The extreme left is at war with the Catholic Church in Latin America. Last week, the invasion led by councilor Renato Freitas, from the Workers’ Party (PT), to the Church of Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos, in Curitiba, shocked the faithful and spectators who had access to the images.
The episode of national repercussion, which was solemnly ignored by the PT’s biggest name, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, refers to others that took place on the continent in the last four years: on May 1, 2019, a group of the Bolivarian National Guard (GNB) invaded a church dedicated to Our Lady of Fatima in the city of San Cristóbal, Venezuela, launching gas bombs tearing during a mass full of elderly people.
The month of October 2015 was marked by the destruction of two churches in Santiago, Chile – the church of San Francisco de Borja and the parish of Asunción -, with the right to publish photos on social networks of the aggressors alongside destroyed religious images.
In 21 in August of last year, protesters spray-painted the cathedral in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with phrases against the Church, against the clergy and against the Bible. In November, supporters of the Cuban regime staged an act of repudiation in front of the Camaguey Curia. The Communist Party threatened a priest to go to jail if he participated in the planned demonstrations against the dictatorship.
Mutual condemnations
The relationship of the The Catholic Church with the left, however, was never linear – especially in Latin America. On the part of the Vatican, it is worth recalling the repeated and vehement condemnations of communism by the popes in recent centuries, dating back to the times of Karl Marx: in 100, in the encyclical Qui Pluribus, Pope Pius IX referred to the “nefarious doctrine of communism, contrary to natural law, which, once accepted, destroys the rights of all, property and even human society.”
Already in Quod Apostolici Muneris, by 1878, Leo XIII warned against “the factions of those who, under various and almost barbaric designations, call themselves socialists, communists or nihilists”, who “marching openly and confidently in the light of day, dare to carry out what they have long scheming: the downfall of all civil society.”
Finally, in 1891, at the hands of Leo XIII, the Church receives the Rerum Renovarum: the foundational text of what would become the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church. After condemning the greed that leads to the excessive accumulation of material goods and to social injustices, the pontiff determines, however, that the “capital error” in Marxism is “to believe that the two classes are innate enemies of each other, as if nature would have armed the rich and the poor to fight each other in a stubborn duel”. “This is such an aberration that it is necessary to place the truth in a contrary doctrine”, he explains.
Half a century later, in 1931, Pope Pius XI stressed that “no one can be both a good Catholic and a true socialist”. In 1930, he would classify the Russian Revolution as a “horrendous scourge” and communism as a “full system of errors and sophistry”.
The left that emerged from the revolutions of the 20th century also demonstrated its opinions about Christianity. It is estimated that around 1878 Catholic priests were killed by the dictatorships of Lenin and Stalin , according to a survey by the Apostolic Administration for Catholics of Northern Europe Russia. Before Stalin decided to “tolerate” the Russian Orthodox Church (after realizing that he was losing support among his faithful), the bloodthirsty dictator threw Christianity underground: during the purges of the 1990s 1930, at least 100 a thousand people were condemned and executed for having some relationship with the Church.
Decades later, Mao Tse Tung would not be left behind. With his “Decision on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”, published in 1966 by the Communist Party, he declared his aims to exterminate education and religion. As a result, churches were closed, demolished or vandalized and religious practices were banned. In the same decade, in Latin America, the guerrilla Ernesto Che Guevara would utter his famous phrase: “I assure you that if Christ crossed my path I would do the same as Nietzsche: I would not hesitate to crush him like a worm”.
John Paul II
If, on the one hand, the 20th century saw the emergence of Soviet communism, avowedly anti-Catholic, and its dismemberments around the world, on the other, it was also the terrain of complex battles between religion and ideology. The election of Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II, to the post of head of the Catholic Church, in 1978, would mark the beginning of a new phase of clashes. Born in Poland ruled by Moscow, John Paul II knew what it meant to grow up in a country where studying to be a priest was a subversive act in itself.
Not for nothing, his pontificate was marked by harsh criticism of the Soviet Union and communism, which he understood as a “spiritual” rather than an economic evil, and he fought with speeches and deeds. It is well known that Wojtyla and the President of the United States, Ronald Reagan, would form one of the greatest alliances of all time, to the point of exchanging essential information for the fight against the Soviet bloc.
It would be However, it was during the pontificate of John Paul II that Liberation Theology would gain strength precisely on the Latin American continent. Founded in 1966 with the Medellín Conference, in a decade the movement headed by the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutierrez and the then Franciscan friar Leonardo Boff, from Brazil, among others, would reach the hands of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, so that its documents and ideals could be judged according to Catholic doctrine.
The rest is history : the Prefect of the Congregation, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was closely following the action of left-wing revolutionaries, determined the rejection of Liberation Theology and ordered Leonardo Boff to remain silent.
As his biographer, Elio Guerriero, Ratzinger not only “saw that liberation theology was not, under any circumstances, a thought born from the cry of injustice of the Latin American people; on the contrary, he considered it a thought created in a laboratory in German or American universities”. His position would be endorsed by John Paul II, who would insist on underlining the importance of the “preferential option for the poor” proposed by the movement, without falling into revolutionary and materialist scams.
None of this would prevent Theology from of Liberation to gain space – and a lot – in Latin America. It should be remembered that the decades of 1978 and were marked by the height of the military dictatorship in Brazil. It was during this period that the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil (CNBB) provided institutional coverage to the so-called base ecclesial communities (CEBs), from which the Workers’ Party would be born.
For his part, João Paulo II tried to establish a diplomatic relationship, even with the Latin American left. Although he became persona non grata in the Soviet Union, a condition that would only change after the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev, the pope made history by visiting revolutionary leader Fidel Castro. , with whom he would have established a respectful relationship, to the point of convincing him to allow the Cuban people to return to celebrate Christian festivals. Later, Benedict XVI and Francis would also be received by the dictator – both with clear messages against the regime. “You don’t serve ideologies, you serve people”, said Francis, in the middle of
Plaza de la Revolución, in
Diplomacy: in of January 1978, Pope John Paul II went to Cuba to meet dictator Fidel Castro. Cubans were allowed to celebrate Christian festivals after the visit (photo: Ahmed Velázquez/Granma). )
A few years after the speech, the attacks of the extreme left on Catholic churches are multiplying across the continent, although the relationship remains complex . Dom José Antônio Peruzzo himself, Archbishop of Curitiba, who signs the note of repudiation against the invasion carried out by the PT councilor, celebrated a mass in the Cathedral of Curitiba as part of the action “Cry of the Excluded and Excluded”, organized by the Workers’ Movement Landless Rural Areas.
“The position of the Archdiocese of Curitiba is one of repudiation in the face of injurious profanation. The Law and free citizenship were also attacked. partisan’ or exacerbate reactions. Confrontations are not pacifying. What is now wanted is to safeguard the dignity of the wonderful, and also painful, history of that Temple”, says the note from the Archdiocese.
There are some hypotheses that help to explain the attacks. At the time of the acts of vandalism in Chile, there were those who related the destruction of the temples to the relationship between the Catholic Church and the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. However, nothing justifies these sayings “Muerte al Nazareno” on the facade of a theirs. It also happens that it is necessary to take into account that the left has changed a lot in recent decades, abandoning the trade union profile that once allied itself with the Church in the formation of CEBs and whose agendas were strictly linked to the economy, and attracting supporters among an educated elite. and, above all, secularized, which has no affection for the religious symbols associated with the new demons of “patriarchy” and “structural racism”.
The interview given by Renato Freitas (PT) to the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo is even a reliable portrait of this detachment: “It is very contradictory: we built a space that, in the end, is managed by a white priest, with blue eyes, of European descent, who occupies it without the awareness of what it actually represents”, said the parliamentarian. As long as the “structures” are questioned on the basis of material realities chosen arbitrarily – as if the fact that the celebrant is a white man with blue eyes justified the disrespect for the priest himself and all the faithful -, the sense of “sacred” can be undermined. As the Polish pope raised to the Catholic altars correctly diagnosed: it is a disease of the spirit.
2022
