The word Jesuit conjures lots of mixed emotions for anyone who closely followed events around Latin America in the 1970s and ’80s. The Jesuit order is dedicated to the promotion of human rights and social justice, a cause that the Roman Catholic Church has always espoused in words but not always supported in deeds because of the leftist connotations inherent in Jesuit philosophy. Under Pope John Paul II, a Pole who witnessed the horrors of Communist rule, the Vatican took a notable shift away from any association with the Jesuit doctrine known as “liberation theology.” Those who preached liberation theology quickly found themselves shunned by the church hierarchy. So, for a Jesuit to be elected pope immediately after two highly conservative papacies that were demonstrably cold to Jesuit social activism is nothing short of monumental.
In the 1970s and ’80s, Latin America was roiling in Cold War political intrigue. Radical revolutionary groups were rising up everywhere, claiming to be fighting on behalf of the poor underclasses in countries like El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia and even Mexico. Chile, Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil were in turmoil as military governments crushed socialist movements and put the finishing touches on the Dirty War that left thousands dead or disappeared.
The CIA was in the thick of it on the military juntas’ side, and on the other side were the Jesuits.
Wherever you looked in Central America’s armed revolutionary movements, Jesuit priests and bishops were politically active behind the scenes. When peasant groups were too afraid to speak out against massacres and military oppression, the Jesuits provided a voice. And they paid a heavy price. In El Salvador, Oscar Romero, theologically grounded as a teenage seminarian in Jesuit philosophy, went on to become archbishop. He was slain by a death squad assassin in 1980. In 1989, six Jesuit scholars and priests were slain at San Salvador’s Universidad Centroamericana on orders of Salvadoran Army officers. The Jesuit order’s work throughout the Salvadoran countryside with civilian supporters of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front was clearly not appreciated by El Salvador’s conservative military leadership.
Pope John Paul II was never enthusiastic about the implications of liberation theology and, according to Central American priests I interviewed in the 1990s, sent out word that the priests were to stop preaching the doctrine. He effectively demoted Romero’s successor in El Salvador, auxiliary bishop Msgr. Gregorio Rosa Chavez and sent orders that Rosa Chavez’s homilies in support of leftist social causes were to cease. Rose Chavez found himself frozen out and passed over as archbishop.
The last vestiges of liberation theology surfaced in Chiapas, southern Mexico, in 1994 when the Zapatista revolutionary movement rose up to challenge Mexico’s political system. An early proponent of the Zapatista cause was Bishop Samuel Ruiz, who studied at the Jesuit-run Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. Even before the revolution, Vatican officials angered by Ruiz’s social activism campaigned unsuccessfully to force his resignation in 1993. In 1997, Ruiz narrowly escaped death in a paramilitary ambush. According to a senior church leader in Central America I interviewed in the late 1990s, Ruiz was completely ostracized by the Vatican after the Zapatista uprising and ordered in no uncertain terms to shut up and lay low. He died in relative obscurity in 2011.
Wherever reporters went in Central America and Colombia to cover the various armed revolutions bubbling during this era, there was always Jesuit priest lurking somewhere in the background. They were great for interviews because they could always be relied upon to be sharp and outspoken — in contrast to the peasantry, which had been cowed into silence by threats from both the revolutionaries and government military forces. They were even-handed. When the armed revolutionaries were abusive, the Jesuits condemned them. When the government was abusive, they also were condemned.
Pope Francis probably will never have to answer fully for his alleged cooperation with the military junta in Argentina in the 1970s. As Father Jorge Mario Bergoglio, he was accused of assisting in the kidnap and subsequent torture of two fellow Jesuit priests. Bergolio denied the allegation — made by one of the kidnapped priests — and said he worked behind the scenes to obtain the priests’ release from captivity. Bergolio’s human rights work focused on the defense of the poor but leaned more heavily on campaigning against abortion and same-sex marriage than on defending the politically oppressed. It’s quite a mixed bag that should leave a lot of people unsettled.
So, given the history of Latin America’s tangled relations with the Jesuit order, it’s a really big deal that a Jesuit is now pope. What Pope Francis does to reconcile his theological foundations with the state of political and economic inequality that pervades Latin America remains to be seen.