The Revolutionary Church in Latin America

Extract

When thirty tons of stolen dynamite were recovered by the police in the Argentine province of Santa Fe in February, the local police chief told journalists that the entire responsibility for subversion in Argentina could be ascribed to ‘those cursed Third World priests’. He was exaggerating, but it is true that members of the Movement of Priests for the Third World along with other young Catholics in other parts of Latin America—both priests and laity—have become increasingly deeply involved in revolutionary activities. This does not just mean that many Catholics now accept the need for radical change in the structure of Latin American society and sympathize with the aspirations of the extreme left. An Uruguayan professor of sociology, writing last year of contemporary trends in Latin American Catholicism, has suggested that the old antithesis of Christianity or Marxism is disappearing, and that a new revolutionary synthesis is emerging: ‘Latin Americans have no time any longer for the parlour discussions that are so popular in Europe. They want a dialogue in action and for action, focussing on the political and strategic future of the Latin American revolution. They do not consider either Christianity or Marxism as immutable, selfsufficient or mutually exclusive options.’

This assumption that there is indeed a Latin American revolution which will lead sooner or later to the building of socialism in Latin America is central to a great deal of Christian thought in the region today. This is perhaps the first great political upheaval of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in which Christians as Christians are in the vanguard.