TV Viewers Learn of Church’s Political Involvement

THE programs on France’s state television about the Catholic Church revealed something else. They revealed a degree of political activity by clergymen of which many viewers were not aware.

For one thing, the televiewers heard the oath by which the Spanish bishops swear allegiance to the state before General Franco. Also featured was a series of interviews showing priests, monks and nuns more or less openly rebellious against the political regime in Spain. This has produced a grave embarrassment to the higher clergy who swear loyalty to the state.

One sequence, filmed near Barcelona, showed a meeting of rebel priests in a convent room placed at their disposal by the nuns. When the French TV interviewer asked one of the priests if political action was compatible with his priestly functions, he replied: “Yes, because the official church deals in politics all the time.” A long-haired ‘hippie’ type Jesuit priest stated that “in Spain, a priest reads the Gospel and Marx.” Asked whether the two were not contradictory, he answered, “No.”

Another interview took place inside a church in which the altar is curtained off when the church is used as a hall for clandestine political meetings. Here a priest stated bluntly that “it is necessary to open people’s eyes to the adulterous marriage between the church and state.” A worker-priest added: “The Church is united with international imperialism. This imperialism must be destroyed, whether it be religious or economic.”

But are these priests attaching more importance to political activity than to teaching people the Word of God? Television watchers saw the interviewer put this question to a Spanish Benedictine monk. Many were surprised to hear the monk answer: “Yes, this is true.”

Then French Cardinal Daniélou was asked to comment on this film report about the Catholic Church in Spain. Cardinal Daniélou stated: “I was struck by the genuineness of these priests. . . . I was also struck by the way they continually affirmed that their revolutionary struggle in no way affected their belief in God.” But many viewers were struck by something else. They thought it strange to hear a cardinal accept the idea of priests being political revolutionaries!

Turmoil Among French Clergy

Another one of the television programs reviewed the political activity of the French clergy. It showed a group of rebel priests, of whom there are said to be about a thousand in France.

A spokesman for these priests declared that they had committed themselves “to political action that mobilizes us to fight as citizens against all the oppressive forces in this country and elsewhere that engender and perpetuate flagrant inequalities and injustices. The Third World begins in the West, so we need to start here, together with all those who are already engaged in this liberation work.”

Television viewers must have wondered if they were listening to a priestly discourse or to a declaration on Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto! Their doubts seemed justified by the next sequence.

The next sequence showed leftist militant Catholics engaged in “class warfare” along with their local priest. The priest felt that mankind is divided, not into believers and atheists, but into those who are fighting to liberate mankind (including both believers and atheists), and those who refuse to take part in this combat. He confided that “personally I feel nearer to some of my Marxist and atheist friends than to those believers who stay outside of this fight.”

Political Differences in United States

One part of the television report had to do with Catholicism in the United States. It showed that there too political differences among the clergy were growing more pronounced.

Commenting on this part of the TV report, the French newspaper Le Monde spoke of the “super-Americanism of the [Catholic] Church, which has tied itself in with the Establishment in order to be accepted by a mainly Protestant community.”

However, a priest who was interviewed during this program admitted that many American Catholics “no longer feel the need to show themselves to be superpatriots.” And this proved to be especially true in another sequence which showed the conflicting Catholic attitudes on the Vietnam war.

Some American Catholics considered the war to be a crusade to save the Vietnam Catholics. But other American Catholics, including some priests, were willing to go to prison for violently demonstrating against the war.

Also revealing to many was the series of interviews with prominent Catholics who told of the important part the Catholic Church played in modern Vietnam. It was disclosed that one of the original reasons why the French colonized Indochina in the nineteenth century was to protect Catholic missionaries who were being persecuted there.

Television viewers were told that during the Indochina war between the French and the Vietminh (1947-1954), and in the present Vietnam war, the defense of Catholic interests was one of the major factors. The TV reporter interviewed a Catholic priest in a Vietnamese village who admitted proudly that he personally gave the villagers​—men, women and children—​military training.

With regard to the Catholic refugees who left North Vietnam after 1954, Le Monde spoke of them as being organized by “shock-troop-type priests, officer-priests who talk as much about machine guns as they do about the Gospel.”

The Church in Latin America

In the last program there was a report on the Catholic Church in Latin America. It showed that Catholicism was forced upon the Latin-American peoples by the conquistadors and the priests who accompanied them from Europe. This program also revealed that the Roman Catholic Church supported authoritarian governments that oppressed the people.

Part of this oppression could be noted in the fact that although present for nearly five centuries and long holding the monopoly in public education, the Church kept its people in ignorance. Even today in many Latin-American countries illiteracy is widespread.

Commenting on this particular program, the pro-Catholic Paris daily Le Figaro wrote: “It must be said to the credit of the producers of this program that they never allowed us to forget the main point, namely the deep poverty of the ‘marginal’ men​—Bolivians, Colombians, Peruvians, Brazilians—​who today are like displaced persons because they have never been considered worthy to be treated like human beings. That the [Catholic] Church and the government acted in complicity was long taken for granted. Now there is something new: today some priests and laymen are trying to break up the marriage between church and state.”

Confirming this, the TV camera showed a priest working among Bolivian Indians. He spoke of the “powerful [Catholic] Church that has flirted with the governments and enriched itself.” A priest in Colombia who works among the poor stated: “The church’s mission is to work with the poor. But in Colombia everything is different because here the church and the state are married, they have set up house together.” Both of these priests are in trouble with their bishops. But they are being joined by other priests who are becoming revolutionaries.

In its comment on this TV program, Le Monde wrote: “The fourth program gave a complex picture of Catholicism in Latin America, particularly in Colombia, Bolivia, Guatemala and Brazil. A painful litany of hunger, poverty, mortality, illiteracy, and a striking disparity in the attitudes of the members of the clergy.”

One can imagine that the growing differences in moral and political attitudes among Catholic clergymen would be reflected in other areas too. It was, and the TV programs showed some of this.