From the editor’s desk

The poor take priority

What might be termed the Age of the Military Dictatorship in Latin America is now largely in the past, and the Catholic Church has had to adapt to a new political reality. Instead of a series of right-wing juntas who looked for support from old-fashioned church traditionalists, from rich landowners and from the US, the continental centre of gravity is now left-of-centre. Marxism is not the American bogeyman it was, not least because the CIA no longer sees it as an ideological fifth column to be manipulated by the Soviet Union. The Church's own fear of Marxism - that it could subvert the Catholic Church from inside by means of liberation theology - has given way to a more relaxed and case-by-case critique of this blend of economic analysis and theological insight.

It is in this context that Pope Benedict's message to the bishops of Latin America, at the opening of CELAM, the Latin American and Caribbean bishops' conference, has to be understood. He has provided a basis for the Church to deal with this new age of centre-left politics in this most Catholic of continents. His basic call is for collaboration and understanding rather than confrontation and contradiction, but with a somewhat poignant regret that more of the politicians who are leading Latin America towards social democracy were not practising Catholics themselves. But neither capitalism nor Marxism meets human need, he declared, and politics has to be humanised by faith in Jesus Christ.

The shameful compromises the official Church regularly made with corrupt and ruthless right-wing governments in the earlier era were undoubtedly the driving force behind liberation theology, which was at heart a protest at the extreme suffering of the millions of poor in Latin America, their exploitation by the rich, and the Church's complicity. If it acknowledged the problem at all, it tended to blame the selfishness of the rich and exhort them to greater charitable benevolence - while the poor had to accept their lot as the will of God. Those who told them otherwise were dismissed as Communists; enemies of the faith. The insight of the early liberationists was that the economic status quo was condemned by the values of the Gospel, and that resisting it was a religious and political imperative.

From the 1968 meeting of CELAM at Medellín onwards, the hierarchy began to wean itself away from this collaboration with the oppressors of the poor. Indeed, the liberationists' "preferential option for the poor" entered the mainstream theological vocabulary. But it was a slow process, hampered by the tendency under John Paul II to prefer the appointment of "safe" bishops over those with prophetic fire in their bellies.

Pope Benedict has put his own seal on these changes, which may revive an interest in politics for the sake of the poor and set the Church firmly against the extreme division between wealth and poverty which is still a shocking feature of many South American societies - as is corruption. But it is still not easy to discern in Latin America a distinctively Catholic yet progressive conception of a just and equitable society, although politicians appear from time to time who claim to have the formula. The Pope has set the terms in which the question has to be debated. Rightly, he has not tried to offer the solution.