by Marie Arana
When his newly won Bolivian friends asked him about his faith, Xavier simply told them about his own teacher: a man who began in a barn surrounded by animals and ended on a hillside surrounded by thieves. When his Jesuit brothers asked him about his work, he answered that he was trying to find how a country might heal its soul. He didn’t specify what country he meant, exactly.
CHAPTER 12
HOUSE OF GOD
Politics is in crisis, very much in crisis in Latin America. . . . It is more sick than well.
—Pope Francis I, 2018
By the time Jesuits were banished from Christian life at the end of the eighteenth century, it had become clear to many colonials—white, brown, black, and mestizo—that the Old European allegory about Latin America was false: the devil was not a godless Indian; the devil was a ruthless Spaniard. The view of colonialism as the personification of evil began to flourish among those born in the New World, product of the seed that Bartolomé de las Casas had planted centuries before, and it grew now with rebellious force, urged on by echoes of the “Black Legend” in Europe. Creole aristocrats—educated, wordly, savvy about the hemisphere they inhabited—chafed at their reduced status, stung by laws put in place by the Council of the Indies. They were white. They were sons of Spaniards. But because they had not been born in Spain, they wielded no clout. They were barred by law from holding office, or making laws, or taking positions of power. And though they ran thriving haciendas, businesses, and mines, they could not profit fully from their own successes. At the very top of any institution, whether it be mercantile, judicial, or social (and that included the Church), sat an overseer—an emissary, an import, a parvenu—from the madre patria. Very often, the mother country did not send its best and brightest, leaving sophisticated Creoles to stew that they had to answer to inept foreigners. Here, then, was the smoldering cinder that spurred the wars of independence. When it flared in the late 1700s and burst into full flame in 1810, revolution sped like a lit wick from the Río Plata to the Rio Grande, igniting the hemisphere and mowing down millions in war’s hellfire. Throughout the carnage, the Church sided with Spain. This was no surprise, since priests had marched in with conquistadors, popes had allied with kings, and the evidence was there for all to see in every plaza central: the most colossal, most glorious church always sat next to the governor’s mansion, and the bishop’s house was just steps away.
When the Latin American revolutions were over and Spain was pushed back across the Atlantic, the destruction was cataclysmal. Entire cities had been wiped from the map. Civilian populations had been reduced by a third. Spain’s expeditionary forces were virtually obliterated. In Venezuela alone, there were more human losses than in the United States Revolution and Civil War combined. The king’s armies limped off to their battered ships, taking governors, archbishops, and bishops with them, creating a vacuum in Latin American leadership that would leave it in virtual chaos for generations to come. Whole missions were emptied out. Churches and convents that hadn’t been destroyed in the fury fell into disrepair. There simply weren’t enough Creole priests to maintain the vast webwork of Catholic enterprises that peppered the American landscape. In smaller towns, locals took over churches, unsure what to do with them. Indians in rural areas lost contact with the faith entirely. As whites swooped in to grab all the power and property the Spaniards had left behind, the darker races were left to get on as best they could.
No one paid much attention to how much control the Church had lost in those humbler communities. Generations passed without any record of their religion or their spiritual practices. The scattering of ordained Creole priests that remained tended to cling to the urban centers, the familiar settings, the whiter congregations, the bustling neighborhoods they knew. Complicating this, the governments of the new independent republics—as tumultuous and disordered as they were—were wary of engaging the Church in anything that smacked of a retreat to the old, colonial ways. In some areas of Central America, anticlerical governments moved to pare church influence to a minimum and curb the old tradition of acting as the Vatican’s collection agency. Mexico, for instance, seized and nationalized all church property in the late 1800s, separated the Church and the state, and then had to live with the consequences: its clergy became radicalized, fighting the government at every turn, until Mexico’s legislators—weary of the resistance—cast all foreign priests out of the country and decreed that only the Mexican born could be preachers. The Guatemalan response was even more austere: an edict rigorously restricted the number of Catholic priests to a maximum of one hundred for the entire country. It was meant as a temporary corrective, but it became the rule for more than seventy years.
Throughout this period, the upper class and upwardly mobile remained loyal to the Church. Ironically, with whiteness the most obvious ticket to power, flaunting one’s high quotient of Hispanicity—and, by association, Catholicism—became an instrument of power in postrevolutionary Spanish America. To be dominant, it was essential to be white, wear a crucifix, sport one’s religion on one’s sleeve. But, in general and in sheer numbers, the Latin American Church was in grave crisis. Subjugated even more cruelly by postrevolutionary bosses than they ever had been by the Spanish, the campesinos who lived in dire poverty and were expected to do the lion’s share of hard labor began to revisit their ancestors’ indigenous rituals with a vengeance born of resentment. To be sure, their spiritual practices had always harbored vestiges of an ancient past, even under the harshest policies of colonial rule. But left to their own devices, rural churches allowed the worship of nature and idols, creating a highly syncretic religion—a fusion of Christian and tribal beliefs—unlike anything the Church had ever seen: a Virgin’s image was likely in the shape of a mountain—a nod to the Earth Mother, Pachamama—with a sun crowning her head and a half moon cradling her feet. Or, in festivals commemorating Christian holidays, processions were led by men dressed as devils, with masks that bore the unmistakeable fangs of Coatlicue or Ai Apaec.
So it was that the revolutions that pulsed through the hemisphere had the unintended consequence of redefining Latin American Christianity for the masses. Eager to do away with the severities—the Christian obsession with sin, for instance, which had always been alien and imponderable—the darker races restored old legends more tolerant of human weakness, beliefs more aligned with the natural world around them. Caribbean blacks returned to the voodoo and trances of Santería, Yoruba, or Mandinga: to worshiping an abundance of orisha gods who corresponded to life as they knew it. The Indians reembraced their divinities—the earth, sun, and sea—and man’s role as a creature of nature.
From the pampas of Argentina to the Yucatán jungle, the people left behind by the fleeing Christian missions began to retrofit faith to ancestral cosmogonies. In the isolated Mexican sierra of Nayarit, for example, the Coras, the last tribe of Mexicans to be evangelized by force, had not seen a priest since the Jesuit exodus of 1767. They remained cut off from Christianity for two centuries until a Franciscan wandered into the mesa in 1969 and resumed preaching the Gospel. What he found was that, in the course of two hundred years of solitude, the Coras had returned to worshiping the Sun. But, to his surprise, the Sun God was now Jesus Christ, complete with passion, crucifixion, and resurrection. Some Indians were even capable of reciting whole portions of the Mass in something that resembled Latin. Judas, an incomprehensible figure to the Coras—unlike any god they had ever had—no longer existed, but his tribe, the Jews, had become los borrados, “the erased ones,” near-naked men smeared in ash and mud, and then brightly painted, sporting the snouts of beasts. In the spring ritual that still persists to this day, the Coras assume that guise, playing the part of Jesus’s crucifiers, whom they believe to have been the Jews. To the loud, persistent beat of drums, men dressed as devils race through villages in pursuit of a boy representing the Christ Sun. Bringing the underworld to life in ways that Christian liturgy cannot, the Cora ritual is a lesson in forbearance: here are the bl
ack sheep of the world—a racing flock of human badness—that, for all their villainy, are fallible, human, just like us. Celebrating wickedness with a prodigal consumption of peyote, the borrados dance their way into night until the Easter sun rises, at which point they plunge into the river, wash off the ash and the evil, and, like Christ, are reborn.
* * *
Xavier Albó did not know it quite yet, but, as with the vanguard of priests that had penetrated those highlands four hundred years before, he was expected to start the Christian process all over again. Even as he contemplated his future, wondering how best to serve people with clearly observable, robust beliefs of their own, he was joined by a wave of foreign priests, who, like him, had been shunted to Latin America to spearhead a Catholic rebirth. Strolling through sleepy mountain towns in Bolivia and Ecuador, or corralled within mission walls, he was unaware he was in the thick of a worldwide initiative. He didn’t realize it fully until he was at Cornell University seeking his doctorate in the late 1960s, when a worldwide peace movement was loosed at full throttle, and liberation theology was being born. The Church was reinventing itself in ways it had not anticipated.
Like sixteenth-century bishops thrust into a volatile hemisphere, twentieth-century friars were expected to intervene, stanch the ebb, fix things. But circumstances were very different now: the Church had considerably less political power. Latin Americans were hardly new to Christianity: they had absorbed it before, imagined its possibilities, tailored it to their uses. The work of priests this time around was not to impose faith so much as to rescue it—to reenter a world abandoned for more than a century and win it back with a gentler approach. It was either this or lose Latin America to Protestantism, evangelicals, atheism, agnosticism, apathy. With little more than a vague game plan to gain believers, Catholic missionaries from around the world, most of them survivors of a chastening World War, went about the work of immersing themselves in local cultures, insinuating themselves into the communities. It was evangelization of a different stripe.
In the cities, the elite were carrying on Christian traditions much as their Spanish forefathers had done before them. Children attended Catholic schools, parents baptized their infants, the dead were given Christian burials, those passing a church dutifully crossed themselves. But in the wider ambit of rural Latin America, campesinos had recast faith itself, making the life of the spirit more relevant than it ever had been under colonial powers. Religion was now community’s full partner—a reason to gather together, share the work, assist the frail—even if that religion could no longer be called Catholicism. The ringleaders of this adapted Christianity were less priests than shamans; they celebrated solstices, the changing seasons, the harvests; they held indigenous fiestas, complete with native customs, even blood rituals. They returned to the abiding principle that worshiping nature was the binding glue of their civilization, a far more comprehensible belief system than anything the white men had taught them. If Jesus and Mary remained in that constellation of holies, it was not as redeemer and virgin but as the ever-present Sun and Earth.
As the Catholic orders of Europe undertook their reconquest of Latin America in the 1950s, seeking to restore and strengthen their hold, they were not alone. Maryknoll missionaries from the United States, having shifted their focus from China to Latin America, flooded into the region but found no ordained priests in the old Spanish churches that punctuated the rural landscape. What they found instead were spiritual chieftains who were startlingly resentful of the intrusion, openly skeptical. The North Americans were seen as usurpers, invaders, modern-day subjugators. Things got worse when those missionaries tried to take over the properties the prerevolutionary Church had left behind. The Indians refused to give them keys to the buildings, or grant access to abandoned schools, or even allow them to see prized images of patron saints the locals had been safeguarding for generations.
There was no doubt about it: the Catholic Church was in a deeply pitched battle to regain the hearts and minds of some fifty million indigenous souls. From the Vatican on down to the most modest mission, the Church’s reentry was seen as a titanic struggle, as urgent as Pope Alexander VI’s audacious campaign to convert all the godless heathen of the New World. More conscious of cultural sensibilities now—aware that the Church needed to shape itself to the people and not the other way around—Catholic missionaries poured into backwood and hinterland, prepared to salvage their losses. In Mexico, where church-state relations had been inflamed for more than a century, as well as in Uruguay, which had long broken diplomatic relations with the Vatican, missionaries swarmed in with the newfound conviction that they would do it right this time.
Integral to this new approach was the concept of “inculturation,” a tacit understanding that in the process of evangelization, the priests themselves were being evangelized. If they were doing it right—learning the language and customs, deeply understanding the people—they were entering rather than altering cultures, winning through camaraderie rather than by force. To that end, priests expanded their evangelizing army by recruiting Indian and mixed-race “catechists,” native laypeople who would act as avatars: teaching the faith, tending the sick, carrying out simple church duties. The Church would win locals with locals, create a human tsunami of Catholic conversion produced by the population itself. The strategy was not unfamiliar. It had been applied five centuries before when Franciscans had used the Nahuas to help convert the rebellious tribes. But it had never been done with the large-scale determination that the Church now marshaled.
There was much to set right. A stark system of discrimination had been afoot in the region’s cities for centuries, and it seemed impossible to correct. Every day there was another affront to the darker, humbler races: a Quechua in native dress turned away from a Lima movie theater; a Yaqui arrested in Mexico City for wandering a white neighborhood; a Mayan prodigy refused admission at a prestigious Catholic school; an Aymara holy man denied a role in a church. “We affirm that both religions, Aymara and Christian, teach love and respect for life,” a group of religious leaders announced at a conclave of priests in Bolivia. “These are not religions of hate. However, by its actions, the Christian religion is a contradiction. It divides. It puts no confidence in native leadership. We are its right arms, but not the head. A theological colonialism still reigns.” And so it seemed. The wave of European and American evangelizers had brought a new sensibility to the task, but they continued to be as foreign as they had ever been, internationally funded, an invasion of sorts. Little appeared to have changed since the priest Pedro de Quiroga had gone home to Spain in 1563 with a Peruvian’s bitter testimony in hand: “We cannot persuade ourselves to believe anything you preach or say, because in everything, you always have lied and deceived us.”
As time progressed and very different civil wars, revolutions, and plagues of terrorism convulsed Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, the missionaries, far more attuned now to the populations they were serving—far more inculturated than their predecessors—found themselves embracing the militant politics of the locals. Bartolomé de las Casas’s outrage had rattled down the centuries to foment a twentieth-century insurgency. This was liberation theology in tooth and claw, and it exploded onto the Latin American stage with a force that surprised the Vatican and spurred a crisis of identity that still bedevils the Church.
WINDS OF A MOVEMENT
I come from a continent in which more than sixty percent of the population lives in a state of poverty, and eighty-two percent of those find themselves in extreme poverty. . . . How do you tell the poor that God loves them?
—Father Gustavo Gutiérrez, Theology of Liberation, 1971
When Xavier Albó received his doctorate in anthropology from Cornell in 1969 and returned to Bolivia, determined to use his knowledge for the betterment of the American Indian, he was thirty-four years old. He had spent more than half his life in Bolivia, almost twenty years of it preparing to serve the Society of Jesus. He had watched liberatio
n theology emerge among his cohort, a will-o-the-wisp notion, a fledgling concept that corresponded to his sympathies but had yet to spread its wings. That same year, Rubem Alves, a young priest from Minas Gerais, who had been driven out of Brazil by a violent clampdown on suspected Communists, completed his doctoral thesis at Princeton University. Titled “Toward a Theology of Liberation,” it was among the first instances that phrase had been used in scholarly circles in the United States. But it was hardly a cogent expression of what had been aswirl in South America for some time—it was merely a wan declaration that Brazil’s poor deserved better from the Church. Alves himself found his paper wanting; Princeton gave it the lowest possible grade.
Coincidentally enough, at about the same time, Gustavo Gutiérrez, a Peruvian who had completed his ecclesiastical studies in Europe, organized a conference of priests in the bustling Peruvian fishing port of Chimbote, bringing together those who, for years, had been discussing a new approach for the region. He called it: “Hacia una teología de la liberación,” Toward a Theology of Liberation. Gutiérrez’s definition of this new movement, bolstered by the surge of Socialist passions sweeping the hemisphere during that tumultuous year, was bold, clear, and had strong implications for a priest’s role: “If faith is a commitment to God and fellow man, and if theology is the understanding of that faith, it’s not the theory that matters. It’s the commitment. It’s action. A theology of liberation intends to forge an active relationship between man’s earthly emancipation—social, political, economic—and the Kingdom of God.”