Marxist Jesuits are not for tribal welfare. India and Indian Catholics both must realise that

Jaithirth Rao in The Print



Representational image | A church in Tamenglong, Manipur | Simrin Sirur | ThePrint
 

The purpose of this article is not to go into the tragic circumstances around the recent death of Father Stan Swamy. While many columns have been written about the tribal rights activist, including one by retired IPS officer Julio Ribeiro in ThePrint, I believe an attempt should be made to look at the larger issues surrounding the Roman Catholic Church and the Jesuit order in the context of their extensive and intensive engagement with Adivasi communities in India.

Christian missionaries and schools are generally viewed positively by Indian society. In most Bollywood movies, the Christian (usually Catholic) padre is portrayed as a benign, helpful and healing figure. I certainly hope the image stays that way, and is not altered or tarnished. For that, it is important to examine the political ideology of Christian/Catholic Marxism.

It is a common belief in India that the Roman Catholic Church in general and the Jesuit order in particular are anti-Marxist. This belief is quite wrong. The so-called ‘liberation theology’ is very much a Roman Catholic product, absent from most Protestant Christian theological outpourings. Liberation theology is profoundly anti-capitalist, anti-markets and justifies violence, using selective quotations from the gospels. They like to talk about the reference in the gospels to Jesus throwing out money-changers from the temple; there is little if any reference to the parable of talents. The leading lights of liberation theology have been Latin American Jesuits who are completely opposed to a conservative strain in philosophical, theological and political matters. The influence of the Marxist Latin American liberation theologists has deeply permeated the Roman Church in India and has impacted the Jesuit order quite profoundly over the last few decades.

It is this ideological orientation among Jesuits that leads to many of them being well-disposed to Maoist insurgents, while publicly donning the robes of supporters, helpers and padrones of the supposedly helpless tribal people. This is pretty much what Catholic Marxists have endorsed in Central and South America also and is a classic “practice” of liberation theology. 

In contrast with peaceful theology

My father and I both have been products of a leading Jesuit college in south India. I am personally a significant supporter of my alma mater. Every time I interact with older, kinder, more sober, more sensible Jesuits, they find it difficult to let their guard down. But directly or indirectly, they admit to me their frustration with the fact that the loudest and most active elements in their order today are Marxists. These Marxist Jesuits reject the earlier accommodative position of the Church and the order. They have also enthusiastically embraced ‘cultural Marxism,’ which in the West attacks white male dominance and in India has chosen to attack Hindu male dominance.

It is a part of liberation theology that such dominance cannot be addressed within peaceful, constitutional, parliamentary channels. A violent, revolutionary change is, therefore, considered necessary and desirable. They want to overthrow Indian society and specifically Hindu society, which, in the vocabulary of cultural Marxism, is seen as hegemonic, patriarchal, misogynistic, and casteist — a society that the Marxist Jesuits cannot and will not come to a peaceful engagement with. This is in complete contrast with the Jesuits of my college days who respected Hindu traditions and were votaries of an empathetic society.

Unfortunately, too many of today’s Roman Catholic and Jesuit priests take their inspiration not from Roberto de Nobili (a Sanskrit and Tamil scholar), Thomas Stephens (a Marathi scholar), Costanzo Giuseppe Beschi (a Tamil scholar) and Anthony de Mello (a scholar of Vedanta, Buddhism and Sufism) but from Gustavo Gutierrez and Jon Sobrino (radical, even revolutionary Latin American Catholic scholars).

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who served as Pope Benedict XVI, was usually stuck between a rock and a hard place while heading the Vatican’s doctrinal office. He had to condemn de Mello’s fondness for Vedanta, Buddhism and Sufism as theologically not quite proper. At the same time, he had to emphatically oppose Gutierrez’ attempt to plant revolutionary Marxism into Catholic dogma. As early as 1984, Ratzinger’s office published a critical analysis where it was specifically mentioned that “Marxism and Catholic Theology are incompatible.” From my perspective, Ratzinger would have been better off supporting de Mello, who, after all, was engaging with traditions infused with the sacred and the spiritual, something that the founder of Christianity would have approved of.

Non-Christian double-talk

Only the most convoluted arguments can stretch the message of the Christian gospels to support violent materialism. Theologians like Gutierrez and Sobrino are looking for an alternative to market capitalism and reject the position that this economic system has in fact done the best job with respect to poverty reduction. They call for a dismantling of the “bourgeois State,” an old Marxist demand. Their influence extends well beyond Latin America and has found fertile soil in India. Marxist Catholic priests in India are no longer happy looking to the spiritual needs of their kinfolk and focusing on old-fashioned parish work. Instead, they want to move away from their home states and turn up in Tribal tracts, in order to work on the political consciousness of the people there and guide them towards the new Christian theology that resembles revolutionary Marxism, while emphasising some sentences from the gospels and ignoring others.

The idea that the Indian bourgeois State is an oppressor of tribals and that it needs radical transformation is frequently interspersed with positive references to the Indian Constitution. This kind of double-talk is taken straight from the tenets of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong and in its lack of respect for veracity, it is distinctly non-Christian. The ideas derived from more recent theories of cultural Marxism are even more aggressive and puzzling. These theories posit the existence of an endless irreconcilable set of contradictions between Hindu society and the tribals. Of course, these scholars do not bother to address that if there actually exists a chasm between Hindus and tribals, why would there not be a greater chasm between Indian tribals and Christianity, admittedly now channelled via a 19th century German philosopher?

Srisailam, Srikalahasti, Puri, Pandharpur, Jejuri, Dharmasthala, Dantewada, Sabarimala and so many other Hindu pilgrimage centres are intertwined with Adivasi traditions. Within the broad Indic tent, there seems to be more engagement, proximity and, may I suggest, unity in diversity. But, of course this narrative is anathema to cultural Marxists. They have to posit the existence of a wicked Hindu, male, hegemonic order that should be overthrown in the revolution that is just around the corner. In the meantime, at a minimum, it is important to keep the Adivasis worked up with real and imaginary grievances and challenging the Indian State as well as Hindu society.

Need for introspection

The Roman Catholic and Jesuit involvement with India’s tribal population is not a religious or spiritual one. It has, under the influence of Gutierrez and Sobrino, turned into a political one. Oddly enough, the tribals are denied subjective agency. They “require” the help of outside Marxist ideologues and we need to question if this so-called help is in fact a euphemism for manipulation. To manipulate tribals and set them up against a powerful State and against immediate neighbours may end up being the most cynical, sordid and dangerous of approaches.

As an external admirer of conservative traditions in the Catholic Church (the Latin Mass and Gregorian chants come to mind), I am deeply disturbed that a new generation of Marxist Catholics are willing to put at risk centuries of peaceful and cordial engagement between Indian society and Christianity of the Chaldean, Syriac, Roman or Anglican varieties. Opposing the Indian State and declaring war on Hindu society are, at a minimum, not smart. This of course certainly does not answer how Christianity, one of the most spiritually informed religious traditions of the world, can make friends with a violent, atheist, materialist cult.

I have already made a passing reference to my personal connections. Let me add. My brother is a product of a Christian Brothers school; my sister of Loretto and Presentation Convent schools. I am a strong supporter of my old Jesuit college. It is with great sadness and acute concern, therefore, that I view the unnecessary and destructive Marxist orientation of so many Roman Catholic priests, especially members of the Jesuit order.

I call for some serious introspection among my Indian Catholic friends. It is they who can best grapple with this thorny issue. Any non-Catholic speaking up will be accused of being non-secular and bigoted. Lay Catholics indulging in self-examination and confronting the imported Marxist rhetoric among their clergy are best placed to re-introduce spirituality and mutual accommodation into their faith and ensure that the forays into the political and materialistic spheres do not take a destructive turn.

The Chávez victory will be felt far beyond Latin America

Popular support for Venezuela's revolution shows the growing space for genuine alternatives in the 21st century

• 
• • Seumas Milne in Caracas
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 9 October 2012 21.30 BST

Hugo Chávez celebrates his re-election as Venezuelan president. Photograph: Jorge Silva/Reuters

The transformation of Latin America is one of the decisive changes reshaping the global order. The tide of progressive change that has swept the region over the last decade has brought a string of elected socialist and social-democratic governments to office that have redistributed wealth and power, rejected western neoliberal orthodoxy, and challenged imperial domination. In the process they have started to build the first truly independent South America for 500 years and demonstrated to the rest of the world that there are, after all, economic and social alternatives in the 21st century.

Central to that process has been Hugo Chávez and his Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela. It is Venezuela, sitting on the world's largest proven oil reserves, that has spearheaded the movement of radical change across Latin America and underwritten the regional integration that is key to its renaissance. By doing so, the endlessly vilified Venezuelan leader has earned the enmity of the US and its camp followers, as well as the social and racial elites that have called the shots in Latin America for hundreds of years.

So Chávez's remarkable presidential election victory on Sunday – in which he won 55% of the vote on an 81% turnout after 14 years in power – has a significance far beyond Venezuela, or even Latin America. The stakes were enormous: if his oligarch challengerHenrique Capriles had won, not only would the revolution have come to a juddering halt, triggering privatisations and the axing of social programmes. So would its essential support for continental integration, mass sponsorship of Cuban doctors across the hemisphere – as well as Chávez's plans to reduce oil dependence on the US market.

Western and Latin American media and corporate elites had convinced themselves that they were at last in with a shout, that this election was "too close to call", or even that a failing Venezuelan president, weakened by cancer, would at last be rejected by his own people. Outgoing World Bank president Robert Zoellick crowed that Chávez's days were "numbered", while Barclays let its excitement run away with itself by calling the election for Capriles.

It's all of a piece with the endlessly recycled Orwellian canard that Chávez is some kind ofa dictator and Venezuela a tyranny where elections are rigged and the media muzzled and prostrate. But as opposition leaders concede, Venezuela is by any rational standards a democracy, with exceptionally high levels of participation, its electoral process more fraud-proof than those in Britain or the US, and its media dominated by a vituperatively anti-government private sector. In reality, the greatest threat to Venezuelan democracy came in the form of the abortive US-backed coup of 2002.

Even senior western diplomats in Caracas roll their eyes at the absurdity of the anti-Chávez propaganda in the western media. And in the queues outside polling stations on Sunday, in the opposition stronghold of San Cristóbal near the Colombian border, Capriles voters told me: "This is a democracy." Several claimed that if Chávez won, it wouldn't be because of manipulation of the voting system but the "laziness" and "greed" of their Venezuelans – by which they seemed to mean the appeal of government social programmes.

Which gets to the heart of the reason so many got the Venezuelan election wrong. Despite claims that Latin America's progressive tide is exhausted, leftwing and centre-left governments continue to be re-elected – from Ecuador to Brazil and Bolivia to Argentina – because they have reduced poverty and inequality and taken control of energy resources to benefit the excluded majority.

That is what Chávez has been able to do on a grander scale, using Venezuela's oil income and publicly owned enterprises to slash poverty by half and extreme poverty by 70%, massively expanding access to health and education, sharply boosting the minimum wage and pension provision, halving unemployment, and giving slum communities direct control over social programmes.

To visit any rally or polling station during the election campaign was to be left in no doubt as to who Chávez represents: the poor, the non-white, the young, the disabled – in other words, the dispossessed majority who have again returned him to power. Euphoria at the result among the poor was palpable: in the foothills of the Andes on Monday groups of red-shirted hillside farmers chanted and waved flags at any passerby.

Of course there is also no shortage of government failures and weaknesses which the opposition was able to target: from runaway violent crime to corruption, lack of delivery and economic diversification, and over-dependence on one man's charismatic leadership. And the US-financed opposition campaign was a much more sophisticated affair than in the past. Capriles presented himself as "centre-left", despite his hard right background, and promised to maintain some Chavista social programmes.

But even so, the Venezuelan president ended up almost 11 points ahead. And the opposition's attempt to triangulate to the left only underlines the success of Chávez in changing Venezuela's society and political terms of trade. He has shown himself to be the most electorally successful radical left leader in history. His re-election now gives him the chance to ensure Venezuela's transformation is deep enough to survive him, to overcome the administration's failures and help entrench the process of change across the continent.

Venezuela's revolution doesn't offer a political model that can be directly transplanted elsewhere, not least because oil revenues allow it to target resources on the poor without seriously attacking the interests of the wealthy. But its innovative social programmes, experiments in direct democracy and success in bringing resources under public control offer lessons to anyone interested in social justice and new forms of socialist politics in the rest of the world.

For all their problems and weaknesses, Venezuela and its Latin American allies have demonstrated that it's no longer necessary to accept a failed economic model, as many social democrats in Europe still do. They have shown it's possible to be both genuinely progressive and popular. Cynicism and media-fuelled ignorance have prevented many who would naturally identify with Latin America's transformation from recognising its significance. But Chávez's re-election has now ensured that the process will continue – and that the space for 21st-century alternatives will grow.

Some History of Monetary Unions

Making friends the shared currency way

Greece is falling out with its neighbours over their common currency - just as it did about a century ago. But forging closer bonds through shared currencies rarely works for long, says historian David Cannadine.

The continuing travails of the Greek economy and the threat they represent to European Monetary Union may both seem novel and unprecedented, but in several significant ways, we've been there before.

Far from being a recent innovation, there have been monetary unions for almost as long as there has been money. But across two and a half millennia, and whatever varied forms they may have taken, few of them have endured, which helps explain why they've been so easily and so largely forgotten.

On earlier occasions, too, the part played by Greece has been pivotal - sometimes positive but sometimes negative. And history has recently been repeating itself in other ways, for the present single currency is not the first such European scheme from which Britain has held aloof.

It's no exaggeration to say that European history is littered with the ruins of earlier endeavours. The most immediate predecessor to the EMU was the 19th Century Latin Monetary Union, which attempted to unify several European currencies at a time when most circulating coins were still made of gold or silver.

It came into being in August 1866; its initial members were France, Belgium, Italy and Switzerland, and they agreed that their national currencies should be standardised and interchangeable. There was no shared, single legal tender, but the currencies of the member countries were pegged at a fixed rate with each other.

Two years later, the four founding nations were joined by Spain and Greece and in 1889 the union was further enlarged by admitting Romania, Bulgaria, Venezuela, Serbia and San Marino. Thus the enlarged Latin Monetary Union lasted until World War I, which abruptly brought to an end the global financial system based on the gold standard. The result was that the LMU effectively came to an end in 1914, although it lingered on as a legal entity until its formal dissolution in 1927.

Negotiations to bring such a union into being had started in 1865, and Britain had initially been part of them. But two proposals were made, which proved to be a major stumbling block: the first was that the UK must reduce the amount of gold in its sovereigns, albeit by only a tiny amount, to make one pound sterling the exact equivalent of 25 French francs.

The second was that Britain must give up shillings and pence and decimalise its coinage to bring it into line with the other European currencies. Neither of these proposals was deemed acceptable, and so then, as in 1999, Britain stayed out, and left the continentals to their own devices. It also showed no interest in another and even more grandiose scheme floated by the French in 1867, for what was termed a "universal currency", which would have been based on equivalent gold coins to be issued by France, Britain and the United States.

Here were signs and portents aplenty of recent British attitudes and behaviour.

As Walter Bagehot, the essayist and editor of The Economist, put it in the late 1860s, there seemed to be a real danger that, "Before long, all Europe, save England, will have one money, and England will be left outstanding with another money."

If this happened, Bagehot went on, "We shall, to use the vulgar expression, 'be left out in the cold'. If we could adopt this coinage ourselves without material inconvenience, I confess I, for one, should urge our doing so."

But Bagehot believed that the practical difficulties of such a step were "simply insurmountable". He feared more generally that "the attempt to found a universal money is not possible now", and the unhappy fate of the Latin Monetary Union would later bear him out. Yet with the establishment of the late 20th Century European Monetary Union, it did seem as if the state of affairs, which Bagehot one day envisaged - and feared - had come very close to realisation.

But in 2001, Greece joined the European Monetary Union, and the rest, as they say, is history - but a history that is not yet anything like being over.

Ever since it gained its hard-fought independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1832, Greece has been plagued by recurrent budget crises, frequent state defaults and long periods during which it's effectively been cut off from the international capital markets.

So while it was one of the earliest nations to join the Latin Monetary Union, its membership soon became more a cause of concern than celebration, for its chronically weak economy meant successive Greek governments responded by decreasing the amount of gold in their coins, thereby debasing their currency in relation to those of other nations in the union and in violation of the original agreement.
So irresponsible and unacceptable did Greece's behaviour become that it was formally expelled from the Latin Monetary Union in 1908. As a result, some effort was made to readjust the nation's
monetary policy and Greece was readmitted to the Union two years later. But by then, the whole enterprise was increasingly fragile, its future looked increasingly uncertain, and the outbreak of WWI was only four years off.

The Latin Monetary Union was not the only one of its kind in Europe during the 19th Century. A German monetary union was created in 1857, which replaced the many different currencies of the many different German states with a dual system based on the north German thaler and the south German gulden. It proved to be a rare success story among such ventures, surviving until German unification in 1870, when political union was effectively aligned with monetary union and five years later the two separate currencies were replaced by the reichsmark.

Less successful was the Scandinavian Monetary Union, established between Denmark and Sweden in 1873, which was joined by Norway two years later. The aim was to do for Scandinavia what the Latin Monetary Union was attempting more broadly for Europe as a whole but it, too, effectively ceased to function on the outbreak of WWI and it was formally brought to an end in 1924.

Such efforts to create common currencies during the 19th and 20th Centuries are only the most recent examples of a process that's been going on for almost as long as coinage itself has existed. It's an intriguing historical irony that among the pioneers of these endeavours seem to have been none other than the ancient Greeks.

One of the earliest examples of such a union occurred sometime about 400BC, along the western coast of Asia Minor, where seven Greek states allied themselves and produced a coinage that directly foreshadowed later European monetary unions. On the front of the coins was a common design of the baby Heracles strangling a snake, and the first three letters of the Greek word for alliance. On the reverse, each state placed its own particular image. All these coins were minted to the same weight and formed a unified currency, which was the tangible symbol of the seven members' economic alliance.

No-one quite knows why or when this early effort at a monetary union collapsed but 200 years later, the ancient Greeks had another try, organised through what was known as the Achaean League, an alliance of territories and city states covering the whole of the Peloponnese that had been formed about 280BC.

Once again, their shared currency had a common obverse design, in this case the head of Zeus, and reverse patterns that were specific to the individual issuing authority.

The result, according to the historian Polybius, was that the Greeks "had not only formed an allied and friendly community but they have the same laws, weights, measures and coinage, as well as the same officials, council and courts of justice". Here was a level of integration, which the most ardent and ambitious Eurocrat of today might envy and this may help explain why, unlike the Latin or the Scandinavian monetary unions, the Achaean League lasted for well over 100 years.

Its eventual dissolution, in 146BC, was not because the members of the league fell out with each other, over the currency or anything else but was the result of an external shock in the form of a crushing military defeat by the Romans at the Battle of Corinth. Which leaves us with the following paradox: the ancient Greeks were pioneers of monetary unions and were quite eager to keep them in being.

Modern Greece, by contrast, has been a threat and a danger to any monetary union that it has ever joined.