The
church
and the
Sandinista
revolution
A MEMBER of the FSLN National Leadership and deputy minister of the interior, Luis Carrion Cruz, is one of those who joined in the revolutionary struggle in Nicaragua on the basis of their Christian faith.
He gave the following interview to Martha Harnecker. It was published in the August 1986 issue of the magazine Encuentro, published by the Jesuit-run Central American University in Managua.
HRISTIANS have played a very important role in the Niyou explain the integration of this new force into the revolution. Is it the result of a change within the church, the Christian traditions of the Nicaraguan people, or the policy of alliances practiced by the Sandinista front? Do you think that it is possible to talk about a strategic alliance between Christians and Marxists? First of all, it should be pointed out that in all popular struggles in Latin America Christians will play an important role, because our peoples are eminently Christian.
Here in Nicaragua, no political organization has ever been able to recruit a major section of the population by using the banner of Christianity. There has been, and still is, a small Social Christian party that has never had a political project of its own and has never been able to use the structures of the Catholic Church to develop its party 21 November 23, 1987 • International Viewpoint
LIBERATION THEOLOGY • NICARAGUA
In this regard, up until the 1970s, Christians had no project, and did not participate in the political life of the country as Christians, even indirectly through a party claiming to be Christian. After Vatican II, which ended in 1965, and in particular after the Medellin Conference in 1968, new currents of thought and action began to show up at the grassroots of the church. After that, the experience of the ecclesiastical or Christian base communities began to unfold, involving a change in the church's methods of work. The parish priests were no longer the only representatives of the church, and it began to create a grassroots church organization in which local Christians participated. • What role did these base communities play? When these Christian lay people started to meet for community meditation, they began to talk not only about Christian themes but also about the economic and social problems afflicting them. You have to remember that all other forms of popular organization were repressed in Nicaragua.
In a series of places, leaders emerged from the Christian base communities. This situation was not the result of work planned by anybody. The initial impetus came from the Catholic Church itself, which encouraged Christians to concer themselves with the problems of the world — Vatican II and Medellin - and at a given moment, that coincided with the activity of the Sandinista front.
These Christian communities were formed by the people of the neighborhoods. In general, they were people of a certain age, who had some authority in the locality. • And what happened among the Something different, but which had the same roots. The best example is that of the university youth. At the beginning of the 1970s, the Catholic youth organizations, such as the Catholic Worker Youth (JOC) or the Catholic University Youth (JUC) no longer existed. Then groups of young people began to form, who met together to meditate on their way of life. What they did in practice was to reflect on the humane commitment of young people. This took the form of sessions of criticism or self-criticism around the reading of the Gospels and motivated by faith.
The substance of this commitment was real action on behalf of our neighbors, whom, in a certain way, we saw as the people, the poorest people. This phenomena developed in many high schools, and later reached the universities. The motivation engendered by the faith itself coincided with the intense political activity that there 22 asterated the policiza time of these was in the universities at the time, and this International Viewpoint • November 23, 1987
CER youth. They began to turn increasingly to overt political activity, even if they were no: yet joining the student organizations led by the FLN. • Some of you went to live in the poor neighborhoods? Yes, that's true. In January-February 1972, our group of Christian students decided to leave our homes to go and live in a poor neighborhood in the parish of the priest Uriel Molina. We combined living there, and the work that it involved, with our student lives. As a result, the incipient Christian student organization was weakened.
We wanted to live the ideal of the first Christian communities, which shared all their goods and lived in communion with the poorest, and in which everyone worked for the collective good. We wanted also to break from our family ties and comforts. Some of us came from quite well-off hornes. We knew that a real commitment to the people's struggle meant sharing the people's poverty, its restrictions and all its • Was it after the formation of these communities that the FLN got in contact with you? Not essentially. The leadership of the Sandinista Front had already noticed that a new phenomena was occurring, that there was a gereration of Christian-trained young students who had a certain degree of organization and a clear revolutionary political vision. The Front then envisaged integrating this movement in its ranks.
So, the first meetings between the leaders of this movement and the leadership of the Sandinista Front took place. The FLN went over the head of the Revolutionary
SOLIDAR CON
AEL SALAR
OREMOS
AL CENTONMERKA Student Front (FER) and established relations directly with this group of Christians. That is how the first discussions got started.
For my part, when our contacts got underway, I thought that an alliance between our forces and those of the Sandinista Front was necessary. While preserving our identity, we could agree and do a lot of things. • Did you think that it was necessary to limit yourselves to unity in action Yes, in fact. The leadership did not openly oppose this position, but in practice it disappeared. As we began to integrate ouragainst the Somoza dictatorship, it became clear for us that we could not operate as an
Later, when some of us were already members of the FLN, we understood the possibility for enormously broadening the Sandinista Front's influence, if we could organize these forces, which had only been half organized up until that time. According to what I learned later, Carlos Fonseca was the first to envisage this project. • Why organize them in a Christian movement and not directly in the FSLN? Because we thought we needed a bridge organization that would make it possible to bring together a large number of young people coming from a background of Christian activism. Even if they had a great will to struggle, they still had reservations and doubts about participating directly in 1. Father Uriel Molina is currently directing the Antonio Valdiviero Ecumenical Center, which publishes the magazine Amanecer.
NICARAGUA • LIBERATION THEOLOGY
Marxist organizations. The movement was very strong in Managua and Leon, the two university centers. Then, it very rapidly began to orient away from the universities, essentially toward the urban poor neighborhoods.
When this movement was formed, the analysis the Sandinista Front made of it was very rudimentary. We prepared three documents - one on the national situation, another on the responsibility of Christians, and I don't remember what the other was about. The first was fundamental. We analyzed the social classes in Nicaragua. We noted that the working class was a small and very dispersed sector. For that reason, we excluded the possibility of concentrating our forces there. We saw that the majority of the poor population was concentrated in the poor neighborhoods, and we concluded that the new movement had to be built there. • The community experience in the neighborhoods must have strongly influenced that decision. Yes, indeed. What is more, our relationships, our links, our contacts were in those neighborhoods, because there was a certain relationship between the university young Christian movement and the base communities. We knew certain priests and lay leaders in the neighborhoods, and naturally the neighborhoods seemed a logical extension of the work of the Christian
Our work in these communities accelerated the politicization that was underway. When we intervened in the neighborhoods, we did so as a Christian movement in which some activists belonged to the Sandinista front. The role of these activists was to bring the best, the most politicized cadres into the Front, but without taking them out of their community.
We left the universities to go into the neighborhoods where we started up work that was not essentially Christian. We began to do work aimed at organizing community leaderships, groups of young people in the neighborhoods, that is, to create an organized mass base to politicize it for the formed base communities, in which there were highly politicized people, people who were no longer in the stage of reflection but already in that of action. Very often, the leaders in these neighborhoods, the community leaders, the leaders of these youth movements, had come out of the ecclesiastical communities, out of these groups of young students that we had sent into the neighborhoods.
As Sandinista activists promoting this Christian movement, we were allowed a wide freedom of action. We were not told how to do our work or what structures to join. The Sandinista Front did not want to define the rules.
We were given great autonomy, despite the fact that we had only recently joined.
This enabled the movement to find its own forms for building itself in harmony with the character of its activists and those of the milieu with which they were in contact. Nothing was ever imposed. We never discussed philosophy or religion. We discussed the practical needs of the armed
The result of all this was the gradual incorporation in the ranks of the Sandinista Front of a very large group of Christian leaders or leaders from Christian backgrounds. They were respected people, who had authority as Christians and as community leaders, which at the same time offered the possibility for maintaining relations with large groups of Christians. The Christian Student Movement (MCU) lasted until the end, and always served as a channel for new people, who could more easily join this movement than the Revolutionary Stu• Did the same thing happen in the countryside? No. It was different in the countryside. The church had built a much more solid and effective organization there than in the cities. A priest would have a much bigger following in the countryside than in the cities, thanks to what were called "Delegates of the Word." These were almost always from poor peasant backgrounds, because in most cases it was in this layer that you found people prepared to devote themselves, with little pay, to this type of work. It must not be forgotten that very often the church backed public works in the countryside, bringing in water, collecting money for a school, or for building housing and so
A priest had 15, 20, 30 or 40 Delegates of the Word scattered around the parish. They carried out certain quasipriestly functions, such as preaching, giving communion with wafers blessed by the priest and so on. When their number increased, the status of deacon was estaadministrative level and oversaw a group of Delegates of the Word.
Through all this organization, a priest could have a very large following. In general, the Delegates of the Word also became politicized when they began to take up problems that were not exclusively religious but were material, concrete, political. And when they saw that the Somoza government failed to respond, except by distrust and sometimes by using the National Guard for repression, "in a natural way" they took the step toward involvement -and even establishing links — with the
The integration of the Christian base into the Sandinista Front in the countryside and in the neighborhoods, or into activities promoted by the Front, became massive at a certain moment. I think that the way that the Sandinista Front approached the question of the Christians in practice was not an insignificant factor in this. I think that it is important to stress that. • Can you explain to me in detail what strategy the FSLN followed toward the The Sandinista National Liberation Front never fell into the temptation of shaping one policy and one style of language for Christians and another for the rest of the people. That would have been a veiled form of sectarianism. In the FLN's experience, neither the people nor the revolutionaries themselves could be divided into Christians and non-Christians.
In the case of Nicaragua, Christianity may be either active, or simply a passive identification, but as a religious and cultural phenomenon it takes in the majority of the population.
The Somoza dictatorship's oppression, subjection to imperialism, the poverty, ignorance and disarray produced by capitalism, affected all of the people without making any distinction among religious beliefs.
The FSLN's work in its Christian base was no different from the work it did among the rest of the people. We called on 23 everyone to struggle to overthrow the dicNovember 23, 1987 • International Viewpoint
LIBERATION THEOLOGY • NICARAGUA tatorship and build a new society.
On the one hand, Christianity is not a political program, and Christians do not form a homogeneous bloc in Latin America. They represent almost the entire society, with its contradictions, its class struggles, its heros and its villains. The cross and the Gospel have accompanied some of the noblest enterprises in human history, and some of the vilest. Therefore, in such circumstances, it is absurd to talk in terms of agreements or alliances with
The policy of the FSLN was not that. We discovered the revolutionary potential and the progressive positions of many grassroots leaders of the Catholic Church, and we went directly to them to recruit them for the revolutionary struggle and for the
Front, without going through any intermediaries or asking anybody's leave. We did not do that any more than we cooked up a pseudo-religious
It is obvious that when base leaders were recruited by the
FSLN, they carried a revolutionary influence into the ecclesiastical bodies to which they belonged. Very often they tried to draw other comrades into revolutionary activity, appealing to them on the basis of their faith and religious convictions.
However, this language was that of genuine Christians, and at the same time, of genuine revolutionists; it was not an artificial creation of the FLN. The official and principled position of the Front was one of the greatest respect for religious beliefs. It fought against manifestations of sectarianism and discrimination that might arise against believers.
• You say "might arise." But did they not in fact arise in the practice of a lot of Marxist parties in Latin America?
Yes. The continent's reactionary sectors until now have tried with success to make religion an anti-progressive and even a counter-revolutionary force. In any case, the hierarchies have managed to block determined participation of the Christian masses in the revolutionary struggle. But we also have to recognize that the vanguard organizations have very often made errors that have contributed to reinforcing the distrust and fears built up over the centuries by our class enemies.
I think that in this respect the main task of the revolutionary leaderships in Latin
America is to eliminate the obstacles and facilitate the integration of the extraordinary potential represented by the Christians
24 nary thereval riprary struggle. Religionis
International Viewpoint • November 23, 1987 a powerful enough ideological force either to hold back or to accelerate the development of the consciousness of the peoples.
To overcome sectarianism, revolutionary Marxists have to recognize that, interpreted positively, the principles of Christianity offer a moral basis for drawing people into the struggle against oppression and injustice. And this is not a philosophical consideration, but a historical fact. I myself, and I am no exception, came to the revolutionary movement on the basis of my religious convictions. I discovered Marxism later. Many other comrades joined in the struggle against the dictatorship in the conviction that their participation in revolutionary action was the only way to live their faith consistently. Their moral stature was not inferior to that of those comrades who came to the struggle on the basis of another kind of ideological conviction.
Another problem to be solved is that of integrating Christian revolutionaries into the Marxist vanguards of the Latin American countries. As long as vanguard organizations keep their doors closed to Christians out of philosophical or ideological convictions alien to revolutionary practice and to people's class positions, it will be difficult to eliminate the distrust and suspicions of Christians that have been fueled by enemy propaganda and also by the sectarianism of a lot of revolutionary organizations. • Then you do not think that there is a contradiction between Christianity and Marxism? I do not see any obstacle that can prevent Christians, without renouncing their faith, from taking up Marxism's remarkable conceptual tools to develop a scientific understanding of social processes and to orient their political work in a revolutionary way. In other words, a Christian can be at one and the same time a Christian and a perfectly consistent Marxist. The problem of
God's existence must not become a divisive factor among revolutionists who have the same point of view on all the other aspects.
In this regard, our experience is very rich in lessons. Many Christians have worked and continue to work in the Sandinista
Front, and some of them are even priests.
And I am not only talking about rank-and- file militants. Some are members of the
Sandinista Assembly and hold high political responsibilities?
Despite the struggle that has been waged within the Catholic Church, the Christianity of these comrades has not come into conflict with their revolutionary activity and their party discipline. But the FSLN has not been transformed into a battleground for philosophic and religious debates either. A lot of things can be said about our experience. But what is for sure is that the Sandinista people's revolution has come out of it stronger.
I think that some Marxist vanguard groups have tended to see the progressive and revolutionary
Christian groups as a rival force winning a section of their political clientele. I think that is an error. Avoiding this error was one of the FSLN's great successes. We linked up with the church base structures, not to take people out of them but to integrate them into the Sandinista Front as a stage in their political development, without that involving any block to their participating in the
Christian bodies.
On the contrary, we left them in these structures so that this greater commitment would be transformed into political action. Their integration into the
FSLN was never represented to them as a dilemma between their Christian faith and their activity in the Front. If we had posed the debate in those terms, we would have been left with a tiny number of activists. *
PATRIA LIBRE
O MORIR
2. The Sandinista Assembly is made up of a hundred members appointed by the National Leadership (the
Nine Commanders of the Revolution). It is the highest consultative body in the FLN.
MEXICO • LIBERATION THEOLOGY