Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (165 page)

With the vernacular Mass also came a musical revolution. Early-twentieth-century Catholicism had witnessed an outburst of scholarly and musical energy devoted to the proper and reverent performance of the Church's ancient plainchant. The training which had gone into such sensitivity was now as redundant as the Baroque altar, when the requirement was for congregations to perform music in their own language. Priests completely untrained in teaching music to their congregations were now forced often against their instincts to impose a musical idiom which had previously hardly existed in Catholicism and which, to begin with, had virtually no repertoire native to the Catholic Church. Overnight, outside a handful of redoubts of traditional musical excellence (plus the pope's Sistine Chapel), the acoustic guitar became the dictator of musical style in Catholicism, with the same suddenness and thoroughness that the Geneva psalm had achieved in Reformation England. Not merely plainsong but the whole heritage of Catholic musical composition centred on the Mass was relegated to the liturgical sidelines, and such music was now probably more frequently and effectively performed by Anglicans than by Catholics.
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Although the hurt extended a good way beyond theological conservatives, the defiant and semi-clandestine celebration of the old Mass and its music became a catalyst for a slow gathering of fury among traditionalist Catholics, which in some places led to schism. Others, including Josef Ratzinger, who was appointed Archbishop of Munich in 1977 and whose elder brother at Regensburg Cathedral was one of German Catholicism's leading church musicians, swallowed their anger and bided their time.
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CATHOLICS, PROTESTANTS AND LIBERATION

Another momentous development for the Church came entirely independent of the Vatican: a worldwide theological movement which has come to have an increasingly tense relationship with central Catholic authority. A huge shift in the membership of global Catholicism from north to south transformed the priorities of laity, clergy and religious in settings where the two-century-old confrontation of Church and French Revolution, or even the Russian Revolution, no longer seemed the most urgent struggle. Instead it was the fight against sheer wretched poverty in the lives of millions in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Academic theology in the earlier part of the century had not said much about poverty, apart from being against it: rather like slaves in earlier centuries, the poor had been, with sadness, taken for granted. Now certain theologians, especially those working closely with the poor, began considering the implications of the Christian doctrine of Providence: the Father cares for humans as much as he clothes the lilies of the field.
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They looked again at the furious debates on poverty generated by the friars in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and listened again to the angry comments by friars like Bartolome de las Casas on the early stages of Spanish colonization in America (see p. 692). They listened also to what socialism and Marxism had drawn out of the French Revolution and Christian tradition in the nineteenth century. They even listened to their congregations, humble folk like those who had fought for the Church as
Cristeros
in the Mexico of the 1920s (see pp. 934-5). They christened what they were doing liberation theology.
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It was not easy for the Church hierarchy in Latin America to move beyond both a long alliance with elite Creole Catholic culture and a political outlook still generally conservative and authoritarian, but there were enough clerics capable of making a new assessment of the significance of lay militancy in earlier popular Catholicism among the
Cristeros
and analogous lay movements throughout the continent. That provided the momentum for an episcopal conference called to Medellin in Colombia in 1968, whose participants sought to call the Church 'to the fulfilment of the redeeming mission to which it is committed by Christ'. Active in the preparation of the bishops' discussions at Medellin was a Peruvian theologian who combined university teaching with the work of a parish priest in a slum area of the Peruvian capital, Lima, Gustavo Gutierrez. He later popularized a phrase first used by a further episcopal conference at Puebla in 1979, in the presence of the recently elected Pope John Paul II: a 'preferential option for the poor' in the Church's construction of its mission. This had been foreshadowed in the statements of the Medellin Conference, which had looked forward to a redistribution of world resources which would give 'preference to the poorest and most needy'.
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In one seminal book,
A Theology of Liberation
, which had started life as a lecture in Peruvian discussions around Medellin, and in many subsequent works, Gutierrez employed a phrase for purposeful action guided by theory,
praxis
. To theologians of classical Catholic training, this word had a ready and negative resonance, because Karl Marx had used it to indicate a philosophy inseparable from action - but that was only half the truth. As the Greek term for structured activity by free men, it was the word embedded in the original Greek title of a book of the New Testament, and of its many subsequent imitators beyond the biblical canon, the
Acts
of the Apostles. It is notable that in Gutierrez's discussion of poverty, he did not look back, as did some liberation theologians, to the history of Christian purposeful poverty since the first monks and hermits of the Church, as an act of solidarity with those who had not chosen to be poor. Having surveyed the biblical discussion of poverty, he simply declared material poverty as a 'subhuman situation' and 'scandalous condition', and dismissed notions of spiritual poverty as unhelpful diversions.
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While Catholics in Latin America were discovering new meanings for justice and equality for the powerless, Protestants in the United States turned a century of black struggle for equal political rights into an interracial campaign to make a reality of the civil war emancipation of enslaved African-Americans. Even in the worst times when white supremacists distorted the democracy of the Southern States, some white Evangelical Protestants in the South were capable of standing out against the culture round them to reach across the racial barrier within Evangelicalism. Belle Harris Bennett, epitome of well-bred white Kentucky Methodism, was central to Southern support for overseas missions, and the founder of a college which also trained women for work at home on civil rights and social projects. She campaigned against lynching, and made sure that the great black activist W. E. B. Du Bois was invited to interracial Methodist gatherings, where she used the force of her personality to ban segregated seating.
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When, in the 1950s, civil rights activists began to campaign against Southern racism, there was a groundswell of support which could look back to affirmations like this. Among the leadership was Martin Luther King Jr, a Baptist minister and son of another who had taken the name of Martin Luther for himself and his son, inspired by his visit to Germany. When the younger King began campaigning for civil rights, his insistence on non-violent struggle had two roots: one, the Bible; the other, the campaigns of Mahatma Gandhi, whose family he had visited in India. In King, the Evangelicalism of the South met the writings of one of the greatest exponents of the 'Social Gospel' in the USA, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, whose synthesis of Reformed and Lutheran theology and liberal Protestant analysis of society he much admired.

Perhaps the greatest achievement in King's career, prompting President Lyndon B. Johnson to put all the skills developed in his rather chequered political career behind an act to protect black voting rights, was a pair of marches through Alabama from Selma to the state capital Montgomery in 1965. In the first, hundreds of marchers, hastily gathered through Sunday sermons from King and his colleagues after the murder of a civil rights worker, were brutally attacked and tear-gassed by state police - fatally for the credibility of Southern government, in full view of television cameras. When King called a new march for two days later to commemorate the brutality, clergy of all denominations from across the nation, and representatives of faith beyond Christianity, poured into Selma. It was one of the most remarkable demonstrations of ecumenism and multi-faith action against injustice yet seen in the world.
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Faced with an order from the state authorities to turn back, King used his authority over the crowds to abandon their march rather than provoke further suffering. This might have seemed like humiliation, but once more King's enemies ruined their cause that same night by their street murder of a Unitarian minister from faraway Massachusetts, who had been among the Selma marchers. A few days later, when President Johnson - wily old Texan politician shocked into uncharacteristic moral indignation - spoke to Congress to back the Voting Rights Act, he ended incongruously but with sensational effectiveness by reciting a slogan from the song which remained the anthem of American protesters throughout the 1960s: 'We shall overcome'. Three years after that, Martin Luther King was shot dead in Memphis, Tennessee, the day after a speech in which he had likened himself to Moses, afforded no more than a glimpse of the Promised Land before the entry of Israel.
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King joined a procession of modern Christian martyrs who were killed for their work for the powerless, at the hands of those defending unjustly wielded power.

On the other side of the world, another situation combining rapid social change and political oppression provoked the development in the 1970s of a different variety of Protestant liberation theology: the
minjung
theology of South Korea. The word means 'ordinary people', but this simple concept changed focus with the bewilderingly fast development of the republic, from factory workers through to the flexibility of the information technology industry: eventually more what might be termed a 'cognitariat' of educationally skilled workers than a 'proletariat'. Jesus was minjung and the friend of the minjung, teaching forgiveness and love of enemies, but Moses was also minjung, political leader of his people against oppression. Minjung theologians were proud of their Korean past, and saw a complex struggle not only with the authoritarian South Korean government, but with the global strategies of the United States, which maintained that regime. Those involved faced torture, imprisonment and execution from South Korea's military dictators. Given the trauma of the Korean War, with nearly a million refugees from the Communist North in their midst, even self-consciously reformist Korean theologians had little inclination to explore the terminology of Marxism in the fashion of South American liberation theologians. Although opposed to the strange dynastic Communism of Kim Il Sung in the North, minjung theologians still sought to show proper respect for the Korean ideal of self-sufficiency which lay behind North Korea's cruelty and inhumanity.
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As Korean democracy gradually came to maturity after three hectic decades of economic development which had taken Europe two centuries to complete, there arose a new problem for minjung theology: how to reinvent for the 'cognitariat' this movement born in political struggle. The movement contributed to the social activism of a society whose needs and problems outran the administrative capacity of government, but it found it difficult to compete with Korean Pentecostalism. Pentecostals celebrated the success of the new society, and in their vehement anti-Communism they gladly adopted a conservative evangelical style from the United States, especially the 'prosperity' message of the 'Word of Faith' movements, while scorning the 'idolatry' to be found in the Korean past. Minjung's roots were in Presbyterianism, long accustomed to respecting and exploring Korean tradition and culture. So minjung theologians in recent years have explored the Korean past to find appropriate forms for a fully involved citizenship. They look with interest to the revolutionary Donghak movement, which, in the same era as the Taiping in China, sought to synthesize religion and reform for Korea. They offer people who are in danger of being too proud of their own new success Jesus's call to principled action, which can be seen as a
praxis
for Korea: 'If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me'.
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For at the heart of all these movements was a meditation on the powerlessness of the crucified Christ, and on the paradox that this powerlessness was the basis for resurrection: freedom and transformation. Christian art created in the twentieth century (beyond run-of-the-mill devotional objects) has interestingly shifted away from old priorities: even in Catholic art, the Madonna and Child appear less often, and there is a greater stress on Christ on the Cross. Against the background of power struggles which had laid empires low and ruined so many lives in two world wars and beyond, much Christian experience thus resonated with the themes of crucified weakness and the tiny scale of the mustard seed before it becomes a great tree. Protestants had discovered ecumenism in their relative failures in small villages in India. Catholics discovered liberation theology in small communities of ordinary people in Latin America. They were often facing as dire threats from military power as the Mexican
Cristeros
before them, and with what little schooling the Church could provide, they turned to the Bible to help them understand their situation. They have come to be described by the inelegant terms (which have not translated well from Iberian languages) 'basic ecclesiastical communities' or 'base groups/ communities'.

Poor people throughout the global south recognized the experiences of Latin Americans and civil rights marchers in their own. They likewise looked for political liberation, but the historic context in Africa and Asia was very different from that in Latin America. From Dakar to Djakarta, the 1940s and 1950s had witnessed rapid disintegration in the enormous colonial empires built up by European colonial powers in the nineteenth century - Africa's decolonization was a particular surprise. Although the United States was initially very ready to encourage Europe's shattered powers to shed their colonies after 1945, no one expected the virtually universal withdrawal which emerged at the end of the 1950s, postponed only by special circumstances in southern Africa. When one young liberal Catholic Belgian academic in 1956 published a work proposing that the Belgian Congo might suitably be given independence on the centenary of its cession to King Leopold in 1885, his book provoked a storm of ridicule and fury in Belgium. In fact the Congo's independence came four years after its publication. Rome had given so little consideration to providing an autonomous future for Catholicism in the vast Belgian territory that an indigenous hierarchy of bishops was only hastily established in the months between the King of Belgium announcing imminent independence in 1959 and the actual handover. The political authorities had shown no more forethought than the Church. This short-sightedness was the prelude to immeasurable human misery in the self-styled Democratic Republic of the Congo which has not yet ceased.
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