Word: puebla
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Compromise at Puebla...
Behind the gray stone walls of Palafox Seminary in Puebla, Mexico, 184 bishops of the third Latin American Bishops' Conference (CELAM III) spent 18 days weighing words like poker chips in a high-risk game. At stake was the future of 300 million Roman Catholics, across a continent plagued by poverty and oppression. Would the bishops be swayed by the progressives in their midst and come out in favor of church activism for the coming decades? Or would they take a conservative line and retreat from tactics that threatened confrontation with repressive political regimes? Last week the bishops emerged...
...Pope had come to Mexico to address the third continent-wide meeting of Latin American bishops and urge a care fully balanced commitment to both spiritual and social goals. The bishops' meeting at Puebla is discussing church strategy in Latin America, where oppressive regimes and desperate poverty abound. In consequence, many priests have turned to "liberation theology" and revolutionary Marxist thinking. In their view, work for social and economic revolution is central to the church's task...
...Puebla address drew careful limits on priestly activism. It emphasized that political work is largely the task of the laity. In other speeches, the Pope warned a meeting of nuns against secularizing their mission, and told a large gathering of the clergy, "Be priests, not social workers or political leaders or functionaries of a temporal power...
...liberation-theology strategists who were observing the Puebla meeting assumed a low profile. They issued no public response to the Pope and pursued behind-the-scenes politicking among friendly bishops from Brazil and elsewhere. The bishops' meeting will run until Feb. 13, and the progressive bishops hope to wring from it an explicit condemnation of right-wing "national security" tactics and capitalist exploitation. They may succeed...