By CHRISTOPHER MANION
Early one morning 50 years ago this week, I was awakened by a bomb blast. Apparently, somebody had blown up a house two doors down the street.
But that was nothing new. After all, I was in in La Paz, Bolivia, and not back home in Indiana. And Bolivia was having another revolution, a pretty commonplace event in those days.
Che Guevara had been killed five years before — and that story has a Catholic angle. An Irish priest from Achill Island, who was a missionary for the White Fathers, served as a chaplain to the Bolivian military after having served in Burundi during the early 1960s. There he had witnessed clashes between the Tutsis and the Hutus, the same tribes that went on to fight a bloody war in 1994 that killed some 800,000 people.
So there he was in Bolivia, Fr. Seamus, traipsing through the jungle with the troops looking for the gruesome terrorist killer. Looking back, he laughed — “The Bolivians knew where he was hiding out,” he said, “but they were getting so much money from the CIA to find him that they just kept going around for a while.”
Finally, on October 8, 1967, Che was captured. Immediately Bolivian Lt. Col. Andrés Selich took a helicopter to the scene, interviewed the prisoner, and oversaw Che’s execution the next day.
Five years later, as I jumped out of bed in the Maryknoll House near the La Paz city center, Selich was leading a revolution. When it was over, the new president, Col. Hugo Banzer, who had led the coup, named Selich minister of the Interior. Juan José Torres Gonzales, a leftist supported by Castro and the Soviets, surrendered. Bolivia’s fiftieth president, he had been in power for only ten months.
Five years later Torres was found dead in the trunk of a car in Argentina. Selich lasted for only two: He was killed by a group of fellow officers in 1973.
So why was I in the middle of this?
My arrival in Bolivia was part of a journey to several Latin American countries inquiring into the early origins of what was already a very popular theme in Latin American politics and religion: Liberation Theology.
I was traveling as an interpreter for Fr. Dan Lyons, SJ, whom some of our faithful readers will remember as a world traveler and anti-Communist writer and speaker. I am forever grateful that it was through him that I met Fr. Kenneth Baker, SJ, who edited the Homiletic and Pastoral Review for forty years, and is still a good friend and a faithful reader of The Wanderer.
Already fifty years ago, Fr. Lyons saw that the Latin American Church was moving leftwards. So we traveled to several countries down south to learn more about it.
Radical Politics With A Christian Cover
“This theology of yours will help the transformation of Latin America more than millions of books on Marxism” — Fidel Castro to Leonardo Boff and Brother Betto in the presence of the Spanish bishop in Brazil, Pedro Casaldaliga, CMF. Bishop Casaldaliga, led the Territorial Prelature of Sao Félix, Brazil, from 1970 to 2005; this passage comes from his memoirs written in 1987.
When the Latin American Bishops’ Conference met in Medellín in 1968, the assembled prelates condemned “the misery that besets large masses of human beings in all of our countries. That misery, as a collective fact, expresses itself as injustice which cries to the heavens.”
It “cried to the heavens,” indeed. However, the response was all on the ground, and all political.
In order to avoid “the temptations of Marxism,” they wrote, “it is necessary that small basic communities be developed in order to establish a balance with minority groups, which are the groups in power. . . . The Church — the People of God — will lend its support to the downtrodden of every social class so that they might come to know their rights and how to make use of them.”
The goal? “Faced with the need for a total change of Latin American structures, we believe that change has political reform as its prerequisite.
“The Church will utilize its moral strength” to pursue that goal, they wrote.
Three years later, Gustavo Gutierrez published his Theology of Liberation, which quickly became a roadmap for radicals in the region. The nascent seed of revolution had blossomed. And Christ would lead it.
Curiously, Fr. Ted Hesburgh, CSC, invited Gutierrez to Notre Dame several years ago. He now serves as a professor emeritus of theology there. According to the Department of Theology’s website, he is currently working on a book “exploring the historical background and continuing theological relevance of the preferential option for the poor.”
Just what is the “preferential option for the poor”? According to Gutierrez’s 2013 work on the subject, “It has become one of the most important yet controversial theological themes of the twentieth century.”
My longtime friend and mentor Michael Novak had a high regard for Gutierrez’s spirituality. “It rings true,” he wrote, “which is why it is important to say that it is not in its spirituality that one has difficulties with liberation theology; it is, rather in its interpretations of economic and social realities.”
Empty Pews — And Churches For Sale
As a dominant symbol in the Theology of Liberation, this “option” is unfortunately one of Liberation Theology’s “interpretations” that has caused tens of millions of Latin American Catholics to abandon Holy Mother Church for a myriad of Evangelical, Pentecostal, and independent sects, all brought to them courtesy of zealous, missionary-oriented American non-Catholic congregations.
“The Catholics preach politics, we preach the Bible.” That’s the mantra of literally thousands of “pastors” great and small. They’ve told it to their countrymen for fifty years and more. It’s true — and it works.
Great? Jimmy Swaggart packed the soccer stadium in Lima, Peru — capacity 90,000 — three days in a row in August 1989.
Small? Storefront makeshift chapels dot every street in cities, towns, and village throughout the region. A classmate of mine from Christ the King Grade School has been a missionary in Central America for over forty years. “It took me twelve years to become a priest,” he says; “they go to school for six weeks and they’re a ‘pastor’.”
Liberation Theology, North American Style
In South America, Liberation Theology’s stated goal was liberation from poverty through revolution. The North American version seeks liberation from truth, as confirmed by the “Call to Action” (CTA) conference held in the Detroit Archdiocese in 1976.
Brian Clowes writes that the CTA attendees — forty percent of whom worked for parishes, chanceries, and other official entities nationwide — attacked every orthodox Catholic teaching and practice. Opposing views were forbidden, and radical changes at every level were CTA’s goal for the future.
The term “base communities” might sound familiar. So too the goal to change “structures,” not souls. It is no accident that the young Barack Obama got his very first “community organizing” grant from the Archdiocese of Chicago ten years after the CTA met.
And it’s no accident that Brother and Sisters to Us, the USCCB’s 1979 pastoral on racism, credits “the consultation on social justice entitled ‘a Call to Action’” as its inspiration. Latin America’s Marxist “class struggle” would fall flat north of the border, so the bishops instead preached their version — “race struggle” — and they still do.
In the past fifty years, droves of North American Catholics have left the pews as well — some fifty million and counting.
Is there a connection?
In coming weeks we will take a closer look.
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