Change a threat or a challenge?

EMERGENCE of Christian base communities in the late 1960s was greeted approvingly by most Latin American bishops. After all, the inspiration and guidance had come from the official pastoral workers, the loyalty of whom had not been questioned.
The historic meeting of the bishops at Medellin, Colombia, in 1968, which called for "global, daring, urgent and basically renewing change," spoke approvingly of them. The subsequent meeting in Puebla, Mexico, in 1979, with its stress on the Church's "preferential option for the poor," again praised the base communities.
Puebla, however, added a new note. The evolution of the base communities during the 1970s had made clear that this was not just a new form of Catholic Action ready to provide foot soldiers to implement policies formulated by the bishops.
It was, as the theologians of liberation were describing it, a new way of being church, a church born of the people. It had its own goals, revolutionary goals in the sense that they envisaged the role of the Church as including the transformation of society. The bishops at Puebla, recognising this, were at pains to insist that their authority not be challenged, that the base communities not become a parallel church.
The issue remains unresolved for two reasons. First, we are dealing with two ecclesiologies. The bishops — and this is particularly true of Central America, as contrasted with Brazil — see the church as a pyramid, with all decisions made at the top by the Pope and filtered through them to the lower clergy and finally to the laity.
This was the theology they learned in the seminary, to the extent they learned any theology. It was unquestioned, at least in public, from Trent to Vatican II.
The base communities, their theology coming through the theology of liberation from Vatican II, see the Church as a series of concentric circles, laity as well as clergy having active roles. They believe, as Vatican II said explicitly, that the Pope and bishops do not always have the answer for each existential situation, so it is up to the people to make their own decisions and act accordingly.
The second reason is that the bishops and base communities represent different classes, the oligarchy and the poor. Sociologically speaking, the judgment of each on the reality they live is determined by this fact. For the one, change is threatening. For the other, survival requires change.
An idealistic reading of the Gospel message has made it difficult for Christians, especially Catholics, to face this fact. But class conflict is fact. It was not invented by Karl Marx. "Every city," wrote Plato, "is two cities, the city of the rich and the city of the poor; and the conflict between these two never ceases."
Conflict in Central America is obviously complicated by the existence of these two divergent ways of being church. In San Salvador, in November 1985, I participated for a long day in a meeting of 100 base community leaders, representing the principal slum communities in and around the city. San Salvador Archbishop Arturo Rivera Damas came for two hours in mid-morning.
His 20-minute talk and the questions and statements from the floor which occupied the rest of the time focused on a single issue: the danger (as the bishop saw it) and the need (as the people saw it) of supporting the popular forces in their struggle against the oligarchy and the US-supported armed forces.
Rivera Damas saw his role as impartial negotiator jeopardised by the alliance. The base community leaders saw support of the popular forces as their overriding obligation. The exchange ended in a draw. Small group discussions in which I participated later in the day made clear nobody had been converted.
The standoff continues today, as my conversations with representatives of both sides indicate. One priest summed up the situation well. The institutional church is like a hovercraft. It carries on with its established activities. But it has no organic relationship with the sea two feet below; the base communities.
Does that mean the base communities have ceased to be church, having transformed themselves into political organisms, as the Institute for Religion and Democracy and other critics claim? I do not think so. Sociologists in the tradition of Max Weber see the base communities as a prophetic church.'
They enable their members to recognise social relations, to make them meaningful as an experience of oppression and exploitation, and teach them to overcome these conditions by human effort understood as revolutionary work. The result is an integrated worldview combined with an emotional response that has extraordinary mobilising power. The worldview retains its religious character because it is articulated around biblical concepts that relate it to a transcendent universe.
Gary MacEoin
Catholic Reporter.
These two article originally appeared in the National