Word: marxist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Since the 1968 CELAM session at Medellin, Colombia, where ringing calls for political and economic justice were issued, the continent has been roiled by bitter church-state conflicts. Angry debate raged over priestly activism, and some younger priests and missionaries responded to governmental oppression by embracing Marxist ideas under the banner of "liberation theology...
...point of departure." In the decade since, he said, "interpretations have been given that have been at times contradictory, not always correct, not always beneficial for the church." He did not elaborate on this intriguing statement, but sources close to John Paul indicate that he is deeply concerned over Marxist infiltration among Latin American priests. From this first glimpse, it seems that John Paul will seek to fend off further Marxist inroads while blending the church's spiritual resources with firm commitment to social justice and human rights...
Attacked from without, the church is dangerously divided within over its social strategy in a region ground down by staggering poverty as well as political oppression. As Sister Marta Freeh Lopez, a missionary nun in Nicaragua, told TIME'S Bernard Diederich, "I am certainly not a Marxist, but while we in the church have contented ourselves with teaching the Lord's Prayer, the Marxists are out offering solutions to existing problems...
...steamrollered its ideas past an apathetic majority. In 1972 Vatican officials favored the CELAM board's selection of auxiliary Bishop Alfonso López Trujillo from the staunchly conservative Colombian hierarchy as secretary-general, or top staff executive. López Trujillo is a firm, shrewd anti-Marxist who once declared, "I don't believe that in Latin America Marxism has any possibilities. Nor does a capitalism that turns its back on mankind." He is a foe of liberation theology and apparently had a hand in an important critique of it that was released...
DIED. F.W. Dupee, 74, literary critic and longtime professor of English at Columbia University (1948-71); of a drug overdose; in Carmel, Calif. A Chicago-born graduate of Yale who worked as a Marxist labor organizer in the 1930s, Dupee in 1937 helped recast as anti-Stalinist the Partisan Review, a radical literary magazine founded three years earlier. Eschewing his political extremism, he eventually achieved prominence as a Henry James scholar, popular poetry teacher and elegant writer on figures ranging from Sir Richard Burton to Charlie Chaplin...