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The Left Side of the Church

The fiftieth anniversary of 1968 has occasioned much reflection on
that pivotal moment in the twentieth century. If the quintessential
image of that year of upheaval is students assembling barricades in
the Paris streets, or protests at Berkeley against the Vietnam War, it
was also marked by challenges to political and social power throughout
the world. Curiously overlooked, however, is the gathering in Colombia
of the Medellín Conference of Latin American Bishops — a pivotal event
in the development of liberation theology throughout Latin America.
The declarations of the conference broke new ground in expanding the
notion of theological “liberation” to imply a positive humanizing
process, and attacking the political, social, and economic structures
that kept millions of Latin Americans poor and oppressed.

Recalling liberation theology’s rejection of the church’s traditional
role as a bulwark of reaction and insistence instead on a
“preferential option for the poor” takes on added importance given
Jair Bolsonaro’s victory in last month’s presidential elections in
Brazil. Appealing to the defense of “Christian civilization” as an ideological support for racism and class war from above, the
president-elect echoes the rhetoric of the 1964–1985 military
dictatorship — a regime he openly extols — along with the rationales advanced by figures like Jorge Rafael Videla and Augusto Pinochet for
their mass murder of suspected dissidents across the continent.

A striking episode that brushes history against the grain of
Bolsonaro’s fetishization of state and church is one from the
dictatorship that he so fondly remembers. The young priest Frei Betto
was arrested, tortured, and imprisoned in the early 1970s by that
regime for his work helping leftist militants, including the Marxist
writer, politician, and guerrilla fighter Carlos Margihella. Betto was castigated by his police interrogator: “How can a Christian
collaborate with a Communist?”

Betto replied that “For me, men are divided not into believers and
atheists, but between oppressors and oppressed, between those who want
to keep this unjust society and those who want to struggle for
justice.” Pressing his prisoner, the policeman retorted “Have you
forgotten that Marx considered religion to be the opium of the
people?” In turn, Betto insisted “It is the bourgeoisie which has
turned religion into an opium of the people by preaching a God lord of
the heavens only, while taking possession of the earth for itself.”

Betto’s activism was part of the broader trend within the Brazilian
church, throwing its lot in with the country’s poor, oppressed, and
despised, in parallel with social movements throughout Latin America
that were catalyzed by the Medellín Conference. His trajectory also exemplifies the crucial point that liberation theology was very far
from a rarefied and detached reconsideration of doctrine.

Rather, its inextricable interconnection with grassroots movements for political and social justice facing obscene repression means that it
is more apt to talk about “liberationist Christianity,” to borrow a
term from Michael Löwy. Without reducing the complexity and variation
of liberationist Christianity, Betto’s exchange was indicative of
three common threads in this influential minority of the Latin
American church.

First, no longer tenable was a conception of faith or belief that
stressed contemplative observation of rites and adherence to a body of
doctrine and ritualistic practice. Rather, an alternative
understanding was put forward, reconceiving the demands of faith as,
first and foremost, commitment to the oppressed and suffering.

In this view, liberationist Christians did not understand themselves
as having a superior knowledge to impart to the world, as if,
condescendingly, their leftist atheist comrades were Christians
without knowing it. By the same token, the target of liberation
theologians was explicitly not atheism but idolatry — the new idols of
death adored by the new Pharaohs, Caesars, and Herods: wealth, the
market, national security, the state, military force, “Western
Christian civilization.”

Secondly, charity was reconceived to rid the concept of lingering
associations with paternalistic hierarchy and self-justification for
the system that produced the need for charity in the first place. As
the Brazilian cardinal Dom Helder Câmara put it, “As long as I asked
people to help the poor, I was called a saint. But when I asked the
question: why is there so much poverty? I was called a communist.”

Liberationist Christianity instead found in the Marxist dictum of
solidarity with the oppressed in their self-emancipation an
appropriate conceptualization of charity. Engagement with the Marxist
concept of the proletariat was not, though, a reduction to it —
contrary to critics of liberation theology within the church.

The term “pooretariat” [pobretariado], coined by Christian Marxist
trade union activists in El Salvador, neatly captures liberationist Christianity’s attempts to encompass the specific Latin American
experience of dependent peripheral capitalism. This crucified poor,
then, included not only exploited classes but also those excluded from
the formal productive system, despised races and marginalized cultures
and, as figures like Gustavo Gutiérrez have stressed, women as a
doubly oppressed social category.

A third innovation was the rejection of the traditional separation
between religion on the one hand and politics on the other. Static and privatized religion and a truncated bourgeois conception of love were
rejected in favor of grappling with dehumanizing political and
economic structures. Dependency theory galvanized an understanding of “structural sin” and a more thoroughgoing anticapitalism than that of
many of the established left parties and movements in the continent.
As Gutiérrez, one of the most influential liberation theologians and a
key advisor at Medellín, put it in 1971:

to deny the reality of the class struggle means in practice taking
a position in favor of the dominant social sectors. Neutrality on this
question is impossible. [What is needed is] to eliminate the
appropriation by a few of the surplus value produced by the work of
the great majority, and not lyrical appeals in favor of social
harmony. We need to build a socialist society which is more just, more
free and more humane, and not a society of false conciliation and
apparent equality.

How did liberation theology come about and how has it manifested in
political and social struggles? And what is its status today,
particularly in view of the reactionary tide in Latin America and
globally?
Beginnings

“In a symbolic way,” Löwy suggests, “one might say that the radical Christian current was born in January 1959 at the moment when Fidel
Castro, Che Guevara and their comrades marched into Havana, while in
Rome John XXIII issued his first call for the convening of the
[Vatican II] Council.” More broadly, this moment was characterized by
the industrialization of Latin America under the hegemony of
multinational capital and, in André Gunder Frank’s phrase, “developed underdevelopment” – the symptoms of which were greater dependency,
deepened social division, rural exodus and a burgeoning impoverished
and marginalized urban poor.

In that context the Cuban Revolution sparked off a new cycle of
intensified social struggles, the appearance of guerrilla movements, a succession of military coups and a crisis of legitimacy of the
political system throughout the hemisphere.

Given that the Latin American church was traditionally a bastion of
support for that system, it was by no means expected that it would
weigh in on the side of the emergent social struggles. That an
influential minority did so can be traced to the emergence of critical
theology in the early twentieth century and the opening up to the
social sciences in the church’s attempted modernization by Vatican II.

Particularly important were German theologians like Karl Rahner and
their French counterparts like Emmanuel Mounier, who drew on French anti-capitalist thought. Heterodox trends within Marxism like Ernst
Bloch’s philosophy of hope and the Frankfurt School also inspired
liberation theologians, as did Marxist sociology and economics more
broadly – both of which informed the declarations of the Medellín Conference.

Crucially, though, liberation theology was not simply an extension to
the Americas of European theological innovations or the reheating of longstanding conservative Catholic antipathy to capitalism. It
involved the creation of a new religious culture expressing the
specific conditions of Latin America: dependent capitalism, massive
poverty, institutionalized violence, popular religiosity. It rejects Eurocentric conceptions of history that linger even in progressive
thought, seeing optimistic visions of history as a story of progress
and technological advance as hubris. Instead, it thinks history from
the reverse viewpoint of the defeated and excluded, the poor as the
bearers of universality and redemption.

An iconic moment in the development of liberationist Christianity was
the death of Camilo Torres, a priest who organized a militant popular
movement and then joined the National Liberation Army (ELN), a
Castroist guerrilla movement in Colombia, in 1965. For Torres, “the Revolution is not only permissible but obligatory for Christians.” He
was killed in 1966 in a clash with the Army, but his martyrdom made a
deep emotional and political impact on Latin American Christians.

Radicalized priests organized throughout the continent — Priests for
the Third World in Argentina in 1966, the National Organization for
Social Integration (ONIS) in Peru in 1968, the Golcanda group in
Colombia, also in 1968, Christians for Socialism in Allende’s Chile in
1971 — while a growing number of Christians became actively involved
in popular struggles. They reinterpreted the Gospel in light of this
practice and often saw in Marxism a key to the understanding of social
reality and a guide to changing it.
Brazil

The Brazilian church is the only church on the continent where
liberation theology and its pastoral followers won decisive influence,
however. Many of the Brazilian popular movements that have made
impressive gains for social justice over the last decades are to a
significant extent the product of the grassroots activity of committed Christians, lay pastoral agents, and Christian base communities: the
radical trade union confederation (CUT), the landless peasant
movements (MST), the poor neighborhood associations — and their
political expression, the Workers’ Party (PT).

Given particularly close cultural ties with France, French progressive
theology made quicker headway into Brazil than elsewhere in the
hemisphere, and so was a readily available tool with which to make
sense of the currents unleashed by the Cuban Revolution. Already by
1960 the Catholic student movement, the JUC, became radicalized and
moved very quickly towards leftist and socialist ideas.

The early 1960s saw the flowering of ideas about the specificities of
the Brazilian situation in light of political and theological
developments further afield. An important aspect of the development of liberationist Christianity in Brazil was popular education. Engaging
with Paulo Freire’s revolutionary pedagogy, the Movement for Base
Education (MEB) was the first Catholic attempt at a radical pastoral
practice among the popular classes. MEB aimed not only to bring
literacy to the poor, but to raise their consciousness and to help
them take control of their own history.

In April 1964, the military took power in order to save “Western
Christian civilization” from “atheistic communism” — in short, to defend the ruling oligarchy threatened by the rise of social movements
under the elected president, João Goulart. True to form, the new
dictatorship was swiftly endorsed by the Bishops’ Conference of Brazil
in June 1964: “while giving thanks to God, who answered the prayers of millions of Brazilians and freed us from the communist danger, we are
grateful to the military, who, at serious risk to their lives, rose up
in the name of the supreme interests of the nation.”

The sentiment was, however, not shared by many Christian activists and
priests, many of whom were among the first victims of the red scare of
the authorities.

If the Christian left was initially broken by repression and
marginalization, over the next few years, as opposition to the
dictatorship increased in civil society, a growing number of
Christians, even including a few bishops, began to side with the
opposition. Some of them were radicalized and in 1967–68 a large group
of Dominicans, including Frei Betto, resolved to support armed
resistance and help clandestine movements such as the ALN (Action for
National Liberation) — a guerrilla group founded by a former leader of
the Brazilian Communist Party, Carlos Marighella — by hiding its
members or helping some of them escape the country.

Soon several of them would be imprisoned and tortured by the military,
and the guerrilla movement destroyed. Oppression was ramped up against Christian activists, and their “subversion” brutally repressed with imprisonments, rapes, torture, and murder — particularly after the
remaining civil liberties and juridical guarantees were curtailed in
December 1968.

Initially cautious in challenging this repression, the church as an
institution changed tack in 1970 with the accession of the new bishop,
Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns, well known for his commitment to the defense
of human rights and his solidarity with the imprisoned religious
activists. This was such a turnaround that during the 1970s, after the annihilation of the underground left, the church appeared to friends
and foes alike as the primary opposition to the regime. It offered
protection to human rights activists, labor movements, and peasant
unions, and it took the regime to task for its violence, lawlessness,
and suppression of democracy.

Its criticism extended to a denunciation of the mode of development
imposed by the military and its supposed “modernization” as inhuman, unjust, and based on the social and economic marginalization and
oppression of the poor. In 1973, for instance, the bishops and
provincial leaders of the various religious orders in the northeast
and center-west areas of Brazil issued two statements which denounced
not only the dictatorship but capitalism itself as “the root of evil.” Nicaragua

Liberationist Christianity also took root in fertile soil in Central
America, albeit much later than in Brazil. It was a vital component of
the Sandinista struggle and 1979 revolution in Nicaragua. The
overthrow of the US-backed Somoza dictatorship was the first
revolution in modern times in which Christians — lay people and clergy
— played an essential role, both at the grassroots and at leadership
levels of the movement.

Before the Medellín Conference, the Nicaraguan church was a
traditionalist and socially conservative institution, which openly
supported the ruling Somoza dynasty. In 1950, for example, its bishops
issued a statement proclaiming that all authority derives from God and
that Christians must therefore obey the established government.

After the Medellín Conference, there was a much broader development of
the base communities, premised on solidarity and class-conscious self-organization, which also drew on the important organizing efforts
of European and US clergy and religious orders, including figures like
Maura Clarke, who would be murdered by the El Salvador military in
1980. The base communities expanded numerically in the slums of
Managua and in the countryside at the same time as they were
increasingly radicalized.

Grassroots organization and the radicalization of these communities
led many members to become activists in or sympathizers with the
Frente Sandinista de Liberacíon Nacional (FSLN). The Marxist guerrilla movement founded in the early 1960s by Carlos Fonseca and Tomás Borge
combined the traditions of radical agrarian nationalism, Guevarist
Marxism, and revolutionary Christianity. It eagerly received these
young Christian radicals, in turn, without trying to impose any
ideological conditions on them. The FSLN’s ranks also drew significant numbers from the burgeoning Catholic university movement, often via
the Christian Revolutionary Movement.

This is not to say that the church as a whole embraced the revolution. Schematically, one can point to hostility from the bishops, support
from the religious orders, and the diocesan clergy divided between
these two camps with the greater number supporting the bishops.
Nonetheless, even the top brass of the Nicaraguan church became
increasingly critical of the Somoza regime as it became mired in
crisis by the 1970s.

Still, as the Sandinista insurrection put paid to the dictatorship
over the course of the insurrections of 1978–79, the flight of Somoza,
and the Sandinistas’ victory in July 1979, the church authorities held
out on supporting the FSLN, issuing a blanket condemnation of
violence.

Ignoring the advice of the prelates, however, many Christians,
particularly young and poor people, actively took part in the
Sandinista uprising. The areas where the struggle was most intensive,
and the action best organized and effective, were precisely those
where base communities and radical Christians had been active in the
preceding years. Furthermore, many priests, religious (especially
Capuchins and Jesuits), and nuns gave direct help to the Sandinistas,
providing them with food, shelter, medicine, and ammunition.

The historical novelty of the huge Christian contribution to the
revolution was not lost on the Sandinista Front, which acknowledged in
its Declaration on Religion in October 1980 that “Christians have been
an integral part of our revolutionary history to a degree
unprecedented in any other revolutionary movement of Latin America and
possibly the world …. Our experience has shown that it is possible to
be a believer and a committed revolutionary at the same time, and that
there is no irreconcilable contradiction between the two.” This
confidence was given practical confirmation by the participation of
three priests in the Sandinista government.
El Salvador

As in Nicaragua, it was only after the Medellín Conference that things
started to move in the Salvadoran church. Under the influence of the
new orientation adopted in 1968 by the Latin American bishops and of
the first writings of liberation theology, a group of priests started missionary work among the poor peasants of the diocese of Aguilares in 1972–73.

The central figure in this group was Father Rutilio Grande, a
Salvadoran Jesuit who taught at the seminary of San Salvador but
decided to leave the city to share the life of the rural poor.

The priests’ missionary team (many of them Jesuits) lived among the
peasants and initiated base communities premised on an understanding
of God’s plan as a rejection of oppressive human relations. A core
purpose of biblical instruction was to break what they considered to
be the passivity of traditional peasant religion. Parishioners were
told that instead of just “adoring” Jesus it was more important to
follow his example and struggle against evil in the world. This
involved self-organization to struggle against what they identified as
social sin — above all, capitalist exploitation. They also promoted self-assurance among the peasants, generating the rise of a new
leadership elected by the community.

Prelate opposition to liberation theology was even more acute within
the Salvadoran church than in Nicaragua. An important exception was
Óscar Romero, who had been appointed Archbishop of San Salvador in
1977 as a safe conservative choice.

Indeed, as he would later say to friends, he was chosen as the most
likely to neutralize the “Marxist priests” and base communities, and improve relations between the church and the military government,
which had deteriorated under his predecessor. Gillo Pontecorvo,
director of the iconic movie The Battle of Algiers, once remarked that
he hoped to make a film about Romero to explore his atypical
conversion from conservative to radical.

That turn was initially occasioned by the murder of Rutilio Grande,
who had been a great friend to Romero on his arrival despite their
different political orientations. After 1978 Romero became deeply
influenced by the Spanish liberation theologian Jon Sobrino. He
entered into growing conflict with the conservative bishops, the papal
nuncio, the military, the oligarchy, and finally the pope himself. He
met regularly with radical priests and the base communities, and later
with trade unionists and BPR militants.

His Sunday sermons were attended by thousands in the cathedral, while
hundreds of thousands heard his message of the self-emancipation of
the poor through church radio. In February 1980 Romero published his
letter to President Jimmy Carter, imploring him not to provide
military aid to the Salvadoran regime and not to interfere in the
destiny of the Salvadoran people.

A month later he made a special address to soldiers not to obey their superiors, reminding them that the peasants that they killed were
their brothers and sisters, and they were no under no obligation to
follow such orders. The next day he was himself killed by the
paramilitary death squads. In his death he became a charismatic symbol
for committed Christians in Latin America and beyond.


Seeds Sown

Many commentators have pointed to a recession in the fortunes of
liberation theology in recent years. One source of the backslide has
been the rise of evangelical Christianity in Latin America on the back
of massive aid from the US, particularly from the 1980s onward. With
important exceptions, Latin American evangelism usually promotes
apolitical religious practice, if not outright reaction and unctuous celebration of prosperity. It is, notably, a key base of Bolsonaro’s
support.

Nor was the rebel church untouched by the tide of triumphant
liberalism from 1989, although it had not been associated with the
rigidities and cruelties of Soviet-style communism. The defeat of the Sandinista government in elections the following year was, likewise, a
huge blow to radical Christianity throughout Latin America.

Interest has recently been regenerated, however, given the position of
figures like Betto as advisor to imprisoned former Brazilian president
Lula, and former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa’s citation of
liberation theology as fundamental to his own political formation. One
of the most consistent obstacles to liberationist Christianity’s
advance has been suspicion or outright hostility from the Vatican. So
the accession of Pope Francis and his exhortations against the
injustice of capitalism and canonization of Romero has naturally
revived interest in the phenomenon, too.

Against prognostications that it is a spent force, Löwy contends that
“a seed has been sown by liberationist Christianity in the hotbed of
Latin American political and religious culture, which will continue to
grow and flourish in the coming decades, and still holds many
surprises in store.” In redressing the depressed fortunes of the Pink
Tide in Latin America, liberation theology — in its refusal of a
consensual and unacceptable status quo, and patient and reflective
militancy on the side of the downtrodden — has an important
contribution still to make.

At the very least, given the sordid record of the perpetration of
monstrous injustices by the church, and the prevalence of Christian
rhetoric in the service of neoliberal capitalism and the rampant
inequalities, immiseration, and violence it generates, it is a
tradition well worth remembering.

About the Author
Hugh McDonnell holds a PhD in history from the University of
Amsterdam.

Source:
https://t.co/HPhrR5rndi

--
Stephen Hayes, Author of The Year of the Dragon
Sample or purchase The Year of the Dragon: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/907935
Web site: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail: shayes@dunelm.org.uk

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