Priestly Rebels

No matter how much they sympathize with the aspirations of the poor they serve, U.S. missionaries abroad have traditionally avoided taking sides in any partisan political conflict. The rule has been broken in Guatemala, where three priests and a nun of the Roman Catholic Maryknoll order have openly sided with the country's left-wing rebels.

Perhaps the best known of the U.S. missionary societies, the Maryknollers have been sending priests and nuns to serve in remote villages of Guatemala since 1943, currently have about 100 stationed there. Until recently, their number included Sister Marian Peter, 39, a sprightly specialist in catechism and social work who organized a cadre of followers among wealthy Catholic students at Guatemala's two major universities. During vacations, she frequently took them to work and study at impoverished missions run by two priest friends: Boston-born Maryknollers Thomas Melville, 37, and his brother Arthur, 35.

During last year's outbreak of left-wing terrorism (TIME, Jan. 26), Sister Marian's students were appalled by the tough government measures taken to put down the uprising, decided on religious grounds to side with the rebels. So did the nun and her two priest friends, who met one day in November with a guerrilla leader in the village of Escuintla. When the Maryknoll superior in Guatemala, Father John M. Breen, heard of the meeting, he ordered the missionaries to stay out of politics or return to the order's headquarters in Ossining, N.Y. Instead, Sister Marian and the Melville brothers flew to Miami and then apparently doubled back to Mexico--where they have since been joined by their student followers.

The Maryknoll fathers suspended the Melvilles from their right to say Mass or hear confessions. More fortunate was the Melvilles' close friend, Father Blase Bonpane, 38, whose house in Guatemala City they frequently used for meetings with Sister Marian and her students. Threatened with a similar suspension, he returned home for reassignment to Hawaii, but he remains sympathetic to the rebel cause. "No one wants violence," he says, "but when 2% of the people own 80% of the arable land, and a right-wing army shoots reformers on the spot as so-called Communists, then violence is already institutionalized." The missing clerics are even more unrepentant. This week the National Catholic Reporter published a letter by Father Thomas Melville, in which he argued that Guatemala's poor were being oppressed and even murdered by the government. "My brother and I," he said, "decided not to be silent accomplices to the mass murder that this system generates."

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