Joy, consternation, and for some, outright
shock is reverberating among Catholics worldwide at the first sight
of their new pope in his red robes, Benedict XVI.
The most conservative regard the German
Joseph Ratzinger as their champion, with his influential rock-hard
stands against gay unions, cloning and the ordination of women, and
against any dismantling of the firewall between Catholicism and
every other religion in the world. Liberals regard him as medieval,
a threat to theological exploration of sexual ethics, pluralism and
a Church for the third millennium.
Now he is pontiff of all — and both
sides are holding their breath.
One key to Benedict’s papacy may be
found in the villages and rough urban misery belts of Latin
America, the globe’s most Catholic region, where Ratzinger
made one of his hallmark stands as a Vatican force. There in the
l980s, he powerfully confronted the fast-moving tide of liberation
theology, an intellectual and popular movement that linked Catholic
theology and political activism in everyday issues of social
justice and human rights. Officially, Ratzinger reversed the tide,
forbidding certain Catholic theologians to publish in what was
called a “silencing.”
Ratzinger issued a 1984 document, called an
“Instruction,” that defined Rome’s opposition to
liberation theology’s “fundamental threat” and
weighing in on naming conservative Latin bishops.
And yet, unofficially, liberation theology
lives. On a continent of some 500 million where most are poor,
where the promise of neo-liberal economic plans of the l990s
didn’t pan out and three-quarters of the population now lives
under democratically elected leftist governments, the attraction of
a Catholicism that links God’s will with the desire for a
better and more dignified life in the here and now — not just
after death — remains strong. How Benedict XVI faces this
reality, for face it he must in a Church that claims to be not just
“one” but “universal,” will be a marker of
his papacy.
In the 1980s the Berlin Wall remained intact,
and Ratzinger believed liberation theology was incipient Marxism
with a religious veneer. He zeroed in on some intellectual
proponents who linked Marx and Jesus. He did not focus on the
outcomes of Vatican II — where Ratzinger himself was
considered a liberal reformer — and the Latin American
conferences in Medellin and Puebla, where bishops decided that the
Latin Church must stake its future on “an option for the
poor.” He did not publicly regard the thousands of small
communities who were reading the Bible together in a new way,
sitting under trees or on dirt floors with no clergy or intellectuals
in sight, finding what they called the strength to be actors in their
lives.
What would have happened, Guatemalans and El
Salvadorans ask to this day, if Ratzinger and Pope John Paul II had
regarded the Latin American call for liberation from autocratic
rulers with the same force with which the European churchmen
supported the Polish Solidarity revolution?
On the eve of his election as pope, Ratzinger
addressed the cardinals with an unmistakable condemnation of
“relativism,” which can include the idea that one
religion is as good as another. He addressed it again last year in
a book, Called to Communion. In the
1980s, the idea rankled Ratzinger that liberation theology was not
strictly Catholic, but “frequently tries to create a new
universality for which the classical church divisions are supposed to
have become irrelevant.”
Indeed, liberation theology was quickly
spreading at the time, and not only geographically, from its
magnetic center in thatched roof chapels in Latin America to
Africa, the Philippines, and the barrios of North America. It was
jumping churches, too. Renowned American Protestant thinkers such
as Robert McAfee Brown spoke to it, and defended Catholic
theologians “silenced” by Ratzinger. Fr. Luis
Gurriaran, a Spanish Sacred Heart priest working in rural
Guatemala, once recalled how fundamentalist evangelical Protestant
preachers — the proliferation of which are seen as a headache
by bishops today — embraced local forms of liberation
theology after massacres or intense hardships in their communities.
“Those who identify with their congregations come to look at
the world through their eyes,” he said.
How the new pope regards this mutual embrace
of people of faith on the ground, no matter what their churches,
will be key to the shape of his tenure.
This article appears in Apr 21-27, 2005.
