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Of This World is a podcast dedicated to discussing religion and politics. Co-hosts Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, a historian at Wesleyan University, and Nick Tabor, a journalist and author, talk with scholars, writers, and theologians working at the seam between faith and the secular. Across each episode they return to one question: can there be an effective religious left in the United States? A joint production with Commonweal magazine.
Nick: This is Nick Tabor.
Nick: I'm a journalist and author living in New York.
Danny: And my name is Daniel Simons-Jenkins.
Danny: I'm an assistant professor of history in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University.
Danny: This is of this world.
Danny: That's it.
Danny: We are excited about today's show, which is with the noted historian of Latin America, Greg Grandin.
Danny: Greg doesn't need much of an introduction.
Danny: Since his books are so well known, but we are going to give him one because we're going to talk about something very specific regarding his work or his recent work.
Danny: Greg is a professor of history at Yale University and the author of, among many books, The Empire of Necessity, which won the Bancroft and Beverage Awards in American History.
Danny: He's also the author of Ford Landia, the rise and fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
Danny: The end of the myth, From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, which did win the Pulitzer Prize, and most recently, America America, a new history of the new world.
Danny: Greg has been giving a lot of talks about this new book, which offers a panoramic grand history of the Western Hemisphere
Danny: from around fifteen to sixteen hundred to the present.
Danny: And in doing so, the book spends a lot of time discussing the history of Catholicism in Latin America.
Danny: In this regard, a piece that Greg recently wrote for the New York Review of Books titled The Education of Pope Leo XIV complements quite well the discussion of Catholicism in the new book.
Danny: So, we thought we'd have Greg on the show today to discuss just this, namely to talk about how the history of Catholicism in Latin America
Danny: as well as how Robert Privost's time in Peru has ended up shaping his papacy as Leo the Fourteenth.
Danny: We're truly
Danny: delighted to have Greg on today's show.
Nick: Greg, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Nick: As I told you before we started recording, we've been looking forward to this call.
Nick: Danny and I have talked about your work at different times over the years, both been admirers for a long time.
Nick: And uh I know you're not necessarily
Nick: your brand is not necessarily being a scholar of religion, but we we felt like you were uh in some ways a really appropriate guest for the show
Nick: We were inspired partly by your your new piece in the New York Review of Books, The Education of Pope Leo XIV.
Nick: But there's also quite a rich treatment of of Catholic history.
Nick: And
Nick: Christian history in general in your newest book, America America.
Nick: So what we want to do is instead of having you kind of recap the the entire argument of of that
Nick: you know, nearly 800-page book, which you've done in many other interviews, is follow one particular thread uh through the book, which is your treatment of of Christianity
Nick: and especially Catholicism, and then we'll kind of come up to the present day and and talk about what this means for Pope Leo's papacy and both what he's doing with you know with bishops and and the way he's responding to political developments in the world
Nick: So anyway, uh to start off, I do feel like religion in general and and Christianity, uh Catholicism in particular, kind of figure into this book in a more prominent way than they have in your previous ones.
Nick: And I I wonder why you think that is.
Nick: Like maybe it's just th that that's inherent in the subject.
Nick: You know, you can't really talk about the history of European encounters with
Nick: with Latin America without talking about the Catholic Church.
Nick: But uh w what would you chalk it up to?
Greg: I mean, but before I answer the question, I will say that uh one other book, the The Empire of Necessity, which was uh Yeah.
Greg: the stu the study of um Herman Melville and and his engagement with a a real history of uh seafaring captains
Greg: uh encounter with an African slave revolt in the Pacific on a Spanish slave ship that I I went quite uh
Greg: You know, the dealing with the three monastic religions, Islam, Judaism, Mongol Actually let me back up a second.
Greg: Islam
Greg: Protestantism and Catholicism not the fantastic religious, but and their interac their interplay in how they uh approached and justified and challenged slavery was a major
Greg: um read of that book.
Nick: So um I I I have read that although it's been a little while.
Greg: I've dealt with it and and I I try you know
Greg: I was, you know, I was I started out as most of a social historian that worked on Guatemala, but I was always kind of um influenced by trying to kind of integrate all different you know
Greg: The totality, you know, thinking about Isaiah environmental history, up intellectual history and certainly, you know
Greg: history as a normative project, both in terms of doing it and the people you study and then you have to deal with religion and working in Latin America, the you know, the centrality of Catholicism.
Greg: For this book in particular
Greg: I'd say one of the one of the early uh motivations and overarching
Greg: themes is the contrast between Latin America as a as a as a cradle of social rights and the tradition of liberalism and radicalism that emphasized the social and and of course
Greg: because of the geography intention with with the United States, which is a more of an agent of of individual rights, uh uh in some ways a less bastion of it.
Greg: I mean you know not to be
Greg: irreductionist, you know, and I know there's different ways of thinking about the right and thinking about political culture in the United States, but certainly a
Greg: you know, it's hard to think of another country in which in which individual right rights is as statiscized and and and serves as a kind of link.
Greg: three different constituencies within a little broader constellation of of conservatives and right-wing movements than than the the obsession about individualism.
Greg: Yeah, no doubt, no doubt.
Greg: You know, so so I tried d so that led to thinking about, you know, y you could I could have stayed in the realm of political theory.
Greg: But I mean, I think it's fairly clear that social rights emerges out of a certain kind of Catholic sociality, a Catholic universalism and and and uh
Greg: you know, and and and some endurance and persistence in Latin America, notwithstanding different moments of conservative you know
Greg: ascendants which we seem to be in at the moment, but um in Latin America, but there still is this kind of despite all the violence, despite all the horror.
Greg: this leadering commitment to to a a vision of citizenship that that entails some kind of sociality and some sometimes social rights and
Greg: And to write a book like this, I felt like I had to go back to the beginning, to the conquest and and and and reconcile the violence and horror of the conquest with the emergence of a
Greg: Such a humanistic vision, you know, how uh uh because that is the question of uh Latin American history over the centuries.
Greg: The the the the
Greg: Yeah, every document of Botarism is a document of civilization nowhere true in Latin America.
Greg: I mean th this there's so much horror and so much civility and so much
Greg: uh exploitation and so much uh racism and then yet there's so much um it's such a humanistic place.
Greg: It's such a humanistic place and how those two things exist in tension
Greg: So that brought me to a deeper engagement with Catholicism, with the conquest, with with the way the conquest was understood and justified.
Greg: Universalism was tested and challenged and and and and and configured as a result of it.
Nick: Mm-hmm.
Nick: Yeah.
Nick: Oh um I want to come back in a few minutes to that that paradox kind of surrounding the conquest as um you know Octavio Paz comes up.
Nick: Um, I I I like your treatment of him.
Nick: But I was gonna say that there's often, of course, you know, quite a lot of suspicion or even hostility toward
Nick: the c the Catholic Church from from people on the left.
Nick: And I wonder uh if your if your personal, you know, views of the of the faith and its history evolved at all as you were writing this.
Nick: I don't know if you have any
Nick: Catholicism in your own history or your family's history.
Nick: Um, but anyway, h yeah, how did it how did your views change?
Nick: If they did.
Greg: Like all Catholics and you know, complicated relationship with Catholicism, my family.
Greg: Yeah, um I was being Catholic.
Greg: Um exactly w you know, w we were actually immigrants from Sweden.
Greg: My father's grandfather came from Sweden, but we were like the new bit
Greg: But it didn't I mean it didn't it didn't fact too large in my childhood except my father was married prior
Greg: Well when my my mother died uh when I was three and the Catholic Church wouldn't let him bury her in a Catholic cemetery because he had been divorced prior
Greg: I'm marrying my mother and this led to me being put in Catholic school and being told to go to mass because my father wouldn't go and do anything.
Greg: So I thought
Greg: It can already end the earth in Kish in the particular it wasn't by any means a g
Greg: uh an intellectual or critical Catholic tradition.
Greg: It was Holy Name of Jesus Christ on the Pastor Bob West in Brooklyn and then Bishop Voigt Sedgwick Catholic High School in
Greg: in you know, overlooking Greenwood Cemetery.
Greg: Um and in in in in Windsor Terrace.
Greg: So it was um it it wasn't like I was getting a lot of critical theor you know
Greg: Right, right, yeah.
Greg: It wasn't it wasn't that tradition.
Greg: But um you just kind of fell away from it for no
Greg: you know, uh it wasn't a big deal, you know, I just you know, just not you know, I didn't dare and then and until I got into thinking about becoming more and more somebody who read and somebody who was interested in politics, just need
Greg: Latin America you have to deal with Catholicism because of the well one, liberation theology is such a s part of the story that leftists tell of the of Latin America in the seventies and eighties
Greg: um and and it is such a part of people's lives and and the contradictions are present, the Catholicism of
Greg: the regimes, you know, you know, the the just anti-Semitism of the Argentine junta and then the heroic Catholicism of the
Greg: you know, the liberation theologians and the Jesuits and and El Salvador, you know, and and and I've written about this but more just as, you know, not not
Greg: Not in in any profound not in any deep way where I was trying to get at some the fundamental theological contradictions and and creating a normative worldview, but
Greg: So yeah, so Catholicism was always was longer was law present in in uh in in against my life and then
Greg: I don't know, somehow I'm nostalgic then.
Nick: So uh I mentioned Octavia Pause a minute ago.
Nick: This has been, I guess, kind of a hobby horse for me for a while.
Nick: I I love this passage in Labyrinth of Solitude where he
Nick: talks about the early encounters between Spaniards and and native peoples in Mexico and he essentially says, like, yes, of course it was brutal, you know, they they they massacred many people when they you know, the ones that they didn't
Nick: Massacre, they kept them alive because they wanted their labor.
Nick: Let's not sugarcoat it.
Nick: And yet at the same time, like there there's a notable difference here between what happened with the Puritans in North America
Nick: So I I just wanna I want to read this this passage.
Nick: I I would say that it I think one of the reasons I like it is that it reminds me of reminds me of Charles Taylor, his treatment of secularism and the ways that that our sort of you know
Nick: Disenchanted as it is.
Nick: Disenchanted reality is different from from the reality that that people in the Middle Ages experiments.
Nick: So he says that along with a l with this exploitation that I'm quoting now, he says um it's difficult to realize that along with this consideration there were others of a more humanitarian nature.
Nick: Anyone who knows the treatment of the Indians by the military will laugh at this hypothesis, but the fate of the Indians would have been very different if it had not been for the church.
Nick: I'm not thinking only of its struggle to improve their living conditions and to organize them in a more just and Christian manner, but also of the opportunity that baptism offered them to form a part of one social order and one religion.
Nick: This possibility of belonging to a living order, even if it was at the bottom of the social pyramid, was cruelly denied to the Indians by the Protestants of New England.
Nick: It is often forgotten that to belong to the Catholic faith meant that one found a place in the cosmos
Nick: the flight of their gods and the death of their leaders had left the natives in a solitude so complete that it is difficult for a modern man to imagine it.
Nick: Catholicism reestablished their ties with the world and the other world
Nick: It gave them back a sense of their place on Earth, it nurtured their hopes and justified their lives and deaths.
Nick: And then there's just a short addendum here which I think is
Nick: a little more closely tied to to what you s talk about in in in America America.
Nick: You say the di uh Pause says the difference between colonial Mexico and the English colonies was immense.
Nick: New Spain committed many horrors, but at least it did not commit the gravest of all, that of denying a place even at the foot of the social scale to the people who composed it.
Nick: There were classes, cases, and slaves, but there were no pariahs, no persons lacking a fixed social condition and a legal, moral, and religious status.
Nick: So you say that you you acknowledge that pods is detractors and that maybe there are
Nick: uh reasons to take issue with his his treatment, but you also think there's something fundamentally true about his analysis.
Nick: So could you could you talk about that a little bit?
Greg: Obviously the expulsion of Jews and and and and uh and and we come dressed in and from the treatment of some women who didn't fit into their place
Greg: It was obviously what m we beg to differ that there were no pariahs.
Greg: It didn't produce a pariah.
Greg: But if you know, I mean it's like everything else, you know, you you you know, you have to accept that it does it it isn't it's a hundred percent true, but there's a certain reino truth into in it.
Greg: And I think that the universalism of Catholicism
Greg: in that hierarchy in which everybody has a place.
Greg: And the fact that the conquest was uh an event in which it wasn't justified by empty land or the doctrine of discovery so much.
Greg: I mean it was justified by the doctrine of discovery, but not
Greg: Doctrine of Empty Land.
Greg: I mean they they knew there were people there.
Greg: Doing the fact that make Bangs Gonsus and others thought thought
Greg: There were more people in the new world than in all of the rest of the world put together, which turns out not to be true, but they knew there were millions upon millions of people.
Greg: So but immediately there was a sense of
Greg: what do we do with these people?
Greg: Like what does this mean to our theology?
Greg: What c you know, what you know, what does it mean to Aristotle's notion of
Greg: natural slavery and and miscans was the most articulate and vanguardist of pushing forward a notion.
Greg: What it means is that there are no s God wouldn't
Greg: not have made a world in which there were more natural slaves than human beings.
Greg: So therefore we are all human.
Greg: And um and and his his insistence that on the humanity was I mean to some degree it was based on the capacity to reason, but it was also based on the capacity to live in society.
Greg: They were hented.
Greg: They were individuals that lived in society to go back to the fundamental uh primaries of social rights, individuals that live in society.
Greg: you know, um and they weren't just individualists.
Greg: And so so mm still I think that that wrestling with that
Greg: fundamental problem Catholicism that the Catholic conquest was the first conquest that had the terms of its own negation in you know in hand in its in its actions and and shock and all of the critics that emerged the other
Greg: from the Salamanca school, Francisco Vitoria, Suarez, uh in the ground, like Douglas Casas and the Montesinos.
Greg: It you know, it it didn't necessarily I mean we could
Greg: It did it did in some ways have an effect, but obviously it didn't end the conference.
Greg: It didn't right.
Greg: But then also the colonial project itself was centered around the organization and administration of difference
Greg: So right away you have uh you you have the fundamental question of modernity, universalism and difference.
Greg: How do you you know in which the Catholic Church is creating
Greg: a world empire that presumes universality but organize itself around the administration of difference in terms of rebuild, in terms of who does what, who's owed what, who's working.
Greg: In the fact that the you know, the people at the bottom of the hierarchy are producing the wealth that creates world capitalism, right?
Greg: They're those silver that comes from
Greg: book to see extracted by indigenous slaves and native and and African American slaves are producing the first universal currency, universal standard.
Greg: So um and then and then of course to the theology itself.
Greg: So Indians, you know, Native Americans and then African Americans and then would were not
Greg: push you know, obviously the point of comparison is British you know you know, Protestantism and the North American colonial project where difference is pushed to the frontier.
Greg: and not dealt with and um and evaded and the question is evaded.
Greg: So Catholicism and you know deals immediately with the question.
Greg: Um and and so that's that's why I I I like I like that quotation thing from Paz.
Greg: You know, um it I think it's some it it captures something.
Greg: you know, conscious that you know that everything all everything fits together, you know.
Greg: It's it's you know it's a vi it's a it's integralism.
Greg: So later on it manif can manifest itself either in
Greg: fascism or in some in social in socialism.
Greg: You know, it's it's a it's a vision uh it's a corporateist vision of society that um that but but but that isn't nativist though.
Greg: That's the thing.
Greg: It's not tri uh well, that's a question for
Greg: what's going on today.
Greg: But it's you know, it it's it's universal.
Greg: It uh it it presumes a universal humanity.
Greg: And and you know it this ma this manifests itself in so many different facets of Latin American political history
Greg: You know, th Latin America is a is a place that developed a nationalism that I mean things are changing and the and the and the effects of the Trump based and general culture wars have
Greg: Towards internationalism, towards towards universalism.
Greg: I mean, you know, p it could be it manifests itself in rather radical socialism like Che, but also in the
Greg: in the liberal political theorists that I deal with that reform international law and imagine the international system
Greg: not as a balance of competitive powers of each nation pursuing its own interests, but as a consortium of nation nations with shared interests.
Greg: Um there's a right of way it's a kind of it's that it's that organization of difference within universalism that is
Greg: It is the fundamental problem of the of Catholicism.
Greg: I mean and and to whatever degree it was a problem
Greg: prior to Columbus in Europe on an abstract level, you know, it becomes more visceral and real.
Greg: It's it's colonialism which brings you know, which forces all of these problems, you know, and and and
Greg: makes them much more.
Greg: Before before the conquest of Hispaniola, there's a there's a like a preview of this with the conquest of the Canary Islands.
Greg: Five centuries before de las Casas proclaimed all humanity is one.
Greg: the Catholic Franciscan bishop on the Canary Islands began defending, you know, the the the indigenous people of the Canary Islands in universalist terms.
Greg: So it's colonialism which, you know
Greg: creates this new humanism, this conflict humanism.
Nick: Right.
Nick: You've you've mentioned Delas Casas a couple times, and I I don't think we can properly discuss this book without dwelling on him for a moment.
Nick: He set he's a pretty central figure.
Nick: So could you give us a little background on Bartolomey de las Casas and talk about why he's why he's important?
Greg: He's well known.
Greg: He's well known.
Greg: He's the father of human rights.
Greg: He you know, he was an advocate for Native Americans and he's
Greg: He was a polemical figure that could be understood as somebody who you know was I think if the Native Americans or somebody who is defending the ultimately defending the the conquest and defending
Greg: uh exp missionary expansionism and and the advance of Catholicism as a colonial project.
Greg: So um but i is is it
Greg: He argued is a more interesting figure that he his his political theory evolves over time.
Greg: As he grows more and more frustrated, it becomes increasingly radical.
Greg: It brings him
Greg: you know, by the end of his life he is he basically thinks the conflicts should be considered null and void.
Greg: Um he is he is
Greg: He's everywhere.
Greg: He was really a unique figure.
Greg: He's he's in the front lines and he goes to he goes to Hispaniola to
Greg: He's already a priest, but he goes there with his father to make money.
Greg: He's friends with Christopher Columbus.
Greg: He's friends with the Columbus family.
Greg: He needs to be incom incomendero and and he is.
Greg: He has two incom
Greg: I mean there's, you know, these allotments of Native Americans who worked for uh man, it's decades before he uh you know, it's not until the fifteen twenties, he's there in fifteen oh three, fifteen oh four, it's not until fifteen twenties that he that he that he
Greg: that something s he says and he says it's not witnessing any of the horrors it is reading some passage in the Ecclesiastics or something uh you know I is that is that the name of the book Ecclesia Ecclesiastics yeah and um
Greg: And uh that that we're you know, about taking people from something taking something from pip unjustly from other people's labor that radicalizes them and then
Greg: Then he's everywhere.
Greg: He's in Guatemala.
Greg: He's in, you know, he's he's back in Spain, he's back in Hispaniola, and he's constantly coming up with new schemes to try to figure out
Greg: you know, he thinks that he's got, you know, the year of the king and they pass the new laws, which he thinks is the end of slavery and the income incomienda system.
Greg: But then it turns out that
Greg: You know, that the I mean there's no way that any of them those radical reforms that he got uh that he got the king to p the you know, the Holy Roman Empire to pass in the in the
Greg: in in in the fifteen forties would take root in in in the Americas.
Greg: Native Americans are just too important as a source of wealth, you know?
Greg: If anybody wants confirmation of the labor theory of value, all you have to do is read the colonialists, the Catholic colonialists who said that this had we'd be nothing if it wasn't for the native, if it wasn't for the Indians.
Greg: And um
Greg: And uh and and so he gets increasingly and then and then he's never been to Peru, but then he develops this remarkable correspondence alliance with with
Greg: with his followers who are then connected with Al Murra and Etchwa and the and the leaders where they come up with this I mean Delas Kansas comes up with this
Greg: idea of using the confessional and the last and last rates as a political strategy for overturning the conquest where like, you know, basically do not steal.
Greg: And he could he starts producing these rule books for confessions to take confessions.
Greg: And there's also changes around this time with the nature of the confession and moves from a communal collector.
Greg: you know, that they stole this and that the conquest was a sin, a great s a really big violation of uh the uh do not steal and um
Greg: And of course this doesn't work and they were that they immediately find workarounds if they did it in good faith, they figure out ways of of of of giving reparations to
Greg: funding hospitals and institutions that ameliorate the worst of the conquests.
Greg: So in some ways it provides a buffer for the colonial system rather than a challenge to the colonial system.
Greg: But
Greg: You know, right until the right until his his his the ending.
Greg: And like he's he has these warm debates with
Greg: these Catholic theologians like Sepulveda who w just wanna defend slavery and defend the conquest and defend the violence of the conquest and he he he draws on whatever he can
Greg: Fine, canon law, theology, the ancients.
Greg: He's just pulling from here and there and he's making these arguments and people don't know what to do.
Greg: He he must have been some kind of
Greg: You know, so i i it must have had a degree of energy that I couldn't imagine.
Greg: the the way that he came down has come down to history.
Greg: You know, the most recently there was a very negative uh critical book of him and not a s another piece of empire that you know said, you know, he never really challenged empire
Greg: And it all nut it's true, but you know, again it's it's it's it's you know looking at
Nick: Yeah, he he comes across as a
Nick: um a much more provocative figure and a vivid figure, I think, than than I had ever thought of him before um in the book.
Nick: Danny, I'll kick it to you.
Nick: Yeah, so we're we're gonna
Nick: jump to the twentieth century, uh, because we wanna s you know talk a little bit about Leo, but in order to set that up
Nick: Uh there is an argument that can be made and I think you actually do make it in this excellent piece that you have in the New York Review of Books on Pope Leo that just came out.
Nick: recently that the main institution, uh, at least in terms of having some kind of success as opp opposing Trumpism
Nick: Is the Catholic Church.
Nick: And there's kind of a mystery as to, you know, what is the main theological influence on Pope Francis, Pope Leo?
Nick: And of course, you deal with liberation theology.
Nick: and and trying to explain, you know, what is influencing their thought.
Nick: And just to maybe like back up to the period before their rise, can you tell us
Nick: A little bit about the origins of liberation theology.
Nick: In the book, you describe it as a reaction to a reaction.
Nick: And, you know, I had the pleasure of interviewing for the nation and
Nick: I asked a similar question about, you know, there the l the connection between liberation theology and uh the emergence of like dependency theorists in in Latin America during this time.
Nick: So maybe, you know, just
Nick: zooming out a little bit, can you can you um give us just your your your your like a general explanation of of what it is and how in what sense was liberation theology a reaction to a reaction which
Nick: I don't think we think of it re in reactionary terms, but um I think you're trying to make kind of a historical argument here.
Greg: Yeah, I mean because the you know the what people tell the story of liberation theology they s usually start with, you know, the he he
Greg: Either the Vatic Vatican two or then or maybe the series of conferences that the bishops had in Latin America in in the late sixties where they
Greg: uh a firm or commitment to the uh you know, uh a preferential option to the poor, or they point to Gustavo Gutierrez or Peruvian, Dominican.
Greg: uh when it's he becomes a Dominicus m the later on in life is provi proving theolog uh priest and theologian that that that coins the phrase liberation theology in nineteen s in nineteen sixty eight in a famous lecture that he gives.
Greg: he writes a book that kind of really uh insists on on Catholicism and these and they and then and the and the so the history of
Greg: Of liberation theology is a history that flows out of Vatican II, flows out of the work of the missionaries that go out into the world to try to create pastoral communities and create a more Catholic
Greg: engagement, uh you know, a vernacular engagement with ca with everyday life and then that radicalizes in places like Peru and Brazil
Greg: But there's a backstory to this.
Greg: Uh not not so much a backstory, but deeper roots, you know, in the nineteen twenties as socialism it's
Greg: isn't emerging and demands for democracy and and the massification of society.
Greg: The Catholic Church in many places in Latin America, which you know had a dual role as being both
Greg: line with the status hierarchy and justifying the colonial and then post colonial order.
Greg: Although its relationship with liberal independence movements was always fraught, but you know, there was always
Greg: with the you know the the the the post-colonial elite in Latin America was split between conservatives and liberals and the you know and so the Catholic Church was a aligned with liberals who wanted to retain as much of the colonial order as possible
Greg: But when that order became challenged by social movements of of all various stripes that we associate with the late nineteenth and early twentieth century
Greg: A lot of priests became reactionaries, became phalangists, they became fascists, they became their criticism of they had individual property rights fell away and they started embracing the idea of property rights.
Greg: Once you had liberals talking about agrarian reform and things like that.
Greg: So um uh uh in Colombia
Greg: the Catholic Church was aligned with some of the the most brutal kind of early death squads in the rural countryside in the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties and nineteen forties as peasants began challenging property relations.
Greg: Um in in El Salvador, the Catholic Church was a li, you know, supported the Ramatanza's massacre of thirty thousand indigenous people.
Greg: So and then of course this was this was very much parallel and integrated with what was going on in Spain, what was going on in Portugal, you know, the ring race of a you know it
Greg: you know, call it whatever you want, fascism, phalangism, and integralism, but but different kind of more conservative movements were challenges that were challeng that were responding to modernity
Greg: And obviously at the same time, just like in Europe, you had parents within the Catholic Church embracing socialism
Greg: And of course there's deep histories of this.
Greg: This go back because you know, but in in France, Christian socialism can go goes back to the
Greg: the eighteen thirties and eighteen forties and even then there were there were interconnections with Latin American activists.
Greg: But it's in reaction to the to the kind of very conservative and violent
Greg: reaction of the Catholic Church to modernity that creates a backlash.
Greg: That's what I mean by the reac just to go back to that phrase, the reaction to the reaction.
Greg: And so by the nineteen
Greg: 40s, 1950s, you have new conflicts that are trying to figure out how to respond to the challenge of the manif that's not fascist.
Greg: And so you have a spread of sociology.
Greg: So Carmilo Torres in Colombia is a perfect example of this.
Greg: He d he's dead.
Greg: He's killed before liberation theology is even coined as a phrase.
Greg: You know, he's in Dominican seminary in in nineteen forty eight in in in Gitama when when the tasso
Greg: a week-long uprising that follows the death of a popular leader takes place.
Greg: He's very much influenced by a number of Dominican missionaries that come to Colombia that that have
Greg: partisan credentials.
Greg: They were fighting the Nazis and they're fighting the fascists.
Greg: One of them had created a movement called Econo Economy and Humanism based on his based on his missionary work on on France's coastal communities.
Greg: in which he saw um uh local fishing communities being destroyed by the emergence of large fishing fleets.
Greg: He he he developed a kind of proto-dependency theory.
Greg: Um, hence you know, humanism and economy was the name of the movement that he created in France and and and that it that took root in Colombia.
Greg: He taught us, goes to Belgium, he goes and he gets a he gets an MA, he gets an advanced degree in in none and he becomes a priest, he he becomes a in but then he becomes a sociologist.
Greg: He comes back
Greg: And he's kind of like a little bit like C.
Greg: Wright Mills.
Greg: He's trying to figure out a new sociology in Columbia.
Greg: He founds a sociology department in in in the University of Columbia and he creates um research teams that go out
Greg: um to figure out the sources of civility and and and how to overcome them and it creates these centers of of con you know what we would call consciousness raising now
Greg: And and but Colombia was so locked into its liberal conservative dyad that um it with liberals becoming very conservative after.
Greg: after at first moving to the left, but then that that they retreated.
Greg: That there was no space.
Greg: The whole political class was so dominated by one the oligarchy and two a political class that was
Greg: that was ossified, that he he eventually gave up and joined a a guerrilla an insurgency.
Greg: This was and again, this was he this was before the term liberation theology was even coined
Greg: And which imma which has a lot of priests and nuns in it that imagines themselves as a creating not just a girl or insurgency.
Greg: But they imagine the insurgency as somehow replicating primitive Christianity.
Greg: The communal is living in the you know, they're living in the jungle, they're sharing things.
Greg: and he's killed in his first military operation in nineteen sixty six, Camilo Torres.
Greg: Um he says right before he joins the guerrillas that to you know, that any Catholic who is not a revolutionary is living in mortal sin.
Greg: So then so then it's after that that that liberation theology really gels as as a
Greg: You know.
Greg: Before that I you know, they they uh the people were using the phrase new Catholics to talk about you know, and there's a lot of kind of different convergences that
Greg: you know, there's a there's a the ecumenical there's Protestant missionaries that have become more socially conscious.
Greg: Um Richard Shaw in in in who go then goes on to be an important illusion in in Princeton.
Greg: I don't know, it's in Colombia in the forties and fifties and he's kind of connecting with the sociology that that Camilo Torres is is putting out there.
Greg: And then and then yeah, and then dependency theory that th you know, like
Greg: You know, in the book I say the three great challeng in in America America, the three big challenges of Latin America to the world order is uh
Greg: American international law, which is basically the what I I briefly talked about, this reformation of the international law, uh liberation theology and dependency theory.
Greg: Like those are, you know, three intellectual movements.
Greg: that were what were serious challenges to the the world order.
Greg: Imagine imagined a different way of organizing the world order.
Greg: International law the international law won't have considerable success.
Greg: Basically, my argument is that the entire post-war liberal owner comes out of uh you know, is respect at the at the founding of L of Spanish American nations who
Greg: who the first League of Nations in the eighteen twenties, they had to learn how to live with each other because there were seven republics on on on a continent that was all filled up.
Greg: And so liberation value bar is very much correlated with dependency theory.
Greg: They draw heavily.
Greg: It's a lot of the priests that are giving that are setting up research centers and popular education classes in which they're trying to understand
Greg: not just uh the poor, but why the poor are poor.
Greg: And and and and then of course um it becomes a bigger challenge and it spreads to
Greg: a lot of the decolonizing world like becomes influential in places like Chicago and this brings us to Leo because, you know, the the Chicago
Greg: Theological union and and how you talk.
Greg: I don't I don't know if that's the name of it, or maybe the Catholic Theological Union.
Greg: Yeah, I think that's a Catholic Theological Union and very much engage with people like Gut Gustavo Gutierrez and in Latin America and the scene.
Greg: you know, the the the problems and and and and conflicts of the nineteen sixties and seventies in the in the United States.
Greg: The uh
Greg: Uh yeah, the this the the Archbishop of Canterbury, I write this in the piece.
Greg: It's g Gustavo Gutierrez in order to criticize Thatcherism's austerity program.
Greg: So there's ways in which it spreads out, both not just to the not just to the like decolonizing world in Africa
Greg: uh mostly and I guess in in certain Christian punch of Asia but but but also into into the United States and Latin America.
Greg: And it's like that it merges with peace Christianity and social Protestantism.
Nick: It it seems like the peace movement was probably or peace Christianity was important for Pope Leo when he was young.
Nick: In his background, we um you know we've had Elise Ann Allen on the show.
Nick: She is the author of the recent biography of him, which you which you wrote about.
Nick: Um but um but you say a little more about him.
Nick: Is it safe to say that he's that he's mostly been aligned with kind of the the left the left-wing current of of um Latin American Catholicism?
Nick: Right, right.
Nick: Uh-huh.
Greg: Right, yeah.
Greg: And and and obviously I was struck by how much time he spent in Peru.
Greg: He's he's he he doesn't you know, he he he he's hard to figure out even in even in that island game.
Greg: You know, it you're not getting deep you know, getting deep into what he's thinking, you know, you're getting you know, there is just this history of
Greg: Did it strike me that he arrives in Peru right at the year that that that re Connor Ratzinger and John Paul are beginning
Greg: their investigation of Gustavo Gutierrez.
Greg: This is a multi-decade-long inquiry into his innercy of liberation theology.
Greg: And of course
Greg: there's this whole history in which John Paul tries to limit the influence of liberation theology in Latin America.
Greg: Um and and and through the congregation of the faith that that is one of the main agents of that.
Greg: And and in many ways Peru, we don't have
Greg: probably don't have time to go into it is the cradle of the I mean I know we talked a lot about Colombia, but Gutierrez and Peru, the the model of the Christian based community.
Greg: the the the horizontal church rather than the vertical church.
Greg: It was very influential in Peru.
Greg: But but Relio
Greg: Oh, Trevor's run uh runnings that kind of moment it's it's it's being run back and the ascendants about this day given
Greg: You know, I know Orbit State is a complicated organization, uh, and there and there were organizations that were much further to the right and much more advanced and much more
Greg: uh Crusader like in its their reaction to liberation theology.
Greg: But Peru is going through this this very
Greg: strong reaction when Lee as Leo is there for pretty much is there for his first tenure.
Greg: And it pretty much coins coincides with the with the consolidation of the
Greg: Conservative a conservative of clergy in and in produ.
Greg: And and Leo's
Greg: First posting is up in uh uh Trucanes, which is in the north, which was which was had uh an a a long pastoral tradition, which liberation theology had a kind of had a presence.
Greg: And then it was on the post.
Greg: And he he he was not true, you know, got into convulsions for like excuse me, Mori.
Greg: uh spreading pants, you know, and it's it's uh it's um and and it seems like he's his politics are
Greg: You know, certainly to go back to the original question, but certainly on the progressive end of the spectrum, there's a photo of him at an anti-nuclear uh you know, opposing the the
Greg: The the deployment of cruise missiles in Italy that is a you know, that was organized by Italian Communist Party.
Greg: And
Greg: You know, th you know, and it seems like he and he comes out of Chicago and he comes out of that Catholic theological union and all in all of that.
Greg: So he's sympathetic.
Greg: But then he but you know he does it you know he he he's focused more on slight I mean there's so much immediate problems
Greg: And it seems strange with Gutierrez while he's in Peru.
Greg: It's unclear.
Greg: Um but there's he's immediately shows not there's the effects of an El Nino, there's
Greg: There's the the Lazarus Shining Path and the and the Peruvian military, which are, you know, really I hate that phrase between two followers, but you know, in Peru it really does
Nick: It really does hold off the Shining Panth, which was brutal and violent and and and this is a the that's the Shining Panth is a Maoist revolutionary.
Greg: Yeah, and they're not and they're not like
Greg: other Latin American, you know, women for the insurgents.
Greg: Yeah, they're on core.
Greg: They're like, we're gonna kill everybody who's not with us, even if especially the
Greg: you know, the people on the left because they're creating this they're creating they're creating you know they were formed this, you know.
Greg: They they were founded by a Kantian a Kantian philosopher.
Greg: Uh-huh.
Nick: Uh-huh.
Greg: defend I see like you know, through a a social history of the r you know, how radicalization or polarization happens.
Greg: The shining path is is uh you can still do that with the shining path, but it's but they're pretty pretty damning
Greg: They're pretty pretty indefensible organizations.
Greg: So anyway, the point is Peru is unique in a lot of ways and and then he looks up with
Greg: Francis, when Francis is this is the Archbishop of of uh of Buenos Aires and and and what's interesting and this is the peace this is what this is what the kind of
Greg: being an argument of the peace, there's a kind of bottom-up rectification of liberation theology taking place in Argentina, in which they kind of admit that liberation theology has become too sociological, too political.
Greg: But it's yeah, it it's not really fair.
Greg: They sput the other is is blind and and he under he believes that God is with the poor
Greg: It's not just an an overlay of Marxism or you know, or or using an overlay of Christianity over Marxism as as critics would have it.
Greg: Could be at as is is um you know, is looking uh you know, but
Greg: But there develops a movement that that that Francis is very much part of uh because his teacher becomes a prominent theologian called the theology of the people
Greg: And they hold on to the notion of a commitment to the poor and that politically active.
Greg: I mean, um many of these people who follow
Greg: in this line of theology.
Greg: Theology of people are labor radicals and they're peasant radicals and they're singled out I mean the
Greg: the violence that the m regime directed at the Catholic Church was formidable in Argentina.
Greg: But they they kind of emphasized popular piety
Greg: and and a kind of ineffable, inaccessible divinity that is present in the popular devotions of
Greg: you know, the incense burning and the intensity of people's belief.
Greg: Like that's what's more important than than
Greg: And in some ways Gutierrez, in some ways this is an argument with Gutierrez.
Greg: I mean, and it's a pointed argument, even though they have points of commonality.
Greg: But in some ways Gutierrez agrees with this.
Greg: He's he at the time, in response to his persecution, he writes a couple of biographies of de las casas to go back to de las casas.
Greg: It's fine.
Greg: You don't want Marxism, we don't need Marxism.
Greg: We can look to the census and find justification for our political positions in in um in liberation theology.
Greg: So this theology of the people, Francis embraces it and it becomes in some ways the organizing principle of his of his papacy.
Greg: And and I would say that Leo, who is Campton Bishop in Peru by Francis, and it's clear that they have an agenda.
Greg: I mean, I don't know.
Greg: I'm not in the story of the church, but you can see what's going on.
Greg: Francis appoints Leo Bishop.
Greg: in provincial city who and then and then he leads the counterattack against Opus Day quietly, respectfully, he listens to people, he doesn't he doesn't like
Greg: You know, he's not out on the streets.
Greg: He but but by the end of his time in Peru, his second tenure in Peru, Peru has flipped back in which the liberation is
Greg: theologians and clerics are are basically hold every major position in the country, including the archbishop.
Greg: office of the Limb, which had additionally been an open state bastion.
Greg: So it's interesting Leo's li you know, his first tenure corresponds to the
Greg: to the rise of of of reaction to liberation theology and consolidation of a of the of the conservative clergy, Opus Day and and groups even further to the right of Opus Day.
Greg: And his second tenure is the dismantling of that.
Greg: And then and then Leon points him to, you know, the
Greg: Whatever that's called, the dicastria.
Greg: What is that called the dickest?
Greg: Charge of appointing bishops on a global scale.
Greg: And again he's quiet.
Greg: He's he's he's not picking he's not pointing confrontational making confrontational points, but by the end of the but by the time Francis dies
Greg: He has appointed bishops that support Francis' agenda.
Greg: And and so it's an interesting both institution uh you know, the it the the the Francis Leo one two
Greg: is it it provides an interesting window both on the institutional politics of the church and the theological
Greg: revision the the theological rehabilitation of liberation theology through this Agentine strand of uh uh of of theology of the people, which in many ways is a fusion of liberation theology and Peronism.
Greg: This parentism, you know, celebrated the organic folk and the people and and you know, and in some way that's that's what li the liberation of the people uh does, except make it more explicitly Catholic.
Greg: And then you know, it's it's it's obviously these schisms in Latin America then segw then kind of segue
Greg: with larger political polarizations and schisms that are taking part in the larger world.
Greg: I mean anything it's uh thing when when you see Biden says that Leo is the anti-Trump
Greg: You know, he's he's summing up a long, long history in in a way that these, you know, multiple polarizations have kind of consolidated into one big schism.
Greg: that will dig through.
Greg: You're either you know a Trumpist brutalist or you're a Leo human uh human yeah you know the humanism of Leo
Nick: Yeah, sort of a religious version of socialism or barbarism.
Nick: Yeah.
Nick: You know, I I as I was reading the book, I kept thinking about how y there are these two extremes in Latin American Catholicism of like a a right wing version and a left wing version.
Nick: And then I kind of stepped back a second and thought, well, that's also true of the country's political history.
Nick: You know, many many brutal dictators and many um
Nick: you know, the glorious revolutionary movements.
Nick: But so y yeah, seems like another way in which we're all yeah, we're all kind of living in
Nick: in their world now, I guess, the the dynamics of Latin America have have spread outward.
Greg: Um it's interesting because, you know, we s we lived I don't know I don't know if we're moving into a kind of more Catholic
Greg: morality than a Protestant morality.
Greg: I mean I you know I think it was Terry Eagleton who said that you know the thing about Catholicism is you can go from Catholicism to socialism without having to pass through liberalism.
Nick: Yes, yeah.
Greg: But Protestantism but but you can't do that in Protestantism.
Greg: In Protestantism you have to go through liberalism first to get to socialism.
Greg: Right, right.
Nick: No, you don't.
Nick: He also has a great line somewhere where he he talked about growing up in Catholic school, um if you know his ancestry is Irish and uh
Nick: He said that after he stopped being religious as a young man, the horizons of the the Catholic of Catholic theology had conditioned in the you know, the convent.
Nick: where he gr was taught had conditioned him so much that liberalism could just never be satisfying for him, that he that he needed a more radical vision of the world.
Nick: And um, you know, he f he found that in Marxism.
Greg: Yeah, yeah.
Greg: And I think that and I think that is the lesson of Latin America because of
Greg: Because in tradition, you can go from Catholicism to socialism or social rights without having to you know, without having to first go through the exercise of socializing liberalism.
Greg: Uh-huh.
Nick: Well, I I'm gonna read um just the last couple sentences of your New York review piece, and maybe you can maybe you can elaborate on this just a little bit, and I think it'll be a good place to close out.
Nick: So you write here, and I think this is this is kind of the heart of your New York review piece, even though it comes at the end, you write one of the great ironies of the last century is that the institution, the philosopher Sidney Hook, once called
Nick: qu the the old quote, the oldest and greatest totalitarian movement in history, unquote, the Catholic Church, supplied the oppressed with tools for critical thinking and advanced a humanism that is now everywhere under threat.
Nick: Today the irony is amplified.
Nick: The church led by Leo has become perhaps the only global force capable of mounting a moral challenge to a rogue United States
Nick: It is no s it is in no small part because of Latin America.
Nick: I think that was so well expressed.
Nick: So maybe there's not a lot more to say.
Nick: It's one way uh Greg of reading your argument as uh kind of uh at least regarding liberation theology as a a rise, fall, and rise again story.
Nick: Now it's a little more complicated because um it's not just liberation theology that's influencing
Nick: uh Leo and Fran and and the late Francis.
Nick: But, you know, the left right now finds itself in pretty dire circumstances
Nick: in terms of s uh how many victories uh the riot has won in recent years.
Nick: And these adjustments that you're kind of describing the Catholic Church as as having made with the last two popes
Nick: Yeah, and again, just connecting it to Nick's last question.
Nick: Is there something to be learned from this on the left in the United States?
Nick: Um not saying you have to abandon um Marxist class analysis um at all, but
Nick: Is there a kind of populism here at play, e even despite the how re reserved uh Leo seems that
Nick: Yeah.
Nick: But yeah.
Greg: I mean, it's a complicated question, right?
Greg: When you when you start thinking about it, you start thinking over in all the dimensions
Greg: Um you know, that I think I think it's the importance of ideology and morality and having a vision of a good society.
Greg: And I think that I think
Greg: We all I think you think of the moral void that Trump presides over.
Greg: There's no effort whatsoever to legitimate anything in any moral terms.
Greg: It's all just
Greg: Transactional power relations and and uh and you know he is you know about the symptom of that and he's and and he's and he's
Greg: We could fight this moral void, so what's gonna fill it up?
Greg: And and it's interesting that the three main candidates for the twenty twenty eight presidency is
Greg: Michael Rubio, Vance, and ALC and they're both Catholics.
Greg: And they're both very different Catholics.
Greg: I don't know what you know, you know, he's he he's given some speeches that you know, that that are playing on that political theory that wants to say that Latin United States is very much influenced by conflict.
Greg: But um but then he also just wants to create a kind of vision of America that is that
Greg: You know, even he's involved in an administration that's defolding conflicts in Latin Americans, that is that has room for a vision of Latin America, greater America in its in its mythology.
Greg: Then you have Vance, who is some kind of thelian guy, man.
Greg: I didn't even know what the hell I am.
Greg: It's like you know it's not good.
Greg: You know it's like
Greg: You know, like some razor and s you know, it's like Mordor and some of the Mordorian kind of politicism.
Greg: And then you have AOC who's like a le gonna run as a Leo Catholic, you know, and and and so I I think I think
Greg: The 2028 election is gonna shape up as you know, a m America the Catholic, and you know, that they're gonna turn the Catholicism to fill that void.
Greg: Um the fill that morals woven that that that Pump Presdock presides over.
Greg: Mr.
Greg: What else could fill it?
Greg: I mean of course socialism could fill it
Greg: You know, but there's so many there's such a ri there's so many I mean the Cold War has left such a uh uh a reactionary instinct in the United States that that it's so easy to control and
Greg: dismiss um that uh you know that socialism might have to find uh it uh a moral basis in something like
Greg: Could yeah, I mean obviously there's a lot of problems, you know, questions about abortion and gay rights and things like that.
Greg: Um you know
Greg: But it but it seems that that's that Cabinetism is is is is is gonna be the well and that that that remodelises.
Greg: I don't know.
Greg: I don't know.
Greg: It is interesting that that um
Greg: Yeah, for many of how many Supreme Court justices are Catholic?
Greg: It's it's it's like it's it's like uh it's like the vo you know, the the termness of American Protestant liberalism.
Greg: And being completely hollowed out hasn't less many options for how to remoralize the world.
Greg: To me, I don't ideologize the world.
Greg: This is the thing about you go back to the question of populism.
Greg: You know, I always fantasize about writing an article but I never get around to it.
Greg: You know, I'm out you know
Greg: it it's the it's it's politic th th it's i you need you you know th there's the technocratic liberals that you know that contribute to the void you need to kind of
Greg: We've seeded everything and what's what's filled up is a kind of conspiracism.
Greg: Thing of tree wisdom, Q and on, whatever it is.
Greg: And part of that is because people haven't embraced the
Greg: fact that we need an ideology.
Greg: You need to be ideological, you need to be moral and you need to and you need to be critical.
Greg: And populism in Latin America, you know, recently the right has learned this and this is why it's been successful at the
Greg: voting boots over the last year with help from the Trump administration, but the left has understood that politics is where people get a sense of themselves.
Greg: And this goes to the heart of liberalism, right?
Greg: Because liberalism wants to say that it's it's in the market where people become individuals, where people become moral, and they make their peace with modernity.
Greg: Well Latin America it was al Latin America never had that pretense or that conceit.
Greg: It was always through politics that people became more of an individual.
Greg: And they didn't lose themselves through politics, they became themselves through politics.
Greg: You know, and and and um and I think that I think that we have to go back to that understand it.
Greg: Uh and and go back to that in the United States.
Greg: We'll go to it in the United States.
Nick: Exactly.
Nick: Yeah.
Nick: All right.
Nick: Well, I think that's a great place to end.
Nick: Um taking so much stuff.
Greg: It's fine to get about so much stuff so much.
Nick: for this episode.
Nick: We want to thank Commonweal for sponsoring the show, and we'll see you next time.
Nick: Thanks for joining us.