Left-wing priests forced to submit

Press, 7 September 1984, Page 17

Left-wing priests forced to submit

From

ROBERT DEL QUIARO,

in Nicaragua

Four Roman Catholic priests who have served in the Left-wing Sandinista Government of Nicaragua despite Vatican displeasure, are to resign their posts after the country’s election in November. Their capitulation to pressure from Rome comes after Church authorities had threatened to expel them from the priesthood unless they fell in with the Pope’s wishes. The four are understood, however, to have asked for an extension of the deadline until after the election and the Vatican is believed to have accepted this delay. The most prominent of the four is Monsignor Ernesto Cardenal, the Culture Minister, who is also a notable poet. He was on television screens across the world last year when, during Pope John Paul Il’s visit to Nicaragua, he was seen kneeling at the feet of the Pontiff, who wagged an admonitory finger over him.

The other three are Father Fernando Cardenal, Education Minis-

ter (and brother of Ernesto); Father Miguel d’Escoto, Foreign Minister; and Father Edgardo Parrales, the country’s ambassador to the Organisation of American States.

The Pope seems to have decided that finger-wagging is not enough. The ultimatum to the Nicaraguans was only the first in a series of actions the Vatican is expected to take during the next few months to curb Latin American priests and nuns whose zeal for social and political change has put them at the forefront of political struggles on behalf of the have-nots.

During the five-year drought in north-east Brazil, where starvation and mass desertion of the countryside reached a devastating nadir early this year, some bishops and priests were publicly absolving parishioners of both sin and crime when the people were looting shops and municipal warehouses. These clergy felt that the drought and 200 per cent inflation,

added to traditional depredations by monopolistic landlords and corrupt officials, had brought people so low that they were entitled to steal in order to save their lives and those of their families.

Pope John Paul, and many other high-ranking Catholics, regard this sort of activity, and the liberation theology which justifies it, as akin to revolutionary communisrti, liable to incur sanctions by Rightwing governments against the Church as a whole in the particular country, as well as to split the Church into liberationists and conservatives.

Various priests and nuns in Latin America have told me this year of how their experience of working

with the poor pushed their political outlook irrevocably to the Left. Many of the Catholic laity, meanwhile, have developed the nerve and know-how to form grass-roots organisations for social and political action, through having taken part in small groups for discussion and Bible-reading. Such gatherings were often the only assemblies allowed in the 1960 s and 19705, apart from those cheering on the government, by such military regimes as those of Brazil, Bolivia, and Nicaragua. Many of these basic communities, as Brazilians call them, arose despite conservative clergy, or functioned with only minimal guidance from over-worked priests. In

any event, these have given confidence in administration and interpretation of the scriptures to thousands of previously biddable members of the laity. For the Vatican, all this smacks of protest and Protestantism.

The next key date in the Vatican’s push for discipline is this week-end, when Father Leonardo Boff, a Brazilian theologian who has criticised the “elitism” of the Church and its failure to speak out on human rights, will appear before a disciplinary commission of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — sitting for the first time since 1980. He will have to defend his writings against questioning by the West German Cardinal, Josef Ratzinger, prefect of the congregation and author of a critical dissection of liberal theology, with others of the Vatican’s most experienced theologians. If Father Boffs answers prove unacceptable, Catholics could be forbidden to

read his works. He sees his summons to Rome as “a broad judgment of our Church, which goes into the lower depths of society and cares for the outcasts, the miserable, and the poor.” He believes that “some principles of Marxism help us to discover what makes the poor poor,” but adds: “Our base is faith, Christianity. Marxism is merely instrumental.” The Pope intends to be in Santo Domingo in October, for a conference of Latin American bishops, although he is not expected to speak. However, at the end of January, the Pope is to visit three Andean countries, including Peru where Father Gustavo Gutierrez, another liberation theologian of note, is under a hierarchical cloud.

There, the Pope may well deliver a strong homily on the matter, in the light of the Vatican's moves between now and then. Copyright — London Observer Service.