Fr. James Martin, S.J. On Liberation Theology

Pope John Paul II admonishing  Fr. Ernesto Cardenal, S.J.

In its heyday, liberation theology was not without controversy: some in the church, and some in the Vatican, thought it skirted too close to Marxism--including Pope John Paul II.  On the other hand, John Paul didn’t shy away from personally involving himself in direct political activism in Poland.  It was the Latin American version of social action that seemed to bother him more.  But even John Paul affirmed the notion of “preferential option for the poor,” as did Paul VI before him.  “When there is question of defending the rights of individuals, the defenseless and the poor have a claim to special consideration,” John Paul wrote in his great encyclical Centesimus Annus, which celebrated 100 years of—uh oh--Catholic Social Teaching. “Liberation theology” is easy to be against.  For one thing, most people don’t have the foggiest idea what you’re talking about.  (It even sounds vaguely suspicious, too.)  It’s also easier to ignore the concerns of the poor, particularly overseas, than it is to actually get to know them as individuals who make a moral claim on us.  For another, there are lots of overheated websites that facilely link it to Marxism.  My response to that last critique is to read the Gospels and count how many times Jesus tells us with should help the poor and even be poor.  In the Gospel of Matthew, in fact, Jesus tells us that the ones who are to enter the Kingdom of heaven are those who help “the least of my brothers and sisters,” i.e., the poor.   After that, read the Acts of the Apostles, and read about the apostles “sharing everything in common.”  Then let me know if helping the poor is communist or simply Christian. I have no idea if President Obama subscribes to liberation theology. But I do.

Link (here) to read the full post entitled, Glenn Beck and Liberation Theology by Fr. James Martin, S.J.

Link (here) to the photo and lengthy  story of “Pope John Paul II on his 1983 arrival in Managua, publicly reprimanded Jesuit priest and Sandinista Minister of Culture Ernesto Cardenal."

More on the subject

An interview with sanctioned Fr. Jon Sobrino, S.J. in Sojourners Magazine (here)

More on Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor program in Washington, D.C. (here)
Read about the Italian Father Alighiero Tondi, S.J. and his Communist connections with the Catholic Action Movement (here) as told by Time Magazine
Jesuit Education and Social Change in El Salvador By Charles Joseph Beirne, S.J.

Go (here) to read the one time Jesuit Fr. Malachi Martin on Liberation Theology in his famous book entitled, The Jesuits.

Obama Administration Appoints Fr. Thomas Reese, S.J. To A U.S. Commission

The White House announced yesterday the appointment of Jesuit Fr. Thomas Reese to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. The position is a non-paid, volunteer appointment. Reese will continue as a senior analyst and columnist for National Catholic Reporter. The commission “is an independent, bipartisan U.S. federal government commission that monitors the universal right to freedom of religion or belief abroad and makes policy recommendations to the President, Secretary of State, and Congress,” according to the commission website. [1] The commission has nine voting members. Commissioners are appointed by the president and Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate.

Link (here) to the stinky Fishwrap

Regis University On List

Regis University

The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) released today a list of the higher education institutions under investigation for possible violations of federal law over the handling of sexual violence and harassment complaints.

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in all education programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance. In the past, Department officials confirmed individual Title IX investigations at institutions, but today's list is the first comprehensive look at which campuses are under review by OCR for possible violations of the law's requirements around sexual violence.

"We are making this list available in an effort to bring more transparency to our enforcement work and to foster better public awareness of civil rights," Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine E. Lhamon said. "We hope this increased transparency will spur community dialogue about this important issue. I also want to make it clear that a college or university's appearance on this list and being the subject of a Title IX investigation in no way indicates at this stage that the college or university is violating or has violated the law."

Regis University is the lone Jesuit university on the Ob@ma Administration list
See the list (here)

Abortion, John Kerry And Jim Crow

Boston College, which has invited Secretary of State John Kerry, who was a consistent proponent of legal abortion and same-sex marriage during his years in the US Senate; Holy Cross, which invited Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy, also an advocate of legal abortion and same-sex marriage; Loyola University in Chicago, which invited White House speechwriter Jon Favreau, who has compared defense of traditional marriage to enforcement of Jim Crow laws; 

Link (here)

A Jesuit University And "Union Busting"

The NLRB is expected to set a vote for some time in May. However, Seattle University officials say they expect to appeal the decision; the appeal deadline is May 1. Adjuncts, sometimes called contingent faculty, are instructors who are not eligible for tenure at colleges and universities and sometimes restricted to part-time work. They’re usually paid at a lower rate than their tenured counterparts — sometimes significantly so — and receive lesser benefits and little job security.

Seattle University argued that it was exempt from NLRB jurisdiction because it is a religiously-operated institution. An earlier Supreme Court case found that the NLRB, the federal agency that safeguards employees’ rights to organize, could infringe on a school’s First Amendment rights if it were to have jurisdiction over a school.

Seattle University also argued that it should be exempt because full-time adjuncts should be classified as managers, because the employees who want to unionize do not represent a “sufficient community of interest” and because the proposed union did not include faulty in the College of Nursing and School of Law. Ronald Hooks, regional director of the NLRB in Seattle, rejected all of those arguments. Among other findings, Hooks wrote that Seattle University “lacks substantial religious character” because it receives no funding from the Catholic Church or Society of Jesus, that only a minority of its students are Catholic and its faculty are subject to no religious requirements.

Link (here)

Jesuit Beaten And Murdered With Two Bullets To The Head

Fr. Frans van der Lugt, S.J. presiding at Mass in Homs

A Dutch Jesuit priest who chose to remain in the beseiged city of Homs to care for its starving population has been shot dead, according to media reports. Fr Frans van der Lugt, a 75-year-old psychologist, had remained in the rebel-controlled Old City throughout the siege, which is now over 600-days long, with government forces surrounding them. He had been offered the chance to leave, but chose to stay. 

His death was reported by the pro-government Al-Mayadeen TV, and the Jesuits have since told the Catholic News Service that Fr van der Lugt was beaten and then shot with two bullets in the head. The Washington Post reports that a masked gunman killed the priest inside a monastery in the Bustan al-Diwan area of the city, although the identity and motive of the killer remains unclear.

In February he had told the Daily Telegraph that the city had been abandoned by the international community. He came to Syria in 1966, and in the 1980s had set up an agricultural project outside the city to help young people with mental disabilities. He said that hunger was sending some people insane.

Link (here) to the Catholic Herald

Bishop Joseph Fan Zhongliang, S.J. Bishop Of The Chinese

Bishop Joseph Fan Zhongliang, S.J.

Bishop Joseph Fan Zhongliang, of Shanghai, a leader of China’s underground Catholic community, died March 15. He was 96. He refused to recognize the Chinese government-controlled Catholic Patriotic Association. So, he served in prison with other priests, who were arrested in 1955, during a government crackdown. From 1958 to 1978, Fan was imprisoned in Qinghai Province. There, his work included carrying corpses to the cemetery, reports Ucanews. China claims it has 23 million Christians, 11 million of them Catholics. “The real number is somewhere between 60 to 130 million”, the Economist estimates. Shanghai refused permission that the funeral mass be held at St Ignatius Cathedral. Instead, it limited rites for Bishop Fan to an open courtyard at the funeral home. 

Chinese Catholics are divided between two communities. One group refuses to “render to Ceasar the things that are God’s”’ and therefore, driven underground. The Vatican accepts the other, with some compromises, to continue its existence. Both stand with the pope. Both face persecution from Chinese authorities, as have other Christian denominations.  

“The more persecution, the more the church grows,” said Protestant Pastor Samuel Lamb in 1993. He died in 2013, age 88.  His 20 years of jail and forced labor followed an earlier two-year sentence. Some 30,000 people attended his memorial service. Police constantly pressured Lamb to comply with official doctrine and register with the government. He always refused, as did Joseph Fan. “China strictly regulates the religious activities of Uighur Muslims,” the latest US State Department report on religious freedom notes. “…It harassed or detained Catholic clergy not affiliated with the government Catholic Patriotic Association... Some 83 Tibetan monks, nuns, and laypersons increasingly sought to express despair and dissent by selfimmolating in 2012.” Fan was baptized a Catholic in 1932, joined the Society of Jesus in 1938. He was named Shanghai bishop by John Paul II in 2000. But the Communist Party refused to recognize him. Ceasar rendered to itself what belonged to God. Security police arrested Fan repeatedly and ransacked his flat. In 1992, the accounts of the entire Shanghai underground church were closed down. His intended successor was Thaddeus Ma Daqin, but he too was taken into custody in 2012 after he quit the government association.

Link (here)

Jesuit Warns Of Draconian Hindu Nationalism In India

Narendra Damodardas Modi

Human rights activist and Jesuit priest Cedric Prakash has warned that Narendra Modi would bring the entire country under the draconian anti-conversion law, curbing freedom of religion, if he becomes the Prime Minister. In 2003, Narendra Modi passed the draconian anti-conversion law, making it mandatory to seek permission of the district Collector to change one’s religion, he told a meeting of the Catholic Association of Goa in Margao on Wednesday. “The law has put innumerable hurdles, curbing their right to religious freedom. If Modi becomes the Prime Minister, he would bring the entire country under the draconian law,” he said.

Link (here) to read the full story at the Silent Voice

"Bergoglio's List,"

Gonzalo Mosca was a radical on the run. Hunted by Uruguay's dictators, he fled to Argentina, where he narrowly escaped a military raid on his hideout. "I thought that they would kill me at any moment," Mosca says.

With nowhere else to turn, he called his brother, a Jesuit priest, who put him in touch with the man he credits with saving his life: Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

It was 1976, South America's dictatorship era, and the future Pope Francis was a 30-something leader of Argentina's Jesuit order. At the time, the country's church hierarchy openly sided with the military junta as it kidnapped, tortured and killed thousands of leftists like Mosca. Critics have argued that Bergoglio's public silence in the face of that repression made him complicit, too, and they warn against what they see as historical revisionism designed to burnish the reputation of a now-popular pope. But the chilling accounts of survivors who credit Bergoglio with saving their lives are hard to deny. They say he conspired right under the soldiers' noses at the theological seminary he directed, providing refuge and safe passage to dozens of priests, seminarians and political dissidents marked for elimination by the 1976-1983 military regime. Mosca was 27 then, a member of a leftist political movement banned by the military government in his home country of Uruguay. Bergoglio answered his call, and rode with him for nearly 20 miles (30 kilometers) to the Colegio Maximo in suburban San Miguel.

"He gave me instructions: 'If they stop us, tell them you're going to a spiritual retreat,' and 'Try to keep yourself a bit hidden,'" Mosca recalled in an interview with The Associated Press.

Mosca said he could hardly breathe until they had passed through the seminary's heavy iron doors, but Bergoglio was very calm. "He made me wonder if he really understood the trouble he was getting into. If they grabbed us together, they would have marched us both off," said Mosca, who stayed hidden in the seminary for days, until Bergoglio got him an airplane ticket to Brazil. Soldiers prowled inside the walled gardens, sniffing for fugitives. But a full raid on the spiritual center was out of the question since Argentina's dictators had cloaked themselves in the mantle of Roman Catholic nationalism. And a constant flow of people masked Bergoglio's scheming from an air force outpost next door. Several new books assert that Bergoglio's public silence enabled him to save more people. "Bergoglio's List," by Vatican reporter Nello Scavo, is already being developed into a movie, its title playing on the "Schindler's List" film about the Nazi businessman whose subterfuge saved hundreds of Jewish prisoners during the Holocaust

Link (here) to read the rest

Cardinal Lopez Calls Jesuit A Left Wing Reprobate

Cardinal Lopez and Fr. Mario Serrano, S.J.

The cardinal in the Dominican Republic (DR) has clashed with the Jesuits in his country, hitting out at a Cardinal Nicolás López Rodríguez, Archbishop of Santo Domingo, has said that a court ruling last year preventing the descendants of Haitians from continuing to claim citizenship must be respected. Thousands of Haitians cross the border illegally into DR, Haiti’s wealthy neighbour, in search of work.

prominent Jesuit priest who defended the right of Haitians born in the Dominican Republic to claim Dominican nationality.

The cardinal called on the Jesuits to stop supporting Fr Mario Serrano, the executive secretary of the DR bishops' commission on Haitian issues. Until 2012 Fr Serrano was director of the Bonó Centre, which works with impoverished Haitians and is at the forefront of support for the right to citizenship of those born in DR.

Cardinal Lopez was videoed at a Mass in January during which he appeared to lose his temper, calling Fr Serrano a left-wing “reprobate” who must be brought under control. "I must be respected in this country but this person seems to think he’s the Pope," he shouted. Addressing the Jesuit superior in DR, he added: “Tell him to shut up and that’s it.”

Link (here) to the Tablet

Pro Abortion Clinton At Georgetown University

On February 25, Georgetown University will host former Secretary of State and likely 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton for the presentation of the annual Hillary Rodham Clinton Awards for Advancing Women in Peace and Security, according to the University’s website.

The award was created by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security.  At Georgetown’s launch of the U.S. National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security (GIWPS) in2011, Clinton was present to announce the creation of the Institute.  Clinton still acts as Honorary Founding Chair.

Clinton once reportedly called a ban on partial birth abortion an “erosion of our constitutional rights” and is thought to be considering a run for the presidency of the United States in 2016.

Link (here) to Aleteia

Fr. David Nazar, S.J. On The Church And The Ukraine

Ukrainian protestors

The struggle against corruption and for democracy in Ukraine has become the Church’s struggle for dignity, “The Church’s role is quite significant in this whole call for a truer justice through peaceful means,” said Fr. David Nazar in a Jan. 26 e-mail to The Register. Bishops, priests, nuns and lay brothers have been in the middle of protests in the main square of the Ukrainian capital. Ukrainians have been protesting against President Viktor Yanukovych since November, when the president shelved an agreement to deepen ties with the European Union and made clear his plans to forge tighter ties with Russia. The anti- government protests have been getting stronger and have recently been met with violence from Ukraine’s security forces. “The overall and enduring atmosphere on the square is peaceful non-violence,” reports Nazar. “There is no alcohol allowed. There is prayer every hour. There is no retaliation for the violence — and now five killings — by the special forces, except the stones to keep them at a distance. You really have to be impressed with the nature of this revolution.”

honesty and peace, says a Canadian Jesuit in Ukraine.

Nazar is a former provincial superior of the English Canadian Jesuits who has been in Ukraine over the last decade helping the order there set up schools and a novitiate program to accommodate a flood of young men seeking to become priests in the Catholic Church’s largest male religious order. Nazar has written for a Jesuit publication in Italy that the protesting Ukrainians have chosen Western, democratic and Christian ideals.

“The Ukrainian people are European, even if the government is not,” wrote Nazar. “It is these very values, whose roots are Christian and which the West takes for granted, that represent the longing of the people and the healing of the country.” Nazar’s report to The Register from Kiev’s Independence Square comes just as Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops’ president Paul-André Durocher has urged the prayers of all Canadian Catholics for peace and justice in Ukraine.

Link (here) to the Catholic Register of Canada

A Word In Arabic

Fr. Lawrence Andrew, S.J.

The nation's inspector general said he would continue investigating a prominent Jesuit under the country's Sedition Act, but he would not question him again.

Jesuit Father Lawrence Andrew, editor of the Catholic Herald, is under investigation for telling the news portal Malaysian Insider that "Allah" would continue to be used in Malay-language Masses in the state of Selangor, because it is the Arabic word for God.

In November, the sultan of Selangor, who is also the head of Islam in the state, said only Muslims may use the word "Allah." The priest's remarks were published by the news portal Jan. 7; on Jan. 8, the priest was questioned by police after they received dozens of complaints about his remarks. The following day, Malaysian Insider reported that the inspector general was continuing his investigation but would not recall Father Andrew.

The 1948 Sedition Act is designed to prevent acts of discontent, resistance or rebellion against the government and includes as an offense uttering "any seditious words." It defines as seditious "any act, speech, words, publication or other thing ... having a seditious  tendency," which could include promoting "feelings of ill will and hostility between different races or classes of the population of Malaysia." For years, the Catholic Herald has been involved in litigation over its use of the word "Allah" to refer to God in its Malay-language edition. In late 2009, the High Court in Kuala Lumpur ruled that the Home Ministry's order banning certain uses of the word was illegal. The court also said the word "Allah" is not exclusive to Islam.

Link (here) to The Catholic Sentinal

"Former Jesuits Now Outnumber Active Jesuits In The United States."

Were Ignatius of Loyola alive today, the Jesuit order he founded wouldn't ordain him. His once-formidable order is in the throes of a collapse as historically significant as its suppression in 1773. This disintegration, known to traditional Catholics for years (and to bishops too cowardly to stifle its corruption), is now even admitted by liberal pundits. Garry Wills' article about the book "Passionate Uncertainty: Inside the American Jesuits" appears in the New York Review of Books under the title, "Jesuits in Disarray." Jonathan Kirsch, a Los Angeles Times reviewer of the same book, notes that the order is in demographic free fall: "former Jesuits now outnumber active Jesuits in the United States."

society is now a corrupt club for

Meanwhile, traditional Jesuits who stay and seek to recover the order's original spark find themselves in exile. The office for the Jesuit Province in California confirmed to TAP that Joseph Fessio, the prolific San Francisco Jesuit publisher of orthodox books and publications, has been ordered to leave San Francisco for a new assignment, effective in May, at an obscure Catholic hospital in Duarte, California. Fessio's banishment coincides with his recent announcement to start a traditional Catholic school called Campion College next door to the openly dissenting Jesuit University of San Francisco, a school which in recent years has advertised such pagan oddities as a "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Student Alliance."

Duarte, California, is becoming the Devil's Island for Jesuits who don't conform to the order's liberal regime. Father Cornelius Buckley, a longtime Jesuit history professor at the University of San Francisco deemed insufficiently liberal for the school, was reassigned to Duarte, California, in the late 1990s. The order called him "divisive."  The crack-up of the liberals in the order will likely accelerate in the wake of their panicky persecution of traditional Jesuits like Fessio. Such desperate actions are in proportion to their fear of exposure and accountability. In a typical liberal irony, the dissenters in the order who rose to power through disobedience to papal authority now use their power to repress "disobedient" traditional Jesuits, lest their revolution inside the Catholic Church grind to a halt.

The Vatican cannot ignore their outrages forever, especially as costly sex abuse lawsuits (the Jesuits settled in 2000 with a seminarian who accused over a dozen Jesuit superiors of sending him pornographic cards and asking him to perform sex acts on them)and lay backlash reveal the modern Jesuits as a chief source of degeneracy and dissent in the Church.

Perhaps it is time for a Second Suppression, not to kill the order, but to save it. Unless the Father Robert Drinans are soon suppressed and replaced with Father Fessios at the head of the order, its days are numbered. The cancer of corruption is rapidly devouring it. If the bishops won't take this fact seriously from the traditional Catholics they take for granted, perhaps they will listen to the liberal cultural commentators who acknowledge it as well. "Entering the Jesuits used to take one into a stable world; but that is far from the experience of recent times," writes Garry Wills. "A thirty-five-year-old still studying theology says: 'My novice master left to marry, my formation director left for a relationship with another man, et cetera. One cannot help but get the sense that we of this generation of Jesuits may be the last of the Shakers.'"

Link (here) to the full article at The American Spectator

Jonathan Taylor Breaks Into Gonzaga Dorm Students Defend Themselves

A "mug shot" of Jonathon Taylor

In case you missed it, administrators at Gonzaga University have decided to place four students on probation, with the possibility of expulsion on the table. Their crime? Defending themselves against a six-time felon Jonathan Taylor inside their university owned apartment by brandishing a firearm (for which they have a permit). Naturally in typical academic fashion, officials are punishing their own students for fighting back and protecting themselves from a violent criminal with a long rap sheet.

The details of this story have already been covered, but what's missing is the scrutiny against the so-called "intellectuals" in this situation.

The actions taken by Gonzaga officials to punish students for a) owning a firearm and b) using that firearm in self-defense, shows us exactly how far they're willing to go in the name of their own partisan ideology. Officials at Gonzaga are clearly more interested in upholding their anti-gun agenda than keeping students safe.

Think the case of a felon on Gonzaga's campus is an isolated incident? Think again. In 2007, a young woman named Amanda Collins was raped at gunpoint just 50-feet from the campus police station at The University of Nevada-Reno. The University of Nevada-Reno is a gun free zone. At the time of the attack, Collins was in possession of her concealed weapons permit but was not in possession of her firearm due to university policies prohibiting carrying concealed weapons on campus. Her attacker, a serial rapist, went on to rape two more young women, killing one of them. Red-tape and university policies empowered her attacker while she, the victim, was punished. 

Link (here) to the full story at Townhall.com

Naval School of Mechanics

The Vatican has firmly denied these claims and there have since been many reports of the "quiet diplomacy" used by Pope Francis, who was then named Jorge Mario Bergoglio and head of the Jesuit order in Argentina. There was no official word on the content of the talks between Francis and Jalics, who was born in Hungary and now lives in a German monastery. Francis has said he experienced "a period of great internal crisis" at the time of the junta and admitted to making mistakes in his leadership. A recent book by an Italian journalist, however, said he took in many leftist students at risk of being jailed by the dictatorship and advised hi

s priests on how best to avoid being spied on. It also published transcripts from testimony given by Bergoglio to prosecutors investigating the crimes of the junta in which he said he lobbied for the release of Jalics and Orlando Yorio.

The two young Jesuits who were preaching in the slums were taken in March 1976 to the notorious Naval School of Mechanics, a torture centre run by the junta. They were freed after five months. 

Father Franz Jalics now lives in a monastery in Germany. Following controversy after the Pope's election in March, Jalics released a statement saying: "Yorio and I were not reported by Father Bergoglio". "I myself formerly tended to believe that we were reported. At the end of the 1990s however it became clear to me after numerous conversations that this assumption was baseless," Jalics said.
Link (here)

"Bix", Arrested Again!

Twenty-three people, including the new U.S. provincial supervisor of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, were arrested Saturday after crossing the property line of a new nuclear weapons complex. The group was participating in a PeaceWorks protest at the National Security Campus, also known as the Kansas City Plant, a five-building facility where 85 percent of the non-nuclear parts for U.S. nuclear weapons will be made or procured. Line-crossers were arrested, fingerprinted, photographed and held at the Jackson County Police Department, according to a PeaceWorks Kansas City press release. All have been released. ... "When I heard Carl invited his provincial, I wanted to join into that," said Jesuit Fr. Bill Bichsel of Tacoma, Wash. "That whole sense of solidarity, I like that. Things become more alive when you're connected to the people that you're doing the action with. It makes it more vibrant and alive -- a spirit that moves." 

 Bichsel was one of two 85-year-olds arrested Saturday. When asked how many times he has been arrested at similar demonstrations, Bichsel laughed and said more than a hundred. "I think that gatherings such as this are much more powerful than a nuclear weapon," Bichsel said. "Relationships are so important in establishing our long-term struggle, our long term fight."  

The Kansas City facility is one of two newly constructed nuclear weapons plants in the United States and, according to Bichsel, is a linchpin in nuclear production. "The plant here in Kansas City represents the United States' thrust and direction into endless war, keeping us in war, keeping us in a wartime economy," Bichsel said. "Of course we're making enemies -- we're threatening everyone with guns to their head."

Link (here) to the Fishwrap

Defrocked Jesuit Priest Jesus Aguirre y Ortiz de Zarate,

In 1978 the Duchess of Alba, Spain’s richest and most titled woman, her full name is Maria del Rosario Cayetana Alfonsa Victoria Eugenia Francisca Fitz-James Stuart y de Silva and she is a duchess seven times over. scandalized the nation by marrying defrocked Jesuit priest Jesus Aguirre y Ortiz de Zarate, her former confessor. Aguirre administered the Alba estate until his death in 2001. 

Link (here) to The Telegraph

Radicalization Of Islam In The Region

Middle East expert Jesuit Father Samir Khalil Samir, who teaches at the University of Beirut. "Many people in Lebanon are concerned because the conflict in Syria is becoming more like a conflict between Shiites and Sunnis. These are the two main currents in Islam. In Lebanon, it is also noticeable that the Shiite Hezbollah behave more aggressively than before towards the Sunni Lebanese. 

In the north of Lebanon - that is, in the city of Tripoli - there are already skirmishes every day leaving people dead. Also in the south of Beirut, there are acts of violence. These are all signs that are to be taken seriously. "the wave of violence in Syria is not just for the neighbours of Lebanon and Syria a problem, says Father Samir Khalil.  

"In the Arab world, there are more divisions and conflicts than ever before. This is due to the radicalization of Islam in the region. This is the basic problem in the Arab world, which one has to actually tackle. It is not important whether one is in Iraq, Egypt or Syria. This radicalization has its roots in the attitude of Israel and its Western allies, for example in relation to occupied territories, such as the Golan Heights, which actually by international law belong to Syria. " 

Link (here) to the preeminent European Catholic blogger Christopher Gillibrand , his full post is at Cathcon

Teología Del Pueblo Is Not Teología De La Liberación

Fr. Juan Carlos Scannone, S.J.

Getting back to liberation theology, does Bergoglio reject holus-bolus everything about liberation theology?El Jesuita, Bergoglio says liberation theology had its pros and cons: the “pro” being its expression of what’s called the “preferential option for the poor,” the “con” being its “ideological deviations.” Well, that’s very close to the assessment expressed in the two “Instructions on Liberation Theology” published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1984 and 1986.
In the interview-book

And who is the Argentine Jesuit that our NYT friends have in mind? In all probability (because there’s really no other candidate), the reference is to Juan Carlos Scannone, S.J., who taught Bergoglio Greek and literature in the seminary.

The difficulty with the Times’ claim, however, is that Scannone isn’t much of a liberation theologian. In fact Scannone has written papers emphasizing where his thought differs from the liberationists. In a 2011 interview, for example, Scannone himself said: “Myself, I‘ve never had anything to do with Marxism.” Scannone specifies that the primary difference between his thought and that of the liberationists is, to use his words, his theology “has neither used Marxist methodology for analyzing reality nor categories taken from Marxism.” Instead, Scannone is best known in Argentina for developing what’s called a teología del pueblo (theology of the people) — something, he says, that is viewed positively by Rome and which Bergoglio has praised on numerous occasions. It’s a theology that takes seriously the popular spirituality and often deeply traditional piety of ordinary people — the kind of thing that’s often the subject of much condescending commentary by your average German progressive theologian but which was also regarded by liberationists such as the late Fr. Juan Luis Segundo, S.J. as a mass phenomenon incapable of fostering revolutionary change, making it an obstacle to “progress.”

But the teología del pueblo, Scannone specifies, also draws considerable inspiration from Paul VI’s 1975 apostolic exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi. In that sense, Scannone argues, the theology of the people represents “a journey of return between Latin America and Rome.” Here it’s worth noting that Evangelii Nuntiandi firmly rejected — over and over and over again — politicized concepts of Christian liberation and underscored that the Church “refuses to replace the proclamation of the kingdom by the proclamation of forms of human liberation.”

Practically speaking, the teología del pueblo that’s alive and well in Argentina tends to be translated into bottom-up and locally based approaches to poverty. It also rejects calls for class struggle and Sandinista-style revolution. And while adherents of teología del pueblo in Argentina certainly insist on a great deal of government intervention, they also firmly reject top-down paternalism — something no doubt reinforced by the populist and statist policies pursued by the Krichners that have wreaked havoc upon Argentina’s economy over the past ten years. But if you want to get a sense of where Francis may take the Catholic Church regarding social and economic issues, you needn’t waste your energy toiling through texts like Boff’s Church: Charism and Power. Instead, pick up a copy of the concluding document of the Fifth General Conference of the Consejo Episcopal Latino Americano held at Aparecida in 2007.

Link (here) to The National Review