The US used to have people killed for practicing what Pope Francis preaches

Horhey · Apr 5, 2014

[video=youtube_share;zPDv_1peapY]http://youtu.be/zPDv_1peapY[/video]

The US terrorist war in Central America was essentially a war against the population, particularly the Church - deemed "Communists" once the Bishops had adopted "the preferential option for the poor."

In 1981, the Committee Of Santa Fe issued a report, advising the Reagan administration that:

Committee Of Santa Fe: Vital Interests

U.S. foreign policy must begin to counter (not react against) Liberation Theology as it is utilized in Latin America by the "liberation theology" clergy.
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In 1999, the U.S. Army School of the Americas (which created the killing machine) website boasted in it's FAQ section:

U.S. ARMY SCHOOL OF THE AMERICAS: FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Liberation Theology -- in Latin America -- was defeated with the assistance of the U.S. Army.
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Human Rights Watch documented the terror campaign against the Church extensively:

Human Rights Watch: A year of reckoning: El Salvador a decade after the assassination of Archbishop Romero

Since the post-Vatican II transformation of the Catholic Church in Latin America and the diffusion of theologies of "liberation" advocating a preferential option for the poor, church workers have fallen under suspician and have become targets of threats and attacks. The enmity felt for the Jesuits within certain sectors of the military and the far right has been matched by violence directed against catechists and other lay and clerical church workers throughout the country.

Archbisphop Romero's explanation of why churches and churchworkers become targets of emnity and hostility in El Salvador still seems apt:

While it is clear that our Church has been the victim of persecution. It is not that just any Priest or just any institution has been persecuted. It is that segment of the Church which is on the side of the poor and has come out in their defense that has been persecuted and attacked.

Here we once again encounter the key to understanding the persecution of the Church: the poor. It is again the poor who permit us to understand what has happened. That is why the Church has come to understand what persecution of the poor is. The persecution comes about because of the Church's defense of the poor, for assuming the destiny of the poor.
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Raw Story: Noam Chomsky: U.S. used to have people killed for practicing what Pope Francis preaches

The United States waged a decades-long war against Catholics who practiced the teachings that got Pope Francis named as Time magazine’s person of the year, said political philosopher Noam Chomsky.

He said that the 1962 Vatican II conference had restored the Gospels to the Roman Catholic Church for the first time since the 4th Century, when the Roman Empire took over Christianity as its official religion, and this had a profound effect on religious leaders in Latin America.

Chomsky said in an interview last week with social justice activist Abel Collins that priests or lay people set up groups with Latin American peasants to read the Gospels and encourage them to demand more rights from the region’s military dictatorships – which became known as liberation theology.

“There is a reason why Christians were persecuted the first three centuries,” Chomsky said. “The Gospels are radical – it’s a radical text – that’s a basically radical pacifism with its preferential option for the poor.”

He said liberation theology’s practitioners were systematically martyred over more than 20 years by U.S.-backed forces to prevent Latin American nations from installing socialist governments to benefit their own people, rather than American interests.

“The U.S. went to war (and) fought a bitter, brutal, violent war against the church,” Chomsky said. “If we had a free press that’s the way they’d present it.”

He said the U.S. supported the “overthrow of governments and institution of neo-Nazi-style dictatorships” as part of a war that finally ended in 1989 with the murder of six Jesuits and two women at the University of Central America by Salvadoran troops.

Chomsky said those troops had received training by the U.S. at the Kennedy School of Counterinsurgency Warfare and acted on official orders from the Salvadoran command, which was close to the U.S. embassy.

“I don’t have to attribute this to the government,” he said. “It accepts this, the School of the Americas, which trains Latin American officers – killers, basically – one of its talking points is that the U.S. Army helped defeat liberation theology.”

Pope Francis, an Argentine Jesuit, has made symbolic gestures to welcome liberation theology back to the church after years of condemnation for its political aspirations by popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

His recent Evangelii Gadium, or Joy of the Gospel, was viewed by many as an attack on capitalism and free-market economics, but Chomsky said that so far the pope had not put his words into action.

“I like the fact that the tone has shifted, (and) there’s more, better words about social justice, but we have to see if it crosses the point where it leads to, say, organizing people to insist on their rights and to pursue the path of preferential option for the poor, (to) take the Gospels seriously,” Chomsky said. “If it gets to that point, then I think we’d see the same reaction.”
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Sandtrap · Apr 6, 2014

I missed it where it says people were killed over their objections to fracking. Could you highlight?

Horhey · Apr 8, 2014

Sandtrap said: ↑

I missed it where it says people were killed over their objections to fracking. Could you highlight?
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Astonishing. Priests and nuns who practiced "liberation theology" - that is "a preferential option for the poor" - were "defeated with the assistance of the U.S. Army."

For example:

New York Times: 6 PRIESTS KILLED IN A CAMPUS RAID IN SAN SALVADOR

Six Jesuit priests, including the rector of a leading university, were killed here before dawn today by what one witness described as a group of 30 men dressed in military uniforms.

Most of the priests were dragged from their beds in cubicles in a dormitory at the Jose Simeon Canas University of Central America on the outskirts of the capital and shot in the head with high-powered rifles, apparently of the same type issued by the army. The Jesuits' cook and her 15-year-old daughter were also shot to death.

''They were assassinated with lavish barbarity'' said the Rev. Jose Maria Tojeira, the Jesuit Provincial for Central America. ''For example, they took out their brains.''

New York Times: Salvadoran Justice Wears Out Patience

The squad that killed the priests had just undergone two days of advanced training by American advisers and formed part of the American-trained Atlacatl Battalion - a unit that consistently has carried out the worst massacres of civilians in the war.
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Furthermore:

IPS: EL SALVADOR: Declassified Docs Shed Light on Jesuits’ Murders

Thousands of pages of declassified U.S. documents shedding light on the 1989 murders of six prominent Jesuit clerics, their housekeeper and her 16-year-old daughter in El Salvador could give a new twist to the case that opened in the Spanish courts in January.

The declassified documents from the late 1980s and early 1990s indicate the CIA (U.S. Central Intelligence Agency) and U.S. State Department had foreknowledge of the Salvadoran military leadership’s plan to kill the then-rector of the José Simeón Cañas Central American University (UCA) in San Salvador, along with four other Spanish priests and a Salvadoran priest on Nov. 16, 1989.

The documents, which include cables to Washington from U.S. embassy, military and CIA officials, “provide important, compelling elements,” said Bernabeu, without entering into detail, because the case is in the hands of the justice system.
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