It’s commonly remarked that while evangelical elites and young
people are partly trending leftward, the same Catholic demographic
is shifting conservative. The former don’t identify with the old
Religious Right icons now passing form the scene. The latter
similarly don’t identify with the old Catholic left so prominent
from the 1960s onward.
One nearly perfect incarnation of the old Catholic left is
Maryknoll Father Roy Bourgeois. For over 20 years he’s continuously
lived outside and demonstrated against the U.S. Army training
center for mainly Latin American military officers at Ft. Benning,
Georgia, formerly called School of the Americas (SOA). Critics like
Bourgeois call it “School of the Assassins” and insist it trains
oppressive militaries in dictatorship and abuse. They claim
hundreds of graduates, out of over 60,000 trainees across the
decades, have committed human rights abuses.
Rightist military dictatorships that once plagued Latin
America are virtually entirely gone, having lost their hold as the
Cold War ended and the new era of international commerce began.
Today, nearly all of Latin America is democratic, and many of the
regimes are left-leaning. The only authentic dictatorships are
primarily of the left, chiefly Cuba and Hugo Chavez’s Venezuelan
paradise.
Like many in his Maryknoll Order, Bourgeois, who’s now in
his early 70s, was an activist regarding Central America during the
1980s. He still blames the U.S. for defeating El Salvador’s Marxist
insurgency and for electorally overthrowing the Sandinistas in
Nicaragua. (Of course, Daniel Ortega is now back in power, but his
Nicaragua socialism, defanged of Soviet support, is no longer
potent.) Bourgeois targeted the old School of the Americas for
iconically representing U.S. backed repression of Marxist
insurgencies throughout Latin America.
Bourgeois was in Washington, D.C. this week, demonstrating
once again against the “School of the Assassins,” now formally
called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation
(WHISC). Evidently a multi-tasker, he simultaneously defended his
status within Roman Catholicism from the hierarchy’s displeasure
with his campaign for female priests. He refused to renounce
helping with an unofficial 2008 ordination of an aspiring female
Catholic clergy. That service, organized by “Womenpriests,”
convened at a Unitarian Universalist Church in Kentucky.
“It would be comparable, in a way, to me recanting my
views on the closing of the SOA/WHINSEC,” Bourgeois recently
told Catholic News Service while in Washington,
lobbying against funding for his least favorite school. Last month,
officers of the left-leaning Maryknoll order formally warned him
that unless he recants, he will face dismissal from the
Maryknollers for “publicly reject[ing] the teaching of the Holy
Father,” with a request to the Vatican that he face “laicization.”
After the 2008 unauthorized ordination, Bourgeois was pronounced
latae sententiae, or effectively excommunicated, no longer
qualified to receive or administer the church’s sacraments.
Reportedly the Maryknollers also cut off their funding for his
anti-military demonstrations.
Whatever the ultimate consequences from his ordination
controversy, Bourgeois doubtless will press ahead against his main
bête noir, like Ahab against the white whale. On April 10,
he and 26 co-belligerents were arrested while staging a “die-in”
outside the White House, now professing to be the celebrated “White
House 27.” They were demanding closure for SOA/WHINSEC and an end
to U.S. “militarization” of Latin America, however defined.
Seemingly hard pressed for recent examples, absent General Pinochet
or any ruling Argentine colonels, Bourgeois’ news release cited
SOA/WHINSEC graduates involved in the 2009 constitutional ouster of
Honduras’ then leftist president, who was trying illegally to
prolong his power. Bourgeois claims support for his anti-school
campaign from labor unions, civil rights groups, The Presbyterian
Church (USA), United Church of Christ, United Methodist Church, and
“over 100 Catholic bishops.”
Bourgeois’ “die-in” outside the White House, like his
larger demonstrations outside Ft. Benning, recall countless
similar, Reagan-era protests during the 1980s, with the usual mock
coffins and papier-mâché giant puppet skulls.
It’s mostly an exercise in nostalgia, trying to resurrect the
dramatic years when Central America was a central ideological and
military battleground between East and West.
Doubtless Bourgeois has some young, diehard followers. But
probably most are from his own 1960s generation. Much of the energy
among active, young U.S. Catholics today inclines towards
traditional social causes, like pro-life and defense of marriage.
Impassioned debates over female ordination within Roman Catholicism
also seem mostly, if not entirely, rooted in an older
generation.
Even left-leaning young evangelicals of today are likely
not commonly performing in Bourgeois’ street theater against
villains of 30 years ago. They are likelier energized by
environmentalism or liberalized immigration. And they are more
routinely found blogging in coffee houses than carrying mock
coffins outside U.S. military bases.
Bourgeois’ causes are mostly wrong-headed and irrelevant
to the present day. But maybe there remains some nobility in a
left-wing, aging priest who’s still defiantly beating his old war
drums. The angry street protests of the 1960s through the 1980s,
providing in drama what they lacked in coherence, will not likely
be replicated by today’s yuppie, online activists.
