Justice vs Vatican

NewInternationalist: [August 2004] During the worst years of Brazil's military dictatorship - from 1968 to 1978 - over 120 bishops, priests and nuns and nearly 300 Catholic layworkers were arrested. Many were tortured. Seven clerics were murdered. Thirty bishops suffered death threats, accusations, kidnappings, or physical violence. Churches and parochial houses were raided. Church newspapers and radio stations were closed down or, censored.

Unlike many of their Latin American counterparts, Brazil's Catholic bishops openly criticized the dictators. They espoused a theology that actively defended the rights of the oppressed by taking 'an option for the poor', in the words of liberation theology's Peruvian originator Gustavo Gutierrez.

As Leonardo Boff, Brazil's most irreverent but influential exponent of the new thinking, pointed out: 'Jesus was a political prisoner, who died on the Cross, not an old man who died in bed.'

In 1984, in the twilight years of the dictatorship, Boff came under attack - not from the generals this time, but from the Vatican.

He was summoned to Rome to be questioned about one of his books. Boff realized that what was really on trial was the Brazilian church's overwhelming endorsement and adoption of liberation theology. So he asked two of Brazil's leading Catholic cardinals to go with him. One of them, Paulo Evaristo Arns, archbishop of the the world's largest Catholic diocese of Sao Paulo, invited Joseph Ratzinger, the Cardinal in charge of questioning Boff, to come to Brazil and see for himself the shantytowns and slums. Then perhaps he could understand where the church was working and why liberation theology was so popular.

But Ratzinger, a member of the Pope's inner circle and head of the powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, refused. He claimed his obligation was to the universal church not a local one.

Boff pointed to the lattice window of the room they were in and said: 'Cardinal, you cannot look at liberation theology through a window like this, where it is framed in little lead squares. You have to go and feel what it's like to be poor. That's where this theology is made, it's the cry of the poor.'

Boff was later banned from preaching and celebrating the sacraments and has since reluctantly left the priesthood. Cardinal Arns' Sao Paulo diocese was drastically reduced in size. Conservative bishops were appointed by the Pope to run the new sees thus created. Link