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Old 05-03-2015, 15:00   #1
Surf n Turf
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The genesis of Liberation Theology in South America ?

The genesis of Liberation Theology in South America ?

Sounds interesting, if true

SnT

Former Soviet spy: We created Liberation Theology

In a startling new interview, a 3-star general and former head of Communist Romania’s secret police who defected to the United States in 1978, claims that the Theology of Liberation was the creation of the KGB, who exported it to Latin America as a way of introducing Marxism into the continent.

Ion Mihai Pacepa has been called “the Cold War’s most important defector,” and after his defection, the Romanian government under Nicolae Ceausescu placed two death sentences and a $2 million bounty on his head. During the more than ten years that Pacepa worked with the CIA, he made what the agency described as “an important and unique contribution to the United States.”

“Liberation theology has been generally understood to be a marriage of Marxism and Christianity. What has not been understood is that it was not the product of Christians who pursued Communism, but of Communists who pursued Christians,” Pacepa said in a recent article. In his role as doctrinal watchdog, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger called liberation theology a “singular heresy” and a “fundamental threat” to the Church
http://www.breitbart.com/national-se...tion-theology/

Ion Mihai Pacepa has seen his share of excitement, serving as general for Communist Romania’s secret police before defecting to the United States in the late 1970s. The highest-ranking defector from communism in the ‘70s
In general, could you say that the spreading of Liberation Theology had any kind of Soviet connection?

Yes. I learned the fine points of the KGB involvement with Liberation Theology from Soviet General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, communist Romania's chief razvedka (foreign intelligence) adviser – and my de facto boss, until 1956, when he became head of the Soviet espionage service, the PGU1, a position he held for an unprecedented record of 15 years.

On October 26, 1959, Sakharovsky and his new boss, Nikita Khrushchev, came to Romania for what would become known as “Khrushchev's six-day vacation.” He had never taken such a long vacation abroad, nor was his stay in Romania really a vacation. Khrushchev wanted to go down in history as the Soviet leader who had exported communism to Central and South America. Romania was the only Latin country in the Soviet bloc, and Khrushchev wanted to enroll her “Latin leaders” in his new “liberation” war.

Was the Theology of Liberation a movement somehow "created" by Sakharovsky's part of the KGB, or it was an existing movement that was exacerbated by the USSR?

The movement was born in the KGB, and it had a KGB-invented name: Liberation Theology. During those years, the KGB had a penchant for “liberation” movements. The National Liberation Army of Columbia (FARC), created by the KGB with help from Fidel Castro; the “National Liberation Army of Bolivia, created by the KGB with help from “Che” Guevara; and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), created by the KGB with help from Yasser Arafat are just a few additional “liberation” movements born at the Lubyanka -- the headquarters of the KGB.

The birth of Liberation Theology was the intent of a 1960 super-secret “Party-State Dezinformatsiya Program” approved by Aleksandr Shelepin, the chairman of the KGB, and by Politburo member Aleksey Kirichenko, who coordinated the Communist Party's international policies. This program demanded that the KGB take secret control of the World Council of Churches (WCC), based in Geneva, Switzerland, and use it as cover for converting Liberation Theology into a South American revolutionary tool. The WCC was the largest international ecumenical organization after the Vatican, representing some 550 million Christians of various denominations throughout 120 countries.

The birth of a new religious movement is a historic event. How was this new religious movement launched?

The KGB began by building an intermediate international religious organization called the Christian Peace Conference (CPC), which was headquartered in Prague. Its main task was to bring the KGB-created Liberation Theology into the real world
The KGB began by building an intermediate international religious organization called the Christian Peace Conference (CPC), which was headquartered in Prague. Its main task was to bring the KGB-created Liberation Theology into the real world.

The new Christian Peace Conference was managed by the KGB and was subordinated to the venerable World Peace Council, another KGB creation, founded in 1949 and by then also headquartered in Prague.

During my years at the top of the Soviet bloc intelligence community I managed the Romanian operations of the World Peace Council (WPC). It was as purely KGB as it gets. Most of the WPC’s employees were undercover Soviet bloc intelligence officers. The WPC’s two publications in French, Nouvelles perspectives and Courier de la Paix, were also managed by undercover KGB – and Romanian DIE2 - intelligence officers. Even the money for the WPC budget came from Moscow, delivered by the KGB in the form of laundered cash dollars to hide their Soviet origin. In 1989, when the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse, the WPC publicly admitted that 90% of its money came from the KGB3.


(Continued)
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Old 05-03-2015, 15:03   #2
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(Continued)

How did the Theology of Liberation start?

I was not involved in the creation of Liberation Theology per se. From Sakharovsky I learned, however, that in 1968 the KGB-created Christian Peace Conference, supported by the world-wide World Peace Council, was able to maneuver a group of leftist South American bishops into holding a Conference of Latin American Bishops at Medellin, Colombia. The Conference’s official task was to ameliorate poverty. Its undeclared goal was to recognize a new religious movement encouraging the poor to rebel against the “institutionalized violence of poverty,” and to recommend the new movement to the World Council of Churches for official approval.

The Medellin Conference achieved both goals. It also bought the KGB-born name “Liberation Theology.”

Theology of Liberation had key leaders, some of them famous “pastoral” figures, some others intellectuals. Do you know if there was any involvement of the Soviet bloc in promoting either the personal image or the writings of such personalities? Any specific connection with Bishops Sergio Mendes Arceo from Mexico or Helder Camara from Brazil? Any possible direct connection with liberation theologians such as Leonardo Boff, Frei Betto, Henry Camacho or Gustavo Gutierrez?

I have good reason to suspect that there was an organic connection between the KGB and some of those leading promoters of Liberation Theology, but I have no evidence to prove it. For the last 15 years of my life in Romania (1963 - 1978), I managed that country's scientific and technological espionage, as well as the disinformation operations aimed at improving Ceausescu's stature in the West.

http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/ne...heology-83634/
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Old 05-03-2015, 15:04   #3
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0.o Makes sense..
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Old 05-03-2015, 15:38   #4
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Having dealt with some of the fallout from Liberation Theology in the 80s, I'm seriously wondering why anyone would act surprised about this "revelation" today. And - despite protestations to the contrary and damage control efforts to declare the movement "heretical" after the fact, I'm firmly convinced the Catholic Church or significant elements thereof was also complicit. Martyrs my ass; personally, I hope they're all rotting in hell.
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Old 05-04-2015, 17:11   #5
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A very interesting read along these lines would be the book, The Jesuits, by the late Father Malachi Martin.
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Old 05-04-2015, 19:09   #6
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Yep.

Our Honduran soldiers caught a Jesuit priest at a roadblock with a trunk full of military grade weapons.

IMHO, when you start doing that, you should be excommunicated, or at least defrocked.

TR
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De Oppresso Liber 01/20/2025
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Old 05-04-2015, 21:26   #7
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Quote:
Originally Posted by The Reaper View Post
Yep.

Our Honduran soldiers caught a Jesuit priest at a roadblock with a trunk full of military grade weapons.

IMHO, when you start doing that, you should be excommunicated, or at least defrocked.

TR
Maybe forced to marry.
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Old 05-05-2015, 05:22   #8
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Originally Posted by MR2 View Post
Maybe forced to marry.
It was against the law in Honduras for anyone to marry young boys, even priests.

TR
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"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." - President Theodore Roosevelt, 1910

De Oppresso Liber 01/20/2025
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Old 05-05-2015, 06:29   #9
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The URSS clearly influenced the movement and supported it, but "created" is a strech.

Please allow a comment from someone who lives in south america:

For al long time the corrupt ruling parties (or simply dictators) in this region oppressed the people and created an ideal breeding ground for this kind of movement. In the cold war era anyone who professed "anti communism", at least in words, was granted help and military assistance from the US and this of course left a very sour taste in anyone who aspired to a different kind of society. Nobody likes to have friends or relatives tortured by someone who just came from the Escuela de las Americas, and let me tell you the vast majority of these people were not even extremists in many countries.

So, the USA was in fact an ally of corrupt/tyrannical goverments in the region and this helped to create the Theology of Liberation as much as the URSS support.

Jimmy Carter is seen as an idiot and weakling by many people in the US, yet for many people in south america he was the first US president that put real pressure on the dictators/juntas and helped a transition towards democracy, a bumpy road that still continues today.

Seems like history repeats itself over and over, doesn't it?
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Old 05-11-2015, 13:58   #10
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What a change in Management can bring

Catholic church warms to liberation theology as founder heads to Vatican

The church has not formally embraced the progressive movement, but Gustavo Gutiérrez’s upcoming visit another sign of rehabilitation under Pope Francis

For decades, Gustavo Gutiérrez, a Peruvian theologian and Dominican priest, was treated with suspicion and even contempt by the Vatican’s hierarchy, which saw him as a dangerous Marxist firebrand who used faith as an instrument of revolution.

Gutiérrez was the founder of a progressive movement within the Catholic church known as liberation theology, and while he was never censured in the manner that some of his philosophical compatriots were, there were often rumblings that Gutiérrez was being investigated by Pope John Paul II’s doctrinal czar, a German cardinal named Joseph Ratzinger who would later become Pope Benedict.

But when the 86-year-old Peruvian arrives in Rome this week as a key speaker at a Vatican event, he will be welcomed as a guest, in a striking show of how Pope Francis – the first Latin American pontiff – has brought tenets of this sometimes controversial movement to the fore of his church, particularly in his pronouncements against the blight of poverty and the dangers of capitalism.

The theology was so divisive during the cold war that, even today, there are claims – which experts thoroughly refute – that the movement was an invention of the KGB as a way to turn the Catholic church in Latin America against the United States.

Pope Francis has never proclaimed himself to be a liberation theologian and was even a critic of aspects of the movement when he was still known as Father Bergoglio in his native Argentina, according to papal biographers. But since his election as pontiff in 2013, Pope Francis’s insistence that the church be “for the poor”, and his pointed criticisms of capitalism and consumerism have gone a long way to rehabilitate the liberation theology movement and incorporate it within the church

http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...tavo-gutierrez
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Old 05-12-2015, 07:27   #11
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Pope Francis views towards a church for the poor, critics of capitalism and consumerism, and more relaxed views towards divorce, gays, trying to settle old internal disputes, etc. have nothing to do with rehabilitation of the Theology of Liberation.

If anything, he has been a constant critic of it.
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