For a start, there’s little question that liberation theology was a disaster for Catholic evangelization. There’s a saying in Latin America that sums this up: “The Church opted for the poor, and the poor opted for the Pentecostals.”
In short, while many Catholic clergy were preaching class war, many of those on whose behalf the war was supposedly being waged decided that they weren’t so interested in learning about Marx or listening to a language of hate. They simply wanted to learn about Jesus Christ and his love for all people (regardless of economic status). They found this in many evangelical communities.
A second major impact was upon the formation of Catholic clergy in parts of Latin America. Instead of being immersed in the fullness of the Catholic faith’s intellectual richness, many Catholic seminarians in the 1970s and 1980s read Marx’s Das Kapital and refused to look at such “bourgeois” literature such Augustine’s City of God or Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae.
This undermined the Church’s ability to witness to Christ in Latin America, not least because some clergy reduced Christ to the status of a heroic but less than divine urban guerrilla and weren’t especially interested in explaining Catholicism’s tenets to their flocks.
Bingo. (Hat tip to my friend George for this one.)
There are now half a billion Pentecostals in the Global South.
I was in Central America in the 70ies, and the Catholic Communities were thriving. Then came the terrible, terrible civil wars in which Catholics were targeted for death squads. There were a great many deaths amongst the the leadership of indigenous Catholics, and among the priests and nuns who served them. Just google the story of Fr Stanley Rother to read about one of them. These people were not Marxists, even of the Catholic variety.
There IS class war in Latin America. The upper classes oppress the poor in ways that are so unjust. I am not surprised that many converted to the religion of Rios Del Mott, given the circumstances.
Hi Rachel,
Thank you for your comment. I am a bit confused though: Are you saying that liberation theology (based in part on Marx’s ideas of class warfare) was not taught and followed in Central and South America over the past decades?
There is certainly a gross disparity between the rich and the poor in Central and South America, which is unjust and deplorable and has led to violence against the rich as well as oppression against the poor, but what should the Catholic response be? What is Christ’s way (for the rich and for the poor)?
What is the religion of Rios del Mott?
Thanks!
When I lived in Guatemala, digging a well for the poor was a Communist act, and enough to get you targeted by a death squad. So was forming a cooperative of small coffee growers: those who had only one or two trees. Unless you have lived there you can’t know how bad it was. Families would be rounded up to work in the coffee plantations, and once there, the company store would take away all of their earnings and they would go home with a debt, that grew every year. While working in the fields, they would be sprayed with pesticide. In one instance, a young Mayan girl died because it triggered an allergy reaction. Then the landlord would not allow her family to bury her, because all the land belonged to him, and he did not want her grave on it. What did Catholics do in that situation? They went in and said, “You are a child of God. You have human dignity.” And this is what made them targets, because the latifundistas considered the Indian to be no more than dogs, no worse, curs, to be treated as such.
I stayed in Santiago Atitlan in those days, where Fr Stanley Rother was later martyred. What great hope there was then. The literacy campaigns were going full throttle. There was agricultural training, and the parish radio station had a great following. People were organizing to better their lives and the lives of their children, as Catholics. There were large numbers of indigenous catechists who took the word of God to the far-flung aldeas.
http://www.americancatholic.org/Messenger/Jul2006/Feature1.asp
All those people were labeled Marxists and Communists and were killed in the 80ies. They weren’t Marxists and Communists, but that didn’t matter. The war had to be justified, and it was. Sorry for my passion, Devin, but I still mourn the loss of those good people. Several were friends.
Rios del Mott is the Pentacostal former president of Guatemala responsible for the war against Catholics, and so called as well as real Marxists, and Communists. That Pentacostals now replace Catholics is no surprise at all. I remember their street missions, that were all about smiting your enemies with impunity.
The Catholics response has been the blood of martyrs.