This is a continuation of the yesterday's blog (http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20170703). (Lily)
Gustavo Gutierrez and the Critique of Developmentalism
By the last half of the sixties it was apparent that the millennium was not about to arrive in Latin America. Military coups in Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Bolivia, and continuing military domination in Central America, demonstrated that a democratic future for Latin America was not inevitable. The agrarian reform programs bogged down or were emasculated. Latin America’s economic integration fell afoul of nationalist economic pressure groups. Latin America did not seem to be approaching the “takeoff– which had been promised by the theories contained in Walt Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth early in the decade.
Why not? Some Latin American social scientists argued that Latin America had been kept in a state of underdevelopment because of its dependencia on the developed countries in the capitalist world, especially the United States. Students and intellectuals became disillusioned with the possibilities of reformism, and argued that a more revolutionary approach along Cuban lines was necessary.
In Catholic-influenced groups, such as the Catholic universities in Lima and Santiago and the International Movement of Catholic Students (MIEC), this led to a rethinking of the developmentalist models of the earlier part of the decade. Much of this rethinking was related to the meeting of the Latin American Bishops Conference (CELAM) held at Medellin, Colombia in 1968. In a preparatory seminar at Chimbote, Peru, Father Gutierrez first set out the themes that were to be developed in later papers and books. He was also present at, and influenced the content of the final documents of, the Medellin meeting. These documents spoke of the need of the transformation of man in the light of the Gospel as “an action of integral development and liberation” and denounced poverty in Latin America. They referred to “a deafening cry from the throats of millions asking for a liberation that reaches them from nowhere else” and calling for the church to “give effective preference to the poorest and most needy sectors.” In the most controversial sections of the Medellin documents, the bishops asserted that “the principal guilt for the economic dependence of our countries rests with powers inspired by uncontrolled desire for gain,” and declared that “in many instances, Latin America finds itself faced with a situation of injustice that can be called institutionalized violence.”
As Latin America (along with, one might note, the United States, France, and many other countries) became more radicalized at the end of the 1960s, the Medellin documents appeared to legitimize a corresponding radicalization of the Catholic intelligentsia. In Chile, for example, the rebelde left of the Christian Democratic Party split off in 1969 to form part of the Allende Popular Unity coalition in the 1970 elections, which was followed by another split by the Christian Left in 1971. Because of the expansion of air travel, like-minded Catholic and Protestant theologians were able to meet in many parts of the continent; Gutierrez took the lead in forming a theologically-based Catholic radicalism which he called liberation theology.
As articulated in English first in an article in the Jesuit journal Theological Studies (“Notes for a Theology of Liberation,” June 1970), Gutierrez argued that for
poor countries, oppressed and dominated, the word, liberation, is appropriate: rather than development. Latin America will never get out of its plight except by a profound transformation, a social revolution that will radically change the conditions it lives in at present. Today a more or less Marxist inspiration prevails among those groups and individuals who are raising the banner of the continent’s liberation. And for many in our continent, this liberation will have to pass, sooner or later, through paths of violence . . . .
Gutierrez quoted the Medellin bishops on the “institutionalized violence” in Latin America and related it to the “situation of dependence” and “condition of neocolonialism” in Latin America. He called for the Latin American Church “to break her ties with the present order,” to “denounce the fundamental injustices on which it is based,” and to commit itself to the poor as the bishops at Medellin had done.
In the book that followed the article, Gutierrez criticized the developmentalism that provides only palliatives that “in the long run actually consolidate an exploitative system.” He attacked Christian Democracy for its “naive reformism,” describing it as “only a justifying ideology . . . for the few to keep living off the poverty of the many.” Referring to Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach (“Philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is, to change it”), Gutierrez defined liberation theology as “critical reflection on Christian praxis in the light of the Word.” Theology needed “a scientific and structural knowledge of socio-economic mechanisms and historical dynamics,” and this would come from a recognition of dependence, “the domination exercised by the great capitalist countries and especially, by the most powerful, the United States of America.” That domination was a result of the “worldwide class struggle between the oppressed countries and dominant peoples.” New solutions, “most frequently of socialist inspiration” were emerging involving a variety of different approaches, “a broad rich and intense revolutionary praxis” which sought a “qualitatively different society” and “the building of a new man.” Among those approaches, Gutierrez cited one that was to be central to the future development of liberation theology — the literacy programs of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. (See Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed [1970].) Freire recommended a process of concientizacao, by which the oppressed person becomes aware of his situation and is encouraged to find a language which makes him “less dependent and more free as he commits himself to the transformation and building up of society.”
Freire’s methods were already being applied in a new movement of renewal within the Brazilian church — the Basic Christian Communities (CEB’s). These small face-to- face groups, usually located in rural or marginal areas, discussed the application of selected passages of the Bible to their daily lives, in ways that the liberation theologians saw as an example of the praxis that they were promoting. Along with the structuralist critique of capitalism, the Basic Christian Communities rapidly became a central element of the liberationist social program.
In a section of A Theology of Liberation which was to be quoted often by his opponents, Gutierrez called for the abolition of the private ownership of capital because it leads to “the exploitation of man by man,” and insisted that “the class struggle is a fact and neutrality in this question is not possible.” “To love one’s enemies presupposes recognizing and accepting that one has class enemies and that it is necessary to combat them . . . .”
What his critics do not quote is Gutierrez’s discussion of “a spirituality of liberation,” which he was to develop further in the 1980s. This involves a recognition that “conversion to God implies conversion to neighbor in an act of gratuitousness which allows one to encounter others fully, the universal encounter which is the foundation of communion of men among themselves and of men with God” producing a joy and celebration which is “the feast of the Christian Community.” However, rather than develop what could have been a fruitful theological exploration, Gutierrez returns to themes of the relation of the church to ideology and the class struggle. Biblical references begin for the first time (there are none in the first eight chapters), but only in the last chapter is there a meditation on the biblical meaning of poverty.
(To be continued)
