Listening to the Periphery

I shot this article to Eric when I noticed his bit about Liberation Theology and his point of concern about the church being able to regulate Theologians. This is specifically talking about the Catholic church - and in the past few decades they have critiqued in a way that hinders the "set the captives free" nature of the gospel.

I am very concerned about the "top down" approach to theology these days - especially with the sickening complex web of injustices, lies, and suppression of the poor done by the "top" (wealthy powerful nations that USE evangelical Christian sects and the entrenched powerful Catholic positions).

Liberation Theology was born from the Catholic church as they saw the dying, starving, dehumanized reality in Latin America. Those priests involved in this movement, as they genuinely found that the God of the Christian religion desired these people to be fully human found that this necessitated social change. This was not appreciated by those in power. In Guatemala, where I've been spending some time, those in power we're coorporate and also part of the United States CIA - the US trained leaders at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia in suppressive military tactics, supposedly to fight communism...actually it was to support US corporation success...
Website on school of the americas:
http://www.soaw.org/
Website on Guatemalan Dictators trained at Fort Benning, Georgia USA.
http://www.derechos.org/soa/guat-not.html

Below is the article I tossed to Eric:
E's blog is:
http://ericdarylmeyer.wordpress.com/about/

Pope John Paul II, the Reagan years
& Liberation Theology

JPII became pope in 1978 and in June 1979 his visited Poland. When his plane landed in Warsaw, the bells in all the country's churches began to ring out. (In 1966, Pope Paul VI was refused permission to visit Poland.). Ronald Reagan, then campaigning for President, was watching the Polish welcome on TV at Santa Barbara, California with his friend Richard Allen, a Catholic, who later became the first national security adviser.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Polish-born national security adviser to Jimmy Carter, had represented JPII's inauguration at St Peter in 1978. In June 1980, Carter met with JPII in June 1980 at the Vatican.
In late 1980, Brz had begun a dialogue with Cardinal J Tomko, head of the Vatican's propaganda ministry in which Poland and the infant Solidarity movement figured prominently and JPII got to know that the US was prepared to back Solidarity. In Dec 1980, Brz phoned the pope and warned him of the threat of Soviet invasion of Poland. He asked for his backing for an ultimatum threatening sanctions if USSR invaded. The Pope agreed to instruct his bishops. The Soviets retreated.

Bishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador had pleaded fruitlessly with Carter to stop the US backing of repression - 6 weeks later, he was murdered in March 1980. Vatican commissions on JPII's orders had visited Romero two times demanding that he explain his outspoken criticism of El Salvador s military rulers. After his murder, the pope appointed Fernando Saenz Lacalle as archbishop, a member of Opus Dei and a starch opponent of liberation theology. The appointment came as a slap in the face to hundreds of peasant church members and religious workers in Latin America. Progressive advancements were reversed and old inequalities were restored.

Reagan took office in Jan 1981. He retained Brz as a consultant on Poland. Brz said: "We involved the Pope directly and he did whatever was to be done to sustain an underground effort. So Solidarity wasn't crushed." Reagan, son of a working-class Irish Catholic father and protestant mother, had won the lion's share of the Catholic vote. He was drawn to other Catholic working class types, like Bill Casey who became CIA Director. Like Reagan, they believed the Marxist-Leninist vision to be spiritually evil and had to be destroyed. Reagan openly forged ties with the Pope and Vatican. By spring 1981, Casey and others were dropping in at the residence of the pope's nuncio Archbishop Pio Laghi for breakfast and consultation. And Laghi visited the White House by the 'back door' for secret meetings with Casey and later the President.

Around 1982, Casey met with the pope at the Vatican and showed him a photo (taken a spy satellite) of the Pope's welcome when he visited Poland in 1979. The photo helped seal an informal secret alliance between the Holy See and the Reagan admin. Western agencies, notably the CIA, provided regular secret briefings on developments in the USSR, Poland, Chile, Argentina, China, on liberation theology, Middle East etc.

JPII & Liberation Theology
JPII's intolerance of left leaning movements arose from the conservative traditions of the Polish church and his experience with the communist regime. Even as Archbishop of Krakow, he was one of 251 bishops who voted agasint the final draft of Gaudium et Spes, the document that sought to reform and modernise the church. (It was passed with 2331 votes in favour.) Any collective initiative for social justice was associated with Marxism and he became a natural ally with the US capitalist government.
His first visit outside Italy was to Mexico in 1979 to attend the Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM). He told the assembled bishops: "The idea of Christ as a political figure, a revolutionary or subversive does not tally with the Church's beliefs." As Swiss theologian Hans Kung said: "He saw too much Marxism in Liberation Theology."

In 1983, JPII publicly rebuked Fr Ernesto Cardenal for joining the Sandinista government as Minister of Culture. HE ignored the order and was defrocked. In the same year, on his visit to El Salvador, JPII made a token visit to Romero's tomb, which had become a major pilgrimage centre for Latin Catholics. He called for the end to the civil war but said no word on Romero's martyrdom.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) issued a document in 1984 warning that liberation theologians made a "disastrous confusion between the poor of the Scripture and the proletariat of Marx... transforming the rights of the poor into a class struggle..."
In 1984, a meeting of Peruvian bishops convened to condemn the work of Fr Gustavo Gutierrez, the father of liberation theology, refused to do so. In the same year, Franciscan Fr Leonardo Boff was summoned to Rome by the CDF for his work Church - Charism & Power: Essays in Militant Ecclesiology. He was backed by Cardinals Arns and Lorscheider. Boff was silence for a year but when the CDF cracked the whip again in 1991, he quit the priesthood.
the Vatican began pressuring the progressive Brazilian prelates such as Dom Helder Camara of Olinda & Recife and Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns of Sao Paulo. When Camara retired at 75 in 1985, he was promptly replaced by an arch conservative, Dom Jose Sobrinho, who re-established the power of the landowners. Radical priests were disciplined and the local Justice & Peace Commission disbanded. Arns' sprawling diocese was split into 5 sections, with those inhabited by the working classes in charge of conservative bishops.

On Cardinal Pio Laghi
He was the Vatican nuncio in Argentina (1974-1980) when the military regime waged its 'dirty war' against political opponents. He was director of an anti-communist crusade. Thousands of trade unionists and community activists simply disappeared, others were tortured and executed by death squads. The Mothers who campaigned for the disappearance of their children accused Pio Laghi for direct involvement in the atrocities, charging that he even ordered the torture of priests connected with left groups. He was seen regularly at the government's torture centres and could decide on the fate of detainees. The Vatican transferred him to the US with the express mandate to combat the liberal tendencies in the North American church. Later in the 1990s returned to Italy where he was appointed to head the Vatican's Congregation of Catholic Education. In 1997, a human rights group filed formal charges against the cardinal in Rome, 75 in 1997 - covered by diplomatic immunity and by the Lateran accords.]

JPII's support for Solidarity finally bore fruit. In July 1988, Soviet President Gorbachev agreed to a role for Solidarity in the government of Poland and in December 1990, Lech Walesa became president of Poland. Reagan's second term had ended in 1989.

References
1. Sunday Times, 23 Sept 1996
2. John Paul II and the Hidden History of our time by Carl Bernstein & Marco Politi (Doubleday 1996)
Note: Bernstein was an investigative journalist in the Watergate scandal
3. The Mixed Legacy of John Paul II, N Menon, Frontline, issue 09, 23 April 2005.