ARTICLES
December 2002 ARTICLES
Contents © 2002
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.
Defender of the Poor or False Prophet?
Controversial Bishop Visits California
By Christopher Zehnder
It was not an instance of bilingualism gone wild, nor was it the harbinger of a Hispanic invasion of California, when on May 25, a speaker -- the keynote speaker -- addressed the graduates of California State University, Monterey Bay, in Spanish. Nor was the "wall of separation" between church and state breached because a state institution had so honored the speaker, a bishop of the Catholic Church. The reality was far more boring. The speaker, Bishop Samuel Ruiz Garcia spoke in Spanish because he knows little English, and his talk carried no direct reference to religion.
But Bishop Ruiz, himself, is far from boring. Bishop of the diocese of San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico, from 1960 to 1999, Don Samuel attended all four sessions of the Second Vatican Council. A champion of the rights of the indigenous Mayas of Chiapas, Ruiz gained world attention when he was appointed intermediary between rebel forces and the Mexican government after the 12-day Zapatista rebellion in 1994. A noted defender of what is called "liberation theology," Ruiz has been accused, in Church circles, of doctrinal irregularities. Because of his promotion of liberation among the Mayas, the government of Mexico accused him of actually fomenting the Zapatista rebellion.
This was not Monseñor Ruiz's first trip to California. In 1999, 2000, and again in 2001, he was a featured speaker at the Los Angeles archdiocese's religious education congress. On October 28, he gave a lecture at the University of California, San Diego's Institute of the Americas on the "Pursuit of Justice from the Perspective of the Poor." At this event there was to be a translator.
Monseñor Ruiz's speech at the May 25 commencement ceremony turned on the themes of solidarity with the poor and respect for other cultures. After giving the customary congratulations to the graduates, Bishop Ruiz noted that the privilege of attending university should impel the alumni to conceive of a future professional life as one of service and not as an opportunity to obtain greater profits for themselves. That the university occupies land formerly used as a military base (Fort Ord) is symbolic, said Ruiz; it shows that the university has a special mission to announce and help realize peace in the world. Peace, however, he said, can not be realized without an anxious care for a just and fraternal world order.
These considerations, said Monseñor Ruiz, demand a change in the objective mission of the university -- not to strengthen "our system, whose goal is profit, competition, enrichment and accumulation," but to discern and prepare for a true social change. The mission of the university, said Ruiz, should be to initiate a "slow but effective" process by which it moves from being an institution that takes account of the poor and their needs, to an institution that succors the poor. But this not the final step. Ultimately, said Ruiz, the university should become an instrument in the hands of the poor.
The university can do this by proceeding along the pathways of solidarity, said Ruiz, which does not signify such things as improvement of farming techniques or support for projects of development, which lead to improvements in the social condition of the poor. Rather, he said, solidarity implies helping the poor obtain the consciousness of their own proper dignity -- that they are the "subjects" (or protagonists) of their own history, not objects to be used for the good of other cultures and peoples.
Finally, said Bishop Ruiz, in contrast to the "homogenization" and "cultural leveling" inherent in the "System," the university "in these latitudes holds the imperative to contribute to the formation of a new world in which cultural differences are recognized and respected." What is needed is an "intercultural and interreligious dialogue. in the American continent between aboriginal cultures and western culture," as well in the European continent "between itself and the cultures of the Asiatic and African settlements significantly present in it."
Mindful of the charges of doctrinal irregularities leveled at Bishop Ruiz, I found his commencement address unobjectionable. Indeed, it could be called traditional. To preserve cultures is to preserve tradition. The call to service of the poor as opposed to the quest for profits resonates with Catholic tradition, both patristic and medieval, which was more apt to condemn avarice than lust and which insisted on service to the poor in the corporal works of mercy. Even the call to social change echoes the Church, in her social encyclicals and in her acts, for did she not transform the very social structures of medieval Europe? The Church has never been concerned only with personal piety.
Yet, much of what I had learned of Monseñor Ruiz gave me pause. For instance, in 1996, according to a Catholic World News report, Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, president of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, asked Ruiz to preach the Gospel "in its integrity, without any Marxist interpretations." Bishop Ruiz, said the report, was "known for his close defense of the Marxist theology of liberation." When I read this, I knew little of liberation theology, except that it has been accused of embracing the Marxist dialectic of class struggle instead of the Church's doctrine of class solidarity, and that the Holy See in recent years has silenced liberation theologians like Leonardo Boff. (In a future article, the Mission will explore liberation theology, what it was and is, and its influence today.) Where Bishop Ruiz stands in the liberation theology spectrum was unclear. In 2000, after Ruiz retired as bishop of San Cristobal de las Casas, he was accused of ordaining female deacons and using Mayan pagan religious texts during Masses. He was, however, not disciplined for these alleged breaches of Church doctrine and discipline.
Of, perhaps, greater significance to Catholics in California is Monseñor Ruiz's association with Call to Action, a group which calls for "progressive" reform of the Church, including the ordination of women and a more democratic Church structure. Though it smells more of prim and latte-soaked baby-boomer liberalism than of blood and soil revolutionary radicalism, Call to Action embraces all that is leftist de rigueur, including Third World liberation issues. Bishop Ruiz receives a warm reception at Call to Action functions, and he has reciprocated the warm feelings. In a 1999 letter posted on the Call to Action website, Ruiz wrote: "Thank you for inviting me to participate in the important Call to Action event. I could see clearly Call to Action's national and international impact, its capacity for dialogue, its sensitivity and quick response to the problems that afflict us, seen as God's call to live out the love of our sisters and brothers. It was God's grace that allowed me to participate. Thank you for your fine work. May the Holy Spirit give you courage to cross the frontier of the Third Millennium!"
The event to which the letter refers was the 1999 Call to Action conference at which Ruiz spoke. According to a National Catholic Reporter interview with Ruiz, conducted during the conference, Ruiz spoke of the need to inculturate the Faith in native cultures. In particular, Ruiz complained that "indigenous who are ordained priests" pass "through the process of deculturation we call seminaries. We already have some such priests. But they are mestizo priests, not indigenous priests." Ruiz claimed that "in all indigenous communities. human maturity is measured, not by years, but by the experience the individual has lived in the smallest social structure, the family. How, [indigenous groups] say, can a person who lacks the experience of guiding, leading and living in a family possibly speak to an entire community?"
If Ruiz were simply calling for a married clergy for indigenous peoples, all would be well. After all, a celibate clergy is not a matter of divine revelation, but of Church discipline. But, it appears, Ruiz may have been calling for more than that. When the Reporter asked Ruiz if the "Mayan cultural understanding of spiritual leadership. does not logically lead to a liturgy in which the married couple, the husband and wife, are the 'priest,' the ones who preside at the celebration of the Eucharist?" Ruiz answered, "that is what we are talking about. That is what is on the table: a priesthood according to the culture." The interview, however, does not say exactly what it means for a husband and wife to be the "priest."
In his talk to Call to Action, "Indigenous Cultures: A New Springtime for the Church," Ruiz related how he came to have the "reputation as an expert on evangelization in Latin America." At a missionary conference he attended in Colombia in the late 1960s, Bishop Ruiz said he heard "for the first time about anthropology and its bearing on our missionary activity" -- this from "a prominent anthropologist, Professor Dormatoff. From Dormatoff, Ruiz learned that "culture is the set of responses that a group of human beings makes to questions of transcendence and of living together, and passes from one generation to the next. He also learned "how the evangelizing activity of the Church was destroying cultures" (and, he confessed, he too was "guilty of destroying the native culture" when he first came to Chiapas in the 1950s.) But what most disturbed Ruiz was Dormatoff's revelation that "religion is the central point of the culture."
At this point, said Ruiz, he turned to his bishop friends and said, "so what do we do now? What is there to evangelize?" Ruiz continued: "and I thought to myself: I am supposed to preach the Gospel. I thought that meant converting the pagan Indians to be Christians, even if we destroyed the Indian culture in the process. But why then has God permitted the existence of so many diverse cultures in the world? Just so missionary activity can come along later and destroy them? Or should I be sitting down and studying the culture, and waiting for the proper moment to preach? And since human beings' ultimate destiny is not the here and now, but beyond history, why would we work so hard to destroy cultures and replace them with one common culture? Why did God choose to have Jesus born into a particular culture, that of being a Jew in that time and place?"
Though Ruiz had been present at all four sessions of the second Vatican council, he said it was liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez who showed him the real meaning of the council's document on missionary activity. According to Ruiz, Gutierrez said that, since God loves all mankind, God "reveals Godself to all the ethnic and cultural groups of the world. Before any missionary arrives to speak of Christ, a process of salvation and a revelation of God is already there!" This understanding, said Ruiz, gives a whole new meaning to missionary activity. Since, as Vatican II taught, the seeds of God's Word are planted in every culture, a missionary must first "see what God has been doing" in a culture. He must "face the people and say. Dominus vobiscum. The Lord IS with you. If God is already present in all these cultures, missionary work has a whole different meaning: announcing the presence of God already there."
It seems that, for Bishop Ruiz, the Church's role is not necessarily to cultivate the "seeds of the Word" into a flourishing harvest of Christian faith. The teacher of the Faith, or the catechist, Ruiz asserted, has a very different role. He is to be "one who harvests the thinking of a community." Before this discovery, he said, catechists "would come into communities to teach what the other people didn't know. From now on, the catechist would come into a village with one little notebook, with three little questions regarding the Gospel for that Sunday, and would gather the harvest of what the community had to say."
The "three little questions" were: "What is the plan of God in history?" "Have men and women really followed this plan?" "How can we live faith, hope and charity in a world where the will of God is not followed?" The will of God was found, said Ruiz, "in the political, the economic and the cultural situation" which were a "reflection of the Trinity" -- the "manifestation of the Father in politics, the Son in economics, and the Holy Spirit in the culture." After posing the three questions, two-hundred catechists gathered the responses of 200 communities that answered the questions, not in light of the teachings of the Church, but in light of their own experience. This "Catechesis of the Exodus," as Ruiz called it, helped the native people live out charity in their concrete economic situation. For instance, they formed a transportation cooperative and fought for their right to keep it when it was challenged by the established transportation system.
A 1998 statement signed by Bishop Ruiz "for the Catholic Church," and by other individuals for theologians, religious, pastoral workers, laypeople and for Protestant and Evangelical churches may shed more light on Monseñor' s approach to liberation and evangelization. The statement (available, translated into English, on the Office of the Americas website, http://officeoftheamericas.org/docs/1998/980830_cry_of_riobamba.html), read at the colosseum in Riobamba, Ecuador, by Bishop Pedro Casaldaliga of Brazil, proclaimed, "we join in a 'Cry of the Excluded' and the hopes of the people of our continent. In an ecumenical spirit we call upon the God of Exodus and of the Passover who always hears the cry of the people in the process of liberation and of life."
Some of the points of the Riobamba statement echo things Pope John Paul II himself has said. The statement called for the "option for the poor," which, it said, has never been more important. "More than 70 percent of the people of Latin America are excluded by the new economic order neo-liberalismo)." The statement denounces "absolutely the iniquity of the new economic order in its totality. It is a system of exclusion, idolatry, and out of control ecocide. Related to this onslaught is the expansion of arms sales together with repressive militarism and paramilitarism." In particular, the Riobamba statement proclaimed its struggle "for the abolition of external debt" and "the payment of the social debt which is owed to our people at the cost of their lives and dignity." The statement also called for "the reform of international institutions such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank." The statement further supports "with effective solidarity, the process of peace and liberation" while opposing "the impunity and institutionalized violence which has marked our continent."
At the same time, the Riobamba statement seems to go beyond strict orthodoxy in its commitment to "evolve from an ecumenism of intention, discourse and isolated gestures to a mutual recognition of the churches while understanding the complementary nature of the truths we hold and the sanctity of the unique mystery of Christ." [Emphasis added.] Does this notion of truth place the Catholic faith on a level with Protestant confessions? And what does the statement mean when it calls for "overcoming the attitudes of centralization and authoritarianism of the Catholic Church as well as the atomization of the Evangelical Churches"? Finally, in proclaiming the solidarity of those who would "fight with hope against the fatalism of a system imposed on us," the statement declares: "we are confident in the loving presence of the God of Jesus, liberator of the poor, Father-Mother of the human family."
A December 22, 1998 Catholic World News report said that at least one Latin American bishop found problems with the Riobamba statement. Cardinal Juan Sandoval Iniguez of Guadalajara, said the report, warned that the statement contained "extremely grave doctrinal errors." Cardinal Sandoval said that Bishop Ruiz was wrong to sign the statement "in the name of the Catholic Church;" "only the pope," said Sandoval, "has the authority to sign a document in the name of the Catholic Church." But the document's greatest error, said Sandoval, was its claim that the Catholic Church no longer claimed to be the only true Church. In seeking ecumenical unity, said Sandoval, no one can lose sight of the truths of the Catholic faith -- particularly that the authority of the Catholic Church flows directly from the authority of Jesus Christ.