“To be a Christian is to be a revolutionary.”
– Padre J. Guadalupe Carney, in TO BE A REVOLUTIONARY, Harper & Row, 1985
At the Mass of ordination for Bishop Dorick Wright held in January of 2007 at the St. John’s College gymnasium, I saw two men take Holy Communion to whose policies I was very much opposed. These were Home Affairs Minister Ralph Fonseca and Dr. Bertie Chimilio, the FFB president. I remember saying to myself at that specific time, now I understand why these two are so powerful.
The papacy of John Paul I lasted for just 33 days (August 26, 1978 – September 28, 1978), before he died suddenly and mysteriously. At the time the Vatican was in the throes of a great banking and financial crisis which later became an international scandal.
More than that, the Church itself was divided between the traditional conservative establishment and a new liberation theology wing which was active and had a high profile in Central America. There were priests and nuns who were murdered and tortured in this region, most notably Salvador, because they believed in the real Jesus Christ, the outspoken champion of the poor and the oppressed.
Amongst those priests who were murdered was an American Jesuit by the name of Jim Carney, who had taught and coached basketball at S.J.C. in the middle 1950’s while he was a scholastic. After he became a priest, Carney spent most of his priesthood working amongst the poor in Honduras, the republic just south of Belize which spent most of the twentieth century under the rule of pro-Washington military dictatorships.
Jim Carney believed that to be a true Christian was to be a revolutionary and to fight against oppression and injustice. Because of this, he was murdered by the Honduran military. His body was never found, but the belief of many is that he was thrown out of an airplane.
John Paul II, who succeeded John Paul I in 1979, was a conservative. A native of Poland, he was fundamentally anti-communist, and opposed to liberation theology. His papacy lasted more than a quarter century, and during that time the Church became “old school” conservative again. Liberation theology, for all intents and purposes, disappeared.
In Belize, both Assad Shoman and Said Musa had attended St. John’s College Sixth Form in the early 1960’s. Assad had been raised as a Catholic at St. Ignatius School and the high school S.J.C. Said Musa was educated as an Anglican in San Ignacio and Belize City primary schools before doing his high school years at the original St. Michael’s College, an Anglican high school for boys.
During their years studying law in England, Shoman and Musa “discovered” their Palestinian identity and became, by Belizean standards, radicals. They returned to Belize around 1967, and were appointed traveling magistrates. Their jobs gave them an opportunity to travel in all the districts of Belize, to renew contact with old classmates, and to recruit and educate (their enemies would say “indoctrinate”) young Belizean intellectuals and workers.
When I met these two young men in the latter part of 1968, they were both progressive, for lack of a better word. They both spoke of the poor – the farmers, the fishermen, the workers. Like myself, they were opposed to the Vietnam War, and they were sympathetic to black power.
In retrospect, the demonstration against the Vietnam War which Shoman and Musa organized to coincide with the New Year of 1969, was part of a future package. In the middle of January, the week after the demonstrations had ended, they called a meeting at Silky Stewart’s residence on Vernon Street to discuss the mechanization of the sugar industry. Unbeknownst to them, I was involved with Rasta Livingston and others in black power lectures at Liberty Hall.
Those Liberty Hall lectures rapidly gave rise to the foundation of the United Black Association for Development (UBAD), in February of 1969. Assad and Said quickly joined UBAD, but soon separated themselves to form the People’s Action Committee (PAC). In the midst of the cultural/political ferment in Belize, they invited me to a meeting with Premier George Price at his office, where Mr. Price invited us to be candidates for the ruling People’s United Party in the upcoming Belize City Council elections. I had been raised as an NIP, so this was a startling development to me, for which I was not at all prepared.
I began this column with the intention of showing you how the liberation wing of the Belizean Roman Catholic Church cut a deal with Shoman and Musa sometime in the middle 1970’s, a deal which created enough legitimacy for the lawyers to win seats in the House of Representatives in 1979. But the journey to that point became an extended process, which I will have to continue in the weekend issue. Inshallah.
The ruling conservative faction of the Church in Belize helped to establish the United Democratic Party in 1973 as a protection against the Shoman/Musa entrance and influence in the PUP. This was basically what the so-called Liberal Party represented – the conservative faction of the Roman Catholic Church.
Mr. Price had spent some time studying for the Catholic priesthood in a Guatemalan seminary in the early 1940’s. This was during a time when Jorge Ubico ruled Guatemala with an iron, fascist fist. The Roman Church in Guatemala has traditionally been the most conservative diocese in the whole of Central America. But Mr. Price himself had read the encyclicals of John XXIII, who liberalized the Church during his papacy (1958-1963), and Mr. Price had become “liberated” enough to incorporate the Shoman/Musa views in his party. As punishment for that, the Church conservatives in Belize helped to form the UDP. This was the first time since Mr. Price became PUP Leader in 1956, that the Roman Catholic Church would not be completely supportive of him.
We will continue on Friday.