Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Terror (1974-1983)
Thank you for the introduction and thank you all for coming to this panel.
What I want to present here is from my doctoral project on Revolutionary
Christianity in Argentina, which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s similar
to movements in other Latin American countries often described as
liberation theology. But drawing on Michael Lowy, I refer to the liberationist
Christian movement, because this wasn’t simply a theology but a broad
social movement that included people from various different Christian
denominations. And the specific topic I want to look at is the different ways
in which the movement responded to state-sponsored violence that really
began in 1974 under the elected government of Juan Perón but
accelerated following the military coup in March 1976 and resulted in the
death, torture and disappearance of around 30,000 people deemed left
wing or Marxist subversives. These victims included many Christians,
including, lay members of all denominations, protestant pastors, Catholic
priests, nuns and even two bishops.
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I have quite a lot to get through so I’ll only give a brief contextual
introduction rather than a more comprehensive historical background.
But the movement increasingly came into conflict with the traditionalist
ecclesial hierarchy, over political issues, liturgical reforms and episcopal
obedience.
I argue that the effect of these conflicts was that a basic tension was
produced within the movement: between being contained within the
confines of the institutional church, and transgressing the ecclesial
institution and its rules. This tension can be seen, for example, in the
divisions over priestly celibacy. Some priests in the country rejected the
ecclesiastical rules on celibacy and married. At the Third World Priests’
last national meeting in 1973, a heated dispute occurred over whether to
accept non-celibate clerics as participating members of the movement. It
seems to me that behind the debate lay this tension between containment
and transgression – some wanted total obedience to institutional rules;
others were more open to dissent.
Among those located on the more transgressive side of the divide, some
rejected the notion of a church institution entirely. This didn’t mean a
schism in their eyes, but rather meant recapturing the original meaning of
the Church as an assembly of people. So, for example, Rubén Dri, one of
the leading Third World Priests, told me in an interview, and I quote: ‘I feel
within the Church. But the thing is, for me the Church is not an institution.
I believe in the ekklesia, really, that is the assembly Church’.
This divide within the movement is important to bear in mind when looking
at the responses of liberationist Christians to state terror.
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Another example of this response was Lucio Gera, a Third World Priest
whose theological work was considered to be a significant contribution to
liberation theology. But he became somewhat less political in the mid
1970s, and in fact came to be considered the acceptable side of
liberationist Christianity by ecclesial authorities, as he was able to nurture
a relatively influential role within the institution. Gera was even asked to
draft an official church document published in 1981, calling for
reconciliation, that was condemned by various liberationist Christians and
human rights leaders for appearing to endorse an amnesty law to prevent
military officers from ever being prosecuted and the lack of self-criticism
over the institutional Church’s role during the dictatorship.
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The final response I want to describe here is the recourse to the politics
of human rights. A number human rights groups appeared in the mid-
1970s, often led by Christians. This was a different response from the first
two for various reasons: firstly, it didn’t involve de-politicisation, and
actually allowed Christians to remain politically active to some degree, as
human rights groups were often somewhat protected by their links with
international human rights groups and foreign embassies.
Another characteristic was that, although there were some human rights
activists within the Catholic Church institution, it tended to involve a
distancing from the Church, as human rights groups explicitly condemned
the Church’s role in legitimising state terror.
A final distinctive feature was that this response involved a qualitative shift
in political character for liberationist Christians – rather than talk about
revolutionary transformation of society, the politics of human rights talked
about the defence of life and liberty.
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