict has been the

Brazilian Northeast, which, with a population ofabout thirty million, is the most extensive and pop-ulous area of extreme poverty in Latin America.The Northeast consists of the so-called droughtpolygon of the semi-desert sertao, as well as thecoastal strip, zona de mata, inhabited by descen-dants of both indigenous peoples and Africanslaves imported to work the region's sugar planta-tions. The social structure is still that of the400-year-old sugar economy, though the industryhas declined steadily since the abolition of slaverya century ago. Although the scarcity of arableland forced most of the freed slaves to remain onthe plantations as subsistence-wage peons, somewere drawn away by the 19th-century rubberboom in the Amazon, and others in recent yearshave migrated to the more prosperous and indus-trialized areas of southern Brazil around Rio deJaneiro and Sao Paulo. In the Northeast, roughlythree-fourths of the population cannot read orwrite. In this primitive region the average churchparish is 300 square miles, with more than 16,000inhabitants for each priest: it is no wonder thatthe area abounds in magical folk religions withAfrican roots and in messianic cults built aroundlegendary revivalist preachers who have roamedthe sertao.

The luxuriant growth of revivalist cults in theNortheast, together with the violent, chronic al-

* From "Religion, the Church, and Social Change inBrazil," reprinted as CIDOC Document 68/73 (Cuernavaca,1968), p. 73/21.


ternations of rain and drought, have contributedto a kind of lyric extremism in both politics andreligion.* In the Pernambuco revolution of 1817,local priests were the revolutionary leaders andchampions of social reform. In 1874 a civil warswept the sertao in protest against the new metricsystem of weights and measures. In November1935 the Brazilian Communist party engineeredbarracks revolts in the Northeastern garrisons ofNatal and Recife; the revolt failed for lack ofcoordination with other plotters in the south.

Under the primitive conditions that prevail inthe Northeast, perhaps any proposal for meaning-ful change might smack of "extremism," whichmay be why the imaginative Church-sponsoredradio literacy campaign, the Basic EducationMovement (MEB), has come under severe attackfor combining literacy education with a novelprogram of conscientizacao: instilling in thepeasant a consciousness of his condition andrights. Just prior to the 1964 military takeover,the MEB-financed by the Ministry ofEducation-had 470 full-time employees provid-ing daily broadcast lessons to some 180,000 peas-ants over 25 radio stations. Although it was organ-ized and supervised by a Council of Bishops, MEBwas run entirely by laymen, many of whom hadbeen involved in the Catholic Action youth move-ments. Even before the 1964 coup, however,MEB's literacy manuals-stored in Rio de Janeirofor distribution in the Northeast-were confis-cated because of their objectionable content,under orders of Carlos Lacerda, the right-wingGovernor of Guanabara state. Since the coup,MEB has been limping along without federal sup-port; the inventor of its conscientizacao tech-niques, Paulo Freire, has been forced into exile inChile, where he has developed an internationalreputation in adult education. The Church-sponsored peasant sindicato movement in theNortheast has likewise been paralyzed since 1964due to opposition by the army and harrassmentby landlords' private gangs, though the priestswho advise the peasant movement have remainedas the only leadership available for the past sixyears. The Church clearly has been involved in aholding operation in the Northeast since 1964, aposition which has become increasingly difficult to

* Euclides da Cunha's literary classic, O Sertao, quotesthis description from 1877 of the most famous of thebackland preachers: "There has appeared in the northernbacklands an individual who goes by the name of AntonioConselheiro, and who exerts a great influence over theminds of the lower classes, making use of his mysterioustrappings and ascetic habits to impose upon their ignor-ance and simplicity. He lets his beard and hair grow long,wears a cotton tunic, and eats sparingly, being almost amummy in aspect. Accompanied by a couple of womenfollowers, he lives by reciting beads and litanies, by preach-,ing, and by giving counsel to the multitudes that cometo hear him when the local Church authorities permit it.Appealing to their religious sentiments, he draws them afterhim in throngs and moves them at his will."

maintain as Church-State conflicts have sharp-ened.

The principal figure in this holding operationis Dom Helder Camara, the Archbishop of Recifeand Olinda, who is Latin America's best-knowncleric and probably the most popular publicfigure in Brazil. A small, wispy Northeasterner, heheld the key post of Secretary-General of the Na-tional Council of Brazilian Bishops during the1962-63 period when, it will be recalled, the bish-ops produced their most dramatic statements onsocial questions. Dom Helder assumed his presentposition-which amounts, in effect, to acting asPrimate of the Northeast-a few days after theApril 1964 coup. Shortly thereafter he was de-nounced by General Itebere Gouvea do Amaral asbeing "on the side of leftism" and for "takingpleasure in appearing on TV with excesses of his-trionics and clownish attitudes." The general alsocharged that "the analysis of Communist organiza-tions on the balance of forces opposing the[military] power seizure considers the disorga-nized Catholic Church in Pernambuco [the stateforming Dom Helder's archdiocese] ripe for infil-tration." During my visit to Recife not long ago,Dom Helder was being sued for libel by a laborlawyer who was offended at a speech the Arch-bishop had made before a sindicato of sugarpeons in the nearby town of Cabo, in which heurged the peasants to "repel as traitors the unionleaders who receive money from bosses to makethe worker accept unjust and immoral contracts.If the workers opened their eyes, they would dis-cover that, besides honest lawyers, there are para-sites enriching themselves from the tears, blood,and sweat of the workers, receiving money fromworker and employer, endorsing contracts so un-just that they draw the curse of God."

Despite his flair for publicity, Dom Helder ap-pears in some ways to be a very traditionalchurchman: thus, e paternalistically dispensescharity to the poor through personal contacts,whereas other progressive bishops favor social-mobilization programs. A leader of the avant-garde at the Vatican Council, Dom Helder hasbeen a personal friend of Pope Paul since 1950when, still an ordinary priest, he approached thethen Msgr. Giovanni Montini with a bold reor-ganization plan for the Brazilian Church; he hassince been careful to remain publicly on the cor-rect side of the Pope on the critical issues of celi-bacy and birth control. At the Pope's request,Dom Helder has recently been urging the adop-tion by Brazilian Catholics of the techniques ofnon-violent rebellion developed by Dr. MartinLuther King.

DURING MY visit to Recife I had an op-portunity to put some questions to

Dom Helder and to obtain an elaboration of hiswidely-discussed views on the Church and revolu-tion. "Within the effort for creation of a theology


of development, one must mold a long chapter forthe theology of revolution," he told me. "What Ihave read until today is not easy to apply to theenormous diversity of worlds in which an appar-ently unitary Latin America is unfolding. Thepresence of the Church in social movements isvery old. What is really new is the angle in whichthe Church places itself. Christianity in LatinAmerica recognizes its great part of responsibilityfor situations of injustice in which a great part ofthe human masses find themselves, in a state of in-ternal colonialism, in infra-human conditions.What looks like a mixture of political mysticismand religious mysticism, what reminds us of oursocial leadership, is a thirst to recuperate lost timeand pay for the sin of omission."

When I asked what he considered the most im-portant work of the Church in his archdiocese,Dom Helder copied out for me in his small hand-writing an excerpt from an article by a Spanishtheologian, Padre Jose Maria Gonzalez Ruiz ofMlaga:

We Christians have important tasks in theconstruction of a world being born and whichis heading for a socialist solution. In this con-struction of socialism we Christians have noconcrete technical solution: the experience of2,000 years teaches us that the civitas humanashould not be absorbed by the Church. TheChurch does not have the mission of creatingits own civitas in which the Gospel is convertedinto an economic, social, and political code. Thecivitas should be built with its own autonomousmeans.... The Christian should commit him-self to the socialist revolution without technicalmisconceptions and without stressing his roleas a believer, but giving at the same time hisnotable contribution of mystique for universalbrotherhood and total hope. Because-and thismust be known-socialism never will be builtwith a sectarian call to the blind fatalism of amechanically-conceived history. Socialism. is anoption of the free creative will of man and, forthe realization of this option, the Gospel hasserved and continues to serve as an impulse ofimmense efficacy.

Dom Helder apologized for the length of the cita-tion-"but it faithfully relates the thought that il-luminates the work of the Church in our arch-diocese," he concluded.

THESE VIEWS, which enjoy considerablesupport among younger laymen,

bishops, and priests, in Brazil and the rest of LatinAmerica, give such primacy to the achievements ofsocial justice as to undermine seriously the Church'smore traditional associations and alliances in tem-poral society. For this reason, moreover, the Bra-zilian Church has been undergoing an internalcrisis in its confrontation with the current mili-tary dictatorship, one that is curiously analogousto the inner stresses within the dictatorship itself.The situation, too, has been aggravated by the in-

crease of political terrorism over the past year. OnMay 27, 1969 the body of Padre Antonio Hen-rique Pereira Netto was found hanging from atree on the campus of the University of Recife,with three bullet wounds in his head and deepslashes in his throat from a faca peixeira, a longknife used by fishermen in the Northeast. Theyoung priest was a professor of sociology at theuniversity and director of Catholic youth move-ments in the state of Pernambuco, and his murderwas preceded by the slaying a month before of aCatholic student leader, Candido Pinto. Both kill-ings were attributed to a right-wing terroristgroup called the Communist-Hunting Com-mandos, which began operating around Recife inearly 1969 and whose list of thirty-two Catholicleaders marked for death included the names ofPadre Pereira, Dom Helder, and the auxiliarybishop of Recife, Dom Jose de Lamartine. Also in1969 the residences of Dom Helder and AngeloCardinal Rossi, Archbishop of Sao Paulo, weretwice shot up.

In November 1969 several priests and friarswere implicated in the leftist violence during theinvestigations that followed the kidnapping of theU.S. Ambassador two months earlier. (Ambassa-dor Elbrick was freed after a few days, when Bra-zilian authorities gave in to the kidnappers' de-mand that fifteen specified political prisoners beflown into exile in Mexico.) The man sought asthe kidnappers' ringleader, a former CommunistDeputy named Carlos Marighela, was killed in agun battle with police November 4, after authori-ties used two Dominican priests, arrested a weekbefore, as the bait to draw Marighela into a policetrap. Since then, the government has charged thatreligious seminaries and monasteries are beingused to prepare subversive literature and to pro-vide hiding places for terrorists seeking to escapeto neighboring countries. In response, Church au-thorities have criticized the involvement of priestsin political violence and terrorism as "anti-evangelical," while at the same time denouncingarrests and tortures by the government.

These developments show how deeply theChurch is being drawn into the conflict that hasbeen polarizing Brazilian society. Despite its hesi-tations and internal divisions, the Church pro-vides the only institutional opposition to the in-creasingly unpopular military regime. Growingpolitical instability-the armed forces on severaloccasions have set aside their own constitution inorder to accommodate internal pressures-hasstrengthened the hand of a leftist-nationalist mili-tary faction that is influenced, in part, by theprogressive wing of the Church. The Braziliancase, although not unique, is the outstanding ex-ample in Latin America of the way in which theChurch, by putting the social doctrines issuingfrom the aggiornamento to an immediate anddangerous test, has assumed a central role in aconflict whose end cannot be seen.


III

UITE PROBABLY there would be noCatholic renewal in many countries

of Latin America today without the Jesuits, whosefamous energies are now being directed almostexclusively toward achieving social justice. Theirchief instrument for this purpose are the centersfor research and social action-Centro de Investi-gaci6n y Acci6n (CIAS)-which the Society ofJesus has established in all of its Latin Americanprovinces. The social-action effort has gained fur-ther impetus from the leadership in Rome ofPadre Pedro Arrupe, a Spaniard who in 1964became the Society's Father-General. (The Jesuits'new activity, it should be noted, has been promotedat the expense of the order's more traditional edu-cational activities oriented toward the training ofelites: some Jesuit schools and colleges in Europehave been closed to free staffs for missionary workin Latin America.) At a meeting in Rio de Janeiroin May 1968, after reviewing the entire Jesuitoperation in Latin America, Padre Arrupe and theSociety's seventeen Latin American province-headssent a letter to the nearly 5,000 Jesuits workingin the region, which proclaimed in part: "Wewish to conceive the totality of our apostolic mis-sion as focusing on the social problem. We wishto avoid any attitude of exclusiveness or domina-tion. We wish to adopt an attitude of service inthe Church and Society, rejecting the image ofpower that frequently is attributed to us...."

For the greater part of this century, the ChileanJesuits were identified with an aristocratic secon-dary school in Santiago, the Colegio San Ignacio.About ten years ago, however, several Jesuits con-cerned with social problems broke away to form,within the CIAS framework, the Centro Bellar-mino, which has since become the most influen-tial Jesuit institution in Chile and is a strikingexample of what a small group of highly-trainedJesuits can accomplish. This community of eigh-teen priests has generated sufficient influence inthe Chilean Catholic hierarchy to make it themost progressive in Latin America. Moreover,they have critically influenced the growth of theChristian Democratic party, helping to transformit from a tiny splinter faction into the rulingparty it has been under President Eduardo Frei(his term expires later this year). The membersof the Centro Bellarmino form a battery of spe-cialists in sociology, trade unionism, theology,communications, housing, and land reform, andover the years they have served as advisors to theChilean bishops on social questions. Besides pub-lishing the influential magazine Mensaie, theCentro Bellarmino operates an impressive varietyof social and research programs.

The impact of the CIAS social-action programis also strong in the smaller, more backward re-publics. In Paraguay, for example, where the dic-tatorship of General Alfredo Stroessner has re-

mained virtually unchallenged for fifteen years, amajor Church-State conflict has developed overthe regime's efforts to extend its control over theJesuit-run Catholic University, which had becomea center of anti-government opposition, and toexpel from the country five Spanish Jesuits hold-ing key professional and administrative positions.One of these was Padre Jose Miguel Munirriz,managing editor of the Church's official weeklynewspaper, Comunidad, which occasionally print-ed editorials critical of the regime and which hadbeen closed by government order while most ofthe Paraguayan hierarchy was away attending the1968 CELAM Latin American bishops' conferencein Medellin, Colombia.

The Spanish Jesuits in Paraguay have been amajor force in the aggiornamento of the tradi-tionally weak and submissive Paraguayan hier-archy; they have also organized Catholic peasantleagues and advised in the formation of a smallbut vigorous Christian Democratic oppositionparty. While the Stroessner regime was pressuringdiplomatically in Rome for the transfer of thefive Jesuits mentioned above, the Paraguayanbishops opened a public campaign for the releaseor trial of political prisoners who had been heldfor several years without formal charges. TheParaguayan hierarchy then issued a pastoral letterbluntly attacking a newly promulgated securitylaw for its "consecration of a form of absolutetotalitarianism that has been condemned manytimes by the Supreme Pontiffs in the name ofsocial morality." These maneuvers continueduntil a climax was reached on October 22, 1969,when Padre Francisco de Paula Oliva, one of themore influential Jesuit professors, was called topolice headquarters and summarily deportedfrom the country; police then beat up and dis-persed a number of students, priests, and profes-sors who had gathered on university grounds toprotest the expulsion. Three priests were injured.The Archbishop of Asunci6n responded with anannouncement that, according to canon law, "theauthorities that ordered the beatings given thepriests have been excommunicated."

IV

As I HAVE noted, dissent and disarrayare threatening the future of the

Latin American priesthood. One of the more dra-matic examples of clerical rebellion is the case ofPadre Camilo Torres, who was killed in Febru-ary 1966 in a clash with an army patrol in themountains of eastern Colombia, where he wasleading a Castroite guerrilla band. The story ofyoung Torres, a son of one of Bogota's sociallyprominent families, also serves to point up thecontinuing crisis in Colombian society, the mostclerically-oriented in Latin America today. Tor-res's death occurred just a few months after hehad been released (at his own request) from all


priestly vows, save that of celibacy, following anugly public dispute over social doctrine with theaged Archbishop of BogotA, Luis CardinalConcha Cordova. This was also shortly after theconclusion of Vatican II, whose liberating effectsled, in BogotA, to a rebellion of the younger mem-bers of lower clergy against the reactionary Car-dinal, which in turn prompted an inspection visitfrom a representative of the Roman Curia andCardinal Concha's retirement a few months later.

Meanwhile, Colombia was passing through dif-ficult times. A sharp decline in coffee export earn-ings had cut in half the dollar value of the Colom-bian peso; political insiders were speculating incheap official dollars, while factories were closingfor lack of foreign exchange to finance imports ofraw materials; a number of sensational kidnapmurders of wealthy citizens had occurred duringthe year, and a Castroite guerrilla insurrectionhad begun in the mountains of eastern Colombia;electoral abstentions had reached as high as 70per cent of the eligible voters in the previouselection; the Liberal-Conservative "NationalFront" pact to end the violencia (the tribal war-fare between the two parties that from 1948 and1958 had cost an estimated 200,000 lives) threat-ened to come apart as powerful splinter groupsdeveloped in both parties. The governmentshowed little capacity to stop the downward slide,and in the middle of 1965 Torres's political ap-peals began to catch on. "The revolutionarystruggle is a Christian and priestly struggle," hedeclared. "I am a revolutionary because I am apriest and because I am a Catholic. The Colom-bian Church is one of the most backward in theworld."

While traveling through Colombia on a report-ing trip in August 1965, I accompanied CamiloTorres on one of his speaking tours to Cali, atropical city near the Pacific coast, which has be-come an industrial mecca and refuge from theviolencia for hundreds of thousands of peasantsfrom Colombia's western departments. "For methere was no possibility of compromise with theChurch,. because the Church has always beenwith the oligarchy, and continues that way," hetold me. "Believe me, many young priests feel asI do, but cannot express themselves. We areforming a United Front with the Communists,the Christian Democrats, and the left-wing of theMovimiento Liberal Revolucionario (MRL).They have accepted my platform of agrarian re-form, of urban reform that will convert all ten-ants into homeowners, and nationalization of hos-pitals, radio and television stations, and the coun-try's natural resources. We would agree to aplebiscite to end the National Front;* but we

* Under the 1958 agreement the Liberals and Con-servatives have undertaken to share equally for sixteenyears the Presidency, governmental appointments, andparliamentary representation, to the exclusion of all otherparties.

would abstain from any other election because inColombia there is no free vote."

The thirty-six-year-old suspended priest, whohad been immensely popular as a chaplain andprofessor of sociology at the National Universityin Bogota, was to speak in a small plaza near thenewly-created slum of E1l Rodeo. Torres's meet-ings had been drawing consistently larger atten-dance than either of the major parties had beenable to attract in many years, and although hearrived two hours late, a big crowd was waitingpatiently for him. The crowd began to driftaway, however, as his speech dragged on. Torres'soratory was full of Marxist cant-"masses," "rev-olution," "oligarchy," "agrarian reform"-whichoften tends more to bore and irritate an audienceof poor people than to win their involvement andsupport. By the time he finished speaking half thecrowd had dispersed.

Within a month after this appearance, Torres'sUnited Front showed clear signs of falling apart.Under pressure from the Church hierarchy, thetiny Christian Democratic party and the radicalCatholic trade-unionists who had supported himbegan publicly to condemn his alliance with theCommunists, the only organized party not to denyhim its support. Torres's public appearances be-came less and less frequent until they stoppedaltogether toward the end of 1965. After he dis-appeared entirely from public view, it wasrumored that he had gone to Cuba; anotherreport had him resting "for reasons of health" insome remote hacienda. In early 1966 a communi-qu6 signed by Torres circulated in Bogota: "Ihave joined the armed struggle. From theseColombian mountains I intend to continue thestruggle with weapons in hand, until power isconquered for my people. I have joined the Ejer-cito de Liberaci6n Nacional (ELN) because Ihave found in the ELN the same ideals as theUnited Front." He died a month later in themunicipio of San Vicente de Chucuri, a primitiveregion deeply scarred by years of the violencia,where ELN guerrillas are still operating.

SINCE HIS DEATH Torres has come to bevenerated by many Latin American

Catholics as a martyred saint who fell in thestruggle for social justice; a cult has grown uparound his memory very much like the one aroundthe memory of Che Guevara. To others, however,the death of Camilo Torres has become symbolicof the general process of dissolution in the LatinAmerican priesthood after the Vatican Council.The future of the priesthood in virtually every re-public is threatened by numerous resignationsfrom the clergy and the near-total lack of priestlyvocations among the young. Beyond this the vari-ous hierarchies are hard-pressed to handle themany rebellions issuing from the ranks of theyounger priests. In Cali not long ago a group ofpriests organized marches to protest the "extortion


against the people" represented by an increase inbus fares. During 1969 four Spanish priests andan American nun were expelled from Colombiafor allegedly inciting student disturbances; someof them were associated with a group of thirty-nine priests and the young bishop of Buenaven-tura, known as the Golconda Group, which hadissued a document calling for a "socialist society"in Colombia and "an increase in revolutionaryaction against imperialism and the neo-colonialbourgeoise."* About this time Church authoritiesalso closed the Colegio Marymount, a fashionablegirls' school run by American nuns, because ofMarxist tendencies among its student and faculty.

In Argentina, where another conservativeChurch hierarchy presides, 283 clergymen belong-ing to a group called "Priests of the ThirdWorld" signed a document last April, proclaim-ing their support of the twenty-eight priests inRosario, Argentina's second city, who had resignedtheir posts in protest against the "insensitivity" ofArchbishop Guillermo Bolatti, who had dismisseda priest in a workers' district for implementingone of the liturgical innovations of Vatican II. Inanother protest in Rosario, 4,500 parishionerssigned a letter to Pope Paul backing the dissidentpriests, whom the Archbishop had called "Marx-ists" and "subversives." In July five persons suf-fered bullet wounds when police broke up ademonstration protesting the arrival of a replace-ment for the dismissed priest. Earlier, the Arch-bishop of Cordoba was forced to resign his postfollowing a similar conflict. Faced with intransi-gent young priests citing the papal encylicals andthe documents of CELAM and the VaticanCouncil, conservative national hierarchies, suchas those of Colombia and Argentina, have oftenbeen forced to yield.

T HE RADICALIZATION of large num-bers of priests has led in turn to

some radical innovations in the symbolic lan-guage of the Church. For example, the ChileanJesuit magazine Mensaje, in an editorial pub-lished on the eve of Pope Paul's 1968 Latin Amer-ican journey, compared the death of Che Gue-vara with that of Christ. This much-discussededitorial attempted to deal with the moral prob-lem of revolutionary violence by turning "mar-tyred" guerrilla leaders such as Che Guevara orCamilo Torres into Christ-figures, who "died formen" while struggling against the injustices andcruelties of Latin American society. Another ex-ample of this sanctification of violence is affordedby the "manifesto" issued by a group of priestsin Higiiey, one of the poorest rural dioceses ofthe Dominican Republic: "The violence (so muchfeared) is already among us. When a peasant withmany children who are hungry and naked, with-out house or school, looks at his children, he mustturn to violence; when he looks at the great ex-tensions of pangola grass, he must turn to vio-

lence; when he sees the well-tended pastures,where the animals are better-fed than his ownchildren, this peasant must turn to violence ...."t

Both the Mensaje editorial and the Higiieymanifesto appeared around the time of the 1968Medellin conference of CELAM, sometimes calledLatin America's own Vatican Council, which wenton record as saying that "Latin America finds itselfin a situation of injustice that could be called in-stitutional violence, because the present struc-tures violate fundamental rights." The sameposition was articulated somewhat more graph-ically by a former Maryknoll priest, Thomas Mel-ville, after he and three other American mission-aries (including a Maryknoll nun whom he latermarried) were expelled from Guatemala, afterfifteen years' work among the highland Indians,for having provided assistance to a Castroite guer-rilla movement. Melville wrote: "Having come tothe conclusion that the actual state of violence,composed of the malnutrition, ignorance, sick-ness and hunger of the vast majority of theGuatemalan population, is the direct result of acapitalist system that makes the defenseless Indiancompete against the powerful and well-armedlandowner, my brother** and I decided not to besilent accomplices of the mass murder that thissystem generates. We began teaching the Indiansthat no one will defend their rights, if they do nottlefend themselves. If the government and the oli-garchy are using arms to maintain them in theirposition of misery, then they have the obligationto take up arms and defend their God-given rightsto be men."t

Most of the recent Catholic discussion regardingthe necessity and legitimacy of revolutionary vio-lence hinges on the following paragraph fromPope Paul's 1967 encyclical, Populorum Progres-sio (On the Development of Peoples):

There are certainly situations whose injusticecries out to heaven. When whole populationsdestitute of necessities live in a state of depen-dence barring them from all initiative and re-sponsibility, and from all opportunity to ad-vance culturally and share in social and politicallife, recourse to violence, as a means to rightthese wrongs to human dignity, is a grave temp-tation. We know, however, that a revolutionaryuprising-save where there is manifest, long-standing tyranny which would do great damageto fundamental personal rights and dangerousharm to the common good of the country-pro-duces new injustices, throws more elements outof balance and brings on new disasters. A real* From "Segundo Encuentro del Grupo Sacerdotal de

Golconda," in SIC, No. 312, Caracas, February 1969.t From "Manifiesto de los Curas de Higiiey," in SIC,

No. 315, May 1969.** Arthur Melville, also a former Maryknoll missionary,

who was expelled from Guatemala with Sister MarionPeter Bradford (whom Thomas Melville married) andFather Blase Bonpane.

t From "Revolution Is Guatemala's Only Solution," inthe National Catholic Reporter, January 31, 1968, p. 5.


evil should not be fought against at the cost ofgreater misery. We want to be clearly under-stood: the present situation must be faced withcourage and the injustices linked with it mustbe fought against and overcome. Developmentdemands bold transformations, innovations thatgo deep. Urgent reforms should be undertakenwithout delay. (Italics added.)

The key words, of course, are contained in theitalicized clause, which repeats a concept that cantrace its theological lineage back to St. ThomasAquinas, who formulated the Church's classicposition on revolution.* The Pope's pronounce-ment has been welcomed by progressive priestsand bishops who, while not advocating violence,believe it may be inescapable in achieving thesweeping social changes advocated in the encyc-lical. Consequently, however, there has been suf-ficient speculation on the advisability of violenceto cause Pope Paul to express some reservationson the subject, and three of the four speeches hedelivered in Bogota in 1968 contained pointedwarnings against revolutionary violence.

V

HE CHURCH'S social involvement ofrecent years, for all the hope it

holds out to Latin America, is nevertheless provingto be a mixed blessing for the hierarchical author-ity. A good case in point is the situation in Chile,where the national hierarchy published in 1962a momentous pastoral letter, "On Social andPolitical Responsibility in the Present Hour,"which was credited with helping pave the wayfor the triumph of the Christian Democratic partyover a Communist-Socialist coalition in the 1964Presidential election. But after this triumph, andafter having changed its popular image by do-nating all its lands for distribution among thepeasants, the hierarchy yet finds itself losing tra-ditional ground-to an extent where the Chileanbishops were recently constrained to speak outagainst the effects and consequences of liberaliza-tion: "weakened feeling for God, deterioration ofthe spiritual life and abandonment of the sacra-ments, arbitrary acts introduced into the liturgy,... ideological confusion, and in particular a 'sec-ularization' that is ill-understood and built on adoctrine that substitutes the evangelizing missionfor a mere strategy of social promotion withvocabulary and method taken from an openlyatheistic ideology." This lament of the Chileanbishops brings into question the role of ecclesi-

* "The tyrannical regime is not just, for not orientingitself toward the common good, but toward the private goodof the ruler, as one reads in the Philosopher [Aristotle]. Forthis reason, the disturbance of such a regime cannot be calledsedition, if it is not disturbed in such a disorderly way thatthe tyrannized multitude suffers more injury with the up-rising than with the tyrannical regime." St. Thomas Aquinas,Summa Theologica, 2-2-42.

astical authority in a situation of inevitablechange; indeed, it is the opinion of many that theshrinking celibate priesthood cannot for long re-sist the transfer of responsibility to leaders emerg-ing from the lay community of the faithful, sincein many areas of Latin America there is simplyno other alternative if the Church is to survive.Moreover, some signs indicate that the new popu-lar sovereignty will increasingly be associated witha spontaneous "prophetism" that will challengethe intercession of an ecclesiastical bureaucracy inmatters of interpreting divine revelation. Thesecertain eventualities are inherent in the insistentdemands being voiced today-that the Pope sharepower with the bishops, that "the People of God"as a whole participate in the choice of bishops(who are now appointed by Rome), and that thepriesthood be opened to exemplary married be-lievers whose authority derives from the com-munity they serve.

Whatever new forms may evolve, it is abun-dantly clear that the present ecclesiastical struc-tures have been considerably weakened. Indeed,the Church is quite visibly shaken, and one wouldbe hard-pressed to say what arouses Rome's great-er inquietude, the crisis in religious discipline orthe social-revolutionary spirit that has been un-leashed by the aggiornamento. Be that as it may,sometimes the two tendencies-they are undoubt-edly complementary-unite in the person of apowerful advocate. Such a person is Ivan Illich,a forty-three-year-old, Vienna-born American Mon-signor of Jewish-Croatian parentage. In 1961,Illich founded the Centro Intercultural de Doc-umentacion (CIDOC) in Cuernavaca, Mexico, aninstitute for the training of missionaries boundfor Latin America, for the publication of booksand pamphlets on Latin American society, and forconferences of intellectuals concerned with hem-ispheric affairs. Prior to this, Illich had obtaineda PhD in history at Salzburg, studied theology atthe Gregorian University in Rome, and was ap-parently headed for a career in the Vatican diplo-matic service when, rather abruptly, he turnedup as a priest in a Puerto Rican parish of theWashington Heights section of Manhattan. Herehe became a protege of the late Francis CardinalSpellman, who supported him in his subsequenttroubles with the Vatican Curia. At the age ofthirty-one, Illich became a Monsignor and, leav-ing New York, was appointed Vice-Rector of theCatholic University in Puerto Rico, where he re-mained for five years until he quarreled withBishop James MacManus of Ponce over theChurch's intervention in the 1960 Puerto Ricanelection.

Illich's reputation as an iconoclast-it is thisthat aroused the wrath of the Curia-derives pri-marily, however, from two magazine articles hepublished in 1967. In "The Seamy Side of Char-ity" (America, January 21, 1967), he wrote withunconcealed scorn: "If North America and Eu-


rope send enough priests [to Latin America] tofill the vacant parishes, there is no need to con-sider laymen-unpaid for part-time work-to ful-fill most evangelical tasks; no need to re-examinethe structure of the parish, the function of thepriest, the Sunday obligation and clerical sermon;no need for exploring the use of the married dea-conate, new forms of celebration of the Word andEucharist and intimate familiar celebrations ofconversion to the Gospel in the milieu of thehome." In "The Vanishing Clergyman" (theCritic, June-July 1967), Illich's contribution tothe celibacy debate, he drew this unpromisingpicture:

. . A large segment of the thinking Churchquestions the tie between the celibacy and thepriesthood. The Pope insists on their connec-tion. Neither doctrine nor tradition give de-finitive support to his position. I believe thatthe emergence of a new pastoral Church dependslargely on compliance with his directive duringour generation. His position helps assure thespeedy death of the clergy.... Thousands ofpriests now reject celibacy, and present the pain-ful spectacle of men trained for sexual abstinencegroping belatedly into big-risk marriage. TheChurch dispenses of them secretly, arbitrarily,and awkwardly. They are forbidden further ex-ercise of their orders. Having chosen marriage,they could still exercise priestly functions, butthey would cease to be models-except perhapsto others like themselves.

What happened thereafter has been widely re-ported. First, CIDOC became the object of vari-ous ecclesiastical investigations as a suspectedcenter of dangerous leftist and heterodox activi-ties. Then, in June 1968 Illich was summoned toRome for a secret appearance before the VaticanCongregation for the Doctrine of Faith (theformer Holy Office), where he was interrogatedby Franjo Cardinal Seper, the Congregation'shead and a fellow Croatian. This was followedby Illich's refusal to take a secrecy vow or toanswer any questions unless given a written copyof all the charges against him. Illich was thenhanded a bizarre list of 85 inquisitorial chargesput-as questions.* He responded by writing a let-ter to Cardinal Seper, stating that he refused toanswer because "a questionnaire of this typeseems designed to wreck any hope of a humanand Christian dialogue between the one judgingand the one being judged." The curtain on thedrama rang down with Seper's dismissal of Illich,in Croatian, with a line that echoed the words ofDostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor: "Get thee hence,get thee hence, and do not come back." Despite aseries of subsequent maneuvers by Illich to ex-empt himself and CIDOC from ecclesiastical con-trol and the sanctions of canon law, the Vatican,in January 1969, forbade all bishops to sendpriests or nuns to CIDOC for missionary training;Illich then appealed his case directly to PopePaul.t

THE PROSECUTION of Ivan Illich bythe former Holy Office of the Vati-

can Curia cannot be separated from the generalcrisis in papal authority-which in practice alsomeans the authority of the Roman Curia-thathas agitated the Church since Vatican II, and thatreached a climax at the Synod of Bishops whichmet in Rome last autumn. The growing impres-sion is that the Vatican has now become afraid ofthe more radical effects of aggiornamento. Paul'simage is no longer that of the winged Pope,making jet-age visits to India and Africa, Bogotaand New York, but of a quietly determined oldman trying, in a last-ditch effort, to save theChurch from the tumult it has generated withinitself. During Easter Week of 1969, for instance,he warned of "a practically schismatic fermentthat divides and subdivides the Church." On June24, while commemorating the sixth anniversary ofhis reign, he spoke of the "grave dangers to theChurch of God" posed by two key problems: "Adiminished sense of doctrinal orthodoxy towardthe repository of faith that the Church has in-herited from its apostolic origin . . . [and] a cer-tain diffuse lack of confidence toward the exerciseof Our ministry which, under the mandate ofChrist, united and guided the People of God onseveral levels." And on his visit to Bogotd in 1968,as we have seen, Pope Paul was pointedly re-served in his social utterances, avoiding repeti-tion of the attacks on neo-colonialism, "liberalcapitalism," and the "international imperialismof money" that he had made a year before inPopulorum Progressio, and warning his LatinAmerican audience against using the encyclicalas a justification for violent revolution.

Nevertheless, for all his public agonizing over

*See Edward B. Fiske's interview with Illich in theNew York Times, February 4, 1969, and texts of theCongregation's 85 questions and Illich's letter to CardinalSeper in the National Catholic Reporter, February 12, 1969.Here are two samples from the 85 questions: "3: What doyou say about those who say you are 'petulant, adventur-ous, imprudent, fanatical, and hypnotizing, a rebel to anyauthority, disposed to accept and recognize only that ofthe Bishop of Cuernavaca'? . . . 5: Is it true that by articles,interviews, and ambiguous theoretical and practical posi-tions, by personal sympathies toward the political and socialLeft and a morbid understanding of ex-religious and ex-priests, you have fomented grave confusion in the souls andconsciences of others, especially by assimilating Marxismto Christianity and by equating the celibate parochialclergy with the married deaconate?"

t A Vatican document reported in Le Monde, June 14,1969 and in the National Catholic Reporter, June 25,1969 said that "the Holy See ... does not oppose attendanceon an experimental basis, by priests and religious, at coursesorganized by CIDOC," but urged that Illich leave CIDOCand place the center under the control of CELAM andthe Mexican Bishops' Conference. In a statement Illich re-ferred to a March 15, 1969 letter to Cardinal TerrenceJ. Cooke of New York, saying: "In this letter I expressedwhat must continue to be my firm intention to governall the decisions and actions of my life completely in-dependently of any canonical authority, legislative or other-wise, special to the clergy."


some of the directions in which the aggiorna-mento is taking the Church, Paul VI has beencareful in most instances not to associate himselfwith the reactionary party in Vatican politics.Moreover; he cannot be unaware that, with theconsolidation of social democracy in most of West-ern Europe and North America since World WarII, Latin America is now the only Catholic regionof the world where the Church's newly enunci-ated social teachings are being put to a serioustest. Certainly the Vatican cannot turn its back onthe public pressure for social justice gener-ated in nation after nation by Latin American lay-men, priests, and bishops. Despite instances ofextremism, this development has issued in a fer-tile enrichment of Christian tradition in an areawhere it has been conspicuously weak. Althoughonly about 10 per cent of the population attendsMass with any regularity, the Church in LatinAmerica has returned to the center of public life

with a social doctrine that has given it a pro-phetic role, and sometimes a polarizing role, inwhat remains an unjust and highly volatile soci-ety. The hierarchical Church remains too weakand poor to bring about by itself the changes itpreaches. Nevertheless, it has learned over theyears that its institutional charisma and solidaritycan be greatest where its temporal pretensionsare least. In the words of Ivan Illich, "I believethe specific task of the Church in the modernworld is the Christian celebration of the experi-ence of change." But, with or without this cele-bration, no one can be sure in what form theChurch will survive. The agony of Catholicismseems likely to continue, with the Church caughtbetween surrendering itself to a religious revolu-tion of its own making, or fortifying itself inthe traditional forms and usages that thesedays show diminishing power to sustain a livingfaith.

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Latin America: The Church Militant - Norman Gall · Latin America: The Church Militant Norman Gall If the Christian believes in the fertility of peace for achieving justice, he believes