Why Catholics are leaving the Church: Part 3

Sunday as American and British bombers shocked and awed Baghdad with more bomb tonnage than the Allies had dropped on Dresden during the Second World War, Trinis who had their radios on the right station were treated to an explanation of these pre-emptive strikes over those still to be found weapons of mass destruction. It was not over petrol, the UN Security Council was not mentioned once. This war, which left Iraqis with uncounted dead, the basic infrastructures of electricity, sewerage or water in smithereens, was ordained by God: it was the fulfillment of prophecy. Wasn’t Iraq really Babylon and wasn’t Sadaam Hussein Nebu-chadnezzar? The collection of millennium old artifacts, the archaeological search for the ruins of ancient civilisations, Sadaam’s preoccupation over old Sumeria, old Assyria and old Babylon, wasn’t this tangible proof that prophecy had been fulfilled? Babylon, lead by the modern Nebuchad-nezzar alias Saddam, she who persecuted the saints, would at last fall conquered by the armies of the Lord. Pastor Cuffy in his weekly column agreed. My pet Seventh Day Adventist weekly columnist got prophecy a little differently. All biblical experts, he assured us, were agreed that the US was Babylon: read Revelations. It was the fall of Babylon — read Revelations — which would bring to the fore the Beast. This Beast was Rome. Obviously the disagreement of Catholics over the Iraq war was a quarrel between Babylon and the Beast.

When Americans
discovered

If until now Fundamentalism — usually discussed in its Islamic expression — and its political implications were seen as the backward beliefs of backward Third World peoples, the continuing Israeli-Palestinian war, September 11, and more crucially the Iraqi war changed this. Rumsfeld, Cheyney and Jeb Bush in the political sphere had as their corollary the tele-evangelists Falwell, Graham and company in the religious sphere. If before the Jewish lobby was seen as the major factor influencing US policy in the Middle East, Christian Fundamentalists — no lovers of Jews — now formed a powerful coalition with Jewish organisations. After all Fun-damentalists too believed in the biblical promised land. Moreover for Fundamentalists Christians “The Jews who are scattered will be regathered” was part of the End of Times prophecy, delightfully ridding the rest of the world of Jews while issuing in the Day of Judgment. Bush’s words ‘crusade’ or his ‘axis of evil’ became not only political terms but religious belief. The implications of this were serious enough for a number of mainstream Christian churches in the USA after the shock and awe of Baghdad to issue a statement warning of the danger of the demonisation of other religions, in this case Islam. Well I read of the discovery of the influence of Fundamentalist Christianity on US foreign policy — or the other way around — with a bit of a sly smile. We in Latin America and the Caribbean were subjected to this not only under Bush but under Reagan.

Crusaders in Latin America

As early as the mid-seventies it was easier for a Pentecostal pastor to get a visa from the military junta in Brazil than for a Catholic Jesuit. Commentators looking at the rapid growth of Pentecostal-ism in Latin America would underline that this was not only due to Pentecostal missionary concerns: it was part of the deliberate cold war strategy of the USA. By the 1970’s it was reckoned in Washington that the Catholic Church was an untrustworthy ally of the Latin American oligarchies and not necessarily a friend of military dictatorships or political theories of National Security. This assessment was not due to the priest Camillio Torres with his duty of the revolutionary is to make the revolution and the duty of a Catholic is to be a revolutionary. He was shot dead, rifle in hand. Nor was it due to liberation theologians, certain of whom, with the Protestantised Hans Kung of popular theology in Europe, would be mediatised in the USA and the UK. It was John XXIII’S Pacem en Terres of 1963 and the slant it gave to Vatican II followed by Medellin in 1968 and the adoption of the policy of the preferential option for the poor which would send cold shivers up political spines. Pacem en Terres embraced human rights as natural law, ie, universally applicable, linked to the nature of humanity as to the nature of the proper wielding of power. It was therefore binding on all states. For the first time the words ‘solidarity’ and ‘common good’ are used in an official Vatican document. Worse, human rights was argued both in terms of political rights, ie, democracy, and Independence, as well as in terms of cultural, economic and social rights. Bad news in a Latin America where Goulart of Brazil had in 1968 been overturned by a military worried about the social consequence of the expansion of the right to vote to the illiterate or where states cancelled human rights in the name of the doctrine of National Security. Option for the poor was bad news too for the Latin American oligarchies of Latifunda or the new industrialists of the cities, both of whom until now had thought of the Church as an extension of themselves. Nothing illustrated the danger better than the evolution of Latin America’s two well-known bishops: Romero of El Salvador and Helder Camara of Brazil. Both started off in near fascist organisations, enter as conservative bishops and become famous for their defence of the poor in the teeth of para-militaries, disappearances and indebtedness. Overnight the crusade tents sprung up as Pentecostalists moved in. Commentators and sociologists analysing the phenomenon of Latin American Catholics leaving the Church would see Pentecostalism and Fundamentalist Christian sects as the deliberate spearhead of Americanisation or later of globalisation. It was not only Latin America. Le Monde Diplomatique, writing mainly about New Age as well as Fundamentalist sects it is true, would see the phenomenon of the sect as America’s Trojan horse in Europe.

Targetting the Caribbean

Nor was the Caribbean spared. At the same time that Pentecostalists were moving into Latin America they were reorganising their missions in the Caribbean. The Gallus Street, Woodbrook Church there for decades and converting few, was old hat. The dispersed gatherings were now coordinated. Areas to be converted were first studied, then targetted. Cells were set up in neighbourhoods, civil service departments, the prisons — anywhere. ‘Ecumenism’ was shrewdly used to invite to ‘ecumenical’ bible study. The ‘small church’ with its single preacher, a phenomenon throughout the Caribbean, was now integrated into the Pentecostal fellowship linked into North America and franchised after the model of Kentucky Fried Chicken or Pizza Hut. By 1992 Pentecostals could boast of 350 pastors as compared with the little over 100 Catholic priests. Students at university abroad were spotted, converted as missionaries to be sent back. The most modern techniques from glossy magazines distributed to doctors’ offices, to radio and TV to press advertisements were used to spread the message. This could be ‘freedom’ outside of prison gates to bible coffees in a Woodbrook of the retired and elderly. If your mother was ill, you employed a nurse’s aide who was Pentecostal — watch out. You could be slipped Pentecostal literature at the checkout point of your grocery or at formerly perfectly mainstream Christian events. If before Hanover Methodist took in charge immigrants from the smaller islands and integrated them into Trini society, that role was now achieved by the corner Pentecostal pastor. Not only did Pentecostals convert, the Pentecostal channel on TV gave daily ‘Christian’ world news interpreting current events while Pentecostals collected the name ‘Christian’ disenfranchising everyone else. At a time when society was in full disintegration, the Pentecostalists offered a certain security, the Bible an explanation, evil was devils and success endless miracles. Indeed Pentecostalist programmes of-fered success in business, in getting jobs or in getting money as the spin-off of being ‘saved’. Pentecostal charities were unencumbered by the ‘everyone’ by which Catholic charities attempted to be the nation’s social security — Pentecostals could zone in on their own.

A fragile church

The Pentecostalist push in Trinidad and Tobago — as the push of other sects from the USA — was taking place at a time when the Catholic Church was at its most fragile. We easily forget that there were only 14 years between the 1956 victory of the PNM at the polls and the students revolts of 1970. During that time there had been Independence, Vatican II, a change from the long leadership of Archbishop Finbar Ryan to local leadership and Anthony Pantin, a change to local leadership in the powerful congregations of Holy Ghost and St Joseph of Cluny, the emergence of a diocesan clergy locally trained, and a Concordat which set serious constraints on denominational schools. In the wider society there had been a savage urbanisation, a transformation in class composition, the gradual elimination of Britain, Ireland or Europe as reference points in favour of the USA and Canada. The Trini church had been prepared for none of these. The two social bulwarks of the Church in times of change were philosophy, ie, the search for meaning, and the insertion of the present within the history of a God who enters history and bouleverses. It was these which formed the principal intellectual anchors of the Holy Spirit as Wisdom or as Discernment. Both were practically absent when Faith and Emotion replaced Faith and Reason. The road was open for ‘prophecy’ to take over.