[Dialogue] Fwd: [POG] The Pope and Liberation Theology
Adelbert Batica
abatica at hotmail.com
Mon Apr 11 19:13:16 EDT 2005
Truly, John Paul II was the complete opposite of John XXIII. In fact,
John Paul looked more like a pope who was living in the shadows of
Pius IX and Pius X, both doctrinaire to the point of paranoia. As a
Catholic, my worst fear is having Opus Dei have a hand in the papal
election. Then God help us if we return to either Vatican I or worse
- the Council of Trent. However, whether the new Pope turns out to be
liberal, moderate, or conservative - he has to have a plan for the
Third World, especially Latin America, home to a majority of the
Catholic faithful. It's been said that politics that does intervene
at Conclave, that it's really the Holy Spirit that guides the voting
process. Well and good. We do need the Holy Spirit in these times of
war and increasing economic disparities, even in the so-called
"developed" West.
Addi Batica,
a pro-Liberation Theology Catholic
>From: kroegerd at aol.com
>Reply-To: Colleague Dialogue <Dialogue at wedgeblade.net>
>To: Dialogue at wedgeblade.net
>Subject: [Dialogue] Fwd: [POG] The Pope and Liberation Theology
>Date: Mon, 11 Apr 2005 15:32:42 -0400
>
>
>
>Dick Kroeger
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Gail Anderson <Gdanderson at mn.rr.com>
>To: People of God <MICAH6-8 at topica.com>
>Sent: Mon, 11 Apr 2005 14:16:10 -0500
>Subject: [POG] The Pope and Liberation Theology
>
>
> >From the Los Angeles Times:
>
> LEGACY OF JOHN PAUL II
>
> Part of the Flock Felt Abandoned by the Pope
>
>By Chris Kraul and Henry Chu
>Times Staff Writers
>
>April 10, 2005
>
>LA MORA, El Salvador â Half a world away, millions of people came
together last week to mourn Pope John Paul II, but you'll hear no
tearful elegies from believers such as Nery Amaya, a Catholic for all
of her 28 years.
>
>As she made the rounds as a CARE volunteer in this impoverished town,
she remembered the time she offered to start a parish program to help
gang members. Her priest suggested that she devote her energies to
Easter week decorations instead.
>
>Amaya charges that under the late pope, the church was too timid in
its ministry to the needy, and maintains that John Paul's efforts to
put the brakes on social activism cost the Latin American Catholic
Church membership as well as momentum in the fight against poverty and
injustice.
>
>"The church has to come down from heaven to the reality on Earth,"
Amaya said. "It's not filling my spiritual needs, and I am looking for
an alternative."
>
>Former priest Miguel Ventura doesn't much mourn the pope's passing,
either. The diocesan cleric left the church during El Salvador's
12-year civil war, in which he was captured and tortured by military
forces because he had organized peasants to demand social justice.
>
>"The arrival of Pope John Paul II was a step backward for El
Salvador," said Ventura, who has married and now practices his own,
unsanctioned brand of Catholicism as a pastor in poor eastern El
Salvador. "He imposed the authoritarian model on the Latin American
church and didn't have an open vision."
>
>In this rare interregnum before the College of Cardinals meets to
select John Paul's successor, Amaya and Ventura spoke of a
disenchantment felt by many Catholic lay people and clergy in Latin
America.
>
>Although the late pope promoted freedoms and denounced war and
globalization, he clamped down on a movement called "liberation
theology" â and in so doing alienated Catholics who wanted the church
to take a more active role in "liberating" the poor from misery and
oppression.
>
>This country reveres the memory of Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was
gunned down by a right-wing death squad while celebrating Mass in
1980. Romero, who spoke out against poverty and repression, has been
adopted as liberation theology's foremost martyr, and few Salvadoran
activists interviewed last week expressed affection for the pope.
Fewer still held out much hope that his successor will rejuvenate the
activism they view as central to faith and social progress in the
developing world.
>
>"The church has another way of thinking now," store owner Norma Gomez
lamented as she stood outside San Salvador's cathedral last week
before a Mass commemorating the anniversary of Romero's assassination.
"The pope wasn't with us in our time of crisis, and I don't expect the
next one to be any different."
>
>There are scattered signs of a revival of liberation theology,
responses to the desperate conditions of the poor that cry out for
activism. A Honduran priest has assumed leadership of an environmental
movement in an area of that country devastated by deforestation.
Myriad communal groups in Brazil observe the tenets of liberation
theology, many of them in the impoverished northeast. Priests are in
the thick of the indigenous rights movement in Colombia.
>
>But the composition of the College of Cardinals, the vast majority of
whom were appointed by John Paul, makes it unlikely that the church
will reembrace liberation theology as a matter of doctrine.
>
>In its heyday in the 1970s and '80s, liberation theology sought to
combine decentralized Catholicism with leftist movements for social
change, to bring God into the fight for justice on Earth.
>
>Central to the doctrine were so-called "base communities" â the small
communal groups that clerics such as Ventura organized to promote
self-awareness and activism.
>
>But soon after his election to the papacy in 1978, John Paul became
alarmed by what he said were similarities between some elements of
liberation theology and Marxism. He saw links between the groups and
the participation of some Latin American clergy in political parties,
government, even guerrilla armies.
>
>Defenders of the theology say the vast majority of priests,
catechists and lay people who practiced it were apolitical and
nonviolent, that John Paul's stance was influenced by his upbringing
in Eastern Europe, where communism and its Marxist underpinnings were
the overriding demons.
>
>"The pope was listening to those who were portraying liberation
theology in caricatures â priests with guns, Marxists â and they just
weren't accurate," said Dean Brackley, a theology professor at the
Jesuit-run Central American University in San Salvador.
>
>In any case, the new pope soon moved to quash liberation theology's
dynamics, without officially declaring it taboo. In Brazil, the pope
fired Archbishop Helder Camara, the "red bishop," and replaced him
with an archconservative in Brazil's needy northeast region. He curbed
the influence of Sao Paulo Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns, a strong
proponent of base communities, by carving up his archdiocese in 1989.
>
>"We were not understood," said Arns, 83 and now retired, adding that
many Catholics became disaffected under the late pope. "A portion of
the lay leadership was lost."
>
>Leading Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff was ordered in
1984 to explain himself before a Vatican tribunal and to observe a
year of "obsequious silence" during which the Franciscan monk was
forbidden to speak out publicly or publish writings. Facing another
such sentence in the early 1990s, Boff later left the order.
>
>On a 1983 visit to Nicaragua, John Paul publicly scolded priest
Ernesto Cardenal, a liberation theology proponent who had taken the
post of minister of culture under the leftist Sandinista regime.
>
>Maria Lopez Vigil, a former nun who is now a journalist in Nicaragua,
accused the pope of taking "the side of the powerful" in the conflicts
that convulsed Central America in the 1970s and 1980s.
>
>"He cost the church members," she said, "but even worse, made
hundreds of thousands of people uncomfortable with a God they thought
was intolerant."
>
>Here in El Salvador, where liberation theology was a driving force in
organizing opposition to the right-wing government, John Paul's
punitive measures were keenly felt.
>
>After John Paul's ascension in 1978, Vatican commissions visited
Romero two times demanding that he explain his outspoken criticism of
El Salvador's military rulers and the seeming impunity of death squads
that ended up claiming 21 priests and nuns as victims.
>
>For years after his death, the Vatican maintained a pointed distance
from Romero, while he became recognized as a martyr. Although John
Paul twice visited Romero's tomb during Central American visits, the
Vatican only recently announced that it was formally initiating
Romero's beatification process.
>
>"The pope didn't understand the meaning of Romero," said former
priest Ventura, now 59. "It indicated that Rome doesn't give aspects
of the Salvadoran, the Latin American church, the attention it
should."
>
>Ventura says that at least 30 priests and nuns left the Salvadoran
clergy after 1990 over disenchantment with Vatican policy. He said he
knows of five other former clerics with untraditional pastorates like
his in El Salvador.
>
>Moreover, the pope moved to more closely supervise seminary training
here and to appoint conservative bishops in the aftermath of Romero's
slaying. The current archbishop of San Salvador is Fernando Saenz
Lacalle, a Spaniard who is a member of Opus Dei, a highly conservative
lay organization.
>
>Andres Santa Maria, a farmer here in La Mora, about 30 miles north of
San Salvador, charges that the church no longer is the advocate for
the poor that it was during most of the civil conflict that ended with
a 1992 peace accord.
>
>"Monsignor Romero gave a voice to the community," he said. "But they
killed him for waking us up. And now there is no priest who denounces
what goes on here, that the peace accords aren't being observed."
>
>At the very least, some of the cardinals who will elect the next pope
recognize that poverty and inequality should be his top concerns.
Cardinal Claudio Hummes of Sao Paulo, one of those mentioned as a
leading contender to succeed John Paul, said the next pontiff should
be "especially at the service of the poor and most excluded."
>
>Others insist that the legacy of liberation theology is still strong,
especially in Africa and Asia.
>
>"It is a seed that Latin America planted and that others are
collecting the fruits of," retired Cardinal Arns said in a newspaper
interview this year. Brazil's Roman Catholic Church is deeply involved
with the Landless Movement, that country's biggest grass-roots force.
>
>Discourse about the poor and downtrodden and the need to solve social
problems is now embedded in Latin America's Catholic Church, analysts
said,* *despite the Vatican's move to damp the impact of the theology
that gave it that higher profile.
>
>Theology professor Brackley said the Vatican could make enormous
strides if the next pope adopted at least a few of liberation
theology's features, such as decentralizing authority, adapting to
local cultures and giving women a greater voice.
>
>Father Alberto Parra of Jesuit Javieriana University in the Colombian
capital, Bogota, said a resurgence of liberation theology was
essential for the church to fulfill its pastoral responsibility.
>
>"The church cannot continue to take refuge in religious elements,"
Parra said. "It has to deal with social problems."
>
>---------------------------------------------------------------------
---
>/Kraul reported from La Mora and Chu from Rio de Janeiro. Staff
writers Richard Boudreaux and Tracy Wilkinson in Rome, Paula Gobbi in
Rio de Janeiro, Hèctor Tobar in Buenos Aires, and special
correspondents Rachel Van Dongen in Bogota and Alex Renderos in San
Salvador contributed to this report.
>/
>
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