Catholic Church warms to liberation theology

Guardian/UK       11 May 2015        Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Jonathan Watts

For decades, Gustavo Gutiérrez, a Peruvian theologian and Dominican priest, was treated with suspicion and even contempt by the Vatican’s hierarchy, which saw him as a dangerous Marxist firebrand who used faith as an instrument of revolution. Gutiérrez was the founder of a progressive movement within the Catholic Church known as liberation theology, and while he was never censured in the manner that some of his philosophical compatriots were, there were often rumblings that Gutiérrez was being investigated.

But when the 86-year-old Peruvian arrives in Rome this week as a key speaker at a Vatican event, he will be welcomed as a guest, in a striking show of how Pope Francis – the first Latin American pontiff – has brought tenets of this sometimes controversial movement to the fore of his church, particularly in his pronouncements against the blight of poverty and the dangers of capitalism.

In its height in the late 1960s and 1970s, liberation theology – a distinctly Latin American movement – preached that it was not enough for the church to simply empathise and care for the poor. Instead, believers said, the church needed to be a vehicle to push for fundamental political and structural changes that would eradicate poverty, even – some believed – if it meant supporting armed struggle against oppressors. In Nicaragua, priests inspired by liberation theology took active part in the 1979 Sandinista revolution against Somoza’s dictatorship. Pope Francis has never proclaimed himself to be a liberation theologian and was even a critic of aspects of the movement when he was still known as Father Bergoglio in his native Argentina, according to papal biographers.

“He was very critical of the liberal Marxist version of liberation theology,” said Austen Ivereigh, who has written a biography of Pope Francis. “At that time, you had leftwing movements in Latin America but in fact these were middle-class movements, which [Bergoglio] believed used the poor as instruments. He had a phrase he used – that they were for the people but never with them.” But since his election as pontiff in 2013, Pope Francis’s insistence that the church be “for the poor”, and his pointed criticisms of capitalism and consumerism have gone a long way to rehabilitate the liberation theology movement and incorporate it within the church.

J Matthew Ashley, chair of the theology department at the University of Notre Dame, where Gutiérrez is also professor, says the pope has been greatly influenced by the Argentinian variety of liberation theology, which is called the theology of the people. While the two have sometimes been seen as opposing theologies, even Gutiérrez has said they simply have “different accents” within a single theology.
Ashley says the “thaw” between Gutiérrez and the Vatican started earlier, when the Peruvian co-authored a book with German cardinal Müller, who is now the prefect of the congregation of the doctrine of the faith and seen as a possible future pope. But he acknowledges that Gutiérrez has never been as welcomed in Rome as he is today.
“There are many points of similarity between Gutiérrez’s theology and Pope Francis’s thought, addresses and actions. Both have emphasised that opting for the poor requires getting to know the poor, becoming friends with the poor … both have a great respect for the spirituality of the poor, particularly in everyday life,” Ashley says.

Jung Mo Sung, a prominent liberation theologian in Brazil, says the church has turned a page on liberation theology precisely because Francis understands that the church’s mission is not just to announce God to a world of unbelievers, “but to a world marked by an idolatry of money”.
“In this sense, we can say that part of liberation theology has been elevated to the doctrine of the church,” Sung says. He attributes this shift to the alarming increase in global inequality and the personal experience of the pope, who has worked in some of the poorest communities of Argentina.

Jimmy Burns, who has written a forthcoming biography of the pontiff, agrees that Francis’s Latin American background, has made a key difference. “His predecessor was a very Eurocentric theologian and European to boot and John Paul was virulently anti-communist from Poland,” Burns says. [Abridged]

http://www.theguardian.com/world/catholicism      

Punishment and Grace

Ian Harris                    Otago Daily Times                    May 8, 2015

The Australian drug traffickers did wrong. But in killing them, punishment triumphed over grace, writes Ian Harris.

What a way to go! Ghastly, tragic, merciless, yet with a defiant air of resolution, peace, even hope, as two Australians faced an Indonesian firing squad 10 days ago [April 29], along with six others who had also smuggled drugs. They showed it by singing the hymn Amazing Grace as they stood, each tied to a cross with arms outstretched, awaiting the order that would end their lives. President Joko Widodo ordered their execution to send a message of ultimate deterrence: Smuggle drugs and you’ll die. This vicious trade causes incalculable harm, and Indonesia is serving up a vicious response. 

The Australians, Sydney-born Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, of Sri Lankan origin, accepted they had broken the law. If the justice system is all about punishment, they deserved to be punished. But human relationships include those between the individual and the societies they live in. They go deeper than merely staying within the law and taking the consequences if you don’t.

Relationships leave room for change, growth, “amendment of life”, as the Book of Common Prayer puts it. They allow for grace – amazing grace – and by all accounts, that was Chan’s experience. As with Sukumaran, the man who was executed was not the man he’d been 10 years earlier. His life had been transformed.

Grace is a key concept in the Christian life-view. It lifts a person’s experience out of the mundane world of reward and punishment into that of generosity of spirit beyond anything anyone could ever say they deserved.

That’s why grace is amazing, and that’s why Amazing Grace was exactly the right hymn for the condemned men to be singing as they stood bound to their crosses. For it was written by a man who today would rightly be condemned as a slave trader.

This was John Newton, a libertine and very much a man of the world when, still in his twenties, he became captain of a ship carrying slaves from Africa to America. At 19 he had been press-ganged to serve in Britain’s navy, deserted, and when recaptured was publicly flogged. Transferred to service on a slaver, he had been brutally abused – the slaves even more so. Amazing Grace, written years later, refers to “a wretch like me”. It was an understatement. An unexpected deliverance from the perils of an Atlantic storm, which Newton attributed to God’s mercy, marked a turning-point towards a new way of life. Getting to know and respect John Wesley and other leaders of the early Methodist movement confirmed it. In 1764 he became an Anglican minister at Olney, in Buckinghamshire, and campaigned against the slave trade. 

Imprisoned in Bali, Chan had a similar transformation. He became a Christian, took a course in theology, and was ordained as a pastor. He led church services and, with Sukumaran, established a drug rehabilitation programme for fellow prisoners. Sukumaran, lured to drugs by the promise of a big pay-off, came to describe his arrest as “a blessing”. Three pastors and a priest who ministered to the eight on the execution field told how they sang Newton’s hymn in unison, “like in a choir”, including a verse that must have seemed written for them:

Yes, when this flesh and heart should fail,
And mortal life shall cease;
I shall possess, within the veil,
A life of joy and peace

Life beyond death? This was not the place or time to quibble over the reality or otherwise of an after-life. As the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in quite another context, “The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of.” This hymn speaks to the heart.

After Amazing Grace came Bless the Lord, O My Soul, cut short by the fatal volley of shots. Clearly, the hymns bonded the singers and gave them peace. With the Australians died four Nigerians, a Brazilian and an Indonesian. Those who put their trust in punishment will take a grim satisfaction from their deaths. But the death penalty is the most callous of weapons in the fight against crime. When prisoners have turned their lives around, as Chan and others had, incarceration has done its job and people of good will show mercy.

A British grandmother, also on Indonesia’s death row, commented: “The men shot dead today were reformed men – good men who transformed the lives of people around them. Their senseless, brutal deaths leave the world a poorer place.” Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop added: “They were examples of hope and transformation.” The world needs more of those. 

A Note on Theologian Marcus Borg (Died January 21, 2015)

One theologian who has influenced me a lot is Marcus Borg, who died earlier this year. He is radical without being confrontational, and helped many others to rethink their faith. ARP.

 

Marcus J. Borg (1995), Meeting Jesus AGAIN for the First Time. This ‘gentle radical’, presents one of the most appealing portraits of Jesus in modern literature. The soft style disguises the rigorous scholarship. He does his portrait without divinising Jesus. Indeed he plainly was impeded in early life by the divinity of the Christ of orthodoxy. But once he began to ask "How is it that when people were with Jesus they felt themselves to be in the transforming presence of God?" his scholarly imagination came to life. Jesus was not God but the God-presence became real in a relationship with Jesus.

Marcus Borg the Professor of New Testament distinguishes two images of Jesus: the fideistic image of the divine saviour and the moralistic image of the teacher. He rejects both these as sufficient bases for a modern picture of Jesus, on grounds that they are inaccurate as images of the historical Jesus and that they lead to incomplete images of the Christian life. His major claim is that the Christian life is "about a relationship with God that involves us in a journey of transformation." (1995, p3)

Borg’s interpretative leap is captured by an heuristic: the pre-Easter Jesus, the one the disciples knew, ie Jesus before his death; and the post-Easter Jesus, ie the Jesus of Christian experience and tradition. Jesus from Easter onward was experienced as still present. Thus he became the ‘Risen Lord’, a living Christ. Borg’s contribution to this familiar position is to say that Jesus moved ‘beyond belief’ to relationship. This continuity of presence they understood as ‘a relationship to the Spirit of God’. In it the follower found transformation.

In making the pre-Easter:post-Easter distinction Borg opens up the possibility of life-changing appreciation of the historical Jesus. He was able to see Jesus as spirit-person, teacher of wisdom, social prophet, and movement founder. Jesus as spirit-person moved the focus from believing in Jesus to "being in relationship with the same spirit that Jesus knew." This relationship is above all an experience of God as compassionate. Borg goes straight to the point, saying this defines politics as seen in Jesus. It placed Jesus in the midst of the world of everyday. He enacted the politics of compassion. The Christian life is therefore an embodiment of compassion.

The pre-Easter/post-Easter concept sheds brilliant light on the manner by which Jesus communicated. He subverted conventional wisdom, presenting for those able to hear, a new Kingdom, the rules of which are those of the compassionate spirit.  The kingdom was declared as real and present and known by the nobodies of the world.  Jesus is, in Borg’s view, a thorough monotheist who knows the life of the Spirit and inspires transformation. But he denies that the use of expressions like "Son of  God" and "Wisdom of God" denotes divinity, seeing these as metaphors by which people referred to the transformative effect of meeting Jesus in the post-Easter testimony. (It is one thing to say Jesus reflected the way of God; it is quite another to say this makes him God. If that were so, there would be a million Christian Gods.)

Jesus and his followers were rooted in Judaism. Similarly, post-Easter people are supported by the story character of Scripture. That story is of Exodus from slavery; exile and return; and being restored to righteousness – the priestly story. To the traditional credal mind, the meaning of the priestly story is that of being accepted because God’s conditions were met by sacrifice. To Borg, the priestly story is an invitation to passivity and to a preoccupation with the afterlife. Yet used metaphorically the stories can restore the images of humanity and of God and thus provide hope for a new beginning.

Finally, Borg sees the gospel as an invitation to post-Easter people to be in the same relationship to Jesus as his pre-Easter followers were. Borg thus ends with what he calls a "transformative understanding of the Christian life" (p136). This means the life of companionship with God. To believe in Jesus ought not to mean literally to make him the object of worship – a fealty reserved for God. To believe in Jesus must mean to "give one’s heart to him". In short, the outcome is the transformed Christian life. The story is not that of believing in certain creedal propositions about Jesus but facing one’s deepest self toward the God-presence Jesus knew. 

The Guardian view on the future of war: critical questions need to be asked

Editorial                             Guardian/UK                          30 April 2015

New kinds of war threaten the world, yet the response is both slow and partial and fails to attend to the fundamental causes

Saigon fell 40 years ago this week. The defeat of the United States seemed at the time to be a world-changing event, which demonstrated that even the planet’s foremost power could not prevail if resolutely opposed. But it was the second time the mistake had been made: 20 or so years before, schoolteachers in French provincial towns had wept in front of their pupils as the impossible, the unbelievable news came in that the army had been vanquished in Dien Bien Phu.

Yet France went on to repeat its errors in Algeria. The United States could not imagine it would meet the same fate as its predecessor in Vietnam, but did. The Soviet Union, ignoring both the French and the US experience, blundered into a quagmire of its own in Afghanistan, which the US then inherited. Today, American forces are still fighting in Afghanistan, even though President Barack Obama months ago declared that the US had ended combat there. The Americans are deploying drones and special forces rather than large units, but this is still war. Is it a “good” war or a “bad” war? Ask President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani, and he will say he needs it until his plans for reform and renewal bear fruit. It is not a bad answer but it is a debatable one as well.

The record suggests that most wars do not “end”. Perhaps Vietnam eventually did, although there was a long aftermath of hostility between Washington and Hanoi. But other conflicts seem to lead on to new ones. Even the one supposedly indisputable victory of western forces in the second half of the 20th century, the Kuwait war in 1991, was not that, for it led to a series of conflicts which, in the shape of the campaign against Islamic State (Isis), is still going on today. There are chains of consequences here that we ignore at our peril. How to break them is a truly critical question.

The costs for the western powers who have tried to order the world by force were high, but even the victors have had cause to repine. “The future lied to us, there in the past,” the Vietnamese novelist Bao Ninh wrote, reflecting on a war that he had fought not merely to throw out the Americans but also to create a fair society, one which Vietnam is still far from achieving. Some thought, back in the Vietnam war days, that a western–ordered oppressive world was going to be replaced by a far better one in which strong socialist states would set the pace. That did not turn out to be the case. The new socialist states even had wars with each other.“Oh, when will they ever learn?” wrote Pete Seeger. Until quite recently, the heartening thing was that we did seem to be learning. The cold war ended. There were, suddenly, fewer wars and more peace agreements. Fewer people were killed. United Nations peacekeepers went out to more countries. It was still terrible but it was less terrible. A time of civility, optimists thought, might be on the horizon and, for all the mistakes and imperfections, the liberal interventionism of the 1990s was a product of that optimism. A new attempt at collective security could contain outbreaks of atavistic nationalism like those in former Yugoslavia.

Then Iraq discredited big western interventions. Good, many would say. Yet what has now emerged is even more worrying than in the era of Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic. On the one hand there are wars of extreme viciousness such as those waged by Isis, al-Qaida, Boko Haram and al-Shabaab, all of them with the potential to reach Europe and America at any time. On the other there is the shadow war that Russia is waging in Ukraine, a war both more difficult to counter or to settle by diplomacy since it is so insidiously below the radar.

The military strength of western countries, Britain very much included, is in decline. The slashing of defence budgets has gone too far, but that does not mean that the principal response to these new developments in war should always be military. We need to react more intelligently. The principal response should be to pay attention to underlying causes, to global warming, over-population, failures of governance, resource shortages and to extremes of inequality. We supposedly do, and yet we don’t. Any observer of Britain’s election campaign, for instance, would imagine that we are still a secure nation sitting in a secure world. Wars are symptoms of the fact that we are not.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/30/guardian-view-future-war-critical-questions-need-asked

Yemen crisis: This exotic war will soon become Europe's problem

 Patrick Cockburn                               Independent/UK                                 26 April 2015        

The main outcome of the Saudi air campaign will be terrorism and boatloads of desperate migrants

Yemen is short of many things, but weapons is not one of them. Yemenis own between 40 and 60 million guns, according to a report by UN experts published earlier this year. This should be enough for Yemen’s 26 million people, although the experts note that demand for grenades that used to cost $5, handguns ($150) and AK-47s ($150) has increased eightfold. Yemeni politics is notoriously complicated and exotic, with shifting alliances in which former enemies embrace and old friends make strenuous efforts to kill each other. Already in the turmoil there is a breeding ground for al-Qaeda type attacks such as that on Charlie Hebdo in Paris.

The collapse of the country into a permanent state of warfare will send waves of boat-people towards Western Europe or anywhere else they can find refuge. It is absurd for European leaders to pretend that they are doing something about “terrorism” or the refugees drowning in the Mediterranean when they ignore the wars that are the root causes of these events.

So far the Yemen war has been left to the Saudis and the Gulf monarchies, with the US ineffectually trying to end it. The reality of what is happening is very different from the way it is presented. The Saudis allege that they are crushing a takeover of Yemen by the Houthi Shia militia backed by Iran and intend to return the legitimate president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, to power. In fact, the Houthis’ seizure of so much of Yemen over the past year has little to do with Iran. It has much more to do with their alliance with their old enemy, former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who still controls much of the Yemeni army. This enabled the Houthis, whose strongholds are in the north of the country, to capture Sanaa easily last September, though UN experts note that the capital “was guarded by no less than 100,000 Republican Guards and Reserve Forces, most of them loyal to the former president”.

The Saudi air campaign is geared more to inflicting severe damage on the units of the Yemeni army loyal to Saleh than it is to weakening the Houthis. The Houthi militiamen are experienced fighters, their military skills and ability to withstand air attack honed between 2004 and 2010, when they fought off six offensives launched by Saleh, who was then in power and closely allied to Saudi Arabia. It was only after he was ousted from office in 2012 that he reconciled with the Houthis.

The Saudi war aim is to break this alliance between the Houthis and the Saleh-controlled military units by destroying the army’s bases and heavy weapons. The more lightly armed Houthis are less likely to be hard-hit by air strikes, but without the support or neutrality of the regular army they will be over-stretched in the provinces south of Sanaa. In Aden, they are fighting not so much Hadi-supporters, but southern separatists who want to reverse the unification agreed in 1990.

The danger for Saudi Arabia is that wars build up an uncontrollable momentum that transforms the political landscape in which they are conceived. Yemenis insist that their society has not traditionally been divided along sectarian lines between the Zaidi Shia, a third of the population, and the two-thirds of Yemenis who are Sunni. But this could change very quickly as the Yemen conflict gets plugged into the wider and increasingly warlike regional confrontation between a Sunni coalition led by Saudi Arabia and a Shia counterpart led by Iran.

The Saudis and the Gulf monarchies worry so much about Yemen because it is very much their backyard. But there is every reason for the rest of the world to worry too, because Yemen is joining Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya and Somalia as places where warlords rule in conditions of anarchy. They are places where life has become unlivable for much of the population, who will take any risk to escape. This is the calamity that is filling the boats and rafts crowded with desperate emigrants that are heading across the Mediterranean for Europe.

And this calamity is particularly bad in Yemen, because the country was in crisis even before the present conflict. According to UN agencies, malnutrition in Yemen is about the same as in much of sub-Saharan Africa and only half the population has access to clean water. It is difficult to move food supplies because of a chronic shortage of fuel. Lack of electricity means that essential medicines in hospitals cannot be stored.

Excerpts from a long article: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/yemen-crisis-this-exotic-war-will-soon-become-europes-problem-10204156.html