From a professor at a university in the eastern United States, this question:
As a Protestant historian writing about a Catholic subject—in a nutshell, how Ivan Illich sabotaged the American Catholic missionary movement to Latin America in the 1960s—I’m unclear on who might provide a different Catholic perspective from what I’m getting. The primary and secondary sources I’ve looked at so far tend to accept, rather uncritically, it seems to me, the shift of Catholic missions toward social justice, development, and presence during the 1960s and 1970s and at the same time to be puzzled by the rapid decline in Catholic missions to the region, despite the calls of two popes for massive aid. Do you know of anyone—scholars, missionaries, bishops—who challenged the primacy of social justice, development, and presence and emphasized evangelization and conversion?
Hmmm...good question. On a global scale, one could point to Pope Paul VI's 1975 Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi, which I think is an excellent reflection on the necessity and place of evangelization, with a very strong emphasis, of course, on conversion. I don't know if this passage was written with an eye toward liberation theology, but it could have been:
9. As the kernel and center of His Good News, Christ proclaims salvation, this great gift of God which is liberation from everything that oppresses man but which is above all liberation from sin and the Evil One, in the joy of knowing God and being known by Him, of seeing Him, and of being given over to Him. All of this is begun during the life of Christ and definitively accomplished by His death and resurrection. But it must be patiently carried on during the course of history, in order to be realized fully on the day of the final coming of Christ, whose date is known to no one except the Father.
10. This kingdom and this salvation, which are the key words of Jesus Christ's evangelization, are available to every human being as grace and mercy, and yet at the same time each individual must gain them by force - they belong to the violent, says the Lord, through toil and suffering, through a life lived according to the Gospel, through abnegation and the cross, through the spirit of the beatitudes. But above all each individual gains them through a total interior renewal which the Gospel calls metanoia; it is a radical conversion, a profound change of mind and heart. (pars 9-10)
As for specific examples of scholars, missionaries, and bishops in Latin America emphasizing evangelization and conversion in the 1960s and 1970s, none readily come to mind, mostly because, frankly, I'm rather clueless about Latin America. (As well as rugby, yodeling, and flying helicopters, but those are topics for another post.)
Anyone?
As a Brazilian myself, let me shed some light (or not) into the subject.
Looking back into my uncatechised upbringing and my immediate and extended family relationship with the Church, I'm afraid that the lack of true evangelization in LA in recent decades just compounded on underlying problems.
I'd mention one that comes to mind at the moment: as the almost absolute majority of Latin-Americans were Catholic, no challenges were posed to the faithful or to the clergy by either proselytism or a secularist state (which is not the same as a secular state). In this situation, it was only natural that the Church became more of a cultural habit.
When (mostly American) Protestants turned their attention to LA in the 60s, the Church, perhaps worried about the lack of depth in the faithful, thought that social justice would bring them to a closer relationship with the Church (or so I speculate).
Thus, I have the impression that the Church was caught by surprise when the Protestants and secularist challenges came about in the 60s, right when it was trying a new approach to make itself closer to the faithful.
Of course, this new approach was not only inopportune, but also flawed, for it should have sought a hook in popular piety to bring social justice, not the other way around. In this case, we can blame Lenin's influence on many institutions of learning, seminaries included.
Such Leninists can also be blamed for the Church insisting on this approach even as the faith became even shallower on one hand because of the influence of Marxist Materialism in the culture. On the other hand, Protestant sects started to offer the spiritual answers to their longing that some felt after the Church turned her back on their spiritual needs.
And Lenin is still very much active in the Church, which only now is awakening to its abysmal state of affairs. just in Brazil, for instance, the Catholic participation in the general population decreases by 1% point per year. Unfortunately, most of today's Latin-American bishops were the same clergy who were instrumental then to get to the current situation.
Risking to sound crude, the tide was only stemmed in the 90s because these bishops and this age group of the clergy has passed away. Not that the current clergy has dumped Lenin completely, but many have, enough to bring a fresher look at shepherding the flock.
Yet, the state of the Church is LA is deplorable. As my uncatechized generation raises another, the Protestant and Leninist converts become more numerous, to the detriment of the Church. And in my personal sampling, the Church, which until the last decade was still considered for Baptism, Marriage and Funeral, even by non-practicing Catholics, is starting to find herself irrelevant even for such milestones in the lives of the faithful (or not so faithful anymore).
It's no wonder that the Pope preferred to be present in the recent CELAM meeting in Aparecida. The Church in LA needs much of his attention, for I believe that he's keenly aware that LA might be the next Europe in less than a generation.
Finally, it's interesting to note that most Protestant sects in LA today are offshoots by the few who converted to the initial Protestant denominations in that missionary effort. Some of these sects are now expanding to North America and Europe. After all, Protestants beget protesters.
Posted by: Augustine | Thursday, November 01, 2007 at 01:54 PM