LIBERATION THEOLOGY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000301560002-3
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 23
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 6, 2010
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: January 20, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20815 [phone]
PROGRAM Firing Line STATION WETA-TV
PBS Network
DATE January 20, 1985 5:00 P.M. CITY Washington, D.C.
Liberation Theology
WILLIAM BUCKLEY: The idea of liberation theology is
only about 20 years old, but it is the hottest issue within the
community of the Catholic Church. Pope John Paul has spoken out
against it, but recently the Vatican suggested that a new papal
statement is on the way, which statement, it is predicted, will
be conciliatory toward the theological liberationists, some of
whom go so far as to attempt to integrate Karl Marx in their
thinking in the role of prophet and exegete.
To discuss the matter, we have as our guests today two
prominent American theologians and churchmen.
The Reverend George William Rutler is associate pastor
of the Church of Our Lady of Victory in New York, serving the
Wall Street financial district. Father Rutler holds six degrees
in various fields. He is a graduate of Dartmouth and Johns
Hopkins. He has studied in Paris and Oxford, and holds the
Pontifical Doctorate in Sacred Theology from Rome. He is a
contributing editor to the New Oxford Review and author of
several books.
The Reverend William D. Smith, a professor of moral
theology, is Dean of St. Joseph's Seminary at Dunwiddie in
Yonkers, New York, the principal seminary for the Archdiocese of
New York. Father Smith was ordained a priest in 1966. He is
widely published in scholarly journals and in weekly journals.
He is a member of the editorial board of Linnica (?) Quarterly,
and served a term as President of the Fellowship of Catholic
Scholars.
I should like to begin by asking Father Smith to tell us
how, at his moment in the controversy, the Vatican stands on the
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subject, while leaving it until later to explore the issues
themselves.
happen?
What's about to happen, or supposed to be about to
FATHER WILLIAM D. SMITH: Immediately, it's not entirely
clear. But back in the autumn, at Labor Day, the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith put out a formal statement, of
which Cardinal Ratzinger is the prefect. And buried in the
statement were indications that there'd be further clarifications
in the future. But the Ratzinger document, which is a formal
teaching statement, outlined clear incompatibilities with the
Catholic faith in the somewhat umbrella term that goes by
liberation theology. It did not name names or individual
authors, but it mentioned enough elements to put two and two
together.
It's been coming for a while, and yet there's probably
more to come.
BUCKLEY: It was after that, was it not, that the
Vatican called in Father Boffe from Brazil? And as I understand
it, the idea was to question him about what he was saying, with
the view to decide whether or not it was theologically tolerable.
Is that correct?
Now, is it known what has happened since that examina-
tion, or what verdict was reached?
FATHER SMITH: No. That's still on hold. That came
BUCKLEY: It came before?
FATHER SMITH: Actually, Cardinal Ratzinger gave a talk
to the Roman authorities last -- toward the end of 1983. And I
knew it was important because it was criticized by all the
dissenters before it was published. And it was defended,
especially by Mr. Briggs in The Times, say last June. Many
people came to the defense of Gutierrez before we even had a
charge about, or against Gutierrez.
FATHER SMITH: Then, during most of the summer, the
business with Leonardo Boffe -- Friar Boffe, as he's called. I
think it evokes Robin Hood and his merry band, or something. And
he went to Rome. There was a formal exchange.
BUCKLEY: He was escorted by a couple of cardinals, too,
wasn't he?
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FATHER SMITH: Yeah. He had more cardinals on his side
than Ratzinger did.
[Laughter]
FATHER SMITH: And they didn't reach complete agreement,
and the Congregation said that they would get back, and they
would.
But he, Gutierrez, Boffe, Juan Sabrino, these are
probably the leading lights of the Latin American version of
liberation theology.
BUCKLEY: Well, so we have a situation in which the
Catholic community, and that wider audience that is obviously
interested in the formulation of Catholic policy, whether it's on
abortion or on liberation theology, is sort of waiting to see
what this clarification from the Vatican is going to say to us.
I'd like now to ask you, Father Rutler, how is it that
the movement continues to grow, notwithstanding the cold water
that's been thrown on it by the Pope, explicitly in this Labor
Day statement, and beginning with his warnings in the Puebla
Conference of Bishops in 1979?
FATHER GEORGE WILLIAM RUTLER: Well, there was a
conference in '79. There was one in '68.
BUCKLEY: In Medellin.
FATHER RUTLER: In Medellin. And [unintelligible]
tackled the same question.
Well, to call it a movement, first of all, is to
attribute to it a certain dignity of growth, which may exist, but
it's very hard to measure.
First of all, it is a theory. Ideas do have effects,
and they are having effects in Latin American in particular. But
the theory is based on an attempt to create a movement. So it
succeeds, in large measure -- this is from a Marxist point of
view -- to the degree to which it actually does become a move-
ment. The evidences are that in many places it is taken serious-
ly.
Part of the very structure of liberation theology is
that it establishes base communities of indoctrination, catechet-
ical centers. And this is a complaint of the Sacred Congreta-
tion, that the people who come to these base communities in good
faith do not have the critical faculties to understand what is
erroneous in what they're being taught.
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So, if it is growing, it's growing largely out of an
artificial encouragement of those communities themselves. And
it's free to grow as long as it's not explicitly condemned.
BUCKLEY: Well, let me play the contrary advocate here
for a moment -- it would load the discussion too distinctly if I
were to say the devil's advocate -- and ask you this:
In your judgment, is Marx seaparable from his position
in respect of atheism?
FATHER RUTLER: Do you mean could Marxism be applied by
a Christian for Christian ends?
FATHER RUTLER: No. This is a fundamental case of the
Church against the Marxist form of liberation theology. Here we
have to qualify what we're talking about. Liberation theology
has various forms. And what is specifically condemned is the
Marxist critique used by many liberation theologians.
Marx, himself, draws initially on the theologian
Feuerbach, who says that any critique of the human problem, which
fundamentally is alienation, has to be a critique of religion.
And Marx then does make a critique of religion by dismissing it,
on this ground: that basic human excellencies are, over the
course of human experience, projected onto an external spirit
called God, which is really a figure of speech for Marx, but
which then deprives the individual of control over his own
virtue. So, in the interest of virtue, Marx sees it necessary to
eliminate the idea of God.
And this, first of all, has its consequences for
religion. Even the Church cannot get on without God for very
long.
BUCKLEY: Well, how would you handle the argument of
someone who said: If you excrete that conclusion of Marx, might
you not then be left with a prophet of class antagonisms whose
essential analytical and social findings are useful in pursuing a
better world, defined here as a world in which the workaday
tensions dissipate? Workaday tensions being primarily the result
of the existence of property.
FATHER RUTLER: Well, the humane inspirations of people
attracted to Marxism are based on a concern for the poor and
justice. So, in that sense, the Christian has to pay attention
to it.
Where Marxism fails is in the fact that it's wrong.
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It's wrong, first of all, because its critical method is based on
an erroneous idea of history. History, to the Marxist, is a
matter of class struggle. The genesis of man comes about by his
evolution through labor. It's completely horizontal progress
separated from any transcendent reference, any vision of the
heavenly kingdom.
Secondly, it's a loaded thing from the start, because
you have an analysis of history which is inseparable from the
praxis. Your vision of history has to determine your analysis of
it. So right from the very start, the consciousness is a
partisan one. That being the case, for the Marxist, you deter-
mine right from wrong by entering into the class struggle, which
involves violence.
Therefore, what Marx calls morality is, fundamentally
for the Christian, the absence of morality. The very fundamental
ground of the distinction between good and evil -- namely, God --
is eliminated.
BUCKLEY: Well, let's ask Father Smith how he handles
the attention given by these theologians to one or two passages
within the Bible. The Magnificat of Luke is quoted: "He hath
put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low
degree. He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich
he hath sent, empty, away."
Now, this is accepted, really, as an earthly injuction,
is it not, by people like Father Gutierrez?
BUCKLEY: And the answer is, what kind of -- with what
kind of assurance can you, in coping with that argument, insist
that Christ was -- or that Luke, rather, was speaking in meta-
phors?
FATHER SMITH: This is one of the problems that Cardinal
Ratzinger brings to the fore early. He gives two examples, one
of which is your Magnificat, the other of which is the Exodus
event, very often.
You can go about 200 pages in Gutierrez's book before
you have any theological reference. So you have the Exodus
event, delivery from slavery in Egypt, basically seen as a
political event.
BUCKLEY: Secular leadership.
FATHER SMITH: Exactly.
Never are we told that the purpose of that liberation
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was to get to Sinai to establish a covenant that would result in
the worship of God.
Early on, the Cardinal points out the primary liberation
in the Christian perspective is the liberation in Christ from
personal sin. If we get that wrong, we get everything wrong. If
sin is first of all social, and man is the agent of deliverance,
and the focus is this world, you end up with a secularized
Gospel. Then there'll come to the Magnificat as some kind of
magnificent statement in power politics. And then the entire
Bible is read through the prism of this analysis, which goes back
to the prior warning.
And actually, before, we were mentioning books and
authors. But the test case has already been -- it exists in
flesh and blood, I believe. Nicaragua is not strong on theo-
logians, but the test case has already been met, and they've
failed the test.
The key concern, I think, from Ratzinger is not economic
analysis right here, it's doctrinal analysis. And the holy
horror of the Catholic Church is schism. And this is exactly
what has been accomplished there. And the Church, herself
--they're not for all the poor, they're just for the poor who
have an ideologically correct understanding of the revolution.
And then that split comes right into worship. If you're part of
the manager class or the teaching class or the bishops, you won't
be given communion in certain base communities. Everything is
judged -- and this is why the warning goes back: Can you just
dip into Marxist analysis, eliminate alleged impurities, and run
off with this critique? And Ratzinger is saying you can't do
that, because the critique itself has presuppositions, non-
transcendent presuppositions. You separate violence from ethics.
The only truth is class truth. Whoever, out of good will or
frustration, buys into that, Christianity's got to lose.
BUCKLEY: So, what he was saying is not only is it
dogmatically incompatible; but for that reason, empirically, it
will always conduce to undesirable results.
FATHER RUTLER: Yes, because it's a lie against history.
Now, you quoted the Magnificat. Who sang that but the
Mother of Christ? This is an old Jewish song that she raises to
a new dignity, the song of Tebbera (?), their great exultation of
the women in the Exodus. But what she does is then draw the
attention of her people to the fact that the Exodus is itself a
sign of the wandering of the human race toward heaven, and the
discovery of it through a passover, which is going to involve a
sacrifice.
That's the thing that the Marxists, first of all, cannot
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abide, the idea of sacrifice, unless it's elicited from somebody
else, you see. If you remove a burden, the totalitarian will
impose it on someone else. He will not take up his cross. This
is what Mary's Son is about to say.
And she uses a Hebrew parallelism there. She says the
mighty are going to be thrown out, and the humble and the weak
will be raised up. And then the rich will be cast out, and the
poor will be raised up.
The parallel there, then, you see, is between poverty
and humility. And her Son will then make it in the Sermon on the
Mount when he says, "Blessed are the poor in spirit," and He is
speaking of that humility, that detachment from things of this
world. It is not an economic category, although it has its
economic manifestations.
So, the Blessed Mother is not a Chairman, or a Madam
Mao. This is not a war song that the voices on earth will
understand. It's a war song rallying the angels.
The Marxist is really lying against history when he
takes that and makes it pedantic. The Marxist is very embar-
rassed by the fact that the poverty of the Holy Family was a
spiritual detachment. It was that humility of which Mary is a
symbol.
As a matter of fact, in social analysis, the Marxists
would have to admit, if pressed to the point, which is why he
avoids it, that the Holy Family -- and I say this with no
disrespect, but with great awe and reverence -- was what the
Marxists would call petit bourgeois. Joseph was a shopkeeper, he
had a trade. They -- Mary, herself, as far as we know from Cana,
was a bit of a managerial type, herself. She was arranging a
banquet there. Maybe she had a business on the side. I don't
know. That's very possible.
And this is the offense, you see, to the person who
wants to dramatize history beyond the supernatural drama. They
want to exaggerate or classify that poverty. They cannot abide
the fact that the poverty of Christ and the Holy Family was a
poverty of detachment, a poverty of humility, and a poverty of
anonymity.
BUCKLEY: Well, they would call this, I think, the
problem of idealism. As you know, they reject the notion that
Christians should acknowledge two seers, one heavenly and another
contemporary. They insist on -- they really insist that the
Biblical mandate is to take power for the purpose of attempting
to perfect the world we live in. And they consider it both
fatalistic and incorrect to read the Bible otherwise.
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Now, under the circumstances, they've developed not only
an appetite for a form of angelism, but also a capacity to see it
where, I think, normal eyes don't.
For instance, here's one Maryknoll describing Castro's
Cuba: "There is an impressive spirit of revolutionary idealism
in the Cuban people and in their lifestyle. There is no doubt
that the Cuban revolution has contributed to better education, to
medical attention for the island's ten million population. It
emphasizes the dignity of women, workers, and campesinos.
Another development is a dedicated internationalism permeating
Cuban society, the realization of personal responsibility for
people outside the nation's borders. These advances in the brief
span of 20 years are unparalleled in Latin America."
Now, that, it seems to me, is, in the first place, to
bear false witness -- i.e., all of those things have not in fact
happened. Secondly, had they happened, they would probably be
something that happened notwithstanding the attempt to corrupt
the philosophical base of the Cuban people.
However, it seems to me that you are both rather
overconfident that this minor heresy will sort of go away, given
that it laps up even on the shores of the Maryknoll, 40 miles
from here, and is indirectly reflected in some of the writings of
Kenneth Briggs in the New York Times.
FATHER SMITH: No, I'm nvt overconfident. I really
believe the motive behind the Doctrine of the Faith Congregation
was becauses of their concern for the unity of the Church.
Presently, a third of the Catholic Church is in Latin America. By
the year 2000, it'll be a half. And that's a main segment of the
Catholic Church.
BUCKLEY: Well, that's pessimistic about the growth of
the Catholic faith elsewhere, isn't it?
FATHER SMITH: Well, I think Europe is doing a good job
of dying. If you go by their population rates, if you have a 1.2
instead of replacement level, it's numbered by the statistics.
And there'd be many people who are cheering for it here
in the United States. [Unintelligible] Maryknoll publishes
everything. But almost humorously, a couple of weeks after it
came out, I think there was someone from Loyola in Chicago,
Thomas Sheahan, Sheahan had an op-ed in the New York Times
pointing out that the unfortunate part about this whole thing was
that John Paul II didn't understand the nuances of Marxism.
I find this unbelievable. The Pope, personally, grew up
with it, lived with it, has been in a dual of wits with it all
his adult life. And then someone in a library in Chicago, whose
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main contacts with Marxism...
BUCKLEY: Accuses the Pope of naivete.
FATHER SMITH: Yeah. He doesn't understand the subtle-
ties in Marxism with a human face.
Solzhenitsyn was on the other side. He's given us other
information.
And very uncritically -- it falls in with some other
liberation things. But that business of the secular gospel, the
secular world, secular salvation. Sin is social; therefore, all
we need, really, is a little social engineering to fix that. And
one of the more significant sentences in there is that social
evils are not so much the cause as the consequence of personal
sin. And they don't accept that at all. And then you end up
with what Carl Barth called another gospel. This is just not the
New Testament.
BUCKLEY: Let me ask you this, because you've made three
references to it. Do I understand you to be saying that there is
no such thing as social sin, only individual sin?
FATHER RUTLER: There are social consequences to sin.
But sin, strictly defined, has to be a human act. Very often
they speak of sinful structures. It must be an accommodation,
like a sinful episode or a sinful play, if you want to talk that.
But strictly speaking, you can only predicate good and evil of
human actions.
BUCKLEY: Well, how would you -- how would that doc-
trine, for instance, handle a society which has a conscription
law, to which the Church a doctrinal exception, which conscrip-
tion law is used to draft young men and cause those young men to
fight unjust wars? It's not the individual's sin in this case,
is it? It is a social sin that they should be committed to that
particular use, is it not? So it would be the government one
would condemn, rather than the individual, would it not?
FATHER SMITH: You could. But I think we're accom-
modating the use. We're using the word a little bit more
broadly. You could speak of a wrong situation, even a sinful
situation, or even, I suppose, a sinful government. But the
problem is, I can't absolve a sinful structure. I'm not sure I
can absolve a sinful government, either.
But there are choices, human choices, wrong, bad human
choices, which we call sinful, which have consequences.
BUCKLEY: I see. In this case, it would be the leaders
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who sent these young men out on unjust wars.
FATHER SMITH: Or the voters.
BUCKLEY: Or the voters. Ah-ha.
Now, the Church has often said that it is -- it has no
position concerning different modes of government. You can't say
the Catholic Church is pro-capitalist or that the Catholic Church
is pro-socialist or that the Catholic Church is pro-monarchy or
anti-monarchy, etcetera, etcetera. At what point does the
Church, as you understand it, permit itself to say a study of the
practice of certain modes of government entitles us, on the basis
of historical experience, to oppose such governments?
FATHER RUTLER: Well, you have to analyze the evidences
of good and evil. And there are three ways to regulate anything.
One is through amputation, if it's evil. The other one is
through mortification discipline, if there's a mix of good and
evil there, an ambiguity. And the third is limitation, if it's
good, but we cannot have an unrestricted good.
This is why when the Pope talks about capitalism he does
not condemn it, but he speaks fervently about the need of a
capitalist to be socially responsible. The Marxist looks upon it
as not something which can be limited, because it is not a good, '
it is an inherent evil. So he goes back to amputation. That's
why you have violence.
Now, in Cardinal Ratzinger's document, there's a whole
section in -- the seventh section, I think the thirteenth
paragraph, he has a sweeping condemnation of what he calls
neocolonialism, exploitation, selfishness. It's a very strong
statement. But he is not condemning an economic system. He's
condemning the abuse.
So what it gets really down to is the definition of good
and evil. And this is what the Marxist will not do. He does not
believe that there is such a thing as a cosmic good and and that
there was a voice that said Serviam (?), I will serve in Christ,
and remedying the voice of Satan, who said Non Serviam, I will
not serve.
And I'll give you an example of how the Church sees
this. In the 1976 Eucharistic Congress in Philadelphia, there
was a gathering and various people were speaking. And this one
man got up and gave a little speech in which he embarrassed
everybody. He said that it is written in the third chapter of
Genesis that the choice was given to man, the temptation, "You
shall be gods." And man has always been tempted to take up that
offer, and has resisted sometimes, and has succumbed in other
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times. But perhaps now the hour is ripe for the final tempta-
tion. And it is possible that we are about to see the final
confrontation between the word and the anti-word.
And everybody coughed a little, and the man then left.
And two years later he appeared on the balcony of St. Peter's in
Rome dressed in white.
BUCKLEY: Don't tell me.
FATHER RUTLER: Yes.
BUCKLEY:. Is that right?
FATHER RUTLER: Yes.
BUCKLEY: Gee, that's a pretty dramatic story. Did he
use the word Armageddon?
FATHER RUTLER: He had said this a few months before,
the Lent before to the Roman Curia, in retreat. Paul VI was on
the throne.
It's a very dramatic scene. These times are so dramatic
that if you were to have anticipated them in a novel or a film 15
years ago, people would have said it was outlandish. But these
things happen. And Paul VI was on the throne, the Curia was
gathered around.
BUCKLEY: You'd sound like Malachy Martin.
FATHER RUTLER: And this Polish Cardinal said this same
thing there in the Curia.
The Pope understands good and evil, in other words, as a
cosmic thing.
BUCKLEY: Let me not permit a little hit-and-run here on
neocolonialism. Do I understand you to say the Cardinal de-
nounced neocolonialism, having first described it, or having not
bothered to describe it?
FATHER RUTLER: He did not define it. And he gave the
impression he did not approve of it, but he did not say what it
was he was not approving of.
BUCKLEY: Because, for instance, I'd be very much,
personally, in favor of a little neocolonialism in Libya right
now.
FATHER RUTLER: Neo or colonialism?
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BUCKLEY: Well, it would be neo becauses it had been
colonized, of course, for several hundred years.
But the notion that a colonial gesture is per se sinful
strikes me as elevating independence beyond rational bounds.
That is to say, one would rather a society governed by, say,
Colonel Idi Amin lost its independence than that it should
continue to be a sacrifical order for 120,000 per year at the
hands of a madman, wouldn't we?
FATHER RUTLER: Well, it would certainly improve famine
conditions in Ethiopia.
BUCKLEY: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, in other words, neocolonialism is denounced -- I
want to be quite certain about this -- surely, depending on the
motives of those people who make those exertions.
Okay, fine.
So, therefore, we haven't yet identified a social
arrangment which is [unintelligible] sinful. It's only the
people who use that arrangement for evil purposes who are sinful.
FATHER SMITH: ...saying that communism and Catholicism
are incompatible.
BUCKLEY: That's right.
FATHER RUTLER: And he was also the one who said it was
the duty of the Church to evangelize, not civilize.
BUCKLEY: Which is true.
FATHER RUTLER: Exactly. Otherwise, we get preachy
instead of preaching. We become moralizers instead of moral.
This is the thing that is so pedantic and so boring about
Marxism, besides the fact it doesn't work; and that is that it is
so preachy, so moralizing, so sickening that way.
BUCKLEY: How can you moralize when you don't dis-
tinguish between good and evil?
FATHER RUTLER: You invent your morality. It gives you
a great...
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FATHER SMITH: Well, if it serves the revolution, it's
good. And if it doesn't serve the revolutionary process...
BUCKLEY: Well, that's an instrumental form of morality.
But morality surely deals with the distinction between good and
evil. And that which is, quotes-unquotes, good is a metaphor,
under strict Marxist usage. It either furthers the revoluton or
doesn't further the revolution.
FATHER SMITH: ...cut off the transcendent base. Like
the Church documents will always speak about the nature, the
origin and the destiny of man, where we come from, where we're
going, and God. Once you cut that off, then you end up with some
kind of a secular calculation of good and evil, and you're using
terms in a diferent way. And that's why, constantly, it's a
separation of violence from ethics. Violence or unjust force can
be used to advance the revolution. Anything that doesn't advance
the revolution -- now, the Catholic Church is not officially
pacifist. It does have a theory to accomodate the just use of
force, even the just use of war, even the just use of a war of
revolution. And if there were situations, as there were in our
own Revolution, and some others, we'd have no big problem with
that.
BUCKLEY: Is there doctrinal difficulty, for instance,
with the slogan, if that's what you want to call it, "Sic semper
tyrannus"?
FATHER RUTLER: Doctrinal difficulty?
BUCKLEY: Yeah. I.e., is the conclusion that force
ought not to be used against an oppressor so comprehensive as to
discourage the notion that tyrants should, if necessary, die at
sword-point?
FATHER RUTLER: Well, Our Lord said "Sic semper
tyrannus."
BUCKLEY: That's what I say.
FATHER RUTLER: But in absolute silence. When the judge
looks at him, or your king, you say it, and he affirms it. But
then he manifests his kingship, you see. That's the essential
difference.
When Cardinal Ratzinger cites the virtue of many people
who sincerely believe even in some form of Marxist interpretation
of liberation theology, he says that the very desire for liber-
ation is a round-about way of saying that we are in the image of
God. The insufficiency of liberation theology, where it is
Marxist, is that it doesn't know what to do about it. It doesn't
understand that to be in the image of God means that we have a
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soul. That's the only reason we can conceive of freedom, to
begin with. So they can only get halfway to freedom. Half-
freedom is independence. Now, that's freedom from something.
Total freedom, holy freedom, is freedom for a thing. And that
can only be accomplished through being free from the ultimate
tyrant, and that's death.
Our Lord said "Sic semper tryannus" on the cross.
BUCKLEY: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the notion that
there's an inherent right of someone who is -- by someone who is
oppressed to physically take measures against the oppressor is or
is not dignified by Christian tradition?
FATHER RUTLER: It is dignified because Christian
tradition invents the concept of dignitas. The very idea of
Marxism is that man does not have an inherent dignity. He is
defined by his class struggle, and the individual is dispensable.
This is the fundamental complaint of the Church against the
Marxist critique of history, that it robs man of his dignity.
BUCKLEY: If a Christian Cambodian were to have assas-
sinated Pol Pot, would he have needed to confess that?
FATHER RUTLER: Yes, and then taken the advice of his
confessor on the subject, who may have concluded that it was not
the sin he thought, you know, because the Church makes a distinc-
tion between killing and murder, and qualifies this, as [unin-
telligible] was saying, on the question of justice and by the
definition of justice.
BUCKLEY: But doesn't killing require some kind of civic
sanction? That is to say, a killing by a soldier is different
from killing by an individual, notwithstanding that the same guy
gets killed.
FATHER RUTLER: Well, consider the moral economy of Our
Lord. You would have no authority were it not given you from
above.
FATHER SMITH: But we would need a few more conditions
in there than someone just figuring out who their favorite tyrant
[Confusion of voices]
FATHER SMITH: The conditions are for a just war are
extended further to a just revolution. I mean it can't be one
grievance from somebody. There has to be a gross and continuing
denial of basic human rights. You must be convinced that, in
terms of proportion, more good will come about, or will you
create a worse situation?
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BUCKLEY: Let's assume the situation were as clear as
indeed it was in Cambodia ten years ago; or, if you like, Hitler.
Would Christian doctrine understand or authorize an individual,
on his own, [Latin expression], pull out a rifle and aiming it at
Adolf Hitler? Or would he have to have been an agent of the
British Government that had declared war on Hitler, or a member
of some kind of formal insurrectionary group?
FATHER SMITH: Authorizing the agent might -- it's hard
to figure than one through. But if someone told me that they
were the one who actually killed Hitler, and they did kill
Hitler, and this is after a long period, that they knew what they
were doing, people were suffering...
BUCKLEY: You'd give them him Hail Marys on that.
FATHER SMITH: I'm not sure. I'd say, "Maybe together
we'd say a prayer for his deceased relatives. But yuu did well,
Friend."
FATHER SMITH: "You have done the human race a favor."
FATHER RUTLER: I knew a lady who said that she had been
to a rally in Nuremberg, and this was in the early days of
Hitler. She said, "If I knew then what I know now, I would have
shot him." I shocked me to hear this nice old lady saying that.
But the problem was, of course, she didn't know. She didn't know
then.
FATHER SMITH: Actually, Aquinas calls it a virtue.
BUCKLEY: Did he?
FATHER SMITH: That if the innocent is being oppressed
and you foresee the probable outcome, you can do something about
it, and you fail to, he says that is vicious. Because you are
upholding the order of justice, and therefore making an act of
virtue in defending the innocent.
BUCKLEY: How would Gutierrez have handled that? Might
he have interpreted that, say, as a license to kill off the
colonels who ran Peru up until four or five years ago?
FATHER SMITH: That's where we need the conditions,
because someone will play fast and loose with that.
FATHER RUTLER: He would have had to extend his know-
ledge of St. Thomas, to the distinction that he makes between
reason and intelligence. And you can reason a thing to death,
and that's called rationalizing it, the deductive arrival at a
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truth. But intelligence, itself, is an intuitive perception: I
see the truth.
These people, a lot of the Marxist interpreters, are
rationalizing their interpretation of the truth because they
don't believe in a transcendent truth itself. They have a
paradise in mind. But when that workers' paradise is built, they
have to put a wall around it without gates to keep the people in.
This is the antithesis of the Kingdom of God, which has 12 gates
in the wall to allow the people in.
BUCKLEY: Well, let's get concrete here and attempt to
address ourselves to some of the questions being asked by people
who are concerned about what's happening right now in Latin
America, and the extent to which organized Christianity, which is
mostly Catholic, is playing a role there. What you seem to see,
reading the journals that cover these matters, is a kind of
slippage in the direction of liberation theology. The attempt to
analyze that is less easily done by telling us that here is an
extraordinary theological insight into the ultimate compatibility
of Marx and Christ, but rather a politics of despair that looks
to the Church to do something about a pesistently awful situa-
tion.
Now, Cardinal Arns was on my program from Sao Paulo
three or four years ago, and this is really the line he was
taking, that it is the job of the clergy to give their communi-
cants reasons not to despair.
Of course I made the obvious comment that presumably, if
the Kingdom of God is not of this world, there can be no cause,
ultimately, to despair.
Well, "Yes. Yes, my son," was his general attitude,
"but there are other and more immediate problems, like food,
shelter, medical aid. And unless you can give them grounds to
believe that that is achievable, they will despair."
The popular notion in much of thinking America is that
liberation theology is heading in that direction because not
enough progress is otherwise being made in Latin America.
FATHER SMITH: Often the case. But there are different
fact situations in Latin America. Argentina and Colombia are
very, very different from Brazil. And I think Lopez-Trujillo,
that Cardinal in Colombia, is probably the ideological opponent
of everything that's going on in Nicaragua. This, I think,
explains how many well-meaning American missionaries go to a
situation, they work hard, they bank their head against a wall;
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but brought up as we were, with instant coffee, instant music,
instant results -- there are not instant results. And in
frustration, as angry people often do, you reach around for any
-- any weapon will do, even if it's a boomerang.
I think, in most cases, the Marxists are smarter than
But it also helps us to focus, I think, on what would be
a proper political philosophy. I believe it is. And I think the
Holy Father -- I'm not guessing. He said it in Puebla, and he
said it more than once. The proper role of the hierarchy and the
clergy is to preach the truth, teach the truth about God and man,
to teach valid general social principles. But on the concrete
application to partisan solutions, that is neither the charism
nor the competence of clergy
BUCKLEY: To what extent do those truths require
submissiveness?
FATHER SMITH: Partisan proposals?
BUCKLEY: No, no, no, no, no. To what extent does the
preaching of the truth call on the Church to ask its parishioners
to be submissive? Is that a virtue in a situation that borders
on despair?
FATHER SMITH: Well, we'd have an obligation, an
obligation, in justice, toward the common good, to support just
laws and a just society. Everything is a little bit less than
perfectly just. And until that got way out of balance, the
Fourth Commandment -- it's not popular, but Aquinas explains
patriotism as a virtue.
FATHER RUTLER: This is a question of submission to
obedience, because it is only through obedience that freedom is
born. The totalitarian mentality requires an obedience to
submission, a loss of the private conscience. And this is the
lack of dignity, the fundamental affront which the Church is
warning that the most -- the best-intended people will lead the
hungry into a deeper hunger, and the most oppressed into a worse
kind of violence.
And we see this modeled again -- and it's not a with-
drawal from reality when we look at the Gospel. This is reality
in its fundamental prism.
There was a sincere Marxist amongst the apostles. There
is an apostolic precedent for Marxism. It was Judas. Now, why?
Judas, there, is in the room when they're pouring the precious
ointment on Christ, and he says, "You shouldn't waste the gross
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national product. You should give it to the poor." And it's
because of that limited view of sacrifice and to history that he
ends up killing himself. He can only repent, says Scripture,
unto himself.
Now, Peter denies Our Lord three times, and yet he
becomes Pope, because he repents back to the Lord. He refuses to
succumb unto that ultimate poverty, which is cynicism.
Our Lord says the same thing to Mary and Martha. Now,
they have a kind of -- when Martha is trying to set up a base
community there in their house. She's running about doing all
kinds of reforming things. She doesn't understand that Christ is
not a reformer, he's a redeemer.
He says, "Martha, Martha, you are busy with a great many
things. But only one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the
better portion," the source of eternal life, the source of her
dignity, that will qualify any legitimate reform. And that's not
an abstraction.
The problem with so many of the critics is they don't
understand that liberation theology has been tried.
BUCKLEY: The headline I thought was interesting -- this
was in the New York Times in June, which is three months before
the Cardinal Ratzinger communication: "Catholic Liberals Defend
Activism. Major Challenge to Vatical on Role of Church in
Politics." Then, of course, the long story, in which they talk
about Gutierrez and Chilabecs (?) and everybody.
Now, could it be that the operative word, really, here
is activism. There's a sense in which the traditional Church is
being criticized for being less than energetic enough.
Let me wind this in another way. About ten years ago,
Irving Kristol said, "Who really thinks that poverty in South
America would endure if, for instance, tomorrow you were to drop
50 million Swiss in Brazil?" And this forces you to to acknow-
ledge that the ethos has a great deal to do with matters of
progress and poverty; and the cultivation of an ethos that
induces to hard work, savings, husbandry, inventiveness is
something that tends to make people impatient if you think of in
terms of breeding it by education, but rather more excited by the
notion of imposing it through some sort of a socialist cadre.
So, is it that lack of activism that's associated with
the traditional Church that is causing so much sympathy with the
liberationists?
FATHER RUTLER: The Church has been the singular most
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active influence in society, Western society, for the last 2000
years. It's all rubbish when people say that.
BUCKLEY: They were certainly effective colonizers.
FATHER RUTLER: Yes. Well, they also did the gracious
benevolence towards an oppressed people by not sending them in a
bunch of Swiss.
FATHER SMITH: That may not be the solution, a bunch of
FATHER RUTLER: Just sending a lot of Swiss people to
teach Latin Americans how to be boring.
[Laughter]
FATHER RUTLER: You see, what you have -- Cardinal
Ratzinger says...
BUCKLEY: And make cuckoo clocks.
FATHER RUTLER: Make cuckoo clocks. Because you have --
you have to have a concept of man based on the concept of God in
the world, which is the Church, which is then based on the
understanding of Christ. If you don't have an understanding of
Christ, the Church, then man becomes boring to other people and
boring to himself. And people would know that if they read
history.
All this was tried in the 19th Century. A great genius,
a greater genius than anybody working on liberation theology
today, Laminet (?). He had been swindled by Rousseau, but he
finally became a Catholic. He began to write about the social
consciousness of the Church and how the prophetic voice of the
Church should not be intimidated by political power. He wrote
three very powerful volumes, 1818, 1820, 1823. And he almost got
a cardinal's hat from Leo XII.
But there were Sopicians (?) and Jesuits who then, like
now, were brilliant, but then used their minds. And he -- they
said there is something suspicious in what he is saying. He is
saying, basically, that the genius of the Church as a social
reformer is because of its long experience. But he is not saying
that it is an authority given to it from above.
. So, eventually, he was condemned in two encyclicals by
the next Pope, Gregory XVI. And then he wrote his great book
[French expression], in which he bares his soul and he really
says he cannot understand man because he cannot understand the
Church, and he cannot understand the Church because he cannot
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understand Christ. So he loses his faith, he joins parliament.
The great revolution comes, 1848, but then in 1852 the reaction
destroys him.
So what you see there is, in the treatment given to him,
first by Leo XII and then by Gregory XVI, you have a parallel
with Paul VI and John Paul II, a very consistent warning on
liberation theology.
Then the final thing is that Pius IX, the great liberal
Pope who's been caricatured by misinformed historians...
BUCKLEY: There are two Pius the IXs.
FATHER SMITH: He started off very liberal.
BUCKLEY: That's right.
FATHER RUTLER: Well, he was a consistent man. His
observers were inconsistent, you see.
BUCKLEY: He just discovered a series of errors along
the way.
FATHER RUTLER: He discovered error. And it's very
touching to see how Pius XI tries to bring Laminet back into the
Church. I really think that's what John Paul II is doing here.
He realizes there's an abundance of natural virtue amongst many
of these theologians, and that they are robbing themselves
because they do not understand the theological virtues. For
them, faith is simply a confidence in history.
BUCKLEY: I think all of what you said is absolutely
correct, engrossing and illuminating. It fails, however, to
synchronize with the nervous mood of the 20th Century, which, as
you said in another context a moment ago, gives you things like
instant coffee and instant satisfaction, and movies and tele-
vision, on the basis of which people can see how other people are
living. And for those people, it becomes very difficult to say
that creature satisfactions, such as a lack of hunger or shelter,
are something that they can count on in the next world, but can't
count on in this world. Which is probably what makes nostrums so
merchandisable in the 20th Century, which would not have been in
the 19th Century.
FATHER RUTLER: Well, you know, Christ fed 5000 people,
and then he said, "I'm doing this because I have bread that you
do not know of."
FATHER SMITH: Part of the standing criticism, at least
in the conventional wisdom, is that the Church was too cozy,
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particularly in Latin America, with the haves. And some went
from what they describe as one either-or to the next either-or,
and they made a big flip.
I still think the basic thrust of Catholic social
teaching is you can't have a good society without good people.
And the primary focus of the Church is the formation of con-
science, preservation of worthy traditions, insistence on the
Judeo-Christian ethic, and all of that type of thing.
But the more they get into a quick political solution,
the less they do what they should do. And it will be absolutely
counterproductive.
But in the long period of history there were some
situations that were just too cozy. There were always good
people, there were always bad people. But the solution...
[Confusion of voices]
pictures.
FATHER SMITH: We can't rewrite everything in rosy
FATHER RUTLER: But the fact is that that corruption
FATHER SMITH: Okay. Was the wrong choices of individ-
ual people who were responsible for them. And their change will
come, their personal salvation will come through Jesus Christ as
well, not through just tinkering with the social system.
FATHER RUTLER: But you see, those problems are the
result of a failure to be Christian. The problems Marxism causes
are directly the result of an obedience to orthodox Marxism.
That's the essential difference.
FATHER SMITH: Okay. And I wouldn't question that. But
when we register the annoyance -- and that may be, "Well, this
takes too long, and it sounds like you're for me-tooism." -- I
think the principle is sound. And what are we finding, the
principle or those Christians who are just too slow or lazy to
put that principle into practice?
FATHER RUTLER: When you say, though, it doesn't answer
the question of the 20th Century, well, the 20th Century only has
16, or less, years to go. We are now approaching the post-modern
age. And the liberation theologians represent the last crumbs of
modern materialism, which has just left carnage throughout this
modern age. And it's going to be a re-rooting of one's self in
the essential foundation of cultural discourse in the 21st
Century that's really going to prevent those mistakes from being
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repeated.
BUCKLEY: Well, I happen -- and I don't think this will
surprise you -- to agree with you. But I do think that we need
to come up with more communicable means of causing people who are
restless under the sanction of the traditional ideas to feel that
we are energetically on their side and that something will
indeed, and should, happen to better their material lot, and that
this can happen much more productively other than under Marxism.
FATHER RUTLER: Well, the clearest explication one can
look at is the Lumingencium (?) document of the Second Vatican
Council.
BUCKLEY: Right. And people like Cardinal Trujillo...
FATHER SMITH: And people like John Paul II, who the day
after he read the Mexican bis -- the Latin American bishops the
riot act on staying out of politics, he went to Southern Mexico
the next day and told all those Indians for their rights, and
he'd help them.
FATHER RUTLER: At the risk of pedantry, there's a line
-- and it's indirectly referred to in the Ratzinger document
--from Lumingencium, it's the thirteenth note on the Church, it's
a quotation of St. John Chrisistum (?). [Latin expression]: "He
who sits in Rome knows that in the farthest corners of the world
are his members." That it is in the seat of unity in the Pope,
through whom the Holy Spirit speaks, that the human race under-
stands its destiny and receives an authority for direction
And this is the problem of liberation theology, is they
try to disunite that voice, looking upon the hierarchical
structure of the Church as some kind of bourgeois imposition upon
a free people.
BUCKLEY: And that insight, you think, is communicable
in any mode -- i.e., among intellecutals, among peasants.
FATHER RUTLER: Which insight?
BUCKLEY: Well, the insight of the institutional help
that the Church can itself give.
FATHER RUTLER: Yes. And there's a natural inclination
against it, not in a Marxist form, but I suppose what a Marxist
would call the bourgeois form in America, when people start
talking about an American church, or a mass which is a celebra-
tion of life, which is a kind of subrbanized version of the
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celebrations of the progress of labor in Latin America.
BUCKLEY: Thank you, Father George William Rutler.
Thank you, Father William Smith.
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