With the pope criticising Cuba’s educational system and apparently trying to reverse Cuba’s political system it seems appropriate to shed an alternative light on the politics of the Roman Catholic Church, in general, and the Pope, in particular. The following text is based on an article I published (when I still used to be a member of the Roman Catholic Church) in the Jamaica Herald (July 18, 1993, p.4A) at the occasion of John Paul’s visit in Jamaica and has been slightly shortened and updated.

It is not so much our concern here that some of the current Pope’s predecessors used to celebrate sumptuous feasts while the wails of pain of the tortured “infidels” resounded through the corridors of the Vatican. It is far more important that today, in 1998 A.D., the Roman Catholic Church’s exegesis and official policy still aim to muzzle the the world’s poor. The US security policy in the Western Hemisphere has in the past actively supported, if not even caused, this attitude.

Let us make no mistake, the Pope is concerned about poverty and he says so too, sometimes. As former Jamaican Archbishop Samuel Carter related to me, he had personally heard the Pope voice his concern that the effects of unbridled capitalism may eventually weigh heavier on the common wealth than the past misdemeanours of atheist communism. He must know, for he grew up known as Karol Wojtyla in communist Poland.

However, the Pope’s occasional utterings do not yet amount to the official policy line of the Vatican and this is precisely the source of the Roman Catholic hypocrisy. Let us look at some background facts. In the late 1960s many Latin American clerics engaged in a more rigorous interpretation of the Bible. As they read it, it is a call to all Christians to concern themselves actively with the material depression and oppression of the large marginalised sectors of the population in their countries, who do not profit from any “trickle down” of a growing national product. The little crumbs falling from the tables of the rich did, for various reasons, did not lift them out of their state of material deprivation. (We may add that the currently advertised brand of “democratisation” in the region is not likely to achieve this either – see e.g., William I. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy. Globalisation, US Intervention, and Hegemony Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). This brand of Bible interpretation soon became known – and feared by the powers that be – as “liberation theology.” Liberation theology bases its considerations on God’s word in the Bible before he led the people out of Egypt: “I have heard the cry of my people.” Consequently more priests involved themselves in politically organising the poor and speaking out against what they regarded as imperialist domination by international financial institutions, exploitation by multinationals and the collaboration of their domestic elites with them. The German theologian Dorothee Soelle summarised the underlying rationale of liberation theology the following way: “I think by growing deaf for the cry of the poor we also make ourselves dumb. If we allow the dream that all hungry be fed – an age-old dream, a dream of mankind common to all religions – to be ruled out, we break with God. And I think that our era is aiming precisely at prohibiting the dream that all hungry will be fed.”

Soon after the Latin American Catholics started to promote this line of reasoning and exegesis, the Vatican began to counter this new trend which it found far too political. Thus, it installed more conservative clerics, like Cardinal Lopez Trujillo, in influential positions within the Latin American Catholic Church. These clerics re-interpreted the social message in the Bible and the task of their Church as primarily of a pastoral nature concentrating on spiritual and religious welfare. This strategy gained full momentum when the current Pope, John Paul II, assumed office and appointed the arch-conservative Cardinal Josef Ratzinger to the post of chief interpreter of the Vatican’s official policy. Since liberation theology’s Biblical foundations are too strong to be renounced, Ratzinger did the “second-best” thing. His re-interpretation claimed that liberation theology is good as long as it confines itself to the “genuinely ecclesiastical task, i.e., the pastoral practice, touching on secular, social questions only secondarily. Consequently, liberation theology was tamed by confining God to the spiritual realm, but not involving Him with the structural limits of political economy. On December 21, 1984 John Paul II expressed concern that liberation theology misused the suffering of the poor “as pretext for a new and sometimes even more burdensome oppression.” Up to now these are the deplorable cornerstones of the Roman Catholic Church’s official attitude to the material, everyday, real life tribulation of the world’s poor. Rejoice, in Heaven the last will be the first. On this basis the Catholic Church started a multi-million dollar media-blitz in Latin America. With the support of state of the art communication systems, it launched an evangelical crusade built on the two major projects “Evangelization 2000” and “Lumen 2000”. As the general secretary of the Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM), Mons. Oscar Rodriguez, explained in an interview published in “30 Giorni” of the neo-conservative “Comunion Liberation” movement, this campaign tried “to fight the general mis-information on the global level.” Among other things, CELAM’s new data bank in Bogota started to monitor the movements and statements of liberation theologists and Catholic priests in Latin America.

The United States security policy in the Western hemisphere fastened on the Vatican’s interpretation of liberation theology which they perceived as a subversive Marxist strategy aiming at her strong economic and political influence in this region. The infamous “Santa Fe Paper” which was presented in 1980 to the new Reagan Administration as a strategic guideline for US policy in Latin America clearly stated: “American foreign policy must begin to fight and not just react to liberation theology as it is practiced in Latin America by a part of the liberation theology clergy. (…) Unfortunately, marxist-leninist forces have transformed the Church into a political weapon against private property and productive capitalism by infiltrating the religious community with ideas which are more communist than Christian.”

The secret documents of the “Conference of the Security Services of the American Armies” for the XVII. Conference of the American Armies (CEA) held in Mar de Plata/Argentina in November 1987 which were leaked to the Church and recently published (Ulrich Duchrow, Gert Eisenburger, and Jochen Hippler [eds.], Totaler Krieg gegen die Armen Chr. Kaiser Publishers, Munich 1989), attempted to give analytical depth to the paranoid fears of the US and Latin American militaries and policy-makers. Thus, they welcomed the Vatican’s resolve to “reject and condemn the adulteration of Marxism which subtly indicated the Gramscian stamp on the formation of a new proletarian consciousness and thereby deepened the antagonisms and deviations. (p.146)

Both the US security apparatus and the Roman Catholic Church were therefore engaged in an attempt to marginalise and incriminate the more pro-active, mundane and politically aware interpretation of the scriptures. The Church was obviously afraid to be drawn into worldly political debates which would more clearly and loudly against economic injustice and social oppression. It therefore exhibits today a similar inertia toward burning political problems as under the Nazi regime when the Catholic Church witnessing blatant abuses of fundamental human rights (and, yes, food, clothing and shelter are such!), did not rally any significant resistance. The US suffered (and still does so) from the delusion that speaking out in favour of the poor automatically amounts to a promotion of communism, expropriation or anti-Americanism.

All those, however, who suffer from such political delusions would do good to let themselves be reminded of the words of the (non-liberation) theologist Eugen Drewermann: “… whether in the battle against apartheid in South Africa, whether in the battle against racism amongst influential circles in the US south, … whether against the absolutely unfair trade conditions on the world market in exchange relations of raw materials and manufactured goods to the permanently aggravating disadvantage of Third and Fourth World countries … every little ‘success’ in the fight against injustice, inhumanity and violence, is undoubtedly a little more ‘nearness’ to the kingdom of heaven which Jesus wanted to bring us. But the paradox exists therefore that there can be no linear, but only a dialectical, relation between the religious message of Jesus and the objectives of political action.”

POSTSCRIPT: I was watching a part of the Pope’s Sunday (Jan. 25) mass on the popular US news station MSNBC and had to marvel at a comment of one of their reporters who found it prudent to point out that the spectators chose all the pertinent passages in the Pope’s address to give their applause. What is hidden behind such a seemingly innocent comment is a widespread ethnocentric attitude which apparently believes that (in this case) Cubans are a bunch of semi-educated and half-witted morons who are not necessarily to be expected to understand what the Pope has to tell them. So much for the objectivity of news in the US media.

Reproduced from the Virtual Institute of Caribbean Studies – http://pw1.netcom.com/~hhenke/index.htm

Michael Smith wrote:

> Rowland C. Croucher wrote:

> >

> > Politics, the Pope and the Pauper: An Alternative View of the Papacy

> >

> > by Holger Henke

>

> [Huge Snip]

>

> Hmmmmmmm.

>

> Far be it from me to support the Catholic church, but “Liberation

> Theology” is a minefield.

>

> Let’s get things straight.

>

> Many people is 3rd world countries are horribly oppressed. It is

> unjust, and it ought to change.

>

> Liberation Theology is not necessarily the way to do it.

>

> It can be summed up as “If you’re oppressed, the bible demands that you

> rebel – and it’s OK to kill innocent people on the way ‘cos God’s on

> your side”.

>

> I have never seen a systematic attempt to justify it from the bible. It

> usually takes a couple of catch phrases (minus context) and makes no

> attempt to reconcile them to the rest of the bible.

Have you read any of Gutierrez’ writings, for example? The radical/militant wing of liberation theology doesn’t necessarily speak for most of it (as is the case with most radical wings of most ideologies).