Salon.com > Mary Jo McConahay

Benedict’s first big challenge

Wed, 20 Apr 2005 08:00:00 +0000

Joy, consternation and, for some, outright shock are reverberating among Catholics worldwide at the first sight of their new pope, Benedict XVI, in his red robes. The most conservative regard the German Joseph Ratzinger as their champion, with his influential rock-hard stands against gay unions, cloning, the ordination of women and any dismantling of the firewall between Catholicism and every other religion in the world. Liberals regard him as medieval, a threat to the theological exploration of sexual ethics, pluralism and a church for the third millennium.

Now that he is pontiff, both sides are holding their breath.

One key to Benedict's papacy may be found far from the elegant St. Peter's Square or the after-Mass coffees in U.S. church halls. Ratzinger made one of his hallmark stands as a Vatican force in the villages and rough urban-misery belts of Latin America, the globe's most Catholic region. There, in the 1980s, he confronted the fast-moving tide of liberation theology, an intellectual and popular movement that linked Catholic theology and political activism in everyday issues of social justice and human rights. Ratzinger officially reversed the tide, forbidding certain Catholic theologians to publish, in what was called a "silencing."

The anguish of mothers in a war zone

Fri, 21 Mar 2003 19:32:00 +0000

On a day 20 years ago when I had been in El Salvador less than a week, a woman carrying twin babies approached me in the upscale neighborhood where I had found a room. She looked poor, out of place, and had two other children, perhaps 4 or 5 years old, a boy and a girl, clinging to her skirts. She pulled back the shawl so I could see the babies' faces -- they looked like newborns, but she said they were four weeks old. "Can you take them ... together?" she asked.

I wondered: What would possess a woman to sell her children?

As if reading my mind, the woman said she wanted no money, only to give the baby girls to someone who might keep them together. Her eyes seemed absent, as if she were watching things that weren't right in front of her. She said her husband had been killed a few days before, near a town on the south coast, in a nameless skirmish in a war that eventually took 75,000 lives, mostly civilians. It was my first encounter with the terrible decisions of mothers in wartime, and I can't forget it as bombs begin to fall over Iraq.

The costs of Mitch

Thu, 12 Nov 1998 20:00:00 +0000

It is an image local residents can't get out of their minds. The mayor of the village next door, fighting to cross the street that had become a river in the dark, rescuing one family and going back for more, when his raincoat caught on debris rushing down from the mountain. The current was too strong, and it carried him away, struggling, until he drowned.

It is only one small story in Central America, where some 10,000 died horribly as a result of Hurricane Mitch. At a moment when mass burials are taking place in hardest-hit Honduras and Nicaragua and disease is breaking out on the still inaccessible Mosquito Coast, it is difficult to look beyond the immediate human tragedy. But Mitch struck at a moment when this region had become a collection of peacetime democracies for the first time in history. If displacement, famine and physical loss are not confronted well and quickly, Mitch's economic and political costs may be as devastating as the immediate effects of the storm.

The Inter-American Development Bank immediately called the hurricane and storms a catastrophe "the likes of which we have not seen hit Latin America before." Such tragedy would never be wished on any country at any time, but from here, it is impossible not to look around and ask, "Why here? Why now?"

Rain Forest on Chopping Block in Belize

Tue, 21 Jan 1997 20:00:00 +0000

San Pedro Columbia, Belize -- Asian lumber companies have begun logging one of the last great rain forests in Central America. And while the falling trees can be heard by those who live on the forest edge, most of them Mayan Indians, their own protests go unheard.

The situation comes into focus in this village of 1200 alongside the Columbia River Forest Reserve, 103,000 acres of old-growth tropical hardwood forest. Sitting outside his house at day's end, Leonardo Acal asks the basic question: "Our rain forest is something we want and need. How can the government just allow the Malaysians to come in and take it away from us?"

Recently, the government permitted Malaysian-backed companies to log areas in the reserve and elsewhere -- more than half a million acres in this district. Most people here are Maya, like Acal, and hold no deeds to their homesites or cornfields or to the hunting areas around the villages where they have lived for generations.

Belize, the former British Honduras, is small -- about the size of Massachusetts with a population of only 210,000 -- and sells its natural resources because it needs foreign exchange to repay a large national debt. But costs could be high -- not only loss of the forest, but the possibility of serious dissent.