SIGNS OF LIFE IN LATIN AMERICA
http://ncrcafe.org/node/1406

John L Allen Jr Weekly Column

When President Nicanor Duarte of Paraguay arrived at the Vatican on
Monday for a meeting with Pope Benedict XVI, he planned to present
the pontiff with a multi-colored poncho as a symbol of Latin America -
- home to almost half the world's 1.1 billion Catholics, and a region
dubbed by Pope John Paul II as "the Continent of Hope."

In the end, however, Benedict had to settle for an IOU: Duarte's bags
got lost somewhere between France and Italy, including his gifts for
the pope.

That small snafu offers a metaphor for what has been a recent season
of discontent for Benedict XVI with regard to Latin America. Despite
the best efforts of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican's
doctrinal czar, to suppress liberation theology in the 1980s and
1990s, this synthesis of Catholic social doctrine and progressive
political action is showing surprising -- and, at least from the
pope's point of view, sometimes vexing -- signs of life.

Consider events from just the last several days:

Venezuela's bishops announced Wednesday that a special delegation is
headed to Rome to meet Benedict XVI, both to explain their opposition
to a constitutional referendum set for Dec. 2 that would grant
leftist President Hugo Chavez sweeping economic powers and allow him
to rule almost indefinitely, and to discuss the activity of some
Chavez-friendly priests. Inspired by liberation theology, these
priests have accused their bishops of reactionary opposition to
reform; Fr. Vidal González, for example, a pastor in Zulia state,
recently told reporters that the bishops have all but said they'd
like Chavez dead. Archbishop Baltazar Porras of Mérida, head of the
bishops' communications committee, asserted Wednesday that such
priests are "determined to insult the hierarchy" in order to distract
attention from the merits of the referendum.

Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, a Catholic Socialist and graduate
of the storied Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, popped up
at a Sant'Egidio-sponsored conference in Naples, Italy, last week to
call for a "new Catholicism" in the 21st century, which, he said,
would challenge globalized capitalism and offer a rebuke to what
Correa described as "anti-immigrant U.S. Christians."

When Benedict XVI and Duarte met Oct. 29, they faced the prospect
that Paraguay's next government could be formed by Fernando Lugo, a
Catholic bishop who's tendered his resignation but who is officially
still on the books. Known as Paraguay's "red bishop" for his
commitment to liberation theology, Lugo has been ordered by Cardinal
Giovanni Battista Re, Prefect of the Vatican's Congregation for
Bishops, not to run for public office in national elections set for
April, an order Lugo has defied. Polls currently show him in the
lead, and at least one of his brother bishops is on board: Bishop
Mario Melanio Medina Salinas of the San Juan Bautista de las Misiones
diocese has said that he would vote for Lugo "100 times" if that were
possible.

While in Italy on Sunday to receive a peace prize from former Soviet
Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, Bolivia's leftist President Evo Morales
playfully suggested that the Vatican be sent packing to New York
while the United Nations relocates to Rome. (Morales has never been a
fan of ecclesiastical authority. Last July, he said the Catholic
bishops had "historically damaged the country" by functioning as "an
instrument of the oligarchs.")

Such church/state tensions in Latin America are often construed as
part of the anti-colonial and anti-capitalist mindset of the left,
and that's certainly an important ingredient. Given the Catholic
history and culture of the continent, however, intra-ecclesiastical
skirmishes inevitably also play a role. In effect, what's happened
over the last decade is that some of those Catholics most committed
to liberation theology have gravitated out of the church and into
secular politics. In a number of Latin American countries, the
electoral success of leftist populists has given the liberationists a
new lease on life.

Lugo, a former Verbite priest and the emeritus bishop of San Fernando
in Paraguay, offers the most explicit case in point. Activism runs in
his veins; his father was arrested no fewer than 20 times under the
regime of former dictator Alfredo Stroessner, and three of his four
brothers were expelled from the country for more than 20 years. In
1996, Lugo hosted a continent-wide gathering of base communities, the
small faith groups dedicated to spiritual formation and political
action associated with liberation theology. In 2004, Lugo supported
peasants in his rural diocese who organized to protest unequal land
distribution and the inroads of massive commercial agriculture, an
experience that helped propel him toward explicit political activism.

Lugo has been careful, however, to position himself as a pragmatist
rather than an ideologue.

"When the pope speaks against liberation theology, he speaks against
the exaggerations of this theology only, particularly regarding the
Marxist message of interpreting reality," Lugo said earlier this
month. "But he also accepts that there is a part of it which is
accepted by the official church."

Correa is likewise a practicing Catholic who, aside from his degree
from Louvain, says that his real education came from working as a lay
Salesian missionary in the mid-1980s in the largely indigenous
province of Cotopaxi. On the campaign trail, speaking in both Spanish
and the indigenous language Quíchua, Correa routinely invokes
Catholic social teaching. In a September address in which Correa
attempted to lay out a Socialist vision for the 21st century, he
invoked the work of Fr. Leonidas Proaño, probably the most famous
liberation theologian in Ecuador.

Chavez is himself backed by a sector of progressive (and often anti-
American) grassroots sentiment in the Venezuelan church, including
his own court theologian, a Jesuit named Fr. Jesús Gazo, a chaplain
at the Universidad Católica del Táchira. Gazo has said that Chavez
has "a very strong theological formation." Gazo is not alone in his
admiration. Fr. Jesús Silva, a Uruguayan priest, has lived in the
Caracas slum of El Valle for 26 years, and claims there is "no doubt"
that Chavez is a committed Catholic. The country's "eternally
excluded and exploited social classes," Silva said in May, today
feel "they have a man in whom they confide."

In Bolivia, Morales' own police chief is an ex-Jesuit and a staunch
liberation theologian, Rafael Puente Calvo, considered one of the
president's ideological hardliners. Upon his appointment, a Catholic
newspaper in Argentina noted sardonically, "When the revolutionaries
need an official to carry out their ideological programs with extreme
cruelty, usually they can rely on a lapsed priest." (In one of
history's ironies, Puente taught as a Jesuit scholastic in
northwestern Spain, where one of his students was Marian Rajoy, today
the leader of Spain's center-right People's Party.)

Similar links between some stalwarts of liberation theology and
secular political forces can be found wherever the left has come to
power in Latin America, such as the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da
Silva in Brazil.

This secular reincarnation of liberation theology, with its inherent
tendency to spawn tensions with the Catholic hierarchy, comes atop a
series of serious challenges already facing Catholicism in the
region. They include the steady erosion of Catholics towards
Pentecostalism (more people defected from Catholicism to
Protestantism in Latin America in the 20th century than in Europe
during the Reformation), and the emergence for the first time of a
sociologically significant pool of people, concentrated especially in
the impoverished barrios of Latin America's teeming mega-cities, who
say they have no religious faith at all.

Despite all this, one can nevertheless make a case for optimism about
the future of the church in Latin America.

For one thing, the Pentecostal challenge may be eroding Catholicism's
traditional monopoly, but it also seems to be doing what competition
usually does -- producing a new sense of hustle. Experts say it's
awakening a church that for centuries sometimes seemed content to
baptize, marry and bury its people, offering little else by way of
formation or pastoral care.

In the forthcoming volume Conversion of a Continent (Rutgers
University Press), Dominican Fr. Edward Cleary, a longtime observer
of the region, argues that that Latin America today is actually in
the grip of a major religious revival, with the surge in
Pentecostalism representing its leading edge. Catholicism, Cleary
says, is also becoming more dynamic, generating higher levels of
commitment among those who remain. Cleary believes that this Catholic
awakening had its roots in lay movements that go back to the 1930s
and 40s, but it's been jump-started by healthy competitive pressure.
In effect, Cleary argues, recent Latin American experience confirms
what believers in the United States have long understood -- an open
religious marketplace, unfettered by an established church, is
healthy for churches all the way around.

As one bit of evidence, Clearly cites vocations to the priesthood. In
Honduras, the national seminary had an enrollment of 170 in 2007, an
all-time high for a country where the total number of priests is
slightly more than 400. Twenty years ago, there were fewer than 40
candidates. Bolivia saw the most remarkable increase; in 1972, the
entire country had 49 seminarians, while in 2001 the number was 714,
representing growth of 1,357 percent. Overall, seminarians in Latin
America have increased 440 percent in the last two decades, according
to Cleary.

This new social capital intersects with a new spirit among the Latin
American bishops, who in the main seem determined to avoid the
ideological fractures of the past and to strike a more pastoral and
evangelical tone. During the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops
of Latin America and the Caribbean, held last May in Aparecida,
Brazil, the bishops effectively endorsed a moderate form of
liberation theology, centered on four points:

• The option for the poor
• The concept of structural sin
• The "see-judge-act" pastoral method
• Base communities

The bishops' assessment was clear from the decision to meet with a
group of liberation theologians prior to the opening of the
conference, and from the fact that several acted as theological
advisors. Asked about the relationship, Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez
Maradiaga of Honduras told the press, "There is no opposition or
antagonism, by any means. We have been open to them from the
beginning, and I can say that we remain in contact with them." Bishop
Roque Paloschi of Roraima, Brazil, was blunt: "The theology of
liberation lives."

Given that stance, it's conceivable that the mainstream leadership of
the church may be able to work out a modus vivendi with Latin
America's new leftist governments, focused on pragmatic social policy
and economic development that benefits the poor, while unleashing the
church's new missionary energies to help build a more dynamic civil
society. Doing so might allow church leaders to more persuasively
challenge the anti-democratic and extremist features of regimes such
as Venezuela under Chavez, without coming off as apologists for
ecclesiastical privilege.

While a Latin American recovery of Aristotle's insight that virtue
falls between two extremes might not convert the Hugo Chavezes of the
world, it could at least help the Catholic church to avoid being
backed into a cycle of endless opposition to the new forces today
shaping a sizeable chunk of the continent, positioning the church
instead to help those forces realize the best version of themselves.