High Stakes in Latin America

In its biggest base, Catholicism faces a formidable challenge

In Brazil, delegates representing 50,000 church-organized grass-roots communities declared at their annual meeting last year: "Land in the hands of those who don't need it, workers earning a pittance, hunger, infant mortality and illiteracy. This great sin is a social sin, and it is called the capitalist system."

> In Nicaragua, Spanish Missionary Gaspar Garcia Laviana sat inspecting a clutch of automatic rifles last October and told a visitor why he had become a firearms expert with the guerrillas who are fighting the Somoza dynasty: "I tried to save the situation in a Christian manner, in the pacifist sense of social promotion, but I realized that all this was a big trick." Two months later, the Nicaraguan National Guard announced that Garcia had been slain in combat.

> Exactly one week before Pope John Paul II inaugurated the third Latin American Bishops' Conference (CELAM III), security troops burst into a retreat center in El Salvador, killed Father Octavio Ortiz Luna and four youths, and arrested the rest. The military government of President General Carlos Humberto Romero said the church house was a guerrilla base. At a Requiem Mass last week, activist Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdamez, no kin to the Salvadoran dictator and his most outspoken foe, denounced the government accusations as "lies."

With some 300 million of the world's 700 million Roman Catholics, Latin America is the church's biggest base. It is also the church's biggest problem area. In many nations, the Roman Catholic Church is the only opposition force to survive state repression, and it is under constant attack. In the decade since CELAM last met, a Vatican expert estimates, at least 1,000 priests and bishops have suffered interrogation, imprisonment, torture or murder. Among those detained has been CELAM'S Brazilian president, Aloisio Cardinal Lorscheider.

Attacked from without, the church is dangerously divided within over its social strategy in a region ground down by staggering poverty as well as political oppression. As Sister Marta Freeh Lopez, a missionary nun in Nicaragua, told TIME'S Bernard Diederich, "I am certainly not a Marxist, but while we in the church have contented ourselves with teaching the Lord's Prayer, the Marxists are out offering solutions to existing problems."

Just 14 weeks into his reign, John Paul II might have been tempted to avoid this Latin American entanglement, as his short-lived predecessor had planned to do. But a leader with his vigorous makeup could hardly resist the challenge. "The Pope is coming to save the church. It's as simple as that," says a Mexican church analyst. Catholicism's future depends greatly on this region's believers, many of them "baptized but not yet sufficiently evangelized," as a bishop in Peru puts it. Religious education is often scant. Says a Vatican specialist, "In Latin America there are 42% of the world's Catholics but only 14% of the priests." Nearly half of those priests are missionaries from overseas. In the past few years, however, priest recruitment has risen in several nations.

The Pope and his bishops have a devilishly difficult course to steer in Latin America. If the church veers too far right in social policy, it risks losing the masses and the radical priests. If it veers left, it risks expulsion of missionaries and wholesale suppression by the military or one-party regimes that control all but three of mainland Latin America's 17 countries. The Pope's much heralded plan to mediate the nasty dispute between Argentina and Chile over the Beagle Channel border only underscores the fact that the Vatican has maintained good relations with these and other military dictatorships. Protesting that coziness, an Argentine group wrote the Pope that if he wants to prevent bloodshed he should consider "the thousands of citizens who are killed, missing or tortured."

The dispute that the Latin American bishops will try to finesse during the next two weeks is not over whether the church should be concerned about oppression and poverty. The reform-minded Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s, and papal decrees, settled that question with an emphatic affirmative. Rather, it is over the balance between political and spiritual aims, the degree to which the church should publicly confront autocracies, and whether it should countenance Marxist economic ideas and, at times, revolutionary violence.

All factions agree that the previous CELAM meeting at Medellin, Colombia, in 1968, was a watershed. Pope Paul VI personally visited the conference to reiterate his commitment to economic justice but also to urge political caution and renounce violent tactics. But the bishops at Medellin were in no mood for pussyfooting. Heavily influenced by progressive advisers, they issued outspoken documents linking capitalism with "institutionalized violence" and an "international imperialism of money" and calling on the church to maintain "solidarity with the poor." The Catholic Church, once the handmaiden of the rich and powerful, was politically engaged on the opposite side.

The years after Medellin brought a conceptual revolution among some priests. They adopted "liberation theology," a shirtsleeves political approach that borrows most of its economic views from Marx even while discarding his atheism.

A bishop who backs the cause, Sergio Mendez Arceo of Mexico, told an interviewer last year that "Marxism is the only solution for Latin America."

To the Vatican, liberation theology went too far, as did Medellin, where, it decided, a liberal minority had steamrollered its ideas past an apathetic majority. In 1972 Vatican officials favored the CELAM board's selection of auxiliary Bishop Alfonso Lopez Trujillo from the staunchly conservative Colombian hierarchy as secretary-general, or top staff executive. Lopez Trujillo is a firm, shrewd anti-Marxist who once declared, "I don't believe that in Latin America Marxism has any possibilities. Nor does a capitalism that turns its back on mankind." He is a foe of liberation theology and apparently had a hand in an important critique of it that was released in 1977 by the International Theological Commission, a blue-ribbon group of scholars that advises the Pope. "Christians do not persuade the masses to destroy violence by counterviolence," said the theologians, nor, they added, should they identify the church with any transitory political theory.

Lopez Trujillo and the top Vatican planner for CELAM, Sebastiano Cardinal Baggio, began advance work to avoid Me-dellin-type surprises. The theme would be "evangelization," hardly a radical buzzword, and the site would be Puebla, the most traditional and pious city in Mexico. There would be fewer advisers, and they would be more conservative. Limitations would be placed on the participation of members of religious orders, who are often more militant than diocesan priests.

A year ago the CELAM staff sent bishops a "preparatory document" for the current meeting. It contained only tepid criticism of militarism and of violence aimed at priests. The poor were offered "the happiness of the [spiritual] kingdom of which no human sorrow can deprive them." Outraged liberals charged that a campaign was afoot to "betray" Medellin. Brazil's bishops took the lead in attacking the document; a new, somewhat less conservative version was subsequently prepared. The Brazilians also rebuffed two top officials of the Vatican's Justice and Peace Commission who made a quiet trip to persuade them to mute political statements at CELAM.

The liberation camp accuses Lopez Trujillo and the Vatican of stacking the 174-member roster of bishop delegates at Puebla with conservatives. However, 139 of them were elected by the hierarchies in their own countries. As a result, Brazil's 37 votes will be largely progressive. Moderates and conservatives predominate in the important delegations from Argentina, Venezuela, Peru and Mexico. The best-known liberation theologian, Peru's Father Gustavo Gutierrez, will be on hand as adviser to Ecuador's "Red Bishop," Leonidas Proano Villalba. But El Salvador's Archbishop Romero, a hero to the poor, was not elected by his conservative colleagues and will attend only as a member of a papal commission. The bishops of impoverished Guatemala appointed the head of the Helena Rubinstein branch as one of the non-episcopal delegates, which led Mexico's respected journal Proceso to fume, "Without any need of cosmetics, Christians everywhere blush at this insult." Dissidents who were not included in the meeting are encamped at Puebla for what amounts to a countermeeting, which they call CELAM 2 1/2. The press corps and international observers number more than 1,000.

The major unknown factor is what Pope John Paul will advise the bishops in this week's closed-door meetings. The left fears that this Pope from Poland will favor the "Polish solution," which uses subtle maneuvering more than confrontation with repressive regimes. Remarks one liberal at the Vatican: "The difference is that in Eastern Europe the regimes are atheistic, while in Latin America they are supposedly Catholic. That gives the Holy See a graver responsibility." The mere presence of the new Pontiff at a conference that could well cause him problems is a sure sign that John Paul II acknowledges that responsibility.

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