CHILE'S SILENT CHURCH:

...They remained at best committed to developmentalism, while several of them were still in the traditional attitude of emotional identification with the oligarchy and committed to the class structures which left most Chileans voiceless and powerless...

...and a more moderate section which retains the name of socialism...

...In 1961 I inter-viewed him for a United States magazine, quoting him as favoring major land reform in Chile, with the Church giving the example-he did in fact distribute all Church land in his diocese of Talca to the peasants who farmed it-and asserting that the Church had a scripture-based duty to be biased toward the poor...

...Backing off from the categorical condemnations of his predecessors, Pius noted the recent split of the social movement into "a more violent section, communism...

...Others really believed they had found a middle way between capitalism and socialism in the formulations of Pius XI as expanded by Vatican II's "Constitution on the Church in the Modern World" and still further (in 1968) by the Medellin statements of the Latin Amer-ican bishops...

...Spokesmen for the World Council of Churches and the U.S...

...It apparently believed, as Frei did, that Chile would experience a conventional coup d'ltat, a change of the palace guard: the elimination of Allende and "constitu-tional" installation of Frei, next in line as head of the Senate...

...The growing strength of the Left after World War II made other bishops recognize the need for new strat-egies...

...Like modern Catholic theology, Silva thought of individual rather than social salvation...

...The Church had come to Chile, as generally to Latin America, as junior partner to an empire-building group which developed in Chile-as elsewhere-into a tightly knit oligarchy that saw itself as sole depository of power and decision-making (al-ways, of course, within the area of maneuver accorded it by a succession of "metropolitan" overlords...

...1973 captioned a photo of the bombing of La Moneda: "The Purification of La Mo-neda...

...Any attempts by Christian groups to express themselves publicly in favor of social liberation are ruthlessly smashed...

...The Church never exercised power over this oligarchy...

...In-stead, it served as legitimator and provided moral sanc-tions to support the physical sanctions imposed by the second perennial institution, the armed forces...

...of the bishops' conference), Fernando Ariztia Ruiz (Copiapo), Carlos Gonzalez Cruchaga (Talca), Bernardino Pifiera Car-vallo (Temuco), and Jorge Hourton and Enrique Alvear Urrutia (both auxiliaries of Santiago...

...Its principal members are Archbishop Emilio Tagle Covarrubias (Valparaiso), Bishops Juan Fresno Larrain (La Serena) Eladio Vi-cuna Aranguiz (Puerto Montt), and Maximiano Valde's Subercaseaux (Osorr...

...The Chilean editor in turn had taken the additional precaution of submitting to the bishop his Spanish translation...

...Chilean bishops, it said, should know better than to talk to United States newsmen who always distorted their stories...

...Like all members of the oli-garchy everywhere in Latin America (and bishops are ex officio assimilated to the oligarchy and its mores), he believed he could do business with the generals or anyone else in power as one club member to another...

...National Council of Churches expressed surprise at this "breach in the Christian community," and the Latin American Catholic news agency Noticias Aliadas said it contrasted radically with the stand of the Catholic Church and that of the Lutherans and other major Protestant Churches...

...The Junta has worked hard and successfully to smash episcopal collegiality...

...The rest of the bishops are hesitant...

...And so we have MAPU (Movimiento de Ac-cidn Popular Unido) in 1969, followed later by MIC (Movimiento lzquierdista Cristiane), while some mem-bers join the extreme left MIR (Movimiento lzquierdista Revolucionario...

...Will this happen...

...Many Church leaders then saw Salazar's Portugal as the hope of the future, and it was under just such a program that two university Catholic activists in Chile, Eduardo Frei and Radomiro Tomic, started the reform move-ment that after World War II developed into Christian Democracy...

...In Calcutta the focus is on city slums...

...One Chilean bishop has revealed that the incidence of violations of human rights and the unexplained disappearance of Chilean citizens was higher in the first four months of 1975 than in the same period a year earlier...

...I have analyzed what I regard as the il-logic, the inadequacy and lack of realism of those docu-ments on other occasions most formally in Revolution Next Door written in 1970...

...Socialist reform could be countered only by Christian reform...

...In 1956 they asked the Jesuit general in Rome to send them some social scientists who would develop strategies to counter the propaganda of the socialists led by Salvador Allende...

...They publicly espoused socialism and followed up with the creation of "Christians for Socialism" in 1972, a move-ment which then had and still has worldwide resonances...

...The Junta was offended by having the Allende regime placed on equal terms...

...This is the so-called 'Polish solution.' I personally am convinced that only the clearest stand against the Junta is in accord with the gospel and also will give the Church credibility for the future...

...It names the heads of Church-related educational and welfare organizations...

...I had an amusing experience of the efforts of the Chilean oligarchy to keep their monopoly of Catholic orthodoxy by downgrading Larrafn...

...It said a new Constitution will need the approval of the people "after discussion in which all citizens can participate actively and knowledgeably...

...A second group adopts a cautious yet openly critical position, particularly on human rights, as expressed in the Easter 1974 statement...

...The free market, Pius charged, "of its own nature" concen-trates power in antisocial types, in those "who fight most violently and give least heed to their conscience...

...Regrettably both Lebret and Larrain had died before it was issued in 1967, Larrafn victim of an automobile accident...

...Even the celebrations of the Holy Year of 1975 are strictly regulated...

...That meant negotiating and making concessions, and effec-tively acknowledging the legitimacy of a system founded on violence, so that the Church in fact contributed to creating and strengthening tyrannical structures...

...One he sent was a Belgian Jesuit, Roger Vekemans, who soon became a key figure in the campaign to stop Allende, especially when Allende all but won the presidency in 1958...

...Those groups rejected the middle way, insisting that socialism was the only alternative to capitalism, and that Christians and Marx-ists must unite to end the institutionalized violence of the capitalist power structures...

...Frei was no exception, and by 1967 his Christian Democratic party was fragmenting into the temporizers and those committed to and aware of the urgent need of radical reform...

...Apparently, it had not even been listening when Nixon proposed Brazil as the prototype of the coming Latin America...

...1973 can be conveniently divided into several periods, all of them marked by continuing tension as the Church sought to retain the autonomy it had been ac-corded by Allende, while the Junta sought to use it...

...Larrafn was really a very moderate reformer, but he was conscious that the social situation in Chile was de-generating rapidly and that the Church would go down with the oligarchy if it continued its historic subservient role...

...The food supplements and health services dif-fer according to the respective needs in the two com-munities...

...government agencies -including the CIA-also poured money through other channels into the Frei campaign...

...The attempt to create a new religion by giving special meanings to traditional theological lan-guage goes back to the installation of the regime...

...In organizing that Frei campaign, Vekemans de-veloped a series of programs, some funded by a West German aid agency, others by United States groups who later were revealed to have been fronts for and funded by the CIA...

...But they asserted that their Christian faith was enlivened and vivified by their political activity-that is, by their active involvement in history with the work-ing class and its liberation...

...These socialist Christians did not try to derive their political stance from their faith, even though they felt that it dovetailed with the gospel mes-sage and with Jesus' predilection for the poor and their liberation...

...Observing that the programs of the mod-erates "often strikingly approach the just demands of Christian social reformers," he claimed that they could be better realized in the corporate state which he saw as a middle way between capitalism and communism...

...The savages who had destroyed all of Chile's most cherished institutions, killed thousands, expelled thousands, imprisoned thousands, driven hundreds of thousands from their jobs, were acknowledged to be as legitimate a government as the one the people had chosen for itself in free elections...

...It was written by Maryknoller Miguel d'Escoto, a longtime activist with Jesuit Roger Vekemans in his varied well-heeled anti-socialist activities...

...They were the disciples rejoicing at the good news and now entrusted with the task of spreading it...

...Meanwhile, criticisms expressed by bishops were both ambiguous and in private, never an appeal to public opinion, all of which further tended to legitimate the oppressive and usurping structures...

...They derived their political stance from an analysis which they wanted to be as objective and scien-tific as possible, and which they saw authenticated by the political praxis of the workers and their avant-garde...

...Cardinal Silva told a private meeting of bishops at Easter that its work would be finished by the end of the year, and Jonathan Kandell has reported in the New York Times (May 5) that he has repeated this statement several times...

...10022...

...From that time, Protestant ministers played a significant role in "Christians for Socialism...

...This group has openly broken unity with the other bishops, especially with formal statements of Tagle and Fresno...

...It has exercised a mainly negative influence on the 40 percent today identified as earning the minimum wage (minimum human survival level), for whom it provides godparents, saints' days and other largely superstitious services...

...I doubt that the Church will take this stand...

...General S. A. Stark, head of the Second Army Division, has told the Church authorities of Santiago that expressions must be strictly religious and are permitted only within parish premises and private homes, with full advance information to the security forces...

...It makes bilateral arrangements with heads of institutions, bypassing Church authorities...

...It was labeled confidential but used shamelessly to slander Allende and his regime and justify all the excesses of the Junta...

...Jesuit Gonzalo Arroyo, recognized leader and theore-tician for "Christians for Socialism," makes a point I regard as important...

...In November 1973, in the Vatican's Osservatore Romano, he told the Junta that the Church in Chile offered it the same cooperation it had offered "to all those works on behalf of the common good that had been sponsored by the Marxist government of President Allende...

...It was utterly unprepared for the savage counter-revolution, the only logical alternative to a continuation of the Allende-headed revolution given the internal and external balance of social forces and pressures, a coun-terrevolution which condensed into weeks the destruc-tion of popular institutions and the physical elimination of popular leadership which had taken years in Brazil...

...The oligarchy reacted violently to the Frei-Tomic suggestion that there could be a party in Chile claiming to be Christian other than the National Party which was the one and only Catholic party, and they ordered the bishops to condemn the upstarts, an action that would have been taken but for the determined opposi-tion of a single young bishop, Manuel Larrafn of Talca...

...In consequence, its response was totally inadequate to the needs of the situa-tion...

...Since September 1973 The efforts of the Church to maintain itself in being as an institution and to exercise an influence on events since Sept...

...I will merely note that this typical bourgeois ideology re-sults from having internalized a set of abstract, a-his-torical ethical values, such as democracy, participation in the political process on a level of total mathematical equality, a repudiation of violence understood-again a-historically-as doing active deliberate hurt to an-other, a repudiation resulting from a selective interpreta-tion of biblical texts, and a concept of liberty as an attitude of mind unrelated to structural conditions...

...The magazine sent me galleys to Santiago to check and I showed them to the editor of the Santiago diccesan weekly who recog-nized the news value, translated into Spanish and fea-tured on page one...

...A report submitted by a group of Chilean priests to the Easter meeting of the bishops insisted that the evils denounced by the bishops a year earlier (see above) had intensified, and that new violations had been added, specifically "manipulations of consciences and an alarming reduction of health services for the poor...

...It is now clear, I would say it was already clear by 1967, half-way through the Frei presidency, that the coalition on which he rested lacked not only a consistent ideology but unity of objectives...

...For example, children near Bombay suffering from night blindness for lack of Vitamin A receive six vitamin-protein biscuits a day to restore their sight...

...AN APPEAL:-Loretto Sisters are conducting a six-months nutrition project in India affecting more than 9,000 persons...

...A large photograph dominating the page showed two soldiers embracing...

...In that encyclical, Pius agreed with Lenin that it was of the nature of "free enterprise" to evolve into monopoly capitalism "an international imperialism whose country is where profit is," a system not able to curb or control itself, and in consequence ultimately self-destructive...

...Chile was not totally typical, particularly because substantial immigration from Europe in the nineteenth century of workers already conscious of the inequities of the capitalist system speeded up processes that came more slowly in most of Latin America...

...Such was the situation at the end of 1974...

...Nor is there reason to doubt that his initial contacts with the Junta were principally motivated by the desire to save innocent lives, an effort in which he had considerable success...

...I believe that the Church still figures that there will be a way to solve diplomatically the differences between Church and State...

...Space forbids a deep probing of the subconscious elements which force many Christians, particularly Ro-man Catholics, to live comfortably with this concept of moral imperatives which marginalizes them in the process of creating a world fit for human habitation...

...But none of the bishops was ever converted to the dialectical interpreta-tion of events which underlay the stand of "Christians for Socialism...

...In actual fact, there has been no let-up in the programs of oppression...

...In the first period, the Church (working ecumenically, particularly with Lutheran Bishop Helmut Frenz) en-gaged in the Committee of Cooperation for Peace and other organizations in a major humanitarian effort to help individuals in the name of human rights...

...The almost unbroken tradition of Chilean politics is that a president is elected on an extremely progressive platform, quickly modifies it and finally reverses it under the pressures of the power-monopolizing oligarchy...

...Those origins, including Pius's distinctions and suggested solution, were to weigh heavily on the development of social reform in Chile from then on-ward...

...ITT and various U.S...

...The first months of 1975 were marked by a series of events indicating the determination of the Junta to continue its efforts to domesticate the Churches while conducting elaborate campaigns of international propaganda to anesthetize world opinion...

...For Jonathan Kandell, it "has become virtually synonymous with church concern for human rights...

...It has exercised significant positive and negative influence on the servants of the oligarchy, the 15 percent who live somewhat on the level of the middle classes in North America and who are served by churches, schools, hospitals and similar institutions...

...And the editor of a Chilean newspaper that claimed to represent the Church should not be so igno-rant as to fail to recognize the heretical teachings on the class war he was attributing to a Chilean bishop...

...The text included an interview with a cleric who compared the 3-year death of Chile under marxism to Christ's suffering, death and glorious Resurrection...

...The existence of this revolutionary current, even though a definitely minor one, undoubtedly helped the formal neutrality of the Chilean bishops during the 1970 elections which gave AUende the presidency, and the institutional Church's collaboration and normally good relations with the predominantly Marxist govern-ment of the Popular Unity coalition...

...But the picture remained mixed...

...He played a leading part in the creation of CELAM (Consejo Episcopal Latin-americano), and he learned how to survive in the hostile climate of the Chilean church-as Dom Helder Camara would later in Brazil -by building an international reputation...

...The bishop and pastor must authorize each manifestation, and the bishop will be held personally responsible for any infraction...

...A priest friend of mine, who is close to Cardinal Silva and who until recently remained optimistic, has given me an answer with which I cannot disagree...

...The educational system is being completely restructured and reoriented along the same fascist lines already established in Brazil, with no regard for views of parents or of the school community...

...It chided the Junta's violation of the rights of citizens, the climate of fear and insecurity, rising unemployment and firing of workers for arbitrary or ideological rea-sons, the restructuring of the economy to impose "an excessive amount of sacrifice" on wage-earners...

...Vekemans and his associates decided that the old ways were no longer viable...

...CHILE'S SILENT CHURCH GARY MacEOIN The emphasis is on individual rather than social salvation From early colonial times until 1950, the role of the Catholic Church in the public life of Chile experienced no significant change...

...Evidence is mounting that the Junta will succeed, within a matter of months, in destroying the Committee of Cooperation for Peace, the sole institution attempting to develop long-term programs to deal with the unemployment, poverty and hunger which the Junta's economic policies have imposed on supporters of the previous regime...

...Its leaders are Cardinal Silva, Bishops Carlos Camus Larena (sec...

...Responding to the Pope's call for New Year's Day 1975 as a day for peace, Pinochet cabled his total com-mitment to the same objective, adding that his regime reflected and expressed the beliefs and practices of Catholicism...

...I suspect that this will be one of the elements leading to bloody conflict in Latin America...

...The combination of hacendade and parish priest could still guarantee election of the reactionary National Party nominee in many rural areas, a factor highly distortive of the real desires and needs of the people of Chile in every election held during the twentieth century...

...The Conservative and Liberal branches of the oligarchy joined early in the National Party under the threat from labor, and considerable segments of the workers emancipated themselves completely from Church influence...

...Vekemans, incidentally, fled Chile in 1970 when Allende was elected, was soon back in big business in the more congenial atmosphere of Bogota, Colombia...

...By this time, the old Catholic-Protestant rivalry had yielded to a new split: progressive Catholics and Pro-testants against reactionary Catholics and Protestants...

...Con-tributions are needed if this notably effective program is to continue...

...When in 1973, Chilean and international capitalism shed its reformist mask, confirming the view always affirmed by MIR and held with varying degrees of clarity by many members of the Popular Unity coali-tion that those who monopolize power will not permit the transformation of society by legal, democratic meth-ods, the institutional Church in Chile lacked a realistic analysis of what was taking place...

...Schematically, and at the hemispheric level, the Church has been ruled by the oligarchy (5 percent of the population...

...The second problem is that winning the battle for individual lives (some of them) lost the war for the life of the people...

...For the present purposes, I need only note that they correctly stressed the need for radical, urgent and revolutionary change in Latin America, then offered as the way that change must come "a radical modification by businessmen and their organizations, as well as the political .authorities, of their attitudes and methods as those affect the purpose, or-ganization and operation of their enterprises...

...In other words, they were telling the Chileans (and other Latin Americans) that they must await the conversion of the CIA and ITT and the rest of the gang who monopolized political and economic power...

...It is Darwinism gone mad...

...Cardinal Raul head of the Chilean episcopate, behaved with great personal propriety throughout the entire process, publicly acknowledging the democratic decision which brought a Marxist to power in 1970, maintaining a cooperative attitude to the Popular Unity regime and repeatedly praising reforms it effected (in-cluding the nationalization of copper) as in Chile's best interests and strictly constitutional...

...They urged the bishops to take a firmer and more open stand against the Junta for the sake of the people as well as for the long-term good of the Church...

...The decisions are now made by computers in New York, London, Tokyo and the counterparts in Moscow with whom their exchange of confidences is steadily greater and more cordial...

...He was prom-inent among the progressives at Vatican Council II (1962-65) and made a contribution second only to that of the French Dominican priest, L. J. Lebret, to Pope Paul's encyclical on world development, Popu-lorum Progressio...

...The result was a major shift of the Chilean Church to the reformism of the Christian Democrats expressed in the slogan of revolution in liberty which carried Frei to victory in 1964...

...Address: Catholic Relief Services, 1011 First Avenue, New York, N.Y...

...That day is over, if only because the area within which the oligarchs can decide freely has been radically nar-rowed...

...The double joke was that Bishop Larrafn had seen my English text and congratulated me in a gracious letter, which I understandably treasure, for "la fidelidad con que ha exp^esado m' pensanrento...

...The Junta is enormously conscious of the importance of restoring the oligarchy's traditional control of the Church as legitimator and moral protector of the regime...

...The Church's position was further clouded by a document sent in the name of the bishops (but representing only some Junta supporters) in December 1973 to bishops in many other countries...

...This shift of emphasis and allegiance was paralleled in the Church, where small but influen-tial numbers of priests and lay leaders, followed parallel lines, starting with the Iglesia Joven movement in 1968, and the declaration of "The 80" priests in 1971...

...Nevertheless, in the light of history, I fear Cardinal Silva will emerge as less than a hero or a reader of the signs of the times...

...The magazine Tizona in Oct...

...One group of bishops identifies the welfare of religion with the objectives of the Junta...

...One such use was an article in Maryknoll magazine repeating all its lies and half-truths without indication of the source...

...in Bombay on drought-stricken or flood-ravaged surround-ing areas...

...Some elements wanted no change in the traditional monopoly of power...

...and relatively little influence on the 40 percent living below the human level...

...The theory is carried over into practice...

...The possibility that the Church might have a judg-mental role-and not merely a legitimating one-on and for society was tentatively raised in the 1930s, follow-ing Pius XFs Quadragesimo Anno (1931...

...Another "whitewash" operation was a series of talks and press conferences in the United States under the aegis of the violently anti-communist Cardinal Minds-zenty Foundation by a Catholic priest on leave from Chile who insisted that Chileans are solidly behind the Junta, that the economy is in excellent shape, and that even those guilty of crimes have been and are being treated leniently...

...El Diario lllustrado, organ of the oligarchy, shot back with a bitter editorial...

...While the Committee has Protestant and Jewish cooperation, its legal basis comes from the cardinal and can be withdrawn by him at will...

...Although stated to be the view of all the bishops, this document accelerated an open rift in the hierarchy...

...In fact, it was being legitimated by the Church...

...It gave a great play to a statement signed by 32 Protestant churchmen (including Bishop T. R. Vasquez of the United Methodist Church) proclaiming the Junta as "God's reply to the prayers of all believers who saw in marxism the satanic force of darkness carried to its culmination...

...For them, as for Pope Pius IX in Nostris et Nobiscum (1849), "it is not given to men to establish new so-cieties and communities opposed to the natural state of human affairs...

...At Easter 1974, El Mercurio headed a full-page essay: "Our Country has Died and Risen from the Dead...

...A significant change occurred in the spring of 1974 when the Secretariat of the Chilean bishops issued a document signed by Cardinal Silva "for all the bishops of Chile," which for the first time challenged basic po-sitions of the Junta...

...In addition to being the one symbol of hope for Chile's poor, the Committee is still seen by churchmen and other observers from other countries as desperately needed to continue its original work of searching for missing persons, providing legal aid to political detainees, and collecting data on abuse of authority...

...One problem is personal in the sense of his class conditioning...