The Emergence of Liberation Theology

For those Americans who came of age in the middle of the last century, “Liberation” as a rallying cry in public life did not begin with civil rights, women’s liberation, gay liberation, or any of the other movements that invoked liberation as its goal. Already in the 1940s, the war against the Nazis was cast as a crusade to liberate the people of Western Europe. During the cold war, we spoke of communist Eastern Europe as “captive nations,” as indeed they were. In Latin America, however, the United States supported an array of military dictators and fascist governments in order to preserve its own hemispheric hegemony. Conversely, the United States opposed liberation movements that threatened the economic, political, and military interests of the American imperium. What we feared most was a communist revolution on this side of the Atlantic.

Thus, when Liberation Theology developed from within the (mostly) Catholic churches of Latin America, it was of more than merely religious interest and of more than merely regional concern. It was a major episode in U.S. as well as Latin American history. For political leaders as well as leaders of the Catholic Church, the success of Liberation Theology as a sociopolitical movement became a test of whether Christians anywhere could join Marxist and other revolutionaries to create a new and more equitable social order. In that context, Liberation Theology was a theology of revolution.

Liberation Theology was the creation of progressive Latin American bishops and theologians in response to Vatican Council II’s declaration that the church should immerse itself in the problems of the world. Initially, their goal was to transform the Catholic Church from a conservative organization that catered primarily to the ruling families to a church that would promote the economic, political, and social liberation of the continent’s desperately poor, oppressed, and marginalized masses. The church could not evangelize the poor—so the argument ran—unless it became the church of the poor.

Like the socialist revolutions in Europe, Liberation Theology was the work of a cadre of intellectuals acting on behalf of the masses. The parallels with Marxist revolutionary theory were many, which is why the movement was hotly contested. But the basic imperatives were drawn from the Bible. That God wills the liberation of His people is as old as the book of Exodus. The other basic imperative—that the Gospel must first be preached to the poor, who are more open than the rich to its reception—is firmly grounded in the preaching of Jesus. In Liberation Theology, the history of salvation is manifest in the ongoing process of human liberation. Like Marx, Liberation Theology insisted that “man” must become the subject of his own history. Also like Marx, Liberation Theology recognized the inevitability of class struggle. But the fundamental link with Marxism was the idea of praxis: that is, the critical relationship between theology and practice whereby the one is influenced and transformed by the other in an ongoing dialectic. The purpose of Liberation Theology, like the purpose of Marxism, was not to interpret the world but to transform it. In other words, one must first commit to solidarity with the poor and their liberation before one can construct a theology of liberation.

United States Connections

From the very beginning, U.S. Catholics played important but often-overlooked roles in the development and spread of Liberation Theology. In the Sixties, Latin America was home to half of the world’s Catholics: Brazil was the world’s largest Catholic country and Mexico was second. But sociological studies showed that no more than one Brazilian in ten attended Sunday Mass or otherwise practiced the faith. A major problem was a critical shortage of priests. Some regions of the continent reported 70,000 Catholics for every priest, compared to an average of 600 for every priest in the United States. In countries like Guatemala and the Dominican Republic, as many as 80 percent of the clergy were missionaries from Europe and the United States. Even so, for Catholics in rural villages, visits from circuit-riding priests were weeks apart and taken up with baptisms, confessions, Mass, and marriages, leaving little time for organized instruction in the faith.

In 1961, Pope John XXIII directed the bishops of the United States to send 20 percent (about thirty-five thousand) of its priests to work among the poor in Latin American parishes. Missionary orders like Maryknoll and the Jesuits made Latin America a priority. Notre Dame and other Catholic universities sent administrators and teachers to bolster Catholic universities in Chile and other countries. In a Catholic version of the Peace Corps, thousands of American laymen and -women signed up to serve as Papal Volunteers for Latin America.

That same year, Monsignor Ivan Illich, a priest of the New York archdiocese, established a think tank in Cuernavaca, a resort town a hundred miles southwest of Mexico City. A polymath European intellectual, Illich conceived the Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC) as a place for scholarly research on Latin American economic and political problems. A major source of CIDOC’s income was its crack language school, funded largely by U.S. bishops to train the priests they sent for pastoral work in Latin America. Illich ran the school like a boot camp: if students did not immediately shed their Yankee cultural assumptions, he sent them home. It was there that Yankees like Daniel Berrigan (1964), Harvey Cox (1968), and Richard Neuhaus (1972) came into contact with the first probes in Liberation Theology.

Ivan Illich was one of the most fecund and unpredictable geniuses I ever encountered. An aristocrat by birth and education, he became contemptuous of American middle-class religion and values—and of the institutions that supported them—while serving as a parish priest in the Bronx. I once argued with him that it was precisely the lack of a thriving middle class that made Latin American countries chronically unstable and prone to military dictatorships. But he would have none of it. Illich was vigorously opposed to U.S.-based multinational corporations, arguing that they only benefited Latin American oligarchies and forced Latin American economies to be dependent on the market-driven vagaries of foreign capitalists. Eventually, he came to resent even the priests and nuns sent to him from the United States as “a colonial power’s lackey chaplains.” Illich never imagined that these foreigners would become far more radical than most Latin American clergy, and that their influx would provide a channel for the introduction of Liberation Theology into the United States.

What I didn’t know then was that Ivan Illich was also Liberation Theology’s initial organizing genius. Beginning in 1964, it was Illich who brought together the first generation of Liberation Theologians—men like Gustavo Gutierrez from Peru, Juan Luis Segundo from Uruguay, and others for a series of meetings in Brazil, Colombia, and Cuba. Most of these theologians worked with the poor and had given up on the idea of establishing Christian Democratic parties like those in postwar Europe. Many eventually embraced socialism as the only system compatible with the Gospel.

The prospect of a church-based radical movement in Latin America bore important implications for U.S. policy in the hemisphere. To see why, we must locate Liberation Theology in its geopolitical context.

In 1959, Fidel Castro’s guerrillas overthrew Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista and established the first communist government in the Western Hemisphere. Castro’s success inspired similar guerrilla movements in Venezuela, Peru, Uruguay, Colombia, and Guatemala. In April 1961, the Kennedy administration tried and failed to oust Castro in the bungled secret invasion at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. The following year, Soviet efforts to build a missile base in Cuba brought the United States to the edge of nuclear warfare with the USSR. At the same time, President Kennedy launched the Alliance for Progress, a political and economic effort to support democratic reform throughout Latin America. The Alliance never achieved the funding Kennedy promised and the project faded as a priority during the Johnson administration’s concentration on another war of liberation, in Vietnam.

But there was one lasting legacy: a beefed-up presence of covert CIA operations throughout Latin America aimed at thwarting left-wing revolutions. Monitoring and infiltrating left-wing church groups that espoused Liberation Theology was part of its assignment. These operations continued for thirty years and came to a combustible head during the Iran-Contra scandal under President Ronald Reagan.

As it happened, one of these CIA operatives was a friend and Notre Dame classmate, a tightly wound philosophy major from Florida who, according to his own account, became so unwound by the torture of people he had turned in to the Uruguayan police that he became an agent—through Cuba—of the KGB. From exile in Germany, he later wrote a book describing in brutal but accurate detail how the CIA maltreated suspects in its care. He also blew the cover on several covert agents around the world. They were immediately killed. In this way did Philip Agee become the era’s most notorious traitor.

In sum, because of the success of the Cuban revolution, the perceived negative impact of multinationals on Latin American economies, CIA support for repressive regimes, and disillusionment with the Alliance for Progress, partisans of Liberation Theology—including many pastoral workers from the United States—came to oppose U.S. imperialism in Latin America. Cuba’s Fidel Castro took note: “The United States shouldn’t worry about the Soviets in Latin America,” he told a group of foreign visitors in 1967, “because they are not revolutionaries anymore. But they should worry about the Catholic revolutionaries, who are.”1

The Papal Connection

In 1961, Pope Paul VI issued a powerful social encyclical, Populorum Progressio (“On the Development of Peoples”), which focused on economic development in Third World countries. In it, he gave papal approval to several themes that would become central to Liberation Theology in Latin America. With a boldness and specificity unmatched by any papal document before or since, the pope called for a more equitable distribution of wealth between and within nations. In his denunciations of economic neocolonialism, he made no distinction between socialist and capitalist nations: against both hegemonic systems he affirmed the right of developing countries to “move freely toward the kind of society they choose.” On the agitated issue of agrarian reform within developing countries, the pope sent a pointed message to established oligarchies: “If certain landed estates impede the general prosperity,” he declared, “…the common good sometimes demands their expropriation.” Private ownership of the means of production, he insisted, is not an “absolute right.”

As the tone of these statements made clear, Pope Paul was calling for social reform by the “haves,” not revolution by the “have-nots.” Even so, he did legitimate revolution “where there is manifest long-standing tyranny which would do great harm to the common good of the country.” To many progressive bishops and clergy in Latin America, long-standing tyranny was exactly what they were up against, and the only choice was between violent and nonviolent revolution.

Astonishingly, many U.S. newspapers overlooked the pope’s most radical statements, myopically searching instead for any hints that he might change the church’s position on contraception as a method of curbing population growth in Third World countries. One notable exception was the Wall Street Journal, which dismissed the encyclical as “warmed over Marxism.” Many Latin American newspapers agreed.

In September 1968, Pope Paul traveled to Medellín, Colombia, to open a crucial meeting of the Latin American Bishops’ Conference (CELAM). It was the first visit by a pope to the continent and his mere presence excited crowds to feverish adulation. At one point a rush of campesinos, having already paid a day’s wages (about thirty-five cents) for commemorative holy cards, stormed a church hoping to see him in person and nearly crushed the pope as he knelt to pray.

The bishops’ meeting was a two-week affair called to formulate the Latin American church’s authoritative response to Vatican Council II. The process, which called for the bishops to critically assess economic, political, and social problems of their countries, reflect on them theologically, and propose the church’s pastoral response, mirrored exactly the methodology of Liberation Theology. This was no surprise, since the leadership of CELAM and its staff had embraced the movement. Most of the Liberation Theologians had been schooled in Europe and were well versed in the Christian-Marxist dialogue raging there, especially in Germany and France. Marxist social analysis was also the intellectual coin of the realm in Latin American universities. Marxist concepts flavored the bishops’ deliberations and free-market capitalism was subjected to withering criticism. But the phrase that epitomized Medellín and became a permanent part of Catholic social teaching was “the preferential option for the poor.” This was a declaration that the church’s primary (though not exclusive) obligation was solidarity with the marginalized, the outcast, the oppressed. That obligation also entailed the liberation of the poor from the “institutional violence” inflicted by “sinful” social, economic, and political structures. And so, with a little help from Karl Marx, ideas like “structural sin” and “institutional violence” gained ecclesiastical approbation.

To this day, Liberation Theologians regard the documents forged at Medellín as the Magna Carta of their movement. They got what they wanted—official support from the continent-wide conference of bishops—even though some bishops clearly didn’t realize what they were approving and some conservative national hierarchies (Colombia was one) refused to ratify the final documents.

As a set of ideas put forward in books, Liberation Theology influenced clergy, university professors and their students, and those radical organizers who looked to religion for inspiration. But the poor of Latin America could not afford to buy books, or understand them if they did. Unless Liberation Theology were grounded in a suitable set of practices for working with the mass of unlettered Latin Americans, it was destined to become just another academic exercise for schooled elites.

As a social movement, Liberation Theology depended on three organizational practices. The first was adopted from the pioneering work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. In books like Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire had demonstrated how literacy education among peasants could be advanced when it was combined with “consciousness-raising” (concientización)—that is, helping them recognize the reasons for the oppression they experienced. In Liberation Theology, “consciousness-raising” became a method of making the poor aware of the economic structures behind their personal oppression and, at the same time, of the Bible’s message of God’s will for their liberation in this life, not just in the next. This was a particularly powerful message in countries like Guatemala, where descendants of the Mayan Indians (85 percent of the population) formed the broad base of a social pyramid that allowed them no hope of upward mobility.

The second method used to reach the poor was the creation of “base ecclesial communities” (BECs) where consciousness-raising could take place. First pioneered by progressive Brazilian bishops, BECs initially were small groups that met in homes or community centers for Bible study and adult education directed by lay catechists. In 1963, Bishop Marcos McGrath of Panama, who had studied at the University of Notre Dame and become a priest of the Congregation of the Holy Cross, invited a group of Chicago priests and sisters headed by Father Leo McMahon to set up in a Panama City slum the first BEC devoted to the praxis of Liberation Theology. McMahon’s experiment showed that if priests and nuns moved out of their rectories and convents and into urban barrios and rural villages to build grassroots BECs, they could ameliorate the clergy shortage in Latin America. Thousands eventually did just that, becoming radicalized in the process.

Partisans of Liberation Theology seized on base communities as the vehicle for identifying the church with the struggles of the poor. Base communities offered an ideal setting where teachers of Liberation Theology could reinterpret the basic mysteries of God, Christ, divine grace, sin, and the sacraments through the experiences of the poor. From the perspective of Liberation Theology, the poor of Latin America were not only the new proletariat; they were, through this reinterpretation, truly God’s chosen people.

The decade following Medellín saw an eruption of BECs throughout Latin America—and with it, the dispersion of Liberation Theology to its target audience. Brazil alone reported eighty thousand base communities. Although the learned vanguard of Liberation theoreticians like Gutierrez, Leonardo Boff (Brazil), and Jesuit Jon Sobrino (El Salvador) never numbered more than a hundred, they spent much of their time giving workshops for tens of thousands of religious and lay pastoral workers in Peru, Chile, and Brazil as well as the politically incendiary countries of Central America. In this way did the movement metastasize.

Unlike traditional Catholic social action movements in Europe and the United States, Liberation Theology insisted on total independence from the hierarchy and the institutional apparatus of the church. As sociologist Christian Smith has shown, the goal was always “to build coalitions with other militants—labor unions, peasant leagues, Marxist organizations, student groups, guerrilla movements and so on—to produce popular campaigns, organizations, and movements that achieve commonly held goals.”2 In this wholly secular context, Liberation Theology easily mutated into a theology of revolution—including the violent kind. We journalists all heard stories of priests who opted to serve God by joining the revolution. The classic figure was Colombia’s Father Camilo Torres, a European-trained sociologist who ran afoul of his bishop after organizing a militant coalition of workers, peasants, and slum dwellers. Rather than give up his work he abandoned the priesthood and joined an insurgent guerrilla movement, declaring, “I took off my cassock to become more truly a priest.” Four months later, the priest-turned-revolutionary was killed in an ambush. By the next year, his face had joined that of Ernesto “Che” Guevara on T-shirts as a symbol of revolutionary sainthood.

By no means were all partisans of Liberation Theology revolutionaries. But those who did embrace the movement from the pulpit, the platform, or a base ecclesial community put their lives at risk from the military, right-wing death squads, or (less often) leftist revolutionaries. Indeed, one of the known fruits of Liberation Theology is a modern martyrology of raped nuns and murdered priests and “disappeared” lay church leaders. Bishops were not excluded. Brazil’s Dom Helder Camara, for example, survived sixteen attempts on his life. But others were not so fortunate.

A Turning Point: Puebla

By 1978, Liberation Theology had developed indigenous roots in Africa and Asia through networks like the Association of Third World Theologians. But in Latin America, the movement was facing a critical backlash within the Catholic Church. Control of CELAM had passed into the hands of political reactionaries headed by Colombian archbishop Alfonso López Trujillo. With encouragement from Cardinal Sebastiano Baggio, the Vatican official in charge of Latin American affairs, he purged the CELAM staff of Liberation Theology sympathizers. The conservatives’ goal was not to repudiate Liberation Theology but to tame and transform it by severing all connections between religion and revolutionary movements. This was to be accomplished in 1979 at the first CELAM meeting since Medellín, held in the Spanish colonial city of Puebla in central Mexico.

In a reversal of Medellín, López Trujillo excluded all but a handful of progressives from the meeting. No Liberation Theologians were invited, either. As an added precaution, he chose as the site for the two-week meeting an isolated seminary surrounded by a ten-foot stone “wall of freedom,” as he called it, and posted with security guards. Delegates could leave the compound, but only delegates were allowed in.

But there was one unknown factor: the new Polish pope, John Paul II, the first man from a communist country to head the Roman Catholic Church. Puebla would be his first foreign journey since his surprising election the previous year. Ironically, Mexico was the only country in Latin America that did not maintain diplomatic ties with the Vatican. Moreover, because of the church’s opposition to Mexico’s 1910 revolution, foreign clergy were forbidden to say Mass and no priests were allowed to wear clerical garb in public. The Mexican government temporarily waived both laws for the pope, but the real question was this: would a pope who had stoutly defended human rights against a communist government in his homeland defend those same rights against repressive Catholic regimes in Latin America? To support Liberation Theology was to risk losing government support for the institutional church, but not to support the movement was to risk losing the continent’s masses.

In the course of his seven-day visit, the pope gave thirty-seven speeches before massive audiences totaling 18 million. Not once did he use the phrase “Liberation Theology.” The reason, I figured, is that he wanted to unify the bishops, the way that the Polish bishops remained united in the face of communist efforts to pit one against another. He made plain his fear that the base ecclesial communities would become a parallel church competing with the hierarchy, and nowhere did he encourage revolution, even as a last resort. Indeed, from my reading of his speeches it seemed evident that the pope rejected most elements of Liberation Theology—specifically, the use of Marxist theory and analysis, clerical involvement in political movements, and the emphasis on social sin over personal sin. Instead he preached a theology of the cross as the true theology of liberation. Still, it was up to the bishops to formulate their own conclusions.

If media interest is any measure, the Puebla meeting was the most dramatic church event since the close of Vatican Council II. Nearly two thousand journalists from around the world crowded the hotels and bars around the city’s central plaza. Esquire magazine dispatched the newly liberal Garry Wills to fly from Rome on the papal plane—such was the secular interest in the future of Liberation Theology. Banner-waving demonstrators for and against Liberation Theology marched daily from the central city to the seminary walls. Mixed among the journalists and marchers were agents of the CIA, Cuban intelligence, and their buddies from the Eastern European secret services and, of course, the Soviet Union’s KGB. It was quite a party.

Puebla was my first opportunity to observe Liberation Theologians in action. Although unwelcome at the bishops’ table, they still found ways to influence the debate. About ninety of them set up shop in a convent three blocks from the seminary. As each committee document emerged from the meeting, a sympathetic bishop would carry a copy to the convent, where teams of Liberation Theologians and social scientists wrote short critiques for circulation inside the conclave. Their strategy was to pepper the meeting’s final, official report with enough positive sentences to justify a pro-Liberation interpretation of the bishops’ concluding pastoral message.

Equally important, their convent headquarters served as the press center for visiting journalists. With no access to the bishops themselves, reporters had to rely (as happened at Vatican II) on the theologians outside the wall to explain what was going on inside the meeting. Every afternoon we gathered in the crowded convent parlor. The air was scented with the odor of theologians who had worked through the night without the benefit of showers, and from the cigarettes they constantly drew on—odious Latin American brands that made the French Gauloises seem like mild Kentucky Burley. Over and over again, the theologians insisted that the bishops’ conservative statements had to be understood in light of other, more liberal statements—which, unbeknown to the reporters, the theologians themselves had written. If opponents of Liberation Theology controlled the agenda, the theologians outside controlled much of what the media made of it.

The bishops’ 240-page final document did indeed include many fine phrases supporting Liberation Theology. But the document was so contradictory that neither side left Puebla with a mandate. In fact, 26 of the 187 voting delegates refused to endorse it and another 27 went home before the meeting ended. The real import of Puebla was that neither the Vatican nor CELAM would second any bishop who dared speak out against the terrorism and repression that passed for governing in many a Latin American country. Those who did were fair game for the death squads.

And so it happened that eight months after Puebla, a marksman pulled up outside the open doors of the Carmelite Sisters’ hospital chapel in San Salvador, El Salvador. Inside, Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero was approaching the most sacred moment of Mass when a single bullet tore open his chest, spattering blood over the bread and wine. Not since the murder of Thomas à Becket had so prominent a prelate been cut down at the altar.

Romero was an unlikely martyr for Liberation Theology. Conservative, cautious, and wary of leftist mystiques of violence, he had only recently begun to speak out against the murderous military junta that ruled his native country. He had dared to support human rights groups, as the pope was then doing in Poland, and had written to President Jimmy Carter asking—to no avail—that the United States cease its military support for El Salvador’s rule by death squads. Only the day before, in his Sunday sermon, he had pleaded with the men in the Salvadoran armed forces: “In the name of God, I pray you, I beseech you, I order you! Let this repression cease.”

Romero’s death was the preface to seventeen years of civil war that left upwards of seventy-five thousand Salvadorans dead. In 1987, I visited the site of his assassination. Already, the Salvadoran people revered him as a patron saint, but the Vatican had made no move to take up his cause, fearing that a proclamation of his sanctity would signal support for opposition forces. It took more than a decade to prove that Romero’s death was ordered by leaders of the right-wing ARENA party, which continued to rule Salvador until 2009. Only after its defeat was Romero’s death officially commemorated in Salvador. In 1990, I published a book, Making Saints: How the Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes a Saint, Who Doesn’t, and Why, that included an examination of the evidence favoring his candidacy for sainthood based on the church’s own criteria for Christian martyrdom. Romero’s cause remained stalled until 2013, when Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, a Jesuit, became the first pope from Latin America. But in the eyes of Christians everywhere, Romero was already a saint.

Romero was a fine example of prophetic religion in the manner of Martin Luther King Jr. But the problem with prophetic religion is that it arouses a passion for justice without knowing what to do with the oppressed once the oppressor is vanquished. In 1979, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) produced the only successful revolution in Latin America after Castro’s in Cuba. With its mix of workers, peasants, and artisans, of Marxists, Leninists, and Catholics from the base communities, the Sandinista Front fit precisely the recipe for revolution envisioned in Liberation Theology: it was popular, democratic, and anti-imperialistic. Even the archbishop of Managua, Miguel Obando y Bravo, welcomed the new regime. For me, Nicaragua was the real test of Liberation Theology: after all the books and organizing, what would its partisans contribute to the creation of a new social order?

Priests of the Revolution

In the fall of 1983, downtown Managua was a muddy checkerboard of empty public squares. The baroque Cathedral of Santiago de Los Caballeros was half rubble, the result of a devastating earthquake in 1972 that tumbled 80 percent of the capital’s buildings into the streets and left a quarter million (mostly poor) Managuans homeless. In the old city core, the only surviving structures visible above the trees were the Hotel InterContinental, shaped like an Aztec pyramid, and an empty former U.S. bank that would eventually house the revolutionary national assembly. The new city center, the Plaza de Revolución, resembled a blacktopped parking lot with a tiny bus shelter and weathered bleachers set below outsize billboards celebrating the revolution’s heroes. Since there were no signs to identify streets, Managuans had no addresses. I thought of what Gertrude Stein had said of Oakland: “there is no there there.”

What the quake had not destroyed the Somoza family had plundered for itself during forty-five years of brutal misrule. Beginning with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who memorably called the first Somoza dictator “a son-of-a-bitch—but he is our son-of-a bitch,” a succession of U.S. presidents supported the rapacious Somozas. At one point, the family controlled 30 percent of Nicaragua’s arable land—a fiefdom roughly equal in size to the whole of El Salvador—and the twenty-six largest businesses. Now, four years after the last of the Somozas had been overthrown in a popular revolution, President Ronald Reagan was threatening the new, Marxist-oriented Sandinista government by a combination of economic strangulation and not-so-covert military action: several thousand “Contras”—most of them former members of Somoza’s National Guard—armed and equipped by the CIA, were staging a counterrevolution along Nicaragua’s border with Honduras. The Reagan administration claimed, with no hard evidence, that the Sandinistas were shipping arms to Salvadoran guerrillas. The administration’s goal was not another U.S. invasion of this desperately poor country—a gambit that 87 percent of Americans opposed, according to a Newsweek poll—but to cripple the Sandinistas’ efforts to build a sovereign, multi-aligned socialist society. Reagan did not want another Cuba in the hemisphere.

For a country ostensibly at war with the United States, Nicaragua was full of North Americans. Altogether, about one hundred thousand U.S. citizens passed through the country in the 1980s. Some were intellectuals like my friend Robert Coles, who explained one evening at dinner that he was there to study the effects of war on the young muchachos—the teenage soldiers who had spearheaded the revolution. Many more were midwestern farmers and other sympathetic brigadistas from the United States who volunteered their labor and expertise while some sixty thousand Nicaraguan workers were conscripted to hold off the Contras. Lay and religious missionaries from Maryknoll were there to teach peasants and help complete what the Sandinistas called “the revolutionary process.” On any given night you could always find correspondents from a dozen U.S. publications at the dark, cavelike bar in the InterContinental. No part of the country was off-limits to foreign journalists: the Sandinistas courted world opinion through them. U.S. photographer Susan Meiselas served as a kind of self-appointed advisor to the junta as to which visiting Americans were likely to be sympathetic to the cause.

My goal was to assess the impact of Liberation Theology by talking to priests who either worked for or advised the junta. I had one specific assignment from GEO magazine to interview Father Ernesto Cardenal, the priest and much-admired poet who served as the Sandinistas’ minister of culture. Eight months earlier, on a brief visit to Nicaragua, Pope John Paul II had publicly admonished Cardenal as the minister doffed his beret and knelt at the airport to kiss the pope’s ring. Instead, the pope angrily shook a finger at the priest and ordered him to regularize his relationship to the church. The moment, captured on television and seen around the world, dramatized the pope’s increasing opposition to Catholic cooperation with revolutionary movements in Latin America. I had wired Cardenal that I wanted to hear his side of the story.

My own view was that Catholic priests ought not take positions in any political party or government. In 1980, the Vatican had ordered Jesuit Robert Drinan, the only Catholic priest ever elected to the U.S. Congress, not to stand for a sixth term as a representative from Massachusetts. Drinan, a passionate liberal Democrat, always wore his clericals in Congress—“It’s the only suit I own,” he liked to say—as if this gave his views an extra layer of authority. But I thought his dual role divisive and inherently compromising for a priest: had his politics been as conservative as they were liberal, Catholics on the left would have called for precisely the action John Paul II took. After all, it was not as if Democrats in Massachusetts—or in any other state—were short of Irish Catholic politicians.

But Nicaragua was different. The Sandinista insurgency, as they preferred to call it, was a nationalist rebellion against a hereditary oppressor in a country where most of the people were Catholics. Unlike Fidel Castro, the Sandinista junta wanted clerical supporters in government posts—not only for the signal their presence sent that Christianity and Marxism were compatible ideologies, but also because priests were among the best-educated and internationally experienced Nicaraguans.

For example, Foreign Minister Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann was the son of a Nicaraguan diplomat, born in Los Angeles, and a priest of Maryknoll. I had met him at Maryknoll headquarters, a mile from my home, where he was the founding publisher of Orbis Books, which specialized in publishing Third World theologians of a Liberationist bent. Ernesto Cardenal and his Jesuit brother, Fernando, who was head of the Sandinistas’ massive (and massively successful) Literacy Campaign, came from a large and wealthy merchant family in Nicaragua. Ernesto had studied poetry at Columbia University in the Fifties and spent three years at the Trappist monastery in Gethsemane, Kentucky, under the spiritual direction of Thomas Merton. Most of the Jesuits at the University of Central America in Managua who supported the revolution were also educated abroad and the government was heavily dependent on their technical expertise. These priests were as eager to talk to a journalist from the United States as I was to question them.

Poetry and Revolution

When I arrived in Nicaragua, Ernesto Cardenal had just returned to his home at Our Lady of Solentiname, a contemplative community he had founded in 1965 on a ripe tropical island in Lake Nicaragua. Over time it had evolved into an arts-and-crafts colony and then a rural base ecclesial community where Cardenal led peasant fishermen in simplified discussions of Liberation Theology in support of the revolution. It was the first time since becoming a government bureaucrat that Cardenal had spent more than a day at his beloved retreat. He would see me there.

The government chartered a small plane to take me to San Carlo, on the lake’s southern edge. There we were met by a young soldier wearing a Florida State University T-shirt with an AK-47 strapped to his back. This was a country where 40 percent of the population was under age twenty-one and he had been one of the teenage muchachos who spearheaded the revolution. I could hear gunfire near the Costa Rican border a few miles away where the United States had created a second Contra force. From San Carlo a rowboat powered by an outboard motor that frequently gave out took four of us on a choppy forty-minute trip to the island. There the poet welcomed us with a lunch of fresh crab soup, boiled lobster, and cold bottles of white wine around an open fire pit. I pulled a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from my bag and we shared a drink.

—

Like Father Drinan, Ernesto seemed to possess only one set of clothes: a loose white peasant’s smock over blue jeans, which he wore in all his photographs. As we talked he squinted myopically behind thin wire glasses, his long white hair bleaching in the sun. Only eight years my senior, Cardenal had long since assumed the bardic mien of Nicaragua’s Walt Whitman. Whenever he could, Cardenal curved our conversation back to his relationship with three other well-known poet-priests: Daniel Berrigan, Merton, and John Paul II. As a poet, Cardenal was the best of the lot.

Right away Ernesto wanted me to know that the fuss over priests serving in government was a nonissue. They had secured prior clearance from the Vatican’s secretary of state, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, who, he said, recognized that Nicaragua presented “a special situation requiring an exception to the pope’s rule.” This news suggested that not all Vatican officials were on the pope’s page. Cardenal thought the pope had acted on impulse and in bad faith when he rebuked him, but the incident still rankled. In any case, the priests had agreed not to say Mass or hear confessions for as long as they were government functionaries. As far as Cardenal was concerned, it was the pope who had stepped out of line.

I asked Ernesto how he became a Marxist. It began, he said, with a visit in 1970 to Cuba, where he saw the government “putting the gospel in action.” The pope “does not understand Marxism,” he insisted—a statement so absurd I let it pass. But when pressed, Cardenal admitted that he himself had not read anything of Marx beyond the early chapters of Das Capital. Most of what Cardenal knew of Marxism came from his readings in Liberation Theology, especially Gutierrez, which had convinced him that one could be a Christian and a Marxist at the same time—indeed that Jesus himself was a communist. “I am a Marxist who believes in God, follows Christ, and is a revolutionary for the sake of His kingdom,” he explained at one point. It would not be the first time that I would hear a priest in Nicaragua identify the Sandinista “revolutionary process” with the coming Kingdom of God.

Until the Sandinista guerrillas took charge of the insurrection, Cardenal had been a pacifist like Berrigan. Berrigan, he said, was like a brother—Ernesto had visited the Jesuit in Danbury prison. But in 1977, Cardenal embraced violence as a revolutionary necessity, allowing Sandinista forces to use Solentiname as a base from which to launch a failed attack on National Guardsmen stationed in San Carlo. The decision provoked a public falling-out with Berrigan, which Cardenal said had caused him more pain than the papal scolding. Someday, he said, he hoped he could again embrace nonviolence, but not as long as Reagan and the Contras threatened counterrevolution.

The man Ernesto most wanted to talk about was Thomas Merton. It was Merton who had urged him to return to Nicaragua and create a new kind of religious community without rules like those the Trappists followed and open to participation by peasants. It was Merton, too, who had told him to take holy orders: he would have to be a priest if he wanted the community recognized by the church. Motioning me to his straw-covered cottage, Cardenal showed me a cache of sixty letters from Merton, whom he called “the spiritual father of Solentiname.” Merton had hoped to join him here on the island, and might have if he hadn’t died from an accidental electrocution on a trip to Bangkok in 1968. Indeed, Cardenal had already built a straw house for the spiritually restless Merton to live in.

“Merton would have loved it here,” Cardenal mused wistfully. “Nicaragua has more poets per capita than any other country. That’s a big part of my job, to teach the people how to make poetry, to paint, make music, cultivate our native crafts. This, too, is part of the revolutionary process, to create a culture of the people.”

I found Ernesto as utterly sincere as he was politically naive. He knew nothing of repressive communist societies as they existed in Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Soviet Union. It didn’t matter. The Sandinistas, he insisted, were building a new kind of democratic socialism that promised a cooperative way of life rather like that of a monastic community. Communism meant the people working together, praying together, creating together, and sharing the fruits of their enterprise. When he spoke of Nicaragua becoming “a society of brothers and sisters,” it was clear that he imagined the future of the entire nation as an enlargement of his vision for the community of Solentiname. All this confirmed my belief that poets—especially poet-priests—are ill-fit for politics: they aim at different things.

As the sun settled into the horizon, Cardenal invited us to stay for dinner and the night. We were glad on several counts: Lake Nicaragua is the world’s only inland lake with sharks, and there were no lights on our boat. But the soldier insisted the outboard was now in working condition and that we must make for San Carlo. And so we did. But Marvin, our pilot, refused to fly from there to Managua in the darkness. That meant no dinner for us that night, and no beds, no blankets, no toilets, either. But as we stretched out on narrow wooden benches in a thatched agricultural commune, Marvin reached into his bag and held up a roll of toilet paper, pointing silently to me and then to himself so the others wouldn’t notice. Toilet paper was a rationed item, one roll per person per week. Greater love hath no Nicaraguan, I decided, than to share his precious stash of tissues. Ernesto would have loved the gesture.

A People’s Church

Solentiname was a dreamscape compared to the Reggio barrio, center of one of the first base ecclesial communities in Managua. The barrio was a vast urban slum, home to some forty thousand Managuans whose makeshift homes were heaped one upon another along unlighted dirt paths. What illumination there was came from the glow of TV sets tuned to U.S. reruns of Kojak and Dragnet. At the center was our destination, the church of Santa Maria de Los Angeles, for an evening with its pastor, Franciscan friar Uriel Molina.

As a priest and pastor, Molina was Liberation Theology’s total package. He had been among the few seminarians from Latin America whose intellectual promise merited study in Rome during Vatican Council II. The bishops’ message at Medellín had given him a vision of activist engagement with politics and the poor. While still a professor at the University of Central America he took charge of the barrio parish and then invited his students to come learn from his poor parishioners what liberation meant to them. The aim, as he saw it, was to rid them of their bourgeois assumptions—much as Gibson Winters and the Chicago Urban Training Center had tried to teach suburban students like Hillary Rodham to see the world from the perspective of inner-city blacks. When the revolution came, the people of the barrio gave it their full support.

Unlike the Cardenal brothers, Molina never joined the Sandinista party. But his vigorous support of the revolution was such that the junta offered him the post of Nicaraguan ambassador to Germany. Instead he chose to remain a parish priest. He also created an institute to explore the relationships between Marxism and Christianity, using donations from fellow Franciscans in the United States, the World Council of Churches, and other religious organizations that supported Liberation Theology.

From our conversation it was clear that Molina regarded the Sandinista revolution as the embodiment of “the people’s will,” with the party serving as the vanguard of that will. Given this new “reality,” the clergy’s duty was to create a “popular church” that would not only embrace the revolution but also eventually purify and transform the bourgeois institutional church represented by the hierarchy and its leader, Archbishop Obando y Bravo, who had by then turned against the revolution as a Marxist threat to the established church.

Beginning with St. Francis and his embrace of “Lady Poverty,” the Franciscans have always harbored a subversive, anti-institutional streak, and there was some of that in Molina’s conflict with the bishops. But the squat, plainspoken Obando y Bravo was one of the very few Latin American bishops with a peasant background, and for that reason was much beloved by “the people.” Moreover, most of the clergy supported him. And so it was not altogether clear who owned the hearts of the poor, Obando y Bravo or the representatives of the popular church.

But what, exactly, was the popular church? That was the other reason I had made my way to Santa Maria de Los Angeles, a modernist sanctuary mounted on metal girders like legs of a giant grasshopper. Father Molina was to celebrate the Misa Campesina, the much-ballyhooed peasants’ mass, composed by musician Carlos Mejia, that had become the most complete liturgical melding of the revolution with Liberation Theology. That evening the congregation was in full throttle, accompanied by guitars and drums. I braced myself for a Nicaraguan version of the tediously keening folk masses à la Peter, Paul & Mary that passed for “contemporary” liturgical music in the United States. Mejia’s melodies were more sophisticated and hum-worthy. The real difference, though, was in the lyrics. The God of the Misa Campesina was “the worker God,” “the laborer Christ” who is resurrected “in every arm outstretched / to defend the people against the exploitation of rulers.” At the Kyrie, the congregation called upon this God not for mercy, as in the traditional mass, but for His support against the ruling classes:

Christ Jesus identify with us.

Lord my God, identify with us.

Christ Jesus be in solidarity

Not with the oppressor class

That squeezes and devours

The community

But with the oppressed

With my people thirsty for peace.

This was liturgy as ideology, but the indoctrination did not end with the mass. The Diego Rivera–like murals Molina had commissioned to cover the church walls were a visual celebration of the Sandinista revolution. Though the murals were not yet finished, one could already see in panoramic sequence the history of Nicaragua told as a narrative that begins in oppression—first by Spanish colonizers, then by the Yankee imperialists—leading to the Somoza dictatorship and climaxing in the revolution. Augusto César Sandino, Carlos Fonseca, Ajax Delgado—all the fallen heroes of the revolutionary movement were on display as figures in a modern martyrology. So, too, were Camilo Torres and Archbishop Romero as witnesses to Liberation Theology’s wider communion of saints. The panels were arranged, Molina explained, as a contemporary Stations of the Cross celebrating the death and resurrection of the Nicaraguan people.

As he spoke I thought of how the Puritan settlers had read themselves into the Bible by identifying their journey to America as a new exodus of God’s people out of bondage and to the New Israel. Here, though, was an even nervier exercise in the appropriation of sacred story: the embedding of a political insurrection in the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus. If this was the popular church, redeemed and at prayer, I wondered what would happen to it and its liturgy over the long haul if, like most revolutions, this one failed to make good on its promises.

The Jesuits’ Economic Plans

I could understand why native Nicaraguans like Molina, D’Escoto, and the Cardenal brothers would want to serve the revolutionary process. But what motivated the Jesuits there, most of whom were foreigners? Drawn to power as much as to the poor wherever they went, the Jesuits had for centuries tutored the children of Latin America’s elites, hoping to influence society indirectly through their students. But in response to Vatican Council II, the order’s father general, Pedro Arrupe, issued a public mea culpa for failing to educate the poor. He told the Jesuits they now had “a moral obligation” to work for “social justice” as the new form of Christian evangelization. With campuses in El Salvador as well as Managua, the Jesuits at the University of Central America represented a valuable reservoir of knowledge and experience of the region and its problems. What they offered the junta was not theological or liturgical cover for the revolution but something much more useful: ideas, analysis, and technical expertise.

The rector of the Jesuit community was a thirty-six-year-old priest from Omaha, Father Peter Marchetti, who had left Marquette University for Nicaragua because he thought his knowledge of agricultural economics would be a greater benefit to peasants than to the sons of prosperous Wisconsin dairy farmers. What he found, he said, was an economy in shambles, a shortage of staples like bread, and a market driven heavily by women selling milk and eggs from their back doors. Even on the larger farms, owners could not accumulate enough capital to buy machinery. To make matters worse, the Contra buildup on the borders required the conscription of much-needed farm laborers. “Go back and tell President Reagan that he is choking a country that cannot feed itself, much less send troops to Salvador,” he said. “Tell him we have about five thousand foreigners here, most of them from Cuba, and they are not training soldiers. They are mostly teachers, doctors and nurses, construction workers giving us services we cannot provide for ourselves because of Mr. Reagan.”

If I wanted to understand the Sandinistas’ political economy, everyone told me, I had to talk to Xabier Gorostiaga, easily the most imposing intellect among the Jesuits of Central America. Like Pedro Arrupe, Gorostiaga was from the fiercely independent Basque region of Spain—which is why, perhaps, he had chosen to devote his life to freeing the Central American region from Yankee domination. His credentials included advanced degrees from Cambridge and the London School of Economics. While still in his thirties, he had served as chief economic advisor to the government of Panama in the negotiations with the Carter administration that led to the gradual Panamanian acquisition of the Panama Canal. Right after the revolution, the Sandinista junta invited him to come to Managua and draw up an economic plan for the new Nicaragua.

Neither a Marxist nor a member of the FSLN, Gorostiaga nonetheless supported the idea that the peasants and workers who formed the backbone of the revolution had earned the right to have their own—very basic—needs met first. Instead of the “trickle-down” economics of the Reagan administration, in which the boats of the poor were the last to be lifted and the yachts of the rich first, his plan envisioned a “trickle-up” approach that put off till last the richest sector’s private accumulation of surplus wealth. Even so, his plan provided from the start for a “mixed economy” of public- and private-sector forces. Government-planned economies, he knew, were notoriously unproductive.

Although the Jesuit described his plan as one called forth by the particulars of the Sandinista political model, it was also, I thought, a very concrete application of Catholic social teachings, which have traditionally favored a vague third way between capitalism and socialism. But Gorostiaga’s plan depended very much on development funds from outside countries and international agencies, which the Reagan administration was doing its utmost to block. Indeed, Gorostiaga himself went to Washington to explain to Congress that the administration’s policies were forcing Nicaragua to lean on socialist nations when its goal was a nonalignment posture that included relations with the United States, Europe, and Third World countries. He got a hearing—but also an absurd lecture on the errors of Liberation Theology from Vice President George H. W. Bush.

Before I left his rooms, Gorostiaga briefly outlined his long-term scheme for a Central American common market that would, he hoped, bring peace, economic stability, and political solidarity to a region of former banana republics struggling under a staggering collective debt of more than $11 billion. In countries like Nicaragua that bordered both the Pacific and the Caribbean seas, he foresaw the creation of ports facilitating new international trade routes through the region. Listening to him, I was reminded that once before, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Jesuits had administered most of what is now Paraguay on behalf of the Portuguese crown. The inhabitants then were poor Indian tribes and by all unbiased accounts the Jesuits did an efficient and humane job in building thriving communities. That was real Liberation Theology. But as we now know, there would be nothing commensurable in Nicaragua, or Central America.

The Collapse of Liberation Theology

Here, in brief, is what happened in Nicaragua. The Sandinistas rejected Gorostiaga’s plan in favor of a more Leninist program of state planning. In 1985, Daniel Ortega was elected president in one of the freest and most open elections in the nation’s history, only to lose five years later to a new coalition of opposition leaders backed by the United States. The Reagan administration’s destabilization strategy worked, but it cost the lives of thirty thousand Sandinista and Contra fighters. The war also produced one of the biggest political scandals of the century: the Iran-Contra affair, an illegal and clandestine exchange of arms for hostages in which Colonel Oliver North, Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, and fourteen other administration officials were indicted on various charges, including lying to Congress. All but one received presidential pardons.

Miguel D’Escoto served several more years as foreign minister but never returned to the priesthood. Ernesto Cardenal eventually broke with Daniel Ortega, charging that he had betrayed the revolution and become just another self-aggrandizing politician. Solentiname became a tropical tourist destination. Uriel Molina was kicked out of the Franciscans but remained a priest. The Misa Campesina survives as a period piece, still available as a recording by Melina Mercouri. The popular church melted into the institutional church, as the pope hoped it might, and Archbishop Obando y Bravo was promoted to cardinal. Peter Marchetti moved on to Honduras, where his pastoral work with the poor made him a target of death squads. Xabier Gorostiaga continued to work in Central America, becoming rector of the university before he died in 2003. Fittingly, he was buried near the Castle of Loyola, where the founder of the Jesuits, Iñigo Lopez de Oñaz y Loyola (St. Ignatius Loyola), was born. In 1991, work began on a new, $3 million cathedral built between two shopping malls and financed almost entirely by the American billionaire Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino’s Pizza, who devoted his fortune to numerous conservative Catholic causes. The Hotel InterContinental still stands but has another name and the bar is no longer a watering hole for foreign journalists. In 2006, Daniel Ortega again won the presidency and a decade later he, his family, and his allies controlled much of the country’s land, its major companies, and the media, not to mention the police, the courts, the military, and the Congress—all of which allowed them to live the opulent kind of life the Somoza clan had.

Outside Nicaragua, Liberation Theology ceased to be a revolutionary force within the Latin American church as the bishops who supported the movement died or retired. In nearly every case Pope John Paul II replaced them with conservative men opposed to the movement. A few of the Liberation Theologians were called to Rome to defend themselves against various charges, and in one sensational case, the hugely popular Brazilian Leonardo Boff was silenced for a year. He eventually left the priesthood.

Even so, the Liberation Theologians were right in one respect. The poor of Latin American did crave base ecclesial communities where they could learn the Bible and find a home in an oppressive world. Ironically, however, the communities that prospered were Evangelical—mainly Pentecostal—churches in which even jobless campesinos could become ministers of the Gospel and every believer could experience the power of the Holy Spirit—just the sort of allegedly otherworldly Christianity that Liberation Theology had hoped to eradicate.

My own sense is that Liberation Theology was done in chiefly by geopolitical events that occurred outside Latin America. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the dismantling of the Soviet Union, and the corresponding triumph of liberal capitalism rendered socialism passé as the answer to Latin America’s still intractable economic and political woes. And Pentecostalism offered a viable economic as well as religious alternative. By 1989, a number of Liberation Theologians had concluded that Marxism was too crude a tool for analyzing social structures. Gutierrez himself declared, “Socialism is not an essential of Liberation Theology…one can do liberation theology without espousing socialism.”3 But without Marx, without socialism, and without associated theories about Latin America’s dependence on capitalist countries as the cause of its poverty, Liberation Theology lost its revolutionary edge.

But to the north, another liberation movement was already well advanced. This movement, too, sought to emancipate the oppressed. And as we will see, it owed some of its ideas and techniques to Liberation Theology.