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Appointment to Chile
I remember
lines from a book by a French theologian, Yves Congar where
he described a farmer who, from a distance, watches two
armies fight in 1815. He knows there’s a war going on but he
doesn’t know that he is watching ‘The Battle of Waterloo.’
That event, with all that it came to signify, would only
become clear to him and to others later on. When I look back
on my years in Chile I realize that, to some extent, I was
in the farmer’s situation. Many things were happening. Some
of them I understood, but the significance of others only
dawned on me later on.
I first
visited Chile during May and June of 1973. The Unidad
Popular government led by Salvador Allende was in its
final months. Every week there was at least one large rally
or protest followed by a counter-event a day or two later.
The country was gradually being paralyzed by internal and
external forces. I left Santiago on the day after an
attempted coup at the end of June. The previous day’s events
were perhaps the first of those whose full significance I
would come to appreciate only later on.
I returned
to my work on the Far East magazine but I indicated
to my superiors that I would be happy to take up an overseas
assignment in the near future. Before the end of 1973 I had
received an appointment to work with the Society of St
Columban in Latin America. This was to take effect from
September 1974. I came to Chile ‘by accident.’ I had in fact
been assigned to Peru but Cardinal Raul Silva of Santiago
visited the Columban Irish headquarters in Navan some time
after I got my appointment – and after the other 9/11, the
military coup. He asked if more priests could be sent to
Chile. After he left, I met the Superior General on the
corridor. He said ‘Oh by the way, we have decided to send
you to Chile’. I have no recollection of being either
delighted or upset by the news.
After
eighteen weeks of language studies in Cochabamba, Bolivia I
arrived in Santiago with reasonably good Spanish in early
March 1975. Chile was to be my home during most of the
military regime of General Pinochet and, for the first three
years of the government led by Patricio Aylwin. Towards the
end of 1993, almost twenty years after I arrived, I left the
country to take up a new assignment in Ireland.
The
First Year
I was
given a pastoral appointment to the parish of San Gabriel,
Lo Prado, in Santiago’s Western Zone. I arrived as the
people of the Zone were going through a kind of mourning
period. Their very much-loved bishop, Fernando Ariztia, had
just been appointed bishop of Copiapó, a diocese that covers
a large expanse of the Atacama Desert. Some people felt that
through some sort of compromise this champion of the poor
and of human rights had been sidelined from the centre of
things. He had been a key member of the Comité pro Paz,
the forerunner of the Vicaría de Solidaridad, the
human rights group which played such a vital role then and
for many years afterwards. (He was a member of one of
Chile’s richest families). The new bishop, Enrique Alvear,
seemed to be relatively unknown to all.
As I write
this, thirty five years later, two events stand out clearly
in my mind from that first year. One was on the 1 May
1975. The deanery groups of Movimiento de Obreros
Católicos (MOAC) and Jóvenes Obreros Católicos (JOC
or YCW) had invited their members and friends to attend a
religious celebration in honour of the Feast of St Joseph
the Worker, the ‘baptized’ version of May Day. The venue was
to be our church in San Gabriel, at about 11.00 am. ‘Church’
is perhaps a rather grand name for what, at that time, was
little more than a large multi-purpose shed. There were the
usual hymns with a social edge to them, and readings;
Jeremiah, Micah and Habacuk were favourites in those days. A
member of one of the groups read from a document prepared by
the MOAC. I cannot remember now whether it was a prayer, or
a kind of letter to the authorities. The words were fairly
mild, asking that the rights of workers be respected by the
new regime. When he finished, as he came down the steps, he
was arrested and taken to the police station which was next
door to the church. Our new bishop, Don Enrique Alvear, and
some of the priests followed immediately to the retén de
Carabineros. The man – today I remember only his first
name – Atrizio, was not released. I spent most of that
afternoon sitting on a low wall opposite the police station
with Fr Mario Garfias, the parish priest of San Luis Beltrán,
the parish of Atrizio. All requests for information were
refused. By late evening we found out that he had been taken
away by the dreaded DINA, the secret police. Hours of
sickening worry followed. I was new to the country, but
I was there long enough to know what had happened to other
innocent people from the area who had fallen into the hands
of the DINA. There was general relief, when perhaps three
days later, Atrizio was released unharmed.
The
housekeeper in the Columban Centre House in Larrain
Gandarillas in central Santiago was Enriqueta Reyes. One
evening at the end of October 1975 I had a long chat with
her. She was only about twenty nine, already married and
separated, the mother of four children who lived ‘down the
country’ with relatives. She had been desperate for work and
was happy to accept the job offered by the Columbans. But
she felt very lonely. Two days after our chat she died in
the second ‘high impact’ event of my first year in Chile.
The DINA also played a prominent part in this episode in the
late evening of 1 November 1975; an event which
is sometimes referred to as the Caso Columbano.
The DINA
may have believed that one or more wounded members of the
MIR, an armed opposition group, were hiding in the house.
Their agents had reported that an English doctor, Sheila
Cassidy was making frequent visits there. She had in fact,
some days previously, given medical attention to a wounded
MIR member, but somewhere else. The DINA had obtained this
information through interrogation of detainees. The reasons
for her visits to the Columban house was the presence of a
nun who was quite ill. Heavily armed agents of the DINA
using powerful lights surrounded the Centre House; their
objective was the arrest of the recently arrived doctor.
When the housekeeper, Enriqueta, moved from the glass door
through which she had spoken to the agents, to get the keys
to open the street gate, they opened fire. Enriqueta died
instantly. The director, Fr Bill Halliden narrowly escaped
death. Dr Cassidy was taken away, interrogated and tortured.
In the
following days all the government-controlled media carried
reports of the courageous fight of the agentes de
seguridad with the ferocious terrorists who were
shooting at them from inside the Columban house. One paper
carried a photo of an arm being operated on to remove a
bullet – one of the injured agentes, the article asserted.
There was of course nobody in the house except Enriqueta,
the sick nun, Fr Halliden and Sheila Cassidy. A military
fiscal, to his credit, over a year later ruled that there
was no evidence whatsoever of shooting from inside the
house. But the Caso Columbano was quoted again and again
during the Pinochet years to show just how involved the
church was with subversion. To this day one can read the
‘priest terrorist’ version of the story on the Internet.
Other
people were arrested at the time of Sheila Cassidy’s
detention, including priests and nuns. They had helped three
MIR members into the Apostolic Nunciature in Santiago where
they applied for asylum. The Cardinal Silva strongly defended
their action. If I recall rightly, his argument was that the
people being pursued would face almost certain
extra-judicial death if handed over.
What Am
I Doing Here?
I do have
another vivid memory from that first year. I occasionally
went for a rest to a parish staffed by Columbans in the port
city of San Antonio. I can remember walking on one of the
nearby beaches with a priest friend one evening as the sun
sank into the Pacific Ocean. One of the things we asked
ourselves was ‘What are we, foreigners from the far side of
the world, doing here in the middle of this turmoil? Often,
as priests in parishes, we are being asked to make decisions
about complex matters that we only half understand,
All of us
worked in poor areas of Chile, mostly Santiago. This,
without a doubt, shaped the way we saw things. If I had been
assigned to an upper-class parish, much less affected by the
political situation my version of history might be quite
different. But I lived in Pudahuel where probably forty per
cent of the people were unemployed. So many of those who
were employed were paid horribly unjust wages. I remember
especially those who took off at dawn to work in the houses
and businesses of the rich on the other side of the city. Some were treated
well; the majority were not. Several people in the area
where I worked had disappeared; many had been arrested and
tortured. The vast majority had voted either with the
Christian Democrats or with some of the parties of the
Unidad Popular – mainly Communist and Socialist. All of
them had hopes and dreams of a better life, of a more just
society.
To come
back to the question ‘What are we doing here?’ I wasn’t
entirely naïve. I had gone to university and also received a
reasonably good education in theology and some of the social
sciences. For four years I had worked on the staff of a
magazine where I had plenty of opportunities to do some
research on religious, social, cultural and political
issues. Two Latin Americans who particularly interested me
at that time were Paulo Freire author of Pedagogy of the
Oppressed and Dom Helder Camara, Archbishop of Olinda
and Recife. They were both Brazilians. I remember at one
stage, when Dom Helder was much in demand around the world
as a speaker, wondering if he was just a kind of holy
showman. Having had the privilege of meeting him on a few
occasions in later years I was left in no doubt that I was
in the presence of a saint.
I was
aware too that the Latin American bishops at a long meeting
in Medellín in Colombia, a sort of South American Vatican
II, had really come to grips with the challenges of the day.
I had read A Theology of Liberation, a book by a
Peruvian priest, Gustavo Gutierrez. This gave me some new
insights. It caused considerable discomfort to some bishops
in Latin American who didn’t see things the way Dom Helder or
Cardinal Arns of Sao Paulo or some of the Chilean bishops
did. During the pontificate of John Paul II Colombian
Cardinal Lopez Trujillo would be the chief promoter of Roman
suspicion of Latinamerican theology.
Daily
Life in Lo Prado
In San
Gabriel the ordinary round of parish activities took up all
available time. Most of my energy went to the Lo Prado area
but I also had some responsibilities for the sizeable
poblaciones of Arturo Prat, Manuel Rodriguez, Los
Maitenes, and a campamento, Los Copihues. It was
not a nine-to-five life. The mornings were frequently taken
up with ‘institutional’ activities. Often there were courses
to be attended or meetings for one reason or another with
priests or religious who worked in the archdiocese. Then
there were funerals or calls to sick people. It was a good
time for just listening to people who wanted a sympathetic
ear and for writing letters of recommendation to potential
employers, school principals and judges. Most of the
pastoral activities took place from mid afternoon until as
late as 11:00 pm. I spent a lot of time participating in
small communities or groups. I inherited a parish where the
ordinary people were used to taking responsibility. As I
look back now, having seen so many places where that does
not happen, I marvel at the extent of the involvement. At
one time, probably around 1981, I did a rough count of the
number of groups functioning in the parish. There were
around two hundred. The majority were those connected to
sacramental preparation. Parents who had children for First
Communion were expected to participate in groups during the
winters/spring for two years. They attended about twenty
sessions per year during which they got a thorough grounding
in the basics of Christian life and teaching. There were
probably about forty of these groups, all led by one or two
people who had done some training as catechists and group
leaders. And of course that meant that there were also forty
groups of children. They got the basics from their parents
but also had back-up sessions with youth leaders. Apart from
that there were Baptism and Confirmation groups; basic
Christian communities, pastoral councils, workers’ and
unemployed peoples’ groups, assistance groups, music groups,
food kitchen and health groups, culture groups, finance
committees, sports clubs and funeral service groups – to
mention the ones I can now remember.
In my
experience, the ordinary people of those poor areas of
Santiago were probably the best educated general body of lay
Christians that I have known – and I have worked and lived
in several countries. I don’t think it is nostalgia that
prompts me to say that. So many of them, young and old, had
a very clear grasp of the fundamentals of the Christian
life, and they tried to put this into practice. So often in
community work or liturgies I felt my own flagging spirits
being raised up by the Spirit that was present among them.
To have had Don Fernando Ariztía as bishop followed by Don
Enrique Alvear was an exceptional blessing for our Western
Zone. They had an enormous influence in shaping the life of
its communities.
I remember
chatting with a member of one of the communities years after
both had gone and other winds were blowing. The priest of
this community, a very down-to-earth man of the people, had
been replaced by some new, very clerical, young priests. He
was reflecting out loud on the change. ‘Over the years, with
Don Fernando and Don Enrique, we had come to know a God who
came down to earth, who really became one of us. Now I feel
that God is being pushed back up into heaven again.’
Why
They Came
I cannot
now recall the name of the professor of anthropology from
the University of Salamanca who wrote an article in Vida
Nueva several years ago describing what motivates
Spanish Catholics. He said they come to church for four main
reasons i) emergency (for example sickness or exams) ii)
social benefit (meet friends) iii) search for meaning in
life iv) solid belief in God, faith etc. He added that
something of those four motives is mixed into the ‘faith’ of
nearly every believer.
In the
years I am talking about most participants in the parish
were motivated by some degree of Christian faith. Some of
them, in normal circumstances, would have been more involved
in local politics and community work. The only spaces
available for people like that in the Pinochet years were in
a few highly manipulated regime projects; not wanting that,
they dedicated their talents to promoting various community
activities under the umbrella of the church. It gave them a
certain security. Close relatives of some members of the
Christian communities had been arrested for their activities
– for example organizing workers to demand better pay – and
had disappeared. Most parishes in poor areas were glad to
welcome people with social or organization skills and there
was a fairly clear understanding about the boundaries of
activities. The presence of former communists or socialists
in Church groups or activities made for plenty of comment at
times. Many of these were also convinced Christians.
I do not
know how many participants were in the category of the man
who said to one of my companions ‘No creo en la iglesia
pero si creo en el cardenal.’ The man he was talking
about was Cardinal Raul Silva Henriquez who played such an
enormous role in the Chile of Pinochet. Recently I read
again a section of his address for 1 May 1982.
Las solucciones que
hasta ahora se han querido dar a la crisis nos parecen
fracasadas. La imposicion de un sistema economico
social-neoliberal no sólo no ha corregido los males que nos
affligan, sino que los ha acentuado, llevándolos a limites
extramedamente peligrosos. Los remedios económicos adolecen,
a nuestro juicio, de un despiadado materialismo que no
respeta al hombre ni sus derechos. El costo social de ellos
es enorme, y para un cristiano, inaceptable. Las estructuras
de participación y de control de la sociedad sobre el Estado
son prácticamente inexistentes y, por lo tanto, inoperantes
[see notes for English translation, ed.].
[1]
On great
occasions like Chile’s national holiday, 18 September, and 1
May the cardinal’s address was a reflection on the current
situation and had suggestions about a way forward. The 1982
words, quoted above brings me back again to the farmer in
the field. I understood what the cardinal was talking about
in the course of the well though-out address. It was
perfectly clear to me that the Chilean ‘miracle’ being
lauded by international financial institutions was not being
seen as such in the Western Zone, where I lived. Twenty-five
years would pass before I read Naomi Klein’s penetrating
analysis of the shock doctrine as applied to economics in
Chile.
[2]
As I lived through it I could see many of the pieces of the
jigsaw but could not put them all together to form the whole
picture. For some people, like that select few who were able
to buy the privatized industries at bargain prices, or pay
slave wages, things were obviously terrific. For the people
I listened to every week in their small groups the story was
very different. Milton Friedman, the architect of Chile’s
new economic policy, the policy the cardinal described as
merciless materialism, was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Economics in 1976.
There is a danger in writing something
many years after the event, from far away and with few
resources on hand. I have seen articles supporting the view
that the sacrifices of the 1970s and 1980s were necessary to
build the foundations of a stable economy in Chile. For me
the question remains ‘Were not other countries able to do it
with a smaller social cost and with less suffering? Social
and political repression was an essential element of the
imposition of the Friedman model. Other relevant
questions might be ‘What was the reality behind the growth
figures? Who benefitted? What is the state of wealth
distribution in Chile today?’
Ways of
Understanding Mission
Recently
in Saengtham College, Bangkok, where I teach, a class of
students invited me to talk to them about my work as a
missionary. I mentioned some of the things I have written
here. When I paused to ask if there were any questions one
student said ‘We were hoping that you would talk to us about
your missionary work’. He didn’t see much relation between
the things I had said and his understanding of mission.
What was
my own understanding of my role as a missionary? The first
thing I would say is that the original motivations that
brought me to make an option for that life would have been
inadequate to see me through it. These initial motivations
were heavily coloured by a simplistic understanding of faith
and salvation. Where did my revised motivations come from?
Membership of the Society of St Columban and the
education/formation I received in UCD and Dalgan Park in the
1960s was obviously one formative influence. New approaches
being used by those who had gone before me was another.
Membership of the Chilean Church was the most significant
one. My understanding of what I should do was shaped by the
lay people, priests, religious, theologians and bishops that
I had the privilege to come to know there. Foremost among
these was Don Enrique Alvear. I came to a new and more
grounded understanding of themes like the Kingdom of God,
the Holy Spirit, the place of the poor, structural sin, the
centrality of justice and the meaning of salvation.
One of the
continual accusations against the Church in the Pinochet
years was that it was hopelessly politicized. There were
plenty of Catholic voices singing in this chorus and the
usual insinuation was that the Church was abandoning its
authentic spiritual mission. The implication was that the
true Church never dirtied its hands with topics like arrest,
torture, disappearance dawn searches of poblaciones,
unemployment, exploitation and so on. Patristic Theology is
one of the subjects I teach today. I find no shortage there
of devastating social and political critique in the writings
of saints like Justin, Athanasius, Basil, the Gregorys of
Cappadocia, Ambrose and John Chrysostom to mention but a
few.
The Big
Picture
A
quotation from another of the Fathers, St Augustine brings
me to a final point about not seeing the full picture at the
time. Augustine’s theme is justice.
The answer that a well-known pirate gave to Alexander the
Great was perfectly accurate and correct. When the king
asked the man what he meant by infesting the sea the man
boldly replied ‘I am doing the same as you, but you are
making war on the whole world. I do my robbing from a small
ship and they call me a pirate. You do yours with a big
fleet of ships and they call you a commander. (City of God: Book IV)
Augustine’s words could be applied to the activity of the
‘Alexander’ that has controlled so much of the world affairs
for over sixty years; and it will probably apply equally to the
new ‘Alexander’ emerging from Asia. The title of William
Blum’s book on the CIA Killing Hope aptly described
what that organization managed to do (not single-handedly,
granted) at the beginning of my time in Chile.
[3]
For so many decades its activities have helped kill the
hopes of millions of people around the world, and especially
in Latin America;
its priorities are the financial interests of
the people it serves. When I arrived in Latin America all but two, as far
as I remember, of the countries were under military regimes.
The CIA had been involved in many of the coups that
suppressed democracy and the doctrine of national security
was the new bible. Many of the coup leaders had been trained
in the School of the Americas.
Around
that
time I read about the Santa Fé Document – the blueprint for
the Reagan Latin American policy, and the earlier Banzer
Plan.[4]
They made it clear that there was an urgent need to
neutralize those who had ideas similar to those of Dom Helder Camara (or later) Archbishop Oscar Romero. The
dictators who applied the recommended anti-church policies
murdered thousands of lay Christian leaders and nearly
seventy bishops, priests and sisters in the seventies and
eighties. The fuller significance of the National Security
Doctrine, the reasons for the multiple coups, and the plans
of campaign only became clear years later, with the
publication of declassified documents and other pieces of
careful research. The saddest and most scandalous reading
from this period comes from Central America. Noam Chomsky,
who I think describes himself as an agnostic Jew, wrote the
following about that period.
Central America was a very striking case, because the United
States was basically at war with the Catholic Church. The
Catholic Church in Latin America in the 1960's and 1970's
had really shifted its traditional vocation. It had adopted
aspects of liberation theology, and had recognized what's
called ‘the preferential option for the poor’. Priests, nuns
and lay workers were organizing peasants into communities,
where they would read the Gospels and draw lessons about
organization that they could use to try to take control of
their own lives. And of course that made them bitter enemies
of the United States and Washington launched a war to
destroy them. For example, one of the publicity points of
the School of the Americas, which changed its name in 2000
to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security
Cooperation, is that the U.S. army helped 'defeat liberation
theology.’ Which is accurate…
It is
interesting to look back at what was happening at that time.
Here was a supposedly very religious country, the United
States, going to war against organized religion. And the
reason was that the church was working for the poor. As long
as religion is working for the rich, it is fine; but not for
the poor.[5]
There may
be a need here to make a distinction between a state’s
policy and its people. It was my privilege in Latin America
to know many missionaries from the USA. There is no attempt
at flattery when I say that few groups were more socially
aware or more committed to teaching and living Gospel
values.
A
Missionary Today?
Why does
one continue to be a missionary in a Catholic Church that
seems to collect a scandal a day? (An inadequate but not
totally irrelevant response is that if you have 1.2 billion
members there is a lot of potential for scandal.) For me the
reason to continue has a lot to do with keeping hope alive
in the face of so many forces that threaten to kill it. I
experienced first-hand how that hope works among the poor.
But in today’s world the ‘non-poor’ are just as much in need
of a system (for want of a better word) to nurture
solidarity and build a more human community. A high profile
but ‘tone deaf to religion’ intellectual like Jurgen
Habermas gives this short description of contemporary
society:
[We
see] the transformation of the citizens of prosperous and
peaceful liberal societies into isolated monads acting on
the basis of their own self-interest, persons who use their
subject rights only as weapons against each other. We can
also see evidence of a crumbling of citizens’ solidarity in
the larger context, where there is no political control over
the dynamic of the global economy and the global society.[6]
Living in
Southeast Asia, where religion is still very much part of
the culture, has made me even more aware of the extent the
‘western’ world has lost its sense of the transcendent. I
still believe that the Church of which I am a member can
play a vital role in keeping that awareness alive and
building caring communities that provide a more fitting
environment for human beings. But beyond the humanitarian
activity it also offers a system of meaning. It is and can
continue to be a great force for good. While much of the
negative criticism today is deserved the ‘carpet bombing’
approach of negative media coverage takes little account of
the positive. Because of negative publicity few people would
be aware for instance that about one quarter of HIV/AIDS
sufferers in the world are taken care of by organizations
related to the Catholic Church.
In 1989, I
interviewed Dom Matthias Schmitt, a bishop in the northeast
of Brazil for the Far East magazine. He was a heroic
defender of the small farmers in his diocese, a man who
lived in the middle of what seemed like unbearable tensions.
My final question was ‘What keeps you going, what keeps your
hope alive?’ His answer sounded like words from one of the
ancient prophets. From what I remember it went more or less
like this.
I do
what I can, but a lot of the time I can’t stop people being
driven off their land or their houses being burned, I can’t
prevent a lot of their daily suffering. But there is a big
difference between suffering alone and suffering with the
support of someone else. Secondly you must always remember
that the seed that is planted never lives to see the fruit.
So you must work in hope, knowing that you, in your lifetime
you may never see the results of what you do.
How do I
evaluate my own time as a missionary in Chile? I would
prefer to let those on the receiving end do that. I remember
a colleague, who perhaps was quoting someone else, saying to
me one time ‘When I leave I hope they will not say “Look at
all the things he did for us.” Rather, I hope they will say
“Look at the things we were able to do ourselves because he
encouraged us’”. All I hope for is that there may be a few
who can honestly say that about me.
Notes
[1]
The following is a translation of Cardinal Raul Silva’s
words in his 1982 homily. ‘The solutions to the crisis which
have been used up until now have, in our opinion, failed.
The imposition of the neoliberal economic system has not
corrected the evils that afflict us; it has accentuated them
and pushed them to dangerous extremes. The economic remedies
in our judgment, suffer from a merciless materialism which
does not respect man or his rights. Their social cost is
enormous, and, for a Christian, is unacceptable. The
structures of participation and control of society over the
state are practically non-existent and, for this reason,
inoperative’.
[2]
Naomi Klein. The Shock Doctrine. (New York:
Metropolitan Book, 2007).
[3]
William Blum. Killing Hope: US Military and CIA
intervention since World War II. (Monroe: Common Courage
Press, 2008).
[4]
Penny Lernoux. Cry of the Poor. (New York: Penguin,
1982) 143-45.
[5]
Noam Chomsky. Imperial Ambitions. (Hamish Hamilton,
2005) 188.
[6]
Jurgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger. The Dialectics of
Civilization. (Ignatius Press, 2005)
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