by Mary Martinez

During the 18 days of the Latin American Episcopal Conference (CELAM) in the lovely Mexican city of Puebla there was a good deal of talk about a "parallel" conference. A fiction was promoted and sustained in much of the press that the 187 Latin American bishops, semi-reactionaries all, were holed up at the Palafox Seminary at the edge of town under siege by opposing forces of progress. It was CENCOS against CELAM.

Actually, the Centre Nacional de Comunicaciones (CENCOS), working out of a set of dilapidated second story offices on the main square, served as lobby for a whole gamut of Left-wing causes which, in some form or other, had long been causes of the carefully selected bishops themselves and were anyhow being worked into their final document. What came over harshly at CENCOS would wind up butter-smooth at CELAM but the message was the same: Church-sponsored revolution in Latin America must go ahead.

During the first days of the conference at least 2000 foreign and Mexican journalists were on hand and when Pope John Paul left, around half that number stayed on. They were all notably frustrated. Whereas at synods and other major meetings at the Vatican, press briefings are given to five separate language groups immediately following each session and detailed information bulletins distributed shortly afterward, in Puebla very little direct news of what went on at the sessions was available at any time.

From the traditional point of view there is no reason why news should be available nor, for that matter any reason for an international bishops' conference. But if social communications are among the great boasts of the post-Conciliar Church, it is only reasonable to expect them to function. True, there were press bulletins of a sort for which one had to be at the seminary, four miles from any reporter's hotel, at 9 in the morning to join a long queue hoping a copy would be left when one reached the desk. Press conferrences were set up in a way to drive journalists up a wall. Questions had to be submitted the day before. Selected questions were then handed to certain bishops who were given a day to compose answers notable for their length and their blandness.

All this played beautifully into the hands of the so-called parallel conference. Every noon and every evening CENCOS sponsored a press conference at a downtown hotel in a hall seating 500 where at least 1200 to 1500 men and women packed themselves in. TV crews from all over the world moved laboriously through the dense crowds in suffocating air. Some of the speakers were CELAM bishops. There was Msgr. Leonidas Proano of Rio Bamba in Ecuador who had been host in August 1976 to 16 bishops including 3 from the United States along with a number of priests and religious when police interrupted the meeting and, under the accusation of subversion, marched the whole assembly off to jail. Today Bishop Proano's "basic peasant communities" are thriving, he told his eager listeners, and they frequently help themselves to land despite police threats. Answering with an emphatic "no" when asked if Pope John Paul had condemned liberation theology he admitted that some of the better known liberation periti had not been invited to the Puebla conference. "But they are all here. We are in contact." Msgr. Proano said that while he accepts all the social and economic theories of Karl Marx, he agrees with the Pope that the Church must go farther and foster man's "integral liberation".

Archbishop Arnulfo Romero of San Salvador, in sympathy with the Jesuit-led youth rebellion last year in which 20 students lost their lives, was scheduled to speak at CENCOS, then thought better of it. But Gustavo Gutierrez was there (see last month's article). He made an interesting revelation about Marxist compassion for the poor. "You don't go out in the street and give something to a starving man. No, you help a whole group, a race, a minority realize they are oppressed and then you show them how to free themselves. That is the real process of liberation!"

Then there was the Brazilian Franciscan, Fr. L. Boff, who startled even the most dedicated Marxists with his statement that life under the new South American governments is worse than anything under the Nazis. Language at CENCOS, whether that of such Jesuit activists as Luis del Valle, the Belgian Joseph Comblin (said to wield great influence over the thinking of Archbishop Helder Camara) or the center's director, Jose Alvarez Icaza, was extravagant enough to make anything said at the Palafox Seminary seem conservative.

In private interviews to influential papers, however, leading CELAM bishops spoke CENCOS language. The grand old liberator himself, Msgr. Camara, railed against "the CIA and the multinationals who establish natural alliances with the privileged classes" and he went on to praise Pope John Paul as a "worker Pope open to humanity" who was "showing new ways to overcome exploitation and injustice." Peru's Cardinal Landazuri seconded the Pope's assertion that liberation must include "the whole man". What about guerilla priests in his diocese? Dialogue, not condemnation was the answer, he said. Cardinal Arns of Sao Paolo, an open advocate of Christians for Socialism, termed accusations that CELAM was infiltrated by Marxists absurd, asking how such a thing could be "since we delegates are all chosen either by our episcopal conferences or by the Vatican itself?"

Not all the men and women who packed the CENCOS lectures were working journalists. On hand were hundreds of Left-wing activists and fellow-travelers who had been accredited to CELAM as "observers". At my hotel I met such members of the progressive old guard as Harvey Cox and, surrounded by a coterie of her theology students, Rosemary Ruether, remembered for her contention that "we must be able to see the death of God as the work of the Holy Spirit in our time." There were Notre Dame priests in sport clothes, American nuns in pants suits. Dozens of Dutchmen who turned out to be priests. Fr. Arrupe admitted that 120 foreign Jesuits had come to watch and at least every third person you talked to was non-Catholic.

The lobbying which was channeled through CENCOS covered the whole range of Marxist causes in Latin America. Argentine mothers were on hand to accuse Buenos Aires police of causing their sons to "disappear". A committee of Argentine doctors working out of Berkeley, California, declared that 13,000 Argentines had disappeared. Niguaraguan Sandinistas, in the person of the priest-poet Ernesto Carenal, pleaded for their country, "crucified" by President Somoza, and a Nicaraguan pop-group played for a dance in the patio of Puebla University. Something called the Latin American Task Force in Detroit sent a message of solidarity full of shame for the oppression of South Americans by North Americans. In the name of 6 million "undocumented" (illegal) immigrants working in the United States, professional agitators from California held a press conference to scoff at Archbishop Quinn's emotional plea before CELAM for "the undocumented, whose rights have been criminally violated", pointing out that he promotes discrimination within his own diocese. An outfit in Fairfax, Virginia, made a bid for photos of Mexicans "struggling to overcome domination, racism and sexism" as well as "scenes showing women responding to the call of a liberating God."

This bustling center over the ice cream parlor on the Zocalo or main square of Puebla did not come into being with CELAM III. Like the super-bishops' conference for which it acted as an effective foil, CENCOS can trace its roots back to Vatican II and before. Two "progressive" information centers, DOC and CCCC, which functioned in Rome during the Council, were merged afterward into IDOC. John Eppstein in Has the Catholic Church Gone Mad? describes IDOC as "an international organization which co-ordinates all the various national groups of progressive activists and reformers; assures simultaneous publication of news favorable to their enthusiasms and prejudices throughout the world; pours out a regular flow of doctrinal material independent of the official magisterium and, by operating from a center in Rome, gives an apparently Catholic flavor to the whole enterprise."

Over coffee one morning in his Puebla hotel veteran progressive enthusiast Gary MacEoin told me that he and others among the original founders of IDOC had set up CENCOS. Literature I picked up afterward at the center, however, suggested that Mr. MacEoin's statement was a simplification. Of particular interest was a copy of the official report of the First Latin American Congress of Christians for Peace which took place in Panama City, April 10-14, 1978. Top speaker: the Mexican engineer who heads CENCOS, Jose Alvarez Icaza. In La Iglesia Montiniana, Fr. Joaquin Saenz describes Alvarez wining and dining susceptible prelates and press in a chic villa in Rome during the years of the Council.

The official bulletin explains that Christians for Peace was founded in Prague in 1958 by the Protestant pastor Joseph Hromdka through the inspiration of the Protestant pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and dedicated to the pursuit of "justice and peace". Subsequent congresses at roughly four year intervals had, as their theme (like the annual New Year's messages of Popes Paul and John Paul) a slogan about peace. The Vatican's timorous "peace is possible" of a few years ago was precisely the title of the Prague Congress of 1968.

CCP, we learn, "works in solidarity with all just causes from the struggles in Vietnam to Angola, Mozambique,Palestine, Puerto Rico and Panama". It was the signer of the recent Panama Canal Treaty, General Omar Torrijos, whose welcoming message opened the first Latin American CCP congress last April under the honorary presidency of Mexico's "Red Bishop" Sergio Mendez Arceo of Cuernavaca. "Your voices," President Torrijos' message read, "proclaiming the Christian word cry out our hope, confronted as we are with oppression and hungry as we are for justice." Taking part were 96 delegates from 15 countries along with representatives from four Soviet bloc countries. Catholics made up 47% of the delegates, Protestants 53%. There is no mention of Orthodox delegates although the President of Christians for Peace International is, or was, until his sudden death at the Vatican last October, Metropolitan Nikodim of Leningrad and Novgorod.

Following the Panama conference two pre-CELAM symposia took place in Mexico, both in July. Their theme: the implantation of the theory of liberation during CELAM III. Among the priests and religious taking part were half a dozen of Latin America's most outspoken pro-marxist priests under the sponsorship, naturally, of the Archbishop of Cuernavaca.

In the published list of 119 agencies and organizations in close touch with CENCOS one finds such regular institutional collaborators of IDOC as The New York Times, the Associated Press, National Catholic News Service. One can also find the Catholic Peace Conference of Prague, Lumen Vitae, the Jesuits' anti-catechetical center in Brussels, National Catholic Reporter, Herder of Germany and the United States. Then there is the Washington Center for Concern, the National Council of Churches, "Red" Abbot Franzoni's paper in Rome, Taize in France and Znak, the Polish agency so close for so many years to Cardinal Wojtyla.

It is hard to imagine the Puebla Conference without CENCOS and its feverish activity. As the days went on the lobbyists' enthusiasm for Marxist causes outran that of even the most committed bishops, a kind of artificial tension was engendered. CELAM secretary, Archbishop Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, began to be labelled a "reactionary". When a confidential letter of his to a bishop in Brazil was purloined and made public there was jubilation al CENCOS since it revealed his antagonism to the darling of the Left, Jesuit Fr. General Arrupe, as well as his fear of not being re-elected at the next CELAM Assembly. A rumor that he would resign was published and denied.

The dependence upon CENCOS of otherwise reasonable journalists who were capable of carrying on an apparently objective and critical conversation about Marxism was surprising to me. Men like Robert Held, top political analyst for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Peter Nichols, the London Times' very knowledgeable Rome correspondent, Rabbi Leon Kliniki, editor of the Anti-Defamation Society's Face to Face—each and every one could be found climbing the rickety stairs over the ice cream parlor in search of their daily CENCOS nourishment.

What about the other side? As far as traditionalists go there was only one sign out of them and it was memorable. On the day Pope John Paul arrived El Sol de Puebla came out with a 70-page edition full of colored photographs and ad after ad in homage to the Pontiff. Smack in the middle of the first section were two full paid-for pages of text headlined "CELAM Promotes Heresy!" and signed by the best known Mexican traditionalist, Gloria Riestra, a poet whose work is reaching German traditionalists in translation through Elizabeth Gerstner's Kyrie Eleison.

All inquiries regarding a Tridentine Mass center in Puebla failed. Why was there no sign from either the Mexico City or Guadalajara centers? The answer probably lies in the fact that those two main Mexican groups are still attached to the bogus traditionalist office in Rome known as Civilta Cristiana. On the eve of the Puebla meetings that office issued a statement pompously entitled the "Rome Declaration" which even the Rome newspapers failed to print and that was the end of their committment or, apparently that of any group attached to them.

That many of the good people of Puebla were conscious that un-Catholic things were going on in their midst was evident a number of times. Both Archbishop Camara and Fr. Arrupe were met at the seminary gate with contrary placards and chanted slogans. Clerical apologists for Castro's Cuba heard "Out with Cuban traitors!" and "Freedom for Catholic prisoners in Cuba!" Representatives of the 10,000-strong independent union of construction workers held a press conference in the mezzanine of the Portales Hotel. Three Mexican reporters and THE ANGELUS correspondent were the only people who came to hear that Mexican workers are Catholics who reject Marxist liberation theology. Running into Herr Held and a TV man from Switzerland I asked if they were coming along. "Ach, nein We know what that kind of thing is about."

After that it was a surprise to find the only other anti-communist press conference fairly well attended. Padres de Familia , a Mexico City group of professional men, pointed to the dangers of Marxist infiltration into CELAM, naming particularly Cardinal Ladazuri Ricketts and Archbishop MacGrath of Panama. At the question period the director of CENCOS, Jose Alvarez Icaza rose among the audience to deliver a 10 minute speech which was followed by thunderous applause lasting well over 5 minutes. It was suddenly clear why so many newsmen had come to a "reactionary" press conference. After this display of solidarity with Alvarez and what he stands for most of them walked out.

The Puebla experience brought home to me for the first time the extent and power of the grip the Liberal Establishment (as conservatives call it) or the Enemy (as traditionalists call it) has on just about everything we read, see and hear about events taking place in the world. All my experience had not been enough to prepare me for what I found in Puebla.

There was a heartwarming wind-up, though. At five in the afternoon before CELAM closed, over 3000 Poblanos gathered in the main square to shout until they were hoarse: "Cristianismo, si! Comunismo, no!" They were young and old, well-off, middling and poor, housewives, farmers, businessmen, office and factory workers—at their head a four-speaker sound truck and a strong contingent of university students. Relaxed and joyful, the Mexican demonstration was a far cry from the grim Italian marches with every side street lined with rows of armored cars full of police in helmets and shields, tear gas canisters at the ready. Instead, here were tall football cheerleaders shouting "Give me a 'c'!", "C!" the crowd cried. "Give me an 'r'!, "R!" so that Cristo Rey was spelled out over and over. Banners as wide as the street proclaimed "Liberation theology is false". As the marchers circled the Zocalo they reached the ice cream parlor chanting "'CENCOS fuera! CENCOS fuera!" (CENCOS out!) For one wonderful moment I thought they would storm the place, Italian style, but the march went on.

In the Zocalp with the marchers going the four streets around it, Italian TV men were filming a scene Italians would never see. I struck up a conversation with one on-looker after another and the burden of their message was the same: "We all feel like they do out there. We don't want socialism in Mexico. We had it once. We have our martyrs." There were cheers for Pope John Paul because, like anti-communists and communists everywhere, they had extracted what they wanted to hear him say and discarded the rest which, I suspect, is just what he hoped they would do.

This is the second 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.