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Popular Voices in Latin American Catholicism
By Daniel H. Levine PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1992 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-08754-2
CHAPTER 1
POPULAR VOICES
DANIEL VIRGUEZ, a Colombian peasant, has sought out adult education, ventured far beyond the confines of his village, and become a respected and effective leader in his church and society. Pastora Chirinos, a woman from the slums of urban Venezuela, became literate and active, forming groups of friends and neighbors who meet to talk about their faith, read the Bible, and work together on community needs for housing and health, education, water, and bus service, Huberto Vanegas grew up illiterate and alone. To survive, he shined shoes in the street, sold beer in a whorehouse, and worked as a migrant laborer. He is now a rural extension agent for the church, founding cooperatives and self-help projects throughout an extensive rural zone. Once isolated, dispirited, and unorganized, Daniel, Pastora, and Huberto have become active, articulate, and confident citizens. They are not revolutionaries, not even very radical. But there is no question that these three people have changed themselves through their involvement in a changing church that has begun to redefine the meaning of religious faith while making a new and legitimate place for the poor in its guiding ideas and core structures.
These individuals have learned to have confidence in their own critical judgment and in their capacity to reason and decide for themselves. They have taught themselves to create and use organizations, and in the process have nurtured a disposition to organization and collective action in general. All this has furthered an ever-fresh re-creation of community: the idea itself, and also the bonds of solidarity and identity on which it rests.
These three dimensions of change—reason, sociability, and community—lie at the heart of the popular experiences reviewed in this book and explain their more general significance. The convergence of reason, sociability, and community constitutes a bridge linking recent Latin American experience to moments of change in other times and places, when cultural and social innovation have come together to reshape the moral and social landscape. Cases in point include the Puritan revolution (and the Reformation generally), the Iranian revolution, a number of cultural affirmations in the face of colonialism, and the whole experience of black religion and culture in America leading to and manifest in the civil rights movement.
The lives of Daniel Virguez, Pastora Chirinos, and Huberto Vanegas are not isolated instances. They share in a broad movement of transformation through which ordinary men and women all over Latin America have found voices of their own: voices they use to praise God, talk with one another, and discuss issues that make a difference to themselves and to their families, churches, communities, and nations. Reflect for a moment on how difficult it must be for people to find an authentic voice when they have long been given to understand that their opinions have no value or—to be more precise—that they have no opinions. Voices are found only through a long process compounded of discovery, conscious self-invention, and struggle. In this book, I explain how these popular voices emerge among the Latin American poor and how they find the words to speak, the confidence to make these words known, and the friends and allies required for successful and enduring action.
The meaning of popular voices in religion has lately been the subject of sharp debate and bitter conflict in Latin America, as elsewhere in the modern world. Struggle has centered on what popular groups of religious inspiration will believe, say, and do; on selection and orientation of leaders; and on control of the groups' relations to institutions of power and meaning in the larger society. The whole process is political in a few related senses. The institutional churches create programs, train people, and project messages that affect government and "politics" as conventionally understood at all levels. This kind of politics is familiar to us all.
But there is more. Leaders and ordinary faithful in the churches learn about politics and the political not only from these explicit messages but also from the implicit models of power and legitimate authority they encounter in the ordinary practice of church and community. When new popular groups find a voice and press for greater autonomy and more democratic forms of governance, they challenge established models of power and authority throughout the social order. They do so partly by example, since their very existence and activities reinforce the legitimacy of such initiatives. Their challenge also comes indirectly, as group life elicits and empowers new types of leaders whose experience, though limited at first to a local ambit, may still provide a basis of skills and self-confidence for activism on a larger canvas. Because religion is a central culture-forming institution, the stakes in all this go well beyond the short-term outcomes of any particular conflict to include the shaping of core concepts about activism and passivity, hierarchy and equality, equity, justice, and legitimacy.
I want to underscore the novelty that independent popular voices constitute in religion as a whole and, specifically, in Latin America. It is not that religions have no place for the poor. To the contrary, throughout history religious institutions have attended to and spoken for poor people. Charity has been provided, the sick cared for, and the cause of the helpless represented before public authorities and the powerful. Poverty has repeatedly been held up as a symbol of the simple and virtuous life. Images and concerns like these have a long and legitimate pedigree in many religions. They also have a central place in Christian traditions, and specifically in Latin American Catholicism. But the broad currents of change in the Catholic church that crystallized with the Second Vatican Council changed the tenor of these commitments in subtle but significant ways. The Council stressed that the church had to understand and promote change and had to change itself. Church leaders and members were urged to listen and learn from ordinary experience and to make a greater place for participation by ordinary people in church, society, and politics. In practical terms, these commitments (among others) gave renewed legitimacy to the old prophetic task: to cut religion's ties with principalities and powers and to serve above all, as voice for the voiceless.
The church as voice for the voiceless has become a familiar metaphor in contemporary Latin America. The phrase carries with it images of fearless advocacy for the marginal and for those without power or position. Across the region, church leaders and activists have taken up the cause of human rights, promoted and empowered grass-roots groups, and helped stake out legitimate new fields for religiously inspired criticism and collective action: housing, land, jobs, unions, to name only a few. Not surprisingly, all this has generated enormous conflict, for example, concerning the church's proper relation to politics and the state, to Marxism and revolution, to popular movements, and to violence or social conflict generally. Civil and military authorities long accustomed to unquestioning support from church elites and religious institutions have been particularly embittered by what they see as a betrayal of the church they were brought up to revere and defend, and of its authentic values and proper alliances. As a result, church-state conflicts in Latin America have arguably been sharper over the past few decades than at any time in the previous century.
Being a "voice for the voiceless" can therefore be difficult and often dangerous. The effort has indeed exposed numerous bishops, clergy, sisters, and countless ordinary people to harassment, abuse, and death. But however arduous the task may be, the role of voice for the voiceless maintains longstanding distinctions between the church and those it leads. Without voices, the mass of ordinary faithful remain silent objects. The church acts in their name, providing leadership and authoritative guidance. What happens when these silent masses begin to speak and act for themselves? It is one thing to speak for, or, to use another phrase that will echo throughout this book, to "opt" for the poor; it is quite another to accept and even promote or empower efforts by the poor to opt and speak for themselves: creating groups, finding leaders, and taking initiatives apart from and possibly in conflict with hierarchical tutelage.
Being a voice for the voiceless is less difficult and demanding for institutions like the churches than is listening to what the hitherto voiceless have to say and giving them space and tools with which to act. The emergence of popular groups and of popular voices able to speak and act for themselves has changed the landscape of religion, politics, and culture in contemporary Latin America. As average men and women move from silence to voice, from the status of objects to subjects, their words and deeds touch sensitive issues of power and meaning in every institution. This complex process of self-creation, conflict, and change is the subject of this book.
Defining and Finding Popular Groups
A few words of definition are appropriate here to clarify the meaning of the term "popular." Contemporary Latin American usage derives the "popular" quality of religion, art, music, and the like not from their popularity (something favored by many) but rather from their fit to a sense of what constitutes the populus—the central defining traits of the population. From this perspective, the term "popular" (lo popular in Spanish) summons images of inequality and subordination and directs attention to the poor conceived as "popular" groups or classes. Reference to lo popular also commonly evokes a sense of collective identity and a claim to group autonomy and self-governance, in particular with regard to choosing leaders, setting group agendas, and explicating the religious significance of all this.
In all these ways, attention to lo popular points analysis and action to the ideas, beliefs, practices, and conditions of poor people however defined and, by extension, to the kinds of ties that bind them to structures of power, privilege, and meaning. Whatever else the word may stand for in Latin American Catholicism, "popular" therefore necessarily denotes activities by large numbers of poor people within church structures. This general definition masks a substantial shift in the meaning and value given to things "popular" in the recent theory and practice of Latin American Catholicism.
Not long ago, reference to lo popular called up images of ignorance, magic, and superstition. Popular religion was taken to mean saints, feast days, shrines, pilgrimages, or processions. Popular groups were depicted as occasional agglomerations of the poor and humble, at best logical extensions of major institutions (confraternities that "keep the saints," parish groups) or simply arms of the church like Catholic Action. From this vantage point, popular culture and action remained subordinate to and ultimately derived from institutions and elites. But the same reference now commonly evokes class identity (the popular as "the people"—specifically peasants, proletarians, etc.), comes wrapped in claims to autonomy and collective self-governance by such people, and is identified in ordinary discourse with values like authenticity, sharing, solidarity, and sacrifice. Reflecting the new status of popular groups (no longer just sheep to be led in a "flock"), verbs like accompany have entered the Catholic lexicon, replacing earlier stress on direction, instruction, and purification.
Why this focus on the poor? To begin with, the poor are obviously the majority of the population, and naturally the churches want to reach and orient them in changing and often difficult circumstances. Poverty and the poor have always held a privileged place in Christian thought. This means that efforts to rethink the sources and meaning of poverty and to work with poor people in new ways engage contexts of religious significance in ways that easily turn into central points of conflict.
These general predispositions have been reinforced and extended in Latin America by the development of theologies (e.g., liberation theology) and related institutional programs dedicated to empowering popular groups and giving them a legitimate place in religion, society, and politics. In situations of economic and political crisis, like those of the past few decades in Latin America, any attempt to reach, orient, and organize the poor is likely to be viewed with fear and suspicion by civil and military authorities. In particular, the ability to shape and direct the organizations of the poor and to train and orient those who link the institutional churches to the poor in daily practice (priests, sisters, catechists, and lay leaders—"pastoral agents" of all kinds) becomes politically explosive and has lately emerged as a central arena of ideological and bureaucratic conflict.
The attention churches, social movements, politicians, and state elites have devoted to popular groups and the intensity of the conflicts centered on them cannot be explained by the numbers they attract. Most accounts agree that membership figures (unreliable in any case) are small and that rates of participation vary enormously from case to case. Supposed "politicization of religion" or accelerated social mobilization through religious groups also fails to account for the energies concentrated on them. At issue here is no simple opposition of religion to political power; for this, Latin American history provides ample precedent. In any event, no political parties fly the banners of liberation theology; no mass movement claims direct inspiration from its tenets. Nowhere in Latin America have theologians, churches, or related popular movements brought down a government or altered basic structures of economic, social, or political power. The Iranian revolution, in short, has no parallel in the Western Hemisphere.
The key to understanding the sources and patterns of conflict lies elsewhere. First, there is less unquestioned unity around core religious institutions led by bishops. Second, the ideological direction of criticism has shifted to embrace considerable religious dissatisfaction with capitalism. This has been fused in practice with challenges to authoritarian rule and abuses of power. Finally, the social location of the process has shifted as popular groups assume a more salient and independent role. Popular religious groups advance claims to autonomy along with commitments in theory and practice to more egalitarian concepts of authority. This means that apart from explicit programs or activities that may lead to confrontations with the powerful, popular groups also challenge prevailing understandings of politics, of religion, and of the church, which have long been founded on expectations of hierarchy and inequality.
The implications of new understandings of the popular are major, for the churches turn on the meanings given to poverty, class, authority, and church in Catholic discourse. Who are the poor, why are they poor, and why does poverty grow? As noted earlier, concern with poverty and the poor is nothing new; the churches have always dealt with the poor in some way. But new understandings of poverty can change the stance institutions take and thus lay the basis for new sorts of relations with the poor in everyday life. The change has been deceptively simple. Once attributed largely to individual failings, poverty now increasingly appears in church discourse as the product of structural inequalities. Poverty is thus no longer an inevitable and universal condition. Now it is treated as the product of certain historically specific structures of power created by human beings and, hence, changeable. Because their condition is contingent on power, the poor need not be "always" with us. Arrangements of power are human creations, subject to challenge and change.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Popular Voices in Latin American Catholicism by Daniel H. Levine. Copyright © 1992 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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