Cross Currents
"WHAT HAPPENS IN LATIN AMERICA "V will, humanly speaking, determine the fate of the church in the next century." The speaker was Pope John Paul II, the occasion the opening of the second general...
...nor did they refer solely to the fact that by the year 2000 three out of every five Catholics would be Latin American...
...At the same time, however, the Social Christians shared the elitist and paternalistic view of religious and political leadership espoused by the traditionalists...
...the state gained the stamp of moral authority...
...A T THE TIME, SOME CONSERVATIVES suggested that the conference was manipulated by the Peruvian Gustavo Gutidrrez, the Belgian-born Jos6 Comblin and other liberation theologians, who acted as advisors to the bishops and drafted many of the documents...
...they strictly limited the Church's role in education and instead encouraged new philosophical trends-positivism, materialism and liberalism-to enter the universities, Masonic lodges and political parties...
...See Roland Flamini, Pope, Premier, President: The Cold War Summit That Never Was (New York: MacMillan, 1980), among others, p. 22...
...The funds came from international Catholic organizations like Caritas, the organization of local diocesan relief projects coordinated by Rome, and Misereor, the West German mission fund...
...Chilean theologian Pablo Richard breaks them down into four groups...
...2 (February 1977), pp...
...One group, including most of the civil-religious authorities, clergy and religious orders, argued that the indigenous had no inherent rights or culture, and were best christianized through coercive labor...
...2 CELAM, which represented the first opportunity for direct communication between the *Members of religious orders officially recognized by the Church...
...next came the bishops, who were encouraged to form national conferences to discuss the role of the Church in each country...
...If the bishops approved the statements decrying unequal international relations, foreign dominance, government by the few, the resounding movement for social change, it was because they were consistent with the realities they saw in their countries...
...2. Edward Cleary, O.P., Crisis and Change: The Church in Latin America Today (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1985), p. 21...
...Cooney, American Pope, pp...
...These relationships also paid off in political favors for Spellman...
...Its members' common characteristic, in addition to anti-Marxism, is to make the legitimacy they confer upon governments conditional in varying degrees on respect for social welfare, labor organizing rights, civil liberties and human rights...
...RONICALLY ENOUGH, ONE REASON FOR Spellman's eventual fall from power was the elec- tion of the United States' first Catholic President...
...They reflected a simple but urgent recognition of the existence of varied, competing "projects" within the Latin American church...
...Increasing numbers of clergy, and even some bishops, reassessed their relationship to secular authorities in the light of Latin America's recent violent history-the U.S...
...2 Spellman's swansong in Latin America was also his greatest failure, and illustrated the trends that were gathering force in the period leading up to Medellin...
...Their impact, however, was solely in the political sphere...
...The day before the conference ended, the Colombian bishops unanimously circulated a dissenting document in outright opposition to the conference conclusions...
...Rome reinforced this purpose through its own early foreign policy toward Latin America, seeking coexistence and mutual prosperity through the concordats...
...Le Monde (Paris), July 25 and July 27-28, 1975...
...Registration of birth, marriage and death also passed to civil hands...
...248, 123...
...In Brazil and Argentina, where the Church structures had developed greater autonomy, Spellman's influence was non-existent...
...The charge is even more widespread today, as part of a fierce revisionist impulse...
...A few, like "guerrilla-priest" Camilo Torres in Colombia, opted for armed rebellion...
...Pope Pius XII opened the conference by emphasizing the drive to neutralize Protestantism, socialism, spiritism and the Masonic movement...
...Ibid., among others, pp...
...The Vatican responded to the advent of Fascism in Italy with a new pragmatism, agreeing to cease its support for the Catholic opposition parties in exchange for a Fascist promise not to touch the Church's organizations in Italy...
...Pope Paul VI gave his approval to the project in principle, but the papal nuncio in Santo Domingo, who was horrified by the intervention, quietly expressed his opposition...
...Spellman was also out of touch with the new political direction of the Vatican under Pope John XXIII...
...Thinking along these lines, the bishops selected by Rome helped move the Latin American Church into a new period of social involvement...
...Brian H. Smith, The Church and Politics in Chile (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 122...
...These tidy arrangements brought mutual benefits...
...7. Ibid., p. 54...
...and "the formation of leaders...
...2 " The first is the conservative sector, which went through no change in the 1930s and offered "unDom Helder Cimara, Recife, Brazil, 1971 conditional legitimacy" to the right-wing military regimes of the 1960s and 1970s...
...Not anti-Marxist, but non-Marxist, its primary work is with the marginalized urban, peasant and indigenous populations...
...but among the laity, and above all the marginalized poor, its appeal has diminished since the early 1960s...
...government agencies gave to the Chilean Christian Democratic Party of Eduardo Frei in its electoral campaign against Salvador Allende's Socialist Party in 1964...
...The bishop was to work closely with his priests and be united with the laity through the "gospel and the Eucharist...
...In 1962, a CIA report concluded that the Vatican was becoming a less reliable ally...
...During the early 19th century wars of independence, fresh political conflicts shook the Church...
...15Visions o the Kingdom Visions of the Kingdom region's bishops, had been formed only seven years earlier...
...If the Church's slow, arduous detachment from feudalism and monarchism in Europe served as any precedent, the course that John XXIII had set was a convoluted one...
...THROUGHOUT THE 19TH CENTURY, AND IN some cases well into the 20th, church leadership was directly linked to the conservative parties of the old landholding oligarchy, often funding and working for their candidates...
...In the mid1960's, Venezuela and Argentina both negotiated agreements with the Vatican allowing them to retain veto power over candidates proposed by Rome...
...The ramifications of this debate have touched the lives of all Latin American Catholics, and have helped shape their aspirations about life and the possibility of influencing social and political relations in the future...
...Bishops and priests now saw their mission as educating and "Christianizing" the elite...
...CROSS CURRENTS 1. "Decree on Bishops in the Church," Documents of Vatican II, cited in Phillip Berryman, The Religious Roots of Rebellion: Christians in Central American Revolutions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984), p. 366...
...The bishops were not prepared to usher in a new political practice, despite the passionate tone of their condemnations...
...Cooney, American Pope, p. 59...
...In Ecuador, Brazil, Cuba, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Chile and Mexico, the Church was disestablished...
...Smith, Church and Politics, p. 116...
...This formula met with the approval of the majority of bishops at the conference, but buried among the hundreds of paragraphs of critique of the system, it was hardly remembered as Medellin's most eloquent statement...
...Mutchler, Church as a Factor, pp...
...Cooney, American Pope, p. 236...
...The bishops appealed to believers to make a "preferential option for the poor," and called upon the Church to establish decentralized base communities...
...the head of the Church was the Spanish king...
...It identifies itself with the poor and rejects alliance with the ruling sectors, but is not linked with any secular political project...
...This was no abstract theology about liberation, but a faith designed to bring about liberation from unjust social structures...
...This was the case in the Dominican Republic in 1965, in Chile in the Popular Unity coalition backing Allende in 1969, and at other times in Paraguay, Brazil, and Uruguay...
...Jolted by the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the wave of socialist movements spawned in its wake, the Catholic leadership awoke to the need to strengthen its grassroots support...
...In Mexico more than 150 priests fought in the revolutionary army, among them independence leader Father Miguel Hidalgo...
...The Church was forced to find a new niche for itself...
...The sweeping Liberal reforms of the late 19th century spelled an end to most of the original concordats...
...Belgian Jesuit Roger Vekemans authored a strategy called Promoci6n Popular, in which church-organized neighborhood councils in working class districts were transformed into Christian Democratic constituency units during the elections and after the party took power...
...Ibid., pp...
...As in Rome, the conflict has been between those who believe that the Church stands above history, and those who see it as a perpetually evolving institution...
...But nowhere else had the conflict affected the ranks of the episcopate so profoundly as in Latin America: in Poland, the bishops stood as a single monolith...
...Not only was the system being challenged...
...His career helped make the U.S...
...The Medellin decisions were in part the outcome of pressure from lay Christian groups and priests who had already redefined their mission...
...Through their educa- tional and organizing programs, the Catholic Bellarmine and DESAL centers provided major political support for the Christian Democrats...
...In the coming years, disquiet among a wavering sector of the Church hierarchy grew as it became apparent that the Medellin declarations embodied a call to political action...
...Though a different emphasis evolved in each country, the growth of the Young Catholic Workers Movement (JOC) is indicative of the overall trend...
...Support for the Conservatives ran parallel to Rome's explicit backing for Catholic parties in Western Europe between 1870 and 1920, as the Vatican sought to create a bulwark against anti-clerical and Marxist movements...
...But Spellman chose a group of Maryknoll sisters and brothers to launch community organizing projects and locate students who would accept payment to write pro-U.S...
...Comblin argues that the same underlying dispute endures as "the primary factor of division inside the Catholic Church.'"' Over the last five centuries, disputes over the inherent dignity and rights of workers, women, indigenous and the marginalized poor have polarized interpretations of God's purpose...
...Cited in Gary MacEoin, Revolution Next Door: Latin America in the 1970's (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971), p. 114...
...They believed this would grow out of mobilizing the poor and overcoming REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 16their fatalism through "conscientization"--the development of a new awareness that social conditions are man-made, not God-given...
...Medellin's conclusions showed the strong influence of the new school of dependency theorists and liberation theologians...
...Rome granted Latin American presidents the right to name bishops...
...The bishops, for their part, were divided into two main categories...
...In fact, the Vatican's horror at the Soviet occupation of Poland-one of the world's most Catholic nations-together with its concern at the growth of the Italian Communist Party, propelled it to take a lead in supporting the Cold War...
...This category is made up mainly of clergy and religious, but some bishops, like the Brazilian Dom Helder CAmara, former Archbishop of Recife, would identify with it...
...The Archbishop of Venezuela went so far as to interpret the 1812 earthquake as God's punishment of the upstart population for refusing to recognize Ferdinand VII as the "virtuous monarch annointed of the Lord...
...A new generation of bishops who entered the episcopate after the 1930's promoted these projects as a means of expanding the church's influence...
...The bishops alone had no strategy to make the message of the Church relevant to a region in turmoil...
...In every country, including the pope's own homeland of Poland, there were differing perspectives on its mission and its relation to secular forces...
...government's policies in Europe and Latin America...
...Around the continent, loyalist bishops branded political opponents as heretics, accused revolutionary priests of Satanic association, and pressured them to stay out of politics...
...and from Christian Democratic parties in Western Europe...
...But the overall political coloration of the bishops at Medellin was conservative...
...Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit, the Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983), p. 155...
...Working with questionnaires returned from the newly formed national episcopal conferences, the continent's new theologians, who included the Mexico-based Ivan Illich, the Belgian-born Jos6 Comblin, the Peruvian Gustavo Gutierrez and Uruguayan Jesuit Juan Luis Segundo, met with bishops, sociologists and others to draw up the documents two years prior to Medellin...
...When the Central American states established their short-lived confederation in 1823, it was a priest, Jos6 Matias Delgado, who was chosen President of the Assembly...
...They began in the 1930s in Chile, Argentina, Peru, Costa Rica and Chile, and by the end of the following decade had spread throughout the continent...
...His career would seem illustrative of the path taken by many of the foreign and Latin American priests...
...Only Brazil had a functioning episcopal conference at the national level...
...Three years of preparations had yielded study papers and discussions throughout Latin America...
...In the center stood the pope...
...It marked the end sEPTEMaERIocToaER i985'9 i SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1985 19ReVpor o the4 Aomec Visions of the Kingdom of the commonly accepted "Christianizing mission," and brought a new reformist approach, profoundly hostile to socialism and committed to expanding Church influence at the mass level...
...The money was spent on Catholic lay housing and training programs, as part of the effort to built a Christian Democratic power base...
...A question mark, if only a tentative one, now hung over the Church's automatic identification with tl- "Free World...
...The effort brought it into active, though not always smooth, alliance with the U.S...
...while the left wing takes a more activist political role, pressuring the state for liberalization.A third sector, the "socially committed," emerged out of the lay movements and the left wing of the Social Christians...
...US programs to halt the spread of socialism through economic reforms and counterinsurgency warfare came to depend less on the palace politics of bishops and car- dinals, and more on the broader structures of the Latin American church...
...Yet those figures camouflage the bishops' differences...
...John began a process which he saw as a journey with an unclear destination...
...In the words of Medellin, "A deafening cry pours from the throats of millions of men, asking their pastors for a liberation that reaches them from nowhere else...
...others were more obdurate, like the majority of bishops from the Dominican Republic and Guatemala, and all those from Argentina and Colombia, who insistently defended their governments despite widespread state violence...
...foreign policy concerns...
...larger numbers embraced a vaguer vision of participatory socialism...
...A more enlightened position-at least in conception-was advanced by the Dominican and Jesuit orders...
...During the early 1960s, this fourth sector was only an embryo...
...In 1899, the Holy See called the First Latin American Continental Council, drawing together 44 bishops and archbishops to discuss the defense of the faith against paganism, superstition, socialism, Masonry and the press...
...Communications went through Spain to Rome, and Church law could be superseded by appeal to the crown...
...Cooney, American Pope, p. 144...
...In pointing to the continent's recent history of military governments, guerrilla movements and growing pauperization, they identified the "signs of the times," which the bishops analyzed in order to arrive at their recommendations...
...The Latin American Church had moved far from the days of the Conservative Party...
...HE ECONOMIC CRISIS OF 1929 HAD thrown the system into turmoil and unhinged the Church from its traditional alliances...
...They straddled the decades in their ambivalence, with one foot in the modern critique of the political economy and the other in the "developmentalist" prescriptions of the Catholic Action era...
...The speaker was Pope John Paul II, the occasion the opening of the second general meeting of the Latin American Episcopal Conference (CELAM) at Puebla, Mexico, in 1979...
...247-393...
...Cited in Cleary, Crisis and Change, p. 42...
...The model of church authority practiced since the 16th Century Council of Trent-a pyramid with an authoritarian pope at its apex-gave way to a decision-making structure in which the pope and his bishops formed a sort of "management team," its board meetings regularly scheduled synods in Rome...
...One priest had worked first with Vekemans in Chile, later in the Dominican Republic on the Spellman project...
...Almost all the bishops wanted change, and they could all find room to agree on the desirability of salvation through "liberation" as the Medellin declaration described the term: "an anticipation of the complete redemption of Christ...
...3. Cited in Berryman, Religious Roots, pp...
...Cited in John Cooney, The American Pope: The Life and Times of Francis Cardinal Spellman (New York: Times Books, 1984), p. 167...
...From the start there were political differences over the Church's purpose...
...But John XXIII went further by refusing to make an outright condemnation of communism...
...IT WAS NOT THE LATIN AMERICANS, OF course, who had first set the institution adrift...
...The fierce reaction of the hierarchy to a war which never challenged the privileged position of the Church illustrated its inability to separate its identity from that of the Spanish Crown...
...The second sector, according to Richard, is the Social Christian reform movement which emerged after the Depression...
...Administration, in their distinct ways, were putting their hopes in the reform movements which became associated with the Alliance for Progress...
...97-98...
...Ambassador "for his review and approval...
...Catholic Church a power in Latin America, and thereby an actor on the U.S...
...Good" priests were party members...
...Never before had the Church worded its criticisms so strongly: We wish to emphasize that the principal guilt for the economic dependency of our countries rests with powers inspired by an uncontrolled desire for gain, which leads to economic dictatorship and the "international imperialism of money," condemned by Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno and by Pope Paul VI in Populorum Progressio.4 The statement rejected the prevailing development model of the 1960s...
...The entire Medellin document was approved by Rome without substantive change, and Paul VI confided to the general secretary of CELAM that, "The Latin American Church had arrived at a degree of maturity and an extraordinary equilibrium that made it capable of assuming fully its own responsibility.'""' There were many, however, both within and outside the Church, and beyond the boundaries of Latin America, who strongly and insistently disagreed...
...The old pyramid structure was replaced by a set of concentric circles...
...sources including the Agency for International Development (AID) and the CIA...
...The response from the United States was the most dramatic: U.S...
...The council made a second important departure from past practice with its formulation of the idea of "collegiality" among members of the hierarchy, and with the priests and laity...
...in the United States, the figure was one to every 827...
...Flamini, Pope, Premier, President, pp...
...They called themselves "parties of Christian inspiration" and claimed to be independent of Church influence...
...Vatican II was a European event...
...Indeed, the man who later became Pope Paul VI, Milan's Cardinal Montini, turned over the Italian bishops' files on activist parish priests for use by the CIA during the Italian elections of 1960.'8 The convergence of views between the United States and the Vatican was especially close during the 1950s, and nowhere more so than in Latin America...
...These were then circulated to the bishops in each country, who in turn invited commentary from local experts...
...In Latin America, the existence of the Christian base communities-grassroots worship and social action groups linked to the growing school of independently minded liberation theologians-were a visible reminder that the future of the Church was being shaped from a number of decentralized points...
...then the priests and religious;* and finally the laity...
...It urged the Latin American bishops to withdraw from any public alliances, ban partisan activity by priests, and instead to emphasize the religious and social formation of the laity...
...Martin A. Lee, "Their Will Be Done," Mother Jones (July 1983...
...In 1954, Spellman acted as go-between for the CIA and Guatemalan Archbishop Mariano Rossell Arellano, whose pastoral letter condemning the communist presence was vital in preparing the atmosphere for the overthrow of the Arbenz government...
...No set of declarations could usher in an entirely new historical era, especially when there was no uniform view of what they meant...
...Hidalgo was excommunicated because of his rebellion against political authority, and was declared by the Holy Office to be "a Judaiser, a Lutheran, a Calvinist, a rebel, a schismatic, and a suspected atheist...
...In colonial Christendom, secular and religious authority were integrated, and the Church grew accustomed to serving civil power in order to accomplish its mission of evangelization...
...Absolutism ended for the Catholic Church with the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), convened by Pope John XXIII in 1962 to explore the Church's aggiornamento, or updating...
...The agency felt compelled to express its concern formally about the Vatican's "leftward drift," and CIA director John McCone made a special visit to Rome to inform Pope John of Kennedy's concern about his overtures to the Soviet Union and his support for critics of U.S...
...In the four years of gatherings from 1962-65 which comprised Vatican II, 2500 bishops from all over the world, at times in plenary session, at other times in smaller working committees, steered the institution into the 20th century...
...refers to non-diocesan priests, lay brothers and all sisters, all of whom have taken vows of poverty, chastity and obedience...
...he only knew the Church had to leave its sheltered haven...
...In the provisional Junta Superior de Gobierno in San Josd, Costa Rica, in 1821, four of the 12 members were clerics...
...The Latin American Church could not detach itself overnight from the social relations which had forged its history...
...he reciprocated by giving their regimes his benediction...
...He issued an urgent plea to Catholics in the developed countries of the West to send resources and personnel to Latin America to combat communism...
...In comparison, over 80% of Catholics in Poland and Ireland were regular worshippers...
...14-59...
...9. Ibid., pp...
...The new model resembled that of the early Church...
...in Colombia, bishops threatened to excommunicate anyone who voted for the Liberals...
...But who was to interpret what that promise would be...
...Clodovis Boff, "Puebla: A graca de confirmacio de Medellin", cited in Phillip Berryman, "What Happened at Puebla," in Daniel Levine, ed., Churches and Politics in Latin America (Beverly Hills: SAGE Publications, 1980), p. 57...
...At Medellin, the progressive new Latin American theologians attributed the "crisis of faith" to the Church's failure to respond adequately to human misery and injustice, which were the consequence of economic and political structures...
...20 According to Spellman's biographer John Cooney, there is a "strong" likelihood that Spellman had "a hand" in writing the 1960 REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 20pastoral letter of the Puerto Rican bishops forbidding church members to vote for the Popular Democratic Party of Governor Luis Mufi6z Marin, which the bishops described as "Godless, immoral, anti-Chris- tian, and against the Ten Commandments...
...Spellman's own emissary came to the same conclusion...
...articles...
...And once the Catholic Church abandoned its first absolute-the claim to be the exclusive means of salvation-uncertainty loomed...
...Many of these Maryknollers had begun their religious careers as political conservatives, and became radicalized during their assignment in the Dominican Republic...
...These first surfaced over the treatment of Latin America's indigenous people, a split which liberation theologian Jos6 Comblin believes "marked the whole history of the colonial empires...
...Ibid., p. 271...
...At the height of the Mexican war, the Holy Office of the Inquisition branded as heretical the very principle of popular sovereignty...
...Pressure from the nuncio restricted the group's movements, and most of the team's priests eventually became disillusioned with the project and concluded that the United States was on the wrong side of the issue...
...In these situations, papal teachings proved open to widely differing interpretations...
...See Jaime Rojas and Franz Vanderschueren, "The Catholic Church of Chile: From 'Social Christianity' to 'Christians for Socialism'," in "The Church and Politics in Latin America," Latin American Research Unit, LARU STUDIES no...
...The Vatican argued against the anti-socialist, pro-fascist alliances pursued by bishops in Germany, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Chile, explaining that these might prove embarrassing and dangerous in the event of a Marxist or fascist triumph...
...ROM THE VERY BEGINNING, LATIN AMERcan Catholicism has been intimately tied to the question of political power...
...They believed that slavery was sinful, given that the indigenous were fully creations of God, like any Spaniard or Portuguese...
...As Chilean theologian Pablo Richard put it, this was "to form a Catholic oligarchy or bourgeoisie from which future Catholic presidents, ministers, congressmen, judges, generals and businessmen would emerge, in turn assuring the power and presence of the Church throughout the society...
...Known in Latin America as desarrollismo, this assigned a leading role to foreign capital, trusted in the military as a modernizing agent, and promised "take-off" and sustained economic growth which would bring economic benefit to all social sectors...
...2 9 By the time of Medellin, members of this group were involved in organizing Christian base communities and in worker-priest experiments, among them Argentina's Bishop Podesta, who lost his diocese as a result...
...many had misgivings about the obligation to take sides...
...invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965, coups in Brazil (1964) and Argentina (1967), continued dictatorships in Guatemala, Paraguay and Nicaragua...
...political scene as well...
...I. (San Jos6, Costa Rica: CSUCA, 1978), pp...
...The most fully documented example is the support 21RVisions o the AKngdom Visions of the Kingdom which the CIA and other U.S...
...Yet where the Christian Democrats came to power, it was with the active support of a majority of the bishops, and in some cases--Chile in 1964, Venezuela in 1968-with the backing of a large number of priests...
...Alliances tended to follow class lines, with the "lower" clergy identifying with the rebellious masses and the new commercial class, and the "higher" clergy with the nobility...
...There was unanimous agreement that the Church was suffering a crisis of influence and was in urgent need of revitalization...
...And nowhere else had divisions taken root so firmly among the peasant and urban laity...
...For consensus to work, however, there has to be a common vision...
...27-28...
...As Clodovis Boff points out, the "socially committed" tend to be those with more direct experience of the poor and of conflict with existing power structures...
...John Paul recognized that Latin America would be one of the main places to reassert this strong leadership...
...50-51...
...Labor organizing by the Guatemalan Young Christian Workers in the late 1950's, and by the Christian Democrats in the 1960's, led to the formation of the militant National Workers Federation (CNT...
...Latin America had only one priest for every 5,700 believers...
...For three centuries until independence, secular and religious authority were indistinguishable...
...despite the spread of lay organizing during the 1950s, church attendance among the poor was actually declining...
...government and Catholic Church...
...The Latin American Church, though it represented the largest single Catholic population, was dubbed "the church of silence" at the Council...
...3 0 Like Vatican II, Medellin was not a consensus but a touchstone for measuring distress...
...Among Latin American bishops, this may well be the majority current...
...The Latin American bishops' agenda was shaped by a combination of their European training (Pope Pius IX had established a seminary for future Latin American bishops in Rome in 1858) and the concerns expressed by the Vatican...
...from the U.S...
...Vekemans reportedly handled at least $25 million a year from the West German government and bishops, and between $5-10 million from U.S...
...These changes were most common among the clergy...
...Richard's characterization sheds light on a striking irony of the early 1960's: many of the lay movements and initiatives designed to combat socialism ended up fuelling precisely the revolutionary movements they had attempted to neutralize...
...295-298...
...elsewhere, they are present only in small numbers...
...But the conference was a sign, a promise...
...Jorge Viteri, exercised control over the country's presidency, placing his own candidate in the office in 1844.9 ESPITE VIOLENT PROTESTS FROM SPAIN, the Holy See recognized the new American governments in 1831, and opened the way for a new framework for religious-secular relations...
...Cooney suggests that the cardinal brought personal pressure to bear on Latin American governments to cast their votes in favor of the admission of Israel into the United Nations, a move which helped turn the tide of opposition on the issue...
...They bestowed honors and titles on him...
...153-173...
...To this, he added control over evangelization, missionary selection, appointment of bishops, collection of tithes and Option for the poor: mass in an occupied cathedral, Santiago, Chile, 1968 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1985 17kRepor o, the Az icasm Visions of the Kingdom construction of churches, as well as the appointment of inquisitors to explore charges of heresy...
...In Central America, the cursillos propelled many Christians toward a new political awareness...
...They instituted a loyalty oath to the defense of the Church as a requirement for holding public office, granted the Church control over education and intellectual censorship, and protected it against other religions...
...CIA collaboration with the Vatican has been widely documented.' It dates back to 1945, when its predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), worked with the Curia to help defeat the Communists in the Italian elections...
...the development of Communism in Latin America...
...Identification with the Church was far higher among social elites...
...Richard identifies this accommodation as the backbone of Christendom: a set of relations between the church hierarchy and the dominant political powers, based on legitimation...
...A S THE CHURCH ENTERED THE 1960s IT was possible to identify several broad political trends among the bishops and clergy...
...These were primarily conceived of as a means of extending church influence, but some also saw them as offering the poor an opportunity for self-awareness and social action...
...But by the 1920s, the initiative in Europe and in many parts of Latin America was shifting rapidly toward mass-based electoral politics...
...He personally selected bishops in Bolivia during the 1950's, and ordered the Archbishop of Bogotd, Colombia, to submit all his statements about the United States to the U.S...
...When General Stroessner carried out his coup in Paraguay in 1954, Spellman quickly boarded a plane to bless the new government...
...The Washington Star, July 23, 1975...
...Its members promoted a socialist political program while maintaining their Christian identity...
...It had moved all over the spectrum...
...Base level organizing really took off following the first meeting of the Latin American Episcopl Conference (CELAM) in 1955...
...50-54...
...As military regimes spread, eliminating political opposition and leaving the church as the only possible area for organizing, the base communities grew...
...Smith, Church and Politics, pp...
...Until then, independence served only to strengthen the existing pillars of power-the military, the landed oligarchy and the Church...
...its centrists see themselves as the mediator between the state and "those who have no voice...
...0" The hierarchy always sought the best possible relations with the state and the ruling elite, both to accomplish its mission and to protect its turf from further state incursions...
...The point man for their joint endeavors was Cardinal Francis Spellman, who served for more than three decades as the Vatican's "primary American responsible for Latin America," as well as informal envoy to the region for U.S...
...Colombia still op- erates under its original concordat, and in Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Costa Rica, Venezuela and Paraguay, financial or legal privileges are still guaranteed to the Church in return for a state hand in approving bishops...
...It meshed with Pope Pius XII's declaration in 1949 of automatic excommunication of any Catholics who "defend and spread the materialist and anti-Christian doctrine of Communism...
...This turned out to be a temporary hiatus amidst the buildup to World War II, but it had significant influence on papal instructions to Latin America and else- where...
...According to a detailed survey of church attendance in Chile from 1958-64, attendance at mass showed no increase.' 4 The new lay movements became natural feeders into the Christian Democratic parties, which gained mass influence in the 1950's in Venezuela and Chile, and later in Central America...
...This polemic, above all in Central America and Brazil, has displayed itself among the bishops in the tension between "standing in the midst of the people" and the call for unity with papal authority...
...6. J. Lloyd Mecham, Church and State in Latin America: A History of Politico-Ecclesiastical Relations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966), pp...
...Pablo Richard and Guillermo Melendez, eds., La Iglesia de los pobres en America Central (San Jos6, Costa Rica: Departamento Ecum6nico de Investigaciones, 1982), p. 19...
...There, in 1968, CELAM held a continent-wide meeting to assess the implications of Vatican II...
...They rejected equally the "liberal capitalist system" and the "temptation of the Marxist system," and called for a restructuring of the economy according to papal directives...
...The Holy See never formally ceded government sovereignty over these areas, but it did so in practice through agreements worked out in country-by-country concordats...
...Characteristically, this step was announced as a new Vatican policy for the world: priests must refrain from party politics, and the Vatican would no longer endorse political parties...
...8. Ibid., pp...
...In return for recognition, the new governments offered financial support...
...Venezuela specifically notes its right to make objections of "a general political character...
...The "socially committed" sector grew most rapidly, but a fourth category-the "politically committed" sector-now began base organizing as well...
...These CELAM consultants unquestionably had tremendous influence in shaping the Medellin agenda...
...So fearful was John Kennedy of being identified with Rome that he leaned over backwards to distance himself publicly from the conservative Catholic circuit which his father, Joe Kennedy, had headed for decades...
...2 2 After 1954, Guatemala's new ruler, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, restored the Church to a status it had not enjoyed in 80 years, able to own property, teach religion in public schools and increase its foreign personnel...
...2 4 For all the CIA's disquiet, both the Vatican and the U.S...
...allies in Latin America...
...They were now being challenged in turn by a new generation of progressives, or "liberationists," who saw their Christian mandate as one of empowering people to challenge any social order which denied them the life of dignity promised by God...
...Cited in Cleary, Crisis and Change, p. 43...
...The Social Christian movement is not homogenous: its right wing speaks the language of national reconciliation with military regimes...
...In his 1963 encyclical Pacem in Terris he wrote, "True, the philosophic formula [of communism] does not change . . . But who can deny the possible existence of good and commendable elements in these programs...
...the substantial Church support they received was rarely given overtly, and at times they even entered into conflict with the hierarchy over their alliance with leftist political groups...
...Money from abroad also funded almost all the infrastructural expansion by national churches at this time...
...Through his frequent travels in the region, Spellman maintained close personal ties with dictators Batista in Cuba, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and Somoza in Nicaragua...
...Those who took its mandate to heart found themselves in open alignment with left wing political forces...
...At the time, some observers interpreted Medellin as a definitive break with the traditional norms of ChurchState relations...
...the Church chose to shift its attention to those who had been marginalized by the economic model...
...It fell to the CELAM staff and consultants to find common ground on which the call for profound change could be answered within the framework of Vatican II...
...The conservatives never accepted the reforms of Vatican II, and today find expression in movements like "Tradition, Family and Property...
...he was Nicaraguan Miguel D'Escoto, today Foreign Minister for the Sandinista government...
...The bishops declared the need for "sweeping, bold, urgent, and profoundly renovating changes.'" From the outset, discussions of the Church's future relevance turned on the question of its relationship to existing power structures...
...Anticlericalism took hold...
...The elder Kennedy had in fact been Spellman's first political patron in his Boston days in the late 1930's...
...Catholic personnel in Latin America increased by nearly 65% between 1958 and 1964, to 3500 persons.' 2 Foreign financing underwrote the growth of Christian trade unions, cooperatives, social research centers, peasant unions, women's centers and schools...
...Values which formerly had been viewed as threats, such as freedom of conscience and the validity of other religions, were now endorsed...
...The Church, which tended to be the largest landholder IsREPORT ON THE AMERICAS REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 18rinalng a new niche, Peru and creditor, stood in the way of the Liberals' goal of promoting free trade and expanding commercial, finan- cial and agricultural activities...
...In return, Spellman arranged for Catholic Relief Services to distribute government surplus food, clothing and medical supplies to the poor as a way of staving off dis- sent against the Castillo Armas government...
...All the independence leaders expressed loyalty to the Roman Catholic Church...
...This pope was serious about promoting reform, and when his Latin American bishops began to criticize the region's rightist governments-Spellman's friendsfor blocking change, the pope encouraged them to speak out...
...For the Latin American bishops, and for much of the world, it was the first glimpse of this new pope...
...tion...
...Priests formed middle class lay groups to study papal instructions on social issues, starting with Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum...
...In the face of this challenge, traditionalists argued for the restoration of the "absolute" Church, which they saw as a great ship, the carrier of an ageless message, moving from one era to the next with a strong pope at the helm...
...Priests had a hand in shaping the constitutions of a number of nascent republics...
...309, 323...
...But Pope John XXIII's modernization showed that the Church had come to terms with the secular world by defining itself as distinct from any one of that world's political systems...
...6 Troops on both sides were pounded by cannonballs melted down from donated church bells...
...Those who saw Christianity as organically tied to Western capitalism were distressed by the Council's affirmation of Gaudium et Spes, which declared that "by its very nature it is not necessarily linked to any political, economic or social system...
...19-20...
...Liberal governments expelled religious orders, suppressed tithes and barred clergy from political debate...
...Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts, Averting Armageddon: The Pope, Diplomacy and the Pursuit of Peace (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984), p. 4. 19...
...presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower.' 9 With Vatican approval-sometimes granted ex post facto-Spellman took a direct role in Latin American church affairs...
...His words were not designed to flatter...
...Rossell's demand for "the people of Guatemala . .. [to] rise as a Out of touch with new directions, Cardinal Spellman Peruvian President Manuel Prado y Ugarteche z a SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1985 single man against the enemy of God and country" was read in every Guatemalan church and airdropped by the CIA a few weeks before the coup...
...Flamini, Pope, Premier, President, p. 22...
...Since the 1930s, most of them had pressured their governments to make a modicum of social reforms...
...Only Sim6n Bolivar privately harbored an interest in some formal separation of Church and State, an idea that would not take hold until the mid-19th century...
...However, one Maryknoll team member reported that, "The anti-Americanism was so strong that we could not find a single student who would write anything positive...
...The outline of modern Christendom was first sketched out when Rome opened negotiations with the new governments over prerogatives formerly exercised by Spain: appointment of church officials, selection of religious orders allowed to operate within the national territory, control of communications between each country's church and the Vatican...
...National Catholic Reporter, May 29, 1977...
...Pope Pius XII established an intelligence network throughout Italy, largely dependent on the Jesuits, which was devoted to tracking the affairs of the Italian Communist Party and its relations with Moscow...
...IN THE 1950s, ASSOCIATION WITH SPELLman was a matter of high prestige for right wing Latin American governments...
...Yet it is in Latin America that the controversies of Vatican II have proved to have the sharpest repercussions...
...In the 1960s, no more than 20% of baptized Latin Americans regularly attended mass, and in some countries the figure dropped as low as 5...
...Collaboration with the CIA was deemed logical and necessary in the fight against a common enemy...
...Elsewhere, as in Nicaragua, Paraguay and Peru, the bishops supported unsuccessful electoral bids by Christian Democratic Parties during the 1960s...
...Inroads by the Protestant churches in the three decades prior to Medellin had brought a 13-fold increase in their membership...
...When news of Columbus' arrival in the West Indies reached the Spanish Court, it was the pope who gave Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella title over the New World...
...The JOC's 1959 conference themes illustrated its concerns: "the situation of working class youth...
...IF TRADITIONALISTS WERE UPSET BY VATIcan II, they were appalled by events four years later in Medellin, Colombia...
...The council declared that he should "stand in the midst of his people as one who serves . . a good shepherd who knows his sheep and whose sheep know him...
...2 3 Spellman's power in the region spoke as much of the institutional weakness of the Latin American Church as it did of U.S...
...These competing visions had to be resolved if the Church was to move forward as a single institution, and the way in which the conflict was resolved would stand as a signpost to the world...
...A number of Latin American regimes abolished property requirements for male suffrage, and the Church confronted the reality of mass support for the Liberals and other opponents of the Conservatives...
...We make an urgent appeal to businessmen and their organizations, as well as to the political authorities, to modify radically their system and values, their attitudes and methods, as they affect the purpose, organization and operation of their enterprises...
...Their strongest influence is in Colombia and Argentina...
...They chose to work with political organizations of the Left, accepting secularly defined revolutionary models within which Christians seek to redefine their faith...
...But to suggest some sort of hidden agenda misses the fundamental meaning of Medellin...
...It was an exercise in the new collegiality, at least among the bishops and the theologians, who spent several weeks before the conference preparing the draft documents...
...When the confederation fell apart, El Salvador's bishop, Dr...
...This period marked the incorporation of Latin America into "Christendom"--a body of cultural beliefs that is primarily concerned with the idea of where authority is derived from and how it is legitimated, rather than with the tenets of Christianity itself...
...In Argentina members of the local clergy raised armies, provided funds, took part in popular assemblies, and explained the ideals of the revolution to parishioners following mass...
...Pablo Richard, "Iglesia, estado autoritario y clases sociales en Amnrica Latina," in Elsa Timez and Satil Trinidad, eds., Capitalismo: Violencia y anti-vida, Vol...
...They guaranteed the Church financial security and broad social influence...
...indeed many Latin American bishops had been selected with at least indirect government influence.* One hundred and thirty-five of Latin America's 650 bishops voted on the final Medellin documents, and dissent never totaled more than five votes on any sec*A Government role in the selection of bishops was first formalized through Vatican concordats...
...4. Cited in Enrique Dussel, A History of the Church in Latin America: Colonialism to Liberation (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1981), p. vii...
...The Cursillos de Capacitaci6n Social, courses pioneered in the 1950's in Venezuela to promote an anti-Marxist "Christian revolution" among students, turned into a locus for ChristianMarxist dialogue...
...In the wake of the 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic, President Johnson asked the Cardinal to send a group of priests down on a U.S.-funded image-building project of "good works...
...B Y THE TIME OF THE MEDELLIN MEETING in 1968, these radical pressures and movements were moving steadily from their fringe position, where they were sometimes tolerated but often stifled by their local bishops, toward a central position of influence...
...The Church would give its visible public blessing to the civil authorities through the full symbolic weight of its ritual...
...In many countries, even the anti-Marxist standard, the common origin of the Christian Democratic parties, failed to endure, as the Christian Democrats' left wing entered into alliance with communists and socialists...
...Not that Latin America was the only place where the Church stood divided...
...The purpose of the Church, it was now proclaimed, was to offer the promise of a more meaningful and dignified human life...
...There was no single strategy to address the church's role in the region, but myriad conflicting strategies...
...The pope reportedly responded that contacts with Catholics in Eastern Europe and the promotion of justice in Latin America were appropriate measures for fighting communism...
...David E. Mutchler, The Church as a Political Factor in Latin America (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1981), p. 24...
...The traditional vision of church mediation between the faithful and society had given way to a "Social REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 14SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1985 Christian" outlook, which conditioned Christian relations with established regimes on their willingness to conduct social reforms...
...5. Jos6 Comblin, The Church and the National Security State (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1979), p. 51...
...Vatican II did not change the formal exercise of authority-a bishop could still assign priests or excommunicate laity, and the pope was still the Church's first teacher-but it did call for a new modus operandi based on consultation and consensus...
...126-161...
...The Liberals confiscated church properties and used them to finance their new economic projects...
...V ATICAN SUPPORT FOR CHRISTIAN DEMocracy was already evident in Italy by the late 1940's...
...By 1958 it had 1,320 centers in 272 Latin American cities, with 23,235 "militants...
...Clergy occupied leadership positions on both the royalist and revolutionary sides...
...With solid Vatican backing, the Church launched a number of programs, generally under the heading of Catholic Action, to organize university students, peasants, women and workers...
Vol. 19 • September 1985 • No. 5
