Liberation Theology: Dissident Leo Boff Says Oscar Romero and Pope Francis Lived It

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Paragon of FrancisChurch Theology

Paragon of FrancisChurch Theology

The HuffPo has an brief interesting study about now beatified Archbishop Oscar Romero and his importance to FrancisChurch.  It’s notable because it’s fairly honest and it has some actual information about these much cloaked and propagandized subjects.

A golden thread links Pope Francis to Oscar Romero, the murdered archbishop whose beatification the Pope ordered to take place last weekend, to the rapturous acclaim of the people of El Salvador and the wider world.

The thread is that of liberation theology, the movement that swept through Latin America, and then other parts of the world, 40 years ago. It maintains that the Gospel contains a preference for poor people — and insists that the Church has a duty to work for political and economic as well as spiritual change.

That’s exactly true.  Liberation Theology maintains the blatant lie that the Gospel contains a preference for poor people.  It doesn’t.  The Gospel proclaims and exemplifies the discipline of poverty and the virtue of charity.  A preference for poor people would be a cruel bigotry on God’s part.

The second lie of Liberation Theology is this worldly agenda for ‘political change’ which is beneath the Gospel and more akin to the Theology of Judas.

Conservatives in the Catholic Church do not like this. They have taken to asserting that Romero was not a liberation theologian. There is an irony in that, for they had spent the previous three decades blocking Romero’s path to sainthood by arguing the opposite. Then they said that to canonize the murdered cleric would effectively endorse liberation theology too.

It is ironic but it’s not conservative.  Any writers who’ve read Romero’s actual words know he had some affinity with the Liberation Theologists, but professional catholics often pretend otherwise.  The popes in our generation were wise and correct to suppress the Romero cause.  Pope Francis has not been so.

Conservatives saw this radical pro-poor movement, at the height of the Cold War, as a Marxist Trojan horse that would allow communism into South America through the back door. Its followers saw it as the words of Jesus in action.

Which was right?  It’s not just a matter of who holds the papacy.

In the years that followed, the mainstream Catholic Church took on board many of the insights of liberation theology. But conservatives in the Vatican and in the Latin American hierarchy worked behind the scenes to counter its influence — and block any attempts to move Romero along the path to becoming a saint.

There is an effective answer to these machinations and manoeuvrings. It is the one given by the man who is indisputably one of the founding fathers of liberation theology, Leonardo Boff, a former Franciscan friar who left the priesthood after the Vatican ordered him to a period of “obsequious silence” under the conservative papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

When asked if Pope Francis was a liberation theologian, Boff gave an answer that would apply as aptly to Romero. “The important thing is not whether he is for liberation theology but [whether he is] for the liberation of the oppressed, the poor and the victims of injustice. And that he is without question. Pope Francis has lived liberation theology.”

Oscar Romero lived it too. He was not a theoretical theologian. He stood unflinchingly by the poor — and died for it.

Standing for the poor is not Catholicism.  It’s love.  Dying for the poor, if such a thing were to happen, is not martyrdom.  It’s getting murdered.  Dying for the robbed or the oppressed is even better, but it’s not necessarily dying for the poor.  But most importantly, living and dying for Liberation Theology does nothing but hurt the poor and endanger their souls as well with a ruthless and materialist heresy.

If that, as Leo Boff asserts, is what both Romero and Pope Francis lived out in their words and deeds, then he’s right.  It doesn’t really matter.

 

 

 

Salon Canonizes Oscar Romero, the New Saint of Communists

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Is this a crucifix or what?

Is this a crucifix or what?

When trying to piece together history from very murky and politicized events, always consider the source.  Why is it that we are only able to find blanket conclusions and sparse facts from the ‘c’atholic press on pre-sanctified ‘martyr’ Archbishop Oscar Romero, and if we want a bigger picture we must turn to leftist rags for their screeds?

Pope Francis is soon to beatify the late Monseñor Óscar Romero, the archbishop of El Salvador who was assassinated in 1980 by a right-wing, pro-capitalist death squad. Unlike others whom Francis has already consecrated, the Blessed (and, sooner than later, Saint) Romero will be a holy figure whose killers still walk the earth.

Not only are they ‘right-wing’ they’re also ‘pro-capitalist.’  Does anyone detect a surge in blatant Communist rhetoric in the press, the Leftist leaders, and our FrancisChurch this week?

If a saint is a sanctified man of God, what do we call the killers of a saint? Is theirs an especial evil? I’m no theologian, but it seems that to kill a saint is in excess of mere man’s law. The Catholic Catechism exhaustively extols the sanctity of saints, saying that Christ’s “holiness shines in the saints.” How then do we describe a powerful organization that trains and gives sanction to the killers of saints? Even the Vatican says that Romero “was shot by a right-wing death squad,” which, as  everyone who understands recent Salvadoran history knows, was trained in the United States.

That’s bad yes?  Why would the United States train Romero’s killers?  And, why is Salon suddenly so Holy?  I thought they despised Catholics saints.

During the Cold War, the Georgia-based School of the Americas (now called WHISC) trained tens of thousands of Central American soldiers for right-wing governments and insurgencies in order to neutralize leftist influence in countries like Nicaragua, Honduras, and Romero’s El Salvador, where civil wars in the 1970s and ’80s pitted U.S.-trained rightists against socialists and leftists who opposed their countries being used as a plantation in service of a Washington-backed elite.

They were against, “a plantation in service of a Washington-backed elite?”  Is Oscar Romero some saint of Communism?

A UN truth commission in 1993 would find that two-thirds of the right-wing soldiers in El Salvador’s horrific civil war were U.S.-trained, many of them to operate the “death squads” that became a feature of Central America while Washington played with a heavy hand to direct the region’s politics and economics.

Is it a surprise that a UN truth commission might call government soldiers on the right side of a civil war ‘death squads?’  Do UN truth commissions work?

Bishop Romero was a thorn in the side of Washington, preaching liberation theology in defense of the poor and becoming known as the “Voice of the Voiceless.” Increasingly worried about Washington’s meddling in El Salvador’s burgeoning war between rightists and leftists, Romero wrote a letter to President Jimmy Carter in 1980, calling out the United States’ support for the murderous right-wing forces who “repress the people and favor the interests of the Salvadoran oligarchy.”

So he lobbied the anti-American Jimmy Carter to throw U.S. support to the Communists, I mean the poor, and cut off backing for the more conservative military regime, I mean the murderous right-wing oligarchy.  That’s staying out of radical politics and preaching and Gospel, yes?

Do you imagine using one’s pulpit and international prestige to decisively change the course of a radical Communist takeover of your country might draw a few enemies?  The question is: how does that have anything to do with the Catholic faith?  How is it even decent to fight for such causes?

Five weeks later, Romero was assassinated by a U.S.-trained death squad while delivering mass at a small hospital chapel. No smoking-gun evidence exists pinning the hit on Washington, but the assassination was the hallmark of U.S. strategy during that time. In a 1984 report for The Progressive magazine, journalist Allan Nairn interviewed “dozens of current and former Salvadoran officers, civilians, and official American sources” and found “a pattern of sustained US participation in building and managing the Salvadoran security apparatus that relies on Death Squad assassinations as its principle means of enforcement.”

Did the U.S. train them to assassinate people or did they train them to shoot in a Cold War battle against totalitarians?  Was the United States on the wrong side of the Cold War?

Ten years later, late Catholic priest William Callahan spoke to the National Catholic Reporter after the UN Truth Commission report brought much more to light, concurring that “[i]t is clear that from the earliest days the U.S. government knew exactly what was going on, especially through the Reagan era, and didn’t care what it was as long as their policy objectives were being achieved.”

Did the Carter White House order the hit? There’s no way to know. But everyone knows where the killers’ training came from. Everyone knows that they were U.S. military proxies. Even the Vatican’s own news agency, in its announcement of Romero’s upcoming canonization, named his killers as “a right-wing death squad,” (read: U.S.-trained death squad) and the National Catholic Reporter points out that the alleged triggerman was a known graduate of the School of the Americas. The United Nations, meanwhile, names two of the alleged assassin squad members as graduates.

The UN and the National Catholic Reporter now: that’s double the Catholic credibility!  The School of the Americas graduates shot a martyr!  They hate Catholicism!  They’re Evil!!

Washington’s culpability in the assassination of Saint Romero doesn’t necessarily depend on an explicit order to carry out the hit. The general directive is enough: These were Washington’s guys doing what Washington needed in the region to maintain capitalist control. Romero is only one of the more than 75,000 who died in El Salvador during the period when the “fragmentation of any opposition or dissident movement by means of arbitrary arrests, murders and selective and indiscriminate disappearances of leaders became common practice” of Washington-backed soldiers, according to the UN Truth Commission’s report. The report continues: “Organized terrorism, in the form of the so-called “death squads”, became the most aberrant manifestation of the escalation of violence…The murder of Monsignor Romero exemplified the limitless, devastating power of these groups.”

There’s that new ‘capitalist’ slur again.  Doesn’t that just mean freedom to have a business, use your own money, and not come to the rotten government to beg for a living?  So the murder of ‘Saint Romero’ is a sign of the ‘limitless devastation’ of ‘capitalist’ groups, yes?

It’s doubtful that El Salvador would be “one of the largest suppliers of clothing to the United States,” with untold thousands of wage slaves sewing our underwear for a dollar an hour if the socialists and Saint Romero had been allowed to design their country how they saw fit. People don’t tend to vote for wage slavery. As in places like Haiti, El Salvador and elsewhere in Central America and the Caribbean, corporate free trade zones tend to be imposed by Washington and compliant domestic governments at the behest of their corporate friends. The 41 percent of Salvadorans living in poverty can be seen as victims, too, of the death squads’ quashing of socialist resistance to Washington’s wishes.

El Salvador is not poor because the allies of Romero lost.  Underwear is sewn for a dollar an hour because they won.  His party rules the country today.  A ‘socialist designed’ country, if you have any sense or recent historical memory, doesn’t improve things.  First they sow murders and rebellions with the help of ‘Saint’ Romeros, then they install a permanent underclass like in Cuba for example.

This piece of Socialist propaganda which attacks freedom, democracy, security, and prosperity, and the country that until recently was the United States; demonstrates the whole purpose behind making Romero so honored by the Church.  It’s the same reason we seem to have Pope Francis now:

To make Communism seem Catholic and to make its obstacles look wrong.

Note to Salon’s Matthew Pulver:

As far as I can tell Romero is only scheduled to be beatified, not canonized.  Not that it matters much these days, but you guys need to brush up on your new Catholicism.

Liberation Theology Has Never Been Catholic, Until Now

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'Martyred for the Faith' just because he defended the poor and oppressed

‘Martyred for the Faith’ just because he defended the poor and oppressed

John Zmirak responds to the recent revelations by a powerful KGB defector that Liberation Theology, so emulated and resurrected by the Franciscan Pontificate yet suppressed until now, was formulated in Soviet Russia.  After recapping the story and some well-known responses, including John Allen’s accusation that the United States exported forms Protestantism south, he writes:

Whatever problems one might have with Pentecostalism, it is genuinely Christian, which Liberation Theology isn’t. It’s scarcely theology. And it doesn’t liberate. In Latin America, it served or serves as the pious fig-leaf for nasty dictatorships like the Sandinistas’ in Nicaragua, and the Chavistas’ in Venezuela. Its watered-down American version — popular among leftists who still claim to be Catholic — offers political cover for pro-abortion, anti-marriage lawmakers, who hope they can buy back their souls by dispensing some extra food stamps and reducing their carbon footprints.

Much worse than Liberation Theology’s worldly effects are the spiritual poisons it trades in: toxic envy, gut-gnawing resentment, a craving for the chance to mete out violence, a scorn for thrift and honest work and an acid cynicism that reduces every human relationship to a swap of money or power. All this in the name of Jesus.

These old lessons should be well-remembered in our time.

It doesn’t seem that Communism or Liberation Theology have waned today.  Instead they have quickly become so pervasive in the world and in the Church that a free faithful alternative no longer exists with which to compare them.  The Faith is so rare and the propaganda machine is so vast, we are now almost entirely immersed in calculated lies.

Put briefly and starkly, Liberation Theology treats Jesus as a proto-revolutionary who came to save the poor from social injustice. The Kingdom of God is the earthly paradise which we will construct from the ruins of Satanic capitalism. The church serves the role of the Party, as the vanguard of the sacred class chosen by History (oops, I meant to say “Jesus”) to overturn the wicked “structures of sin,” and put the Sermon on the Mount into action at the point of a bayonet. The meek shall inherit the earth, once we’ve rounded up all the non-meek into gulags and confiscated their land. You know, the way the Soviets saved Ukraine from greedy farmers in the 1930s.

It sounds like thinly veiled Marxist theory, and that’s exactly what it is. As Norman Cohn and Eric Voegelin showed, Marx himself seized the Christian vision of a New Jerusalem after the Second Coming, dragged it into politics, and dressed it up in a white lab coat as a “scientific” prediction of a this-worldly utopia. Instead of the Second Coming, he inserted “the Revolution,” and in place of the Christian church he plugged in the proletariat and the Party. For decades, idealists around the world were willing to conspire, betray their country, go to prison, die — and wherever they came to power, to kill their fellow men by the tens of millions, and imprison millions more, to force Marx’s kingdom to come.

Leftism is always relentless, not because it works, but because it’s evil. They never learn or give up.  There is no reason to stop trying and hating when you have an eternity before you.

The sordid failure of materialist Marxism to fulfill any — even one — of its messianic promises posed a problem for people who were still, for their own reasons, drawn to revolutionary fantasies that entailed gaining power, confiscating other people’s property and silencing them by force. History, it is perfectly clear, is not inexorably driven to produce a dictatorship of the proletariat. It took Soviet tanks to remind the workers of Hungary and Poland of what was good for them. It demanded concrete walls and barbed wire to stop the common people from fleeing “people’s” regimes by the millions, to live instead in wicked capitalist lands where they would be exploited. What to do, if you still find reality intolerable, and crave a revolution?

You turn to magic. You create a “god from a machine.” You twist people’s faith in Christ into the self-confidence of a conquering social class. You drag down their hope for heaven, and rope it to wishes for cheaper gas and more cassavas. You teach them that real love, tough love, amounts to a cold-blooded calculation about maximizing utility: To make that liberating omelet, Jesus wants you to crack some heads. Perversely, as Marxism by natural means began to collapse all around the world, liberation theologians tried to revive it by calling it Christian.

Look for this in the Pope’s goals, in his allies, and in his rhetoric.  You won’t have to look hard.