April 8, 1980

NEW SOLIDARITY

Page 5

A Look Into The Minds Behind Liberation Theology

by Gretchen Small

Turning religious belief into a political weapon against progress is the hallmark of Liberation Theology. The illustrations with this article are taken from a pamphlet on Mexico's Virgin of Guadalupe, which was prepared for mass distribution by leading liberationist Enrique Dussel. Dussel has devoted considerable effort to building the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe as the mother of "insurgents" and "the oppressed" inside Mexico and among Mexican-Americans.

"Supposing you were convinced, you yourself, you're convinced that if we go as we go, that there is no way of feeding and taking care of the human

population in 1990 and after 2000. And supposing you know in addition that people will not change, and they will not give up the 'good life' . . . You would say, OK, let's create disruption so that finally the idea ofnot exactly One World Governmentbut the idea of total interdependence of all the blocs is so livid and vivid and brought home in such concrete ways that they have to do something about it. . . . "Then I could see you planning to do that . . ." Another left-wing nut anarchist, planning "disruptions" to get attention? Wrong. The speaker is Mr. Malachi Martin, the Vatican expert for "conservative" William F. Buckley's National Review magazine, in an early March interview with a Latin American reporter in New York City, just made available to this newspaper. Martin, trained in theology at the Jesuit University of Louvain in Belgium, taught for a number of years at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome before "quitting" the Jesuit Order in the mid 1970s. After leaving, Martin made a name for himself as the author of the well-known book, The Final Conclave, a novel-scenario forecasting the decentralization and disintegration of the Vatican, and its replacement with a "guerrilla church" which would serve as an agent of revolution to overthrow the nation-state as an oppressive institution. Martin is an "ex"-Jesuit in name only, however. Despite his current "conservative" cover, he still professes, as the interview makes clear, the tenets of "theology of liberation," the "leftist" brainchild of the Jesuit Order. Martin makes clear he maintains close, ongoing working relations with leading Jesuit figures internationally. "Disruptions" of all sorts should be expected, Martin warned, anywhere from Saudi Arabia to Latin America. Interviewed in early March on who and what stood behind the terrorist seizure of the Dominican Embassy in Bogota, Colombia, Martin explained that "the impression I have, and that a lot of my collaborators have, is that there is no end in sight for the moment to these outbreakswhatever form they take. They may even take the form of a mass suicide. . . More often than not in the near future they will take the form of the Bogota incident. . . "In the near future there is no end in sight to the use of terrorism." Reading his words, it is also useful to imagine how they were delivered: in a quiet, clipped British accent with a distinctively queer tenor to them. Mar-

tin's calm, deliberate discussion of how terrorism, mass suicides, and liberation theology are means to an end provide a unique insight into the sheer evil of the mind of Martin, himself just one planner among many in the body of men who espouse a "One World Order" as their goal. "Modernization," Martin asserts, is the "fundamental cause of this sort of disruption." Outbreaks like Iran will continue as a result of "the modernization we effect, or that American companies effect," which destroys the "ceremonials and ritual" in the backward areas of the world, "ceremonials that are the same as were used back in the 15th century!" Incredibly, such things as the introduction of "tampax and Uncle Ben's Rice" are cited by Martin as examples of "modernization" which produces Irans! "The Ayatollah . . . well, if he hadn't been there, he would have had to be invented." Martin makes clear he is in the business of "inventing Ayatollahs." "The West, by which I take North America, Russia, Britain I suppose, and New Zealand, and perhaps some of Europe, share one consensus of feeling about the human condition, of what they should live for. Arrayed against that you have what we'd never had before, you have a bloc of consensus." These forces arrayed against the West, says Martin, are "all unified. It's all been coagulated. We're not faced with a simple figment; we're not faced with trouble in Iran and trouble in Latin America. There is a coordinating thing, . . . it's not merely in the mind of some vile and mischievous coordinators." Does Moscow coordinate global terrorism? "It's not quite that simple," Martin said. Iranian revolutionaries talk to the Colombian M-19 and to the Jesuits, but "there is something that is above it all. Think on it," Martin told his interviewer, "and you will come across it. They are all part of a loose coagulation which is tight enough to keep them talking, and keep them supplied ..." If it is not Moscow that is "above them all," the interviewer questioned, pressing for an answer, "do you have any other hints as to who it is?"

Martin cagily complains: "Well, I hate the phone, and anyway it would be better for you to think it around and find it out for yourself. It's quite detectable. But certainly the thing is coordinated very much. It's damnably coordinated. "Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans," have all done a lot of the military training of the guerrillas, Martin was almost flippant in asserting, as if everyone should know that. Martin estimated that "well over two-thirds of priests and nuns want a Marxist state" in the Latin American church, citing the Bishop of Cuernavaca, Sergio Mendez Arceo, as a leader of this faction within the church.

But the man Martin named as key for all Latin American terrorism and liberation movements, Roger Vekemans, S.J. is no "Marxist." Vekemans is a powerful Belgian Jesuit whose public positions have earned him a reputation internationally as one of the most reactionary, violently anti-communist figures in the Catholic Church! "The man who will be able to give you facts and figures and dates and movements" for the planned upsurges in "four to six South American" countries, "would be Vekemans," Martin recommended. "Part of his job is to monitor all that. To put it all together . . . there is nothing Vekemans does not know about what's going on. . . . It's hard to get to him, but I'm sure you'll find your way. He can give you names there." Timetable For Latin America "What I do see is Central America exploding," Martin said. "And I see about four or six countries in South America exploding. Besides Ecuador, and Venezuela, Bolivia is almost ready. Venezuela is in a very dangerous position. . . . But I think the timetable has been held up; far more than Nicaragua was supposed to have gone by now. "It's a very iffy situation; 30 to 60 days will throw an awful lot of clarity on both ends." There has been nothing "iffy" in Latin America about the last 30 days since Martin uttered his "prophecy." Triggered by the assassination two weeks ago of the Archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Arnulfo Romero, by a professional sharp-shooterhitting him in the heart as he lifted the chalice at communiona wave of protests and demonstrations have swept the area, putting into motion a process of manipulated "religious" fervor that is threatening to tear apart the entire fabric of the continent. Latin America, especially the Central American and Caribbean regions, has now been thrown into the final phase of a long-term, systematic project of the "One Worlders" to introduce the mass religious-political psychosis that characterizes Iran into Latin America. The project has been led by Jesuits like Martin and Vekemans, evil men who are top-level policy makers in the Jesuit Order, and also personally handle the "dirty" details of knowing "the dates, the times, the movements" of the terrorists. For the first time in memory, Latin America's two most powerful social forces which traditionally have competed to sway the "masses" in Latin America the Catholic Church and the political "left"are now being melded into one, coordinated force in the wake of Romero's assassination.

Called the"Christian-Marxist Dialogue" by its strategists, the "liberationists" are men of the ideology described by Martin, hardened fanatics committed to carrying out "livid and vivid" actions like embassy takeovers and mass suicides for their "cause." One top level ideologue who put together "liberation theology" in the early 1970sEnrique Dussel, an Argentine-born historian who is not even a priest, outlined that fanaticism precisely at a Detroit "Theology of the Americas" conference in 1975. Speaking to a group of Latin American liberationists meeting with assorted Christian "activists" for the "oppressed" from the United States, Dussel told the group that "the blood of martyrs," as the Apocalypse says, "is what defines the present situation of Christians in Latin America. We have overcome the period of the 1960s when we used to believe that a developed nation could be a model for an underdeveloped nation," Dussel said. That "time of imitation of the Europeans" has been followed by the formulation of the theology of liberation. "There are saints in the new church," Dussel outlined, actually citing the "bodies of two priest-martyrs in a ditch" shot in Honduras in 1975, as "the basic foundation for our discussion." "This is the basis for our theology," Dussel stressed, "we don't ponder things that are heard, but things that are suffered." Holocaust Begins The assassination of an Archbishop, however, reaches a scale of "theology" much higher than Dussel's mere priests who were "the basis for discussion" back in 1975. Romero's assassination intersected Holy Week, a holiday marked by huge religious celebrations, mass scenes of self-penitence, and pilgrimages in Latin America. On Palm Sunday, crowds gathered for the funeral service for the Archbishop in San Salvador were bombed and shot at, producing a panic in which over 50 died. Attending church dignitaries, including numerous Bishops from Europe, the United States and the rest of Latin America, were terrified by the massacre which they experienced firsthand. Fearing similar results, Easter services were canceled this year in El Salvadoran unheard of measure. By all accounts, the already chaotic situation there is now irretrievably thrown into the phase of a meatgrinder civil war.

A demonstration in Mexico two days ago, however, epitomizes the new forces that have been unleashed, and how they are intended to spread beyond Central America. 5,000 leftists and church leaders marched in Mexico City in protest over the death of Romero, down the traditional route taken by crawling peasants on Easter pilgrimages to the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a thinly transformed Indian cult goddess disguised as a Christian "saint." The slogans of the marchers, including leaders of the Mexican Communist Party (PCM) and radical theologians of the Church, were a witches' brew of cult-worship and "left" ideology: "Guadalupe, your people will not be overcome." Or, "Romero, you are present with us still." This demonstration marked the first time that the Church has dared to openly intervene into the Mexican political process since the Catholic Church led an uprising against the Mexican Constitution in the early 1920s. In the 1920s, the slogan of the so-called Cristero Rebellion was that the Mexican state was "communist"; today that same Church (and in some cases the same people, as in the case of the now-"leftist" Bishop Mendez Arceo) is aligned with the communists to overthrow the Mexican government of Lopez Portillo. The call by one of the speakers, a Jesuit, at the march for the formation of a new "Popular Christian Party" out of the forces represented at the rally, indicated that the newly forged "alliance" is designed to be permanent. Both the traditionally reactionary Mexican Church and the PCM have separately been waging campaigns against the industrialization strategy of

the Mexican government for months, claiming rapid industrialization is destroying the "culture" and environment for the peasantry. Now those forces, using the fervor aroused by the killing of the Salvadorean Archbishop, are acting in open concert. One Starving World As the reader may well suspect, such barbarous political combinations do not come about naturally nor do they originate in the developing countries like Mexico. They are cooked up in the advanced sector; the major target is destroying the living standards and industrial infrastructure of the advanced sector (without which there will be no development anywhere); and it is here in the advanced industrial sector that they must be defeated and destroyed. Not far in the background of the "livid and vivid" events that Jesuit Martin extols lurks the same small body of individuals who were complicit in bringing the Ayatollah Khomeini to power in Iranthe New York Council on Foreign Relations, its British oligarchical parent the Royal Institute for International Affairs, and their affiliate specializing in genocide, the Club of Rome. Cyrus Vance, the U.S. Secretary of State who deliberately triggered the Iran hostage incident by bringing the ex-Shah into the United States, has personally overseen the creation of the networks now carrying out the "religion" project. In 1975, Vance led a conference on "The Food/Energy Crisis and the World Faiths" in Bellagio, Italy at which representatives from five world religions convened. At the time Vance was also overseeing the Council on Foreign Relations "Project 1980s" blueprinting the "controlled disintegration" of the world economy. The Bellagio meeting discussed increasing scarcities of food and energy, and set up a series of implementation meetings. One of these, the 1977 "The World Faiths and the New World Order," was promoted as the "linkage between religion and the Club of Rome," which advocates the diminution of the world's population by 1-2 billion by the end of this century. Another group represented at the 1975 conference, was "Theology in the Americas," the permanent coordinating group of liberationists who sponsored the Detroit conference where Dussel outlined his "dead priests" strategy. A follow-up conference, "Detroit 2," is scheduled for this coming August.