shawa
CNO
Joined: 03 Sep 2004
Posts: 2004
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 Posted: Tue Apr 26, 2005 11:30 am Post subject: The Soul of a Lost Cause |
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The liberals at the LA times celebrating the old radical 'liberation theology' that held
that even though it denied God, Communism was good for 'social justice'
| Quote: | The Soul of a Lost Cause
Ernesto Cardenal is still the poet-priest of Nicaragua's Sandinistas. But he knows that the church and the times have turned against him.
By Reed Johnson, Times Staff Writer
MANAGUA, Nicaragua The radical priest who once bucked the will of Pope John Paul II looks old and frail now, with his wintry beard and shuffling gait.
He's still wearing his beatnik beret, and when he speaks of the glory days of the '70s and '80s his eyes blaze with an apostle's ardor. But Father Ernesto Cardenal's fiery eloquence can't burn away this stubborn thought: that the Nicaraguan revolution, the cause that Cardenal served so devoutly, through so many years of sacrifice and spilled blood, is a ghost of its former self.
Sitting beside his living-room wall, with its eerie photo montage of fallen comrades, Cardenal offers a thudding assessment of what happened to that distant revolutionary dream.
"For now it would seem that it wasn't worthwhile, the death of anyone," says Cardenal, a Roman Catholic priest and one of the most renowned Central American poets of the last half-century. "But in that time it was felt that they had died for a better country, in order to create a better country."
The revolution that brought the leftist Sandinistas to power, and the civil war that followed, left tens of thousands dead and laid waste to this majestically beautiful land. As Cardenal, 80, chronicles in his latest volume of memoirs, "La Revolucion Perdida" (The Lost Revolution), revolutions sometimes have an odd way of turning the tables on their inventors.
The inventors in this case were the members of the Sandinista National Liberation Front. Born as a ragtag resistance movement, the Sandinistas in 1979 led a popular overthrow of the thuggish and corrupt Somoza family's four decades of dictatorship.
They then fought the U.S.-backed Contra rebels to a draw while founding a new government based on socialist principles: the redistribution of private property to the poor and increased financial support for education and public health.
Cardenal served as culture minister, organizing poetry and arts workshops for peasants, soldiers and factory workers. An advocate of liberation theology the left-wing Christian doctrine that Jesus' teachings support revolutionary action against entrenched social injustice Cardenal believed that his duties as priest, poet and Sandinista were essentially one and the same.
Marxism, in Cardenal's view, was compatible with a God-given natural order not the "dogmatic and metaphysical" Marxism of the Soviet Union, as he puts it in "The Lost Revolution," but the "flexible and pluralistic" Marxism of Nicaragua, which had grown organically from the heated soil of the country's volcanic inequalities.
But the Vatican didn't see it that way, particularly not Pope John Paul, whose life in Poland had been shadowed by the specter of Soviet communism. In Latin America, the pontiff began replacing left-leaning bishops with conservatives who cracked down on social activism within the church. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI last week, was John Paul's point man on doctrine, denouncing liberation theology and working through his Vatican office to silence its leading practitioners.
During a visit to Managua in 1983, the pope wagged his finger at the priest and publicly scolded him. As chanting Sandinistas and their supporters drowned out the Holy Father, an open-air Mass dissolved into chaos. Cardenal was pressured by the church to resign his government post but refused.
Cardenal eventually was barred from performing holy sacraments. His brother, Fernando Cardenal, also a priest, served as education minister. He was suspended from the Jesuit order but later readmitted.
In "The Lost Revolution," Ernesto Cardenal maintains that John Paul's condemnation of the Sandinistas showed a basic lack of understanding of Nicaragua's long-suffering citizens. "The people lacked respect for the pope, it's true," he writes, "but it's because first the pope had lacked respect for the people."
Asked about the new pope in an interview last week with a Nicaraguan publication, Cardenal described Benedict as an "inquisitor" and called his election a "fatal" decision by the church.
Now the Sandinistas, who lost Nicaragua's presidency in 1990, are struggling for political relevancy and John Paul lies entombed in St. Peter's. As for the revolution, Cardenal believes, it lost its moorings years ago. He is especially incensed at Daniel Ortega, the Sandinistas' former military leader and president, whom Cardenal has accused of acting like a dictator by quashing dissent within the Sandinista party and cutting cynical deals with the party's former opponents.
Ortega is seeking the presidency for the fourth time. And Cardenal is backing businessman and former Managua Mayor Herty Lewites, who once spent a year in U.S. federal prison for gun-running to the Sandinistas. "I hope that Ortega will not be elected president," Cardenal says. "It would be a disaster for our country."
Even before losing power, Ortega and the Sandinista leadership had alienated many of their followers. While top party officials were allowed to live in the confiscated mansions of Somoza's cronies, ordinary Nicaraguans were still mired in poverty and despair.
Cardenal's memoirs have little to say about other costly errors of the Sandinista regime, such as its forced relocation of the coastal Miskito Indians, for which it was roundly condemned.
Meanwhile, liberation theology has fallen from favor in Latin America. Conservative evangelical Protestantism, not Marxist Catholicism, is the new spiritual growth engine. Across the hemisphere's southern half, a new generation of business-suited, left-leaning leaders in countries such as Argentina, Chile and Brazil has supplanted the bearded, fatigue-wearing comandantes. "Capitalism won. Period," Cardenal conceded in a 1999 interview with the Miami Herald. "What more can be said?" |
Continued:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-et-cardenal26apr26,0,5762873.story?coll=la-home-headlines
_________________
I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death. (Thomas Paine, 1776) |
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