COLUMN ONE : Holy War in Central America : Protestant evangelicals’ success has stunned the Roman Catholic Church, especially in Guatemala. The movement has strong ties to rightist politics.

Here in western Guatemala, where the eternal battle of land and wind has left the mountains a defeated jumble of rocks and ravines, another conflict, between people, is littering the countryside with the spiritual, social and political wreckage of a religious war.

It is a war of Christian against Christian, and it is transforming nearly every aspect of life--not only in Guatemala, where the battle has gone on the longest and is the most intense, but elsewhere in Central America.

At stake is the regional role of the Roman Catholic Church, which from the time of the Spanish conquest has been the most powerful agent of spiritual, economic and political power here.

The church has served both good and evil and has been allied with political ideologies, economic movements, even rival theologies. Whatever its position, the church has always been there, in body and in spirit.

Yet, the influence of the Catholic Church is being eroded by an onslaught of fundamental Protestant evangelism that preaches a direct line to God and personal salvation in time for the second coming of Christ.

The fundamentalist movement opposes what it calls the “heresy and idolatry” of Catholicism and everything it perceives to be sullied by leftist politics.

And unless the trend is reversed, much of Central America, and particularly Guatemala, faces an even more conservative religious atmosphere--and a strong likelihood of increased military dominance and of economic power remaining in the hands of a wealthy oligarchy.

With the exception of a few individuals, the fundamentalist movement is either neutral, accepting the political status quo in a region where nearly all the governments are conservative, or it stands firmly on the right.

“We believe the citizen should be obedient to the government, no matter who’s in charge,” Edmundo Madrid, president of the Evangelical Alliance of Guatemala, said in a recent interview. “It seems that military governments like this teaching.”

Nearly all the experts agree that Protestant evangelism in Guatemala has won over at least 30% of the people--some scholars put the figure at 35%--and is preparing for further growth. The goal, they say, is a growth rate of at least 10% per decade, a pace that would bring half the country into the movement in 20 years.

There are about 300 fundamentalist sects and 10,000 churches in Guatemala. Behind them are millions of dollars and the organizational support of North American evangelical groups.

In Honduras, the evangelicals are believed to have converted close to 15% of the people; in Costa Rica, 20%, and in El Salvador and Nicaragua, 10% to 15%.

In Guatemala, the evangelicals have had considerable political success. Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, who served as president for 16 months, beginning March 23, 1982--albeit by means of a military coup--labeled his country “the New Jerusalem” and Guatemalans “the new Israelites of Central America.”

Rios Montt was advised by evangelical elders inspired by the Gospel Outreach Church of Eureka, Calif., and he used his office to preach the fundamentalist gospel.

He used his army as an avenging force to clean out the influence of Catholicism, condemned as the ideological base of Communist guerrillas. Tens of thousands of Indians, mostly Catholics but also including followers of ancient Mayan rites, were massacred in what was billed as an anti-guerrilla campaign. Among the victims were at least 12 priests and more than 1,000 Catholic lay workers.

The growth of evangelism has stunned and frightened the Catholics, who were overconfident after years of dominance. As late as the 1960s, the Catholic Church could claim more than 90% of the people in Central America.

Now, on top of the decline in the number of Catholics, people who are still counted among the faithful are going to Mass less often and taking part in fewer church activities. Many are defying the church on questions of artificial birth control and divorce. And many priests and lay teachers, or catechists, have embraced “liberation theology,” which, among other things, teaches people to demand political rights and economic security from the state. Rome has denounced “liberation theology” for many of its theories.

“It is sad,” Bishop Julio Cabrera Oballe of Santa Cruz del Quiche said the other day, “but more and more, we (Catholic parishes) are looked to only for baptism and burial.”

Two villages in the department of Quiche, about 2 1/2 hours by car and another 45 minutes on foot northwest of Guatemala City, exemplify the nature of the struggle between the Catholic Church and the evangelical Protestants.

Chunima and Sacpulup lie within sight of each other, and both are peopled by the same tribe of Indians. But the people of Chunima have been converted by the evangelicals, while Sacpulup has remained largely Catholic.

On a recent Friday, about 200 Catholics who live in the region took part in a march to protest the growing influence and involvement of evangelicals in the Guatemalan army in the region, and in the military’s locally organized civil patrols. The marchers complained that the army and the civil patrols are repressing Catholics accused of being in league with Marxist guerrillas.

The unarmed marchers were attacked by 400 civil patrol members shouting “guerrillas” and “subversives.” As the marchers were being pelted by rocks and bottles and menaced with machetes and sharpened shovels, soldiers from the nearby garrison looked on. They made no effort to protect the marchers. At least 20 people were injured.

Later, civil patrol members said they had been organized and encouraged by army officers.

Reporters who entered Chunima to look into the situation were quickly surrounded and menaced by machete-armed villagers, who made it clear that they thought the reporters were Catholic agents intent on reconverting the evangelicals.

Missionary Protestantism is relatively new to Guatemala. It dates to 1882, when anti-Catholic politicians operating under the secular banner of what they called Liberalism invited the Rev. John Clark Hill, an American Presbyterian, to establish Guatemala’s first Protestant church.

The dictator Justo Rufino Barrios, who had expelled the Catholic archbishop, gave Hill land directly across the street from the Catholic cathedral in Guatemala City.

Well into the 20th Century, most Protestant missionaries came from the more moderate, established Protestant churches of the United States, and they presented little real threat to Catholic pre-eminence.

Still, there were fundamentalists among them, and with North American money and the use of radio, they began to make inroads with their messianic message. According to Dennis A. Smith, a scholar on the evangelical movement, they attacked Catholics as “quasi-pagans mired in syncretism and idolatry.”

In the early 1940s, with the growth of anti-communism among right-wing oligarchs and military leaders, some fundamentalists saw an opportunity to bring the “red scare” into their anti-Catholic repertory.

“Not surprisingly,” Smith said in interview, “The (evangelical) Protestants chose to overlook the social injustice, corruption and violence upon which the liberal dictators built their rule.”

The use by Rios Montt of the Communist threat brought praise and additional millions of dollars from the United States. The American evangelical leader Pat Robertson said Rios Montt presented a real choice “between the oppression of corrupt oligarchies and the tyranny of Russian-backed Communist totalitarianism.”

But there is far more to the success of the evangelists than anti-Catholicism and anti-communism. In a region where the life expectancy of a man or woman is under 50 years, where many children die of malnutrition and 5% of the population owns 80% of the land, a promise of personal salvation and direct contact with God as a way to ease the pain of poverty, injustice and physical misery is a powerful attraction.

“Spiritual matters are distinct from and more important than material matters” to the evangelists, according to Smith. “That which is spiritual is good, and that which is material is likely to be evil.”

Religion is “like a tranquilizer,” he said. “Just give your 10% tithe, and you will be saved.”

The emphasis on anti-materialism notwithstanding, the evangelists, at least some of them, have combined their spiritualism with an appreciation that in Central America, where poverty is rampant, something more is necessary. So. they have organized aid programs, but under a system carefully controlled and maintained within the boundaries of fundamental theology.

For instance, after the Guatemala earthquake in 1976, evangelical churches provided housing, food and medical aid to victims. And throughout Central America, some evangelical bodies organize and finance development work, includ ing irrigation and other important rural projects. All undertakings, however, are maintained within the goal of evangelical conversion.

“Material tasks such as education, health care and food distribution gain validity as a form of Christian ministry only when they are used as vehicles for leading people to Christ--a spiritual task,” Smith said.

This approach was reflected on a recent Sunday in the town of Chimaltenango, about 20 miles west of Guatemala City. There, a branch of the Word Church, one of the more powerful evangelical sects, combined religious services with the distribution of food and other supplies.

An amplifier blared religious music familiar to listeners of American Bible broadcasts but with a salsa beat. Interspersed were the messages of the preachers and the shouts of the 300 worshipers, some of whom threw themselves down and writhed on the floor.

Afterward, the worshipers formed a line. In order to receive food, they either had to be known or had to accept conversion on the spot.

“Are you a sinner?” the pastor would ask. “Does God love you and want to save you? Did Jesus as the son of God die for your sins? Do you confess your sins? Do you want God to forgive you? Is God your savior?”

“Yes, yes, God believe me, yes,” one man cried, tears shining in his eyes.

Beyond the politics of the evangelicals, beyond their message and their recent entry into the fields of aid and education, their success is attributed at least in part to the enemy, the Catholic Church.

“Too much of the church here is conservative--not necessarily politically, but religiously within the church itself,” an American Catholic who is close to the church leadership, said not long ago, asking not to be identified by name. “The bishops are overly concerned with a 16th-Century theology at a time when the needs of the people are being ignored, even suppressed.”

This approach is due partly to the church’s conservative doctrine under Pope John Paul II. But it is also a reaction to the way Rome has responded to the rise of “liberation theology,” which some priests have used to argue that Marxism and Christianity can be blended.

“After what happened in the 1970s and early ‘80s,” the American Catholic said, “many of the bishops and other leaders backed away (from liberal attitudes) as far too dangerous to their followers and the church itself. They sought refuge in traditional doctrine.”

Adding to the clerics’ unease is the criticism of their activities by Rome, particularly by the Pope.

“John Paul sees the world in a far more traditional way,” the American said. “He sees in liberation theology a dangerous tendency toward revolution and communism, and that is unacceptable to someone who grew up in a country (Poland) threatened by revolutionary communism.”

But there are other problems. In Guatemala, up to 85% of the priests are foreigners, and the majority of them are white Europeans and North Americans. In a country where there is a sharp division between white descendants of the Spanish conquerors and the Indian majority, the foreign priests are an obstacle to Catholic dominance.

There is a shortage of priests. Of Guatemala’s 326 parishes, more than 10% have no priest. Outside Guatemala City, many parishioners see a priest no more than once or twice a year.

The scholar Smith observed: “The fundamental reason for the growth of evangelicalism is the pastoral failure of the Catholic Church. They are not able to successfully carry out their pastoral ministry. . . . Instead of addressing that problem, they have identified ideological impurities within the Catholic Church as the central problem. They simply aren’t meeting the pastoral needs of the people.”

Can the Catholic Church recoup its losses? Can the evangelicals maintain their momentum and power?

Archbishop Prospero Penados del Barrio, Roman Catholic primate of Guatemala, argued in a series of interviews that the Catholics will hold off the challenge and regain lost ground.

He said that as the people realize what he calls the falsity of the evangelical message, they will turn back to the Catholic Church because “while we speak of the spirit, we also speak of the body; Catholics deal with the problems of man.”

Penados del Barrio mentioned divisions within the fundamentalist movement, but Smith said, “The basic divisions among Central American evangelicals are more questions of style than substance.”

If there is a limit to evangelism, he said, “it may just be a natural limit to growth” and the fact that so many sects have led to competition and a lessening of the effort to convert Catholics.