Liberation of Francis

Through the 1950s and 1960s the Latin American Catholic Church reinterpreted the gospel in a radical way. This radical, politicised Christianity was named Liberation Theology. Check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_theology

In the 1980s, pope John Paul II refused to condemn the right wing regime in El Salvador for running death squads. Ostensibly this was because he didn't like the condemnation of systemic, as opposed to personal, sin.

This was not a philosophy he applied to the communist regimes of Eastern Europe, with which he was a little more familiar. Quite the opposite.

In fact I rather think the John Paul II decided that the greater evil to fight was communism, so he basically took sides in the political dogfight between left and right. He took the side of the right. I do think John Paul II was a basically good man, but I do not think he was politically neutral, I think he could easily make common cause with the political right, such as anti abortion republicans. But he could not condemn the right wing death squads of Latin America. This is the most serious of failings, in my mind it ranks close to his failings on sexual abuse in the Church, and it has a common cause. His right wing philosophy trusted the church hierarchy in a fundamental way. He thought it a good of itself. Where as the revolutionaries of Liberation Theology were only too ready to accept the complicity of religious authority in the excesses of the government, and see both government and church as part of the same ruling class. Much like in medieval Europe.

To my mind, in the same way that some evangelical protestants seem to worship the bible instead of God, some high church Anglicans & Catholics can sometimes appear to worship the church. It is this sin of idolatry which I think John Paul II fell in to. All the institution of the church, human organisation that it is, is not worth one human life, which (for a Christian) is indisputably the creation of God.

From the election of John Paul II up to the resignation of Benedict XVI the papacy was occupied by confirmed right wingers.

This was but a short season. And it aligns with the dominance of the political right in the secular west. The regimes of Reagan/Bush, Thatcher/Cameron. Kohl, Berlusconi. Even the representatives of the left in this time were less radical than the rightists, and would have looked centre right just a couple of decades before. Think of Clinton, Blair, Mitterand & Schroeder.

After the second world war there was a revolution of democratisation throughout the West. Votes guaranteed to all. Welfare states founded. A new accountability for our rulers. An unprecedented expansion of educational opportunity.

The rightwingism from the late seventies up until the aftermath of the Global Economic crisis is the reaction to the revolution. A retrenchment, a rolling back of the earlier reform.

It is time to once again tread the path of radical reform. Liberation theology has returned. I expect secular leadership to also follow this leftward path.