NEWS & VIEWS
NEWS& VIEWS Wave of the Future? Father Gonzalo Arroyo, S.J., a founder of Christians for Socialism, reflects on the psychology and prospects of the movement in the British journal New...
...Too much paper work...
...it is a matter of working to liberate the mass of Christians who, through the penetration to their depths of a Christianity wedded to capitalist values, are blocked by the religion whose heirs they are from becoming aware of the causes of social problems and from adopting a liberating solution...
...But it does not surprise us and we know that it will disappear and that a renewed Church will be able to grow to the precise extent that growing numbers of Christians will identify themselves with liberation movements to destroy the old society and bring about a new one which will more fully allow men to have hearts which beat for others...
...A CFS group has also been formed for immigrant workers spread across France, Switzerland, The Netherlands and Germany...
...Embryo groups are starting in the U.S...
...Even if we admit that our position is difficult in the short term, we think that in the medium and long terms it will appear more clearly in the eyes of a growing number of the faithful as a service to the Church and a service to the authentic message of Jesus Christ which summons Christians to identify themselves with the oppressed, struggling for their liberation and simultaneously for the liberation of all mankind . . . We have been warned by seeing the churches as institutions of the capitalist social order, and it pains us...
...In Europe, their emergence is more recent...
...They were "advised" not to do that, as the barges themselves were costly and worth saving...
...We also pursue a political task...
...We aim at a Church in solidarity with the interests and struggles of the workers, but without breaking with the present Church...
...This task is not that of an avant-garde, and is situated in a restricted sector of the global political field, namely that of culture and ideology...
...What is the receptivity in official quarters to such an idea...
...As CFS, our business is not to constitute a new political organ...
...Odds and Ends -Representatives of 14 ad agencies sat in on the Army's Washington briefing dealing with its "Recruiting Command account...
...It is a matter of identifying, in the dominant interpretation of the Christian message, the elements borrowed from bourgeois ideology...
...JOHN DEEDY...
...The 36 religious leaders who accused the U.S...
...it seems a betrayal of Jesus Christ...
...Given the premises, it is not surprising that Christians for Socialism should have first appeared in Latin America...
...Who's Kidding Whom...
...As for the barges, the Cambodians, it developed, asked permission to sink them in order to keep the insurgents from getting the rice...
...The U.S...
...These groups of left-wing Christians have appeared since the end of the 1960s...
...According to Father Arroyo, there was a CFS meeting in Spain in 1973, and another in Italy attended by 2,000 persons (400 were expected...
...A Montclair, N.J., woman helped The Progressive past the halfway mark in its $98,000 survival-fund drive with a check and covering note: "I was going to use the money for a belly-dancing course, but you need to float more than I need to Wiggle...
...The prize: a slice of $40 million of advertising money...
...The Cambodian high command wanted to know what to do, the official said...
...The CFS movement operates on two levels...
...In North America, CFS has been known in Quebec since 1972...
...They asked our advice," the official unwittingly commented to Schanberg...
...Then the telephone rang...
...and English-speaking Canada, with the likelihood of additional groups organizing in the Philippines, the two Viet-nams and elsewhere in the future...
...It's a big pie, but a number of the largest agencies aren't nibbling...
...The official spoke in urgent tones for some minutes, Schanberg wrote, and came back to explain that the insurgents had just badly shot up a river supply convoy and that two barges carrying 1,000 tons of rice were floating free and about to fall into the hands of insurgents...
...As for us, we wish to maintain a commitment to Church solidarity...
...The psychology is elementary: "We cannot expect that from the heart of the capitalist system solutions will emerge to the problems of ecology, food, population growth and exploitation...
...Father Gonzalo Arroyo, S.J., a founder of Christians for Socialism, reflects on the psychology and prospects of the movement in the British journal New Blackfriars...
...In the end, the Cambodian Navy was unable to save the barges, the rice went to the insurgents, and the operation was a total loss...
...Admittedly," declares Arroyo, "at present many of the hierarchy tend to treat us as marginal, saying to us, 'You cannot continue in that line, for it is not the Church's line...
...official was emphatic: the embassy was being extremely careful not to give military advice...
...The interests of the international bourgeoisie demand, for their maintenance and growth, irrational phenomena like the squandering of natural resources, and the over-exploitation of the international proletariat...
...Schanberg told of an interview with an unnamed American Embassy official in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, during which the old question arose whether American military men attached to the embassy (numbering about 100) ever broke the congressional ban against acting as military advisers to the Cambodians or whether they stuck to their stated jobs of gathering battle information and supervising the delivery and use of American arms...
...If these three conditions are not realized, it is artificial to think of creating CFS groups...
...The strongest groups are said to be in Argentina, Peru, Mexico, Cuba and Central American nations...
...before Christmas of still being up to its neck militarily in Indochina got some oblique accreditation from a "notebook" item of New York Times reporter Sydney H. Schanberg...
...To survive, humanity must choose between destruction and socialism...
...More positively, it is a matter of showing, by our practice as much as by our words, that the Christian faith can and must become more and more at home in a socialist option, even if it cannot become enclosed within that option" (emphasis Arroyo's...
...Father Arroyo explains: "We pursue a task in the Church...
...Then he caught himself-and broke into an embarrassed grin...
...The prospects are somewhat less definable: "Christians for Socialism groups can appear only in those countries where Christianity is socially significant, where there are proletarian organizations struggling for socialism, and where there is a significant group of Christians who are inserted in those organizations...
Vol. 101 • January 1975 • No. 12
