Jungle Jesuit

...His family continues to investigate the facts behind his subsequent disappearance...

...In 1979, he had been illegally expelled from Honduras for organizing and advising the campesino political organizations, encouraging them to fight for land and human rights...

...Such language will surely alienate a number of readers who might otherwise heed Carney's excellent first-hand account of Honduran politics...

...It is the chronicle of his journey from the romanticism that motivated a parochial, middle-class North American to help the poor, to the resolute political activism that Carney came to embrace, not only as necessary, but as the only truly Christian response to the plight of Honduran peasants...

...Despite the digressive polemics, it remains clear that Carney has come to his conclusions through long experience with the poor, and not from his reading of Marxists or liberation theologians...

...Carney wrote this passionate narrative of his twenty years among the campesinos of Honduras by candlelight in a remote Nicaraguan village shortly before his disappearance...

...Coups d'etat—sometimes bloodless, sometimes not—follow soon after every "free and democratic" election...

...It is impossible not to admire him for his commitment, even though some may disagree with his conclusions...

...With all the squabbling, the reader often loses the thread of the struggle...

...His conviction deepens as again and again he sees the poor campesino farmers plant their milpas (corn) in the idle fields of the American-owned Standard Fruit Company, only to have their crops burned and their champas (shacks) destroyed...

...He concludes, "To be a Christian is to be a revolutionary...

...The impoverishment caused by the Honduran government's corruption—its debilitating dependence on U.S...

...He shared his life with the Honduran poor, first as an organizer of Basic Christian Communities, then as the organizer of more than 100 campesino and Indian cooperatives, and later as the landless campesinos' compatriot in the revolutionary guerrilla movements to wrest power from Honduras's wealthy landowners...

...His transformation ends with the recognition that compassion and teaching God's word are not enough...

...When Carney arrived in Honduras in 1962, he was a nonconformist, but hardly revolutionary...

...The reader tires of hearing how the Hondurans are "oppressed," "exploited masses," who need to be "conscientized" in order to be "liberated" from the "imperialistic," "bourgeois" North Americans...

...To Be a Revolutionary is the autobiography of Padre J. Guadalupe Carney, an American-born Jesuit missionary who mysteriously disappeared in the jungles of Honduras in September 1983 and is presumed dead...

...This is the only efficacious way of loving the poor," he writes...

...In 1983, he accompanied ninety-six Honduran guerrillas across the Nicaraguan border to Honduras...

...However radical Carney's conclusions may be, the diligent reader senses that his advocacy of revolutionary socialism and his alignment with liberation theology came about through gradual and thoughtful processes...

...Although Carney's passionate reporting of the events behind the headlines is factual, hard-nosed, and unsentimental, it is tainted by his easy acceptance of Marxist jargon...

...Barbara Paulsen (Barbara Paulsen, a free-lance writer living in Austin, Texas, is the assistant editor of The Texas Humanist...

...political interference—finally leads him to reject pacifism and reform as adequate Christian responses...

...We want to hear more about the people, the landless peasants and poor workers who are the reason for struggle...

...If we are inspired by Carney's autobiography, it is not because it conjures the faces of starving children who need our help...

...He laboriously details the activities of the numerous political organizations, describing the animosities and continually shifting alliances among a confusing array of acronyms...

...Through it all, he is their priest, their Padre "Lupe," as they affectionately call him...

...transnational companies and its sycophantic tolerance of U.S...

...He sees the cooperatives that he and the leaders of the National Association of Honduran Campesinos worked so hard to organize fail, undermined by the assassinations of the cooperative leaders, the government's unfulfilled promises for agrarian reform, and the unstable political climate...

...The story he relates is a political rather than human drama, and this sometimes makes for tedious reading...

...He becomes convinced that theology is not to be studied but "done," by working to "liberate the oppressed...

...He wanted to live as the campesinos did, traveling by foot and mule, with none of the creature comforts the older missionaries enjoyed...