With López gone, new emphasis on human
rights
By LESLIE
WIRPSA NCR Staff Bogotá
Crisis and conversion often accompany one another, and those two
elements may be at the heart of the movement of the Colombian bishops
conference to the national forefront on peace and human rights issues.
For years, under the influence of political and ecclesial
hard-liner Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, Colombias bishops were
noted for being among the most conservative in Latin America. But renewed
violence in the wider culture coupled with an easing of tensions in the church
that occurred when López departed for Rome is transforming the ecclesial
leaders, church and secular sources say.
In 1989, Pax Christi Holland issued a human rights report on
Colombia criticizing the bishops for not making a public defense of human
rights despite deep commitments by religious and laity, many of whom died
working for justice and the poor.
Today, however, many Colombians consider the Catholic church one
of the few institutions with broad enough credibility to help mediate an end to
the countrys bloody conflict.
Bishop Jorge Iván Castaño Rubio of Quibdó,
said, Life is endangered in this country. We cannot stand with our arms
crossed and remain silent. Our worst risk is to fail in making a sincere
commitment to solving this. ... No bishop today can say, I choose not to
drink from this cup.
More than 10,000 people were displaced from Castaños
region in February by military bombardments and paramilitary squads.
Castaño said that confronting the violence and the internal displacement
of more than one million Colombians in the last decade has galvanized the
bishops.
Internal displacement was the final shout, he said.
This violence went beyond the kidnappings and killings of government
officials, of politicians, of soldiers. This violence was against the
defenseless poor, the marginalized, who began to die absurdly.
Key to the bishops new activism was the 1995 publication by
the episcopal conference of a detailed investigation of the displaced.
Bishop Gutiérrez Tulio Duque of the diocese of
Apartadó in the violence-riven region of Urabá said that with the
report the bishops jumped forward prophetically on a huge problem.
The bishops subsequently analyzed the factors that force people to
flee and prevent their return: guerrilla violence, paramilitaries, political
exclusion, abandonment and impoverishment in the countryside, economic inequity
and the repercussions of neoliberal economic policies on the poor.
One episcopal conference insider who asked to remain anonymous
said, There are about 10 bishops from conflict zones who get together to
reflect on the reality their people live. I sat in on one of those
conversations, and they speak in ways that years ago would have been described
as revolutionary.
The bishops have played key roles in mediating explosive
situations, like the freeing June 15 of 70 army soldiers held hostage for nine
months by guerrillas from the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia, FARC, in
the southern Caqueta department. The success of that negotiation was attributed
largely to the low-profile pastoral work of Bishop Luis Augusto Castro Quiroga
of Cartagena del Chaira.
The FARC have controlled this zone for years. This is a zone
that has been marginalized and forgotten by the government, Castro said
shortly after the soldiers release. The FARC has filled a political
void here; drug trafficking has filled an economic void.
The bishops have also given impetus to a national reconciliation
commission, seeking advice on peace initiatives from Central American
counterparts such as progressive San Salvador Auxiliary Bishop Gregorio Rosa
Chávez.
For years Hector Torres, editor of the Christian monthly
Utopias, was disillusioned with the response of the Colombian bishops to
violence and poverty. During an interview in June, however, he lavished
superlatives on the conference.
Theyve become involved in human rights, in working for
peace, he said. They now raise their voices in favor of the
impoverished sectors. They criticize the political elites, state corruption.
... They criticize paramilitary groups, promote justice work. Last February,
their plenary assembly focused on the impoverishment of the Colombian
people.
The López appointment to Rome in 1992 contributed to the
shift in the conference. A bishop, speaking off the record, said, Under
López Trujillo, the bishops did things in silence. Now there is a great
deal more freedom, he said.
Episcopal Conference President Alberto Giraldo denied Lopezs
influence. He said the changes in the conference have been germinating
for 30 years, since Vatican II, (the Latin American bishops meetings in)
Medellín and Puebla, through reflection and thanks to lessons
learned.
Church sources said that the pastoral leadership of Giraldo,
archbishop of Popayán, and of Archbishop Pedro Rubiano Sáenz of
Bogotá, Giraldos predecessor as head of the conference, helped to
create an ecclesial climate of renewal.
However, Fr. Fernán González, assistant director of
the Jesuit Center of Investigation and Popular Education, said that with
López Trujillo in Rome, the Colombian bishops began to speak out
without a big cloud hanging over them.
With López now serving as president of the Pontifical
Council for the Family, González said the image of monolithic
unity that he tried to maintain outside of Colombia has disappeared.
Under López, he said the church was worried about
its internal problems -- things like priests he thought were
rebellious. In contrast, Rubiano and Giraldo took the helm,
González said, and turned the vision of the church toward social
problems.
Gonzalez said the bishops now work closely with the Jesuit
organization creating zones free of tension for displaced returnees
and publicly fostering a climate for peace, an attitude favoring
dialogue.
In conflict zones like northwestern Uraba, bishops work with the
Intercongregational Commission for Justice and Peace. The commission, operating
for over a decade without support from the episcopal conference, was created by
superiors of religious orders in Colombia. For years, under the leadership of
Jesuit Fr. Javier Giraldo, the commission was one of the few organizations
documenting human rights crimes.
The church-state divorce that occurred in the early 1990s also
fueled the bishops transformation, Torres said. In a two-year span, the
government modified a long-standing concordat with the Catholic church and
adopted a 1991 reform of the constitution that removed the word
Catholic from the definition of the Colombian state.
The political class let go of its addiction to the episcopal
conference, Torres said. This dovetailed with the growing anguish of the
flock, the influence of a new generation of bishops, the absence of
López and the Pax Christi critique, he said.
All this led the bishops to realize they were living in a
different country, and it was they themselves who needed to change,
Torres said.
National Catholic Reporter, October 24,
1997
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