Religion: Weighing Words

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Compromise at Puebla

Behind the gray stone walls of Palafox Seminary in Puebla, Mexico, 184 bishops of the third Latin American Bishops' Conference (CELAM III) spent 18 days weighing words like poker chips in a high-risk game. At stake was the future of 300 million Roman Catholics, across a continent plagued by poverty and oppression. Would the bishops be swayed by the progressives in their midst and come out in favor of church activism for the coming decades? Or would they take a conservative line and retreat from tactics that threatened confrontation with repressive political regimes? Last week the bishops emerged with an 8,000-word final statement that mildly surprised most observers. While hardly radical in tone, it contained a stronger mandate for church involvement in social issues than had been expected.

Progressives in Puebla were not at first counting on such an outcome. Pope John Paul II, in his opening speech at the conference, had denounced social injustice but also warned the bishops not to politicize the church, and to eschew violent reform−a delicate balance that discouraged many progressives by its ambiguity. A source of more distress was Colombian Bishop Alfonso López Trujillo, the CELAM secretary general who reportedly had received Vatican approval to stack the group with conservatives to avoid a reprise of the 1968 CELAM II in Medellin, Colombia. There, a liberal minority pushed through strong documents that inspired the Marxist-tinged "theology of liberation." Since the Puebla statement does not condemn liberation theology−or even mention it by name−progressives felt relieved. Pope John Paul was described by aides as "delighted" with the document. Said CELAM President Aloisio Cardinal Lorscheider of Brazil, a shrewd moderate: "It's well balanced and goes forward from Medellin."

In seeking that balance, the bishops rapped both capitalism ("It has made the distance between rich and poor even greater by placing capital before work") and Marxist strategies (They "have sacrificed many Christian values and have fallen into unrealistic and Utopian notions"). The bishops condemned the "national security" ideologies that undergird most of Latin America's military regimes for leading "to the abuse of power and violation of human rights," but they also denounced leftist terrorism. Echoing the Pope's address, the document cautions priests to "divest themselves of all political ideology." But it does advocate Christian action. Said the bishops: "We ask all Christians to collaborate in the changing of unjust structures and to communicate gospel values to the entire culture where we live."

How to do it? Unexpectedly, the bishops gave a vote of confidence to the comunidades de base, or grass-roots base communities, that have sprung up across Latin America since Medellin. Most comunidades number less than 20 Christians, who meet privately and often clandestinely to talk out social and economic problems as well as religious issues. There are as many as 150,000 such communities, most of them in Brazil. Despite some tension between the lay-centered comunidades and the traditional church hierarchy, the bishops acknowledged that "the faith of Christ has flourished" in them.