This should be interesting (and by interesting, I mean worrisome) because Brazil has quite a few followers of liberation theology.
Over the past 25 years, even as the Vatican moved to silence the clerical theorists of liberation theology and the church fortified its conservative hierarchy, the social and economic ills the movement highlighted have worsened. In recent years, the politics of the region have also drifted leftward, giving the movement’s demand that the church embrace “a preferential option for the poor” new impetus and credibility.
Today some 80,000 “base communities,” as the grass-roots building blocks of liberation theology are called, operate in Brazil, the world’s most populous Roman Catholic nation, and nearly one million “Bible circles” meet regularly to read and discuss scripture from the viewpoint of the theology of liberation.
During Benedict’s five-day visit here, he is scheduled to meet with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, canonize a saint, preach to the faithful and visit a drug treatment center before addressing the opening session of a conference of Latin American bishops that will discuss the future of the church in the region where liberation theology originated, prospered and drew so much of his censure. Some liberation theology supporters will be present, others will be at a parallel meeting, and all have been cautioned not to be too aggressive in pressing their views.
In the past, adherents stood firm as death squads made scores of martyrs to the movement, ranging from Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero of El Salvador, killed in 1980 while celebrating Mass, to Dorothy Mae Stang, an American-born nun shot to death in the Brazilian Amazon in February 2005. Compared to that, the pressures of the Vatican are nothing to fear, they maintain.
“Despite everything, we continue to endure in a kind of subterranean way,” said Luiz Antonio Rodrigues dos Santos, a 55-year-old teacher active in the movement for nearly 30 years. “Let Rome and the critics say what they want; we simply persevere in our work with the poor and the oppressed.” [Full story]
Pope Benedict XVI, back when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, the protector of the faith, was called on by John Paul II to help quash the liberation theology movement back in the ’80s. When I learned about this my freshman year of high school, I left the Church and Christianity completely, until not long before Gram died. This was not the main reason — I don’t want to go too deeply into navel-gazing, but the main reason had a lot to do with my self-identification, issues surrounding my biological father, and some deep, deep denial — but it was one of the straws that broke the camel’s back for me.
From here on in, it gets religious, so if you’re not into that sort of thing, this is probably a good place to stop.
I come from German, Filipino and Irish Catholics, who have been Catholics for generations. Catholicism is as much a culture for me as a religion. Even in the decade I was lapsed, I found my thinking influenced by the Church, or rather, by my grandmother.
In many ways, she was a staunch traditionalist with a deep and abiding love and respect for the Church: her best friends were priests and nuns, she had a huge family and reveled in her role as mother and grandmother, she completed a pilgrimage, and she even told me once that the only thing that kept her alive through a bout of post-partum depression after my uncle was born was knowing that she would go to hell if she committed suicide.
My grandmother was also a radical, for her time. She gave time and money to many causes that the mainstream church supported, such as fundraising for high school trips to former concentration camps in Germany and supporting the hospice movement, as well as those they might have frowned upon, such as quietly helping to fundraise and spread information for Roma rights in France and Aboriginal rights in Australia (the second quite by accident; she befriended an Aboriginal rights activist on the plane en route to a vacation there, ended up purchasing several books he recommended and speaking to several Aboriginal activists, and spreading the word at her Church when she got home), and supporting women’s clinics with donations and her voting power.
More than anyone else, my grandmother taught me her faith by living it, and taught me that you have to live your faith to show it. She taught me that the true concerns of the Church were, at its founding, helping the poor, the weak, and the oppressed, and bringing about true equality of rights for everyone. While I think she would be the first to downplay her actions, they may have been small but they were very, very many.
Because of her influence and the way I was raised, I find it completely unconscionable that the Church chose to stomp down liberation theology in the ’80s and has continued to do so through the present day. Even the most cursory reading of the Bible shows that liberation theology is based closely on Jesus’ own teachings and actions in the gospels. For the Church to basically deny that in favor of supporting oppressive powers, or at least not challenging them, is completely reprehensible.
However, despite the Church’s opposition, the movement grows, and not just in Latin America. In Los Angeles, Cardinal Mahoney has founded the New Sanctuary Movement, an interfaith movement to shield undocumented immigrants from ICE raids, imprisonment and deportation. In the Philippines, many of the activists killed in extra-judicial killings have been priests and others working on behalf of farmer’s rights and the rights of the poor, also in an interfaith movement. There are liberation theologians in Nigeria, South Africa, Germany, Nicaragua, Haiti, Peru, and in many other countries, worldwide. Catholics are no longer the only followers, either; the concepts and precepts of liberation theology has spread to the teachings many other Christian churches.
So how will this go, now that the new Pope and old adversary of the movement is going to have it shoved in his face again? Will his reaction be different now that the Church’s numbers are shrinking, and now that it seems like the poverty, hatred, corruption and violence in the world is growing?
I don’t know. But whether he ignores the movement’s leaders, castigates them, or (longshot though it is) supports them, the movement will go on until the need for it is gone. And the need it far too great, and it’s too big, to strong, and too right, to be silenced now.
