Reflections on liberation theology’s alternative to the ‘spiral of violence’
In the 1960s, whilst studying theology at Trinity College, the divinity school of Glasgow University, writes the Reverend Erik Cramb, I was challenged and inspired by ‘liberation theology’, emerging primarily from the favelas in Latin America and the ghettoes of the United States of America.
In particular I was challenged by the assertion of Professor James H. Cone of Union Seminary in New York in his 1969 book A Black Theology of Liberation that ‘there can be no Christian theology which is not identified unreservedly with those who are humiliated and abused’.
I was, at the same time, inspired by the action of Dom. Helder Câmara, a proponent of liberation theology, who had argued when appointed Archbishop of Recife in northern Brazil, that there was no way he could identify with the poor masses of the city if he were to live in the huge, opulent Archbishop’s Palace in the suburbs. So, by night, with the help of some clandestine friends, he did a moonlight flit into the garage of his cathedral which was sited in the midst of the city’s poor, where he remained living throughout his time as Archbishop from 1964-1985.
These were hard challenges even to someone who had spent his university years living in a room and kitchen in a crumbling tenement with a stairhead cludgie and working in a youth club in the slum clearance ghetto of Dalmarnock in Glasgow’s east end.
Having returned to the adjacent parish in the east end as minister of St Thomas’ Gallowgate in 1973, I was able to attend a lecture that Dom. Helder Câmara gave in Glasgow in St Aloysius Church and was blown away by the power and passion of this little man, dressed as always in a simple soutane. His theme that night in Glasgow was ‘the violence of poverty which oppresses most of the world’s population’. I simply had to buy his book Spiral of Violence. Perhaps the best £2.75 I ever spent on a book.
Now, in the face of the current horrors enveloping Palestine and Israel, after more than half a century, what he had to say is cruelly prophetic.
Violence, he argues, attracts violence. No one seeks to suffer injustices, humiliations and restrictions. Poverty reduces children of God to a sub-human condition, to a heritage of poverty.
The violence of poverty attracts the violence of revolt when all peaceful demands are unheard or ignored.
The violence of revolt attracts the violence with which those in power all too readily crush those who dare, against all odds, to revolt.
Helder Câmara’s politics derived from conventional Catholic ‘social teaching’. His politics were essentially practical. His non-violence was not a condemnation of violence but an insistence that for ‘his’ people, who no doubt in the present circumstance would be the innocent residents of Gaza, violence would be suicidal.
The violence of the poverty, the injustices, the humiliations and the restrictions endured for decades by the Palestinian people is the backdrop to the violence of revolt writ large by the Hamas obscenities perpetrated in Israel last Sunday week. The violence of the upcoming response of the Israeli military is fearful beyond all imagination. Maybe there is no way the unimaginable horrors of that response can be averted or even mitigated.
What of the future then? There is only one escape from this horrific spiral of violence and that is through justice. Can the voice of the peacemakers yet be heard echoing across the years?
Who might provide that voice? The oppressed who suffer injustice? Those who belong to the privileged classes of poor countries or the rich classes of the rich countries but no longer accept injustice and acknowledge it to be the primary violence? Those who, having opted for bloody and armed violence, are beginning to wonder whether the violence of the pacifists is not the true solution? Those who still are, or were until recently, the authorities, and who have answered violence with violence but now understand the urgency of the violence of the protesters in demanding justice without falling into armed violence and hatred?
Are such coalitions possible?
Dom. Helder Câmara passionately asserted in Glasgow all these years ago, ‘without being blind to the problems created by the differences in race, language, country and religion; without forgetting hatred, struggles, coldness and egoism, is it a dream or an illusion to think there are, everywhere, people who have made up their minds to demand, in a peaceful but resolute way, justice as a condition of peace?’
Written 16 October 2023, Dundee.