Caesar or God

A gang of self-proclaimed "anti- Communists" kidnaped Brazilian Bishop Adriano Hypolito on Sept. 22, poured liquor down his throat, painted his body with red dye and dumped him, naked, on a back street in outlying Rio de Janeiro. For good measure the thugs blew up his car in front of the Brazilian hi- erarchy's offices.

In rural Ribeirao Bonito in the Mato Grosso on Oct. 11, another Brazilian bishop went to the police station with Jesuit Father Joao Bosco Penido Burnier to investigate the torture of two women prisoners. After a nasty argument a policeman shot the priest to death before the bishop's eyes.

Far from being isolated incidents, these outrages in Brazil are only the most recent in a wave of anticlerical violence that has been sweeping across Latin America. Other recent attacks on churchmen:

>In Argentina, since last March's military coup seven priests, two seminarians and three nuns have been murdered by suspected right-wing death squads with ties to the police. In addition, a bishop who was investigating the murders was killed in a suspicious automobile crash.

>In Ecuador, armed troops last August broke up an international meeting on human rights that had been organized by the Bishop of Riobamba. Herding the visiting clergy to army headquarters at gunpoint, the police expelled 15 bishops (four of them from the U.S.) and 22 priests from nine other nations for inciting "subversion."

>In Chile, when three of those ousted bishops arrived home they were assaulted at the Santiago airport by a rock-throwing mob. The attack had been instigated by several government officials who were identified and promptly excommunicated.

The escalating war between church and state is an amazing turn for Latin America, a region with 263 million baptized Roman Catholics.* Catholicism was long content to buttress the governments and military and economic interests that were in power, hoping thereby to encourage social stability and to pre-serve church privileges. A new generation of church leaders, however, inspired by the teachings of the Second Vatican Council and Popes John XXIII and Paul VI, is more active in struggling against injustice and oppression. The new generation also has a compelling cause for its fast-developing political involvement: military takeovers in nation after nation have been almost invariably accompanied by severe political repression and torture.

The new era began in 1964 with the abrupt end of democracy in Brazil, the continent's largest nation. Around 1968 the Brazilian military regime grew nasty: priests were jailed and dissidents were tortured to death. Says one bishop: "The effect on the church leadership was swift and strong. It would have been impossible for us to concentrate only on pastoral work when we knew human beings were being tortured and mutilated." President Ernesto Geisel, who is a Lutheran, claims that he has ordered an end to political torture, but local police and military officials persist in the practice, as do right-wing vigilantes such as those who kidnaped Bishop Hypolito. After the murder of Father Burnier last month, a Mass was said by the Archbishop of Vitoria "in memory of all those persons who in our country and in all of Latin America suffer violence, torture and death solely because they demand respect for their rights and dignity."

In Chile the church, led by Raul Cardinal Silva Henriquez, has been in constant conflict with the government over political imprisonment, torture and murder since the 1973 military putsch. Secret police have expelled two of the church's top civil rights lawyers, and still hold a third, though they have filed no charges against him. Two months ago, Cardinal Silva and leaders of the Chilean hierarchy issued a strong statement expressing alarm about "the fearful and all-powerful police state" that threatens to impose itself "without opposition in our Latin America." One priest noted ruefully that the theology of liberation used to mean "a man's right to participate in the running of a factory. Now it means getting him out of a concentration camp."

Not that all Catholic leaders are fighting the state. In Argentina the bishops and centrist priests have been reluctant to criticize the new military government, which is striving with great difficulty to re-establish public order. Moreover, the church's authority has been weakened by the past involvement of a group of Argentine Third World Movement priests with left-wing Peronist guerrillas.

Jesus as Communist. The bishops of Colombia hold to a staunch conservative line. Bogota's Anibal Cardinal Munoz Duque accepted the title of army brigadier general and suspended 100 priests and nuns who backed striking bank workers. Colombian priests, however, are increasingly activist; 500 of them recently sent a petition to the Vatican charging that their bishops were "allied with the exploiter against the exploited." On the radical left, Father Saturnino Sepulveda, a leader of the Marxistoriented Priests for Latin America, declares: "I see Jesus Christ as the secretary general of the first ever Communist Party."

Most of the activists, however, would agree with Dom Helder Camara, Archbishop of Olinda and Recife and long the lonely voice for social justice in Brazil. At his diocese's tricentennial last month he said church protest is not "born of leftist ideologies." Rather, the church has realized that "passive Christianity" aids oppression. Now, he stated, it is "the demand of God that we take firm and solid positions, without hatred but also without fear." As never before, the church in Latin America is being united by this commitment.

The Vatican, for its part, prefers to counter Latin American oppression by behind-the-scenes diplomacy. Despite some pointed protests--several from Pope Paul himself--the Vatican has yet to react to the atrocities in Catholic-led nations with the level of outrage it summoned over cold war brutalities in Eastern Europe. Remarks one Vatican observer: "When the enemy was on the left it was easier to identify and denounce it."

*Protestants, often politically active as well, number only 15 million.

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