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Locating turning points in history is strangely attractive. We like to account for them by the actions of great men (rarely women). Before it was like this, after it was like that, the story goes. Though in reality many slow changes and complex dynamics come between before and after.
Peruvian Dominican priest Gustavo Gutiérrez who died on 22 October 2024 aged 96, for many in the Catholic Church, was such a man. Born in the heart of Lima, wheelchair bound for much of his six teenage years, half Quechuan half Hispanic, he became known as the father of Liberation Theology. His theology is the key to understanding the most important current in Catholicism worldwide since the 1960s. To celebrate Gustavo’s life is to celebrate a key contributor to a gradual but vitally important change in the life of a global Church and its 1.36 billion members in the last half century. From the circumstances of Latin America when he was writing, and Catholic tradition, came his vision of theology’s task, ‘el quehacer teologica’. He posed two foundational questions that lay behind the re-discovery of the Church’s “preferential option for the poor” understood as its principal pastoral concern: “How do we convey to the poor that God loves them?” and “How to speak out of the suffering of the innocent about God?” ‘Hablar de Dios desde el sufrimeineto del inocente’, a task that has, to put it mildly, not become redundant with time. When it comes to acknowledging great men, a Peruvian theologian may sound a surprising choice. Many of the world’s Catholics, at least the older ones, would understandably pick instead Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, John XXIII, born into a sharecropper family of thirteen children from a small village in Lombardy, the Pope who called the second Vatican Council (1962-1965). This would be the turning point that – often forgotten - he opened with a speech underlining the Church’s concern for the poor and suffering. A gathering that brought together bishops, leaders and theologians from around the world, largely from Western Europe, which sought to update and renew the life of the Church. The great man story of historical change holds up quite well for the vision behind the Council. But for – what was becoming – a truly global Church, the story neglects the long process of change that had been going on not only in Europe but notably in Latin America. And the impact of the Council in many countries was muted and blocked by cautious bishops, the UK would be a good example, dashing many hopes. Latin America proved more fertile soil. Gutiérrez’s Theology of Liberation: Perspectives published in Spanish in 1971 by the Lima Centro de Estudios y Publicaciones, and in English by the Maryknoll Fathers’ Orbis in 1973, became the core inspirational text driving this process. Latin America had a head-start in addressing the challenge of poverty. In the 1950s, 60% of the population in Peru lived in poverty with 82% of these living in extreme poverty. CELAM, the Bishops’ Conference of Latin America, held its first meeting in 1955, so ideas for action responding to such acute poverty on the continent, such as radio schools, could be shared. Catholic Action officially defined as “the participation of the laity in the apostleship of the hierarchy” drew on the simple formula of see-judge-and-act in movements such as Young Christian Workers and Young Christian Students. Gutiérrez’s recognition of the importance of the economic, social and political in a Christian understanding of the world around him, like that of several other priests, came through student life in Catholic Action, in his case at the National University of San Marcos in Lima. “The poor are the by-product of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible”, he wrote later. His vocation to the priesthood seems to have been in part a response to this responsibility. Gutiérrez’s clerical training brought him to Louvain where he studied psychology and philosophy and, to Lyon, where he was introduced to ‘la nouvelle théologie’ and the European theologians who were later to influence the bishops in the Vatican Council. Central to the thinking in Lyon were writings from the early Christian centuries, the ‘Church Fathers’, a time when the appointment of a bishop could be challenged if he were not ‘a lover of the poor’. That, as Gustavo later put it, the Church must be “on the side of the oppressed classes and dominated peoples clearly and without qualification” was not some leftist novelty but rooted in Church history. On his return to Peru, after ordination in 1959, he served in the small Church of the Holy Redeemer in Rimac, a working-class area to the north of downtown Lima. This was the period when the Cuban revolution was putting Latin America into ferment. Two major forces, Marxism and Catholicism, contended for hearts and minds. In his exploration of a Christian account of liberation Gutiérrez along with other liberation theologians rejected a binary conflict and borrowed some elements of Marxist analysis for description of the reality experienced by the poor. The year 1968 for Latin America, as elsewhere, was something of a turning point. Father Pedro Arrupe, the Superior-General of the Society of Jesus, called on his fellow Jesuits in Latin America to inform their ministry by ‘an option for the poor’. In late July Gutiérrez presented a paper, ‘Towards a Theology of Liberation’ at a second continentwide meeting of priests and laity in the Peruvian coastal town of Chimbote. It was one month before a major meeting of CELAM in Medellin, Colombia, which adopted the language of a preferential option for the poor. Liberation theology saw liberation as a dimension of salvation, ‘a demand that we go and build a different social order’, part of building the kingdom of God of the Lord’s Prayer rather than an entirely separate secular project. Gutiérrez understood full well that this could not be accomplished without conflict - deadly for many - after the succession of coups bringing to power the murderous US-supported military dictatorships and oligarchies of 1960s Latin America. The National Security States branded pastoral workers amongst the poor as “communist infiltration of the Church”, and the military and death squads killed them with virtual impunity. The martyr archbishop, Oscar Romero, came to personify their sacrifice. Despite this, in the 1980s, the Vatican sought to censure liberation theology, though through dialogue conflict was to some degree resolved. The pastoral concern and spirituality that Gutiérrez embodied had already entered the bloodstream of the global Church. Features of it are seen in Pope Francis’ teaching and approach to the papacy. It has motivated the work of countless Catholics finding their vocation in working with the poor and marginalised of their societies. I’ve listened to Gustavo speaking on far too few occasions. One anecdote has stayed with me. To paraphrase what he said: “I have realised how different my life is from that of the poor. I have enough money and not enough time. They have time and not enough money”. Perhaps less true in frantic 2024 Britain. Amongst years of teaching and pioneering writing, finding time for the poor may have been his greatest gift. May he rest in peace.
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Perceptions are formed and shaped by experience. Nathan Thrall’s A Day in The Life of Abed Salama (Penguin 2023) offers a vivid vision of the world of Abed Salama, a Palestinian father from a traditional village, close to East Jerusalem, occupied by Israel since the 1967 war. In the words of Alex Preston of The Observer, this book “speaks with truth of ordinary lives trapped in the jaws of history”.
Unlike other Europeans most British people have no historical memory of Occupation. Most of us – Irish immigrants excepted – don’t have that spontaneous sympathy based on historic experience of political domination. South Africans have it, derived from apartheid, passionately enough to take a case against Israel to the International Court of Justice. The conflict over land between Israelis and Palestinians produces two powerful and contrasting emotional responses. The first is sympathy for Israel rooted in the horror of the Holocaust and a European history of Christian pogroms inherited by post-war generations. The second is sympathy for the plight of Palestinians confronted with the might of a US-supported Jewish State blocking their right to self-determination and punishing attempts to achieve it. Emotion can open the mind to empathy and imagination, or to hatred. Consider the emotional impact of the savage Hamas attack of 7th October and the taking of hostages on the many Jewish people for whom the state of Israel is a powerful symbol of safety. Consider the emotional impact as the texture of a Palestinian society is torn asunder, Gaza a killing ground, casualties in the West Bank growing daily. Which is uppermost in the minds of people in Britain, in many cases, will depend on who is winning the propaganda war accompanying the actual conflict, or simply their personal identity. The BBC tries hard to maintain balance between these two perspectives, encouraging the listener or viewer to imagine both, better to understand what the conflict is about and how it might end. (Though only the simplistic story of good allies, some-going-too-far, versus bad terrorists, all-beyond-the-pale, appears admissible to its critics.) Whilst TV images of grieving Palestinians in extremis, filmed in a bombed-out wasteland, or Hamas footage of the 7 October massacre of Jews, can elicit a range of emotions, empathy is not necessarily the most powerful of them. A focus on the present, on news, without historic context does not help understanding. The Life of Abed Salama was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 2023. Thrall, an accomplished writer, is a contributor to several upmarket US and British periodicals. A Jewish American living in Jerusalem, he also lived for a while in Gaza working from 2010 to 2020 for International Alert (an NGO dedicated to “solving the root causes of conflict across divides”) leading its Arab Israeli Project. Thrall’s narrative pivots around a 2012 bus crash north of Jerusalem that killed a teacher and six children, several horribly burnt, one of whom, Milad, is the son of Abed Salama. Thrall knew Abed well and his story is knitted into the history of Israeli Occupation in a matter- of- fact way, Israeli Defence Forces’ (IDF) roadblocks, checkpoints and boundary walls taken entirely for granted. The much-delayed appearance of firefighters and ambulances at the scene of the accident reminded me of entering Israel from Jordan by the Allenby Bridge in the early 1990s. I emerged opposite a large military control tower. After time in South African-occupied Namibia in the 1980s I recognised an occupied territory. And waiting by the bridge I watched with surprise a Palestinian ambulance transferring a patient to an Israeli one. All of this would have been wallpaper for Thrall. For a Palestinian, transport and the geography of Jewish settlements add hours to travel time and complexity compared with the experience of an Israeli citizen. There are three West Bank zones each with their different rules plus Palestinians’ different coloured identity cards, determining where you can and can’t go. The movement of people and goods, both essential to economic development are strictly controlled and obstructed. The office of the Quartet Representative (UN, US, EU and Russia) was created in November 2015 to develop the institutions and economy of the Palestinian territories. The movement of Palestinians living in Gaza, and of goods, was especially restricted requiring a perpetual struggle with the Israeli authorities to keep open Gaza’s border crossings. The much publicised tunnels were dug to allow the import and export of goods sustaining the vestiges of an economy . They also served as the means to import weapons and as arsenals. Thrall is comfortable with cultural difference between Arab and Western societies. Muslim prayer, piety and practice structure time and daily life. And honour, a prime virtue, is paramount. The Palestinian dramatis personae in his book mainly belong to two large extended families who do not intermarry. Marriages themselves are strongly influenced by family interests and parental guidance, not romance. Abed himself as a young man had fallen in love with Ghazl a member of the Hamdan family, he a Salama, a Romeo and Juliet story. Abed’s membership of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) also had implications for personal relationships. Imprisoned for a while because of his DFLP activities, like many, Abed was contemptuous of Fatah and its role in policing the scattered Area B zones on behalf of the Israelis. On the other hand, Abed’s first cousin, Ibrahim Salama became head of the Palestinian Interior Ministry for Jerusalem. And he maintained reciprocal, supportive relationship with his Israeli counterparts. The bond with Dany Tirza and Colonel Saar Tzur, provides the reader many insights. Also unexpected, on the Jewish side of the divide is early Ashkenazi (Central and Eastern European Jews) discrimination against Mizrahi, Moroccan Jews, officially led by Israel’s founding father David Ben-Gurion. Thrall is not writing to make political points, daily life makes the points for him. In the first intifada (1987-1993), Abed was detained for his participation: “The plainclothes captains of Israel’s intelligence service, the Shabak, tortured him in the usual method, known as shabih ....hands shackled to a pipe high above him so that only his toes touched the ground, pulling his limbs as if on a vertical rack”. Written like remedial instructions from a physiotherapist. Everyday stuff. The Life of Abed Salama describes what is happening on the ground, the relentless expropriation of Palestinian land, destruction of property and exclusion of more and more Palestinians from areas claimed by Jews. Thrall’s big picture is of cycles of violence, people somehow getting used to it, while others by their violent actions ensure that peace eludes the peacemakers. Update and add in Muslim and Jewish religious extremists in power on each side, to account for the contemporary catastrophe. Thrall’s book captures the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of a Palestinian community under occupation. Its disciplined prose conveys a deep empathy which many readers will share. It offers no solutions to an intractable problem. But as much as any words can, it may help some readers to beware of importing a tragic conflict from the Middle East to communities in Britain. See TheArticle 22/10/2024 There is no shortage of experts predicting what Putin may do if Zelensky fires his Western long-range ATACMS (army tactical missile systems) deep into Russia. On Syria’s borders are both US military bases and Russian including Putin’s strategically important naval base at Tartus on the Mediterranean. But opinions how Russia might respond to a major Israeli attack on Iran, with US back-up, are notable by their absence. Instead, we hear repeated, imprecise warnings of a ‘wider war in the Middle East’. How wide though?
From the inception of the Syrian civil war in March 2011, like Iran, Russia provided Assad with military aid. And from late 2011 Iran sent Revolutionary Guard Forces (IRCG) to join the Hezbollah militias propping up Assad’s collapsing regime. In July 2015 General Qasem Soleimani, later assassinated by Israel, visited Moscow to coordinate military tactics. Two months later Russia intervened decisively with its air-force and troops including Wagner Group irregulars. The resultant bombing and slaughter set a pattern for future Russian war crimes. “A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilised”, the words of President Obama in August 2012. Almost a year to the day President Assad used sarin gas on the population of Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, killing some 1,400. No US military intervention against the Syrian regime followed. For a variety of reasons, not least the US’ previous debacles in Somalia and Iraq, the red line had been erased. In 2014, a US-led coalition did act but in an air campaign against ISIS and the Al-Nusra Front in Syria. An opportunity for Putin had opened up. In 2015, Russian firepower was turned indiscriminately on the Free Syrian Army fighting Assad whose murderous regime was helped cling onto power. Syria fell apart, hundreds of thousands died, 6.7 million left the country mainly to Turkey and Lebanon, and 6.8 were internally displaced. Syria became a haven for militias and terrorist groups. Fast forward to today. It is almost a year since Iran’s Deputy Defence Minister, Brigadier General Mahdi Farah, announced the forthcoming delivery of 24 Russian Sukhoi fighter jets and Russia is also believed to be in receipt of some 200 Iranian surface-to-surface short range (75 kms) battlefield missiles and to be supported in manufacturing drones for its war in Ukraine. How Russia would respond to a major Israeli attack on Iran, with or without US support, remains speculation. But Putin’s past record offers some clues. Catherine Belton’s Putin’s People: How the KGB took back Russia and then took on the West (William Collins 2020) presents Putin as an adept practitioner of the dissimulation, oppression and criminality of the Russian intelligence services both internally and externally. He, and they, foresaw the collapse of Soviet communism, were determined to retain power in any new dispensation, and moved KGB funds into overseas accounts, notably through the ‘Londongrad laundromat’. In the 1990s, Putin deployed his training in deception as a KGB lieutenant colonel, his spy’s divided personality, to great effect, hiding ruthless ambition, saying what his listeners wanted to hear, and for several years took in both Angela Merkel and Tony Blair. He had risen from a modest KGB post in Dresden organising the smuggling of Western embargoed technology into Russia. Then, via the mayor’s office in St. Petersburg (deputy mayor in 1994), he became a trusted advisor to President Boris Yeltsin (1991-1999). The next task was to remove Yeltsin and his entourage and become President, then to use of the organs of state to bring the primary beneficiaries of Western enforced privatisation, the oligarchs, to heel, and concentrate power in his own hands. State capture, taking over functioning institutions, required and allowed the gradual accumulation of power, national wealth plundered by selected associates, predominantly FSB, successor to the KGB. Belton tracks the process in extraordinary detail. Until it was too late few Western politicians seemed alarmed that Putin was creating a mafia-style autocracy, opponents assassinated or wasting away in Siberian gulags and prisons, punished for disloyalty. Meanwhile huge sums of money that could be used as future FSB and GRU (military intelligence) obschak, slush fund for subverting democracy, was flowing into London and offshore banks. Bankers, lawyers and reputation managers in London took their fees, oligarchs bought up prime property driving up prices, and FSB enemies were assassinated. But like any good spy Putin needed a good cover story. It was sitting there waiting for him amongst Russia’s economic ruins, the wreckage of the loss of the Soviet Union, and America’s growing influence in Georgia and Ukraine. He, Putin, the story ran, had taken up the Presidency to restore the fatherland and return Russia to its imperial glory. Belton suggests that Putin picked up this Tsarist-sounding nationalism in the 1990s from Paris-based aristocratic White Russians who had fled the Bolshevik Revolution and whom he had met and liked. Putin’s adoption of the Russian Orthodoxy that White Russians held dear, as an ideological substitute for communism, fits this analysis. I visited Moscow in 1990 and met with Gorbachev’s religious advisers. They were bewailing the loss of ‘communist morality’. Would Christianity take its place, they asked me? Putin, several years later, seems to have had a similar idea alleging that he’d been secretly baptised by his mother. Archbishop Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, most likely a former KGB asset - undiplomatically warned by Pope Francis not to become “Putin’s altar boy”- was a natural ally. Army officers were even sent to the Russian Orthodox monastery of St. Panteleimon on Mount Athos for religious retreats. Kirill proclaimed Ukraine a Holy War. Putin shares space satellite programmes with Iran, contempt for ‘Western decadence’, rejection of all things LGBTQ+, and, of course, the rhetoric and reality of hatred of the USA. Beyond the distorted world of Putin’s propaganda Russia as Christian bulwark against Western secularism seems bizarre. After Afghanistan, Russia’s brutal conflict in Chechnya involving Sunni jihadists, the terrible 2004 Beslan school slaughter of young children and the horrors of ISIS, and with American bases in most Sunni States, it’s not surprising Russia might be more comfortable with the geopolitics of Iran, a Shi’a-led State. What then is Putin’s next move in the Middle East? Russia received a Hamas delegation in Moscow in 2023. It has de facto abandoned its former balanced position on the Palestine-Israel conflict. But this does not amount to the Kremlin committing Russian military forces to support Iran against Israel. The IRCG are competing with the needs of Russian forces in Ukraine. Iran even denies that the awaited delivery of Russian Sukhoi fighters is imminent. Putin will continue attempting to use disinformation and cyber-attacks to disrupt UK society as punishment, not for support of Israel, but for Britain’s outspoken role in Europe championing Ukraine. His immediate task is getting Trump elected and US support for Ukraine curtailed, the decisive victory this would give Russia in the Ukraine war, putting NATO in jeopardy. Ukraine takes, by far, priority over Palestinians, Lebanese and Iranians. One thing is sure: Putin will increase his cyber efforts to influence the November US presidential elections and put his friend, Donald Trump, in the White House again. See TheArticle 09/10.2024 |
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