CATHOLIC REVOLUTION IN LATIN AMERICA

...Now we know more, we are in a better position to do it in a peaceful way...

...Chamber of Commerce...

...eternally suppressing reforms in the name of containment against Communist subversion...

...Schaull himself is not a guerrilla at heart...

...The "violence question" hit the CICOP meeting this year with hurricane force...

...When I saw him in his little apartment in Bogota in July, 1965, Camilo talked about starting a political move". . . such radical priests are no longer curiosities in the church . . ." ment to produce pressure groups that would "enable the majority to take power...

...A kind of new style, revolutionary, united front between the Catholics and the Marxists...

...In Guatemala, three Maryknoll priests—Father Arthur Melville, Father Thomas Melville, Father Blase Bonpane—and a nun—Sister Marian Peter—were accused of taking part in the Marxist guerrilla movement there and were forced to leave the country...

...But the important point is that from all sides now in Latin America you can see the changes: the dramatic turn to revolution...

...In 1967 Miss Geyer received an Overseas Press Club award for "the best article or report on Latin America in any medium...

...Yet nothing is changing...

...It is possible, of course, that this phase may be a passing phenomenon which will disappear as changes out-date it...

...As one young American priest in Peru said recently, "These decisions are not always rational ones...

...But there is a kind of vague, unformed quality to the rebels' psychology—that and desperation...

...This is the question that haunts the corridors at church meetings these days, the question that hangs over Catholics in every country in Latin America today...

...the rural masses are mostly disenfranchised...

...Ambassador to Venezuela and first Coordinator of the Alliance for Progress, speaking to the U.S...

...In the next few minutes, he added, "I suspect that for most of us, reliance on guerrilla warfare is not an attractive prospect...

...Arias said...

...Ricardo Arias-Calderon, believe strongly that using violence only carries you from one totalitarian tyranny to another: "I personally see no improvement in going from the pre-Castro to the post-Castro stage," Dr...

...It is almost as if taking a step, doing something, anything, is better than just silently watching conditions get worse...

...There was so much change so fast that even now there is a vast confusion in church circles...

...You have the Pope's pronouncements up here and the Alliance for Progress and below is the void...

...The Development of Peoples" encyclical, warning as it does against "exploitative capitalism," has played a key role in the shift to the far left...

...At the moment you still can see only the forms, the amorphous shadows pushing across the ecclesiastical stage...

...The problem is very complicated: how to find the means that really foster change and not condemn us to a new means of non-participation...

...I consider the work of a priest is to take a person to God," he said, "to work toward the love of one's brother...

...Above them and at the same time backing them up, beyond the conservative cardinals and bishops who remain, are the Vatican's and the Pope's increasingly supportive pronouncements...

...Mexico's independence wars were begun by a priest, Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, who lead a pack of ragged and unkempt Indians...

...We are rightly horrified by the price this would demand in bloodshed, the sacrifice of a new generation, and the long delay in urgent steps toward development...

...Within the past year some of the most prominent Catholic clergy in Latin America have come to praise Fidel Castro, once seen by the church hierarchy as the church's most deadly enemy in their jurisdiction...

...Much of what is happening today is happening because no one knows what the church of the future is going to be...

...Indeed, while there are still plenty of conservatives around, they no longer feel that center stage is theirs and are seldom heard from...

...In Latin America, there is far more freedom to innovate than in the established churches of the United States and Europe...

...What the revolutionary theology will lead to, no one knows...

...It is the question that Pope Paul VI will find the most pervasive when he makes his first trip to Latin America in August for the International Eucharistic Conference in Bogota, Colombia...

...But the fact of the presence, on a massive scale, of such ideas portends great changes not only in the future of the Catholic church but in the future of Latin America...

...The celebrated Colombian priest, Father Rafael Garcia Herreros, known for his radio broadcasts as a kind of "Colombian Bishop Sheen," followed Bishop Zacohi with: "Fidel Castro could be a good Christian...

...In the closing CICOP session, Richard Schaull, a Protestant guest from Princeton Theological Seminary, said: "For an increasing number of Catholic young people, there is only one hope: the organization of armed movements of national liberation, with all the sacrifice and bloodshed that it involves...

...Bishop Zacchi went further and praised Castro as "ethically a Christian, if not ideologically," and instructed Catholics to work for the revolution—the Marxist revolution...

...He was killed in an ambush by government troops...

...A series of reforms and reorganizations were launched which effectively began to liberalize the once dormant church...

...There is even talk from the Vatican of such a phenomenon as a "theology of just violence...

...The clarion call to pursue land reforms which President Kennedy gave at the initiation of the Alliance for Progress has gone mostly unheeded, or given lip service in those countries where social structure reflects the preeminence of those who own the land and the wealth...

...I consider there are circumstances that do not permit a man to offer himself to God...

...A priest must fight those circumstances, and for me they are political...

...The folk hero of the new "experimenters" is the late Colombian priest, Father Camilo Torres, a handsome and charismatic priest who is now the prime martyr for the Catholic radicals...

...What is crucially important in "the Melville affair" is the fact that such radical priests are no longer curiosities in the church...

...But this does not seem likely...

...Instead of exports rising by $300 million last year, they decreased by $300 million...

...Father Joseph Michenfelder, a Maryknoll who heads the Catholic Information Center in Lima, Peru, supported this position: "The Catholic revolutionaries are basing their efforts on the Pope's encyclicals, especially the recent 'Development of Peoples,' which says that in places where peaceful change has failed, violent revolution may be the final necessity...

...in the foreground, the strongest, shrillest cries are those of the young Catholic revolutionaries who see violent revolution as the only way out...

...Quite often our aid has preserved in power regimes whose very reason for existence was precisely to prevent the needed social reforms...

...other movements, in Peru, Venezuela, and Colombia, bankrupt or irrelevant...

...He has a profound faith in the progress of his country, in his people, and in the social liberation of man, which is an aspect of faith in God and of a good Christian...

...Men like Panama's leading Christian Democrat and university professor, Dr...

...Theodore Moscoso, former U.S...

...At one point, the traditionalists, led by men like Boston's venerable Richard Cardinal Cushing, staged a backstage effort to have the meeting held every two years instead of annuBoomeranging Military Aid "The great barrier to modernization [in Latin America] is its regressive social structures—its inefficient, self-serving, generally corrupt bureaucracy (with honorable exceptions), and the pervasive power of an unenlightened military clique whose function, like that of the human vermiform appendix, is either unknown or of little value...

...I want to see Latin societies pass from the type of society that tries to avoid change to a society that installs avenues for change: a revolution to institutionalize revolution, not to create the scene for another revolution...

...It no longer seems to some of the Catholic clergy such an outrageous idea that Christians can again take up violence in the name of the cross and 'that they could work hand in hand with their favorite anti-Christs...

...and over all hovers the omnipresent military (again with a few honorable exceptions) ever leery of changes in the social structure lest they jeopardize their privileges...

...The Alliance for Progress is not dead...

...Dr...

...the economic growth rate is not keeping up...

...The birth rate is growing...

...The change seems to have come about mostly because everything else has failed...

...Nuns, no longer dressed in their habits symbolic of peace and resignation, talked soberly about a sister who had left the order to work with the Guatemalan guerrillas...

...Why, then, has the mood of the Latin church changed so much and so dramatically in only three years...

...How the church hierarchy and Rome will react if these ever become actively—instead of passively—dominant ideas, no one can foresee...

...With these indictments and with their common ideas about the necessity of revolution, the radical Catholics are growing far closer to the Marxists on the social and economic level, if not always on the political level...

...They reason that "the church has always used violence," that violence is already institutionalized in most Latin societies, and that it is the creative counter-violence which will end violence for all time...

...For a time it appeared that it might even break up the conference...

...The Jesuit priest G. Jarlot of the Gregorian University in Rome held a press conference in March on the first anniversary of the encyclical, "The Development of Peoples," and said that in many cases in Latin America: ;'There is only one way to escape from an unjust situation: An, unjust violence can only be defeated by a just violence, and you know as well as I that in many channels people are searching for a theology of the just violence...

...While in Europe the Christian-Marxist dialogue has progressed largely on an intellectual level, in Latin America it is progressing rapidly on an activist level...

...It is simply irrelevant, burdened by a philosophy in Washington that says "revolution is no longer necessary in Latin America...

...the extraordinary dependence upon violence as the only way out of the abyss into which Latin America is slipping...

...Another aspect of the revolution toward violence in the Catholic church is the dramatic trend toward union with the Marxists in Latin America...

...And the spirit of violence spread...

...olic socio-religious research in Latin America...

...the rapprochement with the former enemy...

...In recent months, I have been amazed to discover how many groups of Catholics and Protestants have moved to this conclusion...

...In Brazil, young priests were arrested for distributing leaflets advocating violent overthrow of the government...

...This attitude has developed both because of the anti-capitalist tinge of "The Development of Peoples" encyclical and because of the short-sighted policies of Washington toward Latin America...

...the radical Catholics are growing far closer to the Marxists on the social and economic level, if not always on the political level...

...Indeed, in many countries conditions are becoming worse...

...On the contrary, the shadows are dark, but lively...

...We in the United States with our aid have, unwittingly or not, helped to reinforce the military or back up a dictatorship while positively damaging economic development...

...The Camilo legend grew steadily, with Camilo Torres cells forming all over Latin America...

...Now the fight is between the progressives or liberals and the radicals, with the liberals (the Christian Democrats and the basically non-violent Catholic action movements) arguing that the radicals will, in their excess of revolutionary enthusiasm, serve only to delay the substantive revolution with their impatience...

...The realization of failure and decline—coming from everyday experience and backed up by the economic figures—has led many of the best Latin American priests to the conclusion that reform can not be won peacefully...

...government is traditionally an instrument for acquiring unearned income rather than for providing much needed social services...

...But," he asked finally, "do we have any alternative to offer...

...ally—which the radicals were certain would mean its death...

...I hope it is practically possible...

...By its support of military dictatorships as well as—and sometimes in preference to— democratic regimes, the United States has antagonized and lost the support of the more idealistic Catholic elements...

...The wealthy, educated elite, with very rare exceptions, has no commitment to social reforms...

...The Papal Nuncio in Havana, Bishop Cesar Zacchi, recently was host to Fidel Castro for the first time at a reception in the Nunciature...

...Just a few years ago the overwhelming concept among Catholics, those who were flocking to the Christian Democrat parties and doing the socio-economic research designed to lay the groundwork of peaceful revolution, was precisely the idea that real revolutionary structural change in Latin America could come through non-violent, non-totalitarian means...

...The present changes in the Latin Catholic church stem from the post-World War II period, when the Vatican suddenly became aware that Latin America was slipping away—to secularism, Protestantism, the African cults...

...A massive Christian revolution being carried out on various, even uncoordinated levels...

...They seem to be taking on a life of their own...

...I recall sitting at the 1965 CICOP meeting (where each year you can feel the winds of change) and talking to L'Abbe Francois Houtart, the Belgian priest who is head of all CathGEORGIE ANNE GEYER, a roving foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, has just returned from Latin America, where she interviewed church officials in six countries...

...Ironically, the rebels' fascination with guerrilla warfare as the "only way" comes precisely at the time when guerrilla warfare in Latin America could most truly said to have failed: Che Guevara dead in Bolivia, his movement in pieces...

...The major characteristic of the young rebels is that they do not accept this kind of reasoned critique...

...The metamorphosis of Camilo is important because his development parallels that of so many of the young radicals...

...In many countries, illiteracy is worsening and so is the number of people living on a subsistence level...

...The major point of difference, naturally, is still the apparent conflict between materialism and spiritualism...

...By the following February, in 1966, he had given up hope of a political solution and had taken to the hills with the Marxist guerrillas...

...Increasingly, what they have done is looked upon with open favor by other clergy and laymen, who say they would—and perhaps will —do the same thing...

...It is theoretically possible to change society peacefully...

...The struggle that is going on today is because Catholics are trying to experiment to fill the void...

...He raised his hand symbolically above his head...

...There, peasants told a visiting Mexican correspondent, "he walked through the mountains like a God...

...Priests paced up and down, discussing radically new concepts and praising their Marxist "brothers...

...If we look at the history of Europe, the rupture with the old order was always violent," he said...

...One top Bolivian priest estimates that "half the American priests here are anti-American...

...What the Catholics and the Marxists have in common in Latin America is not so fragile as it might have appeared several years ago...

...One impatient young American priest working in Bolivia told me recently, "I am tired of seeing little coffins put into the ground...

...All the speeches on Christian violence, a Christian theology of revolution, and the Christian-Marxist dialogue frankly horrified the old-style traditional priests who had started the CICOP in the late 1950s as a means of giving more traditional types of pastoral aid to Latin America...

...Without the necessary backing from Washington for true and profound revolutionary change, the most violence-prone frustrations are built up on the part of those Latin Americans who sincerely want change...

...In the 1967 document, Pope Paul VI said that liberal capitalism "has been the source of excessive suffering, injustices, and ,fratricidal- conflicts whose effects still persist...

...In the background of the continent is the steady buzz of whispers of discontent...

...The Catholic clergy in Latin America is increasingly anti-United States...

...today he is more of a hero among students than is Fidel Castro...

...France's worker priests are in this tradition, as are elements of many of the Catholic action movements...

...From the podi-ums in the provocative sessions of the Catholic Inter-American Cooperation Program (CICOP) came constant rumblings of what turned into the major, spontaneous theme of the conference —a "theology of Christian revolution...

...They immediately went to Mexico, where they announced the formation of a Christian guerrilla front—the first in history, according to Latin American priests...

...The move failed, but no one is yet certain which way the whole program will goIt is indicative, too, that, the strife between the two predominant sections in North American-Latin American thought is no longer between the liberals and the conservatives...