The Argentine news magazine Analysis observed: “In the last weeks of 1968, some 150 Catholic priests created political expectation in various parts of the country. Thus in Córdoba they advocated the need for violent revolution: in Neuquén, Chaco and Tucumán, they harassed the government . . . while in Buenos Aires they presented [President] Onganía with a petition.”

In Brazil, too, church leaders have come into conflict with the government because of their political agitating.

And Joseph Michenfelder, a Maryknoll priest who directs the Catholic Information Service in Peru, explains: “The Catholic revolutionaries are basing their efforts on the Popes’ encyclicals, especially the recent ‘Development of Peoples,’ which [supports] . . . violent revolution.”

They have long meddled in politics, even requiring support by their peoples of worldly wars. Thus Catholic historian Gordon Zahn admits: “The Church did become an agency of social control operating in behalf of the Nazi state insofar as insuring wholehearted Catholic support of the [second world] war was concerned.”​—German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars, page 202.

Nation’s Business of August 1964 accurately notes the result of this support of the world wars by the churches:

“The armies of 1914 were composed of Catholics, Protestants and Jews in roughly equal numbers on both sides. Equally acclaimed, or disregarded, on both sides were the teaching of the Hebrew prophets and of Christ Himself. Disdain of religious precepts, it is noted, became even more pronounced in the second war.”

A Catholic, distressed by the unchristian course of the churches, wrote in a Catholic journal:

“See how in World War I, the German and Italian Catholics hated and killed their American and English brothers and we, acting in a like manner, killed our German brethren in Christ. In World War II this same horrible scene was repeated when most Catholics obeyed their respective States and in hatred and fear killed those whom Christ insists they love. . . .

“If the State would order us to kill ourselves we would refuse to obey . . . However, if the State tells us to kill our innocent brother living in another land we generally do so, forgetting entirely, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself’ and that ‘Love does no evil to a neighbor.’”​—The Sign, September 1955.