Religion and Revolution

HERE ARE 225,000 Christian missionaries scattered throughout the world. More than 140,000 of them are Catholic. By any objective measure, Peter Marchetti, one of 6,000 U.S. Catholics working overseas, has been an effective clergyman. For the past six years the Jesuit sociologist from Marquette University has labored in impoverished rural Nicaragua. If his mission record is controversial, it is because, in addition to his apostolic duties, he also is a key agricultural adviser to the Sandinista regime.

Marchetti’s prominence in a country that Washington labels a “communist beachhead” underscores the commitment to and controversy surrounding liberation theology. In 1968, Latin American bishops meeting in Medellin, Colombia, urged the church in Rome to become “the key instrument for liberating the masses from all servitude.” Progressive theologians hailed the statement as a long overdue acknowledgment of Catholicism’s obligation to the poor. Detractors countered that the real objective was to inject Marxist doctrine into Christian gospel. The resulting philosophical dilemma continues to divide the world’s 810 million Catholics, 42% of whom live in Latin America.

What is the goal of the liberation theologists? “It is not a matter of creating a Christian socialism,” Brazilian Franciscan Leonardo Boff explained in 1979. “It is a matter of being able to say that the socialist system, when actually carried out in reality, enables Christians better to live the humanitarian and divine ideals of their faith.”

Boff’s view of Catholicism differs from that of Pope John Paul II, who in 1979 observed, “This idea of Christ as a political figure, a revolutionary, as the subversive man from Nazareth, does not tally with the church’s catechesis.”

Throughout Latin America, governments responded with varying degrees of severity. In 1980, four American Maryknoll nuns working with refugees in El Salvador were kidnaped and executed by a military-sponsored death squad. When two French missionaries told a group of Brazilian Indians in 1982 of their valid claim to an Amazonian rain forest, the absentee owners hired gunmen who killed 47 Indians when they tried to build a village. Brazilian courts cleared the owners of any wrongdoing and jailed the missionaries for “incitement to kill.” In Guatemala, conservative Archbishop Mario Cardinal Casariego was asked before his death in 1983 to take a stand against violence after 10 activist priests disappeared. His response: “If you mix in politics, you get what you deserve.”

Today, Brazil, Guatemala and El Salvador all have popularly elected governments, and Casariego’s successor condemns institutionalized violence. John Paul II, though opposing the political involvement of priests, champions the need for social reform. “Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation,” a Vatican document issued last April, states that a liberation theology free of political ideology can be not only orthodox but necessary as well. The challenge for the 2,180 American Catholics working as missionaries in Latin America will be how to separate one from the other.