LATIN AMERICA: A DIVIDED CHURCH

Shortly before dawn one Sunday this month, 214 left-wing Roman Catholics -- including six priests and two nuns -- "captured" the cathedral in Santiago, Chile. Barricading the doors against all outsiders for 15 hours, they celebrated an informal liturgy, then issued a manifesto denouncing Pope Paul's scheduled visit this week to the 39th International Eucharistic Congress in Bogota, Colombia. "Christ does not need masses of people singing in the streets, or acclaiming his vicarage, or thousands of wax candles," said the declaration. "The Christ of the poor needs courageous action aimed at changing the conditions of the Latin American people." The Santiago rebels charged that the Pope's presence will only ratify "the alliance of the church with military and economic power."

The bizarre episode illustrated the explosive condition of the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America. As never before in its history, reports TIME Correspondent William Forbis, it faces an internal crisis that is both spiritual and political, partly because it contains outspoken extremes of rebellion and reaction. A vociferous, militant minority of radical priests, prelates and laymen argue that the church must embrace revolution, even Marxism, to survive. Traditionalist bishops warn that Christian support of social upheaval would bring on Communist dictatorships, and with it the death of the church.

Nominal Bastion. Vatican officials like to think of the continent civilized by cross and sword as a bastion of Christianity. It is something less than that. Although 90% of Latin America is nominally Catholic, probably fewer than 10% of the people practice what the church preaches. Thousands turn out for such semireligious spectaculars as Lima's festival honoring Our Lord of the Miracles, but grandmothers and schoolchildren are often about the only worshipers at Sunday Mass in the ancient, silent churches. In Brazil, perhaps 25 million people are devotees of a voodoo cult called macumba. Across the continent, the zealous, fundamentalist Pentecostal sects constitute the fastest-growing faith.

Even worse, the church lacks the ecclesiastical manpower to serve the sheep still within the fold. The ratio of priests to laymen in Latin America is 1 to 5,600 (in the U.S. it is 1 to 785). The Catholic seminary in La Paz, Bolivia, currently has only one seminarian; when he is ordained, he will be the institution's first new priest in four years. Almost half of the continent's clergy are foreigners, most of them Spaniards, Italians and Irish-Americans. More often than not, they are better-educated and more zealous than the native priests, but inevitably, they are also separated to a large extent from the culture of their parishioners.

It is no great advertisement for future conversions that the Catholic clergy has traditionally preached the glories of the afterlife while ignoring the continent's social inequities. The average wage in Latin America in terms of U.S. purchasing power is less than $300 a year; 45% of the continent's 268 million people are illiterate. Most of its wealth is held by perhaps 3% of the people. The population growth rate is 2.8% a year, one of the world's highest. Without massive birth control campaigns--unlikely now, in the light of Pope Paul's encyclical Humanae Vitae --the population of Latin America will reach 651 million by the year 2000.

Ten Thousand Urchins. The contrast between a well-established church and unbearable poverty is notably apparent in the country that will play host to Paul VI, Colombia, by reputation, is a devoutly Catholic nation, one of three in Latin America that have concordats with the Vatican (the others are Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Ratified in 1887, the agreement establishes Catholicism as the nation's official religion, gives the church control of education and marriage, and provides for permanent government contributions to dioceses and missions.

Headed by Bogota's reactionary Luis Cardinal Concha Cordoba, the Colombian church owns vast financial holdings. Agricultural day laborers earn an average of $270 per year. Police estimate that there are at least 10,000 abandoned children wandering the streets of the capital--not to mention more than 40,000 prostitutes. It is no wonder that the secret hero of many young clerics is Father Camilo Torres, the priest-turned-guerrilla who was killed by the army while serving with a Castroite rebel cadre. Or that laymen pray for the intercession before God of "Saint Che."

Saving Its Soul. Reformers within the Latin American Catholic Church, although growing in number, are still in the minority. They are nonetheless insistent in their conclusion that Catholicism can transform society--and save its own soul--only by a total commitment to revolution. And they argue that this approach is quite in accord with the teaching of the church. "The contribution of the Second Vatican Council," says Father Ricardo Cetrulo, a Uruguayan theologian and sociologist, "has been to point out that theology reveals man as totally concrete and existential. The task of Latin American theology is to meditate about the problems of the continent, about misery." Since capitalism, they believe, has failed, the only alternative is socialism. Parliamentary democracy as they see it is a mockery; thus progress can come only through revolution.

The talk of the Catholic left can sometimes sound like a message from Radio Havana. The best-known of the continent's revolutionaries, Brazilian Archbishop Helder Camara of Recife, argues that "either the church will ally itself with progressive forces that demand social justice for the enslaved masses, or it will perish for lack of insight and social dynamism." Father Juan Carlos Zaffaroni, the Sorbonne-educated son of a Uruguayan banker and a former worker-priest in a sugar refinery, insists that his only moral course is to support violence and revolution. "It is a problem of identifying with the oppressed, of realizing the reality in which we live. And the reality of Uruguay is violence." To Father Francisco de Araujo, a Dominican prior in Sao Paulo, "Anybody who is not subversive nowadays does not merit the name of Brazilian."

Before Trent. In general, the priests of Brazil and Uruguay are the continent's most outspoken radicals, those of Argentina and Colombia the most conservative. Surprisingly, about 40% of the bishops in Latin America, mostly younger men, sympathize in whole or part with a theology of revolution. The signers of last year's "Message of the Bishops of the Third World," which endorsed revolution and socialism, included ten Latin Americans. A working paper to be presented to a conference of Latin America's bishops, which will follow the Eucharistic Congress, asserts that the answer to the region's problems "does not lie in a choice between the status quo and change, but rather between violent change and peaceful change."

Nevertheless, the majority of the most influential prelates are unbending conservatives in politics as well as in church affairs. Colombia's Cardinal Concha typically forbade any requiem Masses for Camilo Torres on the ground that he died "in mortal sin." Two Argentine bishops, Adolfo Tortola of Parana and Francisco Vicentin of Corrientes, are described even by some of their fellow clerics as "preconciliar--the council in question being that of Trent." In Porto Alegre, Brazil, Archbishop Vicente Scherer broadcasts weekly radio homilies warning against "anarchists and followers of Communism" within the church.

Markedly Communist. In several countries, conservative bishops get strong backing from well-organized laymen's groups. One such active organization in Brazil and Argentina is the Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property. Reacting to the "markedly Communist spirit" of reforms proposed by one Brazilian priest, "T.F.P.," as the organization is called, easily collected half a million signatures for a letter demanding that he be expelled from the Recife Institute of Theology.

The ease with which T.F.P. collected the signatures reflects the fact that a majority of Latinos either approve or at least tolerate Catholic conservatism. Out of ignorance, apathy and even superstition, most peasants and members of the unsophisticated small middle class are willing to accept the church in its present form. Where necessary, the government often steps in to bolster the Catholic conservatives. In Guatemala, two American Maryknoll priest-brothers, Fathers Thomas and Arthur Melville (TIME, Feb. 2) and Sister Marian Peter Bradford* were unceremoniously booted out of the country for their support of Castroite guerrillas.

Literacy Through Penance. A Marxist revolution can hardly represent the Christian ideal. Just as obviously, inertia is no answer to Catholicism's chal lenges today. A sensible middle way would see the church lending its weight to nonviolent reform--as Chilean Theo logian Hernan Larrain puts it, "Christianizing the inevitable revolution." In a few areas, Catholicism has had the time and talent to do so. In Venezuela, for example, the clergy has helped cut illiteracy from 50% to 12% in the past decade. One shrewd but practical way of accomplishing this was to require penitents to teach illiterates how to read and write as penance for their sins. In Panama, a popular American priest, Father Leo Mahon, has successfully combined Peace Corps techniques with preaching to help convert a slum named San Miguelito into a neat and hygienic community. The church in Ecuador is distributing 120,000 acres of its own land to peasants.

In his major address in Bogota, Pope Paul is expected to urge the church to support moderate economic and political reforms, in the spirit of his social encyclical Populorum Progressio. The unanswered question is whether that sound and humane advice will be too late in coming. Latin America's reactionary clerics, who enthusiastically endorsed his decree on birth control, are not likely to change their ways overnight. Nor are the rebel Catholics, who are already committed to support of violence as man's only hope. To some observers, Latin American Catholicism is heading toward something very like a schism--based not on dogma or theology, but on commitment to social principle.

*Thomas Melville later married Sister Marian Peter.

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