Those Beleaguered Maryknollers

By Richard N. Ostling

The missionaries draw fire in Latin America and at home

Miguel d'Escoto is both a Maryknoll priest and Foreign Minister in the new radical, reformist government of Nicaragua. Pope John Paul II has made it bluntly clear that he wants all priests to get out of politics. So have the bishops of Nicaragua. But D'Escoto and other colleagues refuse, saying that they must first serve God by serving the people and the revolution. D'Escoto's position has stirred concern--and rage--about the Maryknoll order across Latin America.

In May another Maryknoll father, Roy Bourgeois, burst into the news when he disappeared in El Salvador, leaving behind a letter that accused the Reagan Administration of providing military aid to a "repressive dictatorship at war with its own people." Maryknoll Superior General James Noonan rushed from the society's headquarters in Ossining, N.Y., to El Salvador and indicated that the priest was the victim of foul play. After all, two Maryknoll nuns and two other missionaries had been murdered in December (six soldiers are currently under provisional arrest for the crime). But, to the embarrassment of Noonan and the whole Maryknoll order, Bourgeois soon surfaced; he had simply gone off to observe the poor and the antigovernment guerrillas for a while. As a result all the Maryknollers have had to leave El Salvador.

In neighboring Honduras the transitional regime, fearing that missionaries will import radicalism, has forbidden any new Maryknollers to join the small component of priests and nuns already there working with the poor.

Last week, in the Philippines, the government of President Ferdinand Marcos ordered Maryknoll Father Edward Shellito out of the country, claiming that he had not only fomented political unrest but had portrayed Jesus Christ as a rebel.

The Maryknollers have also come under attack closer to home. NeoConservative Catholic Michael Novak has accused the society of "promoting Christian Marxism--uncritically, naively, grandly, extensively." Columnists Patrick Buchanan, William F. Buckley Jr. and Father Andrew Greeley have picked up the cry.

Founded in 1911 as the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America, the Maryknollers have regularly worked with the poor and have regularly drawn criticism and harassment from Latin American landowners and governments. But the range and power of the present attack is unprecedented. It also reflects the fact that the Catholic Church, once a see-no-evil friend of oppressive regimes and the wealthy elite, has been siding more and more with the poor for the past 15 years or so. Missionaries, the Maryknollers and Jesuits in particular, sometimes become the most radical and best-trained organizers. Declares Richard Ouellette, a Maryknoll missionary in Brazil: "We've turned tradition on its head. It used to be God's will to accept the suffering. Now it's God's will to denounce suffering."

Maryknoll priests train for seven years, with fieldwork overseas or in the prisons or skid rows of the U.S. The challenge attracts only a handful nowadays (only three men will be ordained this year), but the Maryknoll Society remains the biggest U.S. Catholic foreign mission, with 765 priests, 109 brothers and 68 lay missioners. The separate order of Maryknoll Sisters has 975 nuns.

Most Maryknoll priests and nuns still work alongside peasants in the fields, teach the basics of nutrition and child care, build schools and houses, dispense medical care or develop cottage industries and cooperative farms. But starting with a 1966 policy statement, the society also began emphasizing the need for change in social systems and the rallying of oppressed groups to demand their civil and economic rights. One priest explains the shift: "The church is no longer only involved in giving the campesinos plows and tools, but in making them conscious of their situation."

That consciousness-raising also extends to the U.S. Maryknoll's home-front fund raiser, Father Robert Carleton, says the society's biggest task of all is to "help the traditional Catholic Church in the U.S. understand the new social gospel of the world church."

The radical image dates from 1968 when a group of Maryknoll priests and nuns sided with leftist guerrillas who were hoping to bring down the government of Guatemala. Two of them then got married and, as Thomas and Marjorie Melville, wrote a book called Guatemala: The Politics of Land Ownership. The incident is still well remembered in Central America. Rightly or wrongly, the Maryknollers have acquired such a name for activism that when a gun-toting Irish priest named Donald McKenna joined the current group of leftist guerrillas in Guatemala, some reporters automatically referred to him as a Maryknoll Father, which he was not. The American consul general in El Salvador, Patricia Lasbury, received death threats as a former Maryknoll nun. She once was a nun, but in another order.

While the few political activists attract headlines, other Maryknollers have continued to labor quietly with Latin America's poor. Among them:

> Bill Woods, a Texan who arrived in Guatemala and quickly decided to open up unused northern jungle land for Indians, who were running out of farming space in the highlands. Despite feverish opposition and regular threats on his life from landowners in the area, by the 1970s Woods had managed to relocate 1,000 families. Then, three years ago, the priest's small plane exploded in midair. Missionaries are convinced Woods was murdered.

> William Boteler of Baltimore, who went to Bolivia a dozen years ago, feels that continual incidents of police torture and murder are an outgrowth of distorted family values. "You have people who don't possess values of responsibility and respect for others," he says. "The threat the military government sees is that we are raising the consciousness of the people, that the people have a right to a voice and vote in their own destiny." During the Bolivian dictatorship's current reign of terror, a number of priests have been beaten up or jailed, and others have fled. Troops demolished the Maryknoll radio station and printing press in Riberalta.

> Laura Glynn of Hartford, Conn., and Elsie Monje of Guayaquil, Ecuador, who organize destitute peasants in Ecuador and, as a result, endure constant denunciations as "Communist agitators." Based in Quito, the nuns advise labor and peasant organizers and students. Just now they are obtaining medical aid for several hundred Andean Indians squatting on unused hilly farm land. More than 30 have been wounded by gunshots in repeated skirmishes with police and thugs hired by landowners, but local hospitals refuse to treat them.

The majority of Maryknollers in the field are probably political moderates whose idealism appears to come straight from American civics textbooks. But the simplest American notions about political conscience and human rights are revolutionary when expressed in most Latin American countries. Sister Rose Mary McCormack, who directs the society's nuns in Peru, insists that Maryknollers are not Marxists, but adds: "They are in the same trench with us, fighting the same enemies. It breaks your heart when you see how poor the very poor of Peru can be." Superior General Noonan notes that while "Marxism has very little influence" on Maryknoll life, it is a handy label that opponents have found useful to discredit missionaries who are "asking for change in the basic structures of society."

Though the point is well taken, Maryknoll's reputation is complicated by the existence of Orbis Books, a religious publishing house the society established in 1971. Orbis has become a leading outlet for radical social thinking from Third World theologians. After Peru's Father Gustavo Gutierrez produced his influential A Theology of Liberation in 1971, Orbis issued the English-language edition. Gutierrez's most recent essay for Orbis blesses the class struggle and condemns "imperialist" corporations and "reformist" strategies of social change that forestall the revolution.

Conservative Catholics saw red last year when Maryknoll magazine, edited by D'Escoto before he joined the Nicaraguan revolution, lauded Cuba for "advances in a brief span of 20 years [which] are unparalleled in Latin America." The magazine's publisher, Father Darryl Hunt, like the ill-starred Father Bourgeois, has shed all nonpartisanship on the touchy issue of El Salvador. He charges that "the U.S. continues to support a clique of rightist murderers."

In the field and after hours, moderate Maryknollers grumble about a handful of extreme activists and the political line that sometimes emanates from headquarters. Says one veteran in Central America: "These guys come in and want to change 400 years of mistakes overnight. You're lucky if you can make changes here in 80 years." The last word about salvation and social justice may go, however, to Father Peter Halligan, a former policeman now working in Lima: "We know stark poverty is the devil's best ally."

--By Richard N. Ostling.

Reported by James Wilde/Ossining and James Willwerth/Guatemala City

With reporting by James Wilde and James Willwerth

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