This is a continuation of the previous blogs (http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20170703)(http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20170704)(http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20170706). They are excerpts. (Lily)
The Battle of Puebla
The meeting at Puebla had originally been scheduled for October 1978, the tenth anniversary of the last CELAM General Conference at Medellin. However, the deaths of Pope Paul VI and of his successor, John Paul I, and the election of John Paul II led to its postponement. The CELAM staff sent out preliminary papers that were attacked by Gutierrez and others as insufficiently concerned with the problems of the poor. When none of the well-known liberation theologians were invited as expert advisors (periti) to the meeting, they secured invitations from individual bishops and held their own meetings and press conferences outside the meeting place of the bishops.
The Puebla Conference was covered extensively by the world press, which was especially interested in how the new pope would define his position. His opening address was an indication of how seriously he took the challenge of liberation theology, as well as of the influence of Vekeman’s journal Tierra Nueva, which he had been receiving as cardinal before his election. The pope criticized the politicization of the Gospel message, decried the effort to promote a “people’s church” in opposition to the institutional church, and called for a “Christian concept of liberation that cannot be reduced simply to the restricted domain of economics, society and culture.” During the meeting a leftist newspaper in Mexico published the contents of a cassette dictaphone tape that had been inadvertently given to a journalist by the secretary of Archbishop Lopez Trujillo. It complained of the leftism of the Jesuits and other religious orders in Latin America and urged its recipient to “prepare your bombers for Puebla and get into training before entering the ring for the world match.”
The liberation theologians outside the meeting worked tirelessly, criticizing speeches and draft resolutions and replying to attacks on their views. The result was a final document which could only be described as a draw. It condemned the politicization of theology and “a praxis that has recourse to Marxist analysis” but it also was critical of “liberal capitalism” and of the doctrine of the national security state used by current military regimes to justify their rule. Most important, Puebla made a decisive commitment to “the preferential option for the poor,” which was to be almost as controversial in future discussions as Medellin’s reference to “institutionalized violence.” That commitment was described by the conference as “nonexclusive” in order to defuse criticisms of its possibly partisan or even Marxist (the poor vs. the rich) character; but it committed the Latin American church more clearly than in the past to work with the poor, as the liberation theologians urged.
The press covered the battle between the pro- and anti-liberation bishops as if it were in fact the prize fight alluded to by Lopez Trujillo. The reporters were disappointed that the final outcome was not a decisive victory for one side or the other, but they should have known from past meetings that an effort would be made to fashion a consensus document with something for everyone.
Nicaragua and the Popular Church
If Puebla began to focus attention on liberation theology, Nicaragua made observers aware of the movement’s potential political force. After Vatican II and Medellin, the Central American church had undergone a decisive shift in the direction of involvement for social justice. In 1977 the Salvadoran right-wing death squads even threatened to kill all the members of the Jesuit order if they did not leave the country. In Nicaragua, leading chairmen and women, especially the members of the religious orders, cooperated actively with the Sandinistas in the overthrow of Somoza. Four priests joined the new government established in 1979. The Nicaraguan bishops wrote a pastoral letter justifying the revolution, and with certain important reservations they initially endorsed the government that followed. While the honeymoon between the Sandinistas and the church hierarchy was of short duration, there were many others, particularly the Jesuits and Maryknoll missionaries, who continued to support the Sandinistas and who justified their support in terms of the categories drawn from liberation theology. Church leaders were scandalized by the publication, by a government-supported research group, of a picture of a guerrilla fighter, gun in hand and arms upraised, superimposed on the crucified Christ. But others were ready to support a “popular church” committed to the Sandinistas. Fernando Cardenal, a Jesuit, organized the Sandinista literacy campaign, headed the youth organization, and later became Minister of Education, while his brother, Ernesto, a well-known priest-poet, became Minister of Culture. As polarization increased in the Nicaraguan Church, anti-Sandinista Catholics blamed liberation theology for dividing the church and aiding the Marxists to expand their “totalitarian” control of Nicaragua. (See for example, Humberto Belli, Christians Under Fire, Crossway Books [1985].) When the professors at the Jesuit Central American University in El Salvador also seemed to favor the guerrillas there, and when some leading Christian Democrats joined the left in the civil war, liberation theology was blamed.
As early as June 1981 the priests in the Sandinista government were asked by their bishops to leave their posts — their positions having been judged incompatible with their priestly duties. When they refused to do so, two were forbidden to exercise their priestly functions, another was suspended from the Jesuit order, and a fourth requested laicization. The tension between the pro-Sandinista priests and the Vatican was dramatically illustrated during the Pope’s visit in March 1983, when he was seen on television shaking his finger reprovingly at Ernesto Cardenal, as he knelt to receive the pope’s blessing.
The new Reagan administration made the Central American struggle a central focus of U.S. foreign policy. By this time, explanations for the radicalization of Central America often cited the changes in the Central American church, including the expanding influence of liberation theology. Leading neo-conservatives such as Michael Novak attacked it, and Ernest Lefever’s Center for Ethics and Public Policy published a collection of critical articles. They quoted the early Gutierrez on the class struggle and dependency, and Segundo’s definition of socialism, and they criticized the liberation theologians for attributing all of Latin America’s ills to capitalism, while at the same time being willing to turn over political power to an undefined socialism — which from their enthusiasm for those governments seemed likely to bear a strong resemblance to Cuba or Nicaragua. Others in the U.S. such as Robert McAfee Brown, Rosemary Ruether, and the publishers of the National Catholic Reporter expressed strong support for liberation theology. They attributed the conservative criticisms to the latter’s opposition to the efforts of the poor in Latin America to end centuries of exploitation ad imperialism — when in fact, the arguments of the neo-conservatives were that the poor would be better served by a free market or mixed economic system, than by the statist socialism proposed, or implied by, the liberationists.
(To be continued.)
