Journeys of a Catholic Poster Girl

B XVI and the Pentecostals: (also from John Allen)

São Paulo, Brazil

Though part of the unspoken logic for Benedict XVI’s trip to Brazil is to offset Catholic losses to Pentecostalism, now estimated at almost 20 million Brazilians and growing, political realities in the country on issues such as abortion and gay marriage in some sense make the Pentecostals the pope’s best friends.

Such are the ironies of life in Latin America.

Under current Brazilian law, abortion is illegal except in cases of rape or when a woman’s life is at risk. Nevertheless, there are thought to be somewhere between a million and two million “clandestine” abortions in the country each year, and the Brazilian Minister of Health, Jose Gomes Temporao, has floated the idea of widening the scope of legal abortion.

Brazil’s President, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a Catholic, has said that he is personally opposed to abortion, but that “the state cannot abdicate from caring for this as a public health question, because to do so would lead to the death of many young women in this country.”

On the papal plane on the way to Brazil, Benedict XVI seemed to indicate that Catholic politicians who support expanding abortion rights should be considered excommunicated under the terms of Canon Law.

During his remarks to Lula at the welcoming ceremony at the São Paulo airport, Benedict called for “respect for life from the moment of conception until natural death as an integral requirement of human nature.”

That’s where the Pentecostals come into play.

Of all the political and social forces in Brazil, it’s the Pentecostals who are most likely to be receptive to Benedict’s pro-life message. They are not an inconsiderable force in Brazil’s political galaxy; at the moment, the Pentecostal “block” in the national legislature represents about 10 percent of the total, roughly 60 members. While the Pentecostals come from different parties and hold different positions on issues such as tax policy and international relations, they are compactly in favor of conservative positions on social questions such as abortion.

While some Pentecostal legislators and ministers were damaged by corruption scandals in 2005 and 2006, they still represent a potent political force in the country.

The Vice-President of Brazil, who was Lula’s running mate in the 2002 national elections, José Alencar, is a member of the Pentecostal Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, and is perhaps the most prominent pro-life member of the administration. It will be Alencar who will say goodbye to Benedict on the country’s behalf Sunday evening when the pope departs from São Paulo.

Thus Benedict XVI, as well as local Catholic leaders, face a dilemma in terms of how they relate to what have until recently been know, pejoratively, as “the sects.”

On the one hand, the Catholic church clearly hopes to stop the attrition towards Pentecostalism, and, if possible, recapture some lost ground. That’s part of the implied subtext whenever Benedict and other Catholic leaders call for a renewed commitment to “evangelization.”

Yet Benedict does not want to alienate the Pentecostals either, because on a range of issues, they are his best natural allies.

“It’s not just the specific question of abortion or homosexuality,” one Brazilian journalist explained today. “It’s the broader question of the ‘religiousness’ of Brazil. If the pope had to rely just on the Catholics, the country would actually be much secularized than it already is.”

How Benedict walks this tightrope – promoting healthy competition for adherents, but also fostering strong working relationships at the level of political and cultural debates – may have a great deal to say about the future of Catholic/Pentecostal relations in Latin America.

In the end, one of the ironies of the pope’s Brazil trip may turn out to be that, having come to Brazil to encourage Catholics to resist Pentecostalism, his battle against the dictatorship of relativism may actually usher in a new era of Catholic/Pentecostal “good feelings” instead.

From John Allen:

Day One: The Love/Hate Relationship between Benedict and Liberation Theology
Posted on May 9, 2007 15:24pm CST.

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
São Paulo, Brazil

When Benedict headed for Turkey last November, it was in the wake of the backlash across the Muslim world stirred by his citation at the University of Regensburg of a 14th century Byzantine emperor’s views on Islam. Turkey gave the pope an opportunity to put his own “spin” on Regensburg, stressing dialogue and brotherhood, and even pausing for a moment of silent prayer in Istanbul’s Blue Mosque.

Measured against a different arc of time, Benedict’s May 9-13 trip to Brazil once again offers the pope a chance to provide his own gloss on an area of controversy where he carries some political baggage. The issue this time is not Islam, but liberation theology, and the reaction dates back not a couple of months, but a couple of decades.

Right out of the gate, Benedict argued that his crackdown on liberation theology in the 1980s was not about undermining the church’s engagement on behalf of the poor.

“The meaning of the intervention of the magisterium was not to destroy the commitment to justice,” Benedict XVI said in response to a question from NCR during an airborne news conference, “but to guide it down the right paths, including the proper distinction between political responsibility and ecclesial responsibility.”

The response was merely the latest chapter in a love/hate relationship between Joseph Ratzinger and liberation theology which has deep biographical roots.

As early as his study of Bonaventure and Joachim of Fiore in graduate school during the 1950s, Ratzinger had become wary of messianic movements or promises of a “new age” – all of which, he felt, made the mistake of trying to locate salvation inside history. Moreover, when one imparts eschatological significance to some particular political program or dream, Ratzinger felt, then all manner of excesses and barbarisms can be justified in its name.

In terms of church politics, Ratzinger’s involvement with debates over liberation theology began even before he arrived in the Vatican. While still the Archbishop of Munich-Freising, Pope John Paul I dispatched him as a papal legate to a Marian congress in Ecuador in September 1978, where Ratzinger cautioned against Marxist ideologies and the theology of liberation. Upon arriving at the Vatican, his struggles with the liberationists quickly became the stuff of ecclesiastical legend.

Ratzinger always insisted that the problem was not with the motive of liberation theologians, but with efforts to reshape or even bowdlerize the church’s traditional doctrine to make it more “relevant” for desired social outcomes. When one does that, Ratzinger argued, not only is the faith distorted, but the desired social outcomes are never reached.

Here is the most widely quoted paragraph from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s 1984 Instruction on Liberation Theology:

The overthrow by means of revolutionary violence of structures which generate violence is not ipso facto the beginning of a just regime. A major fact of our times ought to evoke the reflection of all those who would sincerely work for the true liberation of their brothers: Millions of our own contemporaries legitimately yearn to recover those basic freedoms of which they were deprived by totalitarian and atheistic regimes which came to power by violent and revolutionary means, precisely in the name of the liberation of the people. This shame of our time cannot be ignored: While claiming to bring them freedom, these regimes keep whole nations in conditions of servitude which are unworthy of mankind. Those who, perhaps inadvertantly, make themselves accomplices of similar enslavements betray the very poor they mean to help.

At the heart of Ratzinger’s critique of liberation were two key theological motifs, which recur time and again in his writing on other subjects.

(1) Truth: Because the liberationists argued that theological understanding should follow political commitment, Ratzinger believed they were saying that praxis is the standard for judging the rightness of doctrine. In other words, one decides which Christian teachings are “true” on the basis of how well they support political efforts for social justice. As early as 1968 in his Introduction to Christianity, Ratzinger was resisting the “tyranny of the factum,” the tendency to reduce truth to what one does instead of what reality is. This mistake leads some to present Christianity as a tool for changing the world, and to “transpose belief itself to this place.” Thus all doctrine is suspect unless it is useful for social change.

Ratzinger was not simply projecting this understanding onto the liberationists; some did hold this position. Juan Luis Segundo’s famous line from Theology for Artisans of a New Humanity was: “The only truth is the truth that is efficacious for liberation.” Similarly, the Brazilian Hugo Assmann wrote in 1976: “The Bible! It doesn’t exist. The only Bible is the sociological Bible of what I see happening here and now.”

(2) Eschatology: Ratzinger’s fundamental complaint about liberation theology is that it embodies a mistaken notion of eschatology. The liberationists, Ratzinger believes, are looking for the Kingdom of God on this earth and in this order of history. This sort of utopianism is not merely wrong, Ratzinger says, it’s dangerous. Whenever a social or political movement makes absolutist claims about what it can deliver, fascism is not far down the road. It is the lesson of Nazi Germany, Ratzinger argues, and it is the lesson of Soviet Russia.

Thus the goal of Christian must be to strip politics out of eschatology. As he put in his 1987 book Church, Ecumenism and Politics: “Where there is no dualism, there is totalitarianism.”

In Ratzinger’s judgment, the consequences of liberation theology’s warped eschatology show up in at least four ways.

1. Defections from Catholicism: By promising the poor a reign of justice that never comes, Ratzinger believes, liberation theology actually estranged them from Catholicism and led many of them to seek a transcendental faith somewhere else.
2. Terror. If you allow yourself to believe that a perfect society can be the work of human hands, Ratzinger believes, those hands will end up stained with blood.
3. Dissent: Ratzinger has long believed that, inspired by liberation theology, Catholics will perceive a form of “class struggle” between those who hold ecclesial power and those excluded from it, and will thus demand “liberation” from oppressive church structures.
4. Collapse into the culture: Ultimately, what is at stake for Ratzinger is his Augustinian understanding of the distinction between church and culture. To the extent that liberation theology vests its hopes in secular political progress rather than the liberation only Christ can bring, Ratzinger felt, it lost sight of the cross.

None of this means, however, that Ratzinger has an unremittingly bleak view of liberation theology.

In a more positive 1986 document, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Ratzinger declared, “Those who are oppressed by poverty are the object of a love of preference on the part of the church, which since her origin and in spite of the failings of many of her members has not ceased to work for their relief, defense and liberation.”

So far, Benedict XVI seems determined to use the Brazil trip to demonstrate the sincerity of his social concern. On the papal plane, the pope even signaled his support for the beatification of the ultimate icon of the liberation theology movement – the late Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, assassinated in 1980 while celebrating Mass.

“That Romero as a person merits beatification, I have no doubt,” he said, while adding that he’s waiting for the decision of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.