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  • From: Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Anti-catholicism, was Re: The people of Tibet need help now - Boing Boing
  • Date: Tue, 19 Mar 2013 15:14:54 -0400

On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 1:36 PM, Robert Waldrop <bwaldrop1952@att.net> wrote:
> By all means, let us line up the permaculture movement in opposition to this
> freekin ignorant new pope who talks about being in solidarity with the poor
> and
> protecting nature. And who rode the bus to work and lived in a small urban
> apartment instead of the episcopal palace.

Monbiot.com

Cardinal Sins
Posted: 18 Mar 2013 01:27 PM PDT
How a modern Inquisition, with the help of Pope Francis, stifled the
movement protecting the poor.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 19th March 2013

“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why
they are poor, they call me a communist.”

So said the Brazilian archbishop Dom Hélder Câmara. His adage exposes
one of the great fissures in the Catholic Church, and the emptiness of
the new Pope’s claim to be on the side of the poor.
The bravest people I have met are all Catholic priests. Working first
in West Papua(1), then in Brazil, I met men who were prepared
repeatedly to risk death for the sake of others. When I first knocked
on the door of the friary in Bacabal, in the Brazilian state of
Maranhão, the priest who opened it thought I had been sent to kill
him. That morning he had received the latest in a series of death
threats from the local ranchers’ union. Yet still he opened the door.
Inside the friary was a group of peasants, some crying and trembling,
whose bodies were covered in bruises made by rifle butts, and whose
wrists bore the marks of rope burns. They were among thousands of
people the priests were trying to protect, as expansionist landlords,
supported by the police, local politicians and a corrupt judiciary,
burnt their houses, drove them off their land and tortured or killed
those who resisted.
I learnt something of the fear in which the priests lived, when I was
first beaten then nearly shot by the military police(2). But unlike
them, I could move on. They stayed to defend people whose struggles to
keep their land were often a matter of life or death: expulsion meant
malnutrition, disease and murder in the slums or the goldmines.
The priests belonged to a movement that had swept across Latin
America, after the publication of A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo
Gutierrez in 1971. Liberation theologists not only put themselves
between the poor and the killers, they also mobilised their flocks to
resist dispossession, learn their rights and see their struggle as
part of a long history of resistance, beginning with the flight of the
Israelites from Egypt.
By the time I joined them, in 1989, seven Brazilian priests had been
murdered. Óscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, had been shot
dead; many others across the continent had been arrested, tortured and
killed.
But the dictators, landlords, police and gunmen were not their only
enemies. Seven years after I first worked there, I returned to Bacabal
and met the priest who had opened the door(3). He couldn’t talk to me.
He had been silenced, as part of the Church’s great purge of
dissenting voices. The lions of God were led by donkeys. The peasants
had lost their protection.
The assault began in 1984 with the publication by the Congregation for
the Doctrine of the Faith (the body formerly known as the Inquisition)
of a document written by the man who ran it: Joseph Ratzinger, who
later became Pope Benedict. It denounced “the deviations, and risks of
deviation” of liberation theology(4). He did not deny what he called
“the seizure of the vast majority of the wealth by an oligarchy of
owners … military dictators making a mockery of elementary human
rights [and] the savage practices of some foreign capital interests”
in Latin America. But he insisted that “it is from God alone that one
can expect salvation and healing. God, and not man, has the power to
change the situations of suffering.”
The only solution he offered was that priests should seek to convert
the dictators and hired killers to love their neighbours and exercise
self-control. “It is only by making an appeal to the ‘moral potential’
of the person and to the constant need for interior conversion, that
social change will be brought about …”(5). I’m sure the generals and
their death squads were quaking in their boots.
But at least Ratzinger has the possible defence that, being cloistered
in the Vatican,
he had little notion of what he was destroying. During the inquisition
in Rome of one of the leading liberationists, Father Leonardo Boff,
Ratzinger was invited by the archbishop of São Paulo to see the
situation of Brazil’s poor for himself. He refused -then stripped the
archbishop of much of his diocese(6). He was wilfully ignorant. But
the current Pope does not possess even this excuse.
Pope Francis knew what poverty and oppression looked like: several
times a year he celebrated mass in Buenos Aires’s 21-24 slum(7). Yet,
as leader of the Jesuits in Argentina, he denounced liberation
theology, and insisted that the priests seeking to defend and mobilise
the poor remove themselves from the slums, shutting down their
political activity(8,9,10,11).
He now maintains that he “would like a church that is poor and is for
the poor.”(12) But does this mean giving food to the poor, or does it
mean also asking why they are poor? The dictatorships of Latin America
waged a war against the poor, which continued in many places after
those governments collapsed. Different factions of the Catholic Church
took opposing sides in this war. Whatever the stated intentions of
those who attacked and suppressed liberation theology, in practical
terms they were the allies of tyrants, land-grabbers, debt slavers and
death squads. For all his ostentatious humility, Pope Francis was on
the wrong side.

References:
1. George Monbiot, 1989. Poisoned Arrows: an investigative journey
through Indonesia. Michael Joseph, London.
2. The story is told in full in George Monbiot, 1991. Amazon
Watershed: the new environmental investigation. Michael Joseph,
London.
3. http://www.monbiot.com/1996/07/09/hunting-the-beast/
4. Joseph, Cardinal Ratzinger, 1984. Instruction on Certain Aspects of
the “Theology of Liberation” Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19840806_theology-liberation_en.html
5. Joseph, Cardinal Ratzinger, as above.
6. Jan Rocha, August 2004 . Justice vs Vatican. New Internationalist
magazine. http://newint.org/features/2004/08/01/social-justice/
7.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/15/pope-francis-joy-humility-unbending
8.
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/14/a_social_conservative_pope_francis_led
9.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/17/pope-francis-first-sunday-prayer
10.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/15/pope-francis-joy-humility-unbending
11. http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/papabile-day-men-who-could-be-pope-13
12. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/16/pope-francis-church-poverty




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