Graham Greene foresaw Chiapas, even revolution - Analysis - Column

National Catholic Reporter, Jan 21, 1994 by Peter Hebblethwaite

OXFORD, England - There was something familiar about the place names that figured in the accounts of the Mexican uprising. Never having been to Mexico, I wasn't remembering them. Then it came, back. Graham Greene's novel about the whiskey priest, The Power and the Glory, is set in Chiapas.

But Chiapas comes to life just as vividly in his travel book The Lawless Roads, published 55 years ago. "Chiapas was forgotten in Mexico City," he wrote, "it was so far away Mexicans didn't know it existed."

He describes an Indian couple, "small, black and bowed," in the church of Santo Domingo: "They had prayed in Indian, not in Spanish, and I wondered what prayers they had said and what answers they could hope to get in this world of mountains, hunger and irresponsibility."

He got a glimmering of an answer: "I asked if here in Chiapas there was any hope of a change, and I learned for the first time of the rather wild dream that buoys up many people in Chiapas: the hope of a rising."

Back home in London, the Mexican experience remained with this recent Catholic convert: "Mass in Chelsea seemed curiously fictitious; no peon knelt with his arms out in the attitude of the cross, no woman dragged herself up the aisles on her knees. It would have seemed shocking like the Agony itself." In 1990 Greene wrote a foreword called "The Social Challenge of the Gospel" to Church and Politics in Latin America, edited by Dermot Keogh, professor of Modern History at Cork University, Ireland.

Each year since 1983 Keogh has organized a seminar on Latin American affairs in memory of Jean Donovan, who studied in Cork and was murdered in El Salvador.

Greene wrote: "There was a hint in Mexico as early as 1937 of what might become the future base communities. As a result of persecution, the church had been a good deal cleansed of Romanism - even drastically cleansed as I had seen in Tabasco where no church and no priest remained, and hardly less so in Chiapas where no priest was allowed to enter a church."

Greene went on: "The secret Masses held in private houses might be described as middle-class, but when on Sundays the Indians came down from the mountains and tried to celebrate the Mass, as far as they remembered it, without a priek surely the base communities were already beginning."

He concluded, not with memorines, but with his view of the Central American church in 1990: "The church of the poor and the base communities show their strength not only against the U.S. government, the death squads and the contras, but against the very Romanesque views of Cardinal Ratzinger, the great opponent of liberation theology, and perhaps the understandable suspicions of Pope John Paul II."

He conceded that John Paul's suspicions were "understandable" on the grounds that he had drawn a false parallel between Nicaragua, where three priests were government ministers, and Poland under communism.

Greene ended with the thought that "the Catholic church in the American continent has taken on a new and vigorous life, which in time may, one hopes, eventually convert even the Curia and persuade its members to return again to the teaching of John XXIII rather than follow the path of Cardinal Ratzinger and CELAM."

In 1937 Greene was prophetic about what would happen in Chiapas. His hope in 1990 remains unfulfilled and the restoration of diplomatic relations between Mexico and the Holy See, hailed in 1991 as ending decades of anticlericalism, has tilted the balance against liberation theologians.