[Peace-discuss] [sf-core] An opinion from an Irish National about the new Pope

[C. G. Estabrook]

With the disappearance of official Marxism-Leninism, Christianity (especially Catholicism) is the largest anti-capitalist discourse in the Global South today. The election of a bishop of Rome from Argentina may make that more obvious. 

The major social encyclical of the last pope (Ratzinger), Caritas in Veritate (2009), was an attack on neoliberalism and a call for the redistribution of wealth, substantially to the left of any mainstream poplitician in the US or EU. E.g., "The global market has stimulated first and foremost, on the part of rich countries, a search for areas in which to outsource production at low cost with a view to reducing the prices of many goods, increasing purchasing power and thus accelerating the rate of development in terms of greater availability of consumer goods for the domestic market. Consequently, the market has prompted new forms of competition between States as they seek to attract foreign businesses to set up production centres, by means of a variety of instruments, including favourable fiscal regimes and deregulation of the labour market. These processes have led to a downsizing of social security systems as the price to be paid for seeking greater competitive advantage in the global market, with consequent grave danger for the rights of workers, for fundamental human rights and for the solidarity associated with the traditional forms of the social State." 

The new pope (Bergoglio), speaking to a group of Latin American bishops in 2007, said, "We live in the most unequal part of the world, which has grown the most yet reduced misery the least. The unjust distribution of goods persists, creating a situation of social sin that cries out to heaven and limits the possibilities of a fuller life for so many of our brothers."

As to Jesuits as "ideological thugs," that's the view of the Pentagon. Chomsky wrote in 2010, 

"...the plague of state terror in the Western hemisphere was initiated with the Brazilian coup in 1964, installing the first of a series of neo-Nazi National Security States and initiating a plague of repression without precedent in the hemisphere, always strongly backed by Washington, hence a particularly violent form of state-directed international terrorism. The campaign was in substantial measure a war against the Church. It was more than symbolic that it culminated in the assassination of six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, in November 1989, a few days after the fall of the Berlin wall. They were murdered by an elite Salvadoran battalion, fresh from renewed training at the John F. Kennedy Special Forces School in North Carolina. As was learned last November, but apparently aroused no interest, the order for the assassination was signed by the chief of staff and his associates, all of them so closely connected to the Pentagon and the US Embassy that it becomes even harder to imagine that Washington was unaware of the plans of its model battalion. This elite force had already left a trail of blood of the usual victims through the hideous decade of the 1980s in El Salvador, which opened with the assassination of Archbishop Romero, 'the voice of the voiceless,' by much the same hands.

"The murder of the Jesuit priests was a crushing blow to liberation theology, the remarkable revival of Christianity initiated by Pope John XXIII at Vatican II, which he opened in 1962, an event that 'ushered in a new era in the history of the Catholic Church,' in the words of the distinguished theologian and historian of Christianity Hans Kueng. Inspired by Vatican II, Latin American Bishops adopted 'the preferential option for the poor,' renewing the radical pacifism of the Gospels that had been put to rest when the Emperor Constantine established Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire -- 'a revolution' that converted 'the persecuted church' to a 'persecuting church,' in Kueng's words. In the post-Vatican II attempt to revive the Christianity of the pre-Constantine period, priests, nuns, and laypersons took the message of the Gospels to the poor and the persecuted, brought them together in 'base communities,' and encouraged them to take their fate into their own hands and to work together to overcome the misery of survival in brutal realms of US power.

"The reaction to this grave heresy was not long in coming. The first salvo was Kennedy's military coup in Brazil in 1964, overthrowing a mildly social democratic government and instituting a reign of torture and violence. The campaign ended with the murder of the Jesuit intellectuals 20 years ago. There has been much debate about who deserves credit for the fall of the Berlin wall, but there is none about the responsibility for the brutal demolition of the attempt to revive the church of the Gospels. Washington's School of the Americas, famous for its training of Latin American killers, proudly announced as one of its 'talking points' that liberation theology was 'defeated with the assistance of the US army' -- given a helping hand, to be sure by the Vatican, using the gentler means of expulsion and suppression..."

Chomsky said in a radio interview in 2009, "The Catholic Bishops Conference in the United States comes out with statements that are so progressive that the press won't report them. The pope's new year messages are often not reported because they would be considered so far 'to the left' (whatever that means in the US spectrum)."

Finally, Marx' own analysis of religion is more sophisticated, anthropologically and historically, than classical liberalism's simple opposition to Christianity, occasioned by the union of the institutions of church and state in the era of Absolutism. (Formerly, in the High Midlde Ages, they had been directly opposed.) See, e.g., Perry Anderson's still quite valuable "Lineages of the Absolutist State" (1974).

--CGE

On Mar 14, 2013, at 1:05 PM, David Johnson <dlj725 at hughes.net> wrote:

> I see also that this new pope, a Jesuit, the ideological thug wing of the Catholic church, is from Argentina. The Catholic church there and internationally crushed their liberation theology wing and took the side of the military dictatorships in Latin America in the slaughter of the left and active workers and peasants. I think the Argentine church even had to apologize for not opposing the dictatorship and its methods in Argentina. So from the last pope, a former Nazi youth member to a man who helped through his organization the murderous military dictatorship in Argentina. What an outfit. Yes the main and brutal church of capitalism.