John Paul vs. Liberation Theology

In Latin America, the Pope deplores Marxist influences

Seen from the airplane above, all of Mexico City winked and sparkled as thousands of people caught afternoon sunlight in tiny mirrors and flashed a farewell up to Pope John Paul II. It was a showy, yet fond ending to a spectacular seven-day tour. And it reflected not only the depth of religious feeling that has survived a 120-year attempt to secularize Mexico, but the popular impact of the Pope's good-natured and forceful personality. "It was the greatest success any foreign leader has ever scored in Mexico," a local journalist noted. Besides being a public relations coup, the tour had had its substantive side. For it was the occasion of John Paul's first major policy speech, on the agonizing question of Christianity and social revolution.

The turnout of Mexicans intent on seeing the Pope in person defied counting. Many millions greeted him at motorcades, Masses, festivals. Much of his 81 -mile route from Mexico City to Puebla lay through a valley of humanity that lined the road, including the aged and the sick who came in hope of a cure.

Through an exhausting schedule that took him more than 15,000 miles to the Dominican Republic, Mexico and the Bahamas, the Pope proved ever willing to run late in order to make time for people. Near the Guadalajara Cathedral, a crippled teenage girl waited in hopes of meeting John Paul, but he did not see her at first in the press of the crowd. When someone whispered to him about the girl, he whirled around and waded into the mob to find her. He never did.

Wherever he went, the Pope was greeted with showers of confetti, fireworks, floating balloons, flocks of white doves and plenty of overzealous rhetoric. In Puebla, an excited priest, warming up the gigantic crowd assembled at a soccer field, referred to the Pope as "John the Baptist, Christ in the flesh, and the new Moses." Near Oaxaca, in the heart of Mexico's largest concentration of traditional Indian culture, John Paul sat atop a massive dais as women performed a stately dance and men wearing giant white clown masks stomped about. Everywhere, street peddlers hawked papal photos or T shirts with the papal portrait.

The Pope had come to Mexico to address the third continent-wide meeting of Latin American bishops and urge a care fully balanced commitment to both spiritual and social goals. The bishops' meeting at Puebla is discussing church strategy in Latin America, where oppressive regimes and desperate poverty abound. In consequence, many priests have turned to "liberation theology" and revolutionary Marxist thinking. In their view, work for social and economic revolution is central to the church's task.

In the chapel of the Palafox Seminary, before an audience of bishops, 6,500 miles from St. Peter's, John Paul delivered a 5,000-word speech that may mark the entire course of his papacy. The text was designed to strip away any ambiguity over future papal social policy. From Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum (1891) to John XXIII's Mater et Magistra (1961), papal encyclicals have rejected both the "unregulated competition" of laissez-faire capitalism and Marxism's class struggle with its elimination of private property. However, in his 1967 encyclical Populorum Progressio, Paul VI allowed for revolutions in extreme cases and thus left the door open to liberation theology.

John Paul, who rose to eminence in Communist Poland, made clear his urgent desire to eliminate priestly activism based upon Marxist dogma. The Pope emphatically rejected liberation theology, without ever using that phrase. Repeatedly emphasizing the value of each person before God, and the need for spiritual freedom, he used the term liberation in a Christianized context. To the Pope, "atheistic humanism" holds out to mankind only a half liberation, because it bases everything on economic determinism ignores spiritual dynamics. The result, he said, is that man's very being is "reduced in the worst way." Today, he said, "human val ues are trampled on as never before." Implicit in his statements was a basic judgment: the tactics of Marxist revolution, based as they are on class conflict, violate the most profound Christian teaching.

In one passage heavy with theological significance, he rejected efforts by modern radicals to view Jesus Christ as a political Messiah. "People claim to show Jesus as politically committed, as one who fought against Roman oppression and the authorities and also as one involved in the class struggle," said the Pope. "This idea of Christ as a political figure, a revolutionary, as the subversive man from Nazareth, does not tally with the church's catechesis." The Gospel and the church, he preached, must transcend all political ideologies. But while the church's mission is "not social or political," the church "cannot fail to consider man in the entirety of his being." In particular, Christians must seek a "more just and equitable distribution of goods, not only within each nation but also in the world in general."

He made a detailed statement against viola tions of human rights, as he has done previously. Before the Indian audience in Oaxaca, he uttered a fervent plea for economic justice and redistribution of land. Attacking "the powerful-- rich classes who often leave untilled the lands in which lay hidden the bread that many families need,"John Paul cried: "It is not just, it is not human, it is not Chris tian." At Monterrey, he defended laborers' right to organize and protect their economic interests. In an obvious wetbacks who head for the U.S., he stated, "We cannot close our eyes to the plight of millions of men who abandon their homelands, and often their families, in search of work with no social security and miserable wages."

The pivotal issue in the Pope's speech was one of tactics. John Paul believes more rights can be gained for the oppressed through moral education than by agitation and revolution. Said he: "Whatever the miseries or sufferings that afflict man, it is not through violence, the interplay of power, and political systems, but through the truth concerning man, that he journeys toward a better future."

The Puebla address drew careful limits on priestly activism. It emphasized that political work is largely the task of the laity. In other speeches, the Pope warned a meeting of nuns against secularizing their mission, and told a large gathering of the clergy, "Be priests, not social workers or political leaders or functionaries of a temporal power."

Many progressive Catholics found this approach unsatisfactory. Some Latin

American militants were upset that the Pope made only indirect attacks on right-wing regimes that have been harassing and murdering activist priests. One bishop told TIME that because of this omission, the speech had condemned him and others to possible martyrdom. Another bishop said that dictatorships will now use the Pope's words as an excuse to repress all social action by priests and nuns.

Other critics contended that the call for evangelism was naive. Wrote Manuel Stephens Garcia, noted Mexico City political columnist: "When you speak of revolution, the problem of hatred and violence immediately emerges. But Brother John Paul, do you believe that the rich and powerful, who now as a hundred years ago imagine Latin America as their own private property, are going to yield their privileged position, their businesses, by a pacific process of civil, moral and spiritual conviction?"

The key liberation-theology strategists who were observing the Puebla meeting assumed a low profile. They issued no public response to the Pope and pursued behind-the-scenes politicking among friendly bishops from Brazil and elsewhere. The bishops' meeting will run until Feb. 13, and the progressive bishops hope to wring from it an explicit condemnation of right-wing "national security" tactics and capitalist exploitation. They may succeed.

Liberation theologians also want endorsement for church latitude in their continued pursuit of activism and Marxist-influenced theologizing. Whatever the bishops decide, the topics are certain to be hotly debated, not merely at this meeting but for decades to come. -

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