by Marie Arana
In other words, if Latin America’s most pressing wound was injustice—its gaping abyss between rich and poor, white and brown, privilege and neglect—it was incumbent on the Church as God’s champion to address this flagrantly un-Christian state of affairs. Poverty was not a fatal disease, it was a treatable condition. Oppression was not a misfortune, it was a correctable injustice. As the rationale went: the persecution that had caused widespread indigence in Latin America had been artificially imposed by an unjust society, a twisted mentality, a conquering culture; and if that oppression was not innate but inflicted, it could be reversed. Aesop’s wicked scorpion who spoke for all tyrants—“It’s not my fault, it’s just my nature”—was unacceptable. The Church needed to insert itself into the socioeconomic structures that were generating the suffering and dedicate itself to purging the underlying sin. What was the work of the Church, after all, if not Christian salvation? And what was salvation if not the liberation of man?
It was a revolutionary concept, calling for a priest’s involvement far beyond his traditional role, and it meant to transform the social landscape as profoundly as the conquest had done five hundred years before. This time, however, the change would come from the bottom—from the grass roots, from the weakest among them—rather than from any ruling potentate. And this time, rather than assist conquistadors in cowing the indigenous masses, liberation priests would play a dynamic part in unwinding that scandalous history. If men of the cloth had to join rebellions in order to cure Latin America’s poverty—if they had to arm themselves to win the poor some measure of justice—so be it.
The Vatican’s reaction was swift and damning. The liberation sought by this new breed of Latin American priest was more allied with politics, in its view, than with Christianity. Human liberation, as far as the official church was concerned, was the process of freeing oneself from sin. Not rescuing oneself from oppression. It was the individual soul—not the one in a wider, political sphere—that was central to Vatican concerns. More crucial still, the Church wanted nothing to do with Marxism, which was on a disturbing ascendancy around the globe during the sixties and seventies and which, in its purest form, was anti-Christian—antifaith as a whole—and built on an atheist creed. But Latin America’s activist priests were testing the rules and protocols in ways that asked fundamental questions of faith itself. Where did the Church stand if it didn’t stand for human rights? What was it prepared to do to correct endemic, historic abuse? Was Christianity a faith of words only, or one that lived by its commandments, by the lessons of its greatest teacher, Jesus Christ? At what point in human suffering would priests take action to defend the least among them?
In retrospect, looking back at the whirl of history, it is clear that liberation theology was a product of the Vatican itself. Many in Rome’s hierarchy eventually understood that, and it made the sting of this new theology more potent still. It had begun in January 1959 when Pope John XXIII announced the Second Vatican Council and called for a total overhaul of the Church. (The First Vatican Council had been convoked in 1869 by Pope Pius IX to deal with the threat of—among other things—materialism.) Vatican II’s freer interpretation of the missionary role had a profound impact on the Church and on young priests around the world. But in a fateful fluke of history that few in the Church would have predicted, at precisely the same time—January 1959—Fidel Castro swept into Havana, and the Cuban revolution erupted onto the world stage.
Cuba’s revolution had an electrifying effect on Latin America in the 1960s. The gaping divide between rich and poor had long been a ticking bomb in the region, fueling furies, ready to detonate. The radical transformation of Cuba’s wildly corrupt society—its topsy-turvy conversion to a Communist state—was as inspiring to Latin America’s vast underclass as it was terrifying to the region’s oligarchs and the institutions and powers that supported them. But it shook the foundations of the Latin American church. Cuba had taken it by complete surprise.
And yet it presented an opportunity for the new wave of priests charged with reevangelizing Latin America. Even as Xavier pursued his graduate studies at Cornell, Vatican II had thrown open the Church’s windows, redefining Catholicism anew. Much as Cuba had dispensed with its flagrant dictator, Fulgencio Batista, and its old, corrupt system of rule, the Church had called for a clear-cut separation from hidebound strictures of the past. No longer would it be an institution that dictated from on high so much as a covenant with the faithful, “a pilgrim people of God”: a dynamic body of religious that spoke the language of the people, welcomed innovation, accepted ethnic versions of the faith, and took a sober look at the social and economic problems of its believers. Gone was the fusty old Latin Mass. Gone, for many priests and nuns, were the robes and cassocks. Gone was the notion that it was a sacrilege to infuse Catholicism with one’s folk traditions. Most important, perhaps: gone was the meager consolation that the poor would find their reward in heaven. It was incumbent on the modern Church to abolish human suffering. Now.
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No one could have suspected that the next vogue of Christian thought would come from Latin America. But the region’s oppression, its violence, its institutional injustices, and its historic ties to the Catholic Church had created a perfect opportunity for rethinking the role of religion, for forging a new approach. It was not an easy birth. The unleashing of liberation theology brought with it much consternation for bishops in Rome. Who was this angry creed’s adversary, exactly? And why was it dancing so close to Marxist thought? No one could doubt that Communism was posing a danger to organized religion. But so did a Church that had served power and perpetuated social inequities. In order to make good on Vatican II’s promise of a more just world—in order to keep godless Communism from the door—the Church had decided to address poverty at its root, in the very fields and villages where young priests such as Xavier Albó had set their sights. Liberation theologists, too, had made the poor their target, but they were taking a more activist view. Poverty was the product of racism, a caste society, a systematic oppression, and they were betting that the leveling force of Marxism, for all its pronouncements that religion was the opiate of the people, might have a lesson or two for anyone who would remake Latin America.
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It was a surly age. Priests in Rome continued to argue the fine, doctrinal points even as conflagrations around the world flared and consumed populations: the Vietnam War, the troubles in Laos, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the civil rights struggle in the United States, the fierce protests emerging in Europe, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the assassinations of more than a dozen world figures, the independence cry of thirty-two African nations. The time seemed ripe for making Vatican II into a true reversal of the old order. But the Church was willing to go only so far. Although the new pontiff, Pope Paul VI, had dedicated his life to fighting poverty, he declared liberation theology’s declarations too political, too truculent, too harsh on the power elite that had kept the Church afloat for centuries.
It was not the first time the Church had censured priests for defending the underdogs of Latin America. Five hundred years before, Bartolomé de las Casas had decried the cruelties of conquest so stolidly that the Church ultimately tired of his complaints and consigned him to the margins of history. Priests were expected to follow Rome’s orders, obey bishops, hew to the strict regulations of Spain’s Council of the Indies, which was usually headed by a man of the cloth. Those who didn’t—those who protested on behalf of the conquered—were frowned upon, sidelined, defrocked.
Three hundred years later, in 1810, falling in line with the Spanish Crown was still the default position. It was a rare priest who would wage a campaign against the imposing military-clerical complex that Spain’s government represented. In precisely that year, when Father Miguel Hidalgo gave his desperate “Cry of Dolores” and rode out at the head of a peasant revolution—making him perhaps the first true liberation theologist in Latin America—all the weight of the institutional church fel
l upon him. Initially, his plea for justice was met with an outpouring of support from Mexico’s priests and a vast army of the poor marched out under the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe to protest the abuse that had racked Mexico for centuries. But the pope’s rebuke, memorialized in a fiery encyclical, was adamantly on the other side. As far as the pope was concerned, Spain was a paragon of virtue, its king absolute, its children the sons of God. Rebel priests were the “evil ones.” Revolution, “a plague from a sinister well.” With that blistering encyclical in tow, the viceroy called on his archbishop to marshal the entire Mexican Church against the revolutionaries. The archbishop obliged. Warrior priests were sent out to defend Spain, shouting “Viva la Fe Católica!” and fighting under the banner of the Virgin of Remedios. As one historian commented wryly, it was one virgin battling another in the killing fields of Mexico—summoned by rebel and ruler alike—until Father Hidalgo was hunted down and beheaded, his head thrust on a hook and swung from a rooftop in Guanajuato.
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Ironically, 150 years later, by virtue of another pope’s hand, Church dissidents were once again emboldened. Vatican II had spurred a fresh generation of Latin American priests to aspire to make a difference. There was no doubt what their objective would be. In countries that held the largest indigenous and black populations—Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Guatemala, Brazil, Venezuela among them—more than 80 percent of the people lived below the poverty line. Disease, hunger, misery, illiteracy, crime were endemic, and yet governments had proven incapable of addressing the racism that was so clearly at the root of these problems. Something had to be done. Three years after the declaration of Vatican II, a group of thirty theologians called for a conference in Medellín to discuss a new way to think about Catholicism. They called it “the preferential option for the poor.” If the destitute were favored by God, as Scripture made very clear, then to place them at the center of the Church’s work was to fulfill a biblical imperative. In the waning years of the twentieth century, in a hemisphere filled with staggeringly impoverished children of God, there seemed to be no end to the souls the Church might serve.
The world in which Xavier moved in the 1970s and 1980s was populated by those who would bring the philosophy of liberation to the favelas and barriadas, the campo and pueblo—the most desperate neighborhoods of Latin America. Among them was the Franciscan Leonardo Boff of Brazil, a resolute champion of this new thinking who openly supported Communists, excoriated the United States as a terrorist state, and accused the Vatican of being a rigid, fundamentalist dynasty. More than once, the guardians of Rome—especially Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger—censured Boff for his insolence. Ratzinger, who would go on to become Pope Benedict XVI, complained that liberation theology had produced nothing but “rebellion, division, dissent, offense, and anarchy.” Its advocates were nothing less than architects of chaos.
In that supposedly ruinous company was Pedro Casaldáliga, a Brazilian bishop who had dedicated himself to defending field laborers and, for it, was targeted for assassination by hit men answering to the rich landowners of Mato Grosso. (His vicar, in a case of mistaken identity, was killed instead.) Casaldáliga, like Boff, was eventually dressed down by Pope John Paul II for sympathizing too strongly with the Left and for supporting Daniel Ortega’s anti-American regime in Nicaragua. If Communism was the enemy, no aspect of it would be tolerated. The Hobbesian choice was to leave things as they were, which meant that poverty was the only thing on offer.
Passions ran so high in Brazil that the military soon mounted a campaign of violent oppression against anyone, including liberation theologists, who opposed or criticized the country’s social policies. Eliminating freedoms one by one, army generals created a special arm of the secret police to monitor the Church’s political activities—arresting, detaining, even murdering priests for their work in the poorest favelas of the land. And yet, one after another—in Brazil as well as elsewhere in the Americas—Xavier’s young friends were drawn to the prospect of social revolutions.
In answer, the Church began a systematic purge of these unruly ranks. In addition to Boff, Casaldáliga, and numerous others who had come up through Xavier’s ranks, Pope John Paul II defrocked two more: the Jesuit intellectuals Fernando and Ernesto Cardenal, brothers from a wealthy Managua family, who fought openly and unrepentantly against Nicaragua’s grinding oppression. For decades, too, the Vatican treated Peru’s liberation theologist Gustavo Gutiérrez with contempt, accusing him of undermining the Church’s authority and twisting faith into an instrument of rebellion. In Colombia, the Marxist priest Camilo Torres, who joined the guerrilla fighters of the National Liberation Army and was killed in action, had been warned many times by the Church that he risked discharge. His only answer: “If Jesus were alive today, He would be a guerrilla.” But one by one, liberation priests were disavowed, suspended a divinis, expelled.
Xavier might have joined his fellow priests’ more militant efforts, but he never did. He participated in debates with liberation activists. He observed their growing radicalism, was witness to their mounting fury. For him, it was not a question of sympathies—all of which he shared—but of objectives. How best to achieve the social conscience that was sorely needed? Transient political ambitions seemed to pale in comparison to the one fundamental truth that could transform this battered corner of the world: racial bigotry was simply wrong, corrosive, abhorrent. You couldn’t convince others of this through coercion or violence; it was possible only via concord and affiliation. He hoped for a true beacon of reason—akin to Gandhi’s or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s or Nelson Mandela’s—that might change the fabric of Latin America by revealing the inhumanity of its age-old prejudices. In the end, it seemed simple: if each of us wants dignity and justice for ourselves, surely we will want these things for others. The calculus was obvious. It was Jesus’s most potent lesson. Reasonable minds would prevail.
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In a bellicose age, Xavier had chosen peace. As he saw it, the sword had held enough dominion in this part of the world. Judging from Potosí and the wreckage it had left behind, rapacity had been Latin America’s ruin, too. More than anything, he hoped the Church was not a third curse. Like the Indians he had come to know, he would place one stone on another, keep his head down, work. He founded an organization devoted to the welfare of farmers. He worked to instill the Quechua and Aymara people with pride in their language, their history, their long cultural tradition. He installed, by sheer will and improvisation, schools for the young, conferences on ethnic pride, commissions on peace and human rights. He continued to assist the most humble communities, whose deep spirituality sustained him.
Into these quiet convictions, by sheer chance, stepped a priest who would become one of Xavier’s closest friends and confidants. He was Luís Espinal—Lucho, as he was known to his colleagues—a fellow Catalan who had chosen a far more militant path. He had arrived in La Paz just as Xavier was organizing CIPCA (the Center for Research and Promotion of Farmers), and the two understood that they had much in common: as Catalans, as Jesuits, as men devoted to the betterment of the world around them. Lucho was a poet, journalist, filmmaker, and critic, a priest whose impulse to report events as he saw them led to an activism more in line with liberation theologists of his time. When Lucho spoke about the urgent need to be more aggressive, importunate, shrill, Xavier listened. When environmental disasters occurred, they sprang to address them together. When Xavier produced testimonials from child laborers in the cornfields, Lucho publicized them on his television program, En Carne Viva—In Living Flesh. When Che Guevara was hunted down and killed in Bolivia by special forces and their American military advisors in 1967, Lucho hiked into the cordillera to interview what was left of Che’s guerrillas. When Salvador Allende was bombed and killed in his presidential palace, Lucho flew to Santiago, Chile, to walk among the corpses and pray. More and more radicalized by his work—especially with the region’s silver miners—Lucho became a spokesman for the abuses. In his qu
est to improve conditions throughout the country, he cofounded the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights.
In 1977, already a prominent figure in workers’ rights, Lucho joined a hunger strike staged by indigenous women whose husbands had been imprisoned for demanding better conditions in the mines. Out of sympathy for the Quechua and Aymara women, Xavier also joined the strike. Not long after—and presumably because of his activism—Lucho was kidnapped by paramilitaries of the ultra-right-wing government of President Hugo Banzer, tortured, and then killed, his naked corpse flung to one side of the road to Chacaltaya. It was later learned that Operation Condor, the wider campaign of state terror condoned by Henry Kissinger and funded by the United States, had purged him along with sixty thousand other Latin Americans suspected of being “dangerous subversives.” Xavier was never quite the same after that. Most vivid in his mind as he looks back on the long days of that miners’ strike—the racking hunger, the hard floor of the newspaper offices where he kept vigil with the prisoners’ aggrieved wives—is the fleeting figure of a man who came to look on the two gaunt gringo priests amid the flock of starving Indians. His name was Evo Morales, a mere wisp of a youth with ink-black hair and the grim look of determination. Morales would go on to become the first Aymara president of Bolivia—the second indigenous American in five hundred years to be elected to rule his people.
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If liberation theologists thought they had found the way to rescue the poor and win souls to their side, there were other parties intensely committed to that goal. In the decades between 1960 and 1990—in that volatile, bloody-minded era when liberals, dictators, and generals sparred to dominate the arena—no fewer than four spiritual initiatives vied for the soul of Latin America. The Roman Catholic Church declared it had seen the light: it would mend its ways and dedicate itself to addressing poverty through its new Vatican II reforms. Liberation theologists decided with a passion approaching belligerence that they would fight established powers—governments, mining corporations, exporters, banks, even the Church, if need be—to protect the powerless. Atheists, in terrorist insurgencies that tore through the hemisphere from Nicaragua to Peru, sought to win adherents by erasing religion altogether. And in the 1980s, as indigent communities longed for non-Spanish, non-Catholic, non-Communist, genuinely liberating places of worship, Pentecostalist and Evangelical Protestants began to pour into Latin America, eager to vie for the prize. The brown, black, the urban flotsam as well as the rural poor, began to crowd those houses of God, half of them yearning for ancient days when religion had been a tribe’s binding glue, half in protest against a Church that was party to an old invasion. Most seductive about these new Protestant religions were precepts the brown populations could well understand: the faithful might speak in tongues, rituals could heal the sick, exorcisms would be necessary, prophets might walk among us. The Protestant evangelical experience, in other words, promised a life full of miracles, signs, and wonders; not a dour paying down of sins. More persuasive, perhaps, it argued that with faith and a strong commitment to the virtuous life, a poor man could move up the socioeconomic ladder. A pauper might become a prince.