SOLDIERS OF CHRIST, OPEN FIRE!

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard on the contorted theology by which Nicaragua's revolutionary priests seek to justify political violence

Managua ON Christmas Day 1977 Father Gaspar Garcia, a romantic Spanish priest living in Nicaragua, announced he had joined the guerrilla forces of the Sandinista Front of National Liberation (FSLN): 'With a gun in my hand, full of faith and love for my Nicaraguan people, I will fight to my last breath for the coming of the kingdom of justice in our homeland.' A year later he was killed while leading an assault force at a place known locally as `Infierno'.

He was one of several priests who, confronted by the arriviste mentality of the Latin American upper classes and their frequent lack of charity or civic conscience in the face of wretched misery all around them, not only concluded that it was Christian to be a revolutionary but also invoked the authority of the mediaeval Church to sanctify their recourse to vio- lence. 'This is a just war,' declared Father Gaspar, 'one which the holy gospels see as good and which my conscience as a Christ- ian says is good, because it represents the struggle against a state of affairs that is hateful to Our Lord.'

For every one of these Knights Templar there were scores who could not bring themselves to break the sixth command- ment and instead worked passively for the cause of revolution. Their creed was a 'preferential option for the poor', formally adopted by the Latin American episcopal council at Medellin in 1968, and their daily task was to build up networks of Christian base communities which would meet in the evenings to talk about the Bible and which, under the subtler guidance of the priests, would slowly become tools for raising political consciousness and ultimately turn into the cell structure of a revolutionary movement.

In Guatemala, where the army has done just as it pleases for the last 30 years, this kind of pastoral work was considered subversive, as indeed it often was, and 15 priests along with hundreds of lay leaders were hacked to pieces by death squads as a pre-emptive measure. In Nicaragua, however, where for all his sins Somoza was not as bad as the Guatemalan generals, the base communities survived long enough to see the fruits of their labour in the Sandi- nista revolution in 1979. Two of these are now famous and every year thousands of utopian Christians come on pilgrimages from all over the world in the hope of finding the pure spirit of the original Church, long since lost in Europe, among the humble people of Nicaragua. What they don't seem to realise is what really went on in these two communities before they became tourist sites and showpieces of the Sandinista revolution.

One of them was the creation of Father Ernesto Cardenal, a poet and now the minister of culture, who worked with fishermen and peasants on the Solenti- name archipelago of Lake Nicaragua. Trea- ted with great suspicion at first, he slowly won the confidence of the islanders and taught them how to use the Bible as a sort of political textbook. Somoza is compared to Herod, and the American Ambassador to Pontius Pilate. Augusto Sandhi°, the national hero who was murdered in 1934 after leading the resistance against the American military occupation, is identified with Jesus, as both died to liberate their people. In the end Cardenal succeeded in convincing many of them that 'Commun- ists try to achieve a perfect society' and that 'Marxism is the only hope for the

world'. And in case there should be any doubt about the methods to be used 10 fighting capitalism he once said that 'Christ forbade the sword but not the machine gun', as if Christ's pacifism were onlY 3 question of strategy and of historical con- text. It is almost as though he treats the redemption as a mere metaphor, an in- spiration to be understood by each society according, to its own experiences and needs, and not as a transcendental and immutable fact.

The other famous base community Was in the poor Riguero district of Managua where a group of radical and mostly middle-class students formed a circle around a Franciscan priest called Uriel Molina, who is now the eminence grise 01 Nicaragua's 'Popular Church'. This grouP was involved in outright conspiracy almost from the beginning and many of its meal" bers later became guerrilla `comandantes • They saw their dream come true — the 'resurrection' of Nicaragua after the long.- cruel 'crucifixion', to use the sort of lan- guage they like — and now hold key post.s in the Sandinista government. But by their own admission they are no longer Christ- ians. Which means either they never were and just used the Bible group to camouf- lage a political organisation, or that the pastoral guidance of Father Uriel actualli undermined their faith. Having listened to his sermons I should imagine the second to be just as likely as the first. His snazzy, octagonal church, covered with bright murals of Nicaraguan country life and a mestizo peasant Christ painted, I understand, by an Italian artist — has become a temple of revolutionarY humanism. Man is the measure of all thin85 since God became man, and the Sandinis- tas are the best men. Forgetting all those Misquito Indians that disappeared in 1981, Father Uriel calls the combat troops of the FSLN 'Soldiers of God' since they are fighting the Contras, who stand for Reagan, riches and all things sinful. The Contras may claim to be Christians, nlaY even be devout believers, but tot everYi one that saith unto me Lord, Lord, shal enter the kingdom of heaven, but he th doeth the will of my Father which is .111 heaven' (Matt. vii. 21). But the Sanchrus- ras, even if they are out-and-out atheists and the most wretched of sinners, are still the 'Brothers of Jesus' because 'they fulfil the will of God by dying so that there may at last be social justice in the country, and SO that we can build the kingdom of God in Nicaragua.' This is a flagrant challenge to the second Vatican Council which established that 'nobody can draw on the evidence of the Christian faith to make his own political Position a universal obligation', and it is also a perversion of St Augustine's gener- ous definition of the Church as a fellowship of all just men, believers or not. Moreover, the call to build the kingdom of God in Nicaragua itself borders on heresy, for though the kingdom extends to earth and may be prepared on earth, Christ clearly says 'my kingdom is not of this world' (Johl) xvfii. 36). This inconvenience, however, is easily taken care of by the trendy Jesuits who are busy pumping out radical tracts here in Nicaragua. Christ's kingdom, says Father Juan Hernando Pico, is .not of this world because the world is a v.iicked, rotten place, cursed by exploita- tion and elitism. If the world were im- proved, he implies, then Christ might think differently about building his kingdom down here. Maybe, but then you have to be careful with these Jesuits, for one of their chaps in Managua honestly contends that when Marx called religion the opium of the people he was not thinking of opium as a drug and therefore something bad, but rather as a medicine and therefore some- thing good. For the Pope this kind of free thinking is clearly intolerable. Perhaps the Vatican could put up with the folksy liturgy of the new Nicaraguan 'peasants' Mass' which tarns Christ into a militant champion of the Workers, or even the avant-garde baptisms are occasionally performed here — we know that original sin consists of society's division into classes . . . let all selfishness, capitalism, Somozismo, go out °f this girl . . . now I give you your !evolutionary militancy' — but the whole thrust of liberation theology is too far removed from the simple Christian mes- sage of love and reconciliation. It turns the Preferential option for the poor' into an e. xclusive option for the proletariat, whose interests must be served by class struggle. tends to blame injustice on economic Political structures that must be over- r t°wIn by force, rather than seeing the ti°1°r of evil in the sinful nature of man, and etehY makes sin into an anonymous force °f history.

Paul II says these liberation theo- Y Priests must be corrected with 'firm- :ess and charity' but that supposes they are g_nienable to discipline. They can be sil- ;need. for a while, like Leonardo Boff in forazil, or they can be suspended like the Priests in government posts here in "icaragua, but the rebel clergy has its own tWPtieaPons too. One it likes to brandish from e. to time is the formula of Thomas '1(111111as that if there is a contradiction between your conscience and the orders of the Pope, you should obey your consc- ience, even under pain of excommunica- tion. And if John Paul starts throwing his weight around in Latin America, where half the world's Christians will be living at the turn of the century, then these priests can always bring out the heavy artillery: they can threaten open schism. Catholics rebelled against the Church in the 16th century, I heard a Spanish Dominican tell a group of lay leaders, because it had be- come corrupt and elite, and because it did not listen to the people, denying them the Bible in their own languages. 'And now once again the Church is an adultress and a prostitute, and I am absolutely convinced that if Rome tries to hold back the flow, the waters will gush out elsewhere. The people will go their own way.'

It all sounds menacing enough but does the 'Popular Church' really have the strength to enforce such a threat? In Nicaragua it certainly does not. To be sure there is a widespread belief that the Nicaraguan revolution is profoundly reli- gious and has, for the first time in history, reconciled Marxism and Christianity. 'Un- til now all revolutions have opposed the Church because the Church has been against all revolutions,' says Father Fer- nando Cardenal, a suspended Jesuit who has been sanctioned under canon law for refusing to give up his post as minister of education. 'Here we have an instance where the Church is not only not against ' the revolution but is completely in favour of it and supports it.'

This is nonsense. Of the 300 or so priests working in Nicaragua at any one time only a fraction belong to the 'Popular Church" and many of those who do have trouble mustering a quorum at their Masses. That is if they even have a parish to say Mass in, since the bishops refuse to have them in their dioceses. Instead these priests, who are mostly foreign intellectuals who came to Nicaragua after and because of the revolution, end up working in government schemes with refugees or become theolo- gical journalists, where their influence is confined to their own circle. Meanwhile the rump of the Nicaraguan Church re- mains loyal to the Pope and considers the radical priests at best misguided and at worst lackeys of the Sandinistas who have been 'bought off with flattery and pay'.

'A part of our Church, even though a very small part,' runs a pastoral letter of the Nicaraguan bishops, 'has forsaken ecclesial unity and given itself over to a materialist ideology, spreading confusion both at home and abroad.' And the irony is that the 'Popular Church', by becoming a partisan of the ruling FSLN, is repeating, in an inverse form, the same old Latin American alliance between throne and altar for which it has always so trenchantly denounced the bishops.

It is not even as if the Sandinistas could be considered neutral towards the Church.

In the beginning the FSLN talked of a 'strategic alliance' with Christians. 'It shouldn't concern me if you think there is something after death,' said Comandante Oscar Turcios to a priest in the early days of the guerrilla war, 'nor should it interest you if I think that after death I'm going to rot here. What should concern us is that we can work together to build a new Nicar- agua.' But now six years into the revolu- tion it is clear that the 'strategic alliance' is obsolete. The FSLN is force-feeding the Nicaraguan people with socialist propagan- da and Monsignor Miguel Obando y Bra- vo, the newly elevated cardinal, is leading the resistance.

For this the Church has been punished. Eighteen priests have been deported, in- cluding ten last year who were seized and taken straight to the airport without any of their belongings. Clergy have been framed and publicly 'exposed' for gun-running and terrorist conspiracy. And in an incident that is quite typical of FSLN methods a senior curia official, Monsignor Bismarck Carballo, was forced to strip naked at gunpoint and, supposedly being chased by an angry husband who had caught him in bed with his wife, was made to run out into the street where photographers and a local television crew were waiting to ensnare him.

That the Sandinistas have failed to create an easy-going and original form of Latin socialism and have instead turned out to be militant Marxists of the old stamp, intolerant of any force — such as the Church — they cannot control, and resorting to repression as they lose the support of the people, is a boon for the Vatican. For it leaves the radical priests, who are now so enmeshed in the Sandinista proceso they could no longer extricate themselves even if they wanted to, looking pretty silly and serves as a caution to the 'Popular Church' in much more important countries, like Brazil. And it admirably demonstrates what Cardinal Ratzinger in Rome has been saying all along: that liberation theology leads neither to earthly liberation, in the form of justice and prosperity, nor to spiritual salvation.

If Nicaragua is any guide there seems to be little danger of a dramatic reformation in Latin America. The continent's poverty won't go away but it is unlikely that many priests will continue to see Marxism as the panacea. And the 'Popular Church', with its theological acrobatics and political in- fatuations, could well prove to be a passing phase, a sort of clerical expression, years out of date, of Left Bank culture in the 1960s.