New pope has "fearsome reputation"

Or so says the sidebar link at the BBC's homepage. The article, however, does not elaborate on how Ratzinger earned his reputation but does contain this little gem of understatement:

He has a reputation for stifling dissent, and one of his early campaigns was against "liberation theology" in Latin America.

Some priests became involved in fighting poverty through social action, but to Cardinal Ratzinger it smacked of Marxism.

So, Ratzinger didn't want priests helping oppressed Latin American's out of poverty. He must really be a nasty old prick. But, what about "liberation theology", did it really smack of Marxism? Hell, it was Marxism, albeit in a "new and improved" Christian wrapper.

Here's Fr. Robert Sirico on liberation theology:

In the days when the Superpowers were locked in a Cold War, Latin America seethed with revolution, and millions lived behind an iron curtain, a group of theologians concocted a novel idea within the history of Christianity. They proposed to combine the teachings of Jesus with the teachings of Marx as a way of justifying violent revolution to overthrow the economics of capitalism.

The Gospels were re-rendered not as doctrine impacting on the human soul but rather as windows into the historical dialectic of class struggle. These "liberation theologians" saw every biblical criticism of the rich as a mandate to expropriate the expropriating owners of capital, and every expression of compassion for the poor as a call for an uprising by the proletarian class of peasants and workers.

This is hardly the first time that the Gospels have been read in a way that seemed designed to support a peculiar and wayward personal agenda. The history of heresy, usually Gnostic at its root (for its perpetual claim to have discovered some hidden meaning accessible only to the elect), is bound up with the history of megalomania and the search for power over others.

What gave liberation theology its currency was its appeal among elite theological students safely cloistered far from the workers and peasants so much in need of liberation. The sheer exotica of reading Christianity through Marxist eyes had an appeal, as did the political luxury afforded by the strange new respect secular intellectuals had for a version of Christianity that seemed to endorse socialism.

Read the whole thing, it's quite interesting.

Oh yeah, one more thing, never trust the BBC.