Should 1492 be celebrated in Latin America or deplored?

Gary MacEoin looks at a new church document with an ambivalent attitude towards 500 years of Christianity in Latin America.
CONFLICT over the appropriate commemoration of the fifth centenary of European presence in the Americas has been intensified by a document prepared by the Secretariat of the Latin American Episcopal Council (CELAM). It calls itself "Elements for a Pastoral Reflection in Preparation for CELAM IV." This fourth general assembly of Latin American bishops, to be opened by Pope John Paul II in Santo Domingo in 1992, will celebrate 500 years of Christian presence in the Americas.
The conflict has been developing for several years at two levels. One is historical, the other theological. Did the Europeans bring the benefits of a superior civilisation to primitive peoples, or on the contrary, have the long term effects of the encounter been disastrous for most Latin Americans? And what has been the role of a church that was tied closely to the invaders in the destruction of high civilisations and the early enslavement and continuing impoverishment of the indigenous peoples?
The "Kairos Centroamericano", a reflection on Central American society issued three years ago and signed by leading Catholic and Protestant church leaders sympathetic with this critical evaluation, calls for appropriate penitential exercises by all churches, but especially those of Spain, Rome and England, to mark the fifth centenary.
The CELAM authorities have shown no sympathy with that approach. They have, nevertheless, shown their sensitivity to the criticism. The new document, while stressing the defence of the Indians by such missionaries as Bartolome de las Casas and sliding lightly over the major areas of collaboration, prudently avoids any attempt to glorify what is at best an ambiguous past.
It does, however, grossly distort the present. In more than 200 pages of meandering, often contradictory, usually irrelevant argumentation, it recognises the existence of unjust social structures, while condemning effective action to change them. It maintains a false neutrality between oppressors and oppressed. It attempts to justify dictatorships and praises the armed forces as promoters of democracy. Such distortions are necessary as laying the groundwork for completion of the work begun at Puebla in 1971, namely, to negate the commitments made by the bishops of Latin America at Medellin in 1968.
At Medellin, faithful to the call of Vatican [I, the Latin American church changed sides, ending its historic concubinage with the wealthy oppressors and pledging itself to a preferential option for the poor, the oppressed, the voiceless. It was a shot heard around the world. On the one hand, it stimulated the growth of the theology of liberation and of "the new way of being church," the Christian base communities; on the other, it sparked a counter offensive by the oppressors, international and domestic, whose privileges it threatened. After Puebla, the counter offensive picked up steam. During the 1980s, the attacks have come from three directions, rightwing groups in the United States, reactionaries in the Vatican, and conservative bishops in Latin America. Guidelines for the 1980s (known as the Santa Fe Manifesto) issued by advisers to President Reagan, insisted that the United States should actively counter liberation theology.
Opponents of liberation theology in the Vatican and in the church in Latin America make the same blanket condemnation while ignoring the claim of the liberation theologians that they use Marxism only as a sociological tool, a use authorised by Pope Paul VI in Octogesima Adveniens.
Such is the perspective into which the CELAM document mentioned above must be placed. Its c,,ntral theme is insistence on reinforcing authority both in society and in the church. Today's sickness, it asserts, goes back to three revolts against authority: Luther against Rome, the French Revolution against monarchy and Freud against the family.
The emphasis is changed from oppression to disintegration of society, from structural sin and institutionalised violence to disregard for human rights, from conflict to tension. It is a vision of an hierarchical Church headed by an absolute monarch allied to an authoritarian state dedicated to reverse the disintegration caused by the three revolts. It is a vision or rather a nightmare long thought to have been laid eternally to rest by the second Vatican Council.