Someone else who has been talking and writing for years on this subject is Noam Chomsky, a friend and supporter of Father Giraldo. In response to my most recent article on the continued assault against the Church in Colombia, Professor Chomsky wrote to me: "Very few are aware of the war the US waged against the Church after the heresy of Vatican II, seeking to return the Church to the Gospels for the first time since Emperor Constantine. You probably know that I've been writing about it for a long time. To closed ears, mostly." Alas, it was a video of a lecture which Chomsky gave in 2009 which really awakened me to the reality of this war and its true nature.
Thus, in December of 2009, Professor Noam Chomsky gave a fascinating speech at Columbia University which summarized events known to few in the developed world: In 1962, Pope John XXIII, through the Second Vatican Council, attempted to reclaim the early roots of the Church; the Church of the first 300 years when it was the "persecuted Church," the Church of the martyrs. The nature of the Church had changed with Constantine's declaration in 324 A.D. that the Catholic Church would be the official Church of the Roman Empire, thereby making it the "persecuting Church," with the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and complicity with Nazism among the numerous crimes which flowed from this.
With the Second Vatican Council in 1962, the Church worldwide began to reevaluate itself. In Latin America, this took the form of "Liberation Theology" – a philosophy which took a "preferential treatment for the poor" and which called for active support for social justice movements on behalf of workers, landless peasants and indigenous peoples and active opposition to military rule and corporate domination.
This philosophy, which combined Christianity with Marxism, was first formulated at a meeting of Latin American theologians, spearheaded by Gustavo Gutierrez, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1964. Brazil became ground zero for this new movement and Christian "base communities" dedicated to Liberation Theology began to spring up in that country and to spread throughout Latin America, with more theological meetings to develop Liberation Theology held in Havana, Cuba; Bogotá, Colombia and Cuernavaca, Mexico in June and July 1965.
As Noam Chomsky explains, the United States, not content to sit back and watch as an openly Marxist theology take hold in Latin America – a theology which threatened the U.S.'s economic and military domination of the region – quickly moved to wipe out this emerging movement through violence. For its part, the Vatican, after the death of John XXIII, also moved to wipe it out through the censuring, removal and even de-frocking of liberation priests and bishops.
The first strike against Liberation Theology by the U.S., Chomsky relates, took place in its very cradle – Brazil. Thus, in 1964, the U.S. sponsored the toppling of democratically-elected Brazilian President João Goulart, setting up a military dictatorship which would rule until 1985 and which, through continued U.S. military assistance, violently attack Liberation priests, religious and base communities, thereby extracting the new radical theological movement by its roots.
The U.S. would continue to engage in active, military operations to wipe out Liberation Theology, leaving a slew of murdered priests, brothers and sisters, and even the Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, in its wake. All told, well over 100 religious were murdered in Latin America between 1964 and 1985, and the bloodshed did not stop there.
As Chomsky emphasizes, even after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which marked the official end to the Cold War, the U.S. continued its onslaught against the Liberation Church, most famously through its support of the military slaying of 6 Jesuit Priests, along with their housekeeper and her daughter, in November of 1989. As we know from the 1993 UN Truth Commission report, the intellectual authors of the killings of these Jesuits was Col. Inocente Orlando Montano Morales and Colonel Rene Emilio Ponce – fellow 1970 graduates of the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) in Fort Benning, Georgia. And, this stands to reason, for as Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer notes in his book, School for Assassins (Orbis Books, 1999), in 75% of the training exercises at the SOA, the priest or other religious figure (usually played by a U.S. army chaplain) end up either killed or wounded.
