The Sixth Annual Catholic Inter-American Cooperation Program (CICOP) Conference in New York in January, 1969, had as its theme “Human Rights and the Liberation of Man in the Americas,” in recognition of the Twentieth Anniversary of the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights. Human rights have previously been thought of as the individual’s protection against force and violence; most conference participants, though, as George L. Metcalfe puts it, were concerned with “. . . human rights in the sense of sharing in greater national wealth.” This view of human rights is not necessarily consistent with the first and Father Louis M. Colonnese, the volume’s editor, asks in a worried preface, “What can you do to accelerate human progress and to decelerate the current dehumanizing cycles in Latin America without commiting atrocities counter to those of the status quo?”
Several generalizations emerge from reading this collection. Third World rhetoric is now congenial to Latin American Catholic thinkers. Juan Luis Segundo, S.J., of Montevideo thundered, “It can no longer be truthfully said that imperialism is the result of United States foreign policy being in the hands of those whose interests make it an external cause of poverty. It is quite evident that all North Americans are solidly behind the policy because they are aware that their standard of living depends upon it.” Conviction that the United States is responsible for Latin American underdevelopment permeated the conference. Hector Borrat’s critique of the press, radio, and television in Latin America as sustained by United States’ wire services, programs, and advertising money concluded, “. . . the other America plays merely a dependent, silent role, as a big colony (or neo-colony, if you like), not as a free nation, as a servant, not as a partner.” Yet powerful rhetoric was followed by limited or imprecise programmatic proposals. Father Segundo’s thunder ended with a plea for support of the UNCTAD program of trade concessions to the underdeveloped nations. René de León Schlatter, Guatemalan Christian Democrat, after a convincing description of Latin American rural inequities called for “. . . urgent, rapid, and deep agrarian reform” without stipulating what this means. Dom Helder Pessôa Cámara, the outspoken Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, the conference’s principal speaker, called on CICOP to sponsor “the reintegration of Cuba within the Latin American community,” the entry of Red China into the UN, meetings between four or five great American universities and Latin American universities to discuss the UNCTAD proposals, a documentary film on “the sins of the United States against the Rights of Man” as “an invitation to other countries [Brazil?] to carry out similar examinations. . .” and called upon all religions to use their resources to convince the super-powers to end wars, beginning with Vietnam, and devote the funds now going to war preparation to development.
As can be seen, the participants did not advance a specifically Catholic position on how to make over or revolutionize Latin America. François H. Lepagneur, a French Dominican assigned to Brazil, explicitly made the point that the Church’s “. . . process of awareness, however, has not taken the form of a specific ideology (perhaps it can not or should not thus commit itself to such a form any longer).” Nevertheless, the conference heard Paulo Freire, the exiled Brazilian Catholic educator, define “conscientization,” a process whereby an action program “. . . can not be chosen exclusively by those who initiate it but must also be chosen by the popular groups. . ..” Many participants at the conference endorsed “conscientization,” whose general outline suggests it is a variant of the community participation position. Nevertheless, there is something of a Catholic rallying cry here and those who welcome the Latin American Church’s non-specific but pro-change ideology because they see the Church’s mission as making revolution (however defined) acceptable by stamping it with its imprimatur, may yet discover that the Church is not so self-effacing.
In fact, one of the weaknesses of this volume is that, though there are twenty-two contributors, there is practically no evaluation of the obsolescence of the Church argument, questions whether the hierarchy can revitalize itself, whether activist priests can remain within the Church, and whether the contributors to this conference are really representative of Latin American Catholicism. Nor was there discussion of the Church’s position on population growth in Latin America or on birth control, which the young and many not-so-young consider the basic human right for women.
