Leonardo Boff in particular drew Ratzinger’s wrath. Boff, another Brazilian clergyman, was even more radical in the eyes of the Church than Camara. His tireless intellectual efforts set the foundations for Liberation Theology in Latin America. The Vatican was loath to associate itself with this Leftist political movement, Christ’s call for justice be damned. As its chief architect, Boff was a marked man.
Statements like, “Jesus was a political prisoner, who died on the Cross, not an old man who died in bed,” did little to endear him to an institution far more interested in expanding its wealth and influence than in taking a stand against established powers on behalf of the indigent. The Church stripped Boff of a number of his priestly duties. He eventually left the Church and went on to pursue a better world through independent political activism.
Affirming his fervent opposition to our criminal potentates, in November of 2001 Boff commented, "For me, the terrorist attack of September 11 signs the turning for a new humanitarian and world model. The targeted buildings send a message: a new world civilization couldn't be built with the kind of dominating economy (symbolized by the World Trade Center), with the kind of death machine set up (the Pentagon) and with the kind of arrogant politics and producer of many exclusions (White House spared, because the plane fell before). For me the system and culture of the capital started to fell. They are too destructive."
Dot
A US American nun who eventually became a naturalized citizen of Brazil, Dorothy Stang was an indefatigable and valorous defender of both the rainforests and the rights of peasant farmers. Despite death threats from wealthy land-owners and logging interests, she continued helping poor Brazilian families work small land parcels without engaging in deforestation. On 2/12/05, assassins gunned her down at close range.
Dot, as her family called her, summarized her noble agenda succinctly with these words:
"I don't want to flee, nor do I want to abandon the battle of these farmers who live without any protection in the forest. They have the sacrosanct right to aspire to a better life on land where they can live and work with dignity while respecting the environment."
San Romero
Perhaps the most influential member of the deeply inspiring Liberation Theology crusade was “San Romero.” The Vatican gave Oscar Romero his position as Archbishop of San Salvador because he ostensibly supported the “Washington Consensus”. However, witnessing thousands of horrific crimes against humanity catalyzed Romero’s profound conversion. Jimmy Carter (and later Ronald Reagan) helped finance the military of a government in El Salvador dominated by a few wealthy oligarchs who were closely aligned with US corporations. In their efforts to defend their wealth from the threat of the “Communist scourge”, Washington’s friends in El Salvador were murdering 3,000 unarmed “oppositionists” each month by 1980.
Romero advocated a path of non-violence. In 1978 he wrote:
“The counsel of the Gospel to turn the other cheek to an unjust aggressor, far from being passive or cowardly, shows great moral force that leaves the aggressor morally overcome and humiliated. The Christian always prefers peace to war."
Utilizing his position and voice within the Church, Romero delivered powerful sermons calling for an end to the torture and slaughter. As an active means of protest, he closed schools, cancelled masses, opened the seminary to the homeless and wounded, and halted construction of the new cathedral. He leveled powerful accusations against the ruthless tyrants ruling El Salvador. Romero called upon the US to stop funding the butchers in San Salvador (Washington continued sending $1.5 million per day for 12 years), the penurious to take up “their own struggle for liberation”, and the peasant soldiers of El Salvador to defy their government masters:
“Brothers, you are from the same people; you kill your fellow peasant . . . No soldier is obliged to obey an order that is contrary to the will of God. No one has to fulfill an immoral law. It is time to recover your consciences and to obey your consciences rather than the orders of sin. . . . In the name of God then, in the name of this suffering people I ask you, I beg you, I command you in the name of God: stop the repression."
As a result of his appeal to El Salvador’s troops to defy their orders, on March 24, 1980, Monsignor Romero unknowingly presided over his final mass. In the midst of the service, an assassin’s bullet ripped through Romero’s heart. Within moments, he had passed to the other side. Reactionary forces had slain yet another intrepid defender of the tyrannized and poverty-stricken.
Hit Me With Another Round of Inculcation
Yet as Western media pundits, think tanks, and our “public servants” have so astutely observed, there is no class war. Socioeconomic classes are amorphous in a US-dominated world economy offering limitless upward mobility. Marx and his philosophies are dead. It is simply the natural order that “moral beacons” like Carlos Slim Helu, the Walton’s, Charles Koch, Rupert Murdoch and a few hundred others possess more wealth than the world’s poorest 2.5 billion people. While it is a pity, the 11 million children who die as a result of poverty each year are necessary sacrifices upon the altar of Mammon.
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