Berating Marxism's "False Hopes"

By Richard N. Ostling

The Vatican issues a challenge to liberation theology

Sweating profusely in the Nicaraguan heat on a March day in 1983, Pope John Paul II was forced to demand silence from a crowd of Sandinista hecklers present at an outdoor Mass in Managua. When Ernesto Cardenal Martinez, a Roman Catholic priest who also serves as Minister of Culture in Nicaragua's Marxist government, knelt to receive the Pope's blessing, John Paul wagged his finger in Cardenal's face and chided him, "You must straighten out your position with the church." These episodes, and his own keen observations during an eight-day-long visit to Central America, made a lasting impression on the Pontiff. He returned to Rome convinced that the time had come to deal firmly with the increasing conflict between the church and radical priests and nuns in Latin America, and indeed in the Third World in general. Most of those priests and nuns, accompanied by flocks of Catholic laymen, march under the banner of liberation theology, a radical attempt to fuse Marxism and Christianity in a struggle against social and economic oppression.

This week the Vatican is issuing a long-expected document that clearly challenges liberation theology and brands it in its more extreme forms as a perversion of the Christian message. Upholding the primacy of traditional Catholic teaching, the document aims at alerting "the faithful to the deviations . . . damaging to the faith and to Christian living produced by forms of liberation theology that uncritically borrow Marxist ideas." It declares that Marxism holds out the false hope that a revolutionary society will be a just one, while itself creating new forms of oppression. Those who aid such revolutions, it says, "betray the very poor they mean to help." The Vatican warns that radical theologians, by building Christian teaching around Marxist ideas like class struggle, distort the Bible, undercut morality and create divisions within the church.

The document reveals the acute dilemma that the church leadership faces. Even while it opposes the radical nature and methods of liberation theology, it supports the battle against social ills and in justice. Referring to Latin America, it condemns military dictatorships, corruption and economic exploitation. These ills, the decree says, "nourish a passion for revolt among those who thus consider themselves the powerless victims of a new colonialism in the technological, financial, monetary or economic order." And the logic and language of Marxism, it declares, are "incompatible with the Christian vision of humanity."

The decree is bound to disappoint and anger the leftist fringe of Roman Catholicism, especially in Latin America. It comes in the very week that Brazil's leading spokesman for liberation theology, Father Leonardo Boff, is due in Rome to undergo interrogation on his writings. The Vatican also faces a decision on what to do about the liberation-minded priests in Nicaragua, including Father Cardenal, who last week defied a church deadline for quitting government posts. The unusual haste with which the document was printed also indicates that John Paul wants to clear the air before next month, when he is scheduled to visit the Caribbean and Jesuit leaders in Latin America will hold a critical meeting.

Although the 36-page study was ordered by the Pope, it is being issued by the Vatican's Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The guiding spirit behind the text, and indeed the Vatican's champion against the radicals, is Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the doctrinal congregation. In the view of Ratzinger, and thus of the church Establishment, liberation theology has emerged as a major doctrinal threat to the church, particularly in Latin America, where 40% of the world's 784 million Catholics live. It not only has gained a solid foothold among scholars and lay activists but has the backing of important bishops as well. Similar ideas are spreading to the church in Third World nations on other continents.

While sympathetic to liberation theology's call for justice, the Vatican objects to priests' replacing the language of their faith with Marxist rhetoric, for example, using "class struggle" as a central concept. Thus some liberation theologians redefine Christian "love" to mean participation in the class struggle on behalf of oppressed peoples. Others, complains the Vatican document, turn the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ into a political event rather than a sacrifice to redeem humanity from sin, or argue that the poor should not attend Mass alongside the rich "oppressors."

The decree also sees liberation theology as posing a direct threat to the church as an institution: leftist theologians sometimes describe bishops as the overlords and the laity as the underclass. Church teachings are sometimes dismissed as "classist" if they do not fit revolutionary thinking. John Paul has irritated the far left by his insistence that the rights of the individual cannot be surrendered to the collective will of the state. The Vatican decree also protests the practical results of the revolutions that Marxist theory has produced: "Millions of our own contemporaries legitimately yearn to recover those basic freedoms of which they were deprived by totalitarian and atheistic regimes that came to power by violent and revolutionary means, precisely in the name of the liberation of the people."

There is no overestimating the seriousness with which Rome takes the more radical of the liberationists. Says a Vatican official who is familiar with Ratzinger's outlook: "There is the perception of a very grave danger and, equally, of the grave need to take remedial action." John Paul has now laid down a clear standard for political priests to follow. He knows better than anyone else that otherwise the church could face a period of profound, and protracted, conflict.

--By Richard N. Ostling. Reported by Roberto Suro/ Rome

With reporting by Roberto Suro/Rome