Each January since 1964 the North American bishops have played host to those men and women who stand just to the left of power and who are the current talk of Latin America’s Catholic ghetto. This meeting brings a dozen and a half people from the Southern Hemisphere to Chicago, Boston, St. Louis, or New York under the auspices of the Catholic Inter-American Cooperation Program. It also accounts for about 30 percent of the bishops’ annual budget for assistance to the Latin American church. The conference is regularly attended by some 2,000 North Americans—mostly priests and nuns, Protestant church officers, and minor bureaucrats from foundations and government agencies.
This volume collects the 23 speeches delivered at the 1968 meeting. Perfunctory exhortations by Sen. Eugene McCarthy, Dr. George Shuster and the Vatican’s Joseph Gremillion are interspersed with the restated theses of respected Latin Americanists, all of which have been published elsewhere at greater length. In the latter category are papers on political economy by Irving Horowitz and Gustavo Romero-Kolbeck, John Plank’s requiem for the Alliance for Progress, and Lyle N. McAlister’s reflections on militarism.
The greatest number of speeches reprinted here come from leftliberal spokesmen for Latin American Catholicism. These contributions give us, in English, summary statements of positions for which the authors are already well known through Spanish-language publications. This volume constitutes a representative group of such platforms, especially if taken together with the proceedings of previous CICOP conferences.
The tendency to incorporate Christian language into normative political statements, found in contemporary Spanish- and Portuguese-language writings, is a phenomenon worthy of study. The present collection ranges from Richard Shaull and Rubem Alves through Denis Goulet and Jorge Mejía all the way to Arístides Calvani (now Venezuelan chancellor) and Bishop Marcos McGrath. Within this spectrum, Christianity manages to provide the vocabulary both for a desperate call to revolutionary violence in the name of the Gospel and for the subtle legitimation of contemporary Church organization so as to improve inter-American relations. In trying to compare the tone of 1968 with the echo of former CICOP collections, I hear a ring of disillusion and fatigue. In the early sixties dissidents from conservative Latin American Catholicism seemed convinced that their enthusiasm would be a decisive element in mobilizing support for massive social programs. This was the period of doctrinal foundations for Frei’s campaign in Chile and the absorption of Christian language into the statements of Marxist-front movements in Brazil. Church statements in support of the Alliance fall within the same trend. By 1968 Latin America’s church-related Christian liberal (both Protestant and Catholic) seems reduced to a frantic search for some social relevance which he feels he ought to have.
