Shattered Hope
Kantz, Paul
mised that "the growing depersonalization of Southern life may not be such a bad thing .... God writes straight.., if the shrinkage of social intercourse to patio and barbecue pit serves no...
...According to Piero Gleijeses, associate professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, this ongoing nightmare need never have happened...
...The treasures old and new of the church today are meant for more than "something grand...
...Gleijeses's bias--the view that Guatemala desperately needs Arbenz-type reforms-seems indisputable...
...And, had it not been for Washington's clandestine intervention in Guatemala in the 1950s, it never would have...
...Gleijeses dismisses this fear: Moscow ignored its brethren in the obscure tropical locale...
...Shattered Hope is thoroughly documented--to the tune of 1,500 footnotes--so the reader has a solid, if opinionated, basis on which to make up his or her own mind...
...Salvation and damnation exist all around us...
...ROBERT P. HYDE, JR...
...In a group of three essays about the novel he surveys the possibilities and challenges for the artist "to humanize the life around him, to formulate it for someone else, to render the interstates...
...However, his real question is: Does such a question make sense when the two traditional Western modes of thought, "GrecoJudeo-Christian and the scientific-organismic," may conceal more than they reveal...
...Application deadline is April 1. FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE Research assistantships, tuition scholarships, and a limited number of fellowships are available to new and continuing students...
...I think not...
...He lived "there in the strange fashion Chesterton spoke of, that of a man who will neither go inside nor put it [Christianity] entirely behind him as he stands forever grumbling on the porch...
...By our misapprehensions, or as Percy says, our "idolatry," we have become spiritually impoverished...
...Witty...
...In Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 19441954, Gleijeses chronicles the only stint of socially progressive governance in the country's tortured history...
...Though Guatemala's massive injustices date to the days of the Spanish conquistadors, conditions under tin-horn dictator Jorge Ubico (1931-1944) chillingly demonstrate the attitudes and institutions Arbenz felt compelled to combat...
...Sue Gillingham Dr...
...These essays will assist readers of Percy's fiction in understanding the novels, and draw new readers to his work...
...The Southern gentleman, like us, knew of "the Decalogue, the Beatitudes, the doctrine of the Mystical Body" yet, curiously, he could not embrace what he knew...
...Dillistone Bishop Richard Holloway Canon John Fenton Dr...
...But disarming the roughly 2,000 rebel fighters will not end the killing...
...Gleijeses's coverage, which draws on an intriguing mix of interviews, press accounts, and official documents, begins two decades earlier...
...The country in question is not Nicaragua, where the eight-year contra war ended last year...
...The country is Guatemala, Central America's most populous (9 million people) but oft-forgotten republic, where fighting between the ruthless military and Marxist-led rebels has flared and sputtered for some thirty years...
...Washington armed a small band of disgruntled Guatemalans, led by ex-army officer Carlos Casfillo Armas, which invaded from Honduras in June 1954...
...He diagnoses the condition but fails to see its centrality...
...Shattered Hope does much more than retell the story of the CIA-orchestrated coup that, in June 1954, closed the coffin on reform...
...The Guatemalan military was far superior, Gleijeses asserts...
...acerbic...
...Thus Washington, gripped by McCarthyism, viewed the regime as a spearhead of Soviet expansionism...
...Applications for these awards are due by February 1. LOYOLA ~ <~ UNIVERSITY .v CHICAGO For More Information, Please Write To: Director of Graduate Programs Department of Theology Loyola University of Chicago 6525 N. Sheridan Rd...
...Contact: Norma Christensen 820 Park Avenue, Box B Worland, Wyoming 82401 Phone: (307) 347-3836 Fax: (307) 347-2133 or Fernand Beck, Box B Fordham Preparatory School The Bronx, New York 10458 Phone/Fax: (212) 884-6261 8 November 1991:667 peace...
...Lost to a mindless materialism that really does see my own comfort as more important than other human beings and knows nothing of the liberating, self-sacrificial love that Jesus proclaimed...
...A 1932 decree that, in effect, legalized murder by landowners, was barely necessary, Gleijeses writes...
...Yet liberals and conservatives are so busy arguing about the arrangement of the deck chairs on the barque of Peter that they don't see the drowning multitudes overboard...
...ADMISSION Admission is limited to full-time students in the Fall semester only...
...Brian Wren A unique opportunity to join a small ecumenical group and study with these distinguished scholars in the intimate setting of historic Lincoln College, Oxford...
...Have salvation and damnation disappeared...
...So Arbenz--who had "provided Guatemala with the best government it has ever had"--went into exile at the army's request...
...Arbenz, a former army colonel, went further...
...REV...
...I worry for our spiritual health as a church when I see such venom, such lack of courtesy...
...Though the president was not a party member, Communists "were Arbenz's closest associates," and they helped him draw up and implement his programs...
...domination of the economy...
...These moderate changes, while "sadly inadequate in terms of the peasants' needs...seemed revolutionary to the Guatemalan latifundistas," or large landowners...
...they are meant for salvation...
...It was a fatal decision...
...Guatemala's dark night began...
...This is the only point I really disagree on with Mr...
...Arbenz, father of"the first true agrarian reform of Central America," came to power in 1951 after a landslide victory in elections whose relative fairness was owed to the political reforms of his predecessor, Juan Jose Arevalo...
...Tom) Wright Dr...
...Elie...
...Paul Kantz R ecent reports from Central America indicate the Western Hemisphere's longest-running guerrilla conflict may finally be coming to an end...
...Conservative president Jorge Serrano, who chaired semiofficial talks with the guerrillas prior to his January 1991 election, has pledged that negotiations will soon bring RELIGIOUS STUDIES Tuesday 11 AugustMonday 24 August 1992 LINCOLN COLLEGE OXFORD Lecturers: Professor John Macquarrie Bishop Kallistos T. Ware Professor Rowan Williams Bishop Kenneth Cragg Dr...
...Continued on next page) 8 November 1991:669...
...Despite U.S...
...If we would lift up our eyes and see them maybe then we could have the exchange Mr...
...how unlike him to have had the Psalms...
...We seem to have gotten our minds off the real issue, saving souls, and onto a peripheral one, how to implement the council...
...Because you can't get all that worked up about young people going to hell, you mostly worry that if you fail to sponsor a Catholic identity in them, the religion you've known will go out of this comer of the world, and the kids will have missed out on something grand...
...God writes straight.., if the shrinkage of social intercourse to patio and barbecue pit serves no other purpose, it might yet provide a truly public zone where people are free to move about in a secure anonymity until the time comes when they might wish to be friends...
...But it feared a direct U.S...
...PROGRAM in THEOLOGY with specializations in New Testament & Early Christianity and Christian Ethics PROGRAM The curriculum focuses on the distinctive resources of the Roman Catholic theological tradition and places them in an ecumenical dialogue with the faith and theology of other major Christian traditions...
...hopeful, yet sometimes pessimistic, these essays point the way for the pilgrim, "Marcel's Homo viator, to explore further traditional notions" such as "falling prey to the worldliness of the world, and man as pilgrim seeking his salvation" through the mystery of signs, sacrament, and information...
...TAKING SIDES IN GUATEMALA SHATTERED HOPE The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944-1954 Piero Gleijeses Princeton University Press, $29.95,430 pp...
...cranky...
...Gleijeses's rendering is convincing, though some elements--an arms shipment to Guatemala from Czechoslovakia, for instance--suggest Washington's exaggerated fears were somewhat less unreason668: Commonweal able than he makes them out to be...
...Arbenz proposed infrastructure projects to lessen this dependence, and he tried to redistribute land holdings of United Fruit Company, the notorious banana giant...
...Percy's description of the morally paralyzed Southern gentleman of the past who "did live in a Christian edifice" might serve as commentary for today's lost wayfarers...
...His presidency was marked by three departures," Gleijeses notes, "agrarian reform, close ties with the Communist party, [and] stubborn defiance of the United States...
...The oligarchy, beneficiary of the most unequal land distribution in the Americas, violently opposes even the slightest social reform...
...Arbenz's defiance took several forms, including a bid to end U.S...
...Such atrocities, never punished, still occur...
...Human rights groups have documented the murders or "disappearances" of 140,000 civilians during this period, mostly Maya Indians massacred by the armed forces or fight-wing death squads...
...invasion...
...To a sexual morality that asks little or no commitment and sees the self as a product to be packaged and sold...
...the second permitted the election of Arevalo, who protected freedom of expression, ended forced rural labor, and instituted a forty-eight-hour work week...
...This forceful volume enables the reader to watch Guatemala's short-lived social revolution unfold and unravel--from the inside...
...Are not people we see every day, people we know, being lost...
...Chicago, IL 60626 spasm of popular unrest...
...Percy answers "yes...
...Elie and I fervently hope for...
...Those who were never reconciled to the council are at first thrilled, but then disappointed when they realize our admiration of the past is not without its criticism and our criticism of the present is not without its admiration...
...If liberal and conservative Catholics would just realize that some of us "younger Catholics" are heartily sick of liberal/conservative squabbling and litmus tests (perhaps I'm the only one who is), the needed exchange would happen a lot sooner...
...insightful...
...And the John Hopkins prof's academic rigor does not prevent him from creating an accessible, lucid, almost journalistic account of an episode whose tragic consequences still reverberate...
...Ubico resigned in 1944, after an unusual LOYOLA UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO announces the opening of a Ph.D...
...When politicians can generate knockdown, drag-out debates with more courtesy than Catholics, we're in trouble...
...Both the Wanderer and the National Catholic Reporter seem to me equally venomous and I find both painful to read...
...Two army-led juntas followed...
...Percy's point is that the abstract moral distancing associated with Enlightenment rationalism no longer works: We somehow live and explore the mysteries of ourselves as we are embedded in a particular historical and existential context...
...This is why he loves Flannery O'Connor and thus perceives "the Christian culture of the South as, on the whole, a literary asset...
...pressure, Arbenz refused to back away from either his plans or his Communist friends...
...Civilized Guatemalans had always understood the occasional need to kill an Indian...
...its assassins routinely silence those--students, labor leaders, peasant organizers--who dare call for change...
...I know the exchange is needed because it's very hard right now to look at Catholics and say "how they love one another...
...American companies controlled the railway and port systems, the electric company, and vital banana exports...
...L I CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 626) a product of the Vatican II church either criticizes that church or, horror of horrors, expresses some admiration for that preVatican II church he or she never knew...
...The land reform, begun in 1952, redistributed idle parcels to roughly 100,000 peasant families...
...In the lead essay of part 2, "Is a Theory of Man Possible...
...To drugs...
...How like him to go into Chancellorsville, or the Argonne, with Epictetus in his pocket...
...nor E1 Salvador, though its eleven-year-old conflict also is the subject of serious, if slow-moving, peace efforts...
...The best passages place the reader alongside ill-fated president Jacobo Arbenz, fretfully surveying the hostile forces--Washington, along with Somoza's Nicaragua and other Caribbean-area dictatorships--arrayed against him...
Vol. 118 • November 1991 • No. 19
