(2 of 4)
It is no great advertisement for future conversions that the Catholic clergy has traditionally preached the glories of the afterlife while ignoring the continent's social inequities. The average wage in Latin America in terms of U.S. purchasing power is less than $300 a year; 45% of the continent's 268 million people are illiterate. Most of its wealth is held by perhaps 3% of the people. The population growth rate is 2.8% a year, one of the world's highest. Without massive birth control campaigns—unlikely now, in the light of Pope Paul's encyclical Humanae Vitae —the population of Latin America will reach 651 million by the year 2000.
Ten Thousand Urchins. The contrast between a well-established church and unbearable poverty is notably apparent in the country that will play host to Paul VI, Colombia, by reputation, is a devoutly Catholic nation, one of three in Latin America that have concordats with the Vatican (the others are Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Ratified in 1887, the agreement establishes Catholicism as the nation's official religion, gives the church control of education and marriage, and provides for permanent government contributions to dioceses and missions.
Headed by Bogota's reactionary Luis Cardinal Concha Cordoba, the Colombian church owns vast financial holdings. Agricultural day laborers earn an average of $270 per year. Police estimate that there are at least 10,000 abandoned children wandering the streets of the capital—not to mention more than 40,000 prostitutes. It is no wonder that the secret hero of many young clerics is Father Camilo Torres, the priest-turned-guerrilla who was killed by the army while serving with a Castroite rebel cadre. Or that laymen pray for the intercession before God of "Saint Che."
Saving Its Soul. Reformers within the Latin American Catholic Church, although growing in number, are still in the minority. They are nonetheless insistent in their conclusion that Catholicism can transform society—and save its own soul—only by a total commitment to revolution. And they argue that this approach is quite in accord with the teaching of the church. "The contribution of the Second Vatican Council," says Father Ricardo Cetrulo, a Uruguayan theologian and sociologist, "has been to point out that theology reveals man as totally concrete and existential. The task of Latin American theology is to meditate about the problems of the continent, about misery." Since capitalism, they believe, has failed, the only alternative is socialism. Parliamentary democracy as they see it is a mockery; thus progress can come only through revolution.