BASE COMMUNITIES, ONCE HOPE OF CHURCH, NOW IN DISARRAY
http://ncronline.org/NCR_Online/archives2/2004d/111204/111204m.php

NATIONAL CATHOLIC REPORTER
November 12, 2004

Latin America Today - Part Nine: The church: During the latter part
of the 20th century and into the beginning of the next, Latin America
has served as a kind of laboratory in extremis for contemporary
religious ideas and models of church life. Base communities,
liberation theology, new lay movements and traditional Catholicism,
all mix in cultures often beset by desperate poverty, unstable and
bloody politics, and powerful outside influences.

By BARBARA FRASER and PAUL JEFFREY
San Salvador, El Salvador

It's Saturday night in the sprawling industrial suburb of Soyopango,
where grimy factories and dirt-poor neighborhoods lie close together
in the desolate urban landscape of modern Latin America. Halfway up a
narrow street on a shadowy hill, the door of Teresa Rivas' humble
home is open because the people gathered there don't all fit inside.
They tumble out into the street, as does the sound of singing. Inside
there are candles and a small cross placed on a table shoved up
against a wall under a large portrait of Rafael Palacios, a priest
who in 1983 was machined-gunned and run over by a tank in Santa
Tecla, a neighborhood on the other side of San Salvador.

Palacios dominates the room, but he doesn't look subversive. Neither
do the women, men and youth gathered on cheap plastic chairs in front
of his portrait, their hymnals and Bibles at the ready, discussing
tomorrow's scripture lesson. Yet for many in the Roman Catholic
church in Latin America, not to mention in far-off Rome, these humble
folks represent a challenge to what the church is all about.

They are a Christian base community, one of 53 such groups in the
Santa Cruz Parish. They meet twice a week, Tuesdays and Saturday
nights, to sing and pray, to share the Gospel and their lives.

"We're an extended family. The problems of one become the problems of
the group, and we all look for solutions. We're all sinners, but we
look for perfection together, sharing love and the word of God as did
the early Christian communities," said Manuel Ortez, a 17-year-old
group member. "We leave behind television but our compensation is a
chance to live out the Gospel, to share the word of God, to share
bread, to feel part of a family, to feel useful to the society
through the community."

For the Catholic church, the base communities were originally
conceived as a way to extend the ministry of a professional clergy
spread too thin. Rather than a worshiping community focused solely on
Sunday Masses, the communities became a place where faith was made
personal.

"Jesus always walked with the poor, hand in hand, and we try to help
our neighborhoods understand that we're not alone, that Jesus walks
beside each of us no matter what kind of sinner we are. We're very
clear in the community that Jesus presents himself to us in the most
needy, in the vulnerable, in the one who suffers, who is prostituted,
who is disabled or poor. We don't have to go looking for Jesus in
some far-off place. We have him here with us every day," Rivas, the
group's coordinator, told NCR.

Rivas has a busy schedule. Besides the two weekly meetings of her
community, Rivas meets with other base community "animators" on
Friday night to discuss with Luis Salazar, the parish priest, the
scripture readings for Sunday. Salazar gets community input for his
homily, and the communities discuss the readings on Saturday night.

"We go to the Mass better prepared to hear what the father is going
to say in his homily. We don't go to the Mass just to cross ourselves
and pray, but with a desire to live this fiesta, this communion we
share with others. So the Mass is participative. We participate in
the singing, in the reflection, and in taking nourishment from the
body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, which helps us resist
through the coming week," Rivas said.

Like Rivas, other members of this base community have volunteer jobs
in the parish. Some serve on the parish environmental committee,
helping keep the barrio clean. They recently protested enough to get
a gas-emitting factory run out of the area. Others are catechists or
serve on the parish human rights committee. The whole group does door-
to-door evangelism twice a year throughout the neighborhood.

Palacios' image on the wall is no mere adornment. The community took
his name. "He was a prophet in his own land, killed for denouncing
injustice against his own people. He couldn't remain quiet confronted
by injustice against the children of God. So he's our icon to follow.
We follow his path to construct the reign that God has challenged us
to build," said community member Milagro Monge.

The parish's other base communities, which can have from 10 to 60
members each, take the names of other martyrs. There's the John the
Baptist Base Community, the Ita Ford Base Community (for the
Maryknoll sister murdered in 1980), the Segundo Montes Base Community
(for one of the Jesuit priests killed in 1989), and, of course, the
Monseñor Oscar Romero Community (for the archbishop of San Salvador
murdered in 1980).

For those who participate in the Rafael Palacios Base Community, this
is the way the church should be. "If the church would take the base
communities into account, it wouldn't be suffering such a crisis in
so many places. You can see that crisis in empty, dead parishes,
parishes where people show up for Mass and then disappear until the
following Sunday. In this parish we work together all week long.
We're stuck to Jesus all week long, and so we're alive," said Rivas.

Sharing weak coffee and stale cookies at the meeting's conclusion,
the group hardly seems something to make Vatican ideologues lose
sleep. If anything, it would be easy to argue, church leaders should
be glad such enthusiasm for mission exists. Yet here in El Salvador,
as at other points across the region, these groups are controversial,
often scorned by the men who run the church as a challenge to their
authority.

"Those who get involved in the communities don't want to leave,
because they feel alive. And those who criticize us don't really know
us. It's true that the archbishop we have now doesn't appreciate us
very much, but we always respect him as the head of the church in El
Salvador. He's got to accept us in some way, because what we're doing
is for the good of all," said Rivas.

"People are afraid of us because they don't know what we're doing.
They let themselves believe rumors, and talk about us without knowing
what they're talking about. They criticize the communities without
ever having been in one," said group member Martina Velásquez.

San Salvador Archbishop Fernando Sáenz Lecalle is no fan of base
communities, but he hasn't banned them outright, as some of his
hardline colleagues elsewhere have done. Indeed, the Santa Cruz
Parish is one of 17 parishes in the Monseñor Romero Vicariate, a
division of the archdiocese where base communities abound, tolerated
if not appreciated by Sáenz.

The vicariate's base communities involve thousands of lay people in
the nuts and bolts of ministry, yet they are not simply an
organizational gimmick, mere ecclesiastical hamburger helper designed
to stretch priestly attention to the many. For Salazar, the pastor of
the Santa Cruz Parish, they're the future of the church.

"The communities are going to be the salvation of the church. When
the sisters and brothers really share together as it says in the Book
of Acts, sharing all, with the same spirit, holding all in common,
then we're beginning to see the salvation of the church," he told NCR.

Who's to blame?

Despite the health of the Rafael Palacios community, in many areas of
Latin America the base communities are in crisis, with declining
participation and less impact in the neighborhoods and villages
around them. The crisis isn't felt everywhere, but it's general
enough that many search for scapegoats. Not surprisingly, the Vatican
is the favorite villain.

Pope John Paul II has repeatedly praised small Christian communities
in several contexts. Yet, at the same time, he has made hundreds of
episcopal appointments during his 25 years in office (some 300 in
Brazil alone), and almost all of those new bishops have been more
conservative than their predecessors. Every once in a while there's a
surprise, when a conservative arrives in his diocese and, shocked by
the poverty or repression, is converted by the people, as was Romero.
Yet most hold the course, implementing organizational centralization
and fostering doctrinal conservatism. Whether it's an accurate
reading of their nature or not, the base communities are often seen
to threaten both tendencies, and are either frontally combated,
ignored with the hope that they'll go away, or else diluted down by
steadily absorbing them -- "Let's put the base community in charge of
altar flowers this year" -- into the activities of clerically
dominated local parishes.

It's not just Vatican bureaucrats and sinister bishops who are to
blame, however. Madeleine Cousineau, a professor of sociology at
Mount Ida College, Newton Center, Mass., has studied Christian base
communities in Brazil for years. Author of the book Promised Land:
Base Christian Communities and the Struggle for the Amazon, Cousineau
told NCR: "The major influence in the decline of the base communities
wasn't the church so much as the social, political and economic
crisis that people were suffering."

The base communities were born three to four decades ago when Latin
America was struggling to throw off military repression and the last
trappings of neocolonialism. The church was often part of that
struggle, and beyond the project of parish revitalization -- a
response to too many Catholics, too few priests -- that was the
motivation for many to launch the base communities, the small groups
emerged in many localities as a locus of the struggle to throw off
the old and build a new society. It was a heady time, the theology of
liberation was in its prime, and even the region's bishops committed
themselves to a preferential option for the poor.

By the time the '90s arrived, the poor realized that democracy had
not rescued them from poverty, that, indeed, everyday life was
getting worse. The military wasn't around to blame anymore, and
inflation was eating up whatever economic gains popular organizing
had generated. All the gains won by the various popular movements
didn't seem to add up to much. Whereas in the '60s and '70s there was
a sense that the people united could never be defeated, by the '90s
such optimism had worn thin. The malaise spread everywhere, including
into the base communities.

"When the urban popular movements went into a crisis, so did the base
communities," said Cousineau. "And this had nothing to do with the
pope, though I'm not letting him off the hook. As progressive bishops
would retire, the papal nuncio was recommending and the pope was
naming conservatives to replace them, and that certainly had a
discouraging effect."

Throughout the region, observers who report a decline in the base
communities often note that yesterday's leaders are no longer
present. The reasons vary around the Americas. In El Salvador,
government forces killed many of the base community leaders who
emerged during the '70s. "They eliminated a whole generation of
leaders who had been formed within the church. A whole generation
with deep faith and great clarity was simply disappeared," said
Miguel Cavada Diez, a theologian at the Oscar Romero Pastoral Center
of the Jesuit-run Central American University in San Salvador.

Political parties, unions draw leaders

While military repression also took its toll in Brazil, the base
communities there lost most of the leaders they had formed to the
secular popular movements.

José Oscar Beozzo, a historian who heads the Center for
Evangelization and Popular Education in São Paulo, recalls the
identity confusion of the '80s. "In some places I visited, the base
community held its meeting right after the meeting of the union,
which was right after the meeting of the PT [Workers Party]. And it
was the same group of people. And then they'd take time to prepare
celebrations for the catechists, then they'd talk about the problems
of the union, and then they'd talk about the upcoming meeting of the
married couples. They finally arrived at a difficult moment for the
base communities when there was confusion about leadership, because
everyone was in everything. People began to leave the communities
because of so many other commitments. Many base community leaders
left to become mayors and city council members and union leaders,"
Beozzo told NCR.

"The base communities suffered when the leaders of the base
communities were absorbed into the political parties and unions. Much
of the leadership of the communities was pulled away from the base.
The leaders who were born of the communities, in the streets, went
off to the parties. The leadership the church prepared moved on,"
said Cilto Rosembach, a parish priest in São Paulo who edits
Cantareira, a monthly newspaper for base communities and other grass-
roots groups.

According to José de Souza Martins, a sociologist at the University
of São Paulo, the Vatican didn't crack down on the base communities,
but rather on their politicization. The decline in the communities
came not as a result of ecclesiastical repression, but rather from
history moving on, leaving the base communities, known widely as CEBs
(comunidades eclesiales de base), behind as a now obsolete nursery of
the current crop of leftist political leaders.

"It's easy to see that the communities have lost a lot of their
importance. But this is due neither exclusively nor not even
principally to the naming of more conservative bishops. A good part
of the energy of the CEBs was directed to politics, above all the PT
and Lula [Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva]. The growth
of the PT seems to be a corollary of the decline in the visibility of
the CEBs. The ascension of Lula to power, in a certain sense, means
that political hope has displaced eschatological hope, and that has
had a negative impact on the CEBs," Martins told NCR.

Moreover, Martins argues, the religious scene in Brazil has taken a
conservative turn, and CEB leaders are attempting to re-engineer the
movement to fit into the changing environment. One attempt is the
Faith and Politics movement, yet Martins notes that the number of
people who show up for its meetings don't amount to 10 percent of
those who flock to the Sunday Mass of Padre Marcelo, a pop star of
Brazilian Catholicism. As such, Martins said, the base
communities "have become one more type of Catholic organization and
less a type of exercise of the Catholic faith."

Cousineau, however, doesn't let the church off the hook. Asked by NCR
why the hierarchy has been so afraid of the base communities, she
responded: "You said the word: hierarchy. The base communities are
very democratic. Yet the Catholic church is still stuck in the Middle
Ages. The Vatican doesn't favor capitalism. It would like to have
feudalism again. The bishops are lords of their dioceses. It's all
very well and good if you have ladies making altar clothes and people
going to Mass every Sunday and doing what their priest tells them to
do, but the difficulty with the base communities is that when you
develop lay leadership, people start to feel that the bishop is their
equal. And while there are some bishops who are quite comfortable
with that, many bishops don't like the idea that the lay people think
they are equal."

According to Pablo Richard, a Chilean priest who directs the
Ecumenical Investigation Center in San José, Costa Rica, the reaction
of many bishops to such uppity laity has been to drive them out, if
not from the church, at least from their positions of leadership.

"In many parishes there's a tendency to expel the laity from the
administrative councils, get them out of the decision making process.
There's a strong hierarchical centralization going on. You hear all
over: `I'm the priest here!' Although it's a bit of a caricature,
many would say, `The pope in Rome, the bishop in his diocese, and the
priest in his parish.' And it ends there. That's all there is to the
church. Laity are leftovers, especially the laity who are poor. The
only laity who can participate are the ones who are totally
submissive to the priest," Richard told NCR.

While much has been made of official resistance to the base
communities, Cousineau said too much official support can also be a
bad thing. She noted the experience of the archdiocese of São Paulo
under Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns, where the base communities "were
weakened because they were creations from the top down." She said the
communities blossomed under Arns, who sold the archbishop's palace
and used the proceeds to build scores of community centers in poor
neighborhoods around the city, training priests and nuns and lay
people in how to organize base communities. Then the Vatican came
along and gerrymandered the archdiocese, leaving Arns with control of
only the city center while handing over control of the city's legions
of poor neighborhoods to his auxiliaries, who, especially as they
were replaced over the coming years, weren't as crazy about the new
forms of organizing. "This created a lot of discouragement and served
to weaken the base communities, because they had grown accustomed to
getting support from the archbishop," Cousineau said.

She contrasts the São Paulo experience to Rio de Janeiro, where base
communities were literally proscribed under Cardinal Eugênio Sales,
the archbishop of Rio until 2001. The situation was so bad that at a
national meeting of base community leaders in the '90s, participants
from what she called "clandestine base communities" in Rio were not
allowed to attend because under Sales they weren't supposed to exist,
and the meeting's organizers didn't want to provoke an angry reaction
from the cardinal. In the course of researching base communities
around Brazil, Cousineau said she intentionally included Rio and was
surprised to find "resilient communities which, now that there's a
new archbishop in Rio, are beginning to come out of the shadows."

Optimism lingers in countryside

Cousineau's research also found a marked difference between base
communities in the cities and those in the countryside, largely, she
claims, because the crisis in the popular movements wasn't as
profound in rural areas as it was in the cities. In the Brazilian
countryside, the Movimento Sem Terra -- the Landless Movement -- has
remained strong. The rural poor continue to achieve a return on their
organizing. "So the optimism of earlier decades, albeit a cautious
optimism, has carried over longer in the countryside. People have
continued to struggle for land, and still feel that society can
change. That optimism has carried over into the rural Christian base
communities," she said.

The pace of modern life in the city also puts urban base communities
at a relative disadvantage to their country cousins. Whereas rural
base communities are roughly half men and half women, urban base
communities are composed of mostly women. "In urban areas, since the
men have to commute so far to their jobs and work long hours, many of
them are simply not around to take part in base communities. Being a
base community member is hard work, and not everyone wants to be a
member. You don't just go to church and then go home. You're out of
the house several nights a week, and if a man is working two jobs or
lives on the distant edge of the periphery and has to commute into
the city to work, he's just too tired and too short of time to
participate," Cousineau said.

The phenomenon is widespread. Leonel Yañez works with Education and
Communication, a coalition of church- and community-based radio
stations in Chile. He's a base community dropout, and said his
situation is common. "Given where our economies have gone, you've got
to work more these days to maintain a decent lifestyle. You work
longer hours or a second job. Chile is a very workaholic country, so
everyone is stressed. When the weekend comes, individualism takes
over and we settle down in front of the television. That pulls us
away from any community organization. All the news about crime makes
people close themselves in behind the bars of their house. People are
tending to break apart rather than come together. And so community
life, including life in the church, is diminishing," Yañez told NCR.

The changing nature of the base communities has left some outside
observers confused. "As the activism of the base communities in
Brazil has slowed over recent years, some have observed that the base
communities have become more spiritual. That's rather humorous,
because they always have been spiritual. Although I'm a sociologist,
I have a certain sympathy for the communities, and when I began
researching I immediately noticed all their religiosity, the
processions, the saints, the novenas, the hymns, whereas others who
came from a purely secular viewpoint were looking for just activism.
So when the activism begins to diminish, then they see the
religiosity and they proclaim, 'Oh, they're becoming pious groups.'
But because I came from a religious viewpoint I saw the religiosity
at the beginning, and I saw the activism flowing from that
religiosity," Cousineau said.

Activism continues to flow from the religiosity of base communities
throughout the Americas. In Nicaragua, despite official hostility
from the hierarchy, base communities have launched educational and
psychological programs with young sex workers in the streets of
Managua. In the agricultural north of the country, the communities
have sponsored annual pilgrimages that, while ostensibly religious,
have a heavy focus on land reform and the impact on rural villages of
free trade. And communities throughout the country have taken a
leading role in civil society efforts to fight government corruption,
which peaked under former President Arnoldo Alemán.

In Honduras, where base communities have a different organizational
history, forming primarily around the figure of a "delegate of the
word" (a sort of lay pastor), the country's environmental movement
has been energized by the commitment of grass-roots communities in
the remote province of Olancho, where a struggle with logging
companies led to the assassination of one church activist last year.
In the western province of Santa Rose de Copán, far from the
political elites of the capital, the base communities have been at
the forefront of resistance to a regional free trade agreement with
the United States that is pending in the U.S. Congress.

Barbara Fraser, who worked in Peru for 14 years as a Maryknoll lay
missioner, now lives in Peru as a freelance writer. Paul Jeffrey is a
United Methodist missionary who lived in Central America for two
decades. He now lives in Eugene, Ore.