How a modern Inquisition, with the help of Pope Francis, stifled the movement protecting the poor.<\/i><\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.\u201d So said the Brazilian archbishop Dom H\u00e9lder C\u00e2mara. His adage exposes one of the great fissures in the Catholic Church, and the emptiness of the new Pope\u2019s claim to be on the side of the poor.<\/p>\n
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 Maranh\u00e3o, 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\u2019 union. Yet still he opened the door.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
By the time I joined them, in 1989, seven Brazilian priests had been murdered. \u00d3scar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, had been shot dead; many others across the continent had been arrested, tortured and killed.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t talk to me. He had been silenced, as part of the Church\u2019s great purge of dissenting voices. The lions of God were led by donkeys. The peasants had lost their protection.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cthe deviations, and risks of deviation\u201d of liberation theology(4). He did not deny what he called \u201cthe seizure of the vast majority of the wealth by an oligarchy of owners \u2026 military dictators making a mockery of elementary human rights [and] the savage practices of some foreign capital interests\u201d in Latin America. But he insisted that \u201cit is from God alone that one can expect salvation and healing. God, and not man, has the power to change the situations of suffering.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. \u201cIt is only by making an appeal to the \u2018moral potential\u2019 of the person and to the constant need for interior conversion, that social change will be brought about \u2026\u201d(5). I\u2019m sure the generals and their death squads were quaking in their boots.<\/p>\n
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 S\u00e3o Paulo to see the situation of Brazil\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Pope Francis knew what poverty and oppression looked like: several times a year he celebrated mass in Buenos Aires\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n
He now maintains that he \u201cwould like a church that is poor and is for the poor.\u201d(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.<\/p>\n
References: <\/b><\/p>\n
1. George Monbiot, 1989. Poisoned Arrows: an investigative journey through Indonesia. Michael Joseph, London.<\/p>\n
2. The story is told in full in George Monbiot, 1991. Amazon Watershed: the new environmental investigation. Michael Joseph, London.<\/p>\n
3. http:\/\/www.monbiot.com\/1996\/07\/09\/hunting-the-beast\/<\/p>\n
4. Joseph, Cardinal Ratzinger, 1984. Instruction on Certain Aspects of the \u201cTheology of Liberation\u201d Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith http:\/\/www.vatican.va\/roman_curia\/congregations\/cfaith\/documents\/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19840806_theology-liberation_en.html<\/p>\n
5. Joseph, Cardinal Ratzinger, as above.<\/p>\n
6. Jan Rocha, August 2004 . Justice vs Vatican. New Internationalist magazine. http:\/\/newint.org\/features\/2004\/08\/01\/social-justice\/<\/p>\n
7. http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/world\/2013\/mar\/15\/pope-francis-joy-humility-unbending<\/p>\n
8. http:\/\/www.democracynow.org\/2013\/3\/14\/a_social_conservative_pope_francis_led<\/p>\n
9. http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/world\/2013\/mar\/17\/pope-francis-first-sunday-prayer<\/p>\n
10. http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/world\/2013\/mar\/15\/pope-francis-joy-humility-unbending<\/p>\n
11. http:\/\/ncronline.org\/blogs\/ncr-today\/papabile-day-men-who-could-be-pope-13<\/p>\n
12. http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/world\/2013\/mar\/16\/pope-francis-church-poverty<\/p>\n
________________________<\/p>\n
About George Monbiot: Here are some of the things I try to fight: undemocratic power, corruption, deception of the public, environmental destruction, injustice, inequality and the misallocation of resources, waste, denial, the libertarianism which grants freedom to the powerful at the expense of the powerless, undisclosed interests, complacency. Here is what I fear: other people\u2019s cowardice.<\/i><\/p>\n
Published in the Guardian 19th March 2013.<\/i><\/p>\n