- The crucifix was modelled on one owned by Luís Espinal, a Jesuit priest, journalist and leftwing activist who was murdered by paramilitaries in 1980, when Bolivia was under a dictatorship.
Communism and Christianity seem to go perfectly together to me. Matthew 6:24 - "No one can serve two masters. For you will hate one and love the other; you will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and wealth." I'm a secular capitalist so take my words with a pinch of salt.
I was raised Catholic, but am now an agnostic/atheist depending on mood at the time. Most of my adult life, I've been opposed to the idea of religious movements, religion getting entangled with politics. But the pope saying these things, what with everything going on in the world: I can suddenly see why religious movements have been successful in the past. The people are revolting against their leaders? They are nothing, they are powerless, the government can feel free to stamp them out as dissenters, traitors, try them in courts of law. But the head of a major worldwide religion putting out messages to the world asking, in clear terms, a revamp of capitalism, money in politics, how governments relate to its people, and so forth? Wow. What a time we live in. We are a cog on a wheel in a system revolving through time and space, cycles and patterns in a long thread of repeating events.
“This system is by now intolerable: farm workers find it intolerable, laborers find it intolerable, communities find it intolerable, peoples find it intolerable The Earth itself – our sister, Mother Earth, as Saint Francis would say – also finds it intolerable,” he said in an hour-long speech that was interrupted by applause and cheering dozens of times. His remarks make me think of this talk from the Lima climate change confrence. I get the sense he has a feeling of urgency; he sees the need for leadership beyond the status quo. Having been raised Catholic, although long since left the church, for the first time I feel like I can ideologically support the church, on this topic at least. I still don't know exactly what he can do in a concrete sense, and it's hard to find a more ossified institution than the Catholic Church. I'm not sure what to make of the crucifix, though. The whole story feels weird in that regard. The pontiff was handed the symbol of our mortal ideological enemies (speaking from generic American propagandistic POV), and he wasn't sure what to make of it either, the article wasn't even clear one way or the other. It just seems like a strange way to frame his trip. Sure, everything is about symbols and how they manipulate our understanding; it's not just Morales that would be happy to manipulate, co-opt, or otherwise subvert a message of change. “Let us not be afraid to say it: we want change, real change, structural change,” the pope said, decrying a system that “has imposed the mentality of profit at any price, with no concern for social exclusion or the destruction of nature.“
But Rev James Bretzke, a theologian at Boston College in Massachusetts, accused Morales of attempting to manipulate the pope.
Part of hit has to do with Latin America's history as the focal point of Catholic liberation theology, encompassing a more liberal wing of cardinals that focused on class issues. The Catholic Church repudiated the practice in the 1980s when preachers started criticizing the close relationship between the Church and state oligarchies. Pope Benedict XVI had been historically against it. Pope Francis wants to reconcile, even though he had opposed it in the past. My guess is that more conservative wings in the Vatican are still against reconciliation.