Though I am not a Catholic, I am very supportive of my wife and I appreciate the opportunity to attend Mass at Our Lady, Star of the Sea with her. Recently, we saw the screening of “Romero”, and I made these notes:.
Deidre Leach, in her introduction, hit the nail on the head: “Six Salvadorean families owned as much land as 270,000 peasant families”.
Romero, a mild, bookish, political compromiser, was regarded by the military establishment as a safe appointment to Archbishop of El Salvador. But within three years he had become a threat to that establishment and he was therefore assassinated on March 24, 1980 by a death squad trained and funded by the US. His funeral Mass eight days later was attended by 250,000 mourners, some 30-50 of whom were then killed by military gunfire. Sporadic attempts at land reform have subsequently failed and wealth distribution there, and in Latin America generally, remains largely unchanged.
The film was made by the Paulist Fathers some ten years later, receiving respectful rather than enthusiastic reviews, “it has a good heart” implying analytical weakness. Though I am quite familiar with its social background I found the film very powerful, as did the audience when Deidre Leach led the discussion afterwards. We traced Romero’s spiritual development through the assassination of his fellow priest Rutilio Grande, a Liberation Theologian (“If they killed him for doing what he did, then I too have to walk the same
path”), the assassination of the Minister for Agriculture who advocated land reform, and Romero’s own subsequent exposure to poverty and the rape, murder and torture of those who raised objections. Though not mentioned in the film, Romero once said “When I try to help the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor they call me a communist”.
Members of the audience identified the doubting Thomases, betraying Judases, and equated Romero with Thomas A’Beckett. Less clear were our answers to the question posed as to how the Church should address these issues (perhaps more emphasis on classes in social justice?)
As usual, it took me about two hours to formulate my own answer to that question. First, the central problem was gross land inequality. Second, there have been only two successful land reforms in history, both peaceful, both in unique and unrepeatable circumstances. In one, conqueror General MacArthur was given absolute power to stop the Communist slide into South East Asia. Perceiving feudal land systems as the root problem, he forced through land redistributions in Taiwan, South Korea and Japan, lifting these societies out of poverty and inequality. In the other, a power vacuum left by the death of Mao Zedong was immediately and spontaneously filled when the peasants simply walked out of the communes and resumed private household farming. Since there was no feudal landlord creaming off fifty percent of product, the investment of this surplus in small factories led to the highest sustained economic growth rates ever
recorded anywhere.
This seems to leave bloody revolution, which has failed, or land tax reform, which has never been tried, as options. The Church has no business in bloody revolution and probably sees tax reform as political. But, where wealth differences are obscene, should not the Church advocate tax reforms that reduce the size of the camel and increase the aperture in the eye of the needle?
David Smiley