Roman Catholic Church

2. Latin American Colonialism and its Legacy of Bondage

Just as the Hebrews in Egypt toiled beneath the yoke of Pharaoh and his taskmasters, so did the peoples of Latin America for centuries endure bondage to colonial rulers.

And just as remnants of the slave mentality persisted among the Hebrews in the wilderness, so does the legacy of colonial attitudes and institutions persist in Latin America today.

The image of Christ dying in passive agony on the cross, and the image of the Blessed Virgin as a dolorous woman in mourning and pierced by a sword, are common in popular Latin American Catholicism. They speak of centuries of impotence under Spanish and other foreign masters. Even today many practicing Roman Catholics approach carnival as a temporary relief from suffering — a reality that was present yesterday and will be here tomorrow, always. In this sense, carnival is escapism — for a few days. Then real life continues.

The origins of this suffering are clearly to be found in the aristocratic system imposed by papal bull and the armed might of Spain and Portugal, a system that relegated the indigenous Indian population to a life of slavery, at best. In Inter Caeteris, Pope Alexander VI designated King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella "lords and masters" of the New World. Thus were the treasure stores of gold and silver, and later coffee and beef, thrown open — to a well-defined elite.

The encomienda was the basic instrument used by the Spanish empire for settling Latin America. This was a grant of Indians to an encomendero who assumed the obligation, in principle, of Christianizing and civilizing them. The Indians, "in exchange," were required to provide labor and tribute to Spain. We look back upon this epoch as a period of brutal and cynical "pacification" of the indigenous people by conquering exploiters. But it is important to recognize that the encomenderos who were charged with "Christianizing" the natives took their jobs seriously enough to allow the clergy to move in and do their evangelical works without interference. It may be tempting, now, to view those early missionaries as merely cynical agents of colonial expansionism — but in fact, it could not have been so. The enduring pervasive influence of the Catholic Church in Latin America attests to the success of those missionaries on the front lines. Had they not been motivated by a sincere Christian faith, they could not have left such an indelible mark on an entirely different culture.

However, religious works cannot avoid their political context (an insight of the liberation theologians). Although in theory the encomienda was not a grant of land, in practice many of the encomienderos were also granted mercedes, or legal title to vast tracts that gave rise to the late estates. After the encomienda system was abolished, this control of land allowed the economic exploitation of the natives to continue.

Two types of large landed estates survive to this day from the colonial period:

• the hacienda (or fazenda, in Portuguese), raising cattle and a diversity of crops for local use or sale; and
• the plantation, raising a single exportable crop.

Initially, Indians were given as slaves to the landholders. Later, the "freed" natives were tied to the landowners through debts brought on by a subsistence wage system. The shortage of good land off the estate made it easy for the landlord to attract or coerce labor onto his estate.

This pattern continues today with an underclass largely descended from the Indian and African slaves, along with other dispossessed groups. The haciendas and plantations are noted for their inefficient husbandry. Landowners face few social or economic pressures to become good managers, and often live in the cities leaving the estates to be run by overseers. Consequently, the landowners often do not make large profits, but that is not their objective. Their primary concern is the maintenance of the two paramount features of the status quo, which go hand in hand.

• First, labor is very cheap, because workers have no alternative place to employ themselves, even though massive tracts of good land are held nearly idle by the land barons.
• Second, the cost of holding on to huge estates — i.e., the taxes charged by the public for the privilege of retaining possession — are low or effectively nonexistent.

Strong incentives for good stewardship are as absent as the landlords.

There is also little incentive to productivity; most of the population has no share in the fruits of the land or the profits of the estates. The colonial system of land tenure discourages the creation of capital, with most of the surplus from the land going to purchase luxury goods that are produced at the expense of more useful manufacture or more often are imported, thereby straining the country's balance of payments. The situation in the cities is no better for the poor. who are drawn there by word of mouth, radio, television and films that present the cities as if they are the Promised Land. Of course, the image is false. So many landless folk seeking employment in the cities have turned them into places of great degradation. Urban land monopoly and speculation create tremendous housing difficulties for the poor. For example, in 1950, 36% of Brazil's people lived in cities, in 1988, 75% do so. Thus, the city of Sao Paulo has grown from ca. 2.2 million in 1950 to ca. 17 million in less than forty years. Of these, we are told that one third are favelados, landless urban squatters, and over 2.5 million are street children.

Indeed, the primary purpose of holding vast amounts of land, as Andre Gunder Frank writes in On Capitalist Underdevelopment, "is not to use it but to prevent its use by others. These others, denied access to the primary resource, necessarily fall under the domination of the few who do control it. And then they are exploited in all conceivable ways, typically through low wages." ...

4. Life in the Wasteland: The Just Society vs. Baal Worship

Fertile ground for the emergence of liberation theology was provided by the clash of views over the role of politics in the Latin American Church in the first half of this century. One problem encountered was how to acknowledge God's sovereignty in history when the everyday world was structured in ways that seemed to deny it.

• Where could one find a divine presence in a civilization that, in so many ways, seemed so uncivilized?
• And was it up to individuals or governments to establish a reign of righteousness?

Leonardo Boff points to three models of the Church that have impacted on the liberation dialogue in Latin America.

• First, "the Church as City of God" holds that politics and government are essentially outside the realm of religion, which is for individual salvation.
• Second, "The Church as Mater et Magistra" sees the Church as educating and persuading political leaders to work for social betterment.
• Third, "The Church as Sacrament of Salvation" has the religious community opening itself to the world and actively collaborating with the state in uplifting the members of society.

Finding all three historical models of the Church wanting, Boff suggests a fourth, drawn from his experiences in the Brazilian basic ecclesial communities. This model, which can be called "The Church of People-hood and Justice for All," would be much more participatory, avoiding centralization and domination. Being democratic, it would emphasize the community more than the individual. Behind Boff's model is liberation theology's concern for the loss of "people-hood" in Latin America and in much of the world.

The new wave of Latin American theologians couple their critique of "individual Christianity" with an affirmation of the broader concept of being a "people of God." In the Bible, we are reminded, God has a chosen people. He loves the poor, oppressed, and landless — as a group. He hates the oppressors — as a group. It is the people who leave the Wasteland and enter the Promised Land. And although the generations had passed away, their children and grandchildren repeated the history of Egyptian oppression and God's salvation in the first person: "And the Egyptians treated us harshly, and afflicted us, and laid upon us hard bondage. Then we cried to the Lord... and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand." (Deut. 26:5-10)

The Judeo-Christian meaning of liberation is clarified by some attention to Baal, the most active "foreign god" of the Canaanite pantheon. To the Canaanites, fertility depended upon sexual union between Baal and his sister and consort, Anath. Baal worship consisted in reenacting the mating of the gods in orgiastic rites with temple prostitutes. Beyond maintaining natural fertility and harmony, Baal religion was used by the aristocracy to uphold the social order. Canaanite tenants worked as dispossessed farmers on estates owned by magnates, the temple, and the king. They worshiped the landowners, the baals, who held dominion over both the land and the peasants themselves. Old Testament exhortations against Baalism emphasize the proper way to worship Yahweh: by acting with mercy and justice towards one's fellow humans.

Because justice does not prevail when some, like the baals, claim the land and its bounty while others are excluded from these privileges, Hosea denounces Israel for betraying its covenant to recognize God as the true owner of the earth. And Amos, referring to the greed for possessing the land and its fruits, said God is angered by those "who trample upon the needy, and bring the poor of the land to an end" (Amos 8:4). Amos' indictment of Israel mentions oppression of the poor and cultic prostitution as if they were one (Amos 2:6-8). This seems strange until one recognizes that the link between these two sins is a wrongful concept of land ownership. Recall that Baal-worship and its sexual rites glorified inequitable land possession and control. In the Prophets, the role of land is crucial in the divine providential scheme, and the flouting of just principles of land possession has grave consequences. Human beings are caretakers, not the owners, of God's creation.

Amos and Hosea underscored that being a caretaker of the earth, while defining people's relationship to the land, also defined people's relationship to one another. Being a caretaker meant loving justice and doing mercy, letting go of selfish possession and the desire for power over others by usurping their means of livelihood, and instead becoming, like God, compassionate. Consider what a revolutionary break this represents from Baal worship, which idolized control of the soil and deified the landowners!

 

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