To me, this was a very significant thing.
I mean, I would go to meetings in Baltimore, which were sort of inspired by, say, Jesse
Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition movement would always begin our meeting with a prayer.
And I had to get used to the fact that I was not religious.
I was expected to hold hands with everybody else and engage in this prayer.
In Latin America,
again, a lot of the movement was, again, sort of inspired by it, by religiosity and by religious
organization in the churches where it's very significant part of this.
And the churches were very, very connected to political action.
In Costa Rica, for example, I went to a commune where the the priest and the local population
had organized a rescue center for the guerrilla fighters coming out of Nicaragua.
And they would sometimes come out wounded and they’d need care and they needed rest
and all that before going back in to fight in Nicaragua.
And in talking to the priest, we asked the kind of question of, well, you know, this
is a very organized thing here.
And, you know, obviously political active, the population is with you.
The population.
We're providing all of the services that need to be provided, providing the food and good
health care and help and all that kind of thing.
And this is a very, very progressive thing.
It was a Christian based community, as it were, and the priest was at the head of it.
And I kind of said, Well, you know, how do you get on with the hierarchy, the bishops
and so on?
And in this case, the bishops was not terribly fond of what they were doing and but he said
something very interesting to me, which I think was very prophetic.
And that very interesting thing was this.
He said, look, I don't need the bishops to do what I'm doing.
And I got the support of the people.
The people want to do this.
I'm very much with them.
I try to give them guidance and we help and we worked very well.
I am more important to the bishops than the bishops are important to me because without
me, the bishops would not have the kind of popular base which I get from actually the
kind of work that I'm doing here.
So when the bishops come down here and tell me to stop doing what I'm doing, I'm saying,
well, if I stop doing what I'm doing, you’ll no longer have a populist base for, you know,
etc..
I've had that conversation a couple of times and they then left me alone and said, Oh,
well, basically you continue doing what you're doing.
Well, the theology of liberation was so strong in Central America, it sparked all kinds of
attacks upon religious figures.
Archbishop Romero in El Salvador got assassinated in his church.
And there were four American nuns murdered
in El Salvador.
And the other thing that I learned while there was I had an opportunity to talk to one of
the members of the junta that came to power in Nicaragua after the revolution had succeeded.
Sergio Ramirez, the poet and literary figure and the like, who was one of the junta.
And he said a couple of interesting and again, memorable things to me, which are this.
And he said, you know, it's interesting.
Many people here like to talk about globalization and thinking about, oh, my goodness, how do
we organize against globalization?
Well, he said, if you want a ready made organization, which is global in structure and which is
capable of confronting globalization, you would go to the Jesuits and he said nearly
all of the people working in the lot of this revolutionary movement in Nicaragua come from
a Jesuit background.
We, all of us, got of our ideas about justice and so on in the Jesuit seminaries and that
educational base gave an ideological base and a Christian base, if you like, to what
it was we were doing.
Now we have seen social movement after social movement emerge around the world, but there's
no organizing force at the center of it.
The trade unions are not able to do it in most parts of the world.
They still exist quite powerfully in some, but in most parts of the world, the trade
union movement is not.
And socialist movement is is not very, very strong.
And in much of the world, also, the evangelical movement is taking over.
But there is a need and this is, I think, important argument I want to make.
There's a need to have within a political movement some notion of meaning, some notion
of the meaning of resistance of life and all the rest of it.
That makes for the importance of some sort of religious doctrine central to what politics
can be about