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In Chile, President Ricardo Lagos's government indefinitely postponed its planned $600 million purchase of its Air Force of 12 F-16 fighter-bombers in the U.S. when the Episcopal Conference, the assembly of all the nation's Roman Catholic bishops, said last week that "there are some expenditures about to be made which are not immediately necessary", and asked that, in view of an almost 9 percent unemployment, the funds involved be applied to the creation of jobs.
Jointly with the Latin American Episcopal Conference that was meeting in Caracas, Venezuela's Episcopal Conference delivered a sharp criticism to president Hugo Chavez, stating that the political changes he introduced since he took office in early 1999 were "centered and concentrated on the personal popularity and power of the president," declaring that his promises of change had not been translated into effective reforms and that oil-rich Venezuela was suffering from "massive, dehumanizing poverty," growing violent crime and widespread unemployment.
President Chavez was out of the country on a three-week tour of Russia, Iran and Asia, but his chief of staff said he would seek a meeting with local Catholic Church leaders to discuss the criticism and arrange a possible meeting with the president when he returned home at the start of June.
"We don't want to fall into a confrontation with the church or with the ecclesiastic hierarchy over its positions," he said. "What we need to do is bring the parts together ... so that the normal citizen can benefit from the best of what the church and the government are proposing."
Speculation in Venezuela is that the bishops stand on Chavez prompted Francisco Arias Cardenas, an ex comrade-in-arms of Chavez and former governor of Zulia state who maintains close ties with the military, to choose this moment for launching a new party, Union, that offers an alternative to the beleaguered president. Numerous politicians and personalities from all over the ideological spectrum have publicly welcomed the new party, whose creation has had the effect of taking away credence from the rumors, daily denied by the government, that a military coup is in the offing.
In Argentina, in a harsh indictment of the government's latest economic policies as well as of Argentine society at large, the nation's most prominent bishops recently affirmed in homilies delivered from the pulpit across the country that "the Argentine worker has been turned into a hostage that is pressed to accept the ever growing precariousness of his working conditions," and denounced the "calamity" of unemployment, the "intolerable weight" of the external debt and the "culture of speculation and corruption."
Their criticism was more vigorous and to the point than the rather weak and vague pronouncements of opposition political parties and labor unions, and got extraordinary play in the Argentine media, inspiring countless editorial comments.
These are some recent examples of how the Catholic Church is increasingly making its voice heard in South America on social and political issues. In some cases, like in Chile, it is in pursuance of an already well-established tradition of courageous social involvement-its Vicarage of Solidarity has been honored for its thorough documentation of atrocities committed under the rule of general Augusto Pinochet. In the case of Argentina it reflects en effort to regain the ground lost as the Church remained mostly disengaged and silent when military governments were involved in murderous repression of adversaries. In Venezuela, it is making up for a long period in which the Church chose not to speak in condemnation of corrupt governments and deteriorating political parties.
In Central America the Catholic Church has a longer tradition of being outspoken on the issues of freedom and human rights, even in most critical circumstances, as in Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1980s, for example, when the extreme left threatened to dominate through sheer force of arms and violent repression was the consequence. So it shouldn't be surprising that Central America has produced leading prelates that transcend the region, and even martyrs, such as Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, a vocal advocate for the country's poor and politically powerless, who was assassinated during a religious service.
One, however, who is very much alive is Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez, of Honduras, who, in addition to his background as a pastor who has championed the rights of the poor, is a brilliant thinker and a skilled communicator. In the rarefied atmosphere in which a possible successor to ailing Pope John Paul II is being discussed, Cardinal Rodriguez is a name that comes up, as does the name of another Latin American, Cardinal Dario Castrillon, of Colombia, who has been working for years in the Vatican curia.
Experts on papal politics say that chances are that the next pope will be Italian but, were the Italian members of the conclave that would choose a new pope not to come to an agreement-and the odds that they might not are considerable-almost surely the eyes of the conclave would be turned towards a Latin American.
With a Latin American pope in Rome and with the vacuum left by the weakening of secular politics that is registered in most countries, the Catholic Church could grow much faster into becoming an even greater social and political force in the region that it is today.
Claudio Campuzano (claudio-campuzano@hotmail.com) is U.S, correspondent for the Latin American newsweekly Tiempos del Mundo and editorial page editor of the New York daily Noticias del Mundo. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com