Regional Outlook : The Cross and the Gun : Since the fire of liberation theology began spreading in Latin America, priests and revolutionaries have made an unsettling alliance. Now, bloody reprisals have caused many to question that alliance. Will the fire go out?

For Fathers Rogelio Ponseele and Esteban Velazquez, the Kingdom of Heaven is found in this war-battered village in northeastern El Salvador. Their beliefs are in God and armed revolution.

The two Jesuit priests carry no guns, but they are forces, major ones, in the decade-long war by the radical leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front against the armed forces and the oligarchic government of the country.

Ponseele and Velazquez are the advance guard, the personification, of one of the Roman Catholic Church’s most controversial movements--liberation theology, a 22-year-old philosophy founded in the belief that economic, social and political oppression are sins that can be eradicated only when the oppressed seize control of their own destiny, even if that means with a gun.

So on a recent Sunday, the Belgian Ponseele and the Spaniard Velazquez offered communion to guerrillas bearing grenades, bandoleers of bullets and loaded AK-47 and M-16 assault rifles.

The town’s church has been shuttered, as has many of the other buildings. Pro-FMLN graffiti compete on the cracked and chipped walls with pro-army slogans painted by government troops on their infrequent raids.

The services were held in a rambling structure used by pro-guerrilla social action groups, its glassless windows filled with flowering vines. The handful of worshipers were a mix of warriors and civilians, their weathered faces impassive as they mumbled the responses to the Mass, their gnarled fingers moving rosary beads.

And afterward, standing under a fluttering FMLN banner in Perquin’s main street and framed by bullet-shattered buildings, the two casually dressed priests told their battle-tested parishioners that they “are fighting a just war . . . at the direction of Christ.”

Although one may wonder if the guerrillas, a mixture of young men and women--boys and girls, really--would fully understand all the arguments of liberation theology, its distilled message has been accepted with enthusiasm by the dozens of fighters who have made Perquin the capital of a “liberated zone” in the northern half of Morazan province.

As expressed by the priests in the simple terms of Jesus--love and a “just war”--it is a message that, the guerrillas believe, gives meaning to the bloody life they have led for 10 years.

But there are other lessons from the experience of liberation theology, less inspirational ones, which have been written in the blood of other followers of the movement. The deaths of some of those who have challenged the establishment have brought sober second thoughts about both the basis and the practice of liberation theology.

Just 18 miles south of Perquin is the town of San Francisco Gotera, headquarters of the Salvadoran army’s tough 4th Detachment and the scene of a brutal counterattack against liberation theology.

In the 10 years since the civil war began, more than 30 catechists, or Catholic lay leaders, have been assassinated. Under the radical tenets of liberation theology, catechists not only instruct in doctrine but also teach their followers to seek political and economic rights as part of the Gospel.

Of the several hundred catechists trained in northern Morazan, only one continues her work, and she does it in hiding.

And the bloody reaction goes on. Late last year at the height of a guerrilla offensive, army troops raided the Jesuit-operated University of Central America in San Salvador and slaughtered six priests, including Ignacio Ellacuria, a major liberation theologian.

Such a violent counterrevolution here and in other Latin American nations--along with the failure of Eastern European Marxism and the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua to bring social, political and economic justice--have led to calls for a new look at liberation theology.

As Paul E. Sigmund, a Princeton University expert, wrote in his recent book “Liberation Theology at the Crossroads”:

“How helpful to the poor is revolutionary rhetoric and actions when the lessons . . . seem to have been that such rhetoric and action lead only to counterrevolution by the armed forces?”

So while Ponseele and Velazquez continue to preach and practice their radical view of the Catholic Gospel, some of the basic analytical assumptions and practical applications of liberation theology are being questioned, not just by the conservative elements of the church but also by some of those thinkers who first conceived the philosophy.

Although elements of what came to be known as liberation theology existed throughout much of the history of the Roman Catholic Church, its current form is very much a product of Latin America and the tumultuous decade of the 1960s.

According to Sigmund, liberation theology “represents a type of Catholic radicalism that was almost unknown in Latin America prior to the middle and late 1960s. Its emergence was possible only because of the changes that took place in the Catholic Church worldwide during and after the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), and because of the heightened sense of the political and economic crisis in Latin America produced by the challenge of the Cuban revolution and the American-sponsored reforms of the Alliance for Progress.”

Much of the basis for the movement, as well as its name, came from a Peruvian Jesuit priest named Gustavo Gutierrez, whose thinking, inspired by the liberalized liturgical and political thinking of Vatican II, has made him the leading spokesman for liberation theology.

After a series of lectures and papers, Gutierrez in 1971 published his most influential work, “A Theology of Liberation.” In it, he laid out an approach that until now has served as the blueprint for other theologians and those priests and lay workers who have taken the program into the cities, villages and guerrilla camps of Latin America.

On the theological level, Gutierrez argued that a radical break was necessary from the largely conservative religious thinking of the past, with a new focus on “God’s love for the poor.”

The most important biblical basis for the new approach was Isaiah, Chapter 61: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor . . . to liberate those who are oppressed to reach the acceptable year of the Lord, a day of retribution.”

And, Gutierrez wrote, since the essence of life for the poor of Latin America is oppression, the theme of the new Catholic theology must be liberation, the elimination of the causes of oppression.

In assessing those causes, Gutierrez and his followers leaned heavily on Marxist analysis, a view that class struggle is linked to a dependence on capitalism. And they see the United States as the embodiment of capitalism.

The turn from this thinking to action took two forms. The first was the formation of so-called Ecclesiastical Base Communities, grass-roots community groups led by catechists who taught that Christianity encourages popular efforts to force social, economic and political change.

But if such work isn’t enough, “this liberation,” Gutierrez wrote in a 1970 article, “will have to pass, sooner or later, through the paths of violence.”

For some such as Ponseele and Velazquez, these paths came sooner than later.

Sobered by the often-violent reaction by the governing classes, and turning aside Western-style democracy as unworkable in a Latin American context, they and other priests and activists became revolutionaries, or at least actively supported war movements.

Priests, some of them carrying guns, began appearing at the side of FMLN guerrillas in El Salvador, rebels of the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua and members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

A major influence on such priestly involvement was a theme developed by Ellacuria, the slain theologian, who argued that there are two kinds of violence, that of “the unjust oppressor, which is the original aggressive violence,” and the “violence performed on behalf of the oppressed, the violence with which God punishes the unjust oppressor on this Earth . . . good violence.”

The early criticism came expectedly from the wing of the church that traditionally had backed the existing conservative governments and oligarchies of Latin America.

“When I see a church with a machine gun, I cannot see the crucified Christ in that church,” said Bishop Dario Castrillon Hoyos, secretary of the Latin American Bishops Conference.

Other conservative bishops openly compared liberation theology to communism, traditionally branded by the Vatican as a godless enemy of the church.

The movement largely ignored its opponents well into the 1980s. But in recent years, criticism has developed from friendly quarters, and the thinking of many involved in the movement has shifted.

Ellacuria, before his murder, had moved away from the belief that electoral democracy would be ineffectual as a means of easing oppression in El Salvador.

But the most important changes--evolutionary developments rather than fundamental shifts, he would call them--have come from Gutierrez.

As noted in Sigmund’s book, “the most obvious change is from an infatuation with socialist revolution to a recognition that the poor are not going to be liberated by cataclysmic political transformations, but by organizational and personal changes in base communities.”

In a 1984 book titled “The Truth Shall Make You Free: Confrontations,” Gutierrez wrote that while Marxism remains a valuable analytical tool, it can no longer be viewed as totally positive.

“Recent historical events,” he said “ . . . have dispelled illusions regarding concrete historical systems that claim to eliminate all evils. As a result, we have launched out upon new and more realistic quests; quests, too, that are more respectful of all dimensions of the human.” What this means is a recognition that the evils of exploitation are the result not only of class warfare and capitalist dependency but also of racial, ethnic, sexual and political oppression.

“The point I want to make,” said Gutierrez in his later writings, “is simply that an economically based determinist view of class struggle is completely alien to liberation theology.”

Among the revised thinking, there is an acknowledgement that Marxism in practice often ended in the same bloody repression as capitalism or the feudalistic regimes that have existed throughout Latin American history.

Sigmund also has found in the writings of many liberation theologians that the once-favored approach of substituting socialism for dependency on capitalism simply doesn’t work, as has been seen in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

While not abandoning socialism, there is increasing ambiguity about what socialism actually means, as well as a growing tolerance of competing systems and the acceptance of Western-style democracy as a legitimate weapon against oppression.

These shifts have been accompanied by a change in the view of violence as well.

“One no longer hears from the liberation theologists the easy justifications of the necessity of ‘counter-violence’ against the presumed ‘institutionalized violence’ of contemporary institutions,” Sigmund says.

It is not unusual, of course, for scholars and theoreticians to change their minds. But for those who, inspired by the same thinkers, have put their lives into the struggle, the view is different.

Sitting in his dingy and barely furnished home in Perquin, the 51-year-old Ponseele slumps in weariness and rubs the stubble that covers his ruddy face. “These changes you talk of--I feel the changes are of no substance.

“Here,” he said, holding his arms out in an encompassing motion, “we have a duty to fight for liberation. There are no changes in the objectives” of liberation theology.

And, “If you think the revolution is weakening, that is wrong,” Ponseele said. “I prefer a peaceful revolution, but we need both. In this country, we need arms.”

The Gospel of Marx and Isaiah

Liberation theology developed in 1960s as response to economic, political, social oppression in much of Latin America and challenge to Roman Catholic Church’s traditional acceptance of status quo.

Movement’s name and philosophy came from writings of Peruvian Jesuit priest, Gustavo Gutierrez, which became guide for theologians who taught that economic and political repressions are sins.

Using Marxist analysis and Hebrew Prophet Isaiah’s pronouncement that God has directed liberation of oppressed, followers of liberation theology told poor that their religion way to take destinies into their own hands.

Some theologians began writing of need for revolution to overturn existing order, saying “good violence” was sometimes necessary.

As Latin American governments reacted with increasing violence, some priests began actively supporting leftist revolutions; some even joined rebel groups. Movement spread to some of the region’s most troubled countries--El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia.