"The Church of the Poor"

Latin America's comunidades de base keep growing

Among the shabby, working-class shacks of Volta Redonda, a Brazilian steel town of 150,000 in the state of Rio de Janeiro, small groups of neighbors gathered on five different nights last week for a few hours of discussion. Steelworkers, retired welders, grandfathers, young housewives with children on their laps, sipped coffee on borrowed chairs and swapped views on local and national problems: the endless waiting lines at the state hospital, the expulsion of rural squatters by land speculators, nonexistent sanitation and paving in their city. "Mud is the symbol of our lives," Joao, a retired steelworker, said angrily. "We live in mud, we are treated like mud." Later, as quietly as they had assembled, the groups of a dozen or so members broke up and returned to their own impoverished lives.

Political recruiting sessions? Insurrectionist cells? Hardly. All the participants were in fact earnest Roman Catholics and members of the most influential movement among Latin America's 300 million faithful, the small constantly spreading groups called comunidades de base (base communities). There may be as many as 150,000 comunidades, 80,000 in Brazil alone, chiefly in the destitute states of that country's north and northeast.

The comunidades, many started by foreign missionary priests working among the poor, have sprung up during the past decade in virtually every country of Latin America, from Mexico to Argentina.

They are variously involved with the needs and wishes of Latin America's largest class, the desperately poor, the uneducated, the politically unorganized. In fetid Netzahualcdyotl, a slum of 2.6 million people that grows like a tumor on the outskirts of Mexico City, several comunidades have cooperated to help protest rising bus fares and appalling health conditions. Human feces lie in the streets. Contaminated water adds to the filth and contributes to a death rate of more than 50% among children less than four years of age. Before Pope John Paul II's visit to Mexico in January, hundreds of comunidad members from Netzahualcoyotl and elsewhere in Mexico signed a letter to the Pontiff protesting such conditions throughout Mexico.

Not all the region's comunidades are equally radicalized. Most of Colombia's 5,000 or so predominantly rural comunidades have concentrated on spiritual pursuits like reading, Bible study or training non-priests to lead services in remote districts that the church does not reach regularly. One of that country's priests was asked by his bishop to leave the southern sugar-cane town of Puerto Tejada when he started to help the citizenry demand potable water. In Argentina, government repression has all but destroyed the comunidades. But elsewhere, throughout the hemisphere, the little groups have become a force to be reckoned with. Last February at the Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM) in Puebla, Mexico, the comunidades were given a special boost. The 220-page final document of the conference lauded them as "one of the motives for joy and hope for the church" and "the focal point of evangelization, the motor of liberation."

Winning such acceptance from Latin America's bishops has been no easy achievement. Often, says Bishop Anibal Maricevich Fleitas of Concepcidn, Paraguay, the comunidades have seemed a threat to more traditional Catholics because they want the bishops to be "brothers and servants of the poor." This stance, he adds, also makes them "like pepper thrown in the eyes of the government." In fact, scores or perhaps hundreds of comunidad leaders, both priests and laymen, have been imprisoned, tortured and even killed because of their "conscientization," awakening a sense of grievance, among poor people.

The movement is rooted in the liberalization of the Latin hierarchy that followed the Second Vatican Council's emphasis on the need of the church to play a more active role in social and economic life. It was given added thrust by the 1968 CELAM in Medellin, Colombia, when the bishops overwhelmingly denounced the "institutionalized violence" of various Latin American governments. Since then, many supporters of the comunidades have enthusiastically adopted the language and goals of the "theology of liberation," a peculiar blend of Marxian economic analysis and Gospel imperatives, best articulated by Peruvian Priest Gustavo Gutierrez in the early 1970s. Observes Volta Redonda Bishop Waldyr Calheiros de Novais: "The comunidades are the theology of liberation put into practice."

Even so, many priests and bishops in Brazil balked when a lay comunidad member in 1976 announced that "the days when the priest was the main one" were over. Others in Latin American Christendom are likely to be troubled by a declaration at weekly Mass by Volta Redonda's French priest Jacques Duquesne that "faith should not be seen as the burden of the Cross, but rather as faith in a better world." Such apparent doctrinal distortions may have been what prompted Pope John Paul II during his Mexican trip to urge the Latin American clergy to be "priests, not social workers or political leaders or functionaries of temporal power."

Ultimately, the future of the comunidades could well depend less on their theology than on whether they can avoid the appearance of being merely adjuncts of Marxist revolution in the hemisphere. For the present, the region's poor have the last word. Says Volta Redonda Housewife Sebastiana of the comunidades: "They are schools where we learn to be somebody."

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