March 25, 2013 |
“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why
they are poor, they call me a communist.” So said the Brazilian
archbishop Dom Hélder Câmara. His adage exposes one of the great
fissures in the Catholic Church, and the emptiness of the new Pope’s
claim to be on the side of the poor.
The bravest people
I have met are all Catholic priests. Working first in West Papua(1),
then in Brazil, I met men who were prepared repeatedly to risk death for
the sake of others. When I first knocked on the door of the friary in
Bacabal, in the Brazilian state of Maranhão, the priest who opened it
thought I had been sent to kill him. That morning he had received the
latest in a series of death threats from the local ranchers’ union. Yet
still he opened the door.
Inside the friary was a group
of peasants, some crying and trembling, whose bodies were covered in
bruises made by rifle butts, and whose wrists bore the marks of rope
burns. They were among thousands of people the priests were trying to
protect, as expansionist landlords, supported by the police, local
politicians and a corrupt judiciary, burnt their houses, drove them off
their land and tortured or killed those who resisted.
I
learnt something of the fear in which the priests lived, when I was
first beaten then nearly shot by the military police(2). But unlike
them, I could move on. They stayed to defend people whose struggles to
keep their land were often a matter of life or death: expulsion meant
malnutrition, disease and murder in the slums or the goldmines.
The
priests belonged to a movement that had swept across Latin America,
after the publication of A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Gutierrez
in 1971.
Liberation theologists not only put themselves between the poor
and the killers, they also mobilised their flocks to resist
dispossession, learn their rights and see their struggle as part of a
long history of resistance, beginning with the flight of the Israelites
from Egypt.
By the time I joined them, in 1989, seven
Brazilian priests had been murdered. Óscar Romero, the archbishop of San
Salvador, had been shot dead; many others across the continent had been
arrested, tortured and killed.
But the dictators,
landlords, police and gunmen were not their only enemies. Seven years
after I first worked there, I returned to Bacabal and met the priest who
had opened the door(
3).
He couldn’t talk to me. He had been silenced, as part of the Church’s
great purge of dissenting voices. The lions of God were led by donkeys.
The peasants had lost their protection.
The assault
began in 1984 with the publication by the Congregation for the Doctrine
of the Faith (the body formerly known as the Inquisition) of a document
written by the man who ran it: Joseph Ratzinger, who later became Pope
Benedict. It denounced “the deviations, and risks of deviation” of
liberation theology(
4).
He did not deny what he called “the seizure of the vast majority of the
wealth by an oligarchy of owners … military dictators making a mockery
of elementary human rights [and] the savage practices of some foreign
capital interests” in Latin America. But he insisted that “it is from
God alone that one can expect salvation and healing. God, and not man,
has the power to change the situations of suffering.”
The
only solution he offered was that priests should seek to convert the
dictators and hired killers to love their neighbours and exercise
self-control. “It is only by making an appeal to the ‘moral potential’
of the person and to the constant need for interior conversion, that
social change will be brought about …”(5). I’m sure the generals and
their death squads were quaking in their boots.
But at
least Ratzinger has the possible defence that, being cloistered in the
Vatican, he had little notion of what he was destroying. During the
inquisition in Rome of one of the leading liberationists, Father
Leonardo Boff, Ratzinger was invited by the archbishop of São Paulo to
see the situation of Brazil’s poor for himself. He refused -then
stripped the archbishop of much of his diocese(
6). He was wilfully ignorant. But the current Pope does not possess even this excuse.
Pope Francis knew what poverty and oppression looked like: several times a year he celebrated mass in Buenos Aires’s 21-24 slum(
7).
Yet, as leader of the Jesuits in Argentina, he denounced liberation
theology, and insisted that the priests seeking to defend and mobilise
the poor remove themselves from the slums, shutting down their political
activity(
8,
9,
10,
11).
He now maintains that he “would like a church that is poor and is for the poor.”(
12)
But does this mean giving food to the poor, or does it mean also asking
why they are poor? The dictatorships of Latin America waged a war
against the poor, which continued in many places after those governments
collapsed. Different factions of the Catholic Church took opposing
sides in this war. Whatever the stated intentions of those who attacked
and suppressed liberation theology, in practical terms they were the
allies of tyrants, land-grabbers, debt slavers and death squads. For all
his ostentatious humility, Pope Francis was on the wrong side.
References:
1. George Monbiot, 1989. Poisoned Arrows: an investigative journey through Indonesia. Michael Joseph, London.
2.
The story is told in full in George Monbiot, 1991. Amazon Watershed:
the new environmental investigation. Michael Joseph, London.
5. Joseph, Cardinal Ratzinger, as above.
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