America in focus as bishops, theologians
confer at Notre Dame
By PAMELA SCHAEFFER
NCR Staff South Bend, Ind.
A clash of views over who should serve as patron of the Americas
symbolized at a mid-October conference a broader conflict of visions for the
future of the church in the Americas.
The conference, sponsored by the theology department at the
University of Notre Dame, brought together bishops and theologians from the two
hemispheres to talk about Pope John Paul IIs document Ecclesia in
America. The document, signed Jan. 22, during the popes five-day
trip to Mexico, served as his formal response to the 1997 Synod for
America.
The pope asked church leaders to imagine the two continents as one
America as a way of promoting solidarity.
It caught my imagination, John Cavadini, chairman of
the theology department, said by way of explaining his decision to sponsor the
conference. The three-day event, with more than 25 speakers, was first in a
series of millennium events planned by the department.
The pope has proposed Our Lady of Guadalupe as patron of
America, calling for a cross-hemispheric feast, and many conference
speakers followed that lead.
However, Bishop Gregorio Rosa Chávez, auxiliary of El
Salvador, proposed that the martyred Archbishop Oscar Romero be named patron as
a way of assuring that the church would remain focused on social and political
realities, particularly the needs of the poor. Romero, outspoken critic of the
Salvadoran military, was shot in 1981 while celebrating Mass.
While the pope has made urgent pleas for attention to a host of
social problems in Latin America, describing them as social sins which
cry to heaven, he eschews the social and political strategies that marked
leftist struggles against oppressive right-wing governments of the 1970s and
80s.
Calling for a new evangelization in the democratized
political environment of Latin America of today, the pope stresses conversion
based on a personal encounter with Christ and intercontinental solidarity as
basis for church renewal.
In the past, the pope said in the document, a pastoral
strategy directed almost exclusively to meeting peoples material
needs in Latin America may have left unsatisfied peoples
hunger for God, making them vulnerable to aggressive proselytizing
by Protestant religious groups.
But Jesuit Fr. Jon Sobrino of El Salvador, noted liberation
theologian, said the poverty that fed the uprisings of the 1980s has far from
disappeared. Sobrino was among several speakers who noted that disparities of
wealth in a globalized economy might, in fact, have grown worse.
The conservative vision and leadership that characterize the
church today is unlikely to result in renewal, Sobrino said. The vision that is
needed, he said in a powerful speech that ended the conference, belongs to the
church of 30 years ago, symbolized by a meeting of Latin American bishops in
the Colombian city of Medellín.
That 1968 conference was a turning point for a church moving away
from its traditional alliance with military and economic powers and becoming an
outspoken enemy of institutionalized oppression and violence. Liberation
theology was its intellectual fodder; justice in service to the poor was its
rallying force. The Vatican throughout the 1980s waged a counter-attack against
the model of church forged at Medellín, silencing theologians, warning
priests to stay out of politics and appointing conservative bishops.
What kind of church is able to promote those things:
solidarity, communion, encounter with Christ? Sobrino asked, referring to
the synods priorities. The church we need for the future is the
church we dont have today, the church of Medellín. That church was
real. It was the church around which martyrs began to flourish.
Martyrs, he said -- not only Bishop Romero, but women,
children, elderly people who were massacred in Guatemala, El Salvador,
the nameless, crucified people of our times, confront us with honesty;
they interrogate us. That is why it is so important that we in the church have
martyrs ... because the church has a problem with being challenged.
There was also a fantastic generation of bishops,
Sobrino said, who with the sisters, priests and theologians really tried
to do service to the poor, the victims of oppression.
Liturgy, canon law, those are spaces we created to defend
ourselves from reality, he said by way of criticizing the internal focus
of many church leaders today.
Sobrino narrowly missed becoming a victim of an army massacre in
November 1989 that took the lives of six of his Jesuit colleagues, their
housekeeper and her daughter at Central American University in San Salvador.
Sobrino was teaching a theology course in Thailand at the time.
Chávez, sometimes described as a bishop in the tradition of
Romero, and Robert Ellsberg, editor of Orbis Press, echoed Sobrinos
sentiments in formal responses to his talk.
The desire to risk all that marked the church at
Medellín, Chávez said, is necessary for change and transformation
in the church. The powers of this world would like to bury the martyrs,
but the church cannot live and be true to its mission without being
persecuted.
Noting that Romeros name was absent from the popes
document on America, appearing not even in a footnote, Ellsberg said the
document lacked concrete connection to reality. All the references
to encounter with Christ, to solidarity, lack specificity, he said,
without a reference to Romero.
Other bishops, though also regarded as progressive, focused more
positively on the popes agenda. The mission will overcome tensions
in the church and take us forward, said Bishop Luiz Demétrio
Valentini of Brazil. Bishop Alvaro Ramazzini Imeri of Guatemala said church
leaders in Latin America should not take for granted that the faith has
been presented or understood. Many Catholics, ignoring the gospel call to
serve the poor, say bishops and priests are only worried about politics,
historical memories, political prisoners. Protestant evangelizers make it
easy, he said: Tithe, pay your offering and you will be saved.
Many Catholics think of themselves as good Catholics, but
dont want to get involved in their neighborhoods, he said. We
need to help them find a relationship between the Eucharist, Christ and the
poor.
Other speakers focused more directly on solutions to social
problems cited by the pope: the drug trade, political corruption, violence, the
arms race, racial discrimination, social inequalities and environmental
destruction.
These sins are the sign of a deep crisis caused by the loss
of a sense of God, the pope wrote. He also said a global economy driven
by neoliberalism -- the cultivation of unfettered markets -- has
worsened the plight of the poor.
Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute, disagreed. He
said an economic atmosphere favorable to the creation of many new small
businesses is an urgent matter for the liberation of the poor.
Better than to give the poor bread is to help them launch
bakeries and other firms, he said.
Jesuit Fr. Douglas Marcouiller, economist from Boston College,
called for Christians to press for labor changes where economic
policies oppress workers on both sides of the border.
Conference talks were interspersed with small-group sessions,
where participants considered strategies for building solidarity, such as
twinning parishes and dioceses, developing networks at various
levels, sponsoring immersion experiences and interhemispheric
conferences to link families, promoting cybercommunities.
If you could start a movement, Americans together could be
the saviors of the world, said Bishop Jorge Jiménez of
Colombia.
U.S. bishops surveys already show a high degree of
involvement in Latin America, said Daniel Lizárragaz, interim director
of the Secretariat for Latin America, National Conference of Catholic Bishops
in Washington. But, he added, Mutuality is the key.
We have lots of problems in the United States, he
said, and the faith-based perspectives of Latin Americans would balance our
secular perspective.
Cardinal Francis George of Chicago said in a plenary address that
cross-cultural encounters would make better Christians of all Americans.
I dont know Christ nearly as well unless I know a Nigerian
Christian, he said. My sense of Christ is incomplete until I have a
global vision equal to the mission and identity of the church itself.
National Catholic Reporter, October 29,
1999
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