http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/01/AR2005050100821.html
An Abiding Faith in Liberation Theology
Since Vatican's Condemnation, Movement Veterans in Brazil Have Adapted to Times
By Monte Reel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, May 2, 2005; Page A12
SAO PAULO, Brazil -- Magno Marcieta, 28, hopes to become a priest next year,
taking 11 years of quiet religious study into the poverty-stricken streets of
the country with more Roman Catholics than any other.
Because he's a dedicated student, he knows his Saint Augustine and his Thomas
Aquinas. Because he's from Brazil, he also knows his liberation theology.
Magno Marcieta says Brazilian seminarians are still inspired by the
liberation theologians criticized in the 1980s by the Vatican cardinal who is
now pope. (By Monte Reel -- The Washington Post)
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The movement, which took root throughout Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s,
focused on helping the poor and oppressed, even if that meant confronting
political powers. In the 1980s, it was blasted as a "fundamental threat" to the
church by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who has now become Pope Benedict XVI. As a
result of such internal criticism, the movement gradually faded.
In Brazil, though, liberation theology is far from dead.
These days, instead of preaching class struggle and defying dictators, many
veterans of the movement have adapted their rhetoric and role to the times.
They work to promote environmental conservation or women's rights; they help
the homeless and AIDS patients.
And while some young priests have been drawn to the fashionable charismatic
Catholic movement, others say they still draw inspiration from the older
advocates of liberation theology who were once prominent in Brazil.
"The students here really can't avoid liberation theology, even if they want
to," said Marcieta, a student at the Catholic University of Sao Paulo, who
spends mornings steeped in religious volumes and journals. "Many of our
professors are of the generation when liberation theology was dominant, and the
reading lists include the books that shaped their lives."
When Ratzinger became pope, some observers predicted it would be the death
knell for liberation theology. The movement has been slipping from prominence
since the mid-1980s, when Ratzinger wrote the first Vatican document formally
denouncing it and prohibited some of its leading proponents -- including
Brazilian Leonardo Boff-- from speaking publicly.
But the views of young seminarians such as Marcieta make it clear that the
movement has survived, although in a slightly different form. When he was 10,
Marcieta attended the baptism of a family friend in Imperatriz, his home town
in northern Brazil. The same day in the same town, the Rev. Josimo Tavares, a
priest who worked on behalf of landless peasants in a region bloodied by
conflicts over property rights, was shot dead.
Marcieta said he never forgot how the church suddenly filled with townspeople
mourning the loss of someone they called a martyr. On that day -- May 10, 1986
-- he said he formed his concept of what a priest should be.
Tavares was one of hundreds of priests throughout Latin America who staked
their futures on what they called a "preferential option for the poor." Many
believed the church should challenge political systems in countries where
poverty was widespread, taking the side of the poor and fighting against
governments they considered oppressive.
During the 1960s and 1970s, military dictatorships ruled much of Latin America,
including Brazil, Argentina and Chile. The region's anticommunist rulers often
clashed with radical priests, whose confrontational preoccupation with class
struggle had Marxist overtones.
In the Vatican, liberation theology also fell out of favor. Ratzinger,
considered a liberal reformer in his younger years, became point man for Pope
John Paul II on the issue after he was named chairman of the church's doctrinal
watchdog agency in 1981. He called outspoken priests to Rome and censured them
on grounds that they were abandoning the church's spiritual role for
inappropriate socioeconomic activism.
Many bishops seen as left-wing were replaced with more conservative leaders,
and outspoken advocates such as Boff were silenced. Boff, a Franciscan friar
and an editor at Vozes, the major Catholic magazine and publishing house in
Brazil, was ordered to undergo nearly a year of penitent silence and repeatedly
banned from teaching or publishing his work.
As liberation theology fell out of favor, the charismatic Catholic movement,
which infuses evangelical vigor into church services through energetic songs
and advocates individual fulfillment, began to gain popularity. Today
charismatic Masses attract thousands of high-spirited worshipers in Brazilian
cities.
"I guess I'm a dinosaur . . . someone from the last century," said Fernando
Altmeyer, an unrepentant liberation theologian who left the priesthood to marry
but still works as the Catholic University ombudsman here. "Today in Brazil,
the emphasis is on the charismatic priests. But maybe it's like 'Jurassic
Park,' " he mused. "Maybe pterodactyls can come back again."
According to some Catholic observers, though, liberation theology has evolved
to avoid going extinct.
In the post-Cold War world, proponents have shifted their focus and vocabulary
away from class struggle. Boff, who left the priesthood in 1992, now devotes
much of his writing and speaking about ecological concerns. Other liberation
theologians champion Catholic women's rights and racial justice.
The Rev. Julio Lancelotti, 58, who works in a gritty industrial neighborhood in
Sao Paulo, said he was keeping alive the "preferential option for the poor"
that was the core of liberation theology by helping homeless people and running
a shelter for children born with the AIDS virus.
"It is important to work with them, to let them know . . . they are also
children of God," he said. "We are thinking of the church from their point of
view. That principle is still alive."
In the rural provinces of the Amazon, liberation theology is also being applied
through the church's activism in land conflicts, which continue to spark
violence. An American nun, Dorothy Stang, was murdered earlier this year in the
northern state of Para, where she fought property holders to secure land for
poor peasants.
Bishop Pedro Casadaliga, 77, from the eastern state of Mato Grasso, said he had
long followed the tenets of liberation theology. In the 1980s, he recounted in
a telephone interview, he was called to Rome to meet with church officials who
were alarmed by his support of Nicaraguan revolutionaries and his public
statements that powerful countries had "sucked the blood" from Latin America.
Casadaliga survived the scolding and continued his church work until this year,
when he said he was granted a request for retirement. Then he added a bitter
comment about Benedict, his theological nemesis.
"I think the pope should ask for retirement as well," Casadaliga said. Still,
he tempered his criticism with hope, saying it was too early to tell how the
pope might respond to the new strain of liberation theology. He also noted that
Benedict's first speeches have struck harmonious chords aimed at unifying the
church -- even among members like himself who fell out of favor decades ago and
remain at odds with the official line.
"When [Benedict] was young, he had very progressive ideas," Casadaliga said.
"Maybe he will open his mind again."
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