And WILLIAM: "But she says she's a slave of the Lord (who is the Liberator, who is the one who brought freedom from the Egyptian slavery). It's as if she said she was a slave of the liberation. Or as if she said she was a proletarian or a revolutionary campesina."
Another of the girls: "She says she's poor, and she says that God took into account the "poverty of his slave," that is, that God chose her because she was poor. He didn't choose a queen or a lady of high society but a woman from the people. Yes, because God has preferred us poor people. Those are the "great things" that God has done, as Mary says"
And from now on all generations will call me happy,
for Mighty God has one great things for me.
His name is holy,
and his love reaches his faithful ones
from generation to generation.
One of the ladies: "She says that people will call her happy ... She feels happy because she is the mother of Jesus the Liberator, and because she also is a liberator like her son, because she understood her son and did not oppose his mission. She didn't oppose him, unlike other mothers of young people who are messiahs, liberators of their communities. That is her great merit, I say."
And another: "She says that God is holy, and that means 'just." The just person who doesn't offend anybody, the one who doesn't commit any injustices. God is like this and we should be like him."
I said that was a perfect biblical definition of the holiness of God. And then I asked what a holy society would be...
For a Catholic hierarchy that was and, to an extent, is so endlessly fixated with Catholics but, especially, the clergy "giving scandal" the fact is that by 1975 they had abandoned these people to the extent that they had to make recourse to Marxist terminology to come to an understanding of their situation which would lead out of it. For those who make "giving scandal" an excuse for not considering new ideas at every turn, their necessitating the recourse to Marxis terminology in 1975 was the real scandal, risking the discrediting of the Catholic church.
And it is especially scandalous how, in the coming years, the new pope, John Paul II, would scandalize those who sought justice and disgrace himself and the Church through is total abandonment of these people, even to the extent of publicly silencing them in 1983 when they begged him to acknowledge that their children were dying in the dirty wars that Ronald Reagan was waging against them. That he had also turned his back on Oscar Romero led to that not being at all a surprise. I remember thinking at the time that, underneath the PR that JPII acted more like a CIA asset than a pastor, and, in fact, his pastorship was one that led to churches closing as never before. If anything his successor, Ratzinger, was even less pastoral. I would recommend the works of the late Penny Lernoux for insight into Catholic liberal thinking during that period.
It is one of the more widespread misunderstandings of the Catholic church, perhaps a remnant of British anti-Catholic propaganda, that many figure the pope is an absolute despot who has the power to silence those they disagree with and even those who challenge them. That's not the case. Priests and, perhaps even more so, sisters, didn't follow him or his chosen successor in their attempt to obliterate liberation theology, of which The Gospel At Solentiname is one of its most important texts, one which comes directly from the mouths of The People with the most profound understanding of the texts, who have lived the same reality it expounds. It has been reprinted again by the Catholic publishers, Orbis books, the imprint of the Maryknoll order in the United States, the publishers of many works of liberation theologians in Latin America and others such as Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and Allan Boesak.
No comments:
Post a Comment