March 1979 Print

 

POPE JOHN PAUL could not have said it more clearly. Almost the first words he uttered on arriving in Mexico were aimed at us Catholics who are holding to the Faith of our Fathers. To the enormous crowd at the Cathedral of Mexico City during his first Mass in the country he declared that those who "remain attached to the incidental aspects of the Church, aspects which were valid in the past, but which have been superceded, cannot be considered the faithful."

A strange dismissal with which to begin six days of contact with the men and women of Mexico. How many of those inside or outside the cathedral understood his words we cannot know. Certainly the great mass of Mexican devoted to the Guadalupan miracle of the past and who had come to look at a Pope for the first time were not aware of the terrible implication of what he was saying. They came with reverence or curiosity. Not a few were so overcome with the idea of looking on a Vicar of Christ they fainted. Others made it a holiday. But everywhere they gave out the warmth and joyous enthusiasm that is particularly Mexican.

The first encounters of the papal visit, those at the Mexico City Cathedral and that of the villa de Guadalupe were really tremendous. Out there where many hundreds of thousands had been waiting long hours in the sun, the old and new basilicas towered over the crowd in weird contrast. If Church authorities had wanted to ignore the older building they would have had to ask the Pope to ignore a most marvelous 60-foot-high arch made of fresh flowers into which had been woven the papal coat of arms (in Guadalajara the Pope would walk on a tapestry of fresh flowers). The spectacular decoration over the main portal stood there inviting, almost challenging the Pope to enter.

A kind of token entrance was made, and John Paul II blessed the crowd from a low platform outside the door but the principal event took place inside the controversial new structure across the way. In that enormous off-center tentlike arena the painting of Our Lady given to Juan Diego four centuries ago has been set in a prim gold frame and hung on a wall of alternating metallic cubes and stripes. Utterly dwarfed in the colossal circle with its UN flag-of-the-nations display, the sacred picture looks are irrelevant as any holy picture would in such a place.

Anyone reading the text of the half-hour homily of the Pope, a moving invocation to the Blessed Virgin, would naturally imagine him kneeling in front of the ancient picture in an attitude of prayer. Far from it. Seated with his back to the image and facing an audience of privileged reserved-seat holders, Pope John Paul read the prayer from a folio of papers. As the con-celebrated ritual, directed silently by the Vatican's ever present Fr. Virgilio Noe, proceeded, the basilica's Canadian organ with its 11,000 pipes was heard to play more than slightly out of tune to the chagrin of its maestro, Alex Mendez.

All in all the Pope gave thirty-five speeches in six days. The one with the most religious content was the invocation at the Villa, the most radical that to the villagers in the small southern town of Cuilapan, and the most significant, the address which opened the Third General Conference of the Latin American Episcopal Council, known as CELAM. What he said there was, true to the spirit of Vatican II, couched in terms which could be taken to mean a number of things. As a result, left-wing papers said it was a progressive speech, conservative papers that it was conservative. The latter had the better part. Clearly the Pope had insisted that the clergy stay out of politics. On the other hand, had he or had he not condemned the ill-named battle cry of the second CELAM general meeting ten years ago at Medellin, Colombia, namely "liberation theology"? That was the question which dominated every press conference during the first days.

A decisive answer was given by the French Jesuit Pierre Bigo, head of the CELAM Social Action Committee. "Pope John Paul did not explicitly condemn liberation theology in any of his pronouncements. What he did do was give us certain criteria by which to judge liberation theology. There are, as we know, several quite different currents. There are those who think Marxism is everything and those who think it is too exclusive. I am a liberation theologist because I think the Church must involve itself in liberation from slavery, discrimination, and oppression, but it must do this according to the mysteries of a faith, justice, and love. Clearly we have to fight against capitalism, which is institutionalized violence, but in this fight we find that Marxism is too limited due to its insistence on materialism."

Revolution yes, but revolution hallowed by the "evangelism" born of Vatican II. Panama's highly committed Marcos McGrath who had been CELAM Vice President during the tumultuous days of Medellin, made a comparison: "Nobody can expect this time the unanimity of Medellin. That conference was held in the wake of the Council and was carried along by the enthusiasm engendered by the Council. This time we have got to be more pluralistic."

Pluralistic or whatever, the post-Puebla Church in Latin America as counseled by the Pope and to be revealed by the CELAM final document would appear to hold to two points: the whole social order has got to be changed but Churchmen must stay out of the firing line. Both points are eminently political despite the Pope's statement that the clergy must act pastorally and not politically. The meager scraps of news leaking out of the conference to the press during the closed sessions were in accord that it is the duty of the bishops, priests, and religious to lay the ground for revolution but to keep out of it themselves. Their duty first of all, is to make the masses realize they are oppressed and then they must not stand in the way of their struggle for freedom. "Consciencitising" is the name of the technique, and Pope John Paul did not hesitate to endorse it. Speaking to a largely indigenous crowd in the town of Culiapan he said, "It is not just, humane, or Christian to continue with unjust situations. Members of the powerful class have unproductive land. Thus they are hiding the bread from the people who need it." In the same speech he lauded collective farming and even the expropriation of lands "if it is for the common good." In the words of Archbishop McGrath, "While the Church must abstain from acting politically, its action necessarily carry political impact."

Midway during the conference period which lasted from January 27 through February 13 the bishops of France came out with a statement that what happens in Puebla is going to affect the entire Church. The fact is that, within a decade or so half of the Catholics of the world will be Latin Americans. What kind of Catholics these people are, if indeed they are Catholics at all, is of definite interest to people in the United States.

As for CELAM, it is not an episcopal conference but rather a super-council gathered from 22 episcopal conferences in countries from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego and including Cuba and the non-Spanish speaking Antilles. Episcopal collegiality as it functions today was born of directives sent out years before the Second Vatican Council by Pope Pius XII. In the 1950's Archbishop Lefebvre set up half a dozen episcopal conferences in French Africa. It was that doughty protester Bishop Helder Camara who received from Pope Pius permission to set up the first Latin American conference, that of Brazil in 1953. Five years later the same Pope called the first general meeting of Latin American conferences at Rio de Janeiro and at that meeting CELAM, "an organism of investigation, study, coordination, and promotion", was founded. Headquarters were established in the geographically central country of Colombia where in 1968 an International Congress played out in concrete terms the radical new orientations of the Second Vatican Council. Pope Paul took part and on arrival, as his successor would do in Santo Domingo and again in Mexico, fell to the ground to kiss the earth.

Those were the days of guerilla priests like Camilo Torres. Nineteen sixty-eight was the year of the Red May of Paris, of assassinations in the United States and in Latin America, and at CELAM II, held in conjunction with the Congress in Colombia, liberation theology got underway.

Since theo is the same word as deo or "god", it is obvious that theology refers to studies about gods or God. Thus one can speak of the theology of the ancient Aztecs or the theology of Martin Luther but one cannot talk about the theology of happiness or education or liberation. But Marxist word games never demand logic, only parrot-like repetition. This Medellin "theology", we are told, denounces injustice, oppression, international monopolies, imperialism and capitalism, otherwise known as "institutionalized violence."

Medellin with its "theology" gave impetus to Church-inspired subversion in Latin America that sailed ahead for a good four years. Actually, recent events in Nicaragua and San Salvador indicate that the process is still going strong but sometime late in 1972 CELAM itself took a backward step. At the bi-annual general meeting in Sucre, Bolivia, the ultra-progressive Cardinal Brandao and Archbishop McGrath, president and vice president respectively of CELAM, were replaced by the Argentine Pironio (not yet a cardinal) as president and the Colombian Bishop Lopez Trujillo in the active post of secretary. Neither of the men could be accused of conservatism—Cardinal Pironio, as Prefect for the Sacred Congregation for Religious, is known to mix sympathy for "breaking down the structures" with pentecostalist musings—but the change was salubrious from a certain practical point of view.

Most of the money needed to finance the elaborate CELAM organization had, for some time, been coming from the faithful of West Germany. Generous collections were being channeled through the German episcopal charity organizations Adveniat and Miserio. Still healthily anti-communist, the donors were unaware that their money was going to finance Third World subversion. When they began to suspect, CELAM took steps. There was the change of guard and early in 1974 a symposium was held in Rome to which representatives of the two charitable organizations were invited to hear a selected team of Latin American and German theologians explain that the theology of liberation meant only liberation from sin. The representatives who, as good bishops' men must have known all along what CELAM's liberation meant, at least had copies and tapes of lectures to show the German Catholics and to allay their fears.

The second check on CELAM's leftist exuberance is an obvious one. "National security" governments, as new Marxist jargon calls them, have sprung up all over Latin America. Unremarkably, nearly all of the countries in question opted for national security after the conference of Medellin. At a jam-packed unofficial press conference in Puebla the best known liberation theologian, Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez, an excited little man in a short-sleeved blue shirt, declared, "There has been a wonderful thrust forward during these years since Medellin. We have arrived at a great moment!" But a look at the map of South America shows Gutierrez to be whistling in the dark. In country after country liberation theology has produced sharp reaction and military or otherwise authoritative governments have been the result.

CELAM III was a bigger series of meetings than even the 1977 World Episcopal Synod. In attendance were the president, secretaries, and delegates of the twenty-two Latin American Episcopal Conferences, in all 177 prelates, among them fourteen cardinals. Counting pontifical appointees (Cardinal Baggio, eighteen bishops, twenty-two priests, an unspecified number of permanent deacons and lay leaders) twelve representatives of religious orders, heads of European charitable organizations, sixteen theological experts, a bevy of non-Catholic official observers, representatives of European, African and Asian CELAM-type councils and a group of top men from the United States Conference, the grand total of participants came to well over 300.

The five cardinals taking part are worth special mention. Top on the list is the youngest, 54-year-old Aloisio Lorscheider, President of CELAM. Looked on during the two recent conclaves as a pope-maker, the tall, heavy-set German-Brazilian had been host to Patriarch Albino Luciani of Venice on two South American tours, thus cementing a friendship which caused the younger man to put his considerable weight behind the comparatively unknown Italian during the election in September. He is said to have repeated the performance in favor of Cardinal Wojtyla. A native of Brazil, Lorscheider was educated in Rome and stayed on there to teach theology at the college of the Franciscans to which order he belongs. John XXIII spotted him, making him bishop at the age of 38, thus bringing him into the Council. In 1976 Pope Paul made him a cardinal.

Unlike CELAM secretary, Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, Cardinal Lorsheider is a great favorite with the Left. Enjoying free speech privileges by the Brazilian "national security" government which he condemns, he has championed such perennial dissidents as Bishop Helder Camara and Bishop Casaldaliga, the fanatical Spaniard who, at his consecration, substituted for miter and crozier a straw hat and canoe paddle. In a Vatican Radio interview done in Puebla Cardinal Lorscheider made the sweeping statement that his country is "flagellated by the oppressive domination of technocracy, economic planning, and social communications. But the national security threat is not only Latin American; all through history this doctrine has violated the rights of individuals."

Another German-Brazilian Franciscan cardinal one year older than Lorscheider is Cardinal Arns, Archbishop of the burgeoning metropolis of Sao Paulo. An outright "Christian for socialism", Arns preaches a Church "which surges up from the people, a Church for whom the hour for action has come, a fighting action with the people and by the people to throw off oppression."

Senior among this group of cardinals taking part in CELAM III is Silva of Chile, who won international fame for his championship of the Marxist Allende regime and for his subsequent opposition to the military leaders who overthrew Allende. In the last few years Cardinal Silva's declarations against "violence, torture, and the violation of human rights" has taken on a softer tone.

Cardinal Landazuri, Archbishop of Lima, Peru, is another Rome-educated Franciscan. One of the outstanding progressives of the Second Vatican Council, he was made cardinal by Pope John and given curial posts in the Congregations for the Sacraments and the Clergy. Since Medellin he has consistently championed the theology of liberation and allowed his clergy full scope for pastoral initiatives. "The Church," says Cardinal Landazuri Ricketts, "has entered the revolutionary process."

The fifth cardinal, yet another Brazilian, Avelar Brandao, President of CELAM during the Medellin Conference ten years ago, said recently that Medellin has not lost its vitality as "promoter of an open Church in opposition to all forms of oppression."

Should doubt still remain in the minds of faithful Catholics that their Church has become an occupied camp, this rundown of the top men at CELAM III ought to settle the question. This does not mean that the top men are not going to read the signs of the times and counsel a period of "go slowly". The Camilo Torres model of the gun-toting priest is definitely out. Jose Alvarez Icaza, head of the very active unofficial press center during the Puebla, CENCOS, put it this way: "Priests like Camilo Torres only succeed in getting themselves killed while the cautious ones like Helder Camara and Sergio Mendez Arceo survive. The Pope is right. It is not the priests but the laity who must undertake the revolution."

It is the laity, the people, the masses whom the priests must "consciencitize", make aware that they are being oppressed, despoiled, nay, flagellated. For the functioning of this Marxist technique the so-called basic communities are made to order. Long-suffering Latin America is heading for many more years of trouble if the post-Conciliar Church has its way.

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This is the first in a series of articles on CELAM III which Mrs. Martinez covered as special correspondent for THE ANGELUS. Her address on returning to Rome is Via Sommacampagna 47 where she is happy to receive comments and questions from readers, although, due to lack of time, she can only give brief answers at the end of each article. The following questions arrived just before her departure for Mexico.

 

Miss A. J. (Willowdale, Ont.)
The only complete Code of Canon Law in English which I have come across (admittedly, I have never hunted one down) was in the office of the private secretary of Cardinal Knox. When I suggested he consult it to clarify a point he exclaimed, "What? That old book?" Seriously, I will make inquiries on my return to Rome.

Sister M. C. (Pittsburgh, Pa.)
Those Beter tapes are either a cynical way to divest innocents of their money or the imaginings of a sick mind. What possible knowledge of inside Vatican affairs can a man living in the middle of Texas have which 240 Vatican-accredited correspondents don't have?

Mrs. D. A. R. (Riverdale, Ill.)
Regarding Pope John Paul II's attitude toward the traditionalists, above references as well as my article in last month's ANGELUS should make the question clear. As for Lourdes, try by all means to go there during the first days of next June when the traditionalists of Paris will be joined by others from all over Europe.