The Maryknoll Catholic Mission in Peru, 1943-1989: Transnational Faith and Development [1 ed.] 9780268079703, 9780268029050

Table of contents :
Cover
Half title
Series page
Title page
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: Maryknoll and the New Deal for Latin America
Chapter 2: First Impressions
Chapter 3: The Transformative Power of Tradition, 1954– 1967
Chapter 4: The Limits of Alliances, 1968–1976
Chapter 5: Reform, Violence, and “Reconciliation,” 1976–1989
Epilogue
Appendix
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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The Maryknoll Catholic Mission in Peru, 1943–1989

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RE C ENT T I T LES F RO M T H E H ELEN K ELLO G G I NS T I T U T E F O R I NT ERNAT I O NAL S T UDI ES

Scott Mainwaring, series editor The University of Notre Dame Press gratefully thanks the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies for its support in the publication of titles in this series.

Marifeli Pérez-Stable, ed. Looking Forward: Comparative Perspectives on Cuba’s Transition (2007) Jodi S. Finkel Judicial Reform as Political Insurance: Argentina, Peru, and Mexico in the 1990s (2008) Robert H. Wilson, Peter M. Ward, Peter K. Spink, and Victoria E. Rodríguez Governance in the Americas: Decentralization, Democracy, and Subnational Government in Brazil, Mexico, and the USA (2008) Brian S. McBeth Dictatorship and Politics: Intrigue, Betrayal, and Survival in Venezuela, 1908–1935 (2008) Pablo Policzer The Rise and Fall of Repression in Chile (2009) Frances Hagopian, ed. Religious Pluralism, Democracy, and the Catholic Church in Latin America (2009) Marcelo Bergman and Laurence Whitehead, eds. Criminality, Public Security, and the Challenge to Democracy in Latin America (2009) Matthew R. Cleary The Sources of Democratic Responsiveness in Mexico (2010) Leah Anne Carroll Violent Democratization: Social Movements, Elites, and Politics in Colombia’s Rural War Zones, 1984–2008 (2011) Timothy J. Power and Matthew M. Taylor, eds. Corruption and Democracy in Brazil: The Struggle for Accountability (2011) Ana María Bejarano Precarious Democracies: Understanding Regime Stability and Change in Colombia and Venezuela (2011) Carlos Guevara Mann Political Careers, Corruption, and Impunity: Panama's Assembly, 1984–2009 (2011) Gabriela Ippolito-O’Donnell The Right to the City (2011) For a complete list of titles from the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, see http://www.undpress.nd.edu

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the MARYKNOL L

CATHOLIC MISSION in PERU, 1943–1989 Transnational Faith and Transformation

S US A N F ITZPATR ICK-BEHR ENS

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

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Copyright © 2012 by University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fitzpatrick-Behrens, Susan. The Maryknoll Catholic mission in Peru, 1943–1989: transnational faith and transformation / by Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens. p. cm. — (From the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-268-02905-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-268-02905-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America—Missions—Peru— History —20th century. 2. Liberation theology —Peru—History — 20th century. 3. Peru—Church history —20th century. I. Title. BV2853.P6F58 2011 266'.285 — dc23 2011036542 ∞ The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

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Peace is above all the work of justice.

CELAM, Medellín, 1968

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

Maryknoll and the New Deal for Latin America

19

First Impressions: Maryknoll Priests and the People of Puno, 1943–1953

47

THREE

The Transformative Power of Tradition, 1954 –1967

81

F O UR

The Limits of Alliances, 1968–1976

145

F IVE

Reform, Violence, and “Reconciliation,” 1976–1989

205

Epilogue

231

Appendix: Foreign-Controlled and Progressive Dioceses in Peru

240

Notes

244

Selected Bibliography

284

Index

300

O NE

TWO

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AC K N O W L E D G M E N T S

This book has taken a long time and benefited from the help of many people. The project began when I was a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where Eric Van Young was an outstanding mentor. His knowledge and critiques made me push the boundaries of a narrowly focused study by encouraging me to contextualize Maryknoll’s experience in Peru in an examination of the missionaries’ U.S. origins. Richard Madsen inspired me and reminded me that I should try to tell a good story. George Lipsitz introduced me to the history of American culture and ethnicity and the Great Depression’s defining role in immigrants’ lives. Michael Bernstein, Dain Borges, Christine Hunefeldt, Misha Kokotovic, and Ken Serbin provided insights and critiques. I was fortunate to be part of an outstanding cohort of graduate students at UCSD, who became interlocutors and friends. A writing group with Eric Boime, Christina Jimenez, Alberto Loza, Luis Murillo, Javier Villa Flores, and Greg Rodriguez introduced me to new literature and broadened the scope of my research. Roderick Ferguson, Gabriela Soto-Laveaga, Adam Warren, Sarah Shrank, Tamera Marko, and Angela Vergara helped in different ways during the years that this project was “in process.” Special thanks to my close friend, Christina Jimenez, who listened to me work through ideas and struggled with me as I wrote. Maryknoll Catholic missionaries made this work possible in every way. Despite uncertainty about my research and conclusions, Maryknoll as an institution and its current and former missionaries shared time, knowledge, and documentation with me. Sister Mary Grace ix

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Krieger, director of the Maryknoll mission archive in 1995 when I started the research, literally opened the sisters’ home to me. She arranged for me to stay at the convent, introducing me to convent culture and to some of the extraordinary women of Maryknoll. Sister Mary Grace’s example and friendship remain among the nicest benefits I have received through my research. Father William D. McCarthy, Maryknoll historian and missioner to Peru, was among the first people with whom Sister Mary Grace put me in contact. Father McCarthy shared enthusiasm, a breadth of knowledge, extensive documentation, and mission interviews. I am saddened by his passing but will remember his generosity and quiet sense of humor. Ellen Pierce, current director of the Maryknoll archive, and Jennifer Halloran, photo archivist, have responded immediately to my questions and been consistently helpful. Maryknoll missionaries also opened their centers in Peru to me, sometimes giving me a place to stay. Many clergy and lay missionaries shared with me their mission ideals, their first experiences, and their current outlook. Fathers Robert Hoffman, Michael Briggs, Curt Cadorette, Charlie Cappel, Raymond Finch, Steve Judd, James Madden, and Gerard McCrane and Sisters Rose Dominic, Rose Timothy, Patricia Ryan, and Aurelia Atencio provided special insights into Maryknoll in Peru. Inocente Salazar, a former missionary, generously shared with me his unpublished manuscript describing his mission in Puno. Lay missionaries Deidre Savino and Ed Mauer provided friendship and support. Diego Irarrázaval of the Instituto de Estudios Aymaras (IDEA) granted access to the institute’s extensive collection of work on Puno. Irarrázaval also arranged for me to study Aymara at IDEA with Santiago Mendoza and Juan Mejilla, who graciously shared their knowledge of language, culture, and local politics with me. Juan Mejilla allowed me to rent his home in the Aymara community of Cutini Capilla. Although it is not described in this book, my experience in Cutini Capilla defined my interpretation of my interviews and archival materials. It also led me to reinterpret my life. I will always be grateful to this community for allowing me to stay with them for a time and for introducing me to some of the beauty and pain of life in the Andes. In Lima, studies at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú introduced me to scholarship by Peruvian intellectuals. Jeffrey Klaiber,

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S.J., introduced me to Universidad Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, where a small supportive staff granted me access to a wealth of sources about the Catholic Church in Peru. Catalina Romero de Iguiñiz shared her time and extensive knowledge of the Catholic Church and its contribution to promoting social justice in Peru. Manuel Glave introduced me to the extensive literature by Peruvian scholars on Andean peasants. Finally, the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos (IEP), where I was an affiliated researcher, provided insight into Peru’s vibrant intellectual community and access to an extensive library. María Laura Vargas Valcárcel, director of CEAS, took time to speak with me, greatly enhancing my understanding of the Catholic Church’s role in promoting human rights in Peru during the years of the violence. I am also grateful for the assistance of archivists at the Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú, the Biblioteca Municipal de Puno, the Archivo del Obispo de Puno, the Archivo del Obispo de Juli, and the Archivo Eclesiástico del Perú. A postdoctoral fellowship through the Rockefeller Religion in the Americas program at the University of Florida, Gainesville, introduced me to an emerging field of studies on religion in the Americas. The opportunity to work with Milagros Peña, Anna L. Peterson, Manuel Vasquez, and Philip J. Williams was especially important in the development of this work. A number of colleagues I met in Gainesville became friends who influenced my research long after my fellowship term ended. Marixa Lasso de Paulis, Antoinette T. Jackson, and Christine Kovic have all contributed in different ways to my perspective on Latin America and religion. Christine Kovic has been an especially supportive friend and collaborator and has commented extensively on my work. A fellowship at the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame provided the luxury of time to write in a vibrant, intellectually stimulating environment. Conversations with Ted Beatty of the history department and Kellogg fellows Nicanor Dominguez, Ken Greene, Jan Hoffman French, and Timothy Powers gave me new insights into Latin American history, culture, and economics. I enjoyed the privilege of participating in a Notre Dame graduate seminar in theology taught by Gustavo Gutiérrez, which brought liberation theology to life. Sabine MacCormack, whose groundbreaking research on religion in the Andes informed

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every part of this book, epitomizes the quintessential scholar whose goal is a selfless interest in increasing and sharing knowledge. MacCormack’s encouragement and her generous permission to use her painting on the cover of this book means a great deal to me. Scott Mainwaring, longtime director of the Kellogg Institute, has created an intellectual sanctuary where distinguished faculty and fellows develop their knowledge and scholarship in an atmosphere marked by extraordinary collegiality. This book would not have been possible without his support. At California State University, Northridge, I have been fortunate to work with wonderful colleagues and an administration committed to supporting research and scholarship. I could not have finished the book without reassigned time from grants provided by the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the university. Many faculty members in the Department of History have supported my work. I am especially grateful to Patricia Juarez-Dappe, Miriam Nierick, and Merry Ovnick, who encouraged the work as colleagues and took my mind off it as friends. Beatriz Cortez in the Central American Studies Program has shared friendship, theoretical knowledge, and her commitment to social justice. Sheena Malhoutra of the women’s studies department has been a friend, a colleague, and a listener. Other people have also assisted me along the way. Virginia GarrardBurnett, Alida Metcalf, and Catherine LeGrand offered support, encouragement, and questions at key points. Nicanor Dominguez, Alberto Loza, and Al Spangler read and commented on complete drafts of the manuscript. Alberto Loza was my best guide to Peru and a wonderful friend. And Al Spangler has been a friend and supporter since long before I started this work. Sheila Berg and Rebecca R. DeBoer at the University of Notre Dame Press provided extensive editorial support. Their suggestions and corrections immeasurably improved the work. I am responsible for any remaining errors and oversights. I am also grateful to my family, which has always been there for me. I could not have completed my studies, research, and writing without the love and support of my parents, Angela and Ray Behrens, my sister, Cathy Brentlinger, and my uncle Jack Fitzpatrick. My dad, Frank Fitzpatrick, encouraged me in every endeavor. His guidance, quirky humor, and personal history are part of this book.

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Introduction

Like many people who attended Catholic schools in the United States, I was introduced to Maryknoll when a mission priest assigned to Africa gave a talk to my third-grade class. For earlier generations of parochial school students, these mission talks were a staple of the school year and sometimes a first step to joining Maryknoll, possibly the bestknown Catholic mission organization in the United States. I was not a devout Catholic and had no interest in becoming a nun, so Maryknoll and Catholicism moved to the far reaches of my mind until college. A cursory introduction to liberation theology in the United States brought me directly to Maryknoll, whose Orbis Books published virtually all the available works on the subject in English.1 And preliminary study of the conflicts in Central America introduced me to the murdered Maryknoll sisters in El Salvador; to Maryknoll Father Miguel d’Escoto, foreign minister of the revolutionary Sandinista government in Nicaragua; and to Maryknoll Father Roy Bourgeois, founder of the School of the Americas Watch.2 Maryknoll missionaries were at the heart of liberation theology, progressive Catholicism, and revolution, which placed them in opposition to U.S. policy in Latin America. 1

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The Maryknoll Catholic Mission in Peru, 1943–1989

Years later, in a graduate seminar on popular religion in Latin America, I began to think again about Maryknoll and liberation theology. I contacted Maryknoll with the hope of writing a research paper on nuns and their role in liberation theology and popular Catholicism and learned that Maryknoll maintained a well-organized archive. During a preliminary research trip, I stumbled upon the dramatic story of Maryknoll sisters in Guatemala. In 1968 a group of Maryknoll clergy led by Sister Marian Peter (Margarita Melville) was expelled from the country for spearheading a meeting between clergy and leaders of the Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes (FAR), a leftist guerrilla organization seeking to overthrow the U.S.-supported military government. As surprising as seeing a nun in the vanguard of a revolutionary movement was the fact that Sister Marian Peter had not been engaged with the mission to Guatemala’s indigenous poor majority but with education for daughters of the elite in Guatemala City. Maryknoll founded Colegio Monte María in 1953, at the height of elected President Jacobo Arbenz’s agrarian reform program and less than a year before a U.S.sponsored military coup overthrew him. At this time Maryknoll was fully enfranchised with the elite. The sisters shared lunch at the fincas of large landowners, received gifts from the director of the United Fruit Company, and socialized with the wife of the U.S. ambassador.3 The dramatic transformation from advocates of the status quo and allies of the United States to apparent instigators of revolution in just fifteen years called for investigation. But on the face of it, the answer seemed obvious. The new Maryknoll mission in Guatemala was part of a greater transformation of the Latin American church initiated by the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) and the application of its conclusions to the conditions of their region by Latin American clergy and theologians. When the Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM) met in Medellín in 1968 to articulate their church’s response to the Second Vatican Council, they concluded that the greatest challenge confronting the region was not a crisis of faith but poverty.4 Most Latin Americans shared a profound Catholic faith but suffered a poverty so dehumanizing that it appeared an offense against God. CELAM called on the Latin American church to work to change the structural conditions that maintained the status quo. This emphasis on social justice, derived in part from

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the nascent ideas of Peruvian theologian and diocesan priest, Gustavo Gutiérrez, marked a radical departure for the Latin American church, which was historically allied with the elite and the military. Shortly after the CELAM conference, Gutiérrez published A Theology of Liberation, a kind of bible for the progressive Catholic Church in Latin America and, largely through the efforts of Maryknoll, also in the United States.5 Within a decade critics in Latin America, the United States, and even the Vatican would condemn liberation theology and the preferential option for the poor for causing violent revolutions in Latin America.6 U.S. officials even named Maryknoll missionaries as instigators of conflict.7 But as I was beginning to see from my early research on Maryknoll in Guatemala, the situation was complicated. Sister Marian Peter and the small cohort of clergy expelled from Guatemala in 1968 had actually met with FAR in 1967, a year before the CELAM meeting in Medellín. The “roots of rebellion” seemed deeper than the hierarchy’s appeal for change.8 Research in other Latin American countries also suggested that neither CELAM nor liberation theology nor Maryknoll missionaries caused revolution. Instead, the contingent juncture of social, economic, religious, and political contexts determined the influence of these new theological currents. In Peru, where Gustavo Gutiérrez developed A Theology of Liberation and where Cardinal Juan Landázuri Ricketts, copresident of the 1968 CELAM meeting, actively supported progressive Catholicism, the result was reform, not revolution.9 In 1968 General Juan Velasco Alvarado came to power in a military coup against the elected government of Fernando Belaúnde Terry. Velasco’s was among the first of a wave of military dictatorships that would sweep Central and South America in the 1970s.10 But the results were distinct. Whereas most dictatorships repressed popular movements and imposed draconian economic policies, Velasco instituted radical reforms of the type usually associated with violent revolution. He introduced an agrarian reform program that eliminated massive estates, or haciendas, responsible for maintaining a semifeudal land tenure system in southern Peru. He recognized barriadas, settlements formed by “invasions” of rural migrants to the outskirts of Peru’s urban centers, as legal and named them

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The Maryknoll Catholic Mission in Peru, 1943–1989

“pueblos jóvenes” (young towns), suggesting an optimism about their future and that of the country. He simultaneously sought to vitiate indigenous identity by transforming the celebration of the Day of the Indian into the celebration of the Day of the Campesino and to valorize it by recognizing Quechua as an official language of Peru. And he nationalized the corporations of some of the most powerful foreign interests, including the U.S. International Petroleum Company (IPC).11 An alliance with the progressive Catholic Church provided the backbone for Velasco’s reforms. Peru’s traditional powers— the church and the military — formed a mutually reinforcing alliance to institute radical top-down reforms that modernized the country and sought to enfranchise marginalized populations. Liberation theology justified and contributed to this alliance.12 Maryknoll missionaries became silent participants. How was it possible that liberation theology, credited with or blamed for instigating revolution in one country, could promote reform in another, especially when structural conditions appeared similar? And how could the same missionaries become advocates of revolution in one country and silent participants in reform in another? Both Peru and Guatemala were characterized by extreme inequalities in the distribution of land; by socially, politically, and economically disenfranchised indigenous majority populations; by agricultural-exportbased economies; and by dependence on the United States. The church and the military in both countries historically contributed to maintaining the status quo. So why had the church and the military allied in Peru to promote radical reform while segments of the church in Guatemala allied with popular organizations and became identified as the enemies of the military? And why in Peru did the alliance and reforms prove so short-lived? Within a decade, the Catholic Church negotiated a separation from the Peruvian state.13 The reforms designed to stave off revolution seemed instead to lay the groundwork for the Maoistinspired Shining Path that opposed the Catholic Church and ultimately turned against the indigenous people whose interests it claimed to promote.14 This study attempts to answer these questions by examining Maryknoll missionaries’ experience in Peru from 1943 to 1989. Maryknoll helped build the foundation for liberation theology in Peru and con-

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tributed to disseminating ideas that contributed to progressive Catholicism and social transformation in the Americas. Maryknoll missionaries were among the first of a new wave of foreign clergy to settle in Peru during World War II.15 They consistently maintained a force of clergy whose numbers outstripped any other single mission organization. Not even the Jesuits could compete.16 Moreover, Maryknoll in the United States played a guiding role in the development of the U.S. mission to Latin America. Maryknoll Father John Considine was at the heart of the Catholic Church’s interest in the region.17 Maryknoll missionaries arrived in Peru in 1943 hoping to establish a “Romanized” practice of faith emphasizing memorized knowledge of prayer, doctrine, and catechism and rigid participation in the sacramental life of the church. They believed that they would “save” the Peruvian church, which suffered a desperate scarcity of clergy, despite the overwhelming number of Catholics (98 percent) in that country. The missionaries, who departed for Latin America during an era when nationalism, economic resources, and anti-Communism dominated the American ethos, also believed that they could provide economic resources to alleviate the poverty that could make Peru’s people susceptible to the appeals of Communism and Protestantism. Maryknoll priests and sisters introduced religious and economic changes in Peru, but they could not simply impose their ideas, their practices, or their resources. Instead, they were incorporated into a culture with a strongly established Catholic faith embedded in every aspect of life. Catholic celebrations punctuated individual lives; reinforced social, ethnic, and geographic hierarchies; and defined relations between the Peruvian church and state. The result of this engagement was a process— to a large extent unconscious— of negotiation, whereby Maryknoll missionaries and the people of Peru each sought to assert their own ideals and practices of faith. As the missionaries introduced spiritual and material innovations they contributed to change in Peru, but they also reinforced traditions related to the role Catholicism had played historically in the country. Mission was a reciprocal engagement through which both Maryknoll and Peruvians were transformed. No one controlled the results. Mission led to a range of unintended outcomes that had a dramatic influence in Peru and, through Maryknoll, in the United States.

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The Maryknoll Catholic Mission in Peru, 1943–1989

Although Maryknoll played an especially important role in its mission to Peru, its missionaries were part of a much larger influx of foreign Catholic clergy that began during World War II, accelerated in the 1950s, and became a virtual flood in the 1960s.18 The Maryknoll mission endeavor, together with the broader influence of Catholic clergy and laity in Peru from the 1940s through the 1970s, transformed the country. Maryknoll missionaries, for their part, were influenced by changes in the United States, in the universal Catholic Church, and in Latin America. Their mission developed in direct response to these changes. Their experience provides broader insight into the role that religion, long believed to be fated to disappear into the private sphere, played in the modernization of Peru.19 It offers a compelling example of the way that even the most apparently “radical” changes reproduce traditions and by doing so unwittingly maintain foundational structures. Because Maryknoll missionaries’ efforts depended on spiritual and material resources they brought from the United States, their experience in Peru also illustrates the role of religion in relations between the United States and Latin America. Maryknoll missionaries, and other Catholic clergy, in many ways set the stage for contemporary globalization.20

Maryknoll Missionaries in Peru

Maryknoll’s decision to establish a mission in Peru, like its results, seemed serendipitous. The advent of the war, which closed Maryknoll’s mission fields in Asia and barred access to the rest of the world, made Latin America the only viable mission alternative.21 But Latin America was Catholic. It had been Catholic longer than the United States, where European Catholic immigration in the nineteenth and early twentieth century had been the dominant force behind a powerful church. When Maryknoll Superior General James E. Walsh announced his intention to send to Latin America missionaries returned from Asia and those newly ordained, he appealed for a change in Maryknoll’s mission emphasis, from saving “heathens” to providing for “abandoned and needy peoples.”22 “Mission,” to Latin America’s Catholics, meant pro-

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viding not only sacraments and prayers but also social and economic assistance to strengthen the church. This early emphasis on spiritual as well as material aid defined the Maryknoll mission to Latin America. While Maryknoll’s mission to Latin America responded to church demands, it also conformed with the growing interest of the United States in the region. In 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared his Good Neighbor policy for Latin America. To some Catholics in the United States the policy appeared little more than a ploy to ensure access to Latin American resources and support during the war.23 But the Good Neighbor policy also offered Catholics a chance to play a role in their country’s foreign policy, and Maryknoll was quick to embrace this possibility in its mission appeals. It suggested that Catholic missionaries could strengthen relations between the United States and Latin America by basing them on a shared faith. Missionaries could serve as “good will ambassadors for the United States.”24 In Latin America Maryknoll missionaries would serve God and country. Peru became one of the greatest beneficiaries of Vatican and U.S. interest in the region.25 Peru’s papal nuncios played a crucial role in appealing for foreign clergy, but their work was possible because of a long history of cooperation between the Peruvian church and state.26 In contrast to much of Latin America, where a scarcity of clergy resulted from Liberal reforms in the nineteenth century that promoted separation of church and state and requisitioned church resources, Peru maintained Catholicism as the country’s official religion and the government pledged economic support to the church. The Vatican responded to this largess by allowing the Peruvian government to retain the patronato real — the right to name bishops and to establish religious jurisdictions.27 Peru effectively retained some control over the church. A scarcity of economic resources ensured, however, that even though the state supported the church it did not provide enough to pay clergy’s salaries, maintain church buildings, or promote Catholic institutions. The number of clergy in Peru plummeted after independence, especially in the most impoverished, most indigenous, and therefore least “desirable” departments (states).28 Catholic clergy were concentrated in urban centers, and Lima remained the center of religious, political, and economic power. The history of cooperation between church and

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state, while it did not compensate for the scarcity of clergy, ensured that the church and the state would together guide Maryknoll missionaries’ incorporation into Peruvian society. When Walsh traveled to Peru looking for a mission he met with immediate success. Initially, he hoped to send missionaries to Lima to work with the Chinese population, a remnant of Peru’s nineteenthcentury guano boom whose demand for labor led to the “importation” of some 100,000 “Chinese coolies” who remained in the country, settled, and established a powerful presence in urban centers.29 Working with Peruvian Chinese offered continuity with Maryknoll’s mission fields in China.30 But Peru and Latin America generally were sites for change. The Quechua and Aymara indigenous majority in rural areas appeared the neediest and most abandoned in Peru. Maryknoll shared with Peruvian government and church officials and even contemporary anthropologists the belief that “Indians” were the most backward of Latin America’s Catholics. Walsh suggested that the Spanish colonial mission had been a tremendous success “as far as it had gone,” but it had not gone far enough. Spanish missionaries baptized believers who practiced a “folk Catholicism” that incorporated sanctioned Catholic and traditional indigenous practices identified by Maryknoll and others as pre-Columbian or “pagan.” Walsh hoped to establish an “Indian Apostolate,” where Maryknoll missionaries could complete the job started by their Spanish predecessors by establishing Romanized practices of Catholicism emphasizing sacraments and knowledge of prayer, catechism, and doctrine. Walsh recounted that when he appealed to Peru’s papal nuncio for a mission to the indigenous, the nuncio responded “like a trout grabbing a fly, [saying] there was work waiting everywhere.”31 Almost immediately Walsh received an assignment for his priests to go to Puno, a remote highland region in southern Peru notorious for the difficult conditions of life. Father Francis Garvey, among the first Maryknollers to the region, reported a warning by Father Carey, a mission veteran: “‘Get rugged, Fathers; get rugged.’ . . . [O]ur house in Puno is at an elevation of nearly 13,000 feet. Moreover the weather is cold. . . . ‘Hace frio,’ is the only comment people have for Puno. Inquiries from parties who had been there, garnered the following replies: ‘words just

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can’t possibly describe how miserable it is.’ And from a Peruvian, ‘it is the worst place in South America. God certainly never intended that any of his creatures should be forced to live there.”32 At the time, just twenty-eight priests served Puno’s population of 645,000, 92 percent of whom spoke Quechua or Aymara and lived in widely dispersed communities separated by nearly impassable mountainous terrain. Peru’s papal nuncio, the local bishop, and even the government looked to Maryknoll for spiritual and material aid to the abandoned diocese. As a result, Maryknoll missionaries became unwitting participants in churchstate efforts to extend control over a region desperate for aid. Maryknoll’s initial mission to Puno quickly expanded to urban areas, where the missionaries filled a void left by the impoverished church and the weak national government among the poor and an emerging middle class.33 In the mid-1950s Maryknoll opened missions in Lima and Arequipa that served the middle class and a new migrant poor settled in barriadas. The barriadas, a visible manifestation of Peru’s truncated process of modernization, lacked physical infrastructure, including electricity, potable water, schools, meeting centers, and social services. The absence of resources reflected Peru’s existing power structures. The rural poor were caught between a powerful rural landowning elite that exploited their labor and controlled the land and an urban industrializing elite that offered few jobs and no infrastructure to migrants seeking both.34 Maryknoll effectively stepped, or was pushed, into this void by establishing parishes in barriadas and facilitating the development of infrastructure. It was able to do so because of close ties with the U.S. government, which channeled economic resources and personnel through Maryknoll programs, and because of the close ties between the Peruvian church and state.35 In 1954 the United States created a “food for peace” program to distribute surplus grains and other foodstuffs produced at home to impoverished countries abroad. Like most U.S. aid programs, Food for Peace benefited the national economy as much or more than it did the economy of the aid recipients, who were responsible for paying transport fees and eliminating important tariffs. The program also confronted the challenge of all international aid programs: how to distribute resources to the neediest. U.S. Catholic Relief Services (CRS),

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established during World War II to serve refugees, offered one means to address this challenge. With links to a plethora of Catholic mission organizations in remote regions throughout the world, CRS could facilitate food distribution. Maryknoll’s leaders had direct ties with CRS, allowing them to aid in this endeavor. In 1954 Maryknoll established a CRS-Cáritas office in Puno, and missionaries also promoted distribution of aid in Lima, where in 1957 Cardinal Landázuri created the Mission to Lima to address the increasing challenge of migration and poverty.36 Maryknoll missionaries also channeled U.S. aid through networks they established to introduce Romanized Catholicism, and this aid in turn strengthened the networks and facilitated missionaries’ expanding reach through Peru. It also ensured that secular and religious forces were inextricably linked and strengthened the traditional power of the church in Peru, even as the church became increasingly dependent on foreign resources and personnel. As Maryknoll clergy expanded their mission to include distribution of U.S. aid and thereby strengthened and extended networks among the country’s poor and middle class, Peruvian clergy who had studied theology in postwar Europe began to return to their country.37 These members of the clergy returning home in the late 1950s entered at a moment of profound structural change characterized by urbanization and industrialization that caused social displacement and poverty and of an equally profound religious transformation resulting from the globalization of the Catholic Church. In the postwar period the Peruvian church and government created a plethora of new religious jurisdictions in the country’s poorest rural and urban areas.38 Foreign clergy, like those associated with Maryknoll, who entered the country in increasing numbers, became responsible for serving these impoverished areas. In the 1950s Maryknoll spearheaded programs to develop networks to address the religious needs of the country’s poor and emerging middle class: catechetical programs, radio schools, credit and housing cooperatives, and health programs transcended the distinct regions and classes of Peru. These networks facilitated the introduction of Romanized Catholicism but also the distribution of resources. At the

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same time they contributed to a new awareness and access by Peruvian clergy to regions historically inaccessible. Peruvian clergy returning home in the postwar period with their knowledge of European theology emphasizing concern for poverty began to analyze their society in the context of these new realities and the new access provided by foreign clergy.39 Resources offered by foreign clergy through their countries of origin also facilitated the development of progressive Catholic centers, where clergy and laity met to analyze social realities in light of their faith.40 While foreign clergy concentrated, or were concentrated in, the country’s marginal sectors (the poor and middle class in rural departments and the periphery of urban centers), national clergy established links to organized, privileged groups in urban Lima: workers, university students, and the military.41 In the same years, the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch, director of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA / CEPAL), began to articulate what became the foundation of the influential dependency theory. The “backwardness” of Latin America and other “third world” regions, argued Prebisch, did not result from internal conditions (backward Indians, lack of education, geography, Catholicism) but from their relationship with the industrialized world (the United States and Europe). While the “third world” provided raw materials produced by cheap, nonunionized labor, the “first world” relied on well-paid unionized workers to transform these raw materials into finished products that were sold back to the “third world” at higher prices. These conditions of “dependency” prevented “backward” nations from following the linear path to development carved by the “first world.”42 In 1958 Vice President Richard Nixon visited Latin America. At San Marcos University in Lima he was attacked by furious crowds. It was a clear sign of Latin Americans’ deep dissatisfaction with U.S. policy in the region. During the Good Neighbor era the United States had promised to provide aid to the region in exchange for cooperation— a promise never fulfilled. Moreover, the United States demonstrated a disturbing willingness to intervene directly in countries whose policies it opposed. Just four years earlier, in 1954, the United States had directed the overthrow of the democratically elected

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reformist government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala.43 Just one year later, Fidel Castro overthrew the U.S.-supported government of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba. It seemed evident to political leaders that U.S. policy had to change or a wave of Communist-inspired movements might take over Latin America. President Dwight D. Eisenhower initiated the Act of Bogotá in 1959, creating the Inter-American Development Bank to provide loans as the first phase of a reformist response.44 Maryknoll Father John Considine immediately recognized the potential of the act. He wrote to his counterpart, Frank Norris, at CRS, to coordinate plans for the Catholic Church to initiate programs that could be funded by the Act of Bogotá and the Inter-American Development Bank.45 Peru was among the first beneficiaries of these new resources. Credit and housing cooperative programs introduced by Maryknoll Father Daniel McLellan in the mid-1950s immediately gained access to large loans. U.S. aid again seemed to follow established Catholic Church channels, with Maryknoll a leading force in guiding this incorporation and Peru a key beneficiary. In 1961 the Vatican and the U.S. government issued separate but mutually reinforcing appeals for aid to Latin America. John F. Kennedy, who approved the Act of Bogotá, recognized it as the foundation for the Alliance for Progress, which he introduced immediately after his presidential inauguration in 1961.46 Kennedy pledged $20 billion in aid for reform programs in Latin America, asserting in an obvious reference to the Cuban Revolution, but also as an echo of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy, that “those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.”47 Also in 1961, Pope John XXIII, with the help and encouragement of Father Considine, who the year before had been named director of the U.S. National Catholic Welfare Conference’s Latin American Bureau (NCWC-LAB), issued an appeal to clergy in the United States to send 10 percent of their representatives to Latin America to address the scarcity of clergy and the threat of communism.48 The number of foreign clergy in Latin America surged. Both the Alliance for Progress and the appeal for clergy called explicitly for means to alleviate poverty and also recognized that a failure to do so threatened the region by making its people vulnerable to Communist appeals.

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Peru became a primary beneficiary of these mutually reinforcing church/U.S. government programs. Peru received 68 percent of the U.S. diocesan clergy who responded to the pope’s appeal, and Father Considine helped to coordinate this influx through Peru’s papal nuncio, Archbishop Romulo Carboni. Carboni appealed to bishops in Peru to describe their needs, which could then be channeled through NCWCLAB so that Considine could coordinate with diocesan clergy to secure the most appropriate places for them.49 By the 1960s the Catholic Church in Peru, which had been relatively moribund less than two decades earlier, had become the most vibrant force in the country. It had networks extending from the poorest barriadas of urban Peru to the remotest communities in the countryside and to the centers of power in Lima. Moreover, through foreign networks the church had access to vast economic resources, and through national clergy closely affiliated with a progressive hierarchy and trained in the most innovative theological currents the church had a transformative force of ideas. All these influences were in place well before the advent of the Second Vatican Council, credited with transforming the church in Latin America. Liberation theology appeared an exclusively Latin American movement, but it was really the product of a globalized Catholic Church centered in Latin America. Maryknoll and the Peruvian Church after the Second Vatican Council In the early 1970s Maryknoll missionaries enjoyed opportunities and suffered obstacles created during the preceding decades of mission in Peru. Mission to the poor in rural Puno and in urban barriadas placed Maryknoll in the vanguard of the liberation theology church. The missionaries participated actively in the most important centers of progressive Catholicism in Lima, where they joined with Gutiérrez, Cardinal Landázuri, Bishops Luis Bambarén and Germán Schmitz, and the biological brothers Fathers Jorge and Carlos Álvarez Calderón who were leaders in Catholic youth and workers’ movements. Maryknoll also promoted new centers that produced some of the most important proclamations on behalf of the poor. Maryknoll prelates Eduardo Fedders and Alberto Koenigsknecht of Juli joined forces

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with the hierarchy of Cuzco, Puno, Ayaviri, Sicuani, and Chuquibambilla and collectively became the “voice of the poor” in southern Peru.50 Although foreign clergy constituted the majority of the Iglesia del Sur Andino, Peruvian bishops provided its public face. Maryknoll priests also participated actively in the National Office of Social Information (ONIS), a group of progressive clergy established by Peruvian Father Romeo Luna Victoria at the meeting where Gutiérrez first presented A Theology of Liberation. Like the Iglesia del Sur Andino, ONIS was composed almost entirely of foreign clergy, with Maryknollers among the core members, but the public face of the organization was Peruvian.51 Maryknoll missionaries, in concert with Peruvian clergy, also formed part of a new vanguard to valorize indigenous culture. The Velasco military regime tended to focus more on class than on race or ethnicity. Some researchers have suggested that this emphasis helps to explain why in Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, and, to a lesser extent, Chile, indigenous movements formed in the 1980s and 1990s became the vanguard of social and political transformation, while in Peru indigenous identity issues remained in the background.52 The Velasco regime emphasized the campesino and the worker, class identities that in some measure tried to eradicate symbolically indigenous culture and ethnicity even as they supported “the poor.” By contrast, Maryknoll and other key actors in the Catholic Church increasingly valorized indigenous culture and sought to increase knowledge of and respect for it. Maryknoll established the Instituto de Estudios Aymaras (IDEA) in Chucuito, Puno, to promote knowledge of Aymara language and culture.53 The missionaries also supported the Instituto de Pastoral Andina (IPA), founded by the bishops of the Iglesia del Sur Andino in Cuzco in 1969 to develop pastoral programs that engaged indigenous religious ideas and practices to promote an Andeanized Catholicism. And they expanded language programs to promote Aymara by training indigenous teachers and providing language courses to pastoral agents in Cochabamba, Bolivia,54 the seminary in Juliaca, the Centro de Bartolomé de las Casas in Cuzco, and IDEA in Chucuito. Indigenous identity thus became central to the modern church and, by implication, society. The central role of indigenous identity dramatically contradicted the long-held assumption among Western researchers that

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“primitive” or “traditional” communities would disappear as societies modernized. Even as Maryknoll and the progressive Peruvian Catholic Church embraced the preferential option for the poor, indigenous identity, and a more open, modern liberation theology promoting the rights of the marginal, it also reproduced existing power structures. Power followed existing hierarchies. Peruvian clergy based in Lima remained the most important sources of authority in the liberation theology church. Cardinal Landázuri actively supported the progressive clergy and became the voice of last resort in all conflicts between the church and the government. Progressive Peruvian bishops and clergy followed, with power focused in urban centers and spreading out to the marginal urban and rural areas. Not a single indigenous individual, layperson, or female religious became a dominant part of the public face of the progressive church. In Peru it was accurate to say that the church became a voice of the poor, but the poor remained silent and hidden.55 Maryknoll Sisters: A Hidden Force These conditions offered women religious, including Maryknoll sisters, an opportunity. The first Maryknoll sisters arrived in Peru in 1951. Within Maryknoll and the patriarchal Catholic Church, sisters served as auxiliaries to priests. They provided services as acts of Christian charity that manifested their faith. The Maryknoll sisters in Peru were teachers, social workers, and nurses. Their subordinate status as auxiliaries, their provision of services, and their autonomy within subordination granted sisters a distinct means to gain access to local communities. As teachers, Maryknoll sisters visited their students’ homes, which afforded them special insight into the conditions of people’s lives and the nature of family and community. As nurses, they participated in the most intimate aspects of peoples’ lives and shared with them experiences of extreme vulnerability: illness, childbirth, and injury. As social workers, they participated in the distribution of resources in ways that brought them into people’s lives. Maryknoll sisters were closely aligned with the direction of the church after the Second Vatican Council. In the 1950s they had participated in many of the programs initiated by the Maryknoll fathers

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in Peru but had not directed them; they relied on indigenous catechists to provide inoculations and distribute food but did not direct catechetical programs; and they taught in Maryknoll schools but were overseen by priests. After the Second Vatican Council, Maryknoll sisters left the institutional structures of schools and hospitals, but the nature of their service as a manifestation of charity and faith did not radically change. In fact, sisters may have had more opportunities to live the ideals of the church of the poor than did priests, because they did not have to escape the identities they had established during the preceding decade. Moreover, their identity was not tied to the sacramental foundation of the church. If foreign clergy were the invisible base of the progressive Peruvian church, sisters were nearly subterranean.

The Maryknoll experience in Peru illustrates that the Catholic Church played a central role in contemporary modernization and in relations between the United States and Latin America. It also shows that progressive programs did not necessarily play out as they appeared. And finally, it offers insight into the way missionaries lived their experience without always being conscious of the larger structures of which they were a part. For the men and women of Maryknoll, mission was their lives. Most sought to fulfill a religious promise that offered them a chance to make a difference in the world. They wanted to live their faith. And they did so in remarkably difficult conditions. Even given the allowances they made for themselves during their first years, Maryknoll missionaries suffered conditions for a lifetime that few Western researchers tolerate for more than nine months. Thus understanding these larger structural changes is in part about understanding how and why people made their life choices. This book attempts to introduce the experience of the Maryknoll missionaries in Peru to understand these choices and their unintended consequences.

Methodology and Structure

This book is based on a combination of archival research, interviews, and participant observation undertaken from 1995 to 1996, 1997 to

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1998, and 2000 to 2001. I spent most of that time in Peru, where I did research in the archives of the bishops in Puno and Juli, in the provincial archives of Puno, in the Puno library’s collection of newspapers, and in the archives of El Comercio, a daily newspaper in Lima. During that time I also interviewed Maryknoll clergy working in the country. For four months in 1997, I lived in Cutini Capilla, an Aymara community outside of Juli, to gain insight into indigenous life and culture. In addition to research in Peru, I conducted extensive archival research and interviews at the Maryknoll mission center in upstate New York. This work, which included follow-up studies in 2000 and 2001, allowed me to consult the official diaries kept by Maryknoll fathers and sisters in Peru from 1943 to 1968, to review interviews recorded by the Maryknoll Society History Project, and to examine Maryknoll publicity materials, including the Field Afar/Maryknoll. The chapters are organized chronologically, with each detailing a shift in Maryknoll mission methods and practices. Maryknoll missionaries’ status as a transnational Catholic organization based in the United States meant that mission was defined and redefined by changes in the universal Catholic Church, the Latin American church, the U.S. church and society, and the missionaries’ experience in Peru. Chapter 1 examines the foundation of the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America and the Catholic Foreign Mission Sisters of St. Dominic, together known as Maryknoll. Most of the men and women who joined Maryknoll and supported it with donations were working- or middleclass “white ethnics” from the northeastern and midwestern United States. They shared a distinct Catholic ethos formed by the experience of immigration, exclusion, and labor. Chapter 2 examines the period from 1943, when the first missionaries settled in Puno, to 1953. This decade represented more than anything else a period of dramatic culture shock. The Maryknoll missionaries believed when they settled in Puno that people would respect them and embrace immediately the model of Romanized Catholicism they sought to establish. The missionaries’ efforts to impose their ideals and practices brought them into immediate conflict with Peru’s Catholic communities. Moreover, the missionaries discovered that they had to adapt not only to local practices of faith but also to the daunting physical environment of Puno.

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Chapter 3 begins with the 1954 Lima Mission Methods Conference organized by Maryknoll Father John Considine, a central force behind Maryknoll and, in many ways, the U.S. mission to Latin America.56 The conference marked the beginning of a new phase in mission to Latin America and in Maryknoll’s mission to Peru. It followed on the heels of a Semana Pastoral held in Chimbote, Peru, to assess the state of the Catholic Church in Latin America.57 Both the Semana Pastoral and the Lima Mission Methods Conference represented the first efforts to address mission to Latin America systematically by assessing the condition of the church, articulating mission goals, and developing methods to achieve those goals. Maryknoll introduced these mission methods to the newly created prelature in Juli, which was placed under the missionaries’ control in 1957, and in urban Puno, Lima, and Arequipa. Maryknoll sisters arrived in Peru in 1951 and became an important force in the country. Chapter 4 takes up the period from 1968 to 1979. It begins by focusing on the confluence of the 1968 Conference of Latin American Bishops at Medellín and the military coup that brought the reformist General Velasco to power. It concludes in 1979 with the official declaration of separation of church and state in the new Peruvian constitution and the beginning of the Shining Path. Chapter 5 examines the period from the mid-1970s through 1989, when Peru was devastated by the Shining Path and military repression. It analyzes the transformation of Maryknoll into part of a broader movement within the progressive Catholic Church to support human rights in Peru. It argues that the Catholic human rights network evolved from the church structures established during the preceding decades to serve the poor. The legitimacy earned through their efforts and the fact that the church was targeted by both the Shining Path and the Peruvian armed forces allowed it to serve as a mediating force in society. This role culminated in the formation of the Peruvian Commission for Truth and Reconciliation in 2001. The epilogue describes briefly Maryknoll’s contemporary position in the United States and the missionaries’ fate in Peru with conservative forces dominating the local church.

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CHAPTER 1

Maryknoll and the New Deal for Latin America

When Superior General Walsh assigned the first Maryknoll priests to Latin America in 1942, the decision appeared purely pragmatic since World War II rendered most of the world inaccessible. But Latin America also had characteristics that made it an appealing mission field. Despite being overwhelmingly Catholic, the region suffered a striking shortage of clergy, especially in remote rural and impoverished urban areas. In Catholic eyes, people were susceptible to the dangers of Protestantism and, in the cold war context, communism. Moreover, U.S. interest in Latin America, always strong, increased during the war when the region became a primary source of resources for the Allies. Over the next three decades, Maryknoll sent more missionaries to Latin America than to any other mission field.1 Latin America defined Maryknoll. But more than numbers explained the relationship. The confluence of the North American missionaries’ religious and national interests and the reciprocal nature of the relationship with a Catholic region contributed to a profound engagement that transformed Maryknoll, Catholicism in Latin America, and Catholicism in the United States. 19

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The first point of transformation was the missionaries themselves. When they established their missions in Latin America, Maryknollers were nationalistic, anticommunist, doctrinaire Catholics. They measured faith by counting sacraments. They believed that their responsibility was to “save” the Latin American church by establishing the Romanized practice of Catholicism and developing a national clergy. Maryknollers identified their church and their nation as the “answer” to Latin America’s “problems.” “Like the Marines,” proclaimed one article in Maryknoll’s publicity magazine, the Field Afar, “the Catholic Church, when it finds a weak spot, rolls up its sleeves and goes to work. Because of a serious lack of parishes and clergy, traditionally Catholic Latin America finds itself in the paradoxical position of lacking a rich sacramental and liturgical life.” “The solution,” the article concluded, “lies in the powerful and generous cooperation of the United States; more particularly, the solution lies with Maryknoll.”2 Within twenty-five years Maryknollers became outspoken critics of U.S. policy and promoters of an intercultural Catholicism that recognized, respected, and sought to emulate local practices of faith. Maryknoll began to look to Latin America to transform the Catholic Church in the United States. It would seem that mission to the poor in Latin America had transformed Maryknoll. The reality was more complex. The experience of mission and the opportunity it gave Maryknollers to enter into dialogue with Latin American clergy and laity profoundly influenced the missionaries. Yet their experience was shaped by the ideas they carried with them to Latin America as individuals and as a mission institution. Maryknoll developed from the struggle of Irish, German, Italian, Polish, and Bohemian Catholic immigrants to “make America” by building the church in the United States and by gaining political and economic enfranchisement.3 American Catholics’ ideals of faith and nation were inextricably linked, and this relationship motivated Maryknoll’s foundation and determined the nature of its mission. The men and women who became missionaries in the 1940s and 1950s, when Maryknoll grew fastest, came from ethnic communities in the northeastern United States.4 Their grandparents and parents had struggled to organize unions and to survive the Great Depression. The community memory of immigration, labor, and survival created a

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keen awareness of poverty and a belief that charity was a moral obligation for those who could afford to give.5 Maryknoll called on Catholic youth whose ancestors had “made America” to give something back by sharing the spiritual and material benefits they enjoyed with others less fortunate. Nowhere was this sense of obligation more evident than in Latin America, where a Catholic population experienced the immediate influence of U.S. policies. Nowhere were U.S. Catholics called upon more directly to accept responsibility for their church and their nation. Understanding the nature of the reciprocal relationship between the Maryknoll mission in Latin America and Catholic communities in the United States requires that Maryknoll be viewed in the context of the ideals and programs missionaries brought from home. Before the Second Vatican Council, liberation theology, and the 1968 Medellín Conference of Latin American Bishops appeal for a preferential option for the poor, Maryknoll had chosen to serve the poor. This chapter seeks to place Maryknoll’s foundation and missionaries’ identity in the context of the U.S. immigrant Catholic experience. It argues that the Maryknoll mission to Latin America was shaped by the ideals and structures that emerged from ethnic communities in the 1930s6 and were carried through the postwar era of prosperity and consumerism of the 1940s and 1950s. The religious and social practices Maryknoll missionaries carried with them to Latin America emphasized lay engagement, community-based faith, labor organizing, and charity. These ideals and practices would both resonate with those of liberation theology and contribute to its development.

The Founding of Maryknoll

Maryknoll’s founding marked the transformation of the United States from a mission-receiving to a mission-sending country. In 1908 the Vatican removed the United States from its list of mission territories. Just three years later, in 1911, the Vatican recognized the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America.7 Nine years after that, in 1920, the Foreign Mission Sisters of St. Dominic received Vatican approval. Together with the Auxiliary Brothers of St. Michael, they would be

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known as Maryknoll— a name chosen for the site of the mission center on a hill above the Hudson River in upstate New York that the founders called Mary’s Knoll. The Maryknoll fathers, brothers, and sisters maintained separate institutional structures, finances, and leadership, but they shared many mission fields and were identified together popularly as Maryknoll. Maryknoll was the first Catholic organization in the United States founded for the purpose of promoting world mission. Maryknoll offered U.S. Catholics a chance to assert their place in the universal Catholic Church and to repay the debt their immigrant ancestors owed to European missionaries who aided them during the early years of settlement. Maryknoll’s founders reminded Catholics that “the growth of the Church in our country is due, principally, to missionary labors. We are now enjoying their fruits. . . . [W]e cannot forget that we owe a duty to the missions in other countries. Freely we have received; let us freely give in return.”8 Mission also allowed U.S. Catholics to demonstrate to Protestants, who condemned European immigrants’ Catholic faith as a threat to America’s promise, that they were no longer alone in the United States or the world. “The Christianity of America,” announced the first issue of the Field Afar in 1907, “has been too long represented in the foreign missions, solely by Protestantism, and the time has surely come when we Catholics of the United States should enter upon our task among people who are ours by the inheritance of Jesus Christ.”9 Maryknoll offered U.S. Catholics a way to assert their identity at home and in the universal Catholic Church by sending missionaries abroad. Faith and nation, national and international interests, were inextricably linked. The gender norms of the patriarchal Catholic Church and society influenced the formation of the Maryknoll fathers and sisters and defined their missions. The influence of gender and power was immediately evident in the distinct experiences of the Maryknoll founders. The Maryknoll Society was cofounded by Fathers James A. Walsh and Anthony F. Price.10 Father Walsh, an Irish American priest with roots in the powerful Boston Catholic community, who became the public face of Maryknoll, initiated plans for establishing a U.S. Catholic mission society when he served as the U.S. director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. In 1907 he began publishing the Field

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Afar (later named Maryknoll ) to attract support for world mission. He wanted U.S. Catholics to transcend the provincialism of their ethnic communities by recognizing that their faith made them members of a universal Church with obligations beyond the boundaries of their parish, community, and nation. The innovative magazine was written in a popular style with clear prose, photographs, excerpts from missionaries’ diaries and letters, and even games for children. It attracted donations, seminarians, and novices to Maryknoll. It also became an integral part of U.S. Catholic life. Virtually every child who attended parochial school in the United States knew about the Field Afar. Although Walsh was informal, direct, and sensible, he also enjoyed status and authority as a priest, as director of Propagation of the Faith, as publisher of the Field Afar, and as cofounder and bishop of the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America (Maryknoll). Mary Josephine “Molly” Rogers, who as Mother Mary Joseph founded the Maryknoll sisters, enjoyed considerably less prestige. As a student at Smith College, Molly Rogers was struck by Protestant students’ mission fervor and lamented the absence of equivalent opportunities for Catholics. The Field Afar brought Rogers to Walsh. Rogers offered to assist Walsh in promoting global Catholic mission in the United States. As a kind of invisible “helpmeet,” Rogers came to play a central role in Maryknoll, even helping to purchase the site for the future seminary and convent. She and the laywomen who later joined her, together known as “secretaries” and then “Teresians,” became indispensible to the nascent Maryknoll mission. They wrote articles and bound, packaged, and mailed the Field Afar. When the seminary was established, the secretaries settled into a house next door. They assisted seminarians by doing everything from darning socks to washing clothes to preparing meals. They were viewed as auxiliaries whose essential work was secondary to that of the seminarians and priests.11 In “About Maryknoll Sisters,” an article written for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Maryknoll’s founding, Walsh observed that “there comes to us the realization that almost simultaneously with the men’s organization appeared the beginnings, uncertain at the time, of the . . . Foreign Mission Sisters of St. Dominic.”12 After nearly thirty years of labor, the sisters’ presence still seemed something of a surprise.

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In fact, Mother Mary Joseph and many of the women who joined the “Maryknoll movement” were ambivalent about becoming nuns. Most wanted to be missionaries, but for Catholic women sanctification as sisters was a necessary prerequisite to service in mission.13 Perhaps because of their ambivalence or Mother Mary Joseph’s informal, expansive nature, the women struggled to find a religious order to train and sponsor them. Once they gained Vatican recognition as a religious order (more than a decade after the Maryknoll fathers), Mother Mary Joseph tried to adapt the rigid rule of St. Augustine to her community. She emphasized the Maryknoll Spirit, “which for supernatural reasons preserves simple, frank naturalness in each individual and prompts friendliness that will draw people rather than repel them.”14 She believed that “it is a wrong attitude to feel that the Maryknoll spirit cannot be combined with all the dignity and sweetness required of the most austere religious.”15 Women who later joined Maryknoll recounted that in contrast to other religious orders, the Maryknoll sisters were happy and lively. Although they wore the traditional habit until the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council, the Maryknoll sisters participated in the world.16 The Maryknoll fathers also emphasized friendliness, informality, and physical labor, which together seemed part of the essence of American Catholic culture. The Maryknoll Fathers Spiritual Directory encouraged the virtues of “simplicity, generosity, [and] humility.”17 It also valorized manual labor as a way to give “the future missioner intimate knowledge of the laborious life of the humble people whom he will evangelize[;] . . . few things can inure him to the humble lot of his flock as personal labor can.”18 Maryknoll seminarians tended the grounds of the vast compound, worked an experimental farm, and cleaned their rooms. Images in the Field Afar/Maryknoll depicted young men with hoes and shovels hard at work.19 The “Men of Maryknoll” were shown playing on the seminary’s miniature soccer field, one-basket basketball and badminton courts, and football and softball fields and swimming in the large seminary pool. But even as they were publicized as equivalent to “the boy next door,” male missionaries enjoyed authority as priests. Priests had the exclusive power to provide sacraments, believed by Catholics to save souls. Sacraments were the essence of the faith for

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Maryknoll and for the Catholic Church, placing male clergy at the pinnacle of the institution’s patriarchal power structure. Maryknoll’s founders envisioned an exclusively American organization. It was to be “Catholic to distinguish it from Protestant mission groups; Foreign to define its purpose; of America because it had received the official sanction of the American hierarchy, and because the term would distinguish it from European groups and let people of mission lands know that Catholic Americans were interested in them.”20 The name embodied the founders’ guiding influences: a measure of competition with Protestants, a powerful sense of nationalism, and a generosity defined by faith and nation that transcended boundaries. The Maryknoll fathers were diocesan priests incorporated into the Archdiocese of New York. Although Maryknoll was an international Catholic mission organization, the fathers could not accept seminarians from foreign countries. Maryknoll hoped that young men from their mission fields attracted to the priesthood would become diocesan priests or join local orders to serve at home. Indeed, a central part of the Maryknoll mission was to create a “native clergy” so as to “work themselves out of a job.” Yet some critics read this desire as an exclusion of foreigners because they were foreign, and, perhaps, inferior. The Maryknoll sisters, by contrast, as an order of women religious and representatives of the universal Catholic Church, accepted women from all countries. Although the sisters remained an overwhelmingly American Catholic order, dominated by women from the Northeast, the smattering of women from other countries who began to enter the order in the 1960s and 1970s helped to redefine mission. Maryknoll sisters also engaged in mission at home.21 In the longer term, this subtle difference implied a recognition that the United States did not have the “answers” for the rest of the world; the country still needed missionaries’ help. The Men and Women of Maryknoll: “You, Too, Can Change the World”

Although Maryknoll fathers and sisters differed organizationally, the men and women who entered during the period of greatest expansion

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in the 1940s and 1950s came from the same social, ethnic, and economic backgrounds. A survey of Maryknoll seminarians in 1945 found that “in a little more than half the cases, [a seminarian’s] national background, on one or other or both sides of the family is Irish. One out of every four seminarians has a German background. A dozen other national origins are represented in smaller percentages. The principal characteristic of the Maryknoll seminarian is that he is American.” Most seminarians attended parochial grammar schools and high schools, which assured a particular knowledge of faith and its practice and an established idea of the clergy’s role in society based on experience with local parish priests and sisters. The majority reported that they decided to enter Maryknoll because of the Field Afar and the encouragement of a local priest. The most important influence, however, remained personal. The chance to hear a missioner speak to their Catholic school classes usually tipped the balance in favor of a life in mission. Although joining the foreign missions seemed extraordinary, becoming a priest was not. Nineteen percent of seminarians had siblings in religious orders— testimony to the profound faith of European immigrant Catholic communities.22 Maryknoll novices (the female counterpart to seminarians) also attended either parochial high schools (42%) or private schools (27%), and many (43%) had only finished high school when they entered the convent. Maryknoll offered many of these young women a chance to continue their studies by earning bachelor’s or master’s degrees, or even becoming doctors or nurses. Most of the women came from workingclass or lower-middle-class families. Their parents had graduated from high school, but most had not completed college. A survey in 1978 of 204 Maryknoll sisters ranging in age from twenty-seven to eighty-six found that one in five identified the Field Afar as one of the most important influences on her decision to become a mission sister.23 The Maryknoll appeal to young men and women in the 1940s and 1950s reflected the nationalism and triumphalism of the era, but it also appealed to a profound sense of faith and a desire to make a difference. Boys, however, were the most frequent target of Maryknoll’s advertisements. “Say, young fellow,” called out one advertisement in the Field Afar, “you with the book, how would you like to help build a bet-

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ter world? You’re right; it is a pretty large order to change the world. But you can do it. As a matter of fact, you are just the one who has what it takes— you and thousands of young Americans like you.” “We are not looking for a genius,” the appeal continued. “In fact, we might not know what to do with him.” Instead, Maryknoll was looking for “someone like you,” with “1. . . . an intense desire to help the world to do good to your fellow men; 2. Good health; 3. Average intelligence . . . ; 4. Normal piety . . . ; 5. Sense of humor . . . ; 6. Common sense; [and] 7. Generosity.”24 Maryknoll suggested that the candidate might not recognize these characteristics in himself. But mission had the power to draw out the best in a boy. It could even make him a hero. As one story in the mission’s magazine had it, “Many years ago a tall, well-built, dark-haired young man came to Maryknoll seminary. He was strong and energetic, good at games and fairly good in classes. . . . [W]e considered him average, except for his zest for work. But even that was insignificant compared to his heart! That was so very great, it could pity the most revolting of all God’s unfortunates; so strong, it could take him into the grimmest work a man could choose! We could not see his heart; we didn’t even know about it, at first. Probably he didn’t either.” But he “became a hero, a great, a tower of strength to some people in the Orient. [He] became the Reverend Francis J. Connors, of the Maryknoll leper asylum in South China, who lived and died for his afflicted, abandoned sufferers.”25 Priests’ heroism depended on altruism and an unaware but palpable sense of superiority. The appeal to mission entailed an inherent paternalism. It offered a narrow choice between pity and revulsion. But it also mandated that the missionary give more than alms. He had to live with those he served, share their suffering, and work on their behalf. In his dissertation on the Maryknoll seminary, John Joseph Casey argues that emphasis on the average reflected a common belief that because missionaries would be working with “primitive” peoples they did not need the same intellect as priests at home: “Letters were frequently received at society headquarters from pastors on behalf of young men in their parishes who wanted to be priests but lacked the proper mental qualifications. Although unsuitable for entering the

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diocesan seminary in the minds of their pastors they would make excellent missionaries working in underdeveloped countries where the same mental acumen was not demanded.”26 Even as the appeal to the average entailed a patronizing attitude toward the people of mission lands, it was also inherently democratic. It assumed that everyone had a talent to serve the “greater kingdom.” Everyone had a part in God’s divine plan. The appeal to become Maryknoll sisters also reached out to the average girl, but it reflected the limits imposed on women. Bernie Lynch, the subject of a popular Maryknoll book and advertisement based on the life of Maryknoll novice “Bernadette Lynch of Sherman Street, Brooklyn,” represented the ideal. Bernie “knew nothing of life in a convent, nothing of what she might have to go through to become a Sister.” She was known in “St. Joseph’s commercial high school as a good dancer, not much of an athlete, but popular.” These characteristics would not appear to make Bernie an ideal candidate to become either a nun or a professional, but Maryknoll offered a chance to be both. The entrance requirements for Maryknoll sisters were minimal and similar to those for priests. Candidates had to be at least sixteen and not more than thirty and should have finished grammar school and, preferably, hold a high school diploma. They should “possess the four-fold requirements of: (1) the Right intention; (2) good health; (3) intelligence — common sense; and (4) good will.”27 The Maryknoll sisters’ ideal paralleled that of priests, but they did not appear heroic. In fact, they did not appear much at all. The few articles in the Field Afar directed to girls emphasized altruism with a maternal bent. Photographs showed sisters feeding malnourished children, sharing food with them, offering medical care, and teaching in poor areas. Where priests always looked like rugged individualists, Maryknoll sisters appeared together or with local women and children. Sisters rarely signed their diary accounts and often described events as if they played no role in them. As a result, individual women religious seemed less heroic and more like representatives of a community of hardworking, well-intentioned Catholic women. Vitiation of individual identity defined the women, who were to “strip[ ] themselves of self to become part and parcel of God’s plan for the redemption of

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human souls.”28 Sisters were asked to give up their names and either to choose an alternative or to have a new name assigned to them.29 From 1940 to 1960 the number of Maryknoll sisters more than doubled.30 This period of growth occurred in the postwar era when “the short-lived affirmation of women’s independence gave way to a pervasive endorsement of female subordination and domesticity.”31 Maryknoll recognized this change in its appeal to women. “New Horizons,” a 1947 Maryknoll advertisement, observed that “in the decade between 1930 and 1940 the proportion of American women in gainful occupations increased more rapidly than the population. And so . . . what? So, . . . [w]omen, the hearthwatchers, the wicket tenders, the light spreaders, the servers, the patient waiters, have taken up new posts in the mechanized world. . . . [R]esponsibility, recognition, prestige have come with extended fields of work.” It concluded ominously that “a veritable mountain of literature by women about women reveals [that] restlessness and dissatisfaction” were the principal result. More and more women were turning away from career and toward marriage.32 Even as Maryknoll condemned the “modern woman” it recognized the appeal of new opportunities, identifying “medical work, legal work, dietetics, child care, diplomatic service, education . . . [as] tempting possibilities.” The trick, Maryknoll suggested, was to find a way to enjoy the opportunities without denying “woman’s nature.” By becoming a Maryknoll sister, a woman could have the best of all possible worlds. She would fulfill her “spiritual nature” as a woman, yet also enjoy new opportunities and the chance to go abroad and work in the world. Maryknoll called on the average girl, who really had to be extraordinary, offered an alternative to women who really had no alternative, and gave them a chance to defy gender norms while remaining well within them.33 Although the appeal to the average individual suggested that any boy or girl could become a missionary and “change the world,” few heeded the call. Entering Maryknoll meant forsaking not only marriage and children but also many of the comforts of home. The Maryknoll seminary and convent were imposing buildings set on vast grounds, nestled in the lush Hudson Valley and surrounded by mansions. But life within them was restrictive, though less restrictive than life in many

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other Catholic seminaries and convents. Neither novices nor seminarians could read newspapers, magazines, or novels. Television was prohibited. They had to accept any mission assignment given to them without question. They were told that regardless of their assignment, they were doing God’s work. Once they settled in a mission field (if they were assigned to one), Maryknollers could not return home for ten years, meaning a prolonged separation from their families and communities of origin. Maryknoll never numbered more than three thousand priests, brothers, and sisters, a tiny minority of the U.S. Catholic population.34 Despite their small numbers, the missionaries’ leaders shared an expansive vision for what the “Maryknoll movement” could do in the world. Their enthusiasm stemmed in part from the extraordinary success of the U.S. Catholic immigrant church and community. By the 1920s immigrant Catholics had built a thriving American church, with over 300 newspapers, periodicals, and journals; nearly 5,000 parochial schools; and nearly 200 colleges and universities.35 In the National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC), the U.S. hierarchy had a national body that spoke for American Catholics with a unified voice and coordinated activities among the plethora of parishes. In the 1930s the NCWC gained national standing when staff members testified on government legislation that might affect the church. Indeed, by the 1930s the Catholic Church and community had become a powerful political force in the nation.36 This outcome did not seem likely in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when so many Catholic immigrants arrived in the country. The growth of Catholic institutions and influence gave U.S. Catholics a unique sense of faith and a belief in the possibility of transformation of peoples and nations. As successive waves of European immigrants arrived in the United States in the nineteenth century, critics described them as “scum . . . viscerating upon our shores[,] . . . horde[s] of $9.60 steerage slime . . . siphoned upon us from Continental mud tanks.”37 Established Protestants especially derided Catholic immigrants’ faith, which they claimed was antimodern, antidemocratic, and a threat to America’s promise.38 Anti-Catholic sentiment was so strong that the historian Richard Hofstadter identified it as a paradigmatic example of the “paranoid style in American politics.”39 “Protestantism,” Hofstadter parodied,

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was engaged in a life-or-death struggle with Catholicism. . . . [A] great tide of immigration, hostile to free institutions, was sweeping in upon the county, subsidized and sent by “the potentates of Europe,” multiplying tumult and violence, filling jails, crowding poorhouses, quadrupling taxation, and sending increasing thousands of voters to “lay their inexperienced hand upon the helm of our power.” . . . Even so much as a tenth of the voting population, condensed and wielded by the Catholic powers of Europe, might decide our elections, perplex our policy, inflame and divide the nation, break the bond of our union, throw down our free institutions.40

Even as critics lambasted immigrants for their Catholic faith, immigrants turned to their church to establish a place in American society. The historian Barbara Woodcock Tentler observes that often immigrants’ first act in establishing a new community was to form a lay sodality (a Catholic association) to build the parish compound with its church, school, rectory, convent, and meeting hall. “To participate in building a church,” she asserts, was to gain a stake in America. It meant identification with a particular locale and a particular group of “countrymen” in Europe. . . . Ethnicity provided the means by which America’s immigrants entered public life. . . . [I]nsofar as the church facilitated the emergence of ethnic consciousness, it unwittingly facilitated the eventual realization of a trans-ethnic, even a class, identity. . . . [S]upport of such churchlinked institutions as schools, orphanages and hospitals served to limit state power with regard to the group, and underwrote a potentially radical ideology of what we today call community control.41

The parish became the center of immigrant community life. It offered prayer, refuge, education, and socialization. In Chicago, when asked where they lived, many people responded by citing the name of their parish instead of their city.42 Turning points in community members’ lives were celebrated by Catholic ceremonies, which reinforced the church’s centrality: birth corresponded with baptism, early childhood with first communion, adolescence with confirmation, adulthood with

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marriage or, perhaps, holy orders, and death with last rites. Priests and bishops who administered these sacraments offered the means of eternal salvation and of successful passage through life. The parish also served as the focal point of social and even economic life. Parish dances, fiestas, and theater combined with sports activities, and sodalities defined the experience of Catholic youth.43 During the early years of settlement, immigrants appealed to missionary priests and women religious from their countries of origin to staff the parishes and teach in the schools. Appealing to homeland memories and social patterns allowed immigrants to retain their religious faith and their ethnic identity. Sisters taught immigrants’ children in the languages of home while at the same time preparing them to enter into the world of their parents’ adopted country. During periods of economic crisis immigrants turned to their church and to lay sodalities for resources and support. This experience ensured that for Maryknollers a mission meant more than conversion and the church more than a place to pray. Priests and sisters were central to the immigrant experience. Priests were often the best-educated members of the ethnic communities. They guided parishioners through crises, provided them with economic assistance in times of need, helped families survive internal conflict, facilitated union organizing, and advised people on economic issues.44 Priests enjoyed respect and even love, but their power also created opportunities for abuse and for building social barriers between them and their parishioners.45 While priests administered sacraments, aid, and counseling, sisters participated in community members’ daily lives. By working with children in parochial schools, sisters learned about families, visited when a child needed extra help, and always labored to discern the condition of the family’s faith. Catholic schools helped establish a moral foundation for communities and served as a source for future religious vocations.46 They also played a central role in gaining new converts to the faith.47 Women religious also directed hospitals and orphanages, which drew them into intimate relations with families as they cared for the country’s most vulnerable people. Catholics in the United States became deeply engaged in labor organizing, but they turned to the papal social encyclicals Rerum No-

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varum (1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931) rather than to Karl Marx for guidance. Terence Powderly, a Catholic, led the Knights of Labor (1869), the first national union, a majority of whose members were Catholic. When union workers were blamed for the killing of a dozen policemen in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, commemorated internationally as Labor Day on May 1, the Vatican threatened to condemn it. In response, a delegation of archbishops traveled to Rome to warn the pope that “ ‘to lose the heart of the people would be a misfortune for which the friendship of the few rich and powerful would be no compensation.’ ”48 Catholics’ identity as workers translated into a church hierarchy with a powerful labor orientation. In 1947 Archbishop Richard Cushing observed that “in all the American hierarchy resident in the United States, there is not known to me one bishop, archbishop, or cardinal whose father was a college graduate. Every one of our bishops and archbishops is the son of a working man and a working man’s wife.”49 Many of the parents, relatives, and neighbors of the young men and women who entered Maryknoll were active in union movements in the 1920s that culminated in the 1930s in corporate recognition of the right of workers to organize and to be represented. Lizabeth Cohen argues that the strikes of the 1930s helped establish a moral economy among workers, who believed that employers, beneficiaries of their labor, were obliged to treat them fairly by providing decent working conditions, reasonable wages, a degree of job security, and protection in case of injury or illness.50 In short, humanitarian ideals had to take precedence over profit in the workplace. Cohen and the cultural historian Michael Denning both argue that labor organizing and the rise of mass culture also helped create a new sense of American identity rooted in people’s labor and ethnicity.51 The Great Depression sapped the economic vitality of ethnically based community aid organizations and local Catholic parishes. Having exhausted these resources, ethnic communities in the Midwest and Northeast were forced to turn to the government for assistance.Yet the depression also offered Catholics an opportunity. By 1920 the Catholic population had increased to 19,828,000, concentrated in the urban centers of the Northeast and Midwest and organized through religion, labor, and ethnic associations, making it a formidable political force.52

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Franklin Roosevelt recognized this potential and quietly courted Catholics.53 In a public speech, he described Quadragesimo Anno as “one of the greatest documents of modern times” and identified himself as a leader who was “as radical” as the bishop of Rome in his criticism of unrestrained capitalism.54 U.S. Catholics gradually came to view their relationship with the government in terms of reciprocity: in exchange for voting for Roosevelt they gained the support of the federal government. In Chicago there was a “two-thirds increase in voter turnout between 1924 and 1936, with essentially all of these new participants voting Democratic.”55 After his election, Roosevelt named Catholics to his cabinet and assigned them to diplomatic posts, marking a radical change in U.S. politics, which had previously excluded Catholics from power.56 He also seemed to embrace Catholic ideals. New Deal legislation included eleven of the twelve central points of Father John A. Ryan’s Plan for Social Reconstruction, which had been adopted by the NCWC as the “Bishops Plan of 1919.” “Never before in our history,” gushed Father Ryan, “have the politics of the federal government embodied so much legislation that is of a highly ethical order. Never before have government policies been so deliberately, formally and consciously based upon conceptions and convictions of moral right and social justice.”57 Through their support of Roosevelt and his New Deal programs, immigrants and first- and second-generation Americans gained political enfranchisement and a greater sense of nationalism. To them it seemed that their nation had embraced their faith. They began to see provision of aid to the needy in times of crisis as the American government’s obligation to its citizens and supporters, an ideal that would extend to their view of America’s international role in the post–World War II era. Catholics saw Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy as the first realization of their ideal of U.S. international policy guided by Catholic principles. Catholic journals declared the Good Neighbor policy a “New Deal for Latin America.”58 When Roosevelt introduced Good Neighbor Leagues in a nationally broadcast speech commemorating the National Conference of Christians and Jews in 1936, he observed, “Human values come before property values; . . . the long-time pros-

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perity of property requires the long-time well-being of people; . . . the American answer to the revolutionist is the removal of those injustices which make revolution.”59 It seemed that the U.S. government had learned what Father Ryan described as the long-forgotten truth that wealth is stewardship, that profit-making is not the basic justification of business enterprise, and that there are such things as fair profits, fair interest, and fair prices. Above all and before all, he must cultivate and strengthen within his mind the truth . . . that the laborer is a human being, not merely an instrument of production; and that the laborer’s right to a decent livelihood is the first moral charge upon industry. The employer has a right to get a reasonable living out of his business, but he has no right to interest on his investment until his employees have obtained at least living wages.60

Catholics in the United States arrogated to themselves a special role as both facilitators of the Good Neighbor policy and guardians of its principles. A year before Roosevelt’s election, one Catholic commentator laid out those principles. The numerous efforts toward stimulating friendliness among the nations of America, efforts that have secured the approval and the active cooperation not only of governments but of earnest individuals as well, are worthy of all encouragement; but none of them can hope for lasting success without recognizing in a practical manner that in our community of Faith with Latin Americans we Catholics of the United States possess a means of approach far more effective than any other. Goodwill flights, fostering of cultural relations, and similar expedients, are good in themselves and should be supported, but their permanent success depends on the extent to which they are linked in the LatinAmerican mind with the consciousness that back of every friendly move on the part of “The Colossus of the North” stands a united group of 20,000,000 Catholics to whom Yankee imperialism, whether that danger be real or imaginary, is every bit as repugnant as it can possibly be to their fellow-Catholics from Mexico to Patagonia. Catholicism is the only bond that can permanently link the two Americas.61

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In 1931 the NCWC created a Latin America bureau to facilitate relations between the Catholic communities of the United States and Latin America.62 The 1930s seemed a realization of Catholic ideals not only because of the New Deal and the Good Neighbor policy but also because Catholic structures developed in earlier years took on a new relevance and importance. While the New Deal signaled a victory for labor organizers, it left rural economic structures largely unchanged.63 In 1923, in an attempt to address the challenges confronting the minority of Catholics who lived in rural areas, U.S. Catholic leaders had developed the National Catholic Rural Life Conference (NCRLC).64 The NCRLC called for comprehensive programs to address the challenges of rural life, including the development of cooperatives, health clinics, family life courses, religious instruction, popular education, and community programs.65 The organization looked north, to Canada, finding a model in the widely recognized “Antigonish movement” in Nova Scotia, where Father Jimmie Tompkins had developed a highly successful organization of community cooperatives and popular educational programs touted by many as a realization of the ideals of the papal social encyclicals.66 The experience of immigration, the struggle to achieve a place in society, and the poverty wrought by the depression together made U.S. Catholics keenly aware that poverty was not always the fault of the poor. Instead, it resulted from inequitable conditions of labor and from economic crises for which no amount of labor and saving could prepare one.67 Catholics in the United States had supported Roosevelt and the New Deal to address these conditions. At the same time, they had created their own schools, hospitals, orphanages, labor unions, and cooperatives to respond to economic challenges and to allow immigrants to “make America.” These conditions ensured that when the first Maryknoll missionaries settled in Latin America they carried with them specific ideals based on their immigrant ancestors’ experience about how to establish a strong Catholic society and what should be the relationship between the United States and Latin America. It also meant that the missionaries carried models for creating a “good society,” which included active lay engagement, labor organizing, cooperatives, Christian family life, and parochial schools.

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By World War II immigrants’ children were fully enfranchised American citizens joining the ranks of an upwardly mobile middle class. Maryknoll reminded U.S. Catholics of this “miracle” and sought to instill in them a sense of obligation to share it with the world. “No country,” admonished the Field Afar “can selfishly regard its lavish birthright as solely and simply its own. It came from God, and He wants it communicated to God’s children everywhere. This is the reason America was given its unique endowment of material and spiritual advantages never equaled elsewhere in the world: that by spreading its gifts around it might spread over itself that mantle of charity which is the greatest of all gifts; that by saving other souls it might save its own soul.”68

Maryknoll, Latin America, and the Postwar World

During World War II Maryknoll presented Catholicism and the U.S. government as the foundations for a new world order that would guarantee peace founded on social justice. Indeed, the Field Afar depicted Catholic mission and U.S. policy as inextricably linked. As Catholics . . . we believe that the hunger, the disease, the bread lines, the crippling handicaps which we see in our own America should be lifted from men’s shoulders, both by the effort [of ] each of us individually and by the effort of the Church, the state, and other agencies. We believe, further, that doing good should not stop at our national boundary lines; God did not say, “thou shalt love only thy fellow-American neighbor as thyself.” We as individuals, our Church, our government, and all other groups among us should be dedicated to seeing to it that all men receive life’s fundamentals: (1) food, clothing, a home; (2) opportunity to earn a living for self and family; (3) enough education to earn a living and to see the meaning and beauty of life; (4) liberty within the law; (5) equality regardless of color, race or creed; (6) freedom to worship God.69

Maryknoll suggested that missionaries, by providing spiritual and material aid, would play a crucial role in promoting this new world

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order guided by a benevolent United States. Missionaries would exemplify Catholic values and promote respect and affection for the United States by creating international goodwill. “A prominent American recently circled the globe in order to sound out world opinion on the relationship and standing of the United States with its distant neighbors,” reported the Field Afar in 1943. “[H]e cited the mission work performed by Americans as the first and foremost factor in creating good will in those far-flung regions.”70 Maryknoll’s ideal of the new world order was based on the model of the New Deal, when Catholics believed that their government came close to embracing Catholic principles and businesses were forced by unionization and government regulation to treat workers fairly. The Good Neighbor policy seemed to Catholics to extend these practices to Latin America. As a Catholic region inextricably linked to the United States and embraced by the ideals of the New Deal, it seemed to offer a model for the new world order. In an address published in the Jesuit journal America, Senator Dennis Chavez (D-NM) observed, “Expansion of our relations with South America is a sure way of advancing the peace of the United States. By improving our cultural, economic and political relations with our closest neighbors, a new world hegemony can be developed with such strength that it can withstand any economic, cultural or political onslaught from other parts of the world.” U.S. Catholics, suggested Chavez, were being offered a “splendid opportunity” because “the Catholic Church and its communicants are historically the closest bond between the United States and South America, and by this kinship and common ground the Catholic Church occupies a strategically important position in fostering and cementing improved South-American relations.”71 The turn to Latin America mandated by the conditions of the war and the expulsion of missionaries from Asia thus appeared providential to Maryknoll’s leaders. Maryknoll’s early appeals in the Field Afar to establish missions in Latin America reproduced the language used by U.S. Catholic journals during the Good Neighbor era. “All Americans are neighbors,” announced the Field Afar in one of the first pieces promoting missions to Latin America, “but only religion can give to this relationship the blood-beat of brotherhood.”72

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Latin America offered Maryknoll missionaries the unique opportunity to serve God and country. “We Catholics alone speak the spiritual language of Latin America,” announced Monsignor William Barry, chairman of the Cultural Interrelations Committee for Canada, the United States, and Latin America, in an address published by the Field Afar, “and all who do not are looked upon with suspicion and distrust, one of these men of Maryknoll, is a thousand in cementing interAmerican friendship. The best ambassadors of good will to Latin America have been priests and nuns.”73 At the same time that Maryknoll would assist the United States in establishing relations with Latin America, missionaries would serve the interests of the universal church: “In Latin America there are 124,000,000 Catholics, under the care of 16,000 resident priests. In simple reduction this gives about one priest for each seven and a half thousand people. By way of comparison, the United States has 36,000 resident priests for its Catholic population of 22,000,000 or one priest to serve each six hundred Catholics.”74 The influences that made Latin America an appealing mission field for Maryknoll also contained within them the foundation for a potential critique of the United States. If the United States did not fulfill its obligations mandated by the Good Neighbor policy and by its status as a global power with extraordinary resources, then the country’s Catholics would have to remind it of its responsibilities. Missionaries, who might facilitate relations based on a shared foundation in faith, would also have a responsibility to ensure that the country did its part. “To make right the future of the world,” asserted the Field Afar, “ . . . it will take many teachers, many writers, many missionaries working many years, but behind them must be an international business world . . . which not only talks about the common good, but honestly considers it of greater importance than profit.”75 The gradual move to Latin America initiated during the war became a surge after 1961. Pope John XXIII issued an appeal to religious orders and diocesan clergy in the United States, Canada, and Europe to send 10 percent of their representatives to the region.76 Maryknoll Father Considine, arguably the most important force in global Catholic mission in the United States, played a central role in this appeal by designing what was later described as “the call for ten percent” — an

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appeal that reflected his knack for marketing.77 The results of this appeal were striking. In 1956, 1,060 foreign clergy worked in Central and South America; by 1968, the number had more than tripled to 3,400.78 Maryknoll and other clergy from the United States were certainly conscious of the confluence of the pope’s appeal and the election of John F. Kennedy as the country’s first Catholic president. Immediately following his inauguration Kennedy introduced the Alliance for Progress. He pledged $20 billion in public and private funding to carry out reforms that would transform social conditions in the region. By improving social conditions through economic aid and reform, Kennedy hoped to promote democratic governance and to stave off the threat of the Cuban-inspired revolutions. The Alliance was complemented by the creation of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Peace Corps, which together would provide the economic and human resources to promote development. Father Theodore Hesburgh, president of the University of Notre Dame, announced that the Peace Corps was “really an effort that paralleled, under government auspices, what the US church was trying to do.”79 If Kennedy’s Alliance was modeled on Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy, their contexts were distinct. In the intervening thirty years Latin America had developed its own institutions and ideas.80 In 1958 Brazilian President Juscelino Kubitschek called for Operation PanAmerica to promote development in the region. Kubitschek’s appeal reflected research by Raúl Prebisch, the influential economist and head of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL/ECLA), who transformed ideas about Latin America’s economy by emphasizing its status as a peripheral region in a world dependent on the United States. Prebisch’s economic analysis provided the fodder for what would subsequently be known as dependency theory.81 Latin Americans had begun to articulate their own ideas about development and, after the Cuban Revolution, gained increasingly autonomous international standing. The United States could not simply impose unilaterally its political and economic models. In 1961, when Pope John XXIII appealed to North American and European clergy to send representatives to Latin America, he also formally summoned the Second Vatican Council, which would meet

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from 1962 to 1965. Almost immediately after his ascent to the papacy, John XXIII announced plans for the council to “open the windows of the Church to let in some fresh air”— an implicit reference to the need to bring the church into the modern world. The Second Vatican Council represented a watershed moment for the church and the world. The theology it produced reflected both a desire to modernize the church and a recognition of its truly universal status. Where representatives of the first Vatican Council, held nearly a century earlier, came almost entirely from Europe, the Second Vatican Council was an international affair, with clergy from Latin America, Asia, and Africa present and asserting a strong if not always visible influence. Even Protestants were permitted to participate as observers, illustrating a dramatic opening of the church. Only women religious remained excluded. The Latin American church was uniquely well prepared to embrace the emergent theology of the Second Vatican Council. In the 1950s Latin American clergy who had been studying at European theological institutions began to return to their home countries, conveying knowledge of the most innovative and influential theological currents in Europe. Jacques Maritain, the French Jesuit Henri de Lubac, the French Dominican priests Yves Congar and Marie-Dominique Chenu, and the German Jesuit Karl Rahner, all of whom with the exception of Maritain were “born between 1895 and 1904[,] . . . were disturbed by what the political crisis of the 1930s and then the second world war revealed about their church, many of whose members (and leaders) seemed to understand religion as either a pious afterthought to daily life or a reliable bulwark of any social order.”82 Thus the theology of the 1930s influenced Latin American clergy, while the Catholic structures of the 1930s influenced Maryknoll clergy. Latin American clergy returning home began to evaluate social reality through the lens of innovative European theology, and they had the opportunity to introduce it through the structures transferred by North American clergy to their countries in the preceding decade.83 In 1955 the Conference of Latin American Bishops was established, offering a platform for the region’s hierarchy to speak in a single voice. Latin American clergy were also engaging in new efforts to

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promote lay involvement in the church and to respond to the specific faith and needs of their communities. With the financial support and personnel of an international force of foreign Catholic missionaries, the Latin American church extended its reach to university students, workers, and the region’s most impoverished rural and urban communities, creating lay organizations seeking knowledge of theology introduced by the Second Vatican Council. Together these influences ensured that when CELAM met in Medellín in 1968 to interpret the conclusions of the Second Vatican Council vis-à-vis the church in Latin America, the result would be a much more radical theology proclaiming a preferential option for the poor. Missionaries who facilitated the development of the social pastoral of the church in Latin America also helped to disseminate the Latin American interpretations of the Second Vatican Council. Lay catechists and participants in the Juventud Agrícola Católica ( JAC), the Juventud Obrera Católica ( JOC), and the Juventud Universitaria Católica ( JUC) became the vanguard of the new church in Latin America.84 Other Catholic organizations promoted in Latin America after World War II also facilitated the creation of internal linkages. The Catholic Inter-American Cooperation Program (CICOP), founded in 1963, formed a direct link between Latin America and the United States. The idea for CICOP emerged from conversations between Monsignor William Quinn, codirector of the NCWC-LAB, and progressive clergy in Latin America. CICOP sought to “provide Latin American leaders with a platform where they could uninhibitedly express their own views to the American public without being threatened by reprisals, denials of aid, and the like.”85 These networks provided a basis for disseminating information about events at the local level in Latin America to a wider audience. Maryknoll clergy who initiated their mission in Latin America claiming to be goodwill ambassadors for the United States became increasingly critical of U.S. engagement in the region. The degree of criticism depended on the extent to which it became clear that U.S. policies contributed directly to promoting a status quo that supported business and elites while condemning urban workers and rural campesinos to lives of poverty. In many ways, Maryknoll’s criticisms mirrored those articulated by U.S. clergy in the 1930s, when Catholics’

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direct experience of labor and exploitation and their suspicion of the government made them keenly aware of the limitations of reform. In 1930 the Jesuit Wilfred Parsons asked in the journal America, “Does Latin America Love Us?” and concluded with a resounding “no.” “Many Americans,” Parsons observed, do not know how far we have gone in this political penetration [in Latin America]. The Antilles are practically ours: Cuba by a protectorate, Hayti by occupation, San Domingo by customs supervision, Porto Rico and the Virgin Islands by possession. Mexico had its sovereignty impaired by us when we gave Obregon arms to put down a rebellion, and still further in the past two years, when we made ourselves responsible for its government, until it is now almost in the position of Cuba; Guatemala is practically ruled by American fruit interests; our citizens control the finances of Salvador; we intervened in Honduras in 1924; we now occupy Nicaragua and are surveying for a canal there; Costa Rica owes its Government to our intervention in 1919; Panama is a protectorate of ours, and we own the Canal Zone. On the continent of South America we have financial advisors in the Governments of Ecuador and Peru, while Bolivia’s finances are controlled by an American committee. . . . This penetration has taken place in twenty years; it has been steady and rapid. It is no wonder that the remaining states live in a condition of irritated expectation.

Parsons concluded, “It is hard to say it, but the average Latin American has no very high opinion of us. . . . [I]f we persist in believing in fact that our size and power give us rights denied to smaller and weaker nations, we are destined to be, as we have been in the past, mere sowers of hatred and suspicion. Unless we are animated by the principles of justice, charity and noblesse oblige, we are going to be the most hated nation on earth.”86 In contrast to these earlier critiques, which were based on limited knowledge of Latin America and a narrowly defined ideal of Catholicism, Maryknoll’s critiques in the 1970s and 1980s were founded on direct experience. Moreover, they drew more from Latin American theology than they did from the papal social encyclicals or U.S. workingclass ideology. In fact, these earlier experiences had long been forgotten.

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Instead, the “radical” church came to appear as a “new” development that grew exclusively from the seeds of the Second Vatican Council planted in the soil of Latin America. It would take more than two decades of experience in their Latin American mission endeavor for Maryknollers to begin to articulate critiques as strident as those of clergy during the era of the New Deal and the Good Neighbor. Like the criticisms of the 1930s, which derived from the experience of working-class immigrant communities and the struggle to achieve economic rights and dignity through union organizing, the Maryknollers’ critiques of the 1970s came directly from decades of experience trying to improve conditions in Latin America. In the 1930s the New Deal and Good Neighbor policies made it appear that the U.S. government and business interests could operate in accord with Christian principles. The situation in the late 1960s and 1970s in Latin America was distinct. Although the Alliance for Progress promised a similar development, it delivered a remilitarization of the region. In 1961, when Kennedy introduced the Alliance for Progress, all but a few countries in Latin America were nominally democratic. By 1976, after five years of U.S.-promoted militarization, only three countries could be considered democratic.87 Some Maryknoll missionaries who experienced most directly the results of U.S. policies in Central and South America became outspoken critics of their country. By the late 1960s the Catholic Church and community in the United States had become fragmented by the culture of consumer capitalism. The unity wrought by poverty, exclusion, and ethnic communities had given way to division as some Catholics became wealthy, forgot their debt to the national government and labor unions, and overlooked the degree to which the benefits of the 1930s accrued to “white ethnics” while excluding others.88 Missionaries who, in effect, had missed this development because they were living among impoverished Catholics in Latin America and often living the faith and ideals of community and charity could not look to “home” for direction. Instead, the guideposts for the future course of the U.S. church seemed to be in Latin America. With the articulation of a theology of liberation and the preferential option for the poor Maryknoll could bring its new outlook to the United States. With it came increasingly

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articulate critiques of U.S. engagement in the region and its effects. These critiques, however, were articulated by a minority of missionaries who became the public image of Maryknoll. It would be a mistake to attribute the transformation of Maryknoll to any single cause. Myriad influences, ranging from individual dispositions to experience in mission fields to general change in the Catholic Church and American society in the 1960s, contributed to this transformation. One factor whose influence seems to have been underestimated, however, was the ideals and models Maryknoll missionaries carried from the 1930s through the 1950s and 1960s. Working-class firstand second-generation Americans who entered Maryknoll during the World War II era remained suspicious of capitalists who had exploited their labor and that of their ancestors, and perhaps of the American government, which their families had had little reason to support until the advent of the New Deal. But Maryknoll missionaries were also optimistic and idealistic in their belief that in the war era things had changed for the better. Unionization, the New Deal, the Good Neighbor policy, and the declaration of the Four Freedoms all contributed to the view that America could “honestly consider the common good of greater importance than profit.”89

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CHAPTER 2

First Impressions Maryknoll Priests and the People of Puno, 1943–1953

Puno’s bishop, Salvador Herrera, responded enthusiastically when he learned that missionaries from the United States hoped to settle in his diocese. When he met Maryknoll Superior General Walsh at a gathering in Lima, Bishop Herrera had just come from the Santa Catalina Convent in Arequipa where he had been praying for the salvation of his abandoned diocese. The Maryknollers, it seemed, were the answer to his prayers.1 Peru’s apostolic nuncio described Puno as “one of the most unfortunate dioceses in the world.”2 It was the second largest department of Peru and also among the poorest and most remote. It had the nation’s second lowest literacy rate, 14.22 percent; its highest proportion of non-Spanish speakers; and one of its most dispersed populations. Ninety-two percent of the people spoke Quechua or Aymara, and 7,367 of its 9,764 settlements had fewer than fifty residents. The department’s mountainous geography and scarcity of roads made reaching people in outlying districts a nearly insurmountable challenge.3 Moreover, Puno’s average altitude was 12,500 feet, and its climate was marked by bitter cold, intense sun, and cyclical droughts and floods. When the Maryknollers arrived in 1943, just twenty-eight priests served Puno’s 645,000 residents.4 47

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Puno department met all Maryknoll’s requirements for a “real mission”: abandoned and needy people, multiple languages, and a challenging physical environment. But when the first missionaries settled, they knew little about the department, Peru, or Latin America. Half the young men had just been ordained and had hoped to serve in Asia. The other half had just been expelled from missions in Asia.5 None spoke Spanish, Quechua, or Aymara. But still the young priests believed they could save the local church by reestablishing sacramental life and developing a “native” clergy. Maryknollers did not recognize that their ideals and practices of faith were specific to their experience of Catholicism in ethnic communities in the northeastern and midwestern United States and to their training in the seminary. Instead, they believed that theirs was the official Romanized practice of Catholicism sanctioned by the Vatican. They immediately set to work to establish what they knew of the church at home in the highlands of Puno. The Maryknoll priests’ efforts to change the way Catholicism was practiced contributed to a social and political transformation in Puno, with dramatic unintended consequences. Among these was a slow process of chipping away at Puno’s social, political, and religious hierarchies. Within a decade of their arrival, the missionaries displaced Puno’s bishop and subordinated local clergy, thereby eliminating key power holders. They also began to undermine, in incremental ways, the power of large landowners and governing officials who dominated outlying provinces and exploited indigenous people’s labor. Because of these changes and the resources they brought to Puno, the Maryknollers became valuable assets for the weak Peruvian church and government. Maryknoll’s importance grew with the resources its missionaries brought. The Peruvian government recognized that the foreign priests could provide benefits to Puno’s indigenous people and to middle-class mistis (mestizos), and it sought to graft its own minimal aid programs onto those of Maryknoll. Despite being foreigners, Maryknoll missionaries became integrated into the Peruvian state and church.6 Yet no one could have predicted this outcome during Maryknoll’s challenging first decade of mission. In Puno Maryknoll priests lost the sacramental power that defined their authority in the United States.

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Local people did not share U.S. Catholics’ reverence for the sacraments. Their faith was defined by distinct religious practices that they identified as the heart of Catholicism but that Maryknollers viewed as superfluous if not outright pagan. At the same time, the effects of the cold and the high altitude ruined the young priests’ health. In the early years few priests survived more than three years.7 The missionaries struggled to survive, to transform local practices of Catholicism, and to establish the authority that they took for granted as priests at home. Ironically, the changes Maryknoll introduced actually limited the potential for developing a local, Peruvian clergy, which was one of the missionaries’ principle goals. Peruvian clergy in provincial areas like Puno lacked the resources and power to confront the local elite or to meet Maryknoll’s standards of Catholicism, which depended not just on sharing in the sacramental life of the church but also on building churches modeled after those of the wealthy United States. Even as Maryknoll sought to rebuild the local church, the priests’ efforts indirectly promoted dependence on foreign clergy. In later years, as more foreign clergy settled in the country, this dependence defined the Peruvian church.8 Understanding Maryknoll’s role in Puno requires that their mission be seen in the context of the social and economic conditions the priests encountered when they arrived in 1943.

Puno: Exploitation and Stagnation

Puno was identified as one of Peru’s poorest departments. It would be more accurate to say that it had one of the most inequitable distributions of resources in the country. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, as European demand for wool increased, landowners began a relentless expansion using legal and more often illegal means to usurp the land of the department’s indigenous majority.9 The historian Nils Jacobsen argues that instead of promoting the famed “transition to capitalism” that researchers and modernization theorists posited as a natural corollary to participation in the global economy, efforts to feed the wool market instead promoted “neocolonial” relations in

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which “most social groups in the altiplano —Indian community peasants, hispanized large landholders, traders, priests, government officals, police, and military —[used] polarized visions of society, such as those of colonizers/colonized, Spaniards/Indians, civilized notables/barbaric peasants to construct, define, and fortify their own power and social identity.”10 Indigenous people were forced into positions as unpaid tenant farmers (colonos), often on the very same land they had owned. Gamonales, strongmen who dominated the department through their control of land, political positions, and colonos, solidified their control over the region. Catholic clergy acted as agents in this exploitation, extorting labor, demanding exorbitant fees for religious services, and allying with hacendados (large landowners) to quell indigenous rebellions.11 In the early twentieth century as wool prices and hacienda expansion peaked, indigenous communities engaged in a plethora of legal appeals to the national and local governments. These efforts failed to prevent the expansion of haciendas, but they facilitated the creation of national pro-indigenous organizations composed of intellectuals from Lima, Puno, and other departments that made the nation aware of what came to be known as “the Indian Problem.”12 At the same time that indigenous people and their allies, the indigenistas, made conditions in Puno visible to the nation, new social actors settled in the department to work to improve conditions locally. The successes and failures of these efforts reveal the inherent limits of what could be achieved legally by small groups of individuals who lacked ties to strong institutions. None of the organizations founded to address “the Indian Problem” in Puno in the early twentieth century survived more than a decade. The efforts to find legal recourse to address problems in Puno began in 1902 when the first indigenous “messengers” traveled to Lima to protest against land seizures and abuses in their communities. They found a receptive audience in the capital, especially among a group of intellectuals at San Marcos University. In 1909 Dora Meyer, Pedro Zulen, and Joaquin Capelo founded the Asociación Pro-Indígena (API), whose goal was to organize a democratic movement made up of delegates throughout the country who would make indigenous people aware of national laws, raise their moral and social level, and promote

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action through a political network.13 The creation of the API responded to the impetus created by the “messengers” and dovetailed with legal efforts initiated in Puno. Among the API delegates was Teodomiro Gutiérrez Cuevas. Gutiérrez, who served as subprefect of Chucuito in 1903, worked to end unpaid indigenous labor services and pressed charges against district governors in Zepita and Yunguyo. In response, hacendados attacked him, and by 1905 he had been removed from office. Francisco Chuqiwanca Ayulo, a lawyer who promoted indigenous rights in Puno, was another delegate, as were the well-known indigenista Cuzco intellectuals Luís E. Valcárcel, Luís Felipé Aguilar, and José Angél Escalante. The API facilitated contacts among Puno’s “messengers,” Limeño governing officials, intellectuals, and anarchists. Through its publication, El Deber Pro-Indígena, the API also disseminated information about conditions in Puno and reported on indigenous uprisings, which became increasingly frequent and intense. In 1915 El Deber Pro-Indígena appealed to the “messengers” to change the “method of their efforts” by applying the same “imponderable tenacity” that they had exhibited through their appeals to the government in Lima for the past thirteen years to submitting appeals locally. The API declared that it could not continue lending itself to a “perpetual farce played by the messengers.”14 Preparing the legal memorials messengers carried to Lima had become a profitable business for notorious tinterillos, semiprofessional or petty lawyers, who charged indigenous people for this service. A 1915 report by José Frisancho, a prosecutor in Azángaro, where the worst hacienda incursions on indigenous land in the department occurred, concluded that “there are no cases, none, in which the oft-victimized Indian has attained justice against an hacendado.”15 His opinion seemed affirmed in a 1916 opinion piece in Lima’s La Prensa that lamented that gamonalismo was more “irritating” than ever and that “neither government, nor justices, nor police were sufficiently strong to tear the whip from the hands of the gamonales.”16 By 1918 API appeared to have run its course, deteriorating under the weight of internal conflicts among its leaders and an apparent sense of futility.17 At the same time that the messengers made their appeals in Lima and API facilitated and publicized them, Puno itself also became a

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site for struggle. In 1898 Manuel Zuñiga Camacho, an indigenous man who had traveled through Latin America and the United States, returned to Puno to discover that his community had been swallowed up by a neighboring hacienda, forcing his mother to resettle in the community of Utawilaya near Platería. Zuñiga established a “free school” for indigenous people in Utawilaya, which he fought to maintain despite landowners’ efforts to imprison him and burn down the school. Subsequently he invited Seventh Day Adventists, whom he had met through his travels, to come to Puno to establish schools. In 1911 Ferdinand A. Stahl, a Protestant minister, heeded this appeal and took up residence in Utawilaya; he subsequently established what became the first of a number of Adventist schools for indigenous people. This effort had almost immediate and violent repercussions. In 1913 Puno’s Bishop Valentín Ampuero led a raid on Stahl’s school in an attempt to kill the minister and the indigenous students. Schools started by other Adventists associated with Stahl were also attacked and indigenous converts to Adventism killed.18 Hildebrando Castro Pozo, a Peruvian governing official, claimed to have seen documents proving that most Indian schools built between 1921 and 1927 had been burned by gamonales.19 Nonetheless, the Adventist schools strongly influenced Puno by creating a cadre of educated Aymara and Quechua speakers. The attacks also forced the national government in 1915 to recognize the right of all religious groups to worship publicly, weakening Catholicism’s position as Peru’s official religion and sending a warning signal to the church.20 This situation of violent repression combined with the efforts of the messengers and the indigenistas led to equally ineffectual but important responses by Peru’s national government. In 1913 President Billinghurst sent Teodomiro Gutiérrez Cuevas, who had been attacked by hacendados for enforcing regulations against abuse of indigenous people when he served as prefect of Chucuito from 1903 to 1905, to investigate conditions. He distributed handbills advising indigenous people of the investigation in advance. Gamonales responded by attacking Gutiérrez. In 1918 the Peruvian Chamber of Deputies passed a law authorizing the president to appoint regional commissions to study the social, judicial, and economic conditions of the indigenous population.21

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In 1920, in response to this law, José Antonio Encinas, a senator from Puno who had served as rector of San Marcos University in Lima and had written about the effects of gamonal abuse in the department, formed the Special Commission of Investigation of Indigenous Questions of the South of the Republic to investigate conditions in his native region. Accompanied by Enrique Rubín, Humberto Luna, and Erasmo Roca, prominent indigenistas from the department, and joined by Alejandro Franco Hinojosa, who served as secretary and interpreter of Quechua and Aymara, the commission spent weeks traversing Puno, listening to and recording some ten thousand complaints by indigenous people.22 Encinas hoped to be able to resolve land issues, which represented the overwhelming majority of complaints, on the spot. Instead, the commissioners could do little more than encourage indigenous people to press their claims.23 Before their arrival, local officials were reported to have imprisoned Stahl and a local indigenous advocate, Ezequiel Urviola, as a “preventive measure.” Others kept indigenous people from reaching the commission to register their complaints. In the province of Ayaviri, the commissioners themselves were threatened with detention.24 When the time came for the commission to leave Azángaro, thousands of Indians surrounded their car, pleading with them to stay because of fear of reprisals. Their fears proved justified. Almost immediately after the commission departed, a group of vecinos (neighbors) attacked a Seventh Day Adventist mission, killing some twelve indigenous people and injuring four others. The report had little influence in the capital. When the president sought to organize another commission, Encinas refused to participate, arguing that evidence of abuse of indigenous people and land confiscation abounded. It was time to act. Indigenous rebellions against hacendados and gamonales punctuated legal efforts to end abuses, simultaneously making evident the importance of these efforts and their futility. Local hacendados, often with the support of national military forces, responded to disturbances by massacring or in many cases displacing indigenous people and confiscating their land. A few of the most important disturbances were Samán, 1913; the Azángaro-Huancané frontier (Cupsco and Chacamarca), intermittently throughout the period; San José (Azángaro),

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late 1915; Sandia, 1917; Santiago, 1920; Lampa, 1921; and Huancané and Azángaro, 1923.25 Arguably the most important of these uprisings was the Rumi Maqui Rebellion, which lasted nearly a year. Gutiérrez Cuevas, who had served as prefect in Chucuito and then leader of President Billinghurst’s investigation into abuses in 1913, led the rebellion. Jacobsen argues that “the Rumi Maqui Rebellion, which had swept through several livestock districts of Azángaro province since mid-1915, lifted the level of peasant resistance to encroachments on their lands to a level not seen in the altiplano since the late colonial period. Resistance by community peasants against hacendados continued for the rest of the decade, becoming broader and more ideologically charged during the early 1920s. The tide of hacienda expansion thus began to turn even before the wave of prosperity brought on by rising wool exports had crested.”26 The Peruvian historian José Luis Rénique identified the uprisings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Puno as “the most intense community struggles that occurred in the Peruvian Andes against the expansion of large cattle properties. The communities,” he concluded, “did not win the battle, but neither did they lose it.”27 Even before the Great Depression sapped the value of wool exports, hacienda expansion and forced incorporation of indigenous colonos diminished. Jacobsen reports that in some cases land even reverted to indigenous communities and large traditional haciendas fell into decay, with hacendados’ children seeking employment in urban areas.28 Perhaps most important, the rebellions and the documentation of abuses by messengers, indigenistas, and commissions led to an image of “the Indian Problem” that was one of brutal exploitation by hacendados, gamonales, and Catholic priests, an image etched on the Peruvian national imagination. Even as hacienda expansion slowed, land tenure patterns nonetheless left the Puneño majority population, which had grown by 250 percent between 1876 and 1940, with a desperate scarcity of land.29 Although Puno’s indigenous people suffered the greatest burden of this loss, the department’s middle-class mistis were only marginally better off. Most did not suffer the extreme poverty of colonos, but few en-

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countered opportunities for upward mobility. Gamonales controlled land, political power, and wealth, leaving middle-class mistis with jobs as white-collar workers, civil officials, small landowners, teachers, and shopkeepers. Even as the number of primary schools in the department doubled between 1905 and 1922 (from 1,425 to 3,107) and the number of teachers tripled (from 85,000 to 196,000), educational opportunities remained limited.30 The efforts of indigenous messengers and their indigenista allies revealed the weakness of Peru’s national government in its ability to assert control over the remote department of Puno. Many of the core representatives of the indigenista movement like José Encinas, Erasmo Roca, Ezequiel Urviola, and Juan Ríos Palacios were disaffected mistis from Puno who recognized gamonal power as an obstacle to alleviating not only “the Indian Problem” but also the stagnation of the department. Their efforts depended on their perseverance but also on the responsiveness of the country’s presidents, which often proved short-lived and arbitrary. Representatives like the Adventist minister Ferdinand A. Stahl confronted the challenges of Puno’s physical environment, the hostility of Catholic leaders, and the limitations of their own small institutions, ensuring that their influence, while important, was short-lived. Ironically, Catholic clergy, despite or even because of their notorious abuse of indigenous people and their role as allies of hacendados, had the potential to play a powerful role in the region. As representatives of a universal institution with unparalleled linkages that transcended geographic, social, ethnic, and class boundaries, priests enjoyed institutional power. The Catholic Church’s role in Peru was especially important because it had served as a mediating and unifying force. In congressional debates in 1855 about the exclusion of “false cults,” one congressional leader articulated clearly the government’s ideal of the Catholic Church’s role in Peru : What if not the unity of belief is the marvelous link that unites so tightly and sweetly and with equal rights the Peruvians? What if not the Catholic Faith realizes the miracle to maintain united in a single national body such distinct peoples and races? Who but her crosses such great distances, flattening the Andes and the many mountains

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that spike the territory, and filling with charity hearts that otherwise would be dominated by invincible antipathies, establishes and preserves the exchange of affection that allows us to truly call ourselves compatriots and produces the sense of community in social life, that is the community of thoughts, wills, and interests: the capacity to be governed by one law common to all and by a supreme authority.31

The Catholic Church was at the heart of the country and offered the only means of accessing (and potentially controlling) remote indigenous communities. The national government looked to the church to reinforce national laws in Puno, even mandating that the first bishop of the department, Doctor Don Juan Ambrosio Huerta, resign in 1869 after he posted a synod with regulations that conflicted with those of the national government.32 “If you want religious to civilize,” retorted Bishop Ambrose in response, “if you desire that Catholicism exercises influence with the mass of Indians who until now are semi-savage to pacify their natural ferocity,” then you have to recognize the canon laws that grant the bishops the right to dictate synods. The clergy’s role as intermediaries between indigenous people and the national government ensured that when other Latin American countries sought to minimize the power of the church following independence and to establish a separation between church and state, in Peru the church continued to enjoy state support. When Maryknoll missionaries settled in Puno in 1943 they entered the contemporary challenge of a weak Catholic Church and government with limited ties to the department and a historical tradition in which clergy acted as a key mediating force between indigenous people and the government. These traditions were invisible to the missionaries, who sought only to establish their ideal of the sacramental life of the church, but they strongly influenced the development of mission. Local elites, middle classes, and indigenous people all worked in different ways to incorporate Maryknoll priests into practices of Catholicism that supported their interests. The clergy, for their part, sought to establish the practices of faith that they identified as “true” or “universal” or “Roman” Catholicism. Within a decade the confluence of this emphasis on a kind of religious orthodoxy, a preference for in-

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digenous people, and the particular historical moment would establish the Maryknoll missionaries as key intermediaries in Puno.

The Bishop’s Plans

Bishop Herrera had immediate plans for the Maryknoll missionaries when they arrived in Puno. He assigned the priests to direct the San Ambrosio minor seminary in Puno, to oversee the parish of San Juan Bautista, and to take over the five parishes of the remote highland provinces of Carabaya and Sandia. He also suggested various ancillary duties, including teaching English at Colegio Nacional San Carlos, Puno’s recently established public high school, teaching English to elderly men, and acting as chaplains to local communities of religious sisters. With the exception of the work in Carabaya and Sandia, all these efforts were dedicated to Puno’s urban middle class rather than to its rural indigenous poor. While Bishop Herrera viewed the Maryknoll missionaries as a source of spiritual support for his abandoned diocese, he also seemed to identify them (correctly as it turned out) as a source of material aid. Father Arthur C. Kiernan, Maryknoll’s first superior in Puno, immediately recognized that the missionaries were expected to subsidize the local church. “The joker [in the deck] seems to me,” he recounted to Walsh after listing the catalog of responsibilities Herrera had assigned to the missionaries, “that in all these things we shall have to assume the financial burden.”33 The churches the missionaries encountered in Puno were in disrepair. The San Ambrosio minor seminary, for example, which was to be the Maryknoll missionaries’ home and the site of their labor was, according to Father Kiernan, “a rat and flea trap built in 1890. . . . [I]t looks as though it had been left idle for years. The rooms are sickening, the toilet facilities consist of a back-house that is used by everyone that comes through here. There are no bath facilities. . . . On the right is a chapel— dirty, so dirty and in need of repair that we have thought it better not to reserve the Blessed Sacrament.”34 The priests immediately set to work scouring the seminary and adding accoutrements

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they deemed essential to survival in the freezing highlands. Just two weeks after the priests’ arrival, Father Kiernan ordered beds, desks, and closets to be made for the Colegio San Ambrosio. A few weeks later the priests went to Arequipa, the closest city, to buy Sears and Roebuck toilets, sinks, a hot water heater, and a secondhand stove. Father Kiernan wired New York, advising his superiors of the urgent need for heaters. The priests enlarged the windows in the seminary building to open it to the sun, the only source of natural heating. Within three years they began building a new seminary in Puno to separate seminarians from boarding students.35 A few years later they completed a seminary building in Cuzco, which would never be used. This penchant for building later led one bishop to observe wryly “that Maryknoll would leave more ruins in the Peruvian altiplano than the Incas.”36 At the time, however, construction seemed necessary to the priests, and Bishop Herrera seemed to approve it, though he had little voice in the missionaries’ plans. Maryknoll missionaries were not accustomed to being subordinated to a local Catholic hierarchy, nor did they like it. The bishop, reported Father Kiernan, “is here most every day looking things over. . . . Certainly he is running into stranger ideas than he ever met before, but he seems to like them.”37 He seemed to the Maryknollers also to like “the way we talk to [him], giving our opinions straight from the shoulder[,] . . . better than the insincere bowing and scraping [he is accustomed to].”38 The missionaries openly criticized Puno’s religious leaders, beginning with Bishop Herrera and following down the line to local parish priests. While Father Kiernan complained about virtually everything in Puno, from the altitude that “is very unkind to white people[,] . . . [causing] cracked lips, pounding heart, and difficulty sleeping,” to the “cold that [is] bitter in our sense,” to the bad food that caused Father Carey to lose 20 pounds, Father Holfield 10 pounds, Father Murphy 16 pounds, and himself 13 pounds, and the “religious indifference,” his most unrestrained diatribes were reserved for Bishop Herrera. He is, complained Kiernan, “of the Quechua Indian type, [though] he says his ancestors were Spanish”; he does not “speak well any language he speaks”; and “he has two servants, both Quechua Indians and he seems satisfied to go along any way they please.” Emblematic of what Kiernan, who did not speak Spanish and would never speak Quechua or

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Aymara, identified as Herrera’s personal failings was the condition of his home. “He is noted,” recounted Father Kiernan, “as being a very spiritual man and if he were not, then his so-called palace should make him so. It is the typical adobe building. . . . [H]is reception room is done in cheap red brocade, his library shows signs of better days and his sitting room has one chair and a good radio. His dining room would perchance be called a back-shed in the States. The cleanliness, smell and food are all in the same category. He has one of the few bathtubs in Puno, but it is used for storing water not for bathing.”39 All this seemed to reflect the Maryknoll missionaries’ unconscious racism and perception of the decay of Puno’s Catholic faith. For the Maryknoll missionaries, cleanliness, order, and hierarchy were inextricably linked with Catholicism. They took this relationship for granted. James Walsh was said to have told seminarians “in speaking of the Resurrection, [about] Saint John’s hurrying into the tomb and finding the linen cloths folded up, and the napkin, which had been placed about Christ’s head, folded in a separate place. ‘Please note,’ he [said], ‘that the napkin was folded and in its proper place.’ ”40 This penchant for neatness led Maryknollers to build churches, seminaries, and meeting centers in the style of the U.S. church. It also led them to condemn Herrera and local clergy not just for what the missionaries perceived as laxity in their practices of Catholicism but also for their personal hygiene. The two failures went hand in hand. Father Kiernan was, as usual, blunt in his appraisal: “One job, it seems to me is to get the clergy out of the dirt, both figuratively and actually.”41 Other Maryknollers were kinder but no less critical. “The people crowded around the altar, with the decorum of children at a side-show,” lamented Father Francis Garvey, nothing like the order which usually attends Mass in the States. The altar cloth had served its purpose, without a washing for a long, long time; if one such were found on an altar at Maryknoll, it would cause some furor. The Church itself could undergo a thorough renovating and cleaning. To the North American eye it looked unclean and untidy. The Padres themselves did not live up to the American habits in this regard; this also is a rather general observation concerning the priests we met.

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Yet, Father Garvey concluded, the priests’ “friendliness and goodwill . . . enabled us to overlook things which in the states would be unpardonable.”42 Local clergy seemed equally stunned by Maryknollers’ obsession with cleanliness. One priest recorded that when an old Spanish priest came to review the new seminary, “after seeing it all and ah, ahing for a while he put us back on our heels by saying that he wondered if we could save our souls when we could wash our bodies so easily.”43 Although the priests emphasized order and cleanliness as a component of a disciplined practice of Catholicism, the core of the Maryknoll priests’ faith rested on sacraments, prayer, doctrine, and charity. Yet in the first decade the priests had few opportunities to promote their model of Catholicism. Although Bishop Herrera allowed them to indulge their penchant for building, he limited their opportunities to introduce their religious practices. He initially confined the priests’ mission to the young boys of the San Ambrosio minor seminary and to chaplaincies with women religious. He also promised to turn over to Maryknoll missionaries the parish of San Juan Bautista once they learned Spanish. Herrera also indirectly controlled the priests by incorporating them into Catholic processions in celebration of saints’ day feasts and government holidays, thereby defining their place in an established civil-religious hierarchy. In the ceremony celebrating Peruvian President Manuel Prado’s birthday, for example, Father Kiernan reported, “The Bishop officiated and the Prefect of the Department of Puno was in attendance. After the Mass, the Bishop motioned for the Maryknollers to follow him. We went out the front door of the cathedral where the 15th Infantry was drawn up and the band struck up ‘Anchors Aweigh.’ Across the square to the prefecture we went up into the assembly hall where the leading men of Puno were gathered.”44 Thus the missionaries were subordinated to the bishop and lent a new kind of symbolic power to the department’s prefect, its leading men, and the military. Celebrating mass in honor of the nation’s president in the remote department reinforced the relationship between church and state. The Easter celebration also reproduced and reinforced Puno’s social structure and offered Bishop Herrera an opportunity to establish

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the Maryknoll missionaries’ place in it. On Holy Thursday Herrera performed mass, consecrating the host, placing it in a repository, and then locking the door. In his description of the ceremony, Father Kiernan recounted, “The key was put on a huge red ribbon which, in turn, was placed around the Prefect’s neck. The prefect, the mayor and all the leading officials were in public attendance at all the Holy Week ceremonies.” The bishop assigned the Maryknoll priests to sing the “Ave Sanctum Oleum” and the “Ave Sanctum Chrisma.” “In the afternoon, twelve Indian beggars were lined up at the edge of the sanctuary and then the Bishop performed the traditional washing of the feet. After this ceremony, the Bishop and all the clergy [including the Maryknollers] visited all the repositories in Puno.” The secular government followed, and the army band accompanied the people as they visited each repository. The bishop sanctified the host and bathed the feet of the “Indian beggars,” suggesting that the church would provide them with both the body of Christ, crucial to this spring rite, and charity. But the department prefect, who kept the tabernacle key, ultimately guaranteed access to the consecrated host. Maryknollers were left to sing. Indigenous people were symbolically dependent on civil and religious authorities whose relationship was strengthened by the ceremony. This hierarchical order was reproduced in the procession itself, with the bishop in the lead, then the clergy, then the government officials, and finally the military. Each celebration offered another opportunity to remind people of the order of things. On Good Friday Cristo Yacente (the Reclining Christ) was held aloft and followed by the bishop, the clergy, civil authorities, and the military, while people lined either side of the street paying homage to the figure of Christ and (not incidentally) to all the town officials as they passed. This was not the mission Maryknoll had in mind when they selected Puno. The priests could not change local practices but instead were forcibly incorporated into existing hierarchies. Their growing resistance to this incorporation and their later insistence on establishing terms for the celebration of fiestas and processions contributed to a glacial shifting of the balance of social power in Puno by displacing established power holders including clergy, hacendados, and officials.

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Fiesta celebrations gave Maryknollers their first glimpse of indigenous people’s religious devotion. Even though the priests derided many of the celebrations as evidence of the decline of the church in Puno and little more than an opportunity for drunkenness and debauchery, they expressed an almost surprised respect for indigenous people’s expressions of faith. “Father Anthony Michalik writes that to the Indians the vespers of the Feast of San Juan Bautista “means another time for feasting and no work and plenty of music and dancing.” “This morning at mass at San Juan Church,” he continued, “the Indians brought along five fatted sheep all dolled up with colored ribbons and paint on their wool. After mass they were blessed according to the ancient custom and off to the pueblos for the killing and feasting. Then more Indians came around,” asking for blessings of “particles of wool and all sorts of crude statuettes and images.” None of these practices conformed to the Maryknoll priests’ ideal of Romanized Catholic faith, but, as Michalik concluded, “there’s a deep devotion behind it all. These Indians may be poor and maltreated — but they have a devotion that’s deep and sincere and holy.”45 Father Donald Cleary, another of the first Maryknollers in Puno, offered even greater praise for indigenous people’s practices, though he seemed uncertain how to interpret them. “The devotion,” he began in his account of a local celebration, then correcting himself, continued: — or, at least what seems to me to be devotion— of these poor people impresses me deeply. I know they don’t go to Mass or frequent the Sacraments, that the Fiesta is for most a Social event during which there is much drunkenness and other excesses. All this I know. But when I see them straining under the weight of the statue, when I see them crowding around our Blessed Mother, when I see them kneeling in the streets, when I see groups, many of whom are no more than children, dancing about the statue during the entire procession, then it seems to me that these poor uneducated Indians have a love, a faith in many ways deeper and more beautiful than that of which we sometimes feel so proud.46

Maryknoll missionaries seemed to find with indigenous people that a shared experience of faith and devotion transcended (in a limited way)

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cultural barriers. As Father Frank Lyons observed in a similar experience of shared devotion, after seeing what he described as a strikingly beautiful statue of the Fallen Christ, “The realism of the statue brought me to my knees between two old Indian women, and my language and their language was one for it was the language of the heart.”47 The contrast between indigenous people’s religious devotion and the indifference and even hostility the missionaries experienced among Puno’s middle class and elite contributed to a kind of paternalistic alliance between the missionaries and Puno’s indigenous people. The Maryknollers did not look at Quechua and Aymara speakers as equals. Indeed, unconscious racism pervaded their outlook, but they recognized and respected their faith. And they believed that with proper education and training, indigenous people could become knowing, faithful, practical Catholics. Simply by focusing on indigenous people, suggesting the possibility of religious equality, and offering religious services and aid without asking recompense, Maryknollers initiated a process of eroding Puno’s hierarchy. Yet by mandating that indigenous people adopt their sacramental practice of Catholicism, the missionaries also reproduced a traditional power — that of the priest as an authority imposing religious practices on subordinated people. Maryknoll missionaries’ preference for indigenous people, which began with their appeal for an “Indian Apostolate” and was reinforced by their experience of indigenous people’s devotion, increased in direct relation to the hostility they encountered from Puno’s misti middle class and elites. During their first four years in urban Puno, the Maryknoll missionaries had only minimal interaction with the town’s mistis. Most of their time was spent with the bishop, members of religious orders in Puno, and foreigners.48 The Maryknoll center became a center for foreign visitors, with anthropologists, U.S. officials, and clergy from other orders all passing through and creating a lively social atmosphere but also a kind of enclave. After a year of mission Father Cleary lamented, “Ring out the old and ring in the new. It is the end of the year but only the beginning of our work here in Puno. In cold facts and figures we haven’t accomplished very much . . . [but] little by little we have seen the indifference and hostility of the people decrease, so that only now in this last month or so, many greet us in the streets.” “Little enough,” he concluded, “for more than six months work, but

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with the help of God and the prayers of the faithful the year ’44 will see a blossoming of what has just begun.”49 It would take four years and a riot for the Maryknoll missionaries to begin to establish a foothold with the town’s middle class, but they had already made progress with indigenous people and, to a lesser extent, mestizo women. The first baptism they performed in Puno, a full year after their arrival, was that of an Indian child.50 The first confession was that of a woman.51 And the first sick call was made to an indigenous man.52 The process initiated in the first years of Maryknoll mission in the city of Puno would be enhanced in the remote provinces of Carabaya and Sandia and crystallized in their efforts to take control of the San Juan Bautista Parish in 1947.

Carabaya and Sandia: The “Real” Mission

It is not clear why Bishop Herrera assigned the Maryknoll missionaries to Carabaya and Sandia, but it seems likely that the provinces’ isolation, their location on the Bolivian border, and their poverty influenced his choice. The situation of the Catholic Church in Carabaya and Sandia was arguably the most desperate in the department of Puno. As early as 1900 the province had the fewest priests in Puno, five for a population of nearly 20,000.53 In 1912 Bishop Valentín Ampuero lamented that the parishes were so poor that they “hardly give what is necessary to support a priest” and that the churches were decayed nearly beyond repair. Still, the bishop admonished local priests to “display the Peruvian flag . . . [and] instruct the faithful not only in their responsibilities as Christians, but also in their obligations to the country.”54 Even a weak church had a stronger presence than the virtually nonexistent state in Carabaya and Sandia. Despite their isolation, Carabaya and Sandia’s natural resources offered the potential for wealth. The distinct microclimates of the provinces allowed for cultivation of a variety of warm weather crops, including coca, coffee, corn, wheat, fava beans, sugarcane, and rice. The provinces also had gold mines. These resources seemed threatened by Bolivia, which exercised a powerful influence on the border provinces.

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Bolivian currency circulated freely in Carabaya and Sandia. Parents looking to baptize their children often found it easier to cross into Bolivia than to search for a priest at home. Because the church records of baptism, marriage, and death often substituted for civil records, this meant that Peru literally lost citizens to Bolivia.55 Under these circumstances both the Catholic Church and the national government would benefit from the presence of Maryknoll missionaries in Carabaya and Sandia. But the circumstances did not make the region the easiest of missions. In addition to having to acclimate to the challenging physical environment, Maryknoll missionaries entered a world in which a handful of misti elites and a few priests enjoyed complete autonomy and exercised considerable control over indigenous people. As Father Thomas Carey, a China veteran thrown into the unfamiliar terrain of Puno, observed of the local elite after a particularly rowdy town party, these people “are the ‘best’ in town. They run the district the way they want. This place is like the Wild West when it was wild.”56 Father Carey was the first Maryknoll priest to encounter the autonomy enjoyed by Carabaya’s and Sandia’s clergy and provincial elites. When Bishop Herrera sent him to take over the parish of Sandia, he discovered that the local priest had been living for years with his common-law wife. When he arrived in Carabaya and sent word to Father Mariscal that he would be coming to the parish, Mariscal advised Carey that he “was living in the rectory with his family, [and] . . . that conditions were so crowded that he could not possibly find room for Father, and that although he intended to move on to his new assignment soon, it would take about six months to make the necessary arrangements.”57 Father Carey checked into a hotel. This experience might have prepared the priest for local elites’ ridicule when he and Father Michalik refused to dance with the town’s women on New Year’s Eve. “They think that the only reason Father Michalik and I don’t dance,” lamented Father Carey, “is because we don’t like the women. They say we are the only priests who ever came here and didn’t dance.”58 For the young Maryknoll priests, accustomed to a religious order in which priests’ authority was masculine but slightly asexual, the idea of dancing with a woman in public was anathema.59

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Most distressing for the Maryknollers seemed to be the elites’ disregard for their authority as priests and for church precepts. They did not contribute to the church, they did not confess, they did not participate in the Eucharistic celebration, they did not fast on Fridays, and, perhaps worst of all, even the “best” did not marry in the church. Of a parishioner in Ayapata who had been especially helpful, Father Meaney observed with barely contained contempt, “[She] might be considered one of the pillars of the church were it not for the fact that she is the unmarried mother of five children.”60 Local elites may have been equally shocked by the Maryknoll priests’ blunt criticism and correction of their behavior. Father Cleary recounted an invitation to dine at the home of one of the local notables: “I promptly put a damper on the proceedings by refusing to eat half the stuff because it had meat mixed up with it, and informing all present that they shouldn’t eat it either.” “Perhaps not the nicest thing in the world for a guest to do,” he concluded, “but these people have to learn sometime that the few days of fast and abstinence that prevail down here are meant to be observed.”61 In largely unintentional ways, the Maryknoll priests began to clash with local power holders over their public worship practices. In Macusani during Holy Week, Father Cleary recounted that by “insisting that the Mass take place at 9 a.m. because of those who wished to receive Holy Communion I stepped on the toes of a few of the leading citizens who thought the time extremely early to be up and around. [But] as it turned out everyone was on hand, including the town officials and a Guard of Honor from the Guardia Civil.”62 In keeping with the Maryknoll penchant for cleanliness, Father Meaney sent a letter to the alcalde (mayor) “informing him that unless the streets around the plaza were cleaned up by mass time tomorrow, there would be no procession there, in the traditional manner.”63 The Maryknoll missionaries thus demonstrated that they were willing to confront local elites. Indigenous people, by contrast, provided the missionaries with their greatest “consolation,” even if it reminded them of the long road ahead in establishing “true” practices of faith in Puno. “After four days in Ollachea,” recorded Father Meaney,

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the parroco [parish priest] returns to Ayapata. The most consoling incident of this stay in Ollachea, and there were many, was the first communion of an old Indian who was born a Catholic, and who had gone through his eighty years of faithfulness to his religion without even knowing what the Blessed Sacrament is. At times the ignorance of these poor Indians who stalwartly profess that they are Catholics is a caution. When faithfulness to the Church is predicated of these people, it does not always mean that they are practicing Catholics in the North American sense.64

While indigenous people’s practices of faith might not live up to North American standards, it still seemed superior to that of the elites. “The Indians I could excuse,” explained Father Cleary after an especially poor showing for Communion at the Easter Mass, “because they have been neglected for years and have received little or no instruction. But the so-called ‘decentes’ [misti elites] and educated people have no excuse.”65 It was not simply that indigenous people had “an excuse” for not fulfilling what the missionaries identified as their religious obligations, but that they readily responded to Maryknollers with demonstrations of faith and devotion. Once the priests settled in Carabaya and Sandia, indigenous people inundated them with requests for masses, baptisms, sick calls, and blessings. Often these requests did not conform to the missionaries’ ideals, but they demonstrated faith. The priests learned, for example, that indigenous people believed that an unbaptized child would invoke the wrath of God, causing lightning or hail and destroying the crops on which the community’s life depended. As a result, the Maryknollers often had to refuse to baptize dead infants because doing so violated Catholic doctrine.66 Yet knowledge of indigenous people’s “superstitions” and “ignorance” seemed to enhance the Maryknoll missionaries’ desire to work with and transform them. “The more I see of these Indians,” wrote Father Cleary, “the more I pray that God will provide us with both the men and the money to establish and maintain schools and a native seminary. For I feel sure that instruction in the Doctrine would make these people exemplary Catholics and priests of their own could easily keep them such.”67

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The Maryknoll missionaries’ frustration with local elites, their appreciation for indigenous people’s faith, and their desire for an Indian Apostolate led them to bypass elites, who initially sought to mediate relations between the clergy and indigenous communities. Indigenous sacristanes, mayordomos, ecónomos, alferados, fiesta “cargos,”68 and personeros, whose roles were established during the colonial period, offered Maryknollers an alternative to elite intermediaries. These intermediary roles historically served as one component of a system for the exploitation of indigenous communities by clergy and elites. Until the late twentieth century the positions offered priests and elites a way to extract labor and resources from indigenous communities.69 Maryknoll effectively turned this relationship upside down by engaging indigenous intermediaries to introduce spiritual and material resources to communities. In return, they demanded adherence to their model of a rigidly sacramental Catholicism. Within a month of settling in Ayapata, Father Meaney started to visit the indigenous personeros of the surrounding ayllus.70 He seemed to hope that doing so would give him direct access to those communities, enabling him to bypass the authority of the alcalde. Soon indigenous people from distant communities were coming to visit him, inviting him to their communities to say mass, baptize their children, and offer last rites to their sick and dying. These journeys introduced the priest to the conditions in which the local people lived. In response to a scarcity of medical resources, Meany initiated a small medical practice. Gradually, the priest’s efforts drew him into local power dynamics between indigenous people and governing officials. In at least a few cases, it seemed that the priest allied with indigenous people to support their interests. Father Meaney recounted, in a somewhat selfcongratulatory manner: A visit was made to the Juez [ judge] to obtain the copy of an acta or deal promised some time ago to a poor parishioner taken away from him by a certain official’s brother who is trying to circumvent the Law and with whom the Juez is suspected of conniving. It was some time before the Juez finally came to realize that the parroco meant business and didn’t intend to leave the despacho until the copy of the acta was

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delivered. It was a contented poor man who took the copy from the parroco later. This fellow had been waiting for six months for the thing. Now the judge or Juez knows that when he has to deal with the parroco, it is at least a little different from dealing with the Indians. He doesn’t take no for an answer.71

These efforts surely led to a greater alienation of the priest from the local elite and an enhanced sense that he was now allied with the poor in a patronizing but still sometimes effective way. He paid a price for this alliance. When Meaney wrote to the governor of Ituata, an outlying community, advising him of a planned visit and requesting horses, none arrived on the assigned day.72 Months later Meaney learned that the alcalde had not informed community members of his request. It is, of course, possible that they had been told, chose not to send horses, and then blamed the governor. But the story seemed to have been repeated on other occasions. When three indigenous representatives from Taype set out for Father Meaney they were stopped by a drunk and belligerent governor who threatened to take their horses, asserting that the priest should have contacted him directly and did not need additional horses. Again, it is difficult to judge the veracity of the story since Father Meaney’s tendency toward self-aggrandizement made him a questionable source of information. Nonetheless, it seems that some Andean people recognized that the priest might ally with them and confront the local misti power holders.73 Indigenous people of the community seemed even to believe that the priest’s efforts led to his expulsion. Meaney reported that on returning to Ayapata a day late for the patronal fiesta, he was told that all the indigenous people believed he had been transferred to Macusani, a neighboring municipality. According to Meaney, they “thought his enemies in the town, unhappy about his Sunday sermons against the abuse of the Indians, had arranged his transfer.”74 Only a triumphal ride up the steps of the parish house on his trusty horse, Palomina, seemed to convince the indigenous people of the community that “their priest” was really back to stay. Instead of relying on local elites, Maryknoll missionaries turned to indigenous intermediaries, who translated from Quechua to Spanish,

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and explained established practices of Catholicism. When Father Cleary “tried vainly to get the Indians to come to confession . . . the Sacristan finally told [him] that it would be better tomorrow as many wish to receive Communion on Wednesday.” When he tried to explain to penitents that they could not return to the confessional for “reconciliation” every time they thought of a new sin, “in despair [he] called the Sacristan over and had him explain for [him].”75 Another priest, after giving his sermon on confession and communion, had to rely on the catechist to “speak in Quechua on the same subject.”76 At times the missionaries came into conflict with the intermediaries, who sought to promote their own interests and saw the new priests as a threat. Father Carey described the “irremovable economo” who “has been living in concubinage for years and saying ‘Mass’ for the Indians when he gets a good stipend.”77 But those who seemed to abuse their power were replaced by the missionaries. By engaging indigenous intermediaries to reach outlying communities, Maryknoll priests bypassed local misti elites and officials. By providing religious services such as baptism, communion, last rites, and fiesta masses without charging fees, they displaced local clergy who relied on these fees for survival. These changes initiated a gradual transformation of the system of indigenous intermediaries from a mechanism for extracting resources from indigenous communities to a mechanism for providing benefits to indigenous communities. In Carabaya and Sandia this transformation was cut short by the Maryknoll missionaries’ inability to withstand the harsh physical environment. As the missionaries’ sought to establish their influence in these vast provinces, they were forced to travel to hundreds of outlying communities. In some cases, these journeys took the priests on terrifying journeys over 18,000-foot passes. Father Carey’s harrowing account of the “journey to Untuca” offered a paradigmatic example of the challenges the priests faced: the priest was subjected to sleet, snow, rain, altitude sickness, and frighteningly narrow passes, only to have the local people come to a single mass for a “look see” and then flee in subsequent days.78 Even where they restored a local desire for sacraments, the priests confronted overwhelming challenges of geography and language that

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would prevent them from establishing their American ideal of Catholicism. Moreover, indigenous people’s requests for religious services accelerated the deterioration of the Maryknoll missionaries’ health. Each appeal for a sick call, each request for a fiesta mass, each baptism of a dying child forced the missionaries to confront the freezing highlands of Puno. Both Father Carey and Father Meaney became victims of Puno’s environment. Father Carey and another priest, Father Joseph Donnelly, were riding in the back of a truck on the long journey back to Puno when the truck slipped in the mud and careened over the edge of a cliff. Although Father Donnelly saved himself by leaping from the truck, Father Carey’s cassock caught the edge, and he was crushed to death.79 On a journey to meet a fellow Maryknoller, Father Meaney passed out on the road. He was found only when the priest he was meant to meet, concerned about his failure to appear on time, inquired in town if anyone had seen him. The priest learned that “a white man had been seen lying in the road outside of Macusani.”80 No one, it seemed, had offered the priest help. The altitude, the distance to communities, the rugged terrain, and the language barriers made it nearly impossible for the missionaries to provide what Father Francis Garvey described as “any lasting good” in the remote provinces of Carabaya and Sandia. But the experience enhanced the missionaries’ commitment to indigenous people and offered a glimpse of how the barriers of distance and language might be overcome by relying on indigenous intermediaries. At the same time, it illustrated the indifference and even hostility of elite landowners. The gradual and completely unconscious and unintentional process the Maryknollers initiated of confronting and bypassing elites would later facilitate more important changes in Puno. In the short term, however, the Maryknoll missionaries were defeated in their “real mission” among the indigenous people. They withdrew from Carabaya and Sandia in 1947, after just three years, leaving rebuilt churches and rectories in their stead. After recovering from his collapse, Father Meaney was assigned to urban Puno as pastor of San Juan Bautista, the parish promised to the Maryknollers when they arrived in 1943 and finally handed over to them in 1947.

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San Juan Bautista Parish

On Saturday March 1, 1947, Father Meaney took over as pastor of San Juan Bautista Parish in Puno. His account of the parish transfer suggests that even in 1947 the bishop was reluctant to take responsibility for giving the foreign priests control of the parish. In fact, he left town. Herrrera failed to provide Father Meaney with the “Titulo, his facilities, and a state of all his rights and responsibilities.” Worse, as it turned out, the bishop did not leave an inventory of church property. Father Meaney seemed appalled that an inventory was required. “Unlike the conditions in the Church at home,” he announced with barely contained irritation, “here, a priest seems to enjoy no more esteem in the matter of honesty than any ordinary pickpocket!”81 Subsequent developments suggested that in some sectors of Puno the Maryknoll priests may have enjoyed even less esteem than pickpockets. On Wednesday, March 12, one week after Father Meaney sent the notice announcing his appointment to “all Department and Municipal authorities, heads of Institutions, including the Chief of Police, and the Station Master down at the railroad office,” a young man came to the church to warn him that “something [was] cooking in the marketplace.” Puneños were saying that the Maryknoll missionaries were stealing artifacts from the church and were planning a demonstration against them. At first Father Meaney reported finding the rumor “too ridiculous to be funny.” But he took it seriously enough to advise the police of potential trouble whereupon a “special assignment of policemen was promised for the afternoon”— a valuable precaution.82 Sometime after three o’clock the church bells were tolled but not by the official church bell ringer and not with Father Meaney’s approval. A bit later “a mob” appeared, “yelling, shrieking, and milling about the sanctuary.” The mob accused the Maryknollers of stealing the church statues and their jeweled garments. Father Meaney claimed that the women, who he suggested were the loudest protesters, were praying in front of the very statue in “dust laden robes” that they accused the priests of stealing. Other Maryknollers remembered a more complicated situation. They recounted that the trouble began when, in keeping with their penchant for cleanliness and order, the missionaries

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initiated a thorough scouring of the church, placing the statues in packing boxes for protection while they cleaned.83 Regrettably, at the same time the priests sent a shipment via train to outlying mission stations near Sandia. Puno’s residents concluded that the packing crates with their statues were on their way to the United States. In these circumstances, the protesters’ fears seem not to have been so unfounded as to justify Father Meaney’s claim that they were “fit for an asylum.” Father Meaney recorded that in the near-panic of the moment he ascended the pulpit, where “in a loud voice, he began the Rosary. Then there was silence, and the mob prayed; but only for a while. Between Hail Marys Father Meaney shouted in English to his assistant, Father [ Joseph] Early to call the Vicar General.”84 Father Early remembered things a bit differently. According to him, he led the rosary while Meaney fetched the vicar general.85 In any event neither the rosary nor the vicar general calmed the angry crowd for long. Not even a trip to the train station for an examination of the packing crates put an end to the uproar. But it allowed the priests to leave the church and return to the relative safety of their seminary. Later Father Meaney and the other Maryknollers returned to the church for evening prayers. The mob formed again, demanding the keys to the church. At the time the main door, usually open, was locked. Father Meaney recounted that “it was some time before anyone came from inside (the caretaker was inside, where he and his family have lodgings).” The wait must have seemed especially long as “the crowd formed a semicircle around the entrance, hemming [the priests] in. A few police with drawn guns, kept them at bay.” “When the door finally opened, and [the priests] turned to enter, [they] were showered with rocks.” From there things got worse. After they entered the church, Father Meaney reported that he immediately contacted the local military garrison commander. With the approval of Puno’s prefect, the commander called in troops, who, in the words of Father Meaney, ordered the priests to “make a bee line” for the seminary. Many of the rioters were said to have shouted, “‘Let’s repeat La Paz, hang them to the lamp posts,’” in reference to a recent attack on the president of Bolivia during which he was dragged from his palace and hanged from the lamp post in the plaza.86

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The army and the vicar general ultimately restored order, and the next day four “agitators” were arrested for fomenting the riot. Some speculated that “the local clergy was behind the whole affair; others that it was the communists; others that it was started by the sacristan and the secretary in the office who said that the priests were going to steal the statues from the Church and do away with the holiday celebrations.”87 Regardless of its cause, the riot alerted the Maryknollers to what to some degree they already knew: they were “not too well liked by some elements of the town.”88 In the aftermath of what came to be known among the missionaries as “the Puno riot” and the forced withdrawal from Carabaya and Sandia, Maryknoll Superior General Raymond A. Lane visited the mission with evident plans to shut it down. However, he announced to the “Punoknollers” that if “even half of you men had said we should get out of the mission, we would have closed it, but not one single individual has made any such suggestion and most of you are very hopeful about the future.” Bishop Lane promised to work to keep the mission going. He arranged “an interview with Archbishop Luigi Arrigoni, the Apostolic Nuncio to Peru,” apparently with the hope of establishing conditions for the Maryknollers’ continued work in Puno. The papal nuncio assured Lane that “the work in Puno is a tremendous wedge on the part of Catholicism to counteract the activity of the Protestants in Peru, among the highland Indians. If Maryknoll were to abandon its work in Peru, the Church would suffer untold harm, not only in that particular section, but throughout Peru it would discredit the Catholic Church.” The papal nuncio also assured him that “civil authorities are well aware of what Maryknoll is doing and they have a great respect for our men and the work.”89 The conversation seemed to have the desired effect. Within months, Bishop Herrera, a focal point of the Maryknollers’ criticism, retired. The Peruvian government promised Maryknoll additional support for the San Ambrosio minor seminary to augment the $2,000 given to them in 1945 and the $300 they received monthly to cover teachers’ salaries.90 These demonstrations of official support from the Peruvian church and government were crucial to Maryknoll, but they also enjoyed a new freedom to establish their place in Puno. Almost immediately

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after the Puno riots, the missionaries initiated a series of new mission projects in and around the city. Father James O’Brien reported, “There are now five Masses in San Juan Bautista Parish. Besides these, six are celebrated in the following places: the prison, the police barracks, a school courtyard, the market, and two Indian settlements outside of town, one called Huaraya, and the other called Ichu.”91 The priests also taught religion in thirteen of Puno’s public schools, developed sports programs for youth, met with members of Puno’s social clubs, initiated encounters with indigenous people in outlying provinces, and expanded their work at San Ambrosio minor seminary. In addition, they promoted Camp Mejía, a summer camp for seminarians. Most of this work focused on Puno’s urban middle class — a far cry from Maryknoll’s ideal of an “Indian Apostolate” but still an improvement over the days when Bishop Herrera limited their role to singing at fiesta masses. These labors were possible, in part, because the Maryknoll center began to replace missionaries who had fallen to Puno’s harsh environment in the preceding years. Soon the Puno center house seemed filled with young, enthusiastic priests, whose accounts shifted from dreary complaints about cold, dirt, and indifference to a remarkable cheerfulness about everything. This change in tone may have been due in part to Bishop Lane’s admonition, “If you have any difficulties or gripes I would advise you not to mention them outside of your own group [because] [w]rong impressions have gotten back to the Knoll about you.”92 But the optimism of the accounts also reflected an enthusiasm among the priests derived from mission and a shared sense of community. The camaraderie among the clergy seemed evident in Father John Waldie’s account of a “holiday weekend.” “Padres Milroy, Murray, Murphy and Kenny arrived with luggage and smiles from Arequipa.” During the chat session that followed, “Father Frank Milroy . . . [was] put to answering 100 questions on mechanics, electricity, the spiritual life and the new headmaster at the old Newman school.” The gathering continued with the group “drinking beer at 15 cents a quart with Fr. Charlie Murray uncapping the bottles, [while] Father ‘Yo’ Kenny, fitted himself nicely on the biggest bed in Puno to point arguments on bination privileges and the obligation of the Eucharistic

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fast.” Father Waldie concluded, “We don’t remember Marty Murphy doing anything but being a nice guy with a big laugh.”93 This distinctly male social ambience, which also had the priests regularly joking and pulling pranks on each other, surely contributed to Bishop Lane’s conclusion that in Puno he had encountered “the best spirit I have found [among missioners] and this in spite of difficulties with the Bishop, the climate and with the people.“94 The well-known difficulties also seemed to be giving way to success defined by the Maryknollers, in part, as an efflorescence of sacramental life. “The Holy Ghost must have poured some graces down upon our country up here in the sky on the top of the flagpole of the world because something is surely happening,” observed Father Daniel B. McLellan. “Twice during the month of May four of us have heard Confessions on Saturdays from about 3:30 to after seven in the evening, and on the Vigil of the Holy Cross, until about ten p.m. thanks be to God.” He concluded, “We’re planning on two more confessionals for the church.” Indeed, new buildings rose with the monthly counts of baptisms, confessions, communions, and marriages. But the success, as Father McLellan recognized, was due not to the physical structures but to the Maryknollers’ work during the preceding decade: “Thanks, too, to those who kept punching during the difficult days of the past to make this ‘second Spring’ in Puno possible.”95 Although Maryknoll emphasized sacramental life as the primary measure of mission success, their knowledge of social conditions in Puno grew with their contact with local people. Father James “Jim” O’Brien, the first Maryknoll priest who tried to learn Quechua and Aymara, and who fifty years later would still be working in a barriada in Lima, seemed especially sensitive to people’s poverty. “I used to laugh at pictures in the movies of Mexican jails,” he recounted, “but they are palaces compared to the place here. . . . The jail amounts to five enclosed sheds built around a patio. . . . [T]o get out of jail a man needs a lawyer and when his term is up, if he has no lawyer he just stays there.” In the same account he described the difficult conditions for women who had children through common-law marriages: “The man leaves them with a family and they have no recourse. We are able to help a few of them by getting them medicines for their children when

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they are sick, but we can’t do much more. They are abandoned.” When seeking to distribute aid, he lamented, “we had to separate the poorest from the poor, because nearly all are in need.”96 Other Maryknollers also reflected on the people’s poverty. These reflections, combined with the Maryknollers’ foundational ideals about Catholic charity, contributed to token assistance. In the next decade charity would be systematized into developmentalist social aid programs. The missionaries’ perception of indigenous people’s potential as Catholics first evident in Carabaya and Sandia also seemed to be enhanced as their contact with Quechua and Aymara speakers in Puno and outlying districts developed. “Those who live in that country foreign from the rest of Peru: Lima,” began Father McLellan, who would later found the first cooperatives in Puno, “talk about the Indians holding back the country just don’t know what the score is.” “Give the boys from Ichu [a nearby Aymara community] a chance,” he admonished, “and they’d put the gente decente to shame in material things as they are doing in the spiritual realm.” “Sometimes,” he concluded, “I feel like taking a page from Damien and starting the sermon, ‘We Indians.’ ”97 After his first visits to outlying indigenous communities, Father Thomas Verhoeven, who would later direct a catechetical system that prepared indigenous people to teach prayer, catechism, and doctrines to their communities, observed, “If the Indians someday have enough priests, and Sisters and catechists to instruct them so that they may receive the Sacraments, they will be the rebirth of the Church here in Peru.”98 Despite their ideal of sacramental faith, the priests demonstrated a limited willingness to make allowances for indigenous practices. Describing Andean practices related to the Day of the Dead, Father Thomas Higgins concluded, “Maybe the custom has its roots in the paganism of the time of the Incas but there is nothing in it now contrary to Catholic belief.”99 Father McLellan even defended the drinking that had been such a bone of contention for the clergy during fiestas: “Before one condemns the fiestas for this phase of the celebration think a bit about how it sometimes happens at home that the brawny lads after a public profession of faith in a Holy Name rally or parade sometimes stop at a watering station or a friend’s house to quaff a

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draught or more of the liquid that kept the faith alive in the Ould Sod.” Aside from which, he concluded, “anyone who makes that climb [to the top of the mountain for the festival of the Crosses] for a religious motive deserves at least one snort.”100 The priests even seemed to take a more sympathetic view of the Peruvian clergy. Father Albert I. Koenigsknecht, who would later be named prelate to Juli, after describing the death of one of the older priests, concluded, “My hat goes off to him. He spent over half [a] century in this diocese in very poor and difficult surroundings. We are much more fortunate.”101 The Maryknoll missionaries would not return to rural Puno until 1953, ensuring that even as they emphasized work among Puno’s Quechua and Aymara speakers the overwhelming majority of their resources were devoted to the urban middle class. This contrast between an emphasis on the poor and indigenous and a reality of aid to Peru’s middle class increased as Maryknoll expanded its mission labor in the 1950s. In 1951 Maryknoll sisters arrived in Lima to staff the Maryknoll-directed St. Rose of Lima Parish and parochial school, which the school director and pastor, Father John “Red” Lawler, looked on “as something more than just a parish, [for] St. Rose of Lima will show the local clergy how to build such a unit and it should build up a strong parochial life among the people.”102 In 1952 the first missionaries settled in Arequipa, where they started another school. Finally, in 1953, they returned to rural Puno by accepting mission in Azángaro, a Quechua-speaking province of Puno that had been the site of the worst misti confiscation of indigenous people’s land.

Conclusion

Maryknoll’s first decade of labor in Peru cannot be characterized as an unqualified success. The missionaries suffered enormous setbacks and were forced effectively to retreat from the rural indigenous missions they initially identified as their purpose for settling in Peru. With the exception of the three years that the missionaries served in Carabaya and Sandia, Maryknoll’s mission came to be devoted to urban Puno and the people most consistently served were the misti middle class.

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Yet this decade also established a foundation for the Maryknoll mission. The Peruvian national church and government affirmed their support for the U.S. missionaries and demonstrated their willingness to aid them by providing limited material resources and replacing local Catholic leaders who did not meet their standards. Maryknoll thus gained the power to displace local authorities by appealing to the center of religious and secular power in Lima. Although it was not their intention when they arrived in Peru, or a clear expectation on the part of the Peruvian church or government, the Maryknoll missionaries began to address some of the nation’s most pressing needs. In Puno they initiated educational and social programs among the middle class, offering them new opportunities that would allow them to stay in the department. They also began to work with indigenous people, offering them religious services and, in small measure, undermining the authority of hacendados. The informal system of indigenous intermediaries, composed of sacristans, catechists, and even cooks, who provided Maryknollers with their first access to communities would in later years be formalized in a catechetical system. This system allowed the missionaries to overcome the challenges of distance and language that defeated them in rural Carabaya and Sandia. And it allowed the government and the church to gain indirect access through new intermediaries (missionaries and catechists) to Puno’s most remote communities. This effort, combined with direct aid programs, would allow Maryknoll to ameliorate in small measure the conditions that led to indigenous uprisings in the decades before they arrived.

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CHAPTER 3

The Transformative Power of Tradition, 1954–1967

Within a decade of their arrival in Puno, Maryknoll turned the image of priests upside down by taking a pro-indigenous approach to mission, initiating a range of socioreligious programs and acting as models of integrity. Sister Maria Rubina, a Peruvian sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet who grew up in Puno in the 1950s, was among those influenced by Maryknoll. Sister Maria described the missionaries as “super priests,” “revolutionary priests” who transformed everything. The priests before Maryknoll, she recounted, were “too much like us,” too involved in community competition and conflict. Maryknollers, by contrast, “with their blond hair and blue eyes did not even look like us!” Perhaps most dramatically, in Sister Rubina’s view, Maryknoll priests did not recognize social distinctions. She remembered that although the priests looked down a bit on everyone in Puno, they did not understand the distinctions between and among people. They could not tell the difference between Quechua and Aymara speakers, or between elites who lived in town and their supposed social inferiors who lived in parcialidades (independent indigenous communities) or distritos outside of Puno. According to Sister Maria, Maryknoll priests’ 81

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disregard for social distinctions turned the local hierarchy on its head. She remembered a dramatic moment in her public school when the Maryknollers showed a film about an Indian boy from the countryside who entered the seminary and became a priest. At the time the idea of an Indian priest was revolutionary.1 While the missionaries’ personal example and egalitarian outlook transformed priests’ image, their economic resources and energy allowed them to introduce a plethora of social programs that helped to transform Puno. In 1957 the Peruvian church and government gave Maryknoll control of Juli, a newly created prelature in Puno. An agreement between the Peruvian government and the papal nuncio allowed foreign clergy to direct religious jurisdictions.2 The creation of the Juli prelature, which followed the shoreline of Lake Titicaca from the southern to the northern border of Bolivia, allowed Maryknoll to escape the authority of Puno’s local hierarchy. Maryknoll Father Edward Fedders, who served as the first prelate of Juli, oversaw an immediate and dramatic transformation of the region. In addition to building more structures, Maryknoll introduced extensive social and religious programs focused on the region’s Aymara and Quechua speakers. The prelature offered Maryknoll a unique opportunity to develop an innovative mission program, but it contributed to a sense of mission as enclave. Simultaneously Maryknoll extended its mission to the middle class in urban Puno and to urban Lima and Arequipa. Just as the Maryknoll mission to Puno was divided between the rural, indigenous poor and the urban, mestizo middle class, mission to urban centers was divided between the urban middle class and the poor in urban peripheries. In the 1950s indigenous people began migrating en masse to Lima and other cities, where they encountered a devastating shortage of housing. Some responded by “invading” unoccupied public lands on the outskirts of cities, forming barriadas.3 In 1960 Maryknoll established a parish in the first recognized barriada, Lima’s Ciudad de Dios (City of God).4 Just as the Maryknoll mission was divided among social classes, the character of its missions was divided. Among the rural indigenous poor Maryknoll introduced basic spiritual and material aid. Among

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the urban middle class Maryknoll directed parishes, provided formal education, and established credit and housing cooperatives. Among the urban poor Maryknoll directed parishes, created infrastructure, facilitated organizing, and provided basic aid. Thus even as Maryknoll missionaries disregarded Peru’s social distinctions, they reinforced existing divisions based on ethnicity, class, and geography by distributing spiritual and material resources that reinforced people’s “place” in Peruvian society. While Maryknoll missionaries may have been revolutionary in their approach to mission, they did not promote revolution. Instead, by serving the poor and middle class in rural and urban Peru during a period of dramatic economic, political, and social change, Maryknoll helped to ensure stability and to prevent revolution. Maryknoll missionaries indirectly helped to resolve some of the most pressing problems the Peruvian government confronted during the crucial period from 1954 to 1968 when industrialization, urbanization, and modernization together caused dramatic social transformation.5

Maryknoll in the Context of the Peruvian Church and Society

During the 1950s and 1960s the Peruvian government gradually distanced itself from the elite landowners who dominated the Andean highlands of northern, central, and southern Peru. Slowly the government allied with a small urban industrial class to promote industrialization and urbanization. This change entailed a shift in resources and support away from agriculture to urban centers. Even as the national government worked to encourage industrialization, it refused to confront directly rural Peru’s powerful hacendados. Instead, the government introduced reforms, including the elimination of food subsidies and price controls, to encourage more rational systems of agricultural production. Market incentives were meant to persuade large landowners to stop relying on unpaid tenant farmers by making the transition to modern wage labor. Ironically, the government also eliminated restrictions on land transfers, making it easier for large landowners to extend their holdings.6 Indigenous people found their land rights attacked,

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while large landowners’ power was left unchecked. The Peruvian sociologist Julio Cotler argues that this situation created an enormous potential for rebellion. Poor indigenous people could respond only by protesting against changes in rural areas or migrating to the cities. In either case, indigenous people’s options were limited. Andean campesinos in the Peruvian Sierra had no direct channels of communication with the national government. In fact, Peruvian researchers have argued that exploitative hacendados acted as the only intermediaries between indigenous communities and the state. Indigenous people who migrated to urban Lima entered the center of Peruvian political power, but there was no established political infrastructure to incorporate them. Whether they stayed in rural communities and protested against injustices or migrated to urban centers, Indians suffered social, economic, and political exclusion. The Catholic Church in Peru underwent a transformation at the same time that the government instituted these economic changes. Maryknoll represented one part of a much greater transformation, which increased the power and presence of Peru’s Catholic Church but also made it increasingly dependent on foreign clergy and support.7 The steady stream of missionaries to Peru that began in the 1940s became a flood in 1961, when Pope John XXIII issued an appeal to clergy in the United States to send 10 percent of their members to Latin America to counter the threats of communism and Protestantism. The pope subsequently made similar appeals to Catholic clergy in Canada and Europe.8 Peru and Brazil received the largest contingent of foreign priests, sisters, and brothers.9 By 1973, 61.5 percent of Peru’s clergy were foreign-born.10 Foreigners were granted considerable autonomy, especially in the poor rural and urban areas where most of them settled. Between 1957 and 1963 twelve new Prelatures Nullius (like Maryknoll’s in Juli) were established in Peru (see Appendix).11 Foreign prelates directed all these new religious jurisdictions. Although technically they could not participate in the Peruvian Episcopal Conference, they enjoyed the same power, rights, and status as Peruvian bishops. Foreigners also directed eight apostolic vicariates, or mission territories, in Peru. Thus by 1964 foreigners directed more than half of Peru’s thirty-eight religious territories.12

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Maryknoll and other foreign clergy stepped (or were pushed) into voids created by industrialization and urbanization in the mid-1950s. Most missionaries settled in remote highland regions, similar to Maryknoll’s field of labor in Puno.13 In rural areas they provided economic resources that helped to stem the tide of migration. In urban barriadas they provided social services and helped to build a physical and political infrastructure. Among the urban middle class they provided schools and facilitated the development of cooperatives to grant loans for investment and housing. Foreign priests, nuns, and brothers acted as proselytizers and modernizers.14 To make their dual roles possible, missionaries helped to establish (or reinforce) networks of communication and social organization to reach outlying rural Andean communities and migrants to urban areas whose ethnic identity became increasingly ambiguous. These networks, designed to train local people to teach Catholic prayer and doctrine to their communities, also offered a means to disseminate material resources. Foreign clergy substituted for a weak Peruvian government, which in turn sought to graft its programs onto those of the Catholic Church. In fact, foreign clergy and the intermediaries they promoted became important links between marginalized citizens and the Peruvian state.15 In rural Peru clergy helped to displace hacendados by serving as alternative intermediaries sympathetic to the needs of indigenous campesinos, indirectly aiding the national government as it turned its attention to industrialization. In urban Peru clergy helped to develop networks among the poor in barriadas that linked them indirectly to the national government and international aid agencies. The resources channeled through missionary networks helped to build necessary infrastructure in the newly established settlements. Catholic missionaries contributed to establishing a new social order and to ushering in a new political and economic order in Peru. But it was an order that reproduced existing social and political hierarchies even as it promoted change. The center of power remained Lima, where Peruvian clergy dominated the hierarchy and the most important social sectors. Moreover, the order depended on the power of the Catholic Church. The secular government was effectively reduced to riding the coattails or cassocks of priests.

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The increased dependence on foreign clergy correlated with an increased dependence on foreign resources. Between 1961 and 1967 U.S. investment in Peru increased by 38 percent.16 Maryknoll missionaries indirectly facilitated this expansion by acting as conduits of American aid. This effort began with the Food for Peace program in 1954. In 1961, the same year that Pope John XXIII issued the appeal for U.S. clergy to send 10 percent of their representatives to Latin America, President John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president of the United States, introduced the Alliance for Progress and the Peace Corps. Maryknoll Father Considine immediately recognized the potential of the Alliance and actively sought cooperation between U.S. Catholic missionaries, Catholic Relief Services, and the U.S. government.17 European and Canadian clergy also initiated new mission programs in Latin America and brought with them abundant economic resources. According to Catherine LeGrand, “By 1959, 3,300 Canadian Catholic church people, 90 percent from Quebec, were at work in 68 countries, nearly 1,000 of them in Latin America, and by 1971 the number in Latin America surged to almost 2,000.”18 In 1959 West German bishops founded Misereor, which included an annual Lenten collection that had raised $43.5 million for overseas distribution by 1963. In the same year Germans collected $5.8 million exclusively for Latin America.19 Belgium, Spain, Ireland, and France also actively promoted mission to Latin America. Yet it was not just economic resources that influenced the transformation of the Catholic Church in Peru and the rest of Latin America; it was also an explosion of ideas and creative new methods of promoting practices of faith that conformed to a Romanized ideal but also recognized explicitly a demand for social justice founded on Catholic principles. Maryknoll missionaries in Peru were deeply influenced by the broader transformation of the Catholic Church in the country and in Latin America more widely. In fact, a turning point in mission to Peru came in 1954, when Father Considine organized the Lima Methods Conference of the Maryknoll Fathers.20 This preliminary effort to articulate mission goals and to analyze mission methods engaged by Maryknoll and other clergy throughout Latin America defined mission to Peru during the next decade and a half. The conference em-

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phasized Maryknoll mission but also drew on the experience of other Catholic clergy working in the region. The background to and apparent impetus for the conference was the Third Inter-American Catholic Action Week held in Chimbote, Peru, to assess the state of the faith in Latin America.21 The participants concluded that “not only is Latin America not Catholic but each day becomes more paganized and paganizing,” prompting renewed mission efforts and an efflorescence of creative Catholic engagement in Latin America.22 The Maryknoll missionaries in Peru, who suffered a difficult start because of the physical environment of Puno and the challenges of working under a local bishop, appeared behind the curve in developing mission methods discussed during the Lima Methods Conference. They had not created strong catechetical programs, nor were they engaged in union organizing, or cooperatives, which already dominated other missions in Latin America. In fact, their work was largely confined to San Juan Bautista Parish and the San Ambrosio minor seminary. Within three years of the conference, however, Maryknoll clergy in Peru had adopted nearly all the mission methods discussed during the meeting but had transformed them to conform to the particular needs and social and cultural realities of Peru. The same methods introduced in one country, it turned out, had very different results in another. The Proceedings of the Lima Methods Conference of the Maryknoll Fathers offers a point of departure for understanding and analyzing Maryknoll’s mission to Peru from 1954 until 1968 and placing it in the broader context of mission to Latin America.

The Lima Methods Conference, 1954

When Maryknoll initiated its missions in Latin America in 1943, there was concern among the missionaries about their goals and purpose in a Catholic region. “There has been some ground for complaint in the past that there was uncertainty as to just what the work of Maryknoll might be in Latin America and further uncertainty about the means and methods to be applied,” observed Father Considine. All participants at the Lima Methods Conference agreed that the sacramental life of the

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church in Latin America was weak and hence that reinforcing it should be a principal goal. At the same time Maryknoll promoted a distinctly Catholic social justice as the foundation for a powerful church. Father Bernard Meyer, a veteran missionary in China who strongly influenced mission in Latin America, observed, “If Christ were to ask one of our people what was necessary to gain heaven he would no doubt reply, from hearing them so much emphasized, prayer and reception of the Sacraments. Yet Our Lord emphasized the practice of love, the works of mercy. ‘Amen, I say to you, as you did it to one of these My least brethren, you did it to Me.’ . . . Prayers and devotions obey the first great commandment alone; the works of mercy for love of God fulfill both.”23 Father Coleman, a missionary in Chile, affirmed this point by observing, “There is no lack of catechism, the people go to church, or when they do not it’s not because they don’t know that God exists or that it’s a Sunday obligation. They don’t know, however, what the Church is all about. They associate it with going to Mass, and a few liturgical functions like having a Mass a year after a person is dead. They have a profound ignorance of what the Church is as a social body.”24 This emphasis on the Catholic Church as a social body responsible for caring for people “body and soul” preceded the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council and the advent of liberation theology by more than a decade. It ensured that even as missionaries condemned Latin America for “paganizing,” they actively sought to do more than promote prayer and sacraments. Foreign clergy, and especially Maryknoll, actively advanced what would later be described as the “social pastoral of the Church.” This emphasis reflected Maryknoll’s foundational ideas formed in the United States, where poverty, migration, and labor defined the Catholic community. The ideals Maryknollers carried to Latin America in 1943 were reinforced by the poverty they encountered in their missions. Father Fedders observed, “More than 90 percent of our parishes [in Latin America] are in rural areas.”25 The greatest challenges Maryknollers confronted were poverty, large populations spread across vast territories, and indigenous languages. The methods engaged to address these problems articulated during the Lima Methods Conference had their roots in Catholic programs promoted in the United States and Canada in the 1930s.26

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Participants in the Lima Methods Conference consistently emphasized lay leadership (Catholic Action), cooperatives, labor organizing, and Christian family life as the best responses to these challenges. Active lay engagement was at the heart of these efforts. Father Bernard F. Meyer observed, “We have tended to seek the solution of the missionary problem in the sphere of ecclesiastical action almost exclusively. When we want to intensify Catholic life we usually think of more priests and Sisters. [But] clergy and religious cannot get down to the level of the daily lives of the people, be one with them, and we fail to put to work those who could.”27 Meyer and others contrasted Catholic failings in this regard with Communists’ success. “A common idea is that a Christian leader must be a gifted speaker, organizer or administrator. The Communists understand the principle of leadership better. Special abilities are required only on higher levels. In the factory they develop factory workers as leaders, in the mines it is miners, in the villages it is villagers. So we also can find people everywhere capable of being leaders on their own levels.” Meyer concluded, “What a bulwark they would be against the inroads of Protestantism and communism. You began to form world citizens by developing a sense of mutual responsibility in your own block.”28 The discussion that followed suggested that in some missions Maryknoll and other Catholic clergy already were making strides in promoting lay leadership and were doing so in ways that corresponded to local reality. Indeed, lay leadership meant that local people guided the introduction of new practices of faith, ensuring that they conformed with tradition even as they promoted change. In Chile missionaries emphasized labor unions. As Father Coleman recounted, “We’re going to try using laymen in a small way, the leaders of the ASICH, the Catholic labor union. When our boys go back to the farm they will know the social doctrine of the Church and be able to help the labor unions organize their people. . . . We are not interested simply in forming strong labor unions and trained labor leaders. What we want to form are unions and leaders who are motivated and guided by the principles of Christ as expressed in the Catholic social doctrine.”29 Missionaries in Chile discovered that their efforts brought them into immediate conflict with “some of the wealthiest Catholic employers,” who

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identified Catholic labor unions as Communist and demanded government intervention to prevent organizing. As Father John J. Bradley concluded, “It shows that wealthy employers [even Catholics] will stop at nothing to keep conditions as they are.”30 While missionaries in Chile emphasized labor organizing, those in Guatemala focused on Maya catechists. Maryknollers adopted a method of catechesis introduced by Guatemala’s bishop in the rural indigenous department of Totonicapán. “Faced with the problem common to all of us, of how to reach so many and so scattered people, the Fathers [in Guatemala] decided to try and set up a catechetical school. Fourteen men and boys answered the written invitations. Four classes daily were held for a month and then the ‘catechists’ were sent back to their different villages where it was hoped they would prepare a harvest for the priest to reap on his next visitation,” recounted Maryknoll Father Charles Brown. But the plan failed, and the school was dismantled.31 A few months later the auxiliary bishop of Totonicapán came to Maryknoll’s center in Huehuetenango and explained his system of getting “a large number of volunteer catechists whom he brought together at regular intervals for a catechetical instruction. Then each catechist selected five homes in his own village and arranged with the head of the family for a weekly visitation. He visited one home a night for five nights a week, reciting the Rosary with the family and afterwards explaining the point of doctrine he had learned at the catechists’ conference. Centers were set up and visited regularly by the Bishop . . . to check up on work and results.” When Maryknoll Fathers McClear and McGuinness tried a similar approach in their highland parishes in the department of Huehuetenango, it was declared “a flop.” Finally, the priests hit upon a change that conformed to local needs and met with immediate success. By 1954 Maryknoll reported that some six hundred Maya catechists had been organized in Guatemala, “most so illiterate that they had to be given only one point of doctrine at a pilot meeting every Sunday, which they taught during the week to five families assigned to them.”32 Father Considine introduced discussion of a similar method of catechesis in Brazil. An unnamed priest who initiated what came to be known as the “mobile mission” reported:

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The majority of souls in our jurisdiction are scattered over vast expanse of cattle country and coffee plantations. They live in small settlements along the river banks and at the far end of ranges. . . . How [to] bring catechism to these masses of the vast country districts? Four years ago we embarked on . . . the catechetical Mission for three or four days. It is a mass catechism class with all the trappings of a formal Mission as preached by missionaries in the United States. Long months in advance, fliers are sent out through supply caravans; advance prayers are said in the grass-adobe huts. The date is set to coincide with the patron Saint or feast day of the ranch or settlement. Fireworks, and processions and music and then prayers chanted in unison on the arrival of the priest. The mission begins with prayer . . . the Rosary they know so well. The catechism in its simplest form is explained with illustrations, comparisons drawn from their daily routine work life. Charts, flash cards, pictures, slides, chalk sketches help to write these truths on the mind. Then the catechist takes over. Whoever he may be he is restricted to the teachings of memory lessons. The Padre, when he makes subsequent trips, explains and examines farther.33

Success depended on the clergy’s ability to promote mission methods that dovetailed with existing practices, in this case a focus on fiestas, common prayers, and fireworks. Lay engagement through catechesis was linked to other mission programs. In Colombia catechetical programs gave birth to radio schools with catechists using transistor radios to teach religious doctrine and literacy classes. Religious education also was linked with more practical programs to improve social and economic conditions in communities. Semanas de Estudio (Study Weeks) brought into “a central place for a week of living together a group of parishioners with the intention of inculcating religious doctrine and certain techniques in the practice of their profession, e.g, farmers, agricultural techniques; midwives, medical practices, etc.” These “semanas” offered another opportunity to encourage lay engagement in rural areas.34 Credit unions and cooperatives also relied on lay leadership, with catechists often forming the first cooperative councils. In 1963 a Canadian Scarboro priest, Harvey Steele, influenced by the Antigonish

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movement of the 1930s in Nova Scotia, opened the Instituto Cooperativo Interamericano (ICI) in Panama to facilitate the development of cooperatives throughout Latin America. Father Considine referred to Father Steele’s earlier efforts in the Dominican Republic as requiring “no special mention here —[they are] so well known.” The Credit Union National Association (CUNA), with headquarters in Madison, Wisconsin, also facilitated the development of cooperatives throughout the region by offering educational materials, including posters, charts, pamphlets, and films.35 Centers established by Catholic clergy helped to promote cooperatives throughout Latin America by providing training and materials. Some of the most intense discussions at the Lima Methods Conference focused on cooperatives. These discussions revealed differences among missions and hinted at the ways in which local realities transformed mission to Latin America. Asked what he would emphasize in an impoverished rural mission, Father McNiff of Chile immediately responded, “Studying the principles of co-ops.” When challenged on the grounds that cooperatives failed to address religious indifference, McNiff linked the foundation of cooperatives to a religious end: “That would be one way to break up that indifference. Starting the co-ops would show the people you were interested in their material welfare. Once they’re shown that the Church has an interest not only in the spiritual benefit of their souls but also in the material betterment of their lives, then that indifference is broken up. . . . They learn that the Church has a social doctrine, through the co-op. They learn about the pontifical doctrines that have been handed down in the past sixty years or so.”36 Father Arthur Allie, who worked for years with poor Mayas in rural Guatemala, seconded this view of the primacy of economic interest: “The principal need is more economic, to bring up the level of the people, to counteract poverty and ignorance, immorality, and so on. I think the Church in many instances has been faulty in that regard.”37 By contrast, Maryknoll missionaries in Peru, especially those working among indigenous people in Puno, opposed cooperatives, arguing that they would “take Indians out of their culture.” Father Francis X. Lyons of Puno observed that “as regards my people, the Indians of the Altiplano, within their own culture, by their living standards, they live

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under quite satisfactory conditions.” Later in the discussion Lyons again put forward what seemed a controversial point, given that Peruvian journalists described Puno as having “the worst living conditions in the world”:38 “The Indian people, the Aymara and the Quechua, as we’ve mentioned earlier have a different culture altogether from modern society in our countries. Now I can see that any help you give the people in Chile on credit unions or co-ops would assist in raising their standard of living. Among the Indian people their standard of living, within their culture is good. My question is: Are we going to take them out of their culture, with these co-operatives and similar projects, and set them up in a strange way of living, or are we going to leave them in their culture, in which these modern methods have no value?”39 Considine took a fairly hard line against Lyons, demanding to know if it was “proper for us to leave him [the Indian] that way if from our knowledge of the Christian heritage his possession of essential values is incomplete?”40 But Lyons stuck to his point. He contrasted the “true community of Indians” with those being absorbed into urban areas and mining regions, arguing that those in communities could be “Christianized” within their culture. “Within their region and within their culture, I don’t see what you can do to better their condition economically and I think that rather than stir them up we should leave them alone economically.”41 Lyons suggested that the site for introducing indigenous people to modern innovations should be cities and mining regions where a “natural evolution” was taking place. In a striking way this discussion foreshadowed both the particular experience of Maryknoll mission in Peru and later discussions among Peruvian researchers who looked to indigenous migrants to urban areas as the source of modernization of the country and suggested, in effect, that indigenous people in rural communities should be left “in their culture.”42 The question whether economic or religious issues should take precedence within the mission among indigenous people in Puno would be central to the Maryknoll experience in Peru, especially following the conclusion of the CELAM conference in Medellín in 1968 when the Latin American church declared a “preferential option for the poor.” Even as missionaries in Chile and Guatemala embraced mission emphasizing the transformation of socioeconomic conditions,

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Maryknollers in Peru focused on religious, spiritual, and cultural influences in their work among indigenous people. When Maryknoll introduced cooperatives in Peru, they did so in urban centers, where most cooperative members were midlevel misti professionals such as teachers, bureaucrats, and small business owners. Maryknollers in Peru also eschewed labor organizing, a point evident even during these early discussions at the 1954 Lima Methods Conference. Father Lawler, responsible for St. Rose of Lima parochial school in the capital, made clear that Maryknollers were not involved in labor organizing and that he, at least, was reluctant to get involved for “political reasons.” The beliefs articulated by the Maryknollers in Peru who participated in the Lima Methods Conference helped to define their mission. Work with indigenous people emphasized from the beginning an explicitly religious approach, with food aid, basic literacy, and medical care serving as supplements to reduce poverty and facilitate the development of religious programs. In the 1950s work among indigenous people emphasized catechesis focused on rote memorization of prayers, doctrine, and catechism— a method one priest later derided as analogous to training parrots. Programs with the potential to promote socioeconomic change, like cooperatives and formal education, addressed the middle class in urban centers. Maryknoll proselytized within the existing social order rather than transforming it. This continuity was not the missionaries’ fault, nor did it diminish the importance of what were indeed revolutionary innovations, but rather illustrates the extent to which Maryknollers in Peru were guided into existing social structures. The same kinds of programs introduced by Maryknoll missionaries in other Latin American missions often had much more radical outcomes when the proselytized became politicized.

The Catechetical System: The Heart of the Maryknoll Mission in Rural Puno

The ideas introduced during the Lima Methods Conference, combined with the creation of the Juli prelature in 1957, helped Maryknollers to resolve the central problems they confronted in Puno. The

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Juli prelature reduced the challenges of language the missionaries confronted in their trilingual Spanish-Quechua-Aymara mission in Puno by confining the missionaries to a predominantly Aymara population, though the Quechua province of Azángaro played an important role in the new mission. Perhaps most important from the missionaries’ perspective, the Juli prelature allowed them to escape the authority of Peruvian bishops such as Monseñor Salvador Herrera and his successor, Monseñor Alberto M. Dettman. Maryknoll became an autonomous force, even an enclave. This independence granted the clergy mission freedom, but it also limited their interaction with Peruvian clergy, who seemed to resent the wealthy foreigners. Maryknoll had, in fact, unintentionally displaced Puno’s hierarchy and clergy, thereby transforming local power dynamics by introducing a foreign Catholic force. The Juli prelature did not resolve two of the missionaries’ biggest problems: the vastness of their mission territory and the large number of monolingual indigenous people whose demands for religious services seemed to increase exponentially in response to the Maryknollers’ presence. The Juli prelature extended from the southern Bolivian frontier, with parishes in Desaguadero, Zepita, Yunguyo, Pomata, Juli, Ilave, Ácora, Chucuito, and Puno, which marked a transition point, to the northern frontier, with parishes in Pusi, Taraco, Huancané, Vilquechico, and Moho. The prelature had twenty-three parishes and 450,000 people. The land of this region is strikingly beautiful. The routes to the thousands of outlying communities, which often required travel by horseback or later jeeps and motorcycles, took the priests (and later the sisters) high into the mountains, where views of Lake Titicaca with the Bolivian Andes in the background set against a crystal blue sky are truly breathtaking. Yet the environmental conditions devastated the clergy during their first decade in Puno. The priests’ diaries from this period include a litany of evacuation accounts and a corresponding decline in the missionaries’ morale. In 1943 Father William Murphy was forced to descend to lower altitude just five weeks after arriving in Puno. Father Edward P. Brophy was sent to Arequipa after he fell from a curb (possibly having been pegged by a stone thrown from a slingshot) and suffered a fractured skull and hemorrhaging. Father Cyril J. Kramar was transferred to Bolivia after

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reporting feeling that he was being smothered when he tried to sleep at night. In 1944 Father Joseph B. Donnelly was diagnosed with erysipelas, a potentially fatal disease. Father Anthony M. Michalik was sent to Bolivia to recover from high blood pressure, kidney, and liver problems. Father Thomas J. Carey had an appendectomy. Father Stephen P. Foody suffered a heart attack. Father Robert E. Kearns was diagnosed with jaundice. And Father Arthur C. Kiernan suffered liver trouble. By 1945, following the death of Father Carey, Maryknoll’s first “martyr” in Peru, who was thrown from a truck when traveling home from his isolated mission in Cuyocuyo, Maryknoll introduced policies to counteract this devastating record of illness. Priests were ordered to take a one-month altitude leave after six months of work.43 Parishes were to be staffed by a minimum of three priests, ensuring that no one would be overwhelmed by his labors or left alone in case of illness. These changes resolved Maryknoll’s health problems, but they did not allow the priests to respond to the appeals by indigenous people for fiesta masses, baptisms, and sick calls. Nor did they allow the Maryknollers to begin to establish their ideal of a sacramental faith based on knowledge of Catholic prayers, catechism, and doctrine among indigenous people. The only way to resolve these problems seemed to be to formalize the reliance on Aymara and Quechua intermediaries who had helped the priests during their first years of mission. The 1954 Lima Methods Conference suggested ways to turn the relationship with local lay leaders into an organized catechetical system. Local people would be trained to teach Catholic doctrine and prayers in their languages and to prepare their communities to receive the sacraments. The catechetical system dovetailed with Maryknoll experience in China, where missionaries relied on catechists. It also resonated with indigenous people’s experience of Christianization during the colonial period in Juli. Juli was known as the Rome of Puno for the colonial churches that punctuate the landscape and serve as concrete reminders of the power of colonial-era mission in Peru. Jesuits, who settled in Juli in 1576, divided the province into districts each affiliated with its own church structure and guided by indigenous catechists from individual communities. Indigenous community leaders brought their people to

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their district church for prayers, sacraments, and fiesta celebrations on assigned days.44 The emphasis on indigenous leaders, prayer, and sacraments seemed strikingly similar to the catechetical program Maryknoll introduced. The Maryknollers themselves recognized the confluence between their catechetical programs and historical traditions associated with Catholic mission. “It seems as if the whole mechanism for bringing back the Indians to prayer and religious practice is still in existence in the ‘Altiplano’ in dormant form,” marveled Father Thomas J. Verhoeven. “It is like a machine that has been stalled for many years, which needs to be restarted. With a minimum of personnel and material resources it could be restarted to re-Christianize the Indians, reaching practically all of them.”45 The mechanical nature of the catechetical system would in later years become a source of consternation as the priests and sisters sought to get closer to indigenous communities and to understand local culture. At the time, however, it seemed emblematic of the system’s efficiency. In 1952 Maryknoll discovered an established tradition of catechesis in the Quechua province of Azángaro. Before Easter, men came to the parish asking permission to teach basic catechism to children and to bring their communities to church for confession. Maryknoll Father Jim O’Brien, a large, jovial man known for greeting everyone and for being among the few priests to try to learn Quechua and Aymara, remembered that each catechist was assigned a day to bring his group in for confession. On one occasion some thirty groups arrived in Azángaro for prayers, confession, and mass on the same day. Each group wanted to outdo the others in expressing their devotion. They sang, or in Father O’Brien’s account, shouted, Quechua liturgical songs introduced by missionaries during the colonial period and preserved by song leaders within indigenous communities. Each group tried to outsing the others. “So, each one would be singing a different song with his people at the same time,” remembered Father O’Brien. “There was absolute bedlam in there!”46 Despite the chaos, these men’s dedication and enthusiasm for learning and teaching Catholic doctrine persuaded Maryknollers that relying on indigenous catechists might resolve their greatest mission challenges— reaching remote communities and finding ways to teach

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indigenous people in their own languages. A few years later Father Meyer, the mission veteran from China who participated in the Lima Methods Conference, visited the Puno mission and witnessed this burgeoning of faith. He immediately declared, “You have 75 Catechists. You could have 500 Catechists.”47 He was right. Within a few years the Maryknollers’ catechetical system in Puno had become one of the most successful programs in Latin America. The priests’ success depended on their efforts but also on Andean people’s enthusiastic embrace. Indeed, it might be said that the indigenous people of Puno were drawing Maryknoll missionaries into their practice of Catholicism as much or more than the missionaries were transforming them. How and Why the Catechetical System Worked Father Verhoeven became the first director of a catechetical system that moved with incredible speed from the mission of Azángaro through Maryknoll’s other parishes in the newly created prelature of Juli, to the prelature of Puno, and eventually to most of the Andean prelatures and dioceses of Peru’s altiplano. Within a decade Maryknoll priests helped to create a standardized system to disseminate formal knowledge of Catholic prayer, catechism, and doctrine and to prepare communities to receive the sacraments. Since catechists interpreted and taught, priests did not have to learn Quechua and Aymara. Thus Maryknoll priests could devote their time to developing a plethora of innovative social programs. These programs, in turn, relied on catechists who mediated relations between clergy and communities. Amazingly, within five years, the entire altiplano seemed organized. The success of the catechetical program was due in part to Father Verhoeven’s dedication and discipline. Father O’Brien described Verhoeven as “very precise about things: he was very precise[,] . . . a very austere person [whose] idea was to ‘get those people out!’ ”48 Father Verhoeven shared with Father Meyer a vision of the catechetical system’s potential. Shortly after initiating training of the first catechists in 1954, he announced, “It seems not a great deal would be required to start the catechetical work in the whole diocese. Very probably the following would be needed: a) the full time of two priests; b) about

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forty hired catechists at a salary of ten or eleven dollars a month; c) a picup [sic] truck; d) a few thousand catechisms and bible history booklets for voluntary catechists; e) two or three dozen kerosene projectors with doctrinal films and slides.”49 He and Father Meyer were right: very little was required. In December 1954 Father Verhoeven started the first formal catechetical program in Azángaro. He reported, “We had an ex-Franciscan seminarian with us at the time, Lyma Cama. We hired him, gave him a horse and sent him out to visit the various communities. At the end of two weeks he had 23 volunteer catechists!” By September 1956 the priests in Azángaro had fulfilled Father Meyer’s initial prediction. They had five hundred catechists working in the parish.50 Maryknollers in other parishes met with similar success. In April Father Verhoeven reported that “about one third of the parish is organized with classes in over fifty places and over seventy voluntary catechists.”51 In July 1955 the Maryknollers started a catechetical program in Ayaviri, where Father McConaughy reported that the “rapid progress in this work here was marvelous.”52 After just one month they had “nineteen volunteer Catechists in the country, one resident Catechist in our rectory, also a head Catechist, with requests coming in from other farms for more of them!”53 In 1956 they expanded the system to Ilave, where, Father Murphy observed, “the catechists are working very well. . . . At present only about a quarter of the parish is being covered by catechists. This is due only to a lack of transportation in the parish. The people are most enthusiastic and some have come in on their own asking to be allowed to send a catechist or two for instruction on Sunday.”54 The priests in Huancané reported, “Our plans to organize the catechists were advanced by six months when we visited the sick in the rural areas. Again and again the people requested somebody to teach them their simple prayers. . . . By the end of the month twelve different sections had been called together to elect their catechists.”55 From 1953 to 1957 the catechetical system of training worked through individual parishes. Each parish hired a paid catechist who received $15 per month to recruit volunteer catechists; to introduce them to Catholic prayer, catechism, and doctrine; and to encourage them to marry in the church. The catechists gathered one Sunday a

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month at the parish to receive instruction. The catechetical directors and Maryknoll priests used a Quechua or Aymara catechism and a second illustrated text with biblical stories prepared by Father Meyer. Gas projector slides and films were also used to encourage participation. In remote communities lacking electricity, television, radio, and other forms of entertainment, these slide shows became the evening entertainment. Sister Anne Marion (Pauline Frei), assigned to Azángaro in 1957, remembered that in the evenings the priests projected slides and films onto the back wall of the church. Everyone from the town and many people from rural communities came, in part because, as she put it, “we were the only game in town.”56 It is hard not to imagine the experience of the icy cold nights, with people huddled outside staring at the slides on the church wall as the priest narrated, and the spectacular southern sky overhead bursting with stars. In addition to the monthly meetings, during Easter and in preparation for community fiestas special meetings were held so that catechists could prepare their communities by teaching them prayers, songs, and doctrine.57 In 1957, when Peru’s papal nuncio named Maryknoll Father Edward L. Fedders prelate of Juli, the Puno catechetical school was established. Monsignors Fedders and Lucien Metzinger Gress, S.S.C.C., a French priest named prelate of Ayaviri in the department of Puno, together founded the school. Responsibility for catechetical instruction moved from individual parishes to a single center, which enhanced the potential for promoting uniform practices of prayer and provided a central meeting place for indigenous catechists from throughout the vast department. The catechetical school offered four-week courses to volunteer catechists elected by their communities. The men had to be married and in good standing with their communities. Approximately forty-five catechists participated in each four-week session. At the end of the course, the Maryknoll priests gave the men certificates naming them catechists and authorizing them to teach in their communities.58 The priests also designed “rather gaudy armbands for the catechists of Azángaro, Ayaviri, Puno, and Ilave: red and black letters and a design on yellow and white cloth . . . to show the catechist’s special standing in the village.”59 On Sundays the catechists dressed in their finest clothes and wearing their armbands paraded through the town plaza, in a ritual

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reminiscent of that performed by indigenous tenientes, existing indigenous authorities who also came to participate in the catechetical system. Through the catechetical school, the certificate, the armbands, and the provision of sacraments and services, Maryknoll legitimized the catechists and created a new category of officially recognized indigenous intermediaries in southern Peru. Soon catechists were directing priests as much or more than priests were directing them. Catechists guided all the Maryknollers’ visits to communities, their distribution of sacraments, and even their sick calls. The system was so efficient that priests merely showed up on demand in communities to perform in their required roles. Father O’Brien, in one of many enthusiastic accounts of the early days of the catechetical program, recounted a visit to outlying communities: “It was wonderful how well we were received. All the people came to the house or country school where the doctrine is taught by the Catechist. The priest checked over the census that had been taken by the resident Catechist. . . . [O]ver ninety percent of the Indians living outside of town are married in the church.” While the catechist organized the community, took the census, and arranged for marriages, the “visiting priest . . . gives a short talk, especially reminding the people that they are members of the parish and that we are there to serve them.” This talk was followed by the distribution of holy cards, a short blessing, rounds to bless new homes and buildings, and sick calls. “The priests could never do it alone,” concluded Father O’Brien. “Our big job is keeping after the catechists.”60 Father O’Brien reported that the catechists had resolved the overwhelming problem of sick calls, which required that priests spend hours traveling to remote communities, by suggesting “a plan whereby they will give a card to those whom they judge to be seriously ill, and the relatives of the sick person, upon presenting the card at the parish will be accompanied by the priest to the bed of the sick person.”61 In Huancané, catechists brought “the sick and aged to the central meeting places when there was a catechetical meeting, food distribution, or a feast day Mass. . . . On one occasion we anointed 80 people in one day,” reported Father Jean Cameron, who concluded that “it cut down considerably on the work in the rural area which formerly took so much time.”62

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At the same time that catechists gained authority within their communities, they had to perform according to the standards established by Maryknoll priests to guarantee their position and to ensure that their community had access to fiesta masses and sacraments. Catechists had to teach doctrine and prayers through rote memorization typified by the “21 questions,” as Father John Schiff reported: For the volunteer we have placed emphasis on the 21 questions, memorized and chanted. It took a month’s course, one sector a week, to teach thoroughly those questions. The catechists came in three days a week and for six hours each of those days were drilled intensively until they had the simple catechism memorized and [were] able to chant it. (They received very good meals. That was the gimmick.) Then they were given oral exams which if they passed they were given a certificate stating that they had authority to teach the 21 questions. It worked. I would say that today using this catechism as the basis of campo catechism work we have at least 10,000 Indians who know basic catechism, a thing they did not know before.63

In addition to rote memorization of prayers, doctrine, and catechism, catechists also had to drag community members to the altar. Church marriage, another central challenge the missionaries confronted during their first years, became a measure of catechists’ success. Father Richard Quinn recounted the story of “Marryin’ Sam,” a paid catechist who nearly lost his position when he failed to perform. A few months ago, Juan was called in “on the carpet” and told that he was no longer to be a paid catechist . . . since he did not show the necessary drive to be the head catechist in a section, and that the Frs. considered the salary he was receiving as a poor investment. He managed to convince the Pastor that he was worth another try. Since then his record is excellent for the two “missions” he has conducted since the scare. In Huancarani, a village of some 30 families, he lined up 22 couples to get their marriages straightened out in the Church. In the village of Tokori, with some 35 families, he convinced 16 more couples to do the “right thing” before God and get married in the

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Church. “Marryin’ Sam” is zealous, but the $15 a month we pay him gives him the opportunity to devote his time to exercise of his zeal.64

In the short term, the catechetical program seemed to resolve all the Maryknollers’ problems in Puno. The frustration of arriving at fiestas and confronting hundreds of “drunks,” of finding that people lacked knowledge of prayer and doctrine, of being unable to promote marriage, and of responding to appeals for baptisms of dead babies or calls for last rites in remote communities dissipated almost overnight. Moreover, the arduous journeys to outlying communities were reduced to occasional visits organized and directed by the catechists. Father O’Brien observed, “Things are going too well here to have a rational explanation. Lots of people must be praying hard for this parish. Almost everything we touch turns to gold.”65 In the longer term Maryknoll began to question the knowledge catechists and communities gained through rote memorization of prayers and catechism. And, perhaps more important, the clergy began to find the catechetical system, which reduced them to the role of religious service providers, an alienating experience that did not fulfill their ideal of faith and community. Existing Linkages The catechetical system relied on both a tradition linked specifically to Catholic mission and a broader system of intermediation between indigenous communities and external authorities. Father Verhoeven quickly recognized that one of the most efficient ways of reaching new catechists was through the tenientes. “A town governor is a very important person with whom to work to bring the catechetical program to the Indians in the outlying districts,” he wrote. The Indians in their settlements are accustomed to receive news, whether civil or ecclesiastical, through the town governor. It is a custom that started with the Spanish in the 16th century. . . . The lieutenants of each Indian settlement, an Indian who represents the people of his settlement, must present himself to the town governor each Sunday to receive civil news and ecclesiastical news (if the parish priest

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has any), so that the lieutenants can inform the people of their settlement. He certainly is the person to work within each town to channel the catechetical program to the Indians throughout the “Altiplano” of Peru.66

When the missionaries opened the parish in Huancané, the local indigenous authorities were among their first visitors. One of the priests reported, “Our first Sunday here 64 governors from the outlying districts came to visit us and promise their cooperation.”67 Maryknoll directly and indirectly reinforced the power and authority of these indigenous officials through their religious ceremonies and by drawing them into the system of intermediation being created by the catechetical program. Father James Stefaniak recounted that “the New Year in Huancané starts with the oath taking of the 60 or so lieutenant governors of the various districts. They are appointed for a one year term and are the political authorities in their villages.” Maryknoll priests reinforced tenientes’ authority by performing religious ceremonies for them. “We had a mass for the health of the lieutenant governors,” remembered Father Stefaniak. “We agree with them although they have a few little extra-rubrical ceremonies which they have to take care of too. They marched into church, late of course, carrying heavy crosses about six feet high. Apparently each village has one of these although we don’t see them when we visit there. . . . Getting the crosses, candles, and themselves arranged seems far more important to them than what is going on at the altar. But they will learn.” Father Stefaniak recognized that the tenientes were key to reaching Huancané’s outlying communities: “The district of Huancané is divided into smaller geographical sections called ayllos. Each ayllo in turn is made up of villages or estancias, from four to ten in number. Each estancia has an average of about 100 people in it. We hope to use these lieutenant governors to get the cooperation of the people in the various projects around the church.”68 Even as the Maryknoll missionaries introduced innovations in practices of worship, by recognizing tenientes through a public celebration of mass the priests reinforced Andean traditions linking religious and civil authority. At the same time, Maryknoll transformed these traditions. Historically, priests and governing officials worked

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through tenientes to demand free labor from indigenous communities. Tenientes played key roles in an exploitative, neocolonial system for labor and resource extraction.69 Maryknoll modified this system by engaging it to attract labor from communities but also to distribute spiritual and material resources to communities. While tenientes offered Maryknoll the central means to introduce the catechetical system in parcialidades, administrators acted as reluctant intermediaries on haciendas. Father O’Brien recounted, “There is a head catechist (paid) who works directly under Father Verhoeven. He informs the bosses of the haciendas . . . that he is going to visit them so that the people can unite. Then on the appointed day he arrives to meet all the people.”70 Yet Maryknoll missionaries learned in their first years of mission that hacendados did not share the priests’ desire to promote religious change among indigenous people. Father Verhoeven lamented, “It has been said that the landowners treat the Indians working for them with a little bit of fatherly kindness, but since coming to Azángaro the above statement has given way to the truth, which is pitiful. Numerous sick calls and trips to the outlying districts give the true picture. Indians live and die in hovels without medical care and without spiritual care, if the calling of a priest were left up to the landowner. It seems that the animals have more value than the Indians.”71 Father Richard Frank concluded, “I’m convinced that the socalled Catholic ‘hacienda’ owners will never do anything on their own to improve the miserable living conditions of their subjects.”72 Hacienda owners may have recognized that Maryknoll missionaries were an indirect threat to their power and authority. As Father Joseph B. Arsenault reported, “There is bad will on the part of the hacendado, or the administrator. . . . [T]hey don’t want the people to have time for religion or love, because that might put the hacienda in jeopardy — people might start fighting for social justice.”73 Cotler has argued that in rural areas hacendados acted as the only intermediaries between remote rural indigenous communities and the national government. Their abuse of power, wealth, and authority gave rise to devastating rebellions in Puno in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It also facilitated the development of the first indigenous rights movements in the country. Yet these efforts, which depended

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on individual initiatives by intellectuals living in Lima far from the daily experience of indigenous communities and with limited means of gaining access to them, had only nominal success. Maryknoll priests, by contrast, who had an established affiliation with the powerful Peruvian Catholic Church and government, a growing network of indigenous intermediaries, and extraordinary wealth, offered a viable alternative to indigenous people seeking to bypass or evade the power of hacendados. Hierarchically Linked Intermediaries and Religious Resources The Maryknoll Fathers almost immediately sought to extend the catechetical program from their prelature in Juli through the entire department of Puno. In 1955 they reported their success to Puno’s bishop, Alberto M. Dettman, and appealed to him to authorize Father Verhoeven to introduce the catechetical system in the diocese of Puno.74 An unsigned, undated letter on Maryknoll stationery from Azángaro, written in the typically informal style of the “gringo priests,” appealed to Dettman, “Do me the favor of writing a letter to the reverend priests of the province of Azángaro conveying the idea that: 1. The establishment of the catechetical work in all the parishes of Azángaro will conform with canon law and combat Protestantism and communism; 2. Name Reverend Father Thomas W. Verhoeven director of the work in the Province of Azángaro; 3. The director will not accept any type of stipend nor will he administer sacraments, but only will send each person to his own parish to receive sacraments. The responsibility of the director is the establishment of classes in doctrine exclusively with the cooperation of the parish priests.” In January 1956 Monsignor Dettman approved Maryknoll’s request for the catechetical program, naming Father Verhoeven director of catechesis.75 The 1957 creation of the catechetical school in Puno extended the system to the newly created prelature of Ayaviri in the department of Puno. By 1959 Maryknoll’s catechetical system in Peru was so well known that the newly named bishop of Puno, Julio González Ruiz, reported that he had planned to write his thesis on it. In 1961 Father

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Verhoeven traveled to Lima to report on the success of the school to the Peruvian hierarchy. By that time 1,224 catechists had completed the one-month course at the Puno catechetical school. The priest’s report was so well received that the Peruvian hierarchy “decided to extend the catechetical system to the Archdiocese of Cuzco, the Diocese of Abancay (where the St. James Society is working) and the Prelature of Sicuani (where the American Carmelites are working).”76 By 1961, when Pope John XXIII issued his appeal and President Kennedy introduced the Alliance for Progress, the catechetical system was either functioning or on the verge of initiation in the dioceses of Puno, Abancay, and Cuzco and the prelatures of Juli, Ayaviri, and Sicuani. It was recognized by the Catholic hierarchy at the diocesan, national, and even international level. A few years later, in 1964, the U.S. Department of State reported, “To serve the spiritual needs of millions of Indian peasants in the sierra, catechists are being trained in the Cuzco and Puno Departments by the American Catholic religious orders, the Sons of Maryknoll and the Maryknoll Fathers respectively. Because of their growing number and influence, the Communists have opposed them, especially during periods of political agitation. The catechists now number over 4,000 and owing to their anti-Communist training and their position of leadership in their rural communities, they provide an excellent medium for anti-Communist activity in this often-troubled area of Southern Peru.”77 Indigenous communities thus acquired an indirect means to gain access to local and national authorities through a system of hierarchically linked intermediaries. Volunteer catechists worked through paid catechists, who contacted Maryknoll priests, who met with members of the local and national church hierarchy. This was certainly not a part of the Maryknoll missionaries’ “plan,” nor did they necessarily recognize the role that they as foreign priests had come to play as intermediaries in Peru. From Religion to Resources While the catechetical program had been created to introduce knowledge of Catholic prayer, doctrine, and catechism and to promote indigenous people’s participation in the sacramental life of the church,

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the extensive network also facilitated the distribution of material resources. In 1956, just a few years after Maryknoll introduced the catechetical system, Puno suffered a devastating drought. More than 200 million soles in agricultural production were destroyed.78 The priests reported that “February, which should be a month of almost continuous rains, was completely dry. The situation is critical. About eighty percent of the crops are ruined. If rain does not come soon, there will be a general disaster.”79 The drought suffered in 1956 was followed by inundations and then more drought and frost. In 1961 El Comercio declared “The droughts and frosts in Puno offer a terrifying picture.”80 It was estimated that 183 million soles of production were lost.81 Although it devastated Puno’s indigenous communities, the drought proved fortuitous for the expansion of the catechetical system. Within Andean tradition inclement weather is seen as a punishment by God. Failure to worship properly, conflicts within communities, unbaptized babies, and even miscarriages may be interpreted as evidence of a disequilibrium between the Andean people and God. During the drought, Maryknoll received frequent appeals for prayers and masses. Father Harvey Tessier jokingly recounted in his Maryknoll mission diary that “the report came in from an Indian village that the people had just arrived at the conclusion that Father Thomas J. Higgins is a god.” After suffering nine months of drought, the community asked Father Higgins to come to offer a mass to ask for rain. Father Higgins agreed on the condition that “they promise something to God. He told them, “God is angry with you. That is why you have no rain. He is angry with you because you do not come to catechism class. You must promise to come to doctrine class before I will offer Mass for you.” When the rain came, the priest was said to appear as a god.82 The priests reinforced traditional ideas about a God who punished while at the same time linking those ideas to a practice of faith they approved— one based on catechism, prayer, and the sacraments. The drought also gave Maryknoll missionaries an opportunity to link new practices of Catholicism with material resources. In 1954 the United States passed Law 480, subsequently known as the Food for Peace program, allowing for the transfer of surplus crops as “special gifts” or emergency grants to “third world” countries.83 Catholic Re-

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Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.

This image appeared in the Maryknoll magazine, June 1964, with the caption “Papal volunteer John Leahigh tells a catechist how he can help overcome the communists by exposing the lies the Reds plant among the Indian population.” Courtesy of Maryknoll Mission Archives.

lief Services became one of the central beneficiaries of this program. Through the universal Catholic Church, and especially missionaries, CRS could ensure that food reached remote, impoverished communities. In 1954 CRS reported, “By taking the fullest possible advantage of the American Government surplus food disposal program and as a result of another successful Thanksgiving Clothing Collection, War Relief Services—N.C.W.C. was able during the period covered by this report to ship to various areas of need 134,825,821 pounds of food, clothing and medicine which had a total value of $36,321,125.25.”84

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In 1954, at the same time that the missionaries introduced the catechetical program, CRS established the Cáritas office for distribution of surplus U.S. food in Puno.85 Maryknoll directed the office. Missionaries controlled the distribution of material resources provided by the U.S. Catholic Church and government and offered an efficient means to distribute them to thousands of remote rural communities. Maryknoll’s missions in Puno were in “the heart of the area affected by the drought,” and they quickly turned to catechists to help them with distribution of CRS staples.86 Every catechetical group in the parishes was assigned a day of the week to come in for their share of Cáritas food to distribute to their communities.87 This task enhanced the power of catechists and extended the system of hierarchically linked intermediaries from outlying communities through Maryknoll priests to the United States. It also became a means to promote the development of infrastructure. In exchange for food, communities were encouraged to provide labor to build roads.88 The Peruvian government recognized the value of the catechetical program for reaching indigenous communities. In 1957 the government announced that it would provide a $200 monthly subsidy to the catechetical program if the catechists would “teach . . . Indians fundamental concepts of hygiene, and how to read and write.” “[It] fits well with our program,” reported Father Charles Girnius, “and the Indians are sure to accept this addition with enthusiasm.”89 This government subsidy covered the entire cost of the catechetical program in Azángaro, estimated in September 1956 to be $150 per month.90 Carmen LaMazza wrote in the priests’ diaries, “Because of the high percentage of people who cannot read or write and because circumstances make it impossible for them to go to school, the catechists have taken over the job of teaching them. We receive the exercise books and charts from the government and, in turn, give them to the catechists who in their turn trudge off into the hills with them. Ordinarily, the classes are coupled with the doctrine classes.”91 The Peruvian government grafted its programs onto those initiated by the foreign Maryknoll missionaries and was thus able to extend its reach to outlying communities through church networks. This relationship reinforced a history of cooperation between the Peruvian church and state, but it did not strengthen the state.

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In 1961 the Maryknoll priests initiated a plan to open radio schools, like those in Colombia described at the Lima Methods Conference in 1954. Maryknoll built Radio Onda Azul (Blue Wave) in Puno. By 1962 catechists were distributing transistor radios in the campo (countryside), where head catechists prepared to teach “Religion, Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic” in small schools stocked with a “radio, crucifix, flag, and text books.”92 Like every other project Maryknoll seemed to touch in Puno, the radio schools became an extraordinary success and attracted national and international attention. Father Kearns, known for the range of his ideas and his enthusiasm, announced, “the Peruvian government has already granted official acceptance of all marks of future students. The magic words: The Maryknoll Fathers!”93 A few years down the line Maryknoll priests would regard the reputed success of the radio schools as an exaggeration and abandon the project. Maryknollers developed a reputation for dedication, efficiency, and ingenuity. In 1961 Charles Bowles of the U.S. State Department and James Loebe, U.S. ambassador to Peru, visited Puno in a “Hercules U.S. Force plane from Lima with a large party of officials to inaugurate the food for peace program and to see [the] radio schools, both under the able direction of the Pastor of San Juan, Father Robert Kearns.”94 In 1962 Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, was scheduled to visit the Maryknoll radio schools and other programs on his way to La Paz but was preempted when the town prefect rushed him off to La Paz. Questioning Success The catechetical system, which allowed the missionaries to reach thousands of outlying communities with monolingual Aymara or Quechua speakers, was at the heart of the missionaries’ success in rural Puno. Yet by 1961, less than a decade after it started, some clergy were already questioning the efficacy of the catechists. Father Anthony Macri lamented, “After being in parish work for four years, I’m beginning to realize that we or at least I have been taking too much for granted. The majority of the Catechists are very poorly prepared. . . . Some of them have been teaching for a year or more and it was thought that they knew at least the fundamentals. I found that some of them could

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hardly pass a test for First Communion.”95 Worse, it seemed, the catechists’ translations of doctrine threatened to promote more heresies than they eliminated. Father Richard Frank recounted a sick call to a woman who wanted to marry her common-law husband before she died. Her husband was a practicing Adventist, so the priest began with a renunciation of heresies and called upon the volunteer catechist to translate for the Quechua-speaking woman. “When I got to the part where she was to acknowledge the two natures (human and divine) in Christ,” Father Frank said, “the catechist, who didn’t know much Spanish, said to her in Quechua, ‘I believe that Christ was both a man and a woman.’” “Perhaps she was believing in more heresies when we finished than what she had been believing before we started,” concluded the frustrated priest.96 Indeed, allowing indigenous people to introduce prayer, doctrine, and catechism also granted them control and allowed them to translate in terms that conformed with indigenous traditions even if they conflicted with official Catholic doctrine. For Andean people, gender was fluid; there was no rigid dichotomy between male and female. Instead, deities embodied both genders, which together created a unified whole.97 The Quechua catechist’s translation fit perfectly with indigenous beliefs, but it violated foundational Roman Catholic precepts. Maryknollers increasingly began to wonder how many points of their doctrine were being changed by their faithful intermediaries. Even Father Verhoeven, whose enthusiasm for the efficiency of the catechetical program sometimes blinded him to its limitations, acknowledged that “one of the dangers early Spanish missionaries feared in use of Indian catechists was doctrinal error creep[ing] into teaching.” He quickly dismissed this concern, however, asserting that “there is not much danger of that today, since we have better checking on catechists and their teaching in outlying districts due to pickup trucks, and weekly or biweekly pilot meetings. Hired catechists [are] better trained, constantly visiting the different settlements to check teaching of volunteer catechists.”98 In practice, though, it was very difficult for the priests to make this determination, since the catechists effectively controlled them. When priests arrived at the outlying communities, it was catechists

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who ushered them from place to place and then sent them on their way. Father Robert Hoffman, one of the most dedicated Maryknoll priests in Puno, recounted a visit to a community to offer a fiesta mass. As typically happened, after mass he was escorted to the home of the fiesta sponsor, where in isolation from the community he was served a meal. As he ate, he glanced out the window and saw a pile of rocks and coca leaves and a bottle of alcohol. At the time he thought it was interesting but did not investigate what he later came to believe had been an Andean religious rite the purpose of which he would never learn.99 The priests were shielded from indigenous practices they might deem pagan, and the communities were thereby protected and allowed to maintain their religious practices while gaining access to Maryknoll spiritual and material resources. The clergy enjoyed very little direct interaction with community members, so they could not determine what they knew or did not know of Catholic prayer and doctrine. But more than uncertainty came from the system of mediation. Clergy were alienated from communities. There is not a single account in the Maryknoll priests’ diaries for Puno of a conversation between a priest and either a catechist or a community member. Father Arsenault, who dismantled Puno’s Catechetical School in 1967, lamented that the catechetical model promoted an image of the church as “a ‘religious service station’ ” and reduced the priests’ role in this service station to that of “a professional like the patron or king.”100 Following the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council and the CELAM Medellín meeting in 1968, when Maryknoll clergy began to seek more meaningful practices of faith, this limitation became the focus of considerable concern. The priests and sisters wanted to participate in the spiritual life of indigenous communities. To do so, they needed direct access to them, which meant displacing their intermediaries. In the short term the catechetical system made it possible for Maryknoll missionaries to gain access to remote, monolingual, indigenous communities. It did not, however, in and of itself reestablish the Catholic Church in Peru in a way that satisfied the missionaries’ goals. To fulfill their ultimate goal, Maryknoll had to establish a national clergy and to reach other sectors of society — the middle class and

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people in urban centers. Formal education and credit and housing cooperatives became the central foci of Maryknoll’s mission to the urban middle class.

Maryknoll Priests and Puno’s Middle Class

The San Ambrosio Minor Seminary The Maryknoll priests’ central goal in Latin America, and their reason for being there in the first place, was to strengthen the foundation of the Catholic Church by promoting knowledge of Romanized practices of faith, improving the sacramental life of communities, and developing a Latin American clergy. The Maryknollers (and other foreign clergy) attributed the scarcity of priests in Latin America to the failure of the Spanish during the colonial era to promote “native” clergy and to Liberal assaults on the church in the nineteenth century. The missionaries also blamed local clergy for many of what they saw as the failings of the Catholic Church in Peru. Father Harvey J. Tessier lamented that “many good-living parents forbid their boys to enter the seminary, because of the opinion prevalent in Puno that the priesthood is a very low profession.” He concluded that “it would be unjust to condemn them for the opinion because they have been witnesses for so many years to the scandalous lives led by so great a number of their own native priests.”101 It was true, as Sister Maria Rubina remembered and as the archives of the bishop of Puno and of the diocese of Moho attest, that priests frequently had families and many drank excessively. Yet Sister Pauline Frei described the few priests who remained in Puno as “wonderful old men you know who lived out their whole lives at a level that we couldn’t even imagine.”102 In fact, while Maryknoll priests condemned clergy in Puno for their “scandalous lives,” they overlooked the changes Maryknoll made to survive in the department. The Maryknollers’ first decade in Puno was something of a disaster because the priests could not tolerate conditions that Peruvian clergy (many of Spanish origin) had endured for a lifetime. Within a few years Maryknoll built houses and convents in

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each parish of the Juli prelature that looked as if they had been lifted directly from parishes in the midwestern and northeastern United States and dropped into the highlands of Puno. Woodburning fireplaces (in a region above the tree line), hot showers, washing machines, heaters, electric generators, and later electric blankets made the missionaries’ lives extraordinarily comfortable and a striking contrast to those of the average Puneño priest, not to mention the average Puneño. The official Maryknoll policy of mandating three priests in each parish and a one-month altitude leave after six months’ labor were simply impossible for local clergy. Not only did they suffer a scarcity of priests, but they also had no economic resources. Local clergy lived on the stipends they received from parishioners for providing mass and sacraments. While Maryknollers condemned local priests for charging for baptism, marriage, confession, last rites, and mass and while clergy did exploit indigenous people, the reality was that they also had to find resources to survive. Moreover, in the terrible isolation of some of the highland communities, where clergy might be the only Spanish speakers in the community, many succumbed to alcoholism (as did many Maryknollers, though this point was never discussed openly). Although it was not their intention, the programs and policies that Maryknoll priests introduced during the 1950s and 1960s directly threatened the livelihood of Peruvian clergy in the department of Puno. By offering free services or reducing the price (indigenous people often insisted on paying something), Maryknoll undermined the economic well-being of local clergy. By introducing a catechetical system that diminished the role of priests and became inextricably linked to Maryknoll and the provision of economic resources, Maryknoll delegitimized established clergy. And by introducing alternative practices of Catholicism and condemning those of their predecessors, Maryknoll undermined priests. It perhaps should not be surprising that at least one priest began to spread the rumor that “the Maryknoll priests were ‘foreigners and Protestants, who wanted to eliminate national customs and that the Cardenal in Lima was going to kick them out of the country in a year.’”103 In Puno the number of national clergy declined in direct proportion to the increase in the number of foreign clergy working in the department.

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Maryknoll did not necessarily consider the decline in the number of national clergy working in Puno a loss, since they did not think the clergy were up to standards. Instead, the missionaries hoped to replace these clergy with a new generation of priests who had been trained according to U.S. standards. This goal also conformed with the interests of Bishop Herrera, who assigned Maryknoll missionaries to direct the San Ambrosio seminary and minor seminary as one of their first responsibilities when they arrived in Puno in 1943. Yet after more than a decade of labor Maryknollers were far from achieving their goal. In 1955 Father Tessier announced, “It was finally last December after fully twelve years of work that the first two products of our minor seminary reached the hard-to-attain goal of priesthood.”104 Recounting Maryknoll’s experience in Peru in 1976, Father William J. MacIntire, Maryknoll’s secretary general, speaking of San Ambrosio, noted, “Over the years we had trained eight hundred boys, but only twelve were ordained. As of recently, only six or seven were still in the priesthood, and of those only three were working in the Altiplano.”105 If the catechetical program in Puno succeeded because it resurrected established practices of Catholicism within indigenous communities, then it might be said that the seminary failed because it did not. Maryknoll hoped to prepare and ordain both middle-class mestizos and indigenous men in Puno. Neither group responded enthusiastically. The Maryknoll missionaries’ success among Puno’s middle class had been limited at best. In their first decade of labor the priests still appeared largely excluded by people in Puno’s urban center. Even in 1954, after a decade of work, Father Richard Quinn’s observation regarding sick calls suggested that reception was only a little warmer. “Sick Calls: totaled 47 this month,” he observed. “It was gratifying to see, looking over the sick-call book, that some 10 of these calls were from the [urban] center. It may be that the towns-people are used to seeing us taking off at least once every day for a sick call in the country, and they realize that they are missing out on something . . . or, it may be that they are realizing that we do not accept funeral Masses or vigilias [burial services] for people that could have had the priest in time but neglected to call him.”106 It is notable that there are virtually no references in the Maryknoll diaries to requests by members of the

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middle class for Maryknoll priests. While there were clergy in the urban centers, they do not seem to have been incorporated into community life. The missionaries’ inability to recruit middle-class boys for the priesthood, however, resulted not just from parental opposition and “religious indifference” but also from a conflict between Maryknoll expectations and local realities. The Maryknoll sisters’ diary of 1955 recounted “one requirement for registration [at the San Ambrosio minor seminary] which has proved to be an obstacle is the baptismal certificate. Sad to say, people often postpone a child’s Baptism for eight or nine years until a suitable, i.e. wealthy god-parent can be found.”107 The greatest problem the missionaries confronted among the middle class, however, was that of “legitimacy.” “It is a strict rule that only legitimate or legitimated boys be accepted, following the path taken by practically every diocese and religious order in Peru and found by experience to be a worthwhile restriction,” observed Father Tessier. “But,” he concluded, “it eliminates about 75% of the boys interested since it is about that percentage of people living together who are not married in the Church.”108 To address these obstacles, the Maryknoll priests initiated an extensive vocation push in 1955. The priests scoured schools throughout the department of Puno, searching for potential seminarians. They invited interested boys to visit San Ambrosio, but even this effort elicited few recruits. Although the priests gathered more than three hundred names in one of their marathon recruitment efforts, few entered the school, and of those who did, more than 50 percent dropped out.109 This record seemed not to have changed since 1946, when Father Charlie Cappel recorded, “Another seminarian leaves. This brings the number down from 25 in April to 10 in December. Of those who left, we threw out about half and the other half left of their own accord. We think we have reached a point of great success, when they are frank enough to admit that they were only sent by their parents, and do not want to be priests.”110 Although in its publicity magazine Maryknoll presented the San Ambrosio minor seminary as a means to develop indigenous priests, most of their efforts were devoted to the mestizo middle class. Even

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when they tried to encourage indigenous boys to enter the pre-seminary, their own perceptions and structural conditions severely limited their success. Sister Pauline, who directed the San Ambrosio elementary school from 1954 to 1957, remembered that “one thing the [priests] immediately realized was that the majority of the Altiplano in which they were going to work, the whole surrounding countryside[,] . . . had no schools.” So if the missionaries identified indigenous boys with “natural qualities” to be seminarians, the “first thing we’d have to do was put them through elementary school.” As Father Joseph Lang put it: Because of the lack of education training in the local schools, and because of the lack of a spiritual training in the homes (if they may be called homes), these boys need a very special training peculiar to their environment. Perhaps in the states we would not even think of taking these boys into the seminary, but here in the Altiplano they represent the best of the youth of Puno. They must be given a special training in both the supernatural and natural virtues. For these boys the seminary has become a real home away from their adobe huts; and in the minor seminary they must learn what they should have learned in their homes, or what every American boy knows when he first enters the seminary.111

Sister Pauline remembered, “After a very short time . . . I realized the school was going nowhere. In the first place, the boys that they’d sent in from the different missions, they’d never slept in a bed, they had never known any kind of sanitary facilities. They really didn’t know how to sit at a table and eat. So they had to be trained in everything, not just reading, writing and arithmetic.”112 At the time she had observed of the students, “They are truly Indian. . . . Most of them hardly realize just what the priesthood is. Some met priests for the first time when our Fathers came to their village. They have not finished primary school and must come down from the Seminary each day to our Primary for their classes.”113 In 1957, after just three years, to the great surprise of the Maryknoll sisters and the townspeople of Puno, the elementary school was closed. “The poor people simply do not understand why we are leaving after the short space of three years, just when they have come to appreciate our system of education, but then, neither do

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we!” lamented the Maryknoll sisters’ diarist.114 It was decided that the San Ambrose elementary school was outside the jurisdiction of the new Juli prelature. The closure of the grammar school diminished considerably the possibility of promoting indigenous youth to the priesthood, though the Maryknoll magazine would continue to emphasize that the San Ambrosio minor seminary was training “Indian boys” to become priests. Father Domingo Llanque was among the few, and one of the first, Aymara men from rural indigenous communities who made it through San Ambrosio and to the priesthood. His route was neither direct nor easy, as might be imagined from the Maryknoll clergy’s perception of indigenous boys’ potential as seminarians. Domingo Llanque’s background contributed strongly to his success. His father, a Seventh-Day Adventist, insisted that all of his children attend school. Seven of the nine children in the family went to college, and three earned advanced degrees. Father Llanque’s first memory of a priest in his community was when he was about seven and a man would come to the community in May to bless the fields and the houses. He prayed and sprinkled “holy water” but never entered the house. Later Llanque learned that the man was an impostor. Despite this experience and his family’s devotion to Seventh-Day Adventism, Llanque chose the priesthood, creating considerable conflict in his family. Despite his misgivings, Llanque’s father agreed to accompany him to the Maryknoll priests’ house to inquire about attending the San Ambrosio minor seminary. They arrived at the house in what Father Llanque later described as typical clothing of the campo and in hygienic conditions that he believed the Maryknoll priests did not consider up to standards. The priests refused to allow Llanque to attend the San Ambrosio minor seminary. Instead, they told him to attend the Salesian school, a trade school for indigenous boys designed to promote acculturation, and to return when he completed his studies and learned Spanish. Father Llanque’s father, justifiably angry, told his son to forget the priesthood and to attend San Carlos, the public high school, but the young Llanque persisted. After attending the Salesian school, Llanque finished high school at San Ambrosio. He received a grant from U.S. Cardinal Richard Cushing, a strong supporter of mission to Latin America, to study in

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Boston for six years — an education he described as “straightforward. You follow certain lines, do the work, and you’re fine.” In 1967 Domingo Llanque returned to Puno as a priest, working first in Huancané and then moving to Ilave in January 1968. He was told at the time that he was “wasting his talent” by returning to the altiplano. Years later Llanque recounted that mestizos’ immediate response to him was, “What can an Indian teach us?” Llanque’s theological training had been in English, so all the terminology and ideas were in this language rather than Spanish. He also spoke Spanish with something of a “gringo” accent, so he had to work on his Spanish in order to preach and communicate orally and in writing. At first, Puno’s mistis tested him, pushing him to answer questions and challenging his responses. Peruvian clergy, Father Llanque recounted, had the most trouble because he did not fit any of their categories. He was Aymara but also a priest. He spoke Aymara but also English. He spoke Spanish but with a gringo accent. Having studied at a seminary in Boston, he learned what he described as “democracy.” He behaved differently. One priest said to him, “Domingo, we don’t know how to communicate with you. You’re not Spanish. You’re not a gringo, but you act like a gringo. Most clergy sit quietly during their first years of service, but you speak up.” His education in the United States led to what Father Llanque described as a freer expression of self. At the same time, having studied in the United States granted him a certain prestige. Moreover, he had the support of the foreign clergy who dominated the altiplano —Maryknoll in Juli, French clergy in Ayaviri, Spanish clergy in Cuzco, the U.S. St. James Society in Apurímac.115 Father Llanque did not immediately fit into the Andean world either. In Quechua and Aymara communities people were surprised that Llanque retained his indigenous identity. He was not the first Aymara priest, but he was the first to eschew an assimilationist model of the priesthood. He spoke Aymara to people and performed mass in Aymara. Initially people said he could not be a priest because if he were he would say mass in Latin or Spanish. They concluded that he was merely a catechist. Eventually people recognized Llanque as a priest. Establishing a “native” or “national” clergy was essential to Maryknoll’s vision of its work in Peru. At the Lima Methods Conference

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in 1954 they were almost matter-of-fact, assuming that this would be a “natural” outcome of their labor. It is our idea that these large parishes in the Altiplano serve as centers since there are several possible parishes around these larger centers. As each parish is developed it can be divided into relatively smaller parishes to be directed by Maryknoll priests with newly ordained national priests. As the native seminarians are ordained they may serve two or three years in a Maryknoll parish as curates, learning parochial organization. They can be given a parish near the large or center parish. Thus they will have contact with the Maryknoll priests with whom they can share their problems, visit, and have what has been a serious lack for the national priests, priestly companionship. In the undated future these centers can be turned over to the best of the Maryknolltrained national clergy and these can carry on the same system of teaching their younger confreres the manner of directing a parish. This is, of course, looking far into the future but it is the goal we have in the Peru mission.116

In reality, the San Ambrosio minor seminary served mainly as a school for Puno’s middle-class boys who were seeking opportunities for advancement in the secular world rather than a means to create a local clergy. In 1969, when Maryknoll began to reconsider its mission in Puno, it closed San Ambrosio, perhaps accepting at last what Father Tessier had observed more than a decade earlier: “An onlooker, after consider[ing] all of this [the challenges Maryknoll confronted] and speaking in a human fashion, would say that the seminary is a disproportionate effort on our part and so should be de-emphasized.”117

The Credit and Housing Cooperative Movements

Cooperatives introduced in the 1950s expanded the missionaries’ influence among the urban middle class. Credit and housing cooperatives relied on the principles of economic cooperation and shared governance

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by cooperative members. Each cooperative associate contributed a monthly fee, creating a pool of money that could be loaned to members. Cooperative associates formed governing boards, determined who received loans, did the accounting, and selected investments. The governing principle was to be that the cooperative operated for the common good of the community rather than for profit. All profits would be reinvested in the cooperative and the community. As Father James McNiff, a passionate advocate of the cooperatives at the Lima Methods Conference, explained, “The greatest aims of the Cooperative Movement [are] to teach the individual his place in society to co-operate with others for his own good, and so bring about a solid community spirit which is an invaluable aid for the promotion of religion.”118 Lima’s leading newspaper, El Comercio, described cooperatives as the most effective form to enable small industrialists, agriculturalists and merchants to compete with the huge capitalist businesses in the world market. This form of democratic association is the most powerful barricade against unrestrained/voracious capitalism on the one hand and destructive egalitarian Communism on the other. Each Cooperative is a school of civic culture and human fraternity, where democracy is exercised, savings and economy are practiced, honor and labor are exalted, and mutual aid and cooperation among all members are stimulated; that is to say an eminently social work is realized.119

In addition to offering a model for Christian community life embodying the principles of the Catholic social encyclicals, Maryknoll priests hoped that cooperatives would address one of the other challenges they confronted in Latin America, female dominance in the church. In 1955, Maryknoll magazine published an article entitled “Why LatinAmerican Men Avoid the Church.” The author, Father Albert Nevins, a key figure in Maryknoll mission to Latin America who wrote extensively about the region, described two model parishes in which men returned to the church through extracurricular activities: social and sports activities and credit cooperatives. A model parish in Santiago was described as one “in which men play the dominant role. Men have the exclusive management of the flourishing credit union. They com-

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pose the editorial staff of a vigorous parish weekly newspaper. They have their own dialogue Mass on Sundays. In short, the men are the leaders of the parish. They feel they belong.” This model of male belonging was contrasted with the horror of female dominance: “Attempts to bring the men back to the practice of their Faith have met the stumbling block that the man does not want to be associated with a crowd of pious women. He does not want to be ordered around by women, or feel that he is dependent on their initiative.”120 Cooperatives offered a way to draw men into the parish as leaders, thereby reinforcing the patriarchal structure of the church and society. In many ways credit and housing cooperative movements in Peru served as counterparts to the catechetical system. While the catechetical system addressed Quechua and Aymara communities, credit and housing cooperative movements addressed the urban middle class. In the longer term, this division ensured that most economic resources went to the middle class, and rural communities received token aid. The emphasis on the middle class was specific to Peru. In Chile Maryknoll’s cooperatives embraced the working class. In Guatemala Maryknoll cooperatives worked almost exclusively with Mayas, undermining ladino (mestizo) dominance in highland indigenous communities similar to Puno’s. By contrast, while Maryknollers presented cooperatives in Peru as a benefit to the rural indigenous populations, they operated primarily in urban centers for the benefit of the middle class. There was a stark contradiction between image and reality. Father Kearns described the introduction of cooperatives as a response to “the urgent need for the Church to tap the richest mines of Peru— the mattresses of the Indians. This referred to the custom among the Indian people to stuff their mattresses with whatever money they earned, keeping it out of circulation, saving it for a rainy day.”121 Most indigenous people in Puno were too poor to have mattresses, much less a stash of money saved for rainy days. Maryknoll magazine described the first cooperative members as “simple Indians[,] . . . people who are unable to read or write[,] . . . people in whom no one believed. These humble people put their savings in the credit unions; they administer those credit unions; they have given almost 12 million dollars in loans, with the bad-loan loss a fantastic one-half of one percent.”122

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When the first credit cooperative was established in the parish of Yunguyo in the Juli prelature in 1960 Father Murray reported, “Word is slowly getting around and we are looking forward to more of the Indians from the campo signing up.”123 The Peruvian press also presented the cooperatives’ success as evidence that “the Indian fulfilled his contracts punctually and honorably.”124 Sister Maria Rubina, whose father was an active member of the San Juan Bautista Parish cooperative founded in Puno in 1955, recounted, however, that cooperatives helped what she described as “second tier mestizos”: urban professionals, including teachers, local merchants, and small landholders. A review of the list of associates for the cooperative of Juli in 1959 reveals that while there were a few selfidentified chacreros, agricultores, and ganaderos, the vast majority of associates were white-collar workers or wage laborers. In only one case does a fingerprint appear in lieu of a signature, suggesting that the associates were all literate, which, in the 1950s, almost always meant mestizo.125 While the 50 sol fee to become a cooperative member appeared modest to people like Sister Maria Rubina’s father, a local teacher and later the mayor of Puno, it represented an entire month’s salary for what El Comercio described as the “average rural worker in Puno,” who earned 600 soles per year.126 The housing cooperatives Maryknoll initiated, which required a monthly payment of 480 soles (nearly a year’s income), were even further out of reach for Puno’s indigenous people.127 Maryknoll Father Daniel McLellan founded the first credit cooperative in Puno in 1955. It had 23 associates and 603 soles in capital. By 1956 there were 1,034 members and 613,890.30 soles. The next year the number of associates more than doubled, to 2,377, with capital of 3,793,517.59 soles. In 1958 Maryknoll started parish credit cooperatives in Azángaro and Huancané and in 1959 in Juli.128 In the same year, at the request of Father McLellan, the Episcopal Assembly introduced an initiative to form parish credit cooperatives and established a central office of cooperatives. “In 1958 thirty-four priests from 14 Archdioceses, Vicariates, and Prelatures attended the introductory course in Credit Cooperatives given by Father Dan in the Catechetical School of Puno.”129 By 1959 the number of credit unions in Peru

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had increased from one (Maryknoll’s in Puno) to 112, of which 50 were operated by parishes.130 Like the catechetical movement, the cooperative movement spread like wildfire from the department of Puno to the rest of the country because it responded to the needs of the people and of the Peruvian and U.S. governments. Credit cooperatives provided small loans to individuals and businesses, responding to a desperate need in the country, where efforts to promote industrialization meant that money was channeled to large business. Cotler reports that as foreign interests came to dominate Peruvian banking the number of small loans available was reduced dramatically. Most loans were provided to foreign interests engaged in industrialization.131 In April 1959 the Central Office became the Peruvian Credit Union League in Lima and Father McLellan was named managing director.132 Peru’s credit cooperatives were soon incorporated into CUNA, the international federation of cooperatives headquartered in Wisconsin, making them eligible for international financing. Father McLellan placed the Peruvian Catholic Church and, not incidentally, himself at the center of the entire cooperative movement in the country. Peru’s Episcopal Assembly reported with evident pride that “the leadership of the Federation . . . is in the hands of the Church, and already the Central Office is the only place where truly efficient technical assistance is offered to the nation.”133 The Assembly concluded that the Central Office “had placed Peru’s Credit Cooperatives at the head of the South American movement. . . . People from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Ecuador came to Lima to study at the main offices [of the National Federation of Credit Cooperatives].”134 “An observation team of the United Nations praised the development of the Cooperative movement and described it as one of the best, if not the best, social programs they had encountered in our continent.”135 While credit cooperatives provided assistance to individual members, housing cooperatives addressed one of the country’s most pressing needs created by urbanization. In 1959 Father McLellan developed the first housing cooperative in Puno, where he had plans drawn up for seventy-two low-cost cooperative houses. The price was $1,800. Purchasers were to pay off this cost over a period of 13 years 3 months

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at 480 soles per month ($18 per month).136 In a talk presented at the First Reunion of Interamerican Savings and Loans in 1963, Father McLellan reported that “in Peru 54% of families living in metropolitan areas need new housing; 25% of these families live in houses that require rehabilitation. Only 11% live in adequate housing. More than 10% of the population of Lima live in barriadas, in subhuman conditions.”137 McLellan recognized that the cooperative model offered a means of ameliorating the housing problem but only if the cooperatives could get long-term loans. Maryknoll’s success in Peru placed the cooperative movement in an ideal position to benefit from new U.S. programs designed to promote development in Latin America. In 1959 President Dwight D. Eisenhower introduced the Act of Bogotá, which gave birth to the InterAmerican Development Bank and a fund for social development in Latin America.138 The act outlined plans for promoting multilateral development and was a precursor to the Alliance for Progress.139 In 1960 the NCWC-LAB was established, and Maryknoll Father Considine was named the first director. Considine immediately initiated a dialogue with his counterpart, James Norris, director of Catholic Relief Services, to determine how Catholic institutions could gain access to resources provided by the Act of Bogotá to promote programs in Latin America. Considine suggested to Norris, “It would appear that we should make remote plans for the establishment in Latin American countries of properly structured organizations that strive to secure substantial sums for operations in given individual countries. You and I should, I think, take the first steps in proposing which such entities should be initiated and guided by Catholic Relief Services and which might be initiated by the Latin American Bureau.”140 Both the InterAmerican Development Bank and the International Cooperation Administration seemed to offer potential sources of funding for Catholic projects. Father Considine noted, “One factor important to both phases of the aid program, warranting mention here, is that all proposals should have at least the assent, but preferably the support, of the government of a particular country involved.”141 Maryknoll’s established history of relations with the Peruvian government placed the missionaries in an ideal position to benefit from

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the proposals laid out in the Act of Bogotá and at the same time provide a means by which the U.S. government could develop its programs. The cooperative project initiated by Father McLellan benefited directly from this new development in U.S. relations with Latin America. Father McLellan reported: With the establishment of the National Housing Foundation (precursor to the present Bank of Housing of Peru) in May of 1961, the Inter-American Development Bank initiated the paperwork for two requests for credit totaling one million dollars for the Mutual “El Pueblo” and the Central Credit Cooperative of Peru, Ltd. The contract of credit with the Central Credit Cooperative of Peru was signed the 27th of October, 1961; the first deposit was received in February of 1962 — $300,000.00. Last week we received the second deposit of $250,000.00. Part of the initial deposit of $300,000 has been used by the Credit Cooperatives outside of Lima to give 184 houses to Peruvian families and to grant 75 home improvement loans. The loan contract with the Mutual “El Pueblo” was signed the 1st of May, 1962, and the first deposit of $200,000 was received almost at the end of September. These $200,000 have been used in their totality to put 89 Peruvian families in their own homes. In this way, the Alliance for Progress, by means of laudable banking systems, like that of BID, have put 273 families in homes. Both loans were guaranteed by the Peruvian government; feeling this was a laudable example of support for a private association on the part of the government. For this, our most profound and sincere gratitude to the Peruvian government, whose attitude we hope will serve as an example to other governments of the sister countries of América.142

The credit and housing cooperative movements thus responded to a series of needs. The Peruvian middle class in urban centers seeking loans and housing gained access to these crucial resources. The Peruvian government, seeking a means to provide support without expending money, gained a source of technical support, organization, and loans. And the U.S. government, seeking a means to ameliorate conditions in Latin America so as to prevent revolution, found local brokers

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(Maryknoll missionaries) who had established relations and could direct projects. Local lore has it that Maryknoll’s new status brought Father McLellan, not short on confidence, into quiet conflict with local U.S. and Peruvian officials. According to one famous story, when Attorney General Robert Kennedy visited Peru, Father McLellan sat next to him on a private jet. Just before landing, where the U.S. ambassador, a nemesis of the cooperative priest, was to meet and greet Kennedy, Kennedy and McLellan plotted a small joke. Kennedy suggested that McLellan disembark first, greet the ambassador, and then introduce him to his “good friend” Bobby Kennedy. On another occasion during a meeting of Latin American cooperative leaders held in Peru, when the U.S. ambassador failed to organize an encounter with the Peruvian president, Father McLellan stepped in and with a single phone call to the president’s secretary scheduled the meeting.143 Despite their relatively small numbers, the clergy’s control over important projects in Peru enabled them to establish a powerful presence in the country. The cooperative movement in Peru survived Maryknoll and became so much a part of national society that people forgot its Catholic origins. In the 1980s, during a period of skyrocketing inflation when many cooperatives entered into crisis, articles began to appear in El Comercio reminding people of the origins of the movement. One such article published in 1988 reported, “It is a little known fact that the credit cooperative movement had its origins in Peru through the Catholic Church, which decided through the parishes to provide direct support for the formation of these entities. Today, after a quarter of a century, these cooperatives no longer have a direct relationship with the parishes, but they conserve some knowledge of those who initially supported them.”144 Even as knowledge of the origins of the movement surfaced during the crisis, reporters overestimated the degree of autonomy the cooperatives enjoyed, presenting them as exclusively popular movements. One enthusiastic report declared, “Credit cooperatives never received any aid whatsoever from governments since their foundation in the decade of the 1950s. It is precisely this fact that explains their success, because not having received any money or subsidy whatsoever, the cooperative members saw the need of developing an authentic cooperative force: mutual aid and

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individual initiative.”145 The cooperatives did, of course, receive assistance from the Peruvian and U.S. governments, and this assistance made their early labor possible on a large scale.

The Maryknoll Sisters

While the Maryknoll Fathers took center stage in Peru, the Maryknoll sisters who arrived in the country in 1951 acted as auxiliaries. Maryknoll sisters were meant to provide services as manifestations of Christian charity and as means to draw people to the church, where priests would offer the sacraments that guaranteed salvation. Sisters’ subordination within the patriarchal structure of Maryknoll, the Catholic Church, and Peruvian society made them inherently less powerful than priests. But within their subordinate positions the sisters also enjoyed considerable autonomy. They served as teachers, social workers, and medical providers. These roles brought them into people’s lives and introduced them to a distinct social reality. Sisters’ unique roles placed them at the center of some of the most progressive Peruvian Catholic movements emerging in the 1950s and 1960s, especially in urban Lima, where Peruvian clergy dominated an increasingly progressive Catholic Church. The Sisters in Puno The Maryknoll sisters arrived in Puno in 1953, when they were assigned to the San Ambrosio minor seminary. In 1957 the minor seminary was closed abruptly, and to their surprise the sisters were transferred to Azángaro. A few years later, in 1961, sisters were assigned to Juli, the capital of Maryknoll’s new prelature. In Juli and Azángaro the sisters organized education and health programs. The diary accounts from the period suggest that the work was slow and tedious. “Looking back on the year, our second in Juli,” observed the Maryknoll sisters’ diarist, “it is hard to see progress, and we can only be grateful that God looks to our efforts and intention and has His own measuring stick for advancement.”146 A year later, the sisters numbers had increased to

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four, the building of their convent was near completion, and they expanded their work to include service in a government medical clinic. But the tone of their diary account still suggested incremental progress, in stark contrast to the lightning efficiency of the priests’ catechetical system and cooperatives. The diary account for 1964 states, “Who can name a measuring rod for a successful year in a particular convent? There are values that cannot be measured by the eye and God’s eternal values may never find their way into words.”147 The sisters’ mission to Azángaro seemed to progress more rapidly. Yet even here their work and living conditions were difficult and their successes hard to measure. Sister Pauline’s description of Azángaro hinted at the isolation and provincial pace of life in the small town, which had “a general store with sundry articles catering mostly to the Indian trade, a few dark holes-in-the-wall each carrying the same stock in trade: Nescafe, cooking oil, and a few other staples. [On the corner a] drug store, rather well-stocked as most drug stores are in Peru. The post-office, whose very important function is to keep us in touch with the outside world, is a small, dark room where somehow or other they manage to receive and dispatch mail.” The only break in what seemed a dull routine came on Sunday, when “a metamorphosis occurs. At dawn the cobblestone plaza becomes a beehive of activities. Trucks roll in with their human cargo who come either to sell or be sold something. Every available spot is covered with men, women and babies (lots of the last-mentioned) and wares.”148 The isolation of the town seemed greater to Sister Pauline because the priest who invited the sisters, “a dynamic man with great plans,” was almost immediately assigned to another region. His replacement quickly fell to alcoholism, leaving Sister Pauline to her own devices. She immediately set to work on a plan to teach the governmentmandated religion classes in public schools. Like the Maryknoll fathers who worked through existing indigenous intermediaries, Sister Pauline worked through local authorities. The directors of each of the public schools became her intermediaries with the local schoolteachers.149 Sister Pauline developed syllabi using the guidelines of the national government and incorporating work by a progressive U.S. Catholic sister, María de la Cruz, whom she described as “not locked into the

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Baltimore catechism” and as “breaking into very interesting things.” The Second Vatican Council, she recounted, “didn’t happen by itself,” implying that these small innovations contributed to a more dramatic transformation of the church less than a decade later.150 Each night, in the frigid convent house in Azángaro, where a power failure left Sister Pauline for months without electricity, light, or heat, she worked by candlelight developing lesson plans and translating and copying them on an old mimeograph machine. “We didn’t think of it as hard work,” she remembered, “but it really was awful.” “But,” she continued, “you know, I think it helped me grow. I don’t know if it helped everybody grow. But it helped me grow.” Soon Sister Pauline’s work developed a wider audience as U.S. missioners in Bolivia and other places wrote to her requesting materials. Eventually the sisters in Lima took over the work until it became irrelevant. “It served a purpose,” concluded Sister Pauline. “It’s all part of building up the Kingdom. You don’t know exactly how it fits into the mortar but I never regretted a single experience or anything. I just think that it helps you to remain open.”151 At the same time that Sister Pauline developed syllabi for religion classes in public schools, she also began work in a medical clinic opened by Maryknoll Father John Waldie in the Azángaro parish. Their efforts brought them into direct conflict with the owner of the local pharmacy and the town doctor. Maryknoll Father Charles Murray reported in a letter, written in the usual direct Maryknoll style, to the bishop of Puno, “I hope all goes well in Puno. I’m afraid we have enemies of our clinic. A few days ago I received a notification from the Delegate of Pharmacies of Azángaro, the daughter of Francisco Choquehuanca, demanding that we neither sell nor dispense medicines. Worse, the doctor, Dr. Castro, came to the clinic one day and treated the sister-nurse very badly, saying that she should not treat anyone and that she should give him a complete accounting of every sick person that she’d cared for and a list of all the medicines she had.”152 A week later Father Murray sent an urgent letter to Bishop González Ruiz, asking that he “give authorization today” (underline in original), so that the Maryknollers could get government approval from officials in Lima to run the clinic.153

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The Maryknoll sisters’ medical programs relied on the catechetical network and on links to the Peruvian government and international aid agencies. In 1958, just before the sisters initiated medical work, they reported, “The plan for an overnight stay in Puno turned into a week as we awaited the arrival of Doctor Vintner, the head of SCISP [Instituto Nacional de Salud Pública] in Lima. Medical work in the country areas of the parish will depend partly on vaccines and medicines that can be procured free of charge from agencies such as SCISP and the Red Cross.”154 Tuberculosis was the most common problem in the region, so the sisters arranged for patients to be sent to doctors in Juliaca, the nearest large town, for treatment. Shortly thereafter the sisters started a vaccination program, with vaccines obtained from SCISP. A different section of the parish was treated each Monday, with meetings arranged by local catechists.155 The national government thus engaged the Maryknoll sisters to provide essential medical services. Medical treatment became inextricably linked with Catholic religious services. “Each Sunday afternoon,” reported the sisters’ diarist, “Sister sets up shop in one corner of the baptistery and after the saving waters are poured, the newborns are inoculated against tuberculosis. Often our trips are made to coincide with the priest’s visit. This means that Father will hear confessions, celebrate Mass and have a meeting with the local catechists. As a result many more people are gathered together, greater numbers are vaccinated and much more medicine sold.”156 The sisters also relied on catechists, “honest, hard-working Indians. . . . [W]herever we go to advise the people about our visits, telling them when and where to assemble. . . . [the catechist] lines up the children, rounds up the adults, and interprets Quechua for us.”157 The support of catechists was especially important in trips to outlying communities, where they prepared and organized the people for the sisters’ arrival. The diarist recorded one such visit as follows: “We left a little before nine and an hour’s truck ride brought us to Janak Sahuacasi which served as today’s base. The catechist and the school-teacher were awaiting us outside the little school house and 37 boys and girls, inside the one dark little classroom. A table was brought outdoors so that we might keep warm in the sunshine while we worked. The chil-

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dren were quiet, obedient, and well-disciplined. Before long, all had received their smallpox vaccination and a holy card, thus in some measure helping the ‘whole man’ body and soul.”158 The sisters’ “triumphs” in religious education and medical care were small and defined more by the opportunity to share with people than by quantifiable successes. Sister Pauline recounted a discussion one night after she showed a film on the life of Mary Magdelen. During the discussion she emphasized the fact that God forgives the prostitute and asked the group gathered in the parish center who was responsible for prostitution, a common feature of life in Azángaro. When someone responded, “The woman,” she simply continued asking who was responsible. Although no one responded, the silence indicated in her view that there was a recognition that the men of the town who looked for and paid the women carried responsibility. In that discussion, she felt, there was a public acknowledgment of an unspoken social reality. Sister Peg Hennessey, a nurse who later worked in health promoter programs modeled on the catechetical program and designed to teach indigenous men how to provide basic medical care to their communities, shared similar memories of small encounters. Once when she and another sister were in the campo to give vaccinations, they saw some women harvesting potatoes. They asked to help. Across the hill they saw some men in suits walking toward them. The women said something about officials, implying that they were useless. Everyone laughed.159 It was just a moment of sharing. Within the medical work itself, the sisters often emphasized individual cases, like that of “Enrique,” “a barefoot Indian boy of six, winsome and lovable, but something was wrong with his right eye. It protruded so far that he could not close the lid over it. His father said he had been that way for two months. No one in San José knew what to do about it. No one knew how to go about getting help from outside.” The sisters arranged for the boy to travel to Arequipa, where he had surgery and recovered full vision. The family expressed their gratitude with a freshly slaughtered sheep. “This and many similar cases where we have opportunities, both spiritual and corporal, to love God in our neighbor, make us grateful to be here,” concluded the sister.160

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As women religious, Maryknoll sisters were not expected, or for that matter permitted, to triumph. However, the kinds of labor the sisters performed brought them into close (though still not intimate) relationships with people. Moreover, because they were subordinate to priests and did not control the sacraments essential for community well-being, sisters did not threaten people and thus were seen as more accessible than priests. The Sisters’ Social Services in Lima’s Barriadas In urban Peru, where mass migration, urbanization, and industrialization promoted dramatic transformation, the situation was distinct. Although sisters offered the same kinds of services, especially as teachers and social workers, the particular needs of the city created distinct opportunities for them even in the 1950s. As was true in rural Puno, Maryknoll sisters’ roles in Lima drew them into community life in unique ways. They also had more opportunities there to work with Peruvian clergy. Sister Rose Dominic (Marie L. Trapasso), who became a key figure in social work in Lima and ultimately served as director of Cáritas, offers an example of the way Maryknoll sisters became embedded in the country’s religious social structure during a moment of dramatic change.161 Here also Maryknoll sisters were meant to serve as auxiliaries to the priests. The largest group of sisters worked in the parochial school of the St. Rose of Lima Parish, directed by Father John “Red” Lawler. The parish and school were in a middle-class neighborhood transformed by urbanization and migration. The school, where Maryknoll sisters and lay Peruvians taught classes in English, facilitated social mobility among the middle class.162 Following the Second Vatican Council, Maryknoll sisters became increasingly dissatisfied with their work in the school and ultimately withdrew from it, turning to work among the poor over the protests of Father Lawler. Yet even in the 1950s signs of resistance and of a desire to work more directly with the poor were evident. Sister Rose Dominic was arguably the most visible representative of the dissatisfaction that would lead Maryknoll sisters to abandon

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St. Rose of Lima. In October 1954, just months before the founding of Lima’s first recognized barriada, Ciudad de Dios, Sister Rose Dominic started a social service center in the St. Rose of Lima Parish.163 She had studied social work in the United States before entering Maryknoll and worked with Catholic Charities in Niagara Falls. She carried that experience with her Peru. In fact, she became a Maryknoll sister to incorporate what she described as “a spiritual dimension to a life of service undertaken abroad.”164 The St. Rose of Lima social service center brought Sister Rose Dominic into the center of the Peruvian church’s efforts to respond to what the theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez described as the “explosion of the poor.”165 The establishment of barriadas in urban Lima had brought the country’s indigenous rural poor to the attention of the national church and the state in an unprecedented way. Sister Rose Dominic’s experience highlights the less visible role women religious played as intermediaries between the poor and the Peruvian Catholic Church and aid institutions. It suggests that women religious, perhaps because of their subordinate status, the nature of their work in service, and their ability to negotiate distinct spaces, may have enjoyed a unique position among clergy in Peru. The breadth of Sister Rose Dominic’s networks reflected her personal ingenuity but also the nature of work of women religious that brought them into contact with a broad range of people — from the wealthiest to the poorest. In 1954, when she reported on the founding of the social service center, Sister Rose Dominic recounted that she received immediate assistance from “Señorita Maria Rosario Aráoz, president of the Lima School of Social Service and dear friend of Santa Rosa parish.”166 Aráoz, a key figure in the Peruvian Catholic Church, “arranged that sister would visit the important and interesting social service centers and other institutions that would be available for sister’s use in the future.”167 These visits, in turn, immediately put Sister Rose Dominic in touch with national and foreign Catholic clergy. Among those she met were members of a newly formed group of religious, the Little Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, who in 1954, more than a decade before the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council, were wearing lay clothes and devoting their religious lives entirely to social work.

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Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.

Left to right: Sister Rose Timothy (Mary Bernadine Galvin) and Sister Rose Dominic (Marie L. Trapasso). Courtesy of Maryknoll Mission Archives.

She also met Peruvian Jesuits, who would be a key force in liberation theology and progressive Catholicism. The creation of the social service center at the St. Rose of Lima Parish corresponded with the establishment of Ciudad de Dios and the influx of Food for Peace under the auspices of CRS. Sister Rose Dominic became embedded in these worlds. She participated in a meeting held by the papal nuncio and attended by representatives of all the parishes in Lima to determine the most effective means of distributing powdered milk and other foodstuffs.168 Just as Maryknoll became actively involved in distributing food through the catechetical system in Puno, clergy in Lima facilitated distribution of food to the poor in

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the city. A few months later, when Sister Rose Dominic requested a replacement barrel of powdered milk from the nuncio, she instead received two barrels.169 After just a year of work the National Catholic Welfare Conference, responsible for the food sent to the nuncio, was surprising Sister Rose with massive quantities of food. When in July 1956 she sent one of the parish stalwarts who owned a station wagon to pick up a supply of food from the NCWC Social Service Office, he was surprised to find a truckload of food, including nine hundredpound bags of rice, beans, and corn. When “Mr. Harry Ravissin, representative of Catholic Relief Services, overseas division of the NCWC, came to Peru to set up the country distribution of milk and food products donated by the US government and channeled through NCWC,” he immediately visited Sister Rose Dominic. When an advisory committee was formed by Ravissin to develop a Cáritas office in Lima, Sister Rose Dominic was on it. The committee organized distribution and facilitated the creation of “milk” kitchens, inaugurated jointly by the Catholic Church and the American embassy in May 1959, to distribute breakfast to children in the most impoverished areas.170 While Sister Rose Dominic’s work in food distribution brought her into close contact with the NCWC and its Protestant counterpart, CARE, the social service center also facilitated relations with both poor and elite women in Lima. In November 1955 a committee of wealthy Peruvian women “who support and direct the Union de Obras, which is a group of social services, such as day care centers, trade schools, and social work centers[,] . . . came to offer to give a monthly check of 1000 soles to our social service center, in order to augment the work we can do in the parish,” Sister Rose Dominic reported. “This . . . most generous gift will almost double the monthly allowance the office has been receiving.”171 The gift also seemed to have put the sister’s social service center on the radar of Peru’s elite women. Soon she was reporting on Campo Abierto (Open Horizons), a program of informal classes organized by a wealthy widow in her home to “enrich the lives and interests of other society women whose world and views were strictly limited to parties, dinners, and benefits.”172 This enrichment was to come through both informal classes held in the woman’s house and parish charitable work. By 1958 Peruvian and American women, even

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non-Catholics connected with the U.S. embassy, were contacting Sister Rose Dominic to discuss their volunteer work in poor areas of the city.173 At the same time that Sister Rose Dominic was ascending through the hierarchy of religious charity, her close friend and collaborator, Maria Rosario Aráoz, was also making her mark. In 1955 Aráoz resigned from her position as director of Peru’s National School of Social Work and embarked on organizing a new Catholic school. By 1956 she was directing the Office of Catholic Education, responsible to Lima’s archbishop, Juan Landázuri Ricketts. In 1957 Aráoz became director of the archbishop’s Department of Social Assistance. In 1958 the pope awarded her the Benemerenti Medal for “daring and courage,” having already received papal recognition with the Pro Eclesia et Pontifice medal in 1954. Señorita Aráoz’s status and close collaboration with the archbishop made her a key force in the 1957 creation of the Mission of Lima, which was established to “alleviate the social problems of the over 150,000 souls living in slum areas and the sub-standard housing, and to reach these people on a spiritual level.”174 Sister Rose Dominic attended the meeting at which the Mission of Lima was created and soon became actively involved in it. By 1961 Landázuri, who would soon become a cardinal, had commissioned Sister Rose Dominic and another sister to make a study of the Mission of Lima and Cáritas, which entailed visiting almost every parish in Callao and Lima and drawing up a report and recommendations for the programs.175 Maryknoll Sister Rose Dominic had thus become a central part of the new social pastoral of the Peruvian church, dominated by national rather than foreign clergy. This work in turn brought her into contact with Ivan Illich, who became the controversial critic of the U.S. mission to Latin America and who paradoxically ran the only mission training program for clergy settling in the region. She also knew Fathers Jorgé and Carlos Álvarez Calderón, leaders in the fields of Catholic unions and student organizations. At the same time women from Peru’s elite looked to Sister Rose Dominic for counsel on how to participate in charitable work and as a channel through which to direct their own financial contributions. Finally, Sister Rose Dominic enjoyed intimate contact with Lima’s poorest citizens, leading her and

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Sister Rose Timothy, with whom she worked closely, to eventually take up residence in an impoverished community far in advance of other clergy. At the same time that Sister Rose Dominic entered the heart of the Peruvian Catholic Church’s extensive world of social assistance, Maryknoll priests established the first parish in Ciudad de Dios. With the aid of U.S. Cardinal Francis Spellman, the priests developed the physical structures of the church that offered key meeting places for people in the community. They also introduced catechetical programs, similar to those in Puno, but with the difference that most of the catechists were young people. This difference reflected the context of the barriadas, where fixed indigenous identities from the campo quickly changed. The traditional hierarchies linked to age and marriage disintegrated in the city. Young people, who were best equipped to negotiate the new urban space by mastering Spanish and local social reality, and women became leaders. Maryknollers in Ciudad de Dios guided volunteers in the newly created program Papal Volunteers for Latin America (PAVLA), a pet project of Maryknoll Father Considine. When Peace Corps volunteers began to arrive in Peru, Maryknoll also helped to guide them into appropriate work.

Conclusion

By the late 1950s Maryknoll clergy from the United States had come to play a central role in Peruvian society. Their mission extended from the most remote rural communities of Puno to the urban centers of Puno and Lima and through the barriadas of Lima and Arequipa. The populations of these areas were among the most poorly served by the Peruvian national government. By providing food aid, literacy, and health and hygiene programs to Peru’s poorest communities during a moment of dramatic economic change, Maryknoll missionaries helped to minimize the threat of social upheaval. The Peruvian government engaged the Catholic missionaries to act as an indirect arm of the state. By doing so, they extended the reach of a weak national government to remote highland communities, urban middle classes,

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and newly established urban barriadas. The church and the government thus reinforced each other but did so through the crucial assistance of foreign clergy. At the same time the U.S. government also worked through religious channels, delivering food aid under the auspices of Catholic Relief Services, grafting Inter-American Development Bank loans to Catholic housing and credit cooperatives, and supporting projects through the Alliance for Progress and Peace Corps. By doing so, U.S. foreign aid, which might be resented by Peruvians, came to look like church aid. Maryknoll missionaries by themselves played an important role in Peru because of the way that they became embedded in these distinct programs. As the first U.S. Catholic mission sending organization with one of the longest histories of mission in Peru, Maryknoll played a special role in the country. Moreover, Father Considine’s role as director of the National Catholic Welfare Conference’s Latin American Bureau from 1960 to 1968 ensured that the clergy remained at the center of mission innovations in the region and retained close ties to the U.S. government. Finally, Maryknoll’s history of using publicity as a central component of mission enabled them to disseminate information on changes in the Peruvian and Latin American church. Indeed, the 1950s were a period of dramatic changes in the Catholic Church in Latin America, and in many ways Peru was at the center of these changes. In 1955 the Conference of Latin American Bishops was formed to allow the hierarchy of the region to speak with a common voice, reflecting a development similar to that of the National Catholic Welfare Conference in the United States in the 1930s. In the decade following the Second Vatican Council, CELAM played a crucial role in the development of liberation theology and progressive Catholicism in key regions of Latin America. At the same time in Peru, a core group of dynamic young clergy returned from theological studies in Europe where they were exposed to the most recent and innovative theological and Catholic movements. When they returned to their country they analyzed the social reality through the lens of this experience. Father Gustavo Gutiérrez became the director of La Unión Nacional de Estudiantes Católicos (UNEC), Father Jorgé Álvarez Calderón directed the Juventud Obrera Católica ( JOC), Father Carlos Álvarez Calderón directed the Juventud Estudiantil Católica ( JEC).176

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In the 1950s José Dammert Bellido, later the bishop of Cajamarca, began offering Cursillos de Cristiandad (Short Courses on Christianity) to military officers at the Center for Advanced Military Studies (CAEM). At the same time Peruvian clergy, who in the 1930s had been active in Catholic Action with its emphasis on lay engagement, rose through the ranks of the Peruvian church hierarchy. Dammert in Cajamarca, Landázuri in Lima, Julio González in Puno, Luis Bambarén in Chimbote, and Luis Vallejos Santoni in Cuzco all promoted progressive Catholic movements. The social reality of Peru, and more specifically the “explosion of the poor,” evidenced in mass migration and the creation of barriadas that the national government seemed so ill-prepared to address, further facilitated progressive developments in the church. Yet in many ways these movements were made possible by an overwhelming influx of foreign clergy, of which Maryknoll represented only a small but important part. By 1960 there were 2,400 U.S. missionaries in Peru.177 Clergy from Canada and Europe also poured into the country. By 1964 the poor church of Peru, meaning the dioceses and parishes in the poorest and most remote regions of the country, was overwhelmingly foreign (see Appendix). Although the programs Maryknoll initiated in Peru were innovative in many ways, they were also common to many clergy working in Latin America at the time. As was evident in the Lima Methods Conference of 1954, clergy engaged in mission in the region were sharing knowledge about mission methods and developing similar programs. They could do so because they enjoyed vast economic resources and, in many cases, links to their national churches and governments. Cooperatives, catechetical programs, social service centers, Catholic youth and worker groups, and mission centers were all in place in the most important centers of Peru in the early 1960s, before the advent of the Second Vatican Council. While foreign clergy played a crucial role in providing economic resources and developing networks and programs, national clergy introduced new theology and established links with the most vital Peruvian centers: workers, university students, the government, and the military. Although they had certainly not done so on their own, Maryknoll clergy had become part of a movement that achieved the missionaries’ goal of making the Catholic Church “the influential power

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that it could be.” It certainly could no longer be said, as the missionaries claimed in 1954, that the Peruvian church “furnishes little or no leadership in the secular world of ideas and movements, and more often than not has a purely negative outlook on a given problem with no positive program with which to face a given situation.”178 At least in Peru it seemed that the church was in the vanguard of ideas and actions, with the secular government of the country trailing behind. The Catholic Church in Peru had become linked to the elite, the middle class, the military, university students, workers, and the rural and urban poor. In the 1960s, as a result of the Second Vatican Council and direct work among the poor, the church began to adopt an increasingly “radical” stance demanding that the country undertake necessary reforms to ensure social justice for the poor. At the same time a leftist guerrilla movement began in rural Peru. The military officials who had participated in cursillos and taught the language and theory of social justice of the church found themselves overseeing the violent repression of impoverished people and revolutionary leaders whose ideas may not have seemed entirely foreign. By the end of the 1960s, key sectors of Peru’s elite and middle class had come to recognize that inequitable systems of land tenure and unfair distribution of wealth were barriers to social, political, and economic development in Peru.179 The Peruvian Catholic Church was among the most articulate voices in these critiques of existing social conditions, and it enjoyed the most extensive network among the country’s distinct social, economic, and ethnic groups. In the next decade these conditions allowed the church to ally with a progressive military to oversee a dramatic agrarian reform program that restructured Peru’s land tenure system. The Peruvian church’s powerful progressive presence obscured serious weaknesses in the institution. It depended on the presence of foreign clergy and resources. Its center of power remained Lima, where the Peruvian hierarchy became the dominant voice advocating radical reform. Even as it spoke on behalf of the needy, the Peruvian hierarchy and even Peruvian clergy had very limited engagement in the most impoverished sectors of Peruvian society. The Catholic clerical presence in the destitute rural and urban regions of Peru was overwhelm-

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ingly foreign. And, as Maryknoll’s experience illustrates, the nature of the interaction between clergy and the badly off was often indirect and seemed based as much on an exchange of resources as on a shared foundation in faith. Communities were integrated through hierarchically linked intermediaries, and there was virtually no engagement among distinct communities, which limited the potential for a grassroots social movement. In the long term these weaknesses would contribute to undermining the progressive Church in Peru. But in the short term the combination of a powerful progressive Peruvian church promoted by an articulate hierarchy with direct links to CELAM and a growing force of progressive Latin American clergy, as well as links to the power centers of the military, university, and labor in Lima and indirect links through foreign clergy to the country’s poorest regions, allowed the Peruvian church to become a force behind the most dramatic and in many ways surprising reforms undertaken in Latin America in the twentieth century.

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CHAPTER 4

The Limits of Alliances, 1968–1976

It’s not by chance that the thought of the Church, today representing the highest and purest source of the gospel message, formed in the spirit of Medellín has become wedded with a clear shared presence of contemporaneity with the dawn of the Peruvian Revolution. —Gen. Jorge Fernández Maldonado, 1973, quoted in Jeffrey Klaiber, S.J., La iglesia del Perú

In 1968 General Juan Velasco Alvarado came to power in a military coup that overthrew Peru’s democratically elected president, Fernando Belaúnde Terry. Velasco’s was among the first of the military dictatorships that would dominate Latin America in the 1970s. In rapid succession, the military took power in Brazil (1964), Bolivia (1964), Panama (1968), Uruguay (1973), Chile (1973), and Argentina (1976). But the Peruvian dictatorship was different. Whereas most military regimes in Latin America repressed popular movements, General Velasco claimed to act in the name of the poor. He declared the “Day of the Campesino,” named Quechua an official language of Peru, supported bilingual 145

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education, recognized barriadas, nationalized Peru’s petroleum, fish meal, and banking industries, and transformed Peru’s land tenure system through a radical program of agrarian reform. The Velasco military regime made changes that were achieved only by means of violent revolution in other Latin American countries. One reason for the difference between the Velasco regime and other Latin American military dictatorships is hinted at in General Jorge Fernández Maldonado’s observation, quoted in the epigraph above. Fernández not only recognized the coincidence between the CELAM Medellín meeting and the Peruvian revolution, but he also sought to link military reforms with the ideals of the progressive Catholic Church. The Velasco regime’s reforms were informed and made possible by a mutually reinforcing alliance between the Catholic Church and the military. This alliance was a product of historical tradition and of recent change. In the 1950s progressive Peruvian clergy had offered Cursillos de Cristiandad to military officials to promote Catholic values emphasizing the common good and social justice as articulated in the papal social encyclicals. In the 1960s the Jesuit priest Romeo Luna Victoria, a vocal critic of church complicity in structures of inequality, had begun lecturing at the Center for Advanced Military Studies (CAEM) and the military intelligence school. Many of the government officials in the reformist Velasco regime studied at these institutions during these crucial years.1 The interests of the church and the military in promoting reform dovetailed. Pedro De Guchteneere, a Belgian priest who came to Peru in 1964 and served as director of the Centro de Estudios y Publicaciones (CEP), observed that Velasco helped Peru’s bishops enter more fully into Medellín’s preferential option for the poor.2 And the bishops certainly helped Velasco. A progressive Peruvian hierarchy led by Cardinal Landázuri with the support of Catholic pressure groups such as the National Office of Social Information (ONIS) played a crucial role in garnering public support for the Velasco reforms and helping to overcome cleavages within the military.3 Changes in the church and the military were thus mutually reinforcing: each depended on the other for legitimacy in their service to the country’s oppressed. At the same time, the interests of the poor legitimized the policies of the reformist government and the proclamations of the progressive Peruvian church.

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Even as they radically transformed society, the reforms of the Velasco regime embodied the social contradictions of Peru. The church and the military (Peru’s most hierarchical and authoritarian institutions), traditionally allied to maintain the status quo, together undertook a top-down program of radical reform. The reforms’ legitimacy depended on the perception that they were undertaken for the poor, but the poor had little voice in them. Instead, the perception of popular participation depended on church proclamations, which were legitimized by a presence among the poor that was overwhelmingly foreign. Velasco was vocally anti-imperialist, but foreign clergy dominated the impoverished rural prelatures and vicariates and urban barriadas that theoretically constituted the base of his support. Moreover, the networks foreign clergy had established in rural Peru had helped to weaken the power of hacendados, providing a space for the Velasco reforms by offering the government an alternative means to gain access to communities. In the barriadas foreign clergy had played an analogous role by developing networks and infrastructure that the new progressive government could rely on to institute its reforms. In the longer term these contradictions ensured that even as Velasco implemented radical reforms in the name of the progressive Catholic Church and the poor, some of the foundational structures of society remained unchanged. While many of the largest traditional landed families lost power and authority, especially in southern Peru, because of the agrarian reforms, neither autonomous popular organizations nor political parties filled the vacuum of power. Instead, popular demands were channeled through Catholic structures and those created by the Velasco military government. The church and the military remained the most powerful institutions in the country. Popular organizations depended on these institutions for access to resources, but initially this did not facilitate autonomous political organizing. In fact, in the longer term the Second Vatican Council, liberation theology, and the preferential option for the poor declared by the Conference of Latin American Bishops at Medellín in 1968, which together provided the impetus and rationalization for the Velasco-church reforms, also led to conflict between Peru’s progressive Catholic clergy and the military. As General Velasco engaged in increasingly authoritarian and repressive efforts to promote reform in the name of the poor,

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the church had to choose between supporting a military that proclaimed the interests of the poor and supporting the poor who suffered under the military.4 Repression intensified when General Francisco Morales took power, terminating the “Peruvian Experiment” initiated by Velasco. The bases on which the Velasco reforms were built depended on foreign clergy and the resources they brought to Peru from their countries of origin. In some cases the new appeal of the Second Vatican Council, liberation theology, and the preferential option for the poor led foreign clergy to distance themselves from their countries of origin and to minimize what came to appear to them as paternalistic aid. The invisible church structures on which the Velasco reforms were built thus began to erode at the same time that the military government actively sought to destroy the old structures of power formed by hacendados in key areas of rural Peru. Peru’s reform was built on a hollow base.5 Maryknoll missionaries were at the heart of the changes in the Catholic Church and society in Peru in the 1960s and 1970s. They offer a paradigmatic example of the contradictions inherent in them. As U.S. clergy, the missionaries could not participate directly or publicly in the Velasco reforms, but they played a crucial role in Peru’s progressive Catholic Church. The programs Maryknoll had introduced during the preceding decades contributed to developing a new church with a concern for the country’s rural indigenous and urban poor. Maryknoll’s catechetical program, radio schools, cooperatives, and colegios in Puno, Arequipa, and Lima became models for the Peruvian church and for other foreign clergy. Maryknoll also supported progressive Peruvian clergy. It helped to fund Gustavo Gutiérrez’s Centro Bartolomé de las Casas in Lima, and its Orbis Books, founded in 1971, published A Theology of Liberation and other works by progressive Latin American theologians. But changes in the universal Catholic Church following the Second Vatican Council, in the political culture of the United States following the civil rights and Vietnam War protest movements and the assassination of the country’s most promising progressive leaders, and the advent in Peru of the mutually reinforcing church-military reforms together led Maryknoll to radically transform

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its mission, especially after 1967. The reforms Maryknoll instituted in Peru during the crucial years after the CELAM Medellín conference, but even more in the 1970s, in turn, contributed to a fragmentation of its mission. The number of Maryknoll clergy in Peru declined dramatically in the decade from 1968 to 1978, and the nature of their mission also changed radically. Even as Maryknoll contributed to the Peruvian church’s reputation as a presence among the poor, the missionaries’ work hid contradictions. Although the missionaries worked in Peru’s poorest rural and urban areas, they lived in comfortable Western-style parish houses and convents in urban centers. The cooperatives and colegios presented as a means to aid Peru’s poor and indigenous really served the country’s emerging middle class. Even the catechetical system, which linked missionaries to thousands of remote indigenous communities, seemed something of a sham. Indigenous catechists kept priests at bay and seemed (from the perspective of some Maryknollers) more concerned with economic resources than with spiritual development. In the late 1960s and 1970s Maryknoll sought to resolve these contradictions. They curtailed their work among the middle class, closed the Puno catechetical school, eliminated provision of food aid, withdrew from schools, and distanced themselves from cooperatives. In Puno, the mission focus turned to developing intercultural practices of Catholicism that recognized, respected, and incorporated indigenous practices and beliefs. In urban Lima, the mission focused on barriadas, where the Velasco government engaged Maryknoll networks and depended on U.S. resources. For some, this was the most exciting period of mission as people embraced the changes of the new church. For others, it was a period of deep alienation as their labor of earlier years came to seem discredited. In 1967 Ivan Illich, Jesuit director of the Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC) in Cuernavaca, the major training center for U.S. missionaries slated to go to Latin America, published “The Seamy Side of Charity,” a scathing critique of U.S. mission to Latin America that condemned clergy as little more than unwitting imperialists. Just a year later, in 1968, John Considine, arguably the most important force in U.S. mission to Latin America and in Maryknoll,

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resigned as director of the NCWC-LAB. Following the Second Vatican Council the Maryknoll Society and the Maryknoll sisters held governance meetings that immediately and dramatically introduced a plethora of radical changes. Seminary and convent training changed, the process of selecting mission changed, and even the sisters’ habit changed. Individual missionaries working alone or in groups, with the support of the Maryknoll institution, evaluated their previous labor and tried to redefine their roles. They did so without the Maryknoll center and Father Considine as guiding forces. Whereas in the years before 1968 Maryknoll directed all mission activity, subsequently it served primarily to support individual choice. The process of reformation became a centrifugal force sending regions and individual missionaries spinning into their own orbits, circling around the Maryknoll center. Maryknoll missionaries had more to contend with than changes in the universal and Latin American churches. They also experienced the dramatic changes of the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. The Maryknoll missionaries who settled in Peru in the 1940s and 1950s arrived on the wings of the triumph of the United States in World War II and its seemingly unstoppable global and economic expansion. The American Catholic Church benefited from, contributed to, and reveled in this success. While the United States became a force in the world, American Catholics became a force at home and abroad economically, politically, and religiously. It seemed that U.S. Archbishop John Ireland’s nineteenth-century dream that “Catholic truth will travel on the wings of American influence, and with it encircle the universe,” was coming true.6 Maryknoll missionaries identified themselves as agents in this globalization of American Catholicism. The resources Catholics gained through unionization and the New Deal combined with government programs such as Food for Peace, the Act of Bogotá, and the Alliance for Progress offered a means to share the wealth of the U.S. church through mission abroad and thereby serve as goodwill ambassadors for the United States. In the 1950s and 1960s the very success of the U.S. church and the nation generally contributed to a gradual fragmentation of the “American Catholic community.” The defensive unity fostered by social, po-

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litical, and economic exclusion gave way to a new diversity of Catholic thought. The children and grandchildren of Catholic immigrants left the ethnic enclaves in the Northeast and Midwest that had defined their forebears’ faith and identity. They entered universities, settled in suburbs, and became part of a more ethnically homogenous “white middle class.” But even as their class and ethnic identity cohered, Catholics’ religious and political identity fragmented. This fragmentation became especially acute after the Second Vatican Council, which by “opening the windows to let a little air in” created new space for dissension. The rigid practices of Catholicism founded on sacramental life, prayer, doctrine, and catechism that defined the U.S. church gave way to a new openness and new opportunities for interpretation. The Catholic historian Garry Wills observed that the rigidity of Catholic rituals had always hidden underlying conflicts and differences. “That was why the Mass had to be preserved exactly,” Wills wrote. “Move through it with intent fidelity, with legalistic care for validity, for volition, for what must be done — for doing it right, for rite, the last rites left in this unrecurring secular world of accident. This, at least, one saw with relief, could not change. Which is why it had to change.”7 New spaces for religious expression and interpretation came at a moment of dramatic upheaval in the United States that seemed especially traumatic for the country’s Catholics. The 1961 election of John F. Kennedy marked the end of even the appearance of Catholic exclusion in the United States. As Wills noted, Kennedy’s election proved that “the Catholic liberal was as liberal as he was Catholic; indeed, as liberal as any other liberal; just as loyal an American, and loyal because of his Catholic principles— which, it turned out, were simply American principles.”8 The promise of Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Good Neighbor policy seemed fulfilled with Kennedy, the New Frontier, and the Alliance for Progress. But the Kennedy era also revealed the fissures in U.S. society and the contradictions between the promise of reform and the reality of repression. The civil rights movement made evident stark racial and economic inequalities at home, while the Vietnam War revealed the brutality of U.S. foreign policy. Articles began to appear in the Maryknoll magazine in the 1960s, suggesting that the United States might not have all the answers. A “brief aside” in a 1963 article

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detailing U.S. relations with the rest of the world observed, “The United States is really two worlds in which one part does not know how the other part lives. Few of us have any realization of the poverty of a Harlem, or a mining community in West Virginia, or the hogan of a Navajo, or of a migrant worker camp. . . . We have justifiably been spending millions to help the poor in other lands. It is time to end our own blight.”9 The assassinations in rapid succession of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Bobby Kennedy made the limits of reform clear and the future uncertain. As Wills wrote, “The bullet in Dallas — how did one isolate that problem and solve it? . . . Kennedy’s death signaled the rebirth of mystery — the mystery of evil.”10 By 1968, with the CELAM meeting in Medellín and the first articulations of A Theology of Liberation, Maryknoll magazine began to equate conditions in the United States with those of the world. “People are bitter in the Third World, just as people are bitter in Watts and Detroit and Newark, and the bitterness springs from the same source — grinding, deep-rooted poverty from which the underdeveloped of this world can see no exit. . . . There is but one poverty, creating a tragic brotherhood of the indigent, no matter where they are.”11 Maryknoll missionaries who had worked in Latin America for decades could no longer look to the United States as the “answer” to the region’s problems. Young novices and seminarians who entered Maryknoll in the 1960s were attracted more by the opportunity to share a world and a faith outside of the United States than by a desire to impose their religious practices and ideals. They were drawn to Maryknoll because of what they already perceived through Maryknoll magazine and other publicity materials as an intercultural Catholicism with a commitment to aiding the poor. Together the confluence of these changes — the Second Vatican Council, the advent of liberation theology and the preferential option for the poor in Latin America, transformation in the United States, and a convergence of a new generation of missionaries seeking alternatives and an old generation hoping for change — led to a dramatic transformation of the Maryknoll mission to Peru. Because Maryknoll had become an integral part of the Peruvian Catholic Church, changes

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among the U.S. missionaries had invisible ramifications for the Peruvian church and society. As the missionaries sought to live the ideals of the new Catholic Church, they began to undermine the structures that had defined their mission and had facilitated the creation of a powerful progressive Peruvian church. Maryknollers sought to distance themselves from the United States and to emphasize faith and spirituality over economic aid. As was true of every other innovation Maryknoll introduced in Peru, these new efforts would have dramatic unintended consequences, especially in the context of the reforms initiated by the Velasco military regime.

The “New Mission” to Puno

Until 1967 Maryknoll’s mission to Puno was divided between the catechetical program focused on indigenous communities in the rural communities and the San Ambrosio minor seminary, San Juan Bautista Parish, and the credit and housing cooperatives in the urban center. In rapid succession, Maryknoll eliminated these programs. They closed the Puno catechetical school, the San Ambrosio minor seminary, and the radio schools. They severed ties to Cáritas, eliminated food distribution, and distanced themselves from cooperatives. If the old Maryknoll programs had in effect emphasized direct alleviation of poverty through aid and social advancement through education, the new programs focused on cultural and religious encounter. Paradoxically, this new emphasis was possible because of the role that Maryknoll had played in Puno during the preceding twenty-five years. Maryknoll missionaries had developed a reputation for their support of Puno’s poor and indigenous people. This reputation depended on the clergy’s integrity and their provision of spiritual and material aid. On the one hand, Maryknoll’s efforts indirectly created an image of the church as foreign, wealthy, and nominally authoritarian—an image the new generation of missionaries confronted constantly as they sought to change their roles. On the other hand, these efforts also established Maryknoll as an important progressive presence in the region. An older generation of Maryknoll missionaries could serve as guides to a newer

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generation seeking a distinct form of mission.12 The missionaries who settled in Peru in the 1960s and 1970s came from different backgrounds than their predecessors and entered a different church and society. Whereas Maryknollers in the 1940s had to rely on existing power holders such as Bishop Salvador Herrera and local hacendados to guide them, those who entered in the 1960s looked to progressive clergy (Maryknoll and Peruvian) to introduce them to local culture and society. This difference, combined with the very different ideals of the church and society that missionaries carried with them to Peru, contributed to a dramatic transformation most evident in the individual efforts of a few clergy and in the “campo teams” formed after 1967. Although a new generation of Maryknoll missionaries formed the vanguard of change, their ability to act depended on the active and outspoken support of an older generation. Clergy who settled in Peru in the 1940s and 1950s embraced the younger generation, encouraged change, and provided authority and support. Maryknoll Prelate Fedders and his successor, Alfred Koenigsknecht (known as K13, the number of letters in his last name), and Maryknoll Peru Superior Martin Murphy and his successor, Gerard McCrane, counseled and encouraged the old and new generation and sought to keep them together. Among the Maryknoll sisters an older generation also played a key role by introducing new missionaries to the social and political realities of the Peruvian church and society. Father Inocente Salazar: Faith, Innovation, Engagement Father Inocente Salazar, a legend among Maryknollers, was at the vanguard of mission change in Puno. He arrived in Peru in 1964, just before the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council. Although Salazar had been trained in the traditional model of the church, his personal background distinguished him from the generation of Maryknollers who preceded him. Salazar was a Mexican American from Los Angeles, California. His father had been a ranch hand, so Salazar was accustomed to rural life. He had also suffered racism firsthand. Salazar remembered being called a “dirty Mexican” before joining the seminary. His opportunities had been limited by the rigid racist struc-

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tures of Los Angeles. He remembered that due to his seminary training his status and that of his family improved. He went from being a “Mexican” to being a potential priest. Salazar arrived in Peru keenly aware of the way in which race defined one’s place in society and one’s occupation might change his status. He also spoke Spanish fluently.13 When Salazar arrived in Lima and later Puno, he felt immediately at home. The language, the scenes, the food, even the altitude felt familiar and unthreatening. But indigenous concepts of Catholicism surprised him. More surprising was the extent to which the Maryknoll pastor of his assigned parish in Ilave had adapted to local practices of faith. Father Tom Higgins understood some Aymara and had worked to gain insight into local practices of Catholicism and the way they were integrated into an Andean cultural framework and cosmovision. Despite the parish pastor’s explanations to Salazar, it seemed to him that the Catholic sacraments represented little more than magic to the indigenous people. Although he recognized that priests played an important role in the lives of the Aymara, Salazar felt that they were seen locally as little more than magicians. Salazar was reduced to his function as a priest. This was not the mission he imagined.14 Even as Salazar felt indigenous people kept him at a distance and related to his function rather than to his humanity, he began to love the people. “I loved the men when they took their hats off,” he recalled. “Their hair stood straight up like standing bundles of barley sheaves. . . . [W]hen they offered to shake hands, they did not present their sweaty hands, but offered their wrists to shake. I loved the women with their derby hats. . . . I loved them as they wiped their kids’ runny noses with the inside hem of their skirts. . . . I loved how they shared their food generously with beggars at the market or on the street. I loved how they waved their babies’ caps to keep their souls from being lost in a strange setting like the church or the market.”15 Salazar’s initial affection, cultivated through experience and Higgins’s guidance, led him to embark on a new kind of mission— an effort to encounter and understand rather than to change and impose local practices of Catholicism. He began with an intense, and nominally successful, effort to learn Aymara. Although Salazar’s initial inquiries seemed personal, they reflected and responded to a greater need among the Maryknoll missionaries.

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And they represented the first systematic attempts to engage Aymara intermediaries, not to impose new practices of Catholicism, but to learn about indigenous practices of faith. He explained, “[I am embarked on] a study whereby I can understand better and I have the overlapping experiences in which I can relate to the Aymara and to my fellow Maryknollers sharing with both what each has to offer.”16 Salazar believed that he could help to develop symbols to express a shared indigenous-Maryknoll practice of Catholicism. “One of the reasons why I am so concerned with symbol-making,” Salazar recounted, “is that I have seen so many leave the mission because they did not know what they were doing here. There are probably others who would like to be told to leave since they cannot make that decision in the face of meaninglessness.”17 Restoring meaning may have been more important for Maryknoll missionaries who complained of alienation than for Aymara communities. Salazar reversed the relationship between priest and catechist by asking indigenous leaders to serve as his guides to their culture, so he could prepare his Maryknoll community to participate in an authentic church of the people. Salazar’s accounts of Andean rituals revealed the extent to which indigenous people’s participation differed in character from that which they evidenced at Maryknoll Catholic rituals. It also hinted at the resulting sense of alienation experienced by priests. He described his first experience at an unnamed ceremony: Many things there impressed me. I couldn’t get over how the people present felt so much at home at this sacrifice. It was the most natural thing to be present at this sacrifice. The people were happy, conversed [sic] prayed. At the same time, while they were at home, they were very attentive of what was going on, what they were asking for, what they were about to receive, what they were doing. They respected this action very much and their reverence manifested itself by not walking around at the moment of offering or of calling to one’s attention that he didn’t take his hat off or talking or getting up.18

Father Rene Arsenault’s account of Andean people’s response to the eucharistic celebration stands in sharp contrast: “The Church building is

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an art museum adorned with favorite saints where a person can come to get lost in his own little world and cry alone in a corner —even during the celebration of the Eucharist!”19 For Maryknoll priests, the Eucharist, the body and blood of Christ, was the essence of Catholicism, its administration the center of their role. As Reverend John A. O’Brien wrote in a popular exposition of St. Thomas Aquinas’s theology, “In this essential phase of your ministry the power of the priest is not surpassed by that of the bishop, the archbishop, the cardinal, or the Holy Father himself. Indeed it is equal to the power of Jesus Christ; for in this role the priest speaks with the voice and authority of Christ Himself.”20 The priest’s purpose, power, and authority were bound with the eucharistic celebration. But it appeared to Father Arsenault to have little meaning for indigenous people. Or at least little meaning the priest could share with them. Salazar’s effort to understand indigenous culture was not an end in itself but a means to develop a shared Catholicism that recognized, respected, and incorporated indigenous practices and beliefs. He wanted indigenous people to feel a similar degree of comfort, reverence, and respect for rituals of the official church as they did for the unofficial ceremonies they performed. The relationship between the priest and indigenous communities differed dramatically from that which other clergy described for Maryknoll priests and communities. Priests’ access to communities was always mediated by catechists, who seemed to limit their knowledge of local ceremonies and even their opportunities to communicate with individual community members. Salazar immediately recognized that a key obstacle to developing shared meaning was the distance created by the missionaries’ desire to “improve” the lives of the people they encountered. I am not in touch with so many things in his life. I have found Aymara women delightfully cheerful and have a captivating sense of humor; I find they are a happy women but even then, I am not in touch with their lives in a huge way, because we criticize their lot of having to carry such big bundles, take her place behind a man and have to work in a field until they are ready to give birth. . . . In the rites that I have observed these things don’t come out as bad as we criticize them,

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chewing coca, drinking alcohol, working the fields, carrying large bundles, shepherding sheep. These hardships don’t even come up in the prayers at sacrifice.21

Learning about local culture meant, in part, respecting rather than trying to rescue people from their living conditions. Salazar also suggested that clergy necessarily remained outsiders in the Andean world because they did not experience life with indigenous people at the most basic level of labor and family. His desire to share local culture led him ultimately to leave the priesthood and marry an Aymara woman. Celibacy seemed to present an insurmountable obstacle to priests’ participation in indigenous culture and to indigenous men’s vocation as Catholic priests.22 The kind of aid Maryknoll provided through the catechetical system began to seem not only inappropriate but also detrimental to respect for local culture. To gain insight into indigenous communities, Salazar bypassed catechists and cultivated a close relationship with an established spiritual healer who became his compadre and guide. By doing so, he broke with Maryknoll priests’ tradition of identifying themselves as the exclusive spiritual authorities in the region. Salazar not only demonstrated respect for the indigenous yatiri (lit., “knower”; spiritual guide), he sought actively to learn from him. He shared the knowledge he gained with Maryknoll missionaries working in the organization’s headquarters and through Maryknoll shared the knowledge with people in the United States. Maryknoll made an awardwinning but controversial, film, The Healer, depicting Salazar’s relationship with the community yatiri. The film captured a cultural choice, when Salazar elected respect for the yatiri and his form of knowledge and practice of faith over Western medical intervention in the illness of a child. In the film and in fact the child died—a dramatic and stark acceptance of Puno’s reality. Recognizing and accepting local reality meant in part recognizing that token aid of the type Maryknoll had disseminated during the preceding decades would not transform conditions. Although Salazar sought to develop his knowledge of Aymara culture and to enter into religious dialogue with the community, he did so from within an established framework. He remained in the parish

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center in urban Ilave and visited the outlying communities. He did not seek to eliminate or to compete with catechists. In effect, Salazar walked a parallel path with the catechists. While they worked from their communities to explain the religious demands of Maryknoll missionaries to them, Salazar worked from the center to explain the religious practices and beliefs of Aymara people to the clergy. Although Salazar did not confront catechists, his experience and the new emphasis on a church founded on an intercultural Catholicism that engaged indigenous tradition as well as Romanized practices of faith threatened their position. Increasingly, catechists came to appear as obstacles to gaining understanding of local culture and developing a church of the people. It is not clear that indigenous catechists sought to change their association with the church, but they found their role forcibly redefined as a by-product of Maryknollers’ efforts to redefine their own roles as missionaries. Even before the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council, some Maryknoll clergy had accused catechists of being “worse than the famous ‘rice Christians’ of China, [who were] at least . . . instructed in the faith.”23 With the changes introduced by the Second Vatican Council more was at stake than instruction. The ideal of Catholicism had changed, and the model of memorization on which the catechetical system was built no longer seemed appropriate. Forcing people to chant memorized prayers, to form lines for confession and communion, and to recite points of doctrine did not seem the way to develop a church of the people. As Father Arsenault observed, “It is not just a question of man learning Christian doctrine to teach it afterwards to the masses of baptized people in formal doctrine classes so that they may receive the sacraments. We must do all we can to make sure that those who receive the sacraments belong to the Christian community first.”24 Catechists’ training was now to be “much like the seminary training of a priest, the candidate to be a catechist either has or has not a vocation to this demanding work.”25 Although the missionaries may not have recognized it, catechists acted as cultural as well as language translators. They took Maryknoll missionaries’ concepts of Romanized Catholicism and introduced them into established cultural frameworks in their indigenous communities.

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By introducing economic aid through an established structure of intermediation, Maryknoll had transformed it and thereby changed the relationship between the Catholic Church, indigenous communities, and the national government. Catechists’ position depended on retaining legitimacy among both the indigenous people of their communities and the clergy of the Maryknoll community. Without the support conferred on them by their communities, they could not serve as representatives. Without the legitimacy conferred on them by Maryknoll and evidenced by spiritual and material benefits, they could not retain legitimacy in their communities. Maryknollers’ desire to separate the spiritual from the material undermined catechists’ position by eliminating the aid that gave them legitimacy. Father Robert Hoffman, one of the most engaged missionaries and a key force behind the collaborative direction of the Juli prelature, recounted that in Ilave when Maryknoll eliminated víveres the number of catechists plunged from two hundred to about twelve.26 The elimination of víveres also led to open confrontation. Father Phillip Erbland, who joined Maryknoll among the wave of clergy entering during the boom years of the 1950s, remembered a particular visit to a community: “They were absolutely furious with me. I didn’t even know this little town, the only time I ever went to the community and they were all wondering why we weren’t giving them viveres, and new clothes, and stuff. And they were angry. They were actually very angry. . . . [S]omebody deliberately gave me a flat tire there.”27 It was not just a question of eliminating aid. Catechists who had been trained by Maryknoll and the Catholic Church to hide the practices that might be condemned as pagan now found themselves being asked to share their culture. Father Raymond Finch, who was part of the new generation of Maryknollers who arrived in Puno as a seminarian after the Second Vatican Council, remembered, “They were very upset about, say, us taking a different view towards Aymara rights. . . . I mean they’d been condemned for 40 years. They had every right to be upset.” “[But] we were in a position of power,” he concluded, “even as lowly seminarians because we were coming from the Center. So, their response usually was ‘yes, yes.’” Even as the missionaries sought to develop intercultural practices of faith that respected indigenous tradi-

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tions and beliefs, they did so as authorities. Although a desire to respect local culture was at the foundation of the changes Maryknoll initiated, they made them with virtually no consultation with indigenous people. After Inocente Salazar’s initial foray, the Maryknoll clergy seeking to develop closer relations with indigenous people did so considerably more forcefully. They actively sought to eliminate the influence of catechists and to settle in communities and try to change established relations and practices of faith. The priests’ efforts, undertaken with the best intentions, nonetheless brought them into conflict with communities. Having directed the catechetical system and controlled economic resources for nearly fifteen years, they had a difficult time escaping from the roles they had created. In addition, they struggled to define alternative roles that allowed them to demonstrate respect for indigenous culture while at the same time retaining an emphasis on the sacramental life that defined their role as priests. If priests did not provide sacraments, which necessarily entailed embracing elements of a particular model of the church, they could not fulfill their roles as clergy.28 Sisters, whose purpose had always been to provide Christian charity as a manifestation of faith and who were excluded from church power, enjoyed more freedom. These differences and the challenges of accessing local culture are evident in the experience of the campo teams that settled in indigenous communities after the initial efforts by Inocente Salazar. The campo teams were a more ambitious and also a more invasive effort to access indigenous culture. In an odd way, even as the missionaries sought to promote a new respect for local culture, their efforts to bypass catechists actually represented a more direct confrontation with established cultural norms. The catechetical system was founded on a tradition of engaging intermediaries to establish relations between indigenous communities and outsiders that dated back at least to the colonial period. Indigenous intermediaries (catechists) fulfilled the clergy’s desire to have communities demonstrate knowledge of prayer, doctrine, and catechism (even if it was merely rote knowledge) and in exchange received benefits for themselves (stipends and other perks) and for their communities (víveres). Now Maryknoll sought to

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change the terms of the agreement by asking that indigenous people share knowledge with them. The benefits the communities would receive in return were questionable. The results of this effort to transform radically the terms of reciprocity were not what the missionaries anticipated. The Lampa Chica Experiment In 1967 two Maryknoll sisters requested permission from the recently established deanery to move to an indigenous community to share local life and culture. Both the deanery and the rural living reflected the new, egalitarian currents in Maryknoll’s mission to Puno. The deanery was an experiment in shared power, with priests and sisters governing by consensus. The Juli deanery granted Sisters Guadalupe Diaz de León and Doreen Longres permission to live in an indigenous community for one year on the condition that they provide a report detailing their work and experience to share with other clergy.29 The sisters chose the community of Cuturapi, which responded positively to their initial inquiries. They found a house, repaired it, and then arranged with the governor to meet with the community. At the meeting community members immediately asked if the sisters would bring resources. After decades of experience with Maryknoll and the distribution of víveres, transistor radios, bicycles, gas lamp projectors, and used clothing, it was a reasonable question. “No,” they responded. “Only ourselves.” A vote followed. The majority opposed the sisters’ presence. Sisters Doreen and Guadalupe accepted the decision. They had little choice. But they took a positive view, concluding, “We realized that God speaks through people, and this was our way of knowing He did not want us in Cuturapi.” Further consultation with communities led the sisters to Lampa Chica. This time they contacted the community before investing in the house. They also offered to teach in the community’s new school. Still the people of Lampa Chica seemed taken aback and uncertain about their new residents’ role. Clergy had always lived in the center and visited through the mediation of catechists. They provided religious services and in recent years social services and economic resources.

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And then they left. “They just can’t believe it,” remembered the sisters’ chronicler, “— that we want to live in the campo, some of the people of the pueblo, I think even Gregory, the owner of the house in which we are living, and others.” Yet, she concluded, “Christ lived with the people during His apostolate, so must some of us carry on our lives this way. Willingly with faith, hope, and love.” The expectations of the church and Maryknoll after the Second Vatican Council had changed radically. The missionary’s role no longer necessarily entailed introducing knowledge of prayer and sacraments or improving material conditions with aid. Instead, the missionary was to emulate Christ by living with the people. This presence became a manifestation of faith. Entering people’s lives proved more challenging than entering a community. The successes, never spectacular for the sisters in Juli, seemed even more difficult to quantify or describe. “We feel the people are a little closer to us,” recounted the Lampa Chica sisters’ chronicler hopefully. Six have been able to tell us about their illnesses; three have been helped to some degree. One woman came with her three year old baby, who had been sick for three weeks. She had gone to the posta [medical clinic] two weeks after he was sick, but the sanitario [health officer] was not there, and she did not bother to go back. Now the baby was dying and the mother wanted to know if we had something to cure him. We said the only possibility would be to take the baby to the posta. She did not want to do this. We gave the mother and her daughter coffee and we talked for a while. The baby died later that day.

Later the sisters sent another ill child to the hospital for surgery. He also died. When the teacher at the newly established school stopped showing up for classes, some parents came to speak with the sisters. They suggested the parents complain to the government. The result was positive. The teacher began to fulfill his responsibilities. The sisters volunteered at the school. Three times a week they helped a young man learn English. People asked little of them and nothing in relation to their role as women religious. The sisters reported, “No one has asked

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about baptism, first Communion preparation, or marriage instructions. Around Easter time one man did ask for a catechism.” With few requests, the sisters’ role seemed limited. “At present we are trying to help the people ‘be’ and appreciate themselves, encourage them, and help them,” they said. “They are adults and know what they want.” For herself, the sisters’ diarist concluded of the experiment, “I have never had such a meaningful prayer life as I have had in Lampa Chica. I have really felt Christ present at our shared mediations and informal chats.” Lampa Chica gave the sisters insight into indigenous communities, but it was not clear who benefited. Two sisters enjoyed a meaningful prayer life and may have taken a first step toward changing the image of clergy in indigenous communities. But what did the community gain? It was difficult to justify this mission given the scarcity of clergy that had brought Maryknoll to Puno. The experiment ended after one year. But the desire to get close and to better understand the culture of the indigenous people with whom Maryknoll had been working for twentyfive years did not. This first tentative pass would be followed by others, with each drawing the Maryknollers into a distinct reality and at the same time transforming the image of the missionaries in Puno and in Peru. Father James “Jim” Madden: ¿Dónde está tu pueblo? In 1960 Father James “Jim” Madden, a handsome, energetic, determined young priest with sharp blue eyes, arrived in Peru. Although Father Madden went through training in the pre –Vatican II seminary, his experience was still somewhat distinct from that of the missionaries who preceded him in Peru. “The first thing, the first shock,” he remembered, laughing as he described his years at Maryknoll, “was, there were only a few of us that were not from the East Coast. So we were these hicks from the West or the Midwest.” The other seminarians insisted on knowing “What are you?” “Well, I’m an American,” he would reply. “‘No! What are you, Irish or German or Italian?” Madden was a product of a changing American church. The ethnic enclaves that had defined faith and community in the 1940s began by the mid-1950s

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to give way to a more diverse and dispersed Catholic population as people left the urban centers of the East Coast and moved west, settling in suburbs where ethnic identity was subsumed into middle class “American” identity. This change contributed to a gradual transformation of the U.S. Catholic Church as the homogeneity created by poverty and exclusion gave way to increased openness and a reforming sense of what it meant to be Catholic and American. Father Madden’s first assignment was Maryknoll’s parish in the urban barriada Ciudad de Dios. He arrived at an exciting moment, when Peruvian clergy were laying the foundation for what would be articulated a decade later by Gustavo Gutiérrez in A Theology of Liberation. Fathers Jorge and Carlos Álvarez Calderón, who together provided the organizing base for the progressive Juventud Universitaria Católica and Juventud Obrero Católica, “took him under their wing.” They began to teach Madden about conditions in Peru and to introduce him to a new perspective of the United States. At a May Day parade in Lima some of the young people recounted that they celebrated Labor Day because of the “Chicago martyrs” and began to ask Madden about them. Although he was Catholic and from the United States, Madden realized that he knew nothing about the Haymarket uprising or the U.S. Catholic bishops’ support for the workers or the papal social encyclicals. He began to question the way he had been “domesticated into a system.” Madden was also awakened to the reality of Maryknoll’s mission to Peru: “We had all the answers,” and “the way to work here would be to do it the way that you do it in the States.” He found many Maryknollers “living a middle-class North American lifestyle, living in the towns[,] . . . the centers of the Parishes which are the power centers, where the oppressors live, the lawyers, the merchants, the land owners, the cops, the whole bit.”30 In 1964, Madden received a new assignment to Chucuito, Puno. He decided immediately after arriving that he wanted something different. He wanted to develop relationships with indigenous people and to understand indigenous culture. This knowledge and experience could only be gained through direct communication. “I very quickly decided, when I got up there,” recounted Madden, “I was either going to be able to talk with those people or I wasn’t going to stay. I wouldn’t

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just be a functionary, doing Sacraments or something. I was going to have to be able to relate with the folks.” While others had studied Aymara and developed limited ability to greet people, hear confessions, and make simple conversation, Madden gained true fluency in the language — an amazing achievement and testimony to his discipline and intelligence. During his first years in the Juli prelature, Madden studied Aymara every day. And the whole time he kept thinking, “There’s got to be a better way. There’s got to be a different way. We’ve got to somehow find out what the reality is up here.” In 1967, the year the sisters initiated the Lampa Chica experiment, Madden proposed an ambitious plan to have a group of priests and sisters move to an indigenous community. After three years’ consideration, the prelature accepted Madden’s proposal as a five-year pilot project. He and three sisters from different religious orders settled in Mocachi, a community about forty-five minutes south of Puno. The project, the five-year commitment, the emphasis on Aymara language, and the team’s composition of a priest and sisters from distinct religious communities were all dramatic departures from the tradition of Maryknoll work in Juli. Each team member would offer a service to the community. Father Madden provided religious services: masses, burials, baptisms, blessings, and sick calls. Sister Barbara Cavanaugh, a nurse, provided medical care, and Sisters Pilar Desmond and Audrey Loher offered classes. The gendered division of labor adhered to church traditions wherein Father Madden provided spiritual services while sisters provided more mundane services. Madden’s goal was to learn about the local church and develop a liturgy that respected and represented indigenous culture instead of imposing a Western model of Catholicism. For him, measures of success included the degree of understanding he gained and the extent to which indigenous people and Catholic pastoral agents adopted his liturgical innovations. The sisters sought acceptance by the community through provision of services, so their measures of success were quite different from Madden’s. Almost immediately Father Madden identified catechists as an obstacle to developing a shared cultural Catholicism in Puno. “I started early on to having doubts,” he recounted, “because the Catechists that would come in every week[,] . . . were very friendly, very submissive,

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very obedient, very passive, very humble, very and so on and so on. Then when I was going out into the campo, . . . I’d meet people out in these different communities, I had the impression that these men were pretty tough hombres.”31 At the same time, he concluded that “in some cases the Catechists were people who . . . you immediately would name as the losers.”32 The catechists were not, in short, the kind of spiritual leaders Maryknoll hoped to cultivate to create a church of the people. “In this zone we have had contact with twenty-two catechists, and possibly a few more,” Madden continued. “Of these twenty-two only five manifest leadership qualities among their brothers. Of these five leaders, three are good and two use their capacity in negative ways, abusing their power.” Madden concluded that “the majority of the catechists are common people; good people, but not distinguished from others neither for better nor for worse. The great majority are not leaders.”33 Father Madden’s criticism was not just of the catechists but also of the purpose implicit in the catechetical program: “We consider that the formation given is to prepare them to change their style of life, to change their social class, and to adapt them to the existing structure of the Church.”34 This effort, he suggested, did not conform to the needs of the community. The real leaders, he argued, were more capable and better informed than the campesinos who attended the courses at the catechetical centers. These organic leaders were not prepared adequately and would benefit from courses on various themes. It seemed, however, that these leaders were not interested in the team’s courses. Madden lamented that “they have no interest in the themes that we can teach, or we are not capable of offering the content they wanted.” Despite Madden’s knowledge of Aymara and the team’s residence in the community, it proved difficult to access local culture. People resisted sharing their religious practices with the clergy. In ¿Dónde está tu pueblo? the book published to share knowledge of the experiment with other missionaries, the team recounted, “We had come here to put ourselves in contact with the local reality and the people maintained us only to ask of us traditional services, without allowing us to enter their lives to the point that we could question, to see, to form an opinion, or to challenge what existed.”35 Aymara community members in Mocachi asked Father Madden for masses and baptisms and

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requested medical care from Sister Barbara Cavanaugh but otherwise kept the team at bay. Madden tried to attend all meetings in the eleven communities in the area around Mocachi. Sometimes communities changed the place and time of their meetings, and Madden believed they did so to keep him from participating. He held meetings for people interested in learning about the Bible and prayers, but neither catechists nor yatiris attended often. After a year and a half Madden finally was invited to participate in an Andean ceremony to appeal for rain. It was a turning point that marked his ability to establish gradually a relationship with a single spiritual leader who would act as his guide — a different kind of intermediary. It seemed that accessing local culture required more than being present and open. The campo team instituted policies designed to encourage more directly a “cultural exchange” between the missionaries and the Aymara residents of Mocachi. We arrived at the conclusion that we should start to demand a response and a minimal collaboration in exchange for our services and teaching. The result was a policy initiated in January of 1973 [the year food aid was terminated], and that continued as a permanent policy during the following years. We called it our “firm line.” . . . [W]e became conscious of the presence of many religious leaders in the communities and these men exercised their function with authority and prestige. The people saw Jim [Madden] also as a man capable of certain things. If we could not unite the religious practices of the two types then we would be repeating the same activity that occurred in the parishes where the people live with a divided religion. . . . [T]he policy determined was that Jim would give a religious service only when the interested person would name a local religious leader of his choice to participate in a position of authority in the same service.36

The same “firm line” was adopted for Sister Barbara Cavanaugh’s services as a nurse: “Barbara would aid a sick person or a woman at the point of birth only if the interested person called a person of their preference who knew how to cure to participate in their art and knowledge together with Barbara.” Father Madden suggested that the pur-

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pose of the “firm line” was not simply to gain information but also to ensure that clergy did not displace local religious leaders and healers.37 Still, the team succeeded only nominally in persuading Andean people and Catholic pastoral agents to participate in shared activities. Madden worked with the yatiri with whom he had established a relationship to prepare a series of pamphlets written in Aymara for use by local religious leaders and Catholic clergy. He included biblical reflections, prayers, and writing that articulated his perception of local sentiment during ceremonies. Very few people read the pamphlets. Madden attributed the lack of interest to the fact that they were written in Aymara. It may also have been that indigenous religious leaders did not need to have their religious ceremonies sanctioned by priests. Maryknoll clergy seemed little more enthusiastic. Madden recounted that he “made copies of all that stuff, offered them to give to all the priests around the prelature, and very few of them picked it up.”38 At the same time, Aymara leaders showed little enthusiasm for Madden’s participation in their ceremonies. With the exception of “firm line” ceremonies, the team was rarely invited to participate in Andean rituals. Madden concluded that five years were simply not enough to gain the confidence of Andean religious leaders.39 Although his stated purpose was to adapt Catholicism to indigenous practices, Madden also wanted to adapt Andean people to a distinct model of Catholicism. Two communities asked for help constructing local churches. But building did not conform to the priest’s goals. As he explained, the policy was “that first we help to prepare the hearts of the people to pray and to participate in Mass and when a Church became necessary for a Christian Assembly we would help.” It was the priest who determined when a church was necessary, and necessity was measured by attendance at mass. Madden offered mass to the communities appealing for a church building once a week for six months. It was, he recounted, a “complete disaster with hardly any attendance.”40 As a result, he denied the communities’ requests. When they made another appeal, Madden reminded the leaders of the earlier failure. Residents of Mocachi seemed no more enthusiastic about participating in the ritual of mass than were the people of the communities hoping for a church building. Madden concluded “that they needed a

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reason to attend Mass. The Mass is considered one special manner [to communicate with God] for special motives, but not the best form to pray for all necessities. We hope that with time at least a small group of people will come to see the Mass like we see it and to participate regularly in it with the maximum liturgical expression of their faith.”41 The ultimate goal was still to establish a particular form of sacramental Catholicism. Father Madden hoped, however, that this goal would be achieved by imbuing Catholic rituals with indigenous meaning. In this way mass would not be an imposition of a meaningless practice but an expression of a shared faith. Father Madden learned that Andean people did not share his goals. He also learned the limits of priests’ power when they excluded their intermediaries, changed the terms of reciprocity, and left the urban center. He could not force Andean communities to adopt his innovations. When necessary they bypassed him to secure masses without the strictures he imposed. For example, Madden established a series of options open to the community to secure fiesta masses. One option was that Father Madden would perform the mass free on the condition that the community would attend a series of preparatory classes in advance. The community elected this option on only two of twenty-four occasions. Usually the community simply paid a priest from the parish center to come to say mass or took their religious icon to the parish center and paid to have a mass said there.42 When the team stopped providing economic assistance for development projects, the community prohibited members from attending community meetings.43 The priest’s power dissipated when he moved from the urban center of church power to the periphery of indigenous power. In the communities yatiris enjoyed status as recognized spiritual leaders. The priest had to try to establish a place for himself in a distinct cultural framework. When Madden participated in a ceremony with a local religious leader, he recounted, “This other guy . . . was top dog. We were up there and did the whole ceremony together and the old timer put his arm around me toward the end of and he says, ‘You know what? I think before God you and I are equal.’ And I thought, ‘I wonder who’s getting lifted up here?’ Was I getting up to his level or, I didn’t dare ask.’ ” There was an almost inherent competition between

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Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title. An unnamed yatiri (left) and Father James Madden (right) during a shared ceremony in Juli prelature. Courtesy of Maryknoll Mission Archives.

priests and yatiris, which was more challenging for the priests who needed yatiris to access local culture than for the yatiris, whose practices were autonomous and respected by communities. Within their centers indigenous people had power. The degree of power clergy wielded corresponded directly to their provision of spiritual and material resources. It was a reciprocal relationship. By changing the terms of reciprocity without engaging the cooperation of communities, the missionaries lost their power. They also lost their status as intermediaries between indigenous communities and the Peruvian and U.S. governments. Entering indigenous communities in some ways made them irrelevant to secular society. A Generation of Campo Teams The contrast between the power exercised by clergy in the center and on the periphery is nowhere more evident than in the experience of

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the members of another campo team. In the 1960s, as part of an effort to increase seminarians’ knowledge and experience of mission, Maryknoll established the Overseas Training Program (OTP). Seminarians spent a year in a Maryknoll region prior to ordination to introduce them to the reality of mission. In 1973 Michael Briggs and Raymond Finch were among the seminarians who settled in Puno to experience life and mission in the altiplano. They arrived at an exciting moment of change. Father Inocente Salazar had developed profound insights into Aymara culture and was anxious to share them and to introduce the young men to the world of indigenous life and culture. Father Jim Madden had developed sufficient knowledge of Aymara to converse with people without the aid of translators and had introduced the dynamic model of the campo team. It was a dramatically different mission from that of the early days of Maryknoll, when the priests stumbled through Spanish and fought to establish a place in the cold highlands of Puno. But many of the missionaries from that era now formed the leadership of Maryknoll and the Juli prelature. They actively supported innovations. Maryknoll’s old guard offered Briggs and Finch space to explore. Their openness and generosity were repaid in 1976 when the two ordained priests elected Puno as their mission field. When Fathers Finch and Briggs returned to Puno as priests, they came with a vision of sharing life in the campo with indigenous people. Briggs remembered that there was “a sense of asking questions of what the missionary does in this world[,] . . . the sense that this whole thing seems to function without a Church’s presence and what were we about here.”44 Describing his experience in an issue of Maryknoll magazine devoted to mission vocation, Briggs recounted, “I was convinced that the starting point for mission in the altiplano had to be the Aymara campesino. For me this meant that I had somehow to become part of his world, to immerse myself in it so that I could listen to God revealing Himself to the Aymara. I needed to discover how the dynamics of salvation and liberation work among these people as they tilled their fields, grazed their animals and celebrated their fiestas. Only as I became a part of this culture would I discover my role as a missioner among them.” Yet the process of discovery was challenging, sometimes even painful. Briggs concluded, “During these months, I came to many

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realizations. One was the Aymara way of being present to others. I constantly bumped into my limitations and found I was dealing better with them. I realized also that one must enter another culture alone, that the price of admission is loneliness. At some point for me the loneliness became solitude. What had previously been anxiety and pain opened onto peace, union with God and a deep sense of wholeness.”45 The heroism of the new missionary came not in confronting rebels, treacherous terrain, or paganism but in confronting himself and finding God. Briggs’s and Finch’s experience with OTP made them aware of the challenges they would face trying to access local culture. But even with this preparation the reality proved surprising. As a seminarian in OTP, Finch taught a class on the Bible, the church, and Andean culture. Describing the course, he exclaimed with obvious amusement, “Can you believe that? I would give them a course on their own culture.” The apparent absurdity reflected the challenge of finding ways to learn about local culture from people who had been told for five hundred years that their practices were pagan. By valorizing indigenous traditions, Finch hoped to create a comfortable space where clergy and indigenous people could discuss their religious practices and beliefs. But he quickly learned that receptiveness did not necessarily elicit information from indigenous people. “After they’d get past the point of saying it [Andean religion] didn’t exist,” Father Finch remembered, “then they’d say it did exist. Finally at least, they could talk with some confidence.” He added, “It never got to the point of a lot of confidence I’d have to say, except with maybe one or two of the guys.”46 The priests also had been influenced by Father Madden’s experience in Mocachi. Like him, they wanted to leave the middle-class lifestyle of the priests in the urban centers. They formed a campo team composed of priests and sisters and reproduced a gendered division of labor, though one that appeared less rigid than that evident in the Madden team. Fathers Finch and Briggs guided religious rituals, but Sisters Lois Lippencot and María Zeballos also took an active role in them. At the same time, while Sister María, a nurse, provided medical care, she also taught with Sister Lois. The priests also taught. Moreover,

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this campo team did not reproduce Madden’s effort to develop specific guidelines for rituals and ceremonies that incorporated indigenous practices into an officially sanctioned Catholic framework. Finch recounted that while he could not have articulated at the time why he was not comfortable with that approach, looking at it with the clearer perspective of hindsight he felt that doing so might just be co-opting “their religious beliefs in roles that aren’t all that Catholic in terms of church, in terms of belonging to a Catholic church.” He asked himself if that might not be “just kind of forcing them into something that I need them to be part of, and those they don’t need to be part of?”47 The team’s goal was more modest. They sought to be closer to indigenous people by sharing life in their communities. Like Father Madden, though with less success, both priests studied Aymara in the hope of drawing closer to community members without relying on catechists or other intermediaries. In 1978 Fathers Finch and Briggs and Sisters Lois and María moved to Chacapampa, a community outside of Huancané. They had spent about four months looking for a community willing to accept the team. Everyone seemed receptive, but some communities were friendlier and more open than others. Chacapampa’s leaders seemed most enthusiastic. They invited the clergy to settle and offered them a community building in which they could live in exchange for paying to have it repaired.48 Chacapampa was also appealing because it had no catechists. The clergy quickly learned that the community leaders who invited them hoped they would be the clergy’s intermediaries. These indigenous leaders wanted spiritual and material benefits for their community. Father Briggs lamented that the leaders were working “on the assumption that our coming in was going to bring in a lot of economic resources for their community and we were kind of working on the opposite hypothesis of trying to scale down, trying to live simply.”49 The Maryknoll team offered limited benefits to the community in the form of spiritual and material aid. They taught English and religion in a newly constructed community high school that had no teachers. Sister María provided medical care and developed a health promoters program to train local people in preventive medicine, diagnosis,

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and treatment. The priests offered religious services. Finch remembered that when they settled in the community his strongest sense was that people responded to him and Briggs as “the function rather than to the person.” They were priests. Escaping established roles proved more challenging than leaving the urban center of power and the parish and settling on the periphery in indigenous communities. The priests wanted to gradually change local perceptions of their function in society. But their new function was not clear, since priests’ were defined by sacraments. Without sacraments, they had no clear purpose. So they tried to modify their role by imposing conditions on the provision of sacraments to make their purpose meaningful. When the community requested a fiesta mass, the priests provided it only if they could meet with community members two or three times before the fiesta. “Our experience,” recounted Briggs, “is that the Fiesta Mass could be a very good experience if you ‘know’ the people. It could be a very good experience but it’s not a moment of serious reflection, it’s a moment of celebration. So that if there’s nothing there previously that it’s celebrating, it can be pretty empty.” In exchange for their time, community members were told that they would not have to pay for the mass. Father Finch reported, however, that people “felt they had to pay something. If they didn’t pay something, it wasn’t theirs.” The team also offered courses on biblical reflection, sacramental life, and social analysis to Chacapampa and eleven neighboring communities. People rarely participated. Sister Maria’s medical services offered the team the greatest insight into community life and culture. Her work took her into local homes to talk with people about their problems. After two years Chacapampa’s leaders evicted the team, reclaiming the center that served as their home. At first the clergy tried to fight the expulsion by appealing directly to the community, asking if people really wanted them to leave. No one responded. But rumors began to reach them. The clergy were told that people believed they might be kharisiris. The kharisiri ( pishtaco in Quechua) traditionally was depicted as a Franciscan priest wearing a long habit with a hood who comes out at dusk, ringing a bell to lull his victims to sleep and then stealing their fat. Rumors about kharisiris abound in Andean culture. President Alan García, notorious for his corruption, was said to

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have released a brigade of kharisiris to steal campesinos’ fat, which he would sell abroad to pay off the national debt.50 In the case of the Maryknollers in Chacapampa, the accusations came indirectly, making it difficult to contest them. Individual community members who had contact with the team (intermediaries of a different sort) were sent by the community with discreet messages about the team members’ dubious status. A woman claimed to have walked by the team’s house late one night when a blinding light came out. One of the health promoters working with a Maryknoll sister from the team was also accused of being a kharisiri. Father Briggs concluded that the community’s rejection resulted in part simply from their uncertainty about the missionaries’ purpose or function. What did they want? What were they doing? He had even heard that people believed the team was counterfeiting money or selling drugs. After a number of meetings the community leaders rescinded the eviction—but only on the condition that the team build a factory that would employ one hundred people. The team left. As Father Finch remembered: [They said,] “Goodbye.You’re out of here.” And it was interesting . . . because [they] could never have said that if we were in a parish. Really, given the way it’s set up there it would never have worked. They could never have gotten away with that. But we had put ourselves in a position of being vulnerable. Which is good, which is what we wanted to do. Except we didn’t want the results. That’s a fact. We did not want those results. But it comes with the territory. . . . [We] also realized that that’s what we were trying to do — put ourselves in that position. That takes a little figuring out. It’s not that easy to accept.51

The team had no choice. They accepted the community’s decision and moved down the road to another community, only to be expelled again. The new community had become a center for the growing coca trade. A short distance from the team’s house was a storage place where coca was transferred from truck to storage to truck. Word soon got back to the team via one of the health promoters that it was time to move on. To give an extra push, the man whose home the clergy rented reneged on their contract. The team was homeless— again.

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Four years later, in 1984, a reconstituted Maryknoll team moved to Pilcuyo, a larger town close to Ilave. The team had been invited to settle in Pilcuyo in 1976 when they instead chose Chacapampa. Pilcuyo seemed too cosmopolitan. It was urban, modern, and saturated with nongovernmental organizations. A weekly market attracted crowds of people from outlying communities. Seventh Day Adventists were a powerful presence. Even in this cosmopolitan Andean town the Maryknollers encountered problems. A campesino political leader from the community believed the clergy were supporting the opposition political party, so he spread the rumor that they were kharisiris. Briggs reported that soon people were driving past them shouting “Kharisiri!”as they went. On the occasion of a political rally for this campesino leader, the Maryknoll team showed up only to find themselves subjected to a crowd shouting “Kharisiri!” at them. In this case the priests appealed to another priest who had been supporting the politician. The priest’s intervention ended the accusations, and the team kept their home. In the end, the Maryknoll team became part of this semiurban center. A Maryknoll team has been present in Pilcuyo since 1984.52 They offered medical services in a clinic that drew many people from outlying communities, and they offered courses that drew fewer people. Father Briggs reported that their baptism class was accepted only twice. Once a local teacher who wanted to have his child baptized persuaded the rest of the community to participate in the course. Marriage requests were uncommon, perhaps two or three a year. Many of those who were married were migrants who had left Pilcuyo but wanted to maintain their ties to it and did so through marriage. Father Finch later recounted, “I would say that we came to the point where we had good relationships with the people[,] . . . where there was an appreciation, a mutual appreciation, much more honesty than in the beginning. . . [T]his honesty came out in their saying ‘No’ when they meant no, which before they wouldn’t do. They’d say ‘yes’ and then not show up.”53

Maryknoll Sisters in Puno: Freedom in Subordination

Maryknoll priests who sought to transform mission in Puno after the Second Vatican Council confronted the history of their role or function

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as priests in indigenous communities, the image they created during the preceding twenty-five years, and the history of the Catholic Church’s colonial system of intermediation. Maryknoll sisters enjoyed considerably more freedom. Sisters’ roles also changed after the Second Vatican Council as they left the confines of institutions and sought to draw closer to communities. But the nature of their mission did not change. They no longer worked in hospitals or parochial schools or as auxiliaries, but they continued to offer assistance to communities. Service was a manifestation of their faith. They had never been in positions to deny religious ceremonies or material benefits to communities. They did not direct the catechetical program, nor did they perform baptisms, say mass, or hear confession. Sister Patricia “Pat” Ryan recognized the difference in the roles of priests and sisters in religious processions: “It would be the comandante, the military. It would be the highest political authority, and it would be the bishop.” Women religious were given respect, but they did not lead processions. “It made a very big difference,” she concluded.54 The Institute for Rural Education (IER), an experimental farm and education center located in the beautiful community of Palermo south of Juli and near the Bolivian border, was among the sites where Maryknoll sisters had the greatest influence after the Second Vatican Council. IER was established by Maryknoll in Peru in 1964 and was modeled after a similar education program established by Maryknoll more than a decade earlier in rural Chile. Although Maryknoll priests founded IER and played a key role in it, Maryknoll sisters seemed to define the place and its relationship with indigenous communities. Through the programs offered at IER women religious gained access to indigenous life and culture in ways that seemed at least as revealing and profound as the experience of the campo teams. In fact, the experiences were not mutually exclusive. Many of the members of the campo teams also participated at IER. The nature of sisters’ “work” in agriculture, health, and education combined with their subordinate status as women and sisters in the patriarchal church granted them unique access to local culture. The ostensibly mundane services (agricultural production, medical care, education) that they oversaw at IER were inextricably linked with the sacred in indigenous culture. By pro-

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viding services that appeared from a Western perspective part of the realm of the mundane, sisters accessed the sacred. Sister Aurelia Atencio: “Señora Madre Ingeniera” Sister Aurelia Atencio entered Maryknoll in 1966 just after the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council, when the ideals of the new Church were in the air, and just being introduced in the novitiate.55 She was drawn to Maryknoll because it seemed to her that the missionaries were doing what the church should do, work with the poor. During her time as a novice, she remembered watching the generation before following rules that no longer seemed relevant. Having come from New Mexico, Sister Aurelia was among the few in the Maryknoll community not born and raised in the midwestern or northeastern United States. The conditions in her community were similar to those she would later encounter in Peru. Young people left as soon as they finished school to look for work. Catholicism pervaded the life of the community. It was not so much an orthodox or Romanized Catholicism but a belief that God was central to people’s lives and a sense of dependence on God. The strength of the community and the mutual respect expressed by community members formed a part of the community’s faith and morality. Perhaps in part because of her ability to speak Spanish fluently, Maryknoll selected Sister Aurelia for an experimental program in Peru. In 1968 she was sent to study at San Marcos University in Lima. There she lived with Sisters Rose Dominic and Rose Timothy, who worked together in Cardinal Juan Landázuri Ricketts’s Mission to Lima and were at the heart of the progressive Peruvian church. Sister Aurelia shared with these women a commitment to social justice and an acute political sensibility. She described her year in Lima as the best thing that could have happened. It was right after the military coup that had brought General Juan Velasco Alvarado to power. She read extensively about the country and the political context. At the same time, she was present during the foundational years of liberation theology. She attended a talk by Gutiérrez and read a mimeographed copy of what would be published a few years later as A Theology of Liberation.

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Sister Aurelia was drawn immediately to what she described as a “new language of the church.” It was a language she could identify with, one that expressed more clearly what attracted her to mission than the theology she had read during her novitiate. For her the answers to what the church should be were in Latin American theology. Attending San Marcos University proved complicated because of bureaucracy and prerequisite courses. After earning the required equivalent of a Peruvian high school diploma, Sister Aurelia returned to New Mexico to earn a master’s degree in agronomy. She hoped that with this degree she could work with campesinos to help improve their lives. Her faith, education, and goal drew her to the IER. When she began working there, Aymara campesinos seemed uncertain how to classify her. She was an agronomist and thus potentially a representative of outside experts who historically had sought to impose their methods and ideas on indigenous communities. But she was also a woman and a religious sister. Since women worked the land, she conformed to a local tradition of female participation in the earth’s reproductive cycle. At the same time, as a woman religious Sister Aurelia was defined by her role as a representative of the sacred. Local people would greet her by calling her “Señora Madre Ingeniera,” suggesting overlapping and therefore indivisible, unclassifiable social, work, faith, and gender categories. These mutually reinforcing roles made it difficult for people to confine Sister Aurelia to a particular function. Sister Aurelia’s role as a woman religious instilled confidence in people, while her work as an agronomist gave her unique insight into indigenous people’s lives and faith. Land was at the heart of community; it defined social relations, the economy, the life cycle, and faith. Through land, Sister Aurelia learned about the integral nature of indigenous community life and spirituality. She began by asking questions. The physical and cultural reality of the altiplano differed dramatically from what she had studied at New Mexico State University. Her view of agriculture was defined by process and profitability: you follow steps 1 through 3, and the result is a crop. In this view, land is a commodity, and the goal of cultivation is to produce a marketable commodity. Sister Aurelia quickly learned that people in Juli saw things differently. For them, land is a living being. It has to be respected. It is

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the source of life, not just products. “[Land is] not necessarily meant to be worked to the maximum level of production,” recounted Sister Aurelia, “because production isn’t the only purpose. And people look at whatever the land produces as a gift that the earth is to be thanked for.” Sometimes the lessons were hard. Sister Aurelia remembered with some embarrassment an incident related to planting potatoes that made her starkly aware of the difference between Western and Andean ideals. It had rained on a Friday, and the soil was perfect. She thought the conditions were ideal for planting and worried that if it were dry over the weekend it would be too late to plant. She consulted with the men in charge, advising them that that was the day to plant. “No, Hermana,” they responded, “the moon isn’t in the right phase and if we plant today, the plants will grow but there won’t be any potatoes.” She persuaded the men to “do an experiment” by planting and seeing the results. They planted, and there were potatoes, but by then she had learned that the product was not the point. In hindsight, she felt she must have looked “foolish to them.” For them, she learned, planting was part of the whole cosmos, just one small element of a whole. One must take into account the phase of the moon to make sure that the planting fits with the larger order of things. Perhaps most important, she realized that “the agricultural cycle is an integral part of people’s life and religiosity.” Learning about the land, its role in people’s lives, and their perceptions of it gave Sister Aurelia insight into their faith. The knowledge Sister Aurelia gained at IER led her to leave it. She concluded that it was an artificial setting, with access to resources totally absent from most communities, that limited her understanding of the land and of local faith and culture. She heard people say, “You could do those things [at IER],” because it was special. They had access to fertilizer and irrigation. After six years with IER, Sister Aurelia joined the Chacapampa campo team with Fathers Mike Briggs and Ray Finch and Sister María Zeballos. The knowledge she gained through IER and her experience in Chacapampa allowed Sister Aurelia to respond to a natural disaster in a way that conformed more closely to established cultural norms and responded more directly to short- and long-term community needs while still taking missionaries’ interests into account.

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In 1982 Puno was hit by a devastating drought. The conditions were strikingly similar to those of the 1950s, when Maryknoll initiated the catechetical system and engaged it to distribute food aid provided by Catholic Relief Services to thousands of devastated indigenous communities. The closure of the catechetical school in 1967, the elimination of food aid in 1973, and the new knowledge gained through experimental programs meant that Maryknoll missionaries would not respond to the crisis of 1982 as they had to that of 1956. Instead, Sister Aurelia, whose modesty would lead her to minimize her role, spearheaded “the potato project.” Along with Fathers Briggs and Jim Christiansen and Aymara lay leaders José Callo Mamani and Marcelino Yupanqui, Sister Aurelia initiated a project to bring potatoes from Ireland to replace the seed lost to the drought. Yet the potato project offered more than replacement food. It provided a space for encounter and for strengthening indigenous community unity by calling on them to distribute seed, participate in planting, and plan for the future in ways that would reinforce unity. The committee asked pastoral agents to accompany communities during key points of the cultivation process. Sometimes clergy worked directly with communities, providing physical labor, but sometimes they simply accompanied them to give moral support. The potato project introduced many clergy to agricultural life. They participated in the rituals before planting, sharing people’s lives in a way that had been closed to them. This experience offered insight into the divisions and minimized tendencies to idealize organic, egalitarian communities. Instead, the clergy recognized “the good and bad in communities.” They encouraged people to maintain a seed bank to guard against similar problems in the future after they had repaid the Juli prelature for the borrowed potato seeds. Some communities responded positively, creating communal plots with potatoes planted from the “seed bank” and sharing them during the lean years of bad harvests. In the team’s view, the next best thing that could happen was that a community would work the project well and distribute everything so that all members of the community were content. It was a good but a lesser good. In the worst cases, remembered Sister Aurelia, you might get the whole community together, and everyone would agree to the terms of the project; they

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would all sign the contract, but then the leadership would end up distributing the seeds to a select group, and in the end no one would want to repay the loan. Many times people in the community remained silent and suffered the consequences. Agriculture provided Sister Aurelia and all Maryknollers associated with IER and the potato project a distinct perspective on indigenous communities. They learned about Andean spirituality as it was integrated into community life. The very undefinability of Sister Aurelia’s position as a woman religious, an agronomist, and even a Hispanic seemed to facilitate the development of a distinct relationship that offered new and unanticipated insights into the integral nature of indigenous community life and the relationship with the land. Sister María Zeballos: Faith and Healing Sister María found a point of encounter through health.56 Like Sister Aurelia, she represented a new generation of Maryknoll clergy. She was a mestiza from Arequipa who had participated in a Maryknollsponsored effort to form a local religious order. Ultimately, this experiment led her to Maryknoll, making her one of a handful of international women who became Maryknoll sisters in the 1960s and 1970s. Sister María’s role as a nurse established her as an integral participant in the Chacapampa team. Her participation in this community and the knowledge she gained allowed her to put together a health and education program that integrated indigenous and Western medicine. Faith, healing, and agriculture are inextricably linked in indigenous communities. As a result, insight into health practices gave Sister María a window through which to view Andean spirituality. Sister María and three other women religious formed a health promoters’ program to prepare indigenous leaders to provide health services and knowledge of preventive medicine and hygiene to their communities. Similar programs were established by Maryknoll sisters in their missions with indigenous people in Bolivia and Guatemala. In each country and region, local responses defined the programs. This program was eventually turned over to the Peruvian government, and

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Sister María turned to facilitating courses designed to integrate Andean and Western practices of medicine. Sister María began with questions, which initially people were reluctant to answer. Like all professionals, she recounted, Andean healers wanted to keep their secrets. Many refused to share their methods even with each other, far less with outsiders. She started organizing contests, inviting healers in the area to bring their herbs and share their knowledge. They all spoke Aymara. At the time Sister María was studying the language, but she did not understand much of what was being said, so instead of relying on words, she watched people, reading their faces and looking to see how they responded to one another’s knowledge. If she saw that there was discord about a cure, she would go to the board and recount what she understood from the speaker. Then she would turn to those whose expressions suggested doubt, asking them, “Is that what you think? Are there other methods?” Gradually she gathered more and more information, learning from them, and facilitating their teaching each other. Learning local methods of healing gave Sister María a new means of accessing communities that was based on the trust gained through shared knowledge. For years, she remembered, people from the communities would come to her with babies on the verge of death. Often it was obvious that the infant had been ill for a long time and that they had come for a death certificate rather than a cure. With tremendous anguish and sadness, she explained that she would ask why they had not come earlier. “But just the other day, I saw you in the plaza. Why didn’t you say something?” As she learned about indigenous methods of healing, her questions changed. She asked what they had done to that point to help the child and listed methods she knew to be common. As people listened to her knowledge and heard her respect for their practices, they recognized that she was not asking to condemn but to help and to learn. Gradually they shared more information. Yet even these efforts included a firm line to ensure shared knowledge and shared responsibility. She developed a program with midwives founded on the same principle of engaging indigenous and Western methods to discern what was best for the expecting mother. At the beginning, like Sister Barbara Cavenaugh who worked with Fa-

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ther Madden in Mocachi, she had to mandate that a midwife stay with her if she were called for a birth. Giving birth was dangerous. Many women died. Among the most common causes of death was failure to expel the placenta. Sister María learned that one method used frequently and with considerable success involved taking a chicken feather and passing it under the woman’s nose to make her sneeze. The natural contraction and relaxation of the body often forced the placenta out. She remembered one occasion when a woman was suffering this problem and she asked the woman’s mother for a chicken feather. The distraught mother reached under the bed and plucked a feather from one of the chickens. Not only did the method work, but the women’s surprise at Sister María’s knowledge increased their trust in her. When Sister María shared the method and experience with Western doctors at a conference, they simply laughed and said that she had clearly been affected by Puno’s high altitude and life with indigenous people. Yet, as she pointed out, this method was the most natural and the least intrusive that could be used. With the feather one did not have to put one’s hand inside the woman’s body and wrench the placenta free. She suggested that one did not have to accept all indigenous methods of healing as superior to Western ones but recognize that some of those methods were better. Moreover, there was an inherent logic in their methods, and recognizing and understanding that logic was central to sharing and participating in local culture. With that knowledge and understanding it was possible to discuss ideas, issues, differences, and similarities among people of distinct cultures. Sister Patricia “Pat” Ryan: From Knowledge to Justice Like Sisters Aurelia and María, Sister Patricia “Pat” Ryan entered Maryknoll at a unique moment in history. Hers was the first class of Maryknoll novices to experience an alternative formation based on the conclusions of the Second Vatican Council. During the psychological testing before she entered Maryknoll, Sister Pat was asked, “Why would you ever want to come right now? Everything is changing: it might not be like it is right now. We can’t offer you anything secure.” She

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responded, “That’s why I’d like to come. I want to see the changes.” “They sounded exciting,” she said. She was especially affected by the changes in the ideal of the church: “Where it’s more . . . church as community, we’re equal in that. It’s not a question of man/woman. It’s not a question of one culture or another. It’s how you join together as a community of people to celebrate what you believe and to try to live that and support each other in doing that.”57 Even before she entered Maryknoll, Sister Pat’s Catholic experience was distinctive. As a young woman in Queens, New York, and later Levittown, Long Island, she participated in a youth group whose facilitator encouraged them to analyze the world according to the see, judge, act model initiated by the Belgian worker priest Joseph Cardign. They were to examine social reality, analyze it in the light of gospel values, and respond through their faith. The reality of the 1960s in the United States offered plenty to analyze. Sister Pat had friends whose husbands had died in the Vietnam War. She witnessed the civil rights movement. And she volunteered in a Head Start program in a Latino community in New York as part of her experience as a Maryknoll novice. Like Sister Aurelia, Sister Pat was attracted to Maryknoll because mission seemed to offer a chance to serve the poor, to live the values that she identified with her faith. She was taken aback to find that in contrast to the images presented in Maryknoll magazine, most missionaries lived middle-class lifestyles. “When we came, I took for granted that we were doing this [living with the poor].” Her image of Maryknoll, she said, came “from pictures I had seen and talking with some of our sisters who’d been down here, I thought we were living out in the campo. If I was going out into the city, I’d be living in one of those pueblos jóvenes. It was a surprise to me when I came and realized we weren’t yet. There were [a] few exceptions to that, but that wasn’t really the case yet. That surprised me a lot. To go to Juli— that surprised me a lot.” In Juli it “was like coming into a house that could have been in the States, a convent in the States.” While the rest of the community lacked electricity and lived with water rationing, the sisters’ convent had generators and water tanks. For the new missionaries this led to a kind of “whispering in the house. But where do they come from?

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What happened? How did we get these houses?” “I just never ever imagined,” recounted Sister Pat, “that we were living in buildings like that. So for me it was a tremendous challenge to understand the history of where all that came from. And how do you hold hands with history and walk forward? Which means some things you leave behind, but you appreciate where they came from, how they came about.”58 At the same time that Sister Pat struggled with the history of Maryknoll’s mission in Peru, she also relied on clergy to guide her to a preliminary understanding of Peru’s social and political realities. When she arrived in Lima, Sisters Rose Dominic and Rose Timothy directed her orientation program. One of her first lessons in the dynamics of local power was when General Velasco, the reforming military dictator who claimed to act in the name of the poor, returned to Lima after his first trip to the provinces. Sister Rose Dominic took Sister Pat and another new arrival to a friend’s house to watch Velasco’s triumphant return from a rooftop overlooking Lima’s Plaza de Armas. Indigenous people and residents of the pueblos jóvenes had been trucked to the plaza for the event. “We had seen as we were walking in to go to this building to watch. But they’re being brought in on trucks. They were all being directed by the officials of the government and herded into certain zones. When they had the main plaza, the president came out onto the balcony to speak to the hordes of people who were supposed to be there to welcome him back — their dear president,” she remembered. After the demonstration Sister Rose Dominic invited the sisters downstairs to watch the event on the local news. It was portrayed as a populist victory. As they walked home later, they listened to people complaining: “ ‘They promised they would bring us, and they were going to give us food and a place to stay and take us home, and they just left us.’ And they came from far. How were they going to get back? Where were they going to spend the night?” Sister Rose Dominic and Rose Timothy “would take us to different events like that and just watch and see,” she continued, “ . . . and they would help us understand the different newspapers.” This experience and the opportunity to live in one of the pueblos jóvenes prepared Sister Pat for Juli, where she settled in 1971. She began to work at IER in a program of reciprocal education. The indigenous

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people would learn leadership skills, and the clergy would learn more about community organization. This gave Sister Pat greater insight into the “reformist Velasco military regime” but also into how he fit into a longer history of manipulation and repression of indigenous people. Initially the Velasco government supported IER, providing salaries to train teachers to develop capacitación [lit. “training,” but often with an emphasis on consciousness raising] classes in the campo. But Sister Pat remembered that when it became evident that these teachers were becoming effective working with local communities, developing leaders, and creating linkages among communities, the program ended. The government stopped funding the courses and sent the most effective teachers to remote regions of the country, into a kind of exile. The Velasco government, at this time, was imposing its own leadership structure on indigenous communities as a central component of its program of land reform. Autonomous organizing was not in the government’s interest.59 In fact, a visit to Puno by Velasco’s wife offered another deeply disturbing lesson in power and inequality. Sister Pat had initiated a course titled “Community Organization Reflection,” using the see, judge, act method. She facilitated rather than taught and learned more than she taught. “We took different things that were happening, which I was learning about as they were happening,” she said. The visit by Velasco’s wife offered an opportunity for reflection. “That’s a moment that’s marked Puno’s history,” Sister Pat remembered. “That moment. You ask anybody who is in Puno, and they’ll tell you about what happened that day here in Puno and in this department.” When university students and community members gathered to protest, some were shot, others were tear gassed, and others disappeared. “We didn’t know any of this was going to happen, of course, and there we are. We were going to participate in this and see what all this really means and go further with it,” Sister Pat said. I didn’t do the reflection. I just had to question them, question the things that come out and how people saw this as, “It’s always been like this. This is not unusual. The military and the police always treat us like this.” And they’d start to give their stories. And it wasn’t being

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Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title. Sister Patricia “Pat” Ryan (center) and Sister Doreen Longres (right) with unnamed Aymara woman in Chucuito, Juli prelature. Courtesy of Maryknoll Mission Archives.

said with vehemence, it was like, “This is the way our life is here. How we’re treated by the mistis in the processions and things. And how we’re treated like that by them no matter where we go here. And what happened here in Puno, the repression against students, people being detained beaten, is normal. That’s the only way of life. No respect whatsoever.” To be a campesino is to suffer a lot. To be a campesino you have to put your head down in front of them; you can’t stand up; you can’t look at another person eye to eye.

Even as the Velasco government engaged in indirect and overt repression of indigenous people in Puno, the agrarian reform program he introduced provided new spaces for engagement. To access the land and resources being offered by the government, communities had to gain government recognition. Sister Pat remembered that “the government wanted [to] change all of [the community leaders] and disregard the authorities, not recognize the authorities that were elected

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by the people, and make them elect another kind of system. And if you didn’t go into that new system you were not considered, you had no recognition in the eyes of the state and therefore no rights. And the government would come in and offer your community, ‘If you’re going to get recognized, you can have tractors. We’ll give you the dump trucks so you can cart the stuff you need to build something over here in that area.’” Thus gaining access to resources in this new political system required a new system of mediation. Indigenous tenientes were to be replaced by government sanctioned authorities. At the same time, Maryknoll was dismantling the catechetical system. Changes thus undermined two core intermediaries in rural indigenous communities. Sister Pat and others from IER began going to communities to inform them about the laws and to help them organize and decide how to respond. At the same time that communities gained a new kind of government recognition, individuals also earned recognition as citizens with rights. “People didn’t have documents, they weren’t recognized as citizens,” Sister Pat said. They didn’t have their birth certificates, so they weren’t recognized as people, as persons. They didn’t exist for the state. They didn’t have any; even on paper they didn’t have rights. . . . There was a movement that had started in the sixties with some of the communities to get their rights recognized. And we decided to get together with the leaders of that movement from the different districts [and] asked if they’d like to get together with people from another sector/department and have a roundtable, which is sitting around on the ground someplace together, just talking about the experience of what they had done, what they’d achieved, and where it was at and what they might think about those groupings toward in the future.

The “roundtables” ultimately led to new laws passed in Lima that provided for “extraordinary inscription of birth certificates, of births.” Sister Pat continued: [We were] helping/accompanying in that whole process. Again with information this is possible, these laws exist, this is what they say, this

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is what is needed. If there are abuses, what can be done? If they’re charging you and it’s supposed to be free, what can be done about that? If the books don’t arrive, special books for the inscribing of the births in your district, what can be done there? There’d be open forums here in the plaza and some of the other places way, way out, and people would come from all over and just talk about this. They’d talk about it in front of the authorities who were [doing the] abusing as well.60

In one of Sister Pat’s capacitación classes she and the students discussed the Feast of Saint Peter and Paul and its significance and then went into town to participate in it. The participation and reflection offered an opportunity to learn about Puno’s social structures and the relationship between the town and the campo. “The campo people come from all over for the feast, and they have the procession around the plaza,” Sister Pat remembered. “The townspeople would stand in the doorway and make comments, joking about it, or on the balconies. A lot of the things [the people in the class] pointed out to me I missed. . . . It was their reflection.” Sister Pat remembered the people telling her, “Did you see when [the procession] turned this corner here? Some of them threw out, like, spitballs, some of the young kids, from the decente families, from the balcony and onto the statue [and] they complained, ‘They’re using our plaza for their procession.’” At the same time, she learned about “their own concept of sacred. For them this was a very sacred moment, this procession. That would be ridiculed by other people [the mistis].” Sister Pat learned how practices of faith were inextricably woven into structures of inequality. The processions, dancing, and embrace were an expression and a vindication of faith at the same time that they were a site of injustice. They reinforced the division between the campo and the town even as they brought the people of both worlds together in a shared physical space through what was ostensibly a shared religious faith. IER offered a form of education very different from that offered in the catechetical system. It responded directly to people’s needs and was linked to their faith, through the way that their faith was linked to community structures and the land. Yet like the catechetical system, literacy, and Cáritas food aid, it depended on existing community

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structures and responded to inextricably linked religious, educational, and economic needs. It also, like the catechetical system, became linked to the national government, except that the terms were no longer established by either the missionaries or the government. Instead, they were the products of a dialogue.

Codifying Change: Describing the Indian Face of God and Becoming a “Voice of the Poor”

The new church of the Juli prelature was necessarily small. The nature of the emphasis on getting close to people, leaving urban centers, and finding ways to access local culture could not be engaged on a large scale. There were not enough Maryknoll clergy, and catechists who had facilitated access to communities seemed like obstacles to the new model of mission. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of participants in these experiments were young. Youth allowed them to struggle to learn Aymara and to survive what remained very difficult physical conditions at Puno’s 12,500-foot altitude. While older clergy supported the new mission, the church of the poor in Juli might also have been described as the church of the young. Although many older clergy actively embraced the Second Vatican Council, liberation theology, and the preferential option for the poor, they could not participate in the same kinds of experimental programs as the younger generation. At the same time, some of the older clergy were merely annoyed by the campo teams. The pastor of Huancané was notorious for refusing to allow members of one of the campo teams to shower in the very comfortable parish house; in his view, since they had chosen to live like the people, they should live with that choice.61 For many of the older generation of Maryknoll missionaries, the the new mission was as alienating as it was for the catechists. In some measure both felt discredited and excluded by the dramatic and sudden change in the church. Father Gerard McCrane, who with his calm intelligence, warm sense of humor, and deep spirituality would guide Maryknoll priests as Peru’s regional superior during the turbulent 1970s, remembered the experience of the local Maryknoll pastor, Tony Macri,

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when he arrived in Juli in 1967. Father Macri had been ordained in the late 1950s. In 1967 he attended a workshop on the new ideals of catechetics. The workshop emphasized the formation of people, the possibility that the church was not the only way to salvation, a “much broader vision of salvation, of how people encounter God, how they find the Lord.” For Father McCrane, the anguish experienced by Father Macri, the pastor of Juli, who had been trained in the traditional ideal of church in which Catholicism was the only path to salvation and required strict adherence to specific church laws, was paradigmatic of the displacement felt by some of the older generation of clergy. For those priests who lived for this faith and labored for years to establish it in Puno, the new church was sometimes overwhelming. Father Macri concluded after his seminar, “All my years have been wasted.” He and many others left.62 In 1968 the number of Maryknollers in Peru peaked with 84 priests and 47 sisters. By 1979 that number had been reduced nearly by half, to 49 priests and 23 sisters.63 Despite the decline in Maryknoll numbers and the relatively confined nature of the campo experiments, the image of Maryknoll in Peru in the 1970s and 1980s became defined by intercultural practices of faith, the church of the poor, and liberation theology. Although this image was not false, it obscured a more complex reality. In fact, the image grew from Maryknoll publications and proclamations, which amplified reality. In the 1970s the Instituto de Estudios Aymaras became a center for publishing material on Aymara culture, in Spanish and Aymara, related specifically to Maryknoll’s pastoral interests. Among the publications were pamphlets intended to serve Maryknoll clergy and missionaries from other religious orders seeking to access local culture. Maryknoll priests with advanced degrees in linguistics and anthropology directed IDEA. Cultural knowledge seemed to confer new status on priests as their sacramental roles diminished. IDEA’s main Aymara researcher was a local schoolteacher. Although most of the researchers affiliated with IDEA had college educations and in some cases advanced degrees, the center also trained a few Aymara men and women with limited formal education to teach Aymara to pastoral workers. IDEA publications and service as an educational center for pastoral workers enhanced Maryknoll’s public association with

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indigenous culture. The Instituto de Pastoral Andina (IPA), which Maryknoll supported, served as a counterpart to IDEA in Cuzco. IPA published work by pastoral agents and Peruvian intellectuals to offer insight into indigenous culture and pastoral innovations to pastoral workers and lay researchers. These intellectual endeavors placed Maryknoll at the center of efforts to promote an “Indian face of God” in Peru. While IDEA and IPA published materials that disseminated information about intercultural Catholicism and the Maryknoll missionaries’ experimental programs, the hierarchy of the Iglesia del Sur Andino began to issue joint proclamations of a more overtly political nature. Luis Vallejos, archbishop of Cuzco; Jesús Calderón, bishop of Puno; Luis Dalle, prelate of Ayaviri; Albano Quinn, prelate of Sicuani; and Albert Koenigsknecht, Maryknoll prelate of Juli, together became the “voice of the poor” in southern Peru.64 The Iglesia del Sur Andino enhanced the image of the church as a progressive voice promoting reform, but proclamations were made with no direct input from grassroots organizations. In fact, the exclusively hierarchical nature of the Sur Andino reproduced some inequalities even as it condemned others. The nature of most Maryknoll work in the new church in the Juli prelature was, in fact, overwhelmingly cultural, often apolitical, and hierarchical. Yet the image created by the Iglesia del Sur Andino and by Maryknoll’s outspoken advocacy for Aymara and Quechua culture and indigenous people ensured that the missionaries would appear at the center of the new progressive Catholic Church in Peru. And they were. It was just that the progressive Catholic Church in Peru did not quite embody the ideals that it proclaimed.

Lima: Pamplona Alta, a Paradigmatic Case of Power and Hierarchy in the Reforming Church

In 1966, two years before the crucial meeting of CELAM at Medellín, Maryknoll commissioned Peruvian researchers to conduct a survey of two hundred Maryknoll missionaries in Peru. The results of the study, published as Los Maryknoll en el Perú: Estudio de opiniones y actitudes (Maryknoll in Peru: A Study of Opinions and Attitudes),

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were surprising.65 Even as intercultural Catholicism came to define Maryknoll, many Maryknollers thought work in rural indigenous communities was one of the least desirable missions. Given the choice, indigenous people were second only to merchants as the last mission choice among surveyed missionaries. Of the 200 surveyed, 144 selected urban areas as their first choice, 23 chose small towns, 30 elected rural areas, and 3 chose the jungle.66 There appeared a striking contrast between the emerging image of an “Indian face of God” and the reality of an increasingly urban mission interest. But this contrast also reflected the reality of Peru in the 1960s and 1970s. Even as the national government under Velasco instituted a radical program of agrarian reform, the center of change remained Lima. Velasco’s agrarian reform, which eliminated many of the large landholdings that defined the semifeudal character of Peru, marked the death knoll for the country’s rural hacendados in southern Peru and the weakening of the last obstacle to Peru’s transition to capitalism. Capitalism, urbanization, and modernization seemed to be mutually reinforcing. In 1978 the Peruvian sociologist Héctor Maletta published an article titled with the rhetorical question, “Perú, ¿País campesino?” (Peru: A Campesino Country?).67 Maletta responded unreservedly that it was not. He claimed that for the first time in the country’s history more people lived in urban areas (narrowly defined as those with populations of more than 2,000) than in rural hinterlands. People looked to cities as transformative sites. The transformation of indigenous people who settled in the barriadas into cholos (an intermediary identity suggesting the possibility of a later transformation into mestizos) gave hope to the country’s racist elite that indigenous people would disappear by becoming part of a modernizing mestizo majority.68 Enthusiastic intellectuals would later describe indigenous migrants to Lima’s barriadas (or, pueblos jóvenes, as Velasco termed them) as the “New Face of Peru,” “The Other Modernity,” and “Conquistadores of a New World.”69 For the progressive Catholic Church and the Velasco government urban young towns represented spaces of possibility for creating a new Peru.70 Maryknoll missionaries’ professed choice of urban mission reflected the excitement and enthusiasm that would be expressed by the

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progressive Peruvian Catholic Church and the reformist military government. Pueblos jóvenes also offered a counterpoint and compliment to the indigenous apostolate. Ninety percent of the clergy working in pueblos jóvenes were foreign, making them equivalent to the rural prelatures and vicariates in their dependence on an international Catholic presence.71 Yet the pueblos jóvenes in Lima also attracted progressive Peruvian Catholic clergy and the hierarchy. Cardinal Landázuri established the Mission to Lima in 1957 in response to the plight of the migrant poor who had “invaded” what became Ciudad de Dios in 1954. Gutiérrez brought university students from the Union of Catholic Students (UNEC) to special programs in the pueblos jóvenes. And the Fathers Jorge and Carlos Álvarez Calderón centered much of their work with Juventud Obrera Católica and Juventud Universitaria Católica in the pueblos jóvenes. In fact, the progressive image of the Peruvian church grew from its association with these young towns. Maryknoll and other foreign missionaries, who helped to develop the physical infrastructure and social organization, facilitated Velasco’s access to the pueblos jóvenes. In many ways the role that Maryknoll played in Lima’s barriadas appeared similar to that which the missionaries had played in Puno a decade earlier. The “invasions” of the 1950s, like the indigenous rebellions of the 1920s, forced the Peruvian government to recognize the plight of the country’s poor. Foreign missionaries, Maryknoll key among them, built infrastructure, provided aid, and facilitated community organizing. In Ciudad de Dios, where Maryknoll established the first parish in 1960, the missionaries helped to develop parish networks. As was true of the catechetical system in Puno, these networks offered means of accessing the national government through the mediation of the church. The Maryknoll missionaries’ methods appeared similar to those they used in Puno, but they reflected changes in the church and the distinct “modernizing” site of urban Lima. Maryknoll clergy developed catechetical programs, but they attracted youth instead of married men as they had in Puno. Young people, with their bilingual language skills and their ability to negotiate the spaces of urban Lima, gained new status in barriadas, radically transforming the age-based system of authority that dominated indigenous communities. Women also played key roles in new

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community organizations. Maryknollers helped to consolidate nascent community organizations that became centered on the parish. Parish councils organized to meet community demands later provided the foundation for contacting the Velasco government and international aid organizations to access resources. Maryknoll missionaries again served as aids for a weak state, providing necessary resources for development.72 Maryknoll established a social service center in Ciudad de Dios that was directed by Sister Rosemary McCormack. Initially, Sister Rosemary ran it like a center in the United States— investigating each appeal for assistance, visiting homes, and maintaining detailed records. Gradually she began to adapt to local practices of organization, and she realized that records were useless. No one would look at them. She learned that people had their own networks for addressing small problems. If somebody did not have enough to eat, or needed shoes for their child to go to school, or needed somebody to watch their child while they went out, the neighbors would pool their money and help. They also had a greater sense of extended family, so not just the aunts, uncles, and grandparents were raising the children but also the neighbors. People would visit the church social service center only for serious emergencies. Sister Rosemary realized that the houses of each zone had a specific number sequence and generally if the people gave the right address, then their story was true. Conversely, if they lied about the address, then their stories were likely to be lies. Although the social service center could help, resources were limited. Sister Rosemary found that the answer to resolving the community’s problems was organizing. If community members could help with the small things, then getting people together for the big things would also allow them to take care of each other. So the parish started women’s groups to deal with local problems. The women of each block would elect two or three women as spokespeople for the block. Through these networks, the church social service center organized childcare. Initially each block raised the money to pay one woman to watch the children, because otherwise the mothers were often forced to just lock their children inside. The women’s block organization later petitioned the United Nations, which had started a childcare program. With UN

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funding, the community organized twelve childcare centers with professionals to watch the children. Since not every community needed a clinic, the women’s block organization helped to distribute resources as needed. One district would get a clinic, another a chapel. This distribution of resources ensured that people shared spaces outside of their immediate zones, thereby maintaining a measure of unity as the community grew.73 At the same time receiving resources reinforced organization. Church organizing also facilitated the development of links between Ciudad de Dios and the Velasco military government, which was recognizing the leaders of the pueblos jóvenes and responding to their demands. If the community appealed for a school, the government would provide the teachers if they built the school. Laura Vargas Varcárcel, director of Peru’s Episcopal Commission of Social Action (CEAS), recounted that when she worked as an educator paid by the Peruvian government in the 1970s the only infrastructure was that of the church. She held classes in the parish hall.74 As a result of this reciprocal engagement communities became increasingly well organized, so well organized, in fact, that their demands began to surprise the Velasco government and to surpass its willingness to respond. With church support, communities were, in some cases, able to maneuver the government into granting support that it might otherwise refuse. The paradigm of this coerced support, and of the way it depended on a system of hierarchically linked intermediaries inextricably bound to the church, came with the establishment of Villa El Salvador, an offshoot of Ciudad de Dios. More than a decade after its founding in 1954, Ciudad de Dios was becoming increasingly crowded. The children of the first settlers, married and now with their own children, needed to find their own spaces, but the government was not providing them. The residents of Ciudad de Dios knew that the official government policy was to respond to “invasions” of such landless people if they included more than one thousand families. Police forces were keen to prevent this kind of mass invasion and were vigilant about expelling people and burning their makeshift houses before they reached a critical mass. But in 1971 a huge invasion of more than one thousand families moved onto pri-

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Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title. Sister Rosemary McCormack (center) with unnamed priest in foreground and children of Ciudad de Dios. Courtesy of Maryknoll Mission Archives.

vate land known as Pamplona near a Jesuit school and were somehow overlooked. The straw mat houses people had constructed to mark their space were not burned to the ground. The next night another thousand families arrived. At that point police responded by trying to dislodge the settlers with violence. In the melee that followed one person was killed. The church councils immediately called a meeting. The “invaders” attended to explain their situation. This was a moment of dramatic change in the church: progressive clergy felt obligated to show their support for the country’s poor even as the military government was becoming more authoritarian. Sister Rosemary remembered that just a week before the invasion the parish held a long meeting on solidarity and affirmed the need to support each other and the community. It seemed clear to her that they had to support the invaders of Pamplona in order to be consistent with the values they had declared just a week

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earlier. The parish priest, Maryknoll Father Carmen LaMazza, was on leave for the weekend, so he did not know about the invasion. Sister Rosemary and the parish council wrote a petition supporting the invaders and proposing a solidarity mass on Sunday at the site of the invasion. Masses could serve to reinforce social hierarchies and inequalities, but they could also offer transformative spaces. The pueblos jóvenes appeared only in the peripheral vision of the urban center of Lima. As long as there was no news of the invasion and repression in the press, the police and military could act with impunity. By organizing the mass, the parish council made the invasion public. Doing so also had the potential to bring the parish and the people into direct confrontation with the government, whose policy had been to dispel the settlers. When Father LaMazza returned to Ciudad de Dios, Sister Rosemary handed him the petition, asked him to sign it, and told him she would explain later. With the parish pastor’s seal of approval, the petition made its way from the pueblo jóven of Ciudad de Dios to the parishes of Lima. Everyone would be invited to the mass at the site of the invasion. While the petition made its way outward, news of it also traveled upward through the chain of command of the Peruvian church hierarchy. Father LaMazza recognized immediately that he had to notify Luis Bambarén, bishop of the barriadas. Bishop Bambarén had been active in the barriadas since the 1950s. He collaborated with the Velasco government to promote development in the pueblos jóvenes and served as church representative to the National Office of Development of the Pueblos Jóvenes (ONDEPJOV), which in 1971 became the new government agency, the National System of Social Mobilization (SINAMOS). Although Bishop Bambarén maintained close relations with the Velasco government, he clashed with the minister of the interior, Armando Artola, who was responsible for the pueblos jóvenes. As a result, the conflict over the invasion also became a clash of power between Bambarén and Artola or between church and state.75 Bishop Bambarén and auxiliary Bishop Germán Schmitz presided over the Sunday mass with five priests. Artola responded by detaining Bambarén and accusing him of instigating the invasion. Father LaMazza was also arrested.

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In the meantime, news and tension had continued to travel up the hierarchical lines of church and state to Cardinal Landázuri and General Velasco. Landázuri, the force behind much of the progressive church of Peru who had served as copresident of the CELAM meeting in 1968, had been out of the country at the time of the invasion. He returned to find his clergy in prison. Maryknoll priests who experienced the intense conflict between the reforming military government and the progressive church remembered a press conference held at the airport, with Landázuri standing on a chair demanding release of his clergy. Soon Velasco declared it all a “misunderstanding.” He ordered the release of the clergy and moved the settlers to land that became Villa El Salvador. Minister of the Interior Artola resigned. What began as a popular movement initiated without the support of the church or the government became a clash of power between representatives of the church and the state. It began with Sister Rosemary and the parish council whose engagement depended on the approval of the parish priest, Carmen LaMazza, who authorized the appeal to the parishes of Lima and called on Bishop Bambarén, who contacted Bishop Schmitz to say the public mass that attracted the attention of the press. When the minister of the interior tried to confront the clergy and assert his power, he lost. The Velasco regime needed the alliance with the church to maintain its legitimacy. For its part, the community’s well-being depended on the mediation of the church and especially the support of the hierarchy. The relationship was based on a system of hierarchically linked intermediaries. And it was tenuous.

Maryknoll, the Progressive Peruvian Church, and Political Power

By the 1970s Maryknoll had dismantled most of the structures that reinforced the missionaries’ roles as intermediaries between and among indigenous communities, an emerging middle class, and the U.S. and Peruvian governments. By transferring or closing parochial schools in Lima and Arequipa and the San Ambrosio pre-seminary in Puno and minimizing ties with cooperatives, Maryknoll eliminated one of the

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missionaries’ main subsidies for the national government. At the same time, by dismantling the Puno catechetical school and no longer providing food aid, the missionaries eliminated another indirect subsidy and undermined their role as intermediaries between indigenous communities and the governments of both countries. For Maryknoll, changes in mission were simply about living the ideals of the new Catholic Church defined by the Second Vatican Council, liberation theology, and the preferential option for the poor. The missionaries were largely (if not completely) unaware of their role as an indirect aid to a weak Peruvian state. Even if they had been more conscious of this apparently secular role, Maryknoll would likely have worked to eliminate ties to the government because they did not want to be compromised by an alliance with the military. In fact, the whole Peruvian church began to distance itself from the military government as it became increasingly authoritarian. In 1979 the new Peruvian constitution declared an official separation between church and state.76 By the end of the 1970s Maryknoll and other foreign clergy in rural areas minimized the emphasis on catechetical programs and reduced direct aid to communities. They continued to work with communities, but their efforts offered greater potential for conflict with the national government than for co-optation by it. The number of recognized intermediaries, both catechists and clergy, declined dramatically, and the nature of their work became more fragmented. The uniformity that characterized Maryknoll’s mission to Peru in the 1950s disappeared. A few missionaries developed closer relations with indigenous communities and disseminated knowledge of indigenous culture that contributed to asserting indigenous culture as a crucial component of modernity, but the breadth of the mission diminished dramatically. Work in barriadas/pueblos jóvenes continued and became a focal point of reform. All work that was not directly associated with liberation theology and the preferential option for the poor effectively disappeared from public view. In the 1980s the radical, Maoist Shining Path entered the vacuum that had been left by powerful hacendados and agents of the Catholic Church. It grew strongest in the areas where the church was weakest. In stark contrast to leftist movements that emerged in other Latin

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American countries during the late 1970s and 1980s, which often looked to the Catholic Church as an ally, the Shining Path identified the Catholic Church as its enemy. The leadership claimed that the church would be the dessert or the last course in a destructive force that consumed Peruvian society for more than a decade.77 Understanding the strength of the movement requires recognizing not only the vacuum left by the elimination of many haciendas but also that created by the new division between church and state. Yet none of these influences was particularly relevant or even visible to the Maryknoll missionaries. For many of them, the 1970s were the period when they tried hardest to ensure that their mission ideal conformed to reality. By working to live simply and understand indigenous culture, they sought to create an authentic church of the people.

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CHAPTER 5

Reform, Violence, and “Reconciliation,” 1976–1989

In four years fatal car accidents killed four bishops of the progressive Iglesia del Sur Andino in rapid succession. On May 9, 1982, Monseñor Luis Dalle was returning to his prelature of Ayaviri when his bus struck a parked truck, killing him, the driver, and other passengers. Just a month later, on June 8, 1982, Monseñor Luis Vallejos, archbishop of Cuzco, suffered a similar fate when his bus en route to the campesino community of Chonta plunged over a cliff. On January 5, 1986, Julio González Ruiz, former bishop of Puno, was struck by a car in Lima and died a few days later. On February 9, 1986, Monseñor Alberto Koenigsknecht died on his return to the prelature of Juli when his car hit the back of a parked truck.1 The deaths came at a difficult time. In the 1980s the bishops of southern Peru remained outspoken critics of social and political injustice in the country.2 The Iglesia del Sur Andino was at the center of the national progressive Catholic Church. The rapid succession of the bishops’ deaths, the similarity in their form, and the effect on the Iglesia del Sur Andino led some to suggest that there must have been foul play;3 these were not mere accidents but a clear effort to stop what 205

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pastoral agents described as the prophetic voice of the Iglesia del Sur Andino. Those who believed these were not accidents differed in whom they held responsible for the deaths. Some attributed the “accidents” to the Maoist Shining Path (PCP-SL) that initiated in 1980 a devastating campaign of violence to destroy the country. Others laid the blame on Peru’s armed forces, which acted with nearly equivalent brutality to eradicate support for Shining Path. The belief — whether valid or mere conspiracy theory — that either Shining Path or the armed forces might have killed the bishops revealed the peculiar position of the progressive Catholic Church during the political violence that paralyzed Peru from 1980 through 1992. The conflict in Peru between Shining Path and the national government took the lives of some 69,000 people. One of every five victims was a Quechua speaker — testimony that the vortex of violence was in Peru’s rural highland communities and that virulent racism permitted the massacre with strikingly little public protest. Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report (CVR), undertaken more than a decade after the conclusion of the war, attributed 54 percent of the violence to Shining Path and 30 percent to Peru’s armed forces. With this record it might not be surprising that people believed the bishops could have been killed by either of these two forces of violence and repression.4 But something more was at stake. In the mid- to late 1980s, when the violence became most intense, the Catholic Church was, as one observer put it, “between the sword and the wall.”5 The indigenous rural communities and urban barriadas at the center of the progressive church’s commitment to the poor in Peru also became the sites of some of the greatest conflicts between Shining Path and the armed forces.6 Shining Path recognized Catholic networks as among the best organized and the most socially conscious in these communities. They actively sought to infiltrate church networks to gain recruits.7 When they failed, Shining Path’s leaders identified Catholic social programs as an obstacle to revolution and a target for annihilation.8 For their part, Peru’s armed forces, which engaged in indiscriminate repression of campesinos and barriada residents, resented the progressive church’s outspoken defense of human rights. To the military, seeking to destroy Shining Path at any cost in indigenous (and therefore expendable)

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lives, this defense made clergy equivalent to the terrorists of Shining Path.9 Ironically, perhaps, the church’s position caught in between Shining Path and the armed forces may have granted it legitimacy during the years of the armed conflict. The institutional structures established during the preceding two decades in response to the appeal of the Second Vatican Council, the Conference of Latin American Bishops at Medellín and Puebla, and Gutiérrez’s A Theology of Liberation were transformed into a network to defend the rights of victims of the violence in the 1980s.10 This network extended from remote rural indigenous communities through the center of power in Lima to the international community. It depended on a steady flow of European aid that poured into the country to promote human rights at the height of the violence. Laura Vargas, director of CEAS, the Lima-based organization at the center of the Peruvian Catholic Church’s struggle for human rights, remembered that Germany’s Misereor and the Cáritas programs of Denmark and Norway ensured that economic resources were not an issue.11 The Catholic role in supporting human rights during the violence of the 1980s reflected historical tradition, the recent globalization of the Peruvian church, and the contemporary international movement for human rights. As Jeffrey Klaiber observed, one of the central roles of the Catholic Church had always been to mediate between indigenous people and the government and to restore social peace during indigenous uprisings.12 Catholic clergy and members of the hierarchy played crucial roles in stemming the tide of violence during the rebellions of Taki Onqoy in the seventeenth century, Túpac Amaru in the eighteenth century, Juan Bustamante in the nineteenth century, and Rumi Maki in the twentieth century.13 The Catholic Church’s support for human rights in the 1980s, which helped to restore social peace and the legitimacy of the Peruvian state, thus conformed to tradition. But it did so in ways that reflected contemporary changes in the church and society. The church had always transcended the social, cultural, and geographic divisions within Peru, and after three decades of mission it also transcended the boundaries of Peru. While Catholic centers created by clergy and the hierarchy in the preceding decades provided the foundation for the infrastructure of the

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church’s human rights network in Peru, the intensity of the violence and the position of the church as a target of Shining Path and the armed forces created a unity of purpose. The experience of Maryknoll offers a clear-cut example of this process. Until the late 1970s Maryknoll played a central role in the progressive Catholic Church, but the missionaries’ programs were largely autonomous. In the Juli prelature of the Sur Andino, Maryknoll emphasized an intercultural approach to evangelization manifested in the campo teams, IDEA, and IER. This emphasis put the missionaries at odds with some of the more overtly left-leaning Catholic clergy in the region. Despite a history of tension between Maryknoll and other clergy in the Sur Andino, the violence of the late 1970s and 1980s drew the U.S. missionaries into the broader movement of the progressive Catholic Church in defense of human rights. Although it did not change the Maryknoll missionaries’ political perspective, they became identified, like the church of which they were a part, as “leftists.” This chapter examines the transformation of the Maryknoll mission into a more integrated force in the progressive Peruvian church’s human rights movement and analyzes the development of the institutional structures of the human rights network. I suggest that violence and repression unified the progressive Catholic Church (even as it divided a progressive and conservative wing of the church), while the preceding decades of church support for “the poor” and the church’s targeting by both sides of the conflict gave it legitimacy. The Catholic centers established to promote cultural awareness, encourage consciousnessraising, and facilitate the development of infrastructure in rural and urban Peru since the 1960s merged to create the human rights network. Each step in the violence and repression drew the progressive Catholic Church closer together through the clergy’s and laity’s shared support for the relatively apolitical appeal for human rights. Maryknoll and the Development of the Church Human Rights Network in the Sur Andino

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Maryknoll clergy in Peru introduced innovative mission programs in urban pueblos jóvenes and in indigenous communities in the altiplano, but they maintained a safe distance

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CALCA QUILLABAMBA QUILLABAMBA

ANTA ANTA ANDAHUAYLAS

ABANCA Y ABANCAY

PAUCARTAMBO PAUCARTAMBO

CU CUZCO ZCO

QUISPICANCHIS QUISPICANC HIS

PARURO P AR ARURO

COT COTABAMBAS ABAMBAS GRA U GRAU

CARABAYA ACOMAYO

ANT ANTABAMBA TABAMBA ABA A AYMARAES A YMARAES

CHUNBIVILCAS

SANDIA CANCHIS

CANAS E SPINAR ESPINAR

MELGAR

AZANGARO AZANGARO HUANCANE HU ANCANE

Archdiocese of Cuzco, 1537. Ricardo Durand Flórez, 1966 – 1975, Luis Vallejos Santoni, 1975 – 1982.

LAMPA LAM PA LAKE TITICACA

SAN ROMAN

Diocese of Puno, 1861. Julio Gonzále] Ruiz, SDB, 1959 – 1972, Jesús Mateo Calderón Barrueto, OP, 1972 – 1998.

PUNO PU NO

CHUCUITO CHUCU ITO

Diocese of Abancay, 1958. Enrique Pélach y Feliu, 1968 – 1992. Prelature of Juli, 1957. Eduardo L. Fedders, M.M. [USA], 1963 – 1973, Alberto L. Koenigsknecht Thelen, M.M. [USA] 1974 – 1986. Prelature of Ayaviri, Ayaviri, 1958. Greff, Metz 64 – 1971, Luciano M. Metzinger Gref f, SS.CC. [France] 1964 Perier,, SS.CC. [France] 1971 – 1991. Luis Dalle Perier Prelature of Sicuani, 1959. Nevin William Hayes, Ha O.Carm. [USA], 1959 – 1970, Albano Edward Quinn Wilson, 1971 – 1998. Prelature of Chuquibambilla, 1968. Miccheli, O.S.A O.S.A [Italy], 1976 – 1986. Lorenzo Micchel

The Iglesia del Sur Andino. Credit: Carlos Alexis Ordóñez Vicuña

BOLIVIA

URUBAM URUBAMBA BA

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from anything they perceived as radical or left-wing. Their resistance to what they identified as political already appeared evident in the 1954 Lima Methods Conference, when Father Lawler warned against fraternizing with labor unions.14 Although the missionaries’ cultural conservatism underwent a radical transformation, their political conservatism persisted. As Father Raymond Finch, a key figure in the Juli prelature who would serve later as Maryknoll superior general, observed of the Juli prelature, “I would say generally political awareness on the part of pastoral agents in the prelature was very low across the board[,] . . . extremely low.” “We came,” he concluded, “with our own prejudices as North Americans in terms of seeing things that might be a little bit left, or a little bit maybe inspired by socialism as menacing.”15 Despite their marginal political engagement, Maryknoll clergy participated in the most important progressive centers of the Peruvian Catholic Church in the 1960s because they shared in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, the meetings of CELAM, and liberation theology. Many Maryknoll priests participated in ONIS, and Maryknoll’s Father Fedders was a key figure among the progressive bishops of the Iglesia del Sur Andino. This organization of the hierarchy of southern Peru offered a unified voice for the region and sought to promote a shared pastoral approach. To fulfill this goal, the bishops of the Sur Andino created the Instituto de Pastoral Andina in 1969 for the purpose of “knowing the Andean soul and putting the campesinos on their feet.”16 IPA became the focal point for the Iglesia del Sur Andino, drawing together the clergy and laity of the region, but in its early years some Maryknoll clergy felt that the center’s directors promoted an overtly leftist perspective that emphasized economics over culture. As a result, they kept their distance from IPA until the late 1970s. IPA was the nexus of the Iglesia del Sur Andino, but each prelature and diocese had its own centers for study and evangelization. These centers promoted goals similar to those of IPA, but they reflected the particular ideals of the diverse clergy in each religious jurisdiction and local social, cultural, and economic conditions. The centers included the Centro de Estudios Rurales Andinos Bartolomé de las Casas in Cuzco, founded by the French Dominican Fathers; the Instituto de Estudios Aymaras in Chucuito, Juli, founded by Maryknoll; the Instituto

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de Estudios Rurales Waqrani in Ayaviri, Puno, founded by Peruvian Luciano Metzinger, and another in Pomata, Juli, founded by Maryknoll; the Centro de Capacitación Agro Industrial Jesús Obrero (CCAIJO) in Andahuylillas, Cuzco, founded by the Jesuits; the Granja Escuela Pumamarka de Yucay in Cuzco; the Centro Artesanal José Mauri in Asillo, Puno; the Centro de Formación Campesina in Sicuani, Puno; and the Centro de Promoción y Capacitación Campesina in Azángaro, Puno.17 Each site of evangelization promoted consciousness-raising among Andean campesinos and knowledge of Andean culture, but the similarity of their goals hid underlying divisions. Nonetheless, together these centers provided a Catholic network composed of clergy and laity committed to Quechua and Aymara people and a cadre of local indigenous leaders. Maryknoll’s emphasis on evangelization within Andean culture established them as outliers until the late 1970s, when state repression in Peru promoted an increased political consciousness even among the U.S. clergy. “We were,” recounted Maryknoll Father Curt Cadorette of the Instituto de Estudios Aymaras, seen as “almost irresponsible because we didn’t want to become politically engaged.”18 The tension was so intense that Father Steve Judd remembered that when he went to IPA for the first time as a newly ordained priest in 1973, he was “the only North American there. Nobody from the prelature went.” It was not a welcoming environment. In fact, in Judd’s memory it was “horrible.” The Spanish directors of IPA whose consciousness had been formed by the Spanish Civil War and resistance to the Catholic dictator Francisco Franco’s fascism were openly allied with leftist political parties. They had little patience for those who did not share their perspective. Judd did not return to IPA until 1975, when conditions seemed a bit better. Still, the environment was in Judd’s memory very antiAmerican and anti-imperialistic. Worse, there were no liturgies. The Spaniards even smoked during mass to express their disdain for more traditional clergy. By returning day after day for a dose of abuse, Judd gradually established a relationship with the Spanish clergy based on mutual respect. He concluded that despite the initial tension, the Spanish “taught us about solidarity, about how we could support one another . . . and they were the ones you knew you could count on.”19

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Although Judd’s encounter with IPA came from his own initiative, it also reflected changes in conditions in Peru and in the leadership of the Iglesia del Sur Andino. In 1971 Luis Dalle of Ayaviri and Albano Quinn of Sicuani, two new bishops, joined the progressive coalition. A year later Jesús Calderón joined as bishop of Puno, and the following year Maryknoll’s Alberto Koenigsknecht became prelate of Juli. Luciano Metzinger, who had served as prelate of Ayaviri, became secretary general of the Peruvian Episcopal Conference, carrying the voice of the Iglesia del Sur Andino to the center of church power in Lima. Metzinger subsequently served along with Luis Bambarén, the “bishop of the barriadas,” and José Dammert, the progressive bishop of Cajamarca, as part of the Peruvian delegation to the CELAM meeting in Puebla in 1979, when the church affirmed the preferential option for the poor.20 There was thus a merging of the historically divided rural and urban Peruvian church leadership with the Latin American church allied with liberation theology. These changes in leadership corresponded with changes in the Iglesia del Sur Andino and in IPA. In 1972 the Peruvian Episcopal Assembly organized pastoral regions that grouped together distinct dioceses and encouraged regional coordination through assemblies in which pastoral agents participated. This institutional change gave the Iglesia del Sur Andino official status as a church region, which transformed the ideal of unity created by the bishops in 1969 into a reality recognized by the hierarchy. IPA became the center of this new regional focus and the site where the clergy and laity of southern Peru came together to develop a coordinated pastoral approach, which included programs to address health, women’s issues, and even seminary training specifically for the region. Al Koenigsknecht, who participated in ONIS in the 1960s, was, in the words of Maryknoll Father Raymond Finch, “an extremely strong supporter of IPA, and he pushed people to be involved. He pushed people to be involved, and he pushed people to participate in it, and it was very strong in that we couldn’t be isolated in terms of the Iglesia del Sur Andino. That Maryknoll had no right to be there just on its own, without being in contact and working with other groups in the area.”21 Judd recounted that Gustavo Gutiérrez also helped to unify the clergy of the Sur Andino by encourag-

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ing them to recognize that “we had much more that unite[d] us than divide[d] us.”22 Gutiérrez was also involved with the Union of Catholic Students in Cuzco, another organization that would become affiliated indirectly with IPA. In 1973 he organized a workshop on liberation theology with twenty-seven UNEC participants in Cuzco. The participants included students from local day and night schools. Inés Callalli, a firstgeneration Quechua university student, remembered that the questions that dominated the encounter with Gutiérrez and others in what became annual meetings was, “What have you done for others, what have you done to demonstrate that we are all children of God, what services have you given?” The students responded by developing a plethora of programs to provide education to poor people in urban Cuzco and in the surrounding indigenous communities. The experience was transformative and in Callalli’s memory a beautiful period in Peruvian society, when young people came together seeking ways to serve their communities. She remembered a young man studying architecture who changed his major to veterinary studies because he recognized that this would offer greater opportunities to serve campesino communities. As a result of her participation in UNEC, Callalli became affiliated with the Centro de Estudios Rurales Andinos Bartolomé de las Casas, founded by the French Dominicans in Cuzco in 1974. In 1976 she was invited to a course to learn to teach Quechua, her native language, to pastoral agents. From 1976 to 1980 courses were held annually at IPA for pastoral agents and laity from throughout the world. IPA thus extended its network to lay pastoral agents and emerging indigenous leaders with ties to rural communities. Indigenous leaders were teaching pastoral agents in a formal setting.23 By 1972 the Iglesia del Sur Andino was recognized by the Peruvian Episcopal Assembly as a region. The archdiocese of Cuzco, the diocese of Puno, and each of the prelatures had individual centers devoted to promoting knowledge of Andean culture, preparing campesinos as leaders, and publishing educational materials. These centers came together in Cuzco at IPA. The bishops of the Iglesia del Sur Andino offered a unified voice for the region. Finally, the Iglesia del Sur Andino was linked to the center of church power in Lima through

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Luciano Metzinger, who served as general secretary of the Assembly. These institutional structures, the support of the hierarchy, and a unified pastoral ideal based in the principles of A Theology of Liberation and the preferential option for the poor declared by CELAM in 1979 put the Catholic Church of the Sur Andino in a unique position to respond to the deterioration of economic conditions and the intensification of violence that characterized Peru from the late 1970s through the early 1990s.

Lima: The Node of the Catholic Human Rights Network

Just as a network linking the distinct religious jurisdictions of the Sur Andino emerged and developed in the 1960s and early 1970s, the same thing occurred in the urban center of Lima. In 1965, The Episcopal Commission of Social Action (CEAS) was established in Lima to promote greater knowledge of Peruvian social reality and the social pastoral of the church. Juan Landázuri Ricketts, archbishop and founder of the Mission to Lima; Luis Bambarén, bishop of the barriadas; and Bishop Luciano Metzinger, former participant in the Iglesia del Sur Andino, together played crucial roles in the development of CEAS.24 In 1973 CEAS initiated a new organizational structure that would later include a department of the campesino (1974) to coordinate pastoral plans dedicated to campesinos at a national level; a department of human rights, which gave birth to the Coordination of the Pastoral of Human Rights (CPDH) (1976) to promote at the level of the national church an emphasis on respect for human rights and to include it in the national pastoral plans; and a juridical department (1976) to provide legal advice in the name of the church to urban and rural residents whose rights were violated.25 These structures provided a foundation for the coordination of human rights that defined the church in the late 1970s and 1980s. As was true in the Iglesia del Sur Andino, Maryknoll’s engagement with the new pastoral of the Peruvian church was a result both of encouragement by a key figure in the Maryknoll hierarchy and in response to changing conditions in the pueblos jóvenes. In 1969 Fa-

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ther Martin Murphy, the Maryknoll superior who had more than two decades of experience in Peru, held a meeting for the missionaries encouraging them to, in the words of Father Tom Burns, “listen to the Peruvian clergy and people.”26 Like Monseñor Koenigsknecht’s insistence that the Maryknollers be part of the Iglesia del Sur Andino, Murphy’s admonition symbolized an important shift in the Maryknoll attitude toward mission. Maryknoll became integrated into an inclusive Peruvian church. The first clear opportunity to put Father Murphy’s advice into practice came with the 1971 “invasion” of Pamplona Alta, when Maryknoll followed the lead of the people in the parish councils and helped to facilitate the legal recognition of this settlement. The emphasis on listening to the Peruvian people and clergy was reinforced in 1976 at a meeting with Bishop Bambarén, who was serving as president of CEAS, in which he encouraged clergy to become involved in human rights. This appeal marked the beginning of parish commissions and Solidarity Action, which became key to coordinating information and action during the years of the violence. In 1977 the emphasis was reinforced by what was arguably the most important political event in Peru prior to the advent of Shining Path.27 In 1975 General Francisco Morales Bermúdez took control of Peru’s military regime, concluding what had been described as the “Peruvian Experiment” initiated by the progressive General Juan Velasco Alvarado. By this time it was clear that the reforms instituted by Velasco did not have the desired effect. The agrarian reform program dismantled many of the country’s large landholdings and reduced the power of traditional hacendados in some regions, but it failed to distribute land to the majority of peasants. Moreover, it was designed to promote a capitalist model of agricultural production devoted to export rather than subsistence. Land was distributed to officially recognized “cooperatives” composed of people who had worked the haciendas rather than to individual campesinos or indigenous communities. As a result, most of Peru’s poorest campesinos were excluded from the benefits of the reform. The nationalization of petroleum, banking, and fish meal production created a massive national debt and made the state the most powerful economic force in the country. With the advent of

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the oil embargo in 1973, Peru entered into a simultaneous debt and labor crisis.28 When Morales Bermúdez took control from Velasco he responded to the crisis with draconian economic reforms that gave rise to largescale protests throughout the country. Morales Bermúdez oversaw 30 percent devaluations of currency every three months. The devaluations combined with devastating inflation made survival for wage workers nearly impossible. A stunningly well-organized popular sector in rural and urban Peru and powerful leftist political parties were, in fact, another unintended consequence of the Velasco reforms. Together, these organizations proved able and willing to take to the streets to protest the reforms devastating the livelihoods of urban workers and rural campesinos. Most dramatically, in 1977 a national strike was called with the hope of paralyzing the country to make people aware of the plight of workers.29 The emphasis on human rights, promoted by Bishop Bambáren, came shortly before the declaration of this strike. Maryknoll Father Burns recounted that in his parish of Jesus the Worker in Surquillo in Ciudad de Dios, a meeting had been called to promote the formation of the Human Rights Commission. It was scheduled for July 18, 1977. The national strike was called for July 19, 1977. The plan had been to open the meeting by listening to the news on the radio and then engaging in a reflection on the announcements. The first announcement was the interior minister’s assertion that the strike was illegal. Immediately reflection turned to how the church should respond. The result was creative planning that brought the parish into direct engagement with workers. A plan evolved to barricade the only bridge that provided access to Ciudad de Dios and thereby block public transportation. Older women in the parish, whose age and friendship with people in local police stations made them immune to arrest, were recruited to help get people out of prison. Food was distributed, medical care was provided, and parishioners took to the streets recording arrests and serving as witnesses to police abuse.30 The conjuncture of an appeal for a consciousness of human rights by Bishop Bambarén and the particular political context of the strike helped to transform the role of the church and Maryknoll. Histori-

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cally, Maryknoll and other clergy working in the pueblos jóvenes organized mainly to facilitate the development of infrastructure and to help people in their daily lives. The workers’ strike and the government repression called for a new type of engagement by the church and Maryknoll, which brought the missionaries and lay leaders much closer to organized workers, who were, in turn, supported by leftist political parties. In addition to the immediate aid during the strike, the parish and CEAS introduced “comedores populares,” community kitchens where women from the barriadas organized to prepare food provided by CEAS, which was supported by Germany and Holland. These comedores, which operated from 1977 to 1980, played a central role in community organizing, especially among women. They also contributed to enhancing the reputation of CEAS as a site for the defense of human rights. Parish engagement in the 1977 strike contributed to the development of the Coordination of the Pastoral of Human Dignity (CPDH), which evolved from meetings at CEAS among pastoral agents in the impoverished areas of Lima and Callao to discuss the situation of the country.31 This coordination, in turn, contributed to a new plan to address the human rights situation throughout the country. CEAS created five pastoral regions to bridge the gap between remote rural communities and the Lima-based center. These regions were the Sur Andino, the Nor Andino, the Sierra Central, the Costa, and the Selva.32 By 1977 there were 35 pastoral teams participating in the CPDH. By 1980 the number had increased to 100 pastoral teams. And by 1988 the number was more than 700. In 1980 CEAS began to organize national encounters among the distinct regions that united clergy, women religious, and laity. These meetings not only provided a means of coordinating responses to changing conditions in the country but also offered one of the only sites where it was possible to gain a perspective on what was happening throughout the country and even in the most remote rural regions where the violence was becoming increasingly intense.33 Even without this formal coordination, however, the divisions between rural indigenous communities and the urban center of Lima began to diminish in the late 1970s. Indigenous migration, which began

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in the 1930s and increased in the 1950s, became a constant by the 1970s and a flood by the 1980s, when violence forced people to flee rural communities. Rather than settle permanently, indigenous people often traveled between their rural communities and urban centers. At the same time Catholic clergy and members of the hierarchy moved with greater fluidity between these sites. This new fluidity between the center and the periphery became evident on July 10, 1977, just over a week before the national strike was declared, when the bishops of the Iglesia del Sur Andino presented a pastoral letter, Recogiendo el clamor, in response to government repression of local demonstrations in Cuzco and Azángaro. The letter was read at every parish mass in the department of Puno. It was even disseminated in Bolivia. Recogiendo el clamor offered an articulate and clear condemnation of the injustice in Peru and asserted that the “demands of the people in the streets are just, and they should raise their voices in protest against the political repression and the use of violence (torture) against the population.”34 The appeal seemed to have influence in Lima, thereby moving the power of the church from the center to the periphery. The bishops’ contribution to the July 19, 1977, strike cannot be determined, but it is evident that their appeal was heard and revealed the church’s support for organized popular groups. The military government was said to be furious about the document, which in addition to justifying “taking to the streets,” criticized directly Morales Bermúdez’s economic measures. Neither the bishops’ appeal nor the massive strike countered the power of the military government, however, which responded with violent repression: protesters were killed, injured, or arrested, and it has been estimated that by 1979 five thousand workers and labor leaders were fired. For the first time the category “political-social prisoner” became part of the lexicon of human rights in Peru.35

The Violence of Democracy

In 1980, in part because of the intensity of popular protest against the Morales Bermúdez regime, democratic elections were held in Peru following twelve years of military regimes. The 1979 constitution allowed

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illiterate people to vote. This change meant, in effect, that for the first time in Peruvian history large numbers of Quechua and Aymara speakers could participate as citizens in national elections.36 Maryknoll’s Instituto de Educación Rural in Pomata, Juli, and other Catholic centers in the Sur Andino embarked on education and voter registration campaigns to prepare indigenous people to exercise their rights as citizens. Ironically, the 1980 election also marked the rise of Shining Path. On the day of the election in Chuschi, a remote community in the Quechua department of Ayacucho in Peru’s central highlands, ballot boxes were seized and burned in the town plaza. At the end of the year people began to awaken in Ayacucho and Lima to find dead dogs hung from traffic lights and lamp posts with signs saying, “Deng Xiaoping, Son of a Bitch.”37 Shining Path, which had been operating in Ayacucho for well over a decade without incident, had made a public appearance. The “revolution” would begin, and it would take “its quota of blood.”38 Abimael Guzmán, a philosophy professor at the University of Huamanga in Ayacucho and leader of Shining Path, famously declared that “the triumph of the revolution will cost a million deaths.”39 Inspired by Mao Zedong’s revolution in China, Shining Path declared that a new order in Peru would result from the total destruction of society initiated by the peasantry in rural areas and gradually moving to the urban centers. Although Shining Path would bring Peru to the verge of collapse by the 1990s, in 1980 no one credited it with sufficient power or influence to have much impact on the country. In 1970 Guzmán led a split with the Partido Communista del Peru–Bandera Roja (PCP–Bandera Roja). Some youth reported that the name “Shining Path of Peru” at first provoked laughter. It almost seemed silly to have a Communist Party organization with the almost sappy name “shining path.” But within a decade the PCP-SL, whose name derived from Guzmán’s emphasis on following the “Shining Path of José Carlos Marátegui,” among Peru’s most important Marxist social theorists and critics, proved that it was not a joke. At the time of the split, PCP-SL was said by Guzmán to have just a dozen militants in Ayacucho and around fifty more in the entire country.40 Within a decade it became an overwhelming force in the country.

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The department of Ayacucho shared characteristics with the Sur Andino. It was a highland region where a small number of hacendados historically controlled scarce economic resources and exacted a devastating economic and social toll on the Quechua majority. The land in the department was so arid that “tunas,” the fruit of a native cactus, were among the most important “agricultural” products exported to other parts of the country. During the armed conflict Ayacucho became a key transit point in the growing coca trade that provided Shining Path with necessary resources for its revolution.41 But in key ways Ayacucho was different from the Sur Andino. It was among the departments least affected by Velasco’s agrarian reform program, which served only to weaken but not to destroy the hacendados. By contrast, the agrarian reform program completely transformed land tenure in the department of Puno but failed to benefit the majority of the indigenous people. In Puno, where large landowners had controlled 77.5 percent of the land and 83.8 percent of the campesinos owned 3.3 percent of the land, the majority of the 1,103 haciendas were converted to 44 cooperative associations, which benefited the former hacienda workers. This method of division meant that only 67 communities benefited from the reform, while some 80 percent of the department’s campesinos were excluded. In Cuzco the story was the same: 23 percent of campesinos benefited, while 77 percent remained outside of the system and received no land from the reform.42 Even though campesinos did not benefit overwhelmingly from the reform, it still undermined the haciendas. The same was not true of Ayacucho, where many haciendas survived the Velasco reforms and continued to exact resources from the indigenous majority of the population. The Catholic Church in Ayacucho was directed by Archbishop Federico Richter Fernández-Prada, an extraordinarily conservative leader who actively opposed the social pastoral of the church and prevented clergy in the department from engaging in social programs of the type that dominated the Sur Andino.43 The combination of the desperate economic conditions, the presence of a university, the virulent racism, the weakened hacendados, and the absence of Catholic social programs seemed to make Ayacucho ripe for revolution. Quechua university students, who retained ties to

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their communities of origin but recognized the scarcity of opportunities they would enjoy despite their education, played a central role in Shining Path. They became the main intermediaries between their communities and the leadership of the rigidly hierarchical Maoist movement and persuaded people that the revolution, by destroying the old structures that dominated society, would give people a chance to share their country’s wealth and power. The Velasco regime’s weakening of the traditional hacendados, who had exercised brutal authority in the department, and the absence of a strongly engaged Catholic Church together created a vacuum of power that Shining Path was able to exploit effectively in the department.44 Although the center of the Shining Path movement was the department of Ayacucho, the similarity of conditions in Cuzco, Ayaviri, and Azángaro in the Sur Andino meant that they also became targeted by the movement. Maryknoll’s Juli prelature was less influenced because the Aymara people there had been able to retain control of their lands and prevent the expansion of haciendas. The barriadas of Lima, where Shining Path planned the final destructive conclusion of the “revolution,” also became recruitment sites. Ironically, although the structures of the church in the Sur Andino were openly targeted by Shining Path, they were equally victimized by local and, to a lesser degree, national political authorities. Moreover, this victimization began before the advent of the Shining Path movement in 1980, suggesting that in some measure the PCP-SL offered opponents of the social programs of the church an opportunity to attack and condemn the clergy as “communists” and “terrorists.” In the same way Shining Path offered an excuse to eliminate leftist popular organizations and political parties, all of which became conflated with terrorism. Understanding this process again requires focusing on the period immediately preceding the advent of Shining Path. For Maryknoll, which had been so far from the left that it was condemned by more “political” leaders within the church, the first signs of trouble in the prelature of Juli came in 1977 at IDEA in Chucuito. IDEA had been founded by Maryknoll Father Frank McGourn, part of the new generation of clergy who settled in Peru in the 1970s. McGourn earned a doctorate in Latin American studies and linguistics at

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Stanford University and arrived in the Juli prelature looking for ways to serve in mission and apply his formal knowledge to local reality. His first work was in a radio station where government programs were broadcast in Aymara and Quechua to teach literacy. McGourn concluded that these programs, which were translated directly from Spanish, failed to reach most indigenous people because they did not engage in methods or language that conformed to established cultural norms. Translation, in his view, meant more than simply speaking the words of the language; it also required conceptualizing the world differently and presenting ideas in accord with the Aymara and Quechua worldview. “Translating,” in this sense, required much more than knowledge of the mechanics of language. McGourn established IDEA with the goal of gaining greater insight into Aymara culture so as to facilitate true communication. IDEA also sought actively to promote indigenous culture by valorizing the language and local norms. The center, which received most of its funding from European institutions, published bulletins that detailed local cultural practices and provided guidelines to pastoral agents. McGourn published a version of the bulletins in Spanish and one exclusively in Aymara. It was, he asserted, “more of a symbolic gesture than anything else . . . because one of the things that you very, very frequently hear is that Aymara is a dialect— which is their [mistis] way of saying it is not a language — it’s not something that has a dignity and a value of itself. And they [mistis] always point to the fact that nothing is written in Aymara. To just simply sort of thumb our noses at that, we publish this in Aymara.”45 Nose thumbing would prove to have frightening consequences in the tense and racialized environment of Puno in the late 1970s. In 1974 Maryknoll’s Curt Cadorette, who had been studying the New Testament for a Ph.D. at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, arrived in Puno at the invitation of Raymond Finch and Michael Briggs as part of his seminary preparation. He visited Chucuito, and McGourn invited him to join IDEA. He became part of the team and was fascinated by Aymara culture, but his biggest lesson occurred in 1977, a time in his life he would “rather forget.” It was “an ugly fight with the landowners in Chucuito, . . . nasty, nasty stuff.”

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The conflict revolved not around politics per se but religion. In Chucuito the Aymara campesinos celebrated the Feast of the Assumption on August 15 as their patronal fiesta, while the mistis celebrated a separate patronal fiesta in October. Each group had a corresponding mass in its respective church. In 1977, when the mistis came to McGourn to ask for a fiesta mass, he responded in what Cadorette described as a “quite condensed version” by saying, in effect, “You’re a bunch of bastards,” and initially denying them mass. After receiving serious threats, McGourn recanted and agreed to say the mass but did so in Aymara. The mistis immediately attacked McGourn, but indirectly. They arrested the church sacristan, who was also the compadre of a Maryknoll brother, and all of McGourn’s Aymara friends, accusing them of stealing artifacts from the church. The situation became so tense that Koenigsknecht had to travel to Chucuito to try to settle things, but his visit had minimal effect. Shortly after the incident McGourn had to leave town for scheduled trips outside the region, leaving Cadorette on his own in IDEA and the parish. From that moment on, Cadorette experienced the full intensity and power of Puno’s traditional landowning elite. “When you’re on the receiving end of oppression,” he recounted later, “you begin to realize with the Aymara . . . [that] they just can’t afford to tell the truth, as it were, about who they are, what they feel, what they think, because they’ll be all the more oppressed.” Maryknoll had been accused before of stealing artifacts from Puno’s churches. In fact, it was a defining experience for the new mission in 1947. But at that time the missionaries enjoyed overwhelming support from the Peruvian government. By 1977 times had changed, and the Maryknollers found themselves on their own with the Aymara people in confrontation with the elite. Cadorette’s closest Aymara friend in Chucuito was arrested. McGourn spoke to the head of the court in Puno, a “very decent guy,” in Cadorette’s words, who informed him, “Father, if I do anything, they’ll kill me, the landowners from Chucuito.” At one town meeting with the mistis, Cadorette recounted, “quite literally my bones were telling me, ‘Get the hell out of here. We are going to be attacked, physically attacked.’ ” When the clergy met with the campesinos in Chucuito to discuss the situation with them, “they basically said, ‘Listen,

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leave this situation alone. It will solve itself, this mess, with time. We’ve seen these landowners before. They’re vicious. Just forget it. You cannot right these wrongs.’” “Basically they were saying,” concluded Cadorette, “ ‘Let us use our own devices to fend people off.’ ” The conflict finally ended nearly two years later at Easter, when the mistis realized that an injunction Monseñor Koenigsknecht had issued against saying mass in the community until things calmed down would mean no celebration of the fiesta.46 This experience in Chucuito of conflict between the large landowners and the clergy who promoted indigenous culture and rights was repeated throughout the Sur Andino. In 1977 the mayor of Cuyocuyo and Sandia, where Maryknoll had such a difficult time with the local elites during their first years of mission, demanded that the clergy take down the church bells because “the bells served to incite the campesinos to riot against the police.”47 On February 20, 1980, the entire pastoral team in Yauri, Cuzco, was accused of being “communist” and the “intellectual authors” of a campesino “invasion” of a large landholding. The prelate, Monseñor Albano Quinn, was even accused of attacking the national guard post while disguised as a campesino. A month later the landowners of Langui, another community in Cuzco, expelled the local priest, accusing him of being “Bolivian” (he was Peruvian) and of having stolen artifacts from the church. In 1983 local landowners made a second attempt to expel the pastoral team from Yauri but failed.48 In 1982, when Monseñor Koenigsknecht was killed in the car accident, he was returning from IER in Pomata to investigate another accusation of church theft and another arrest and torture of the sacristan.49 It is important to note that these accusations often combined the traditional pretense of “theft of church artifacts” with the contemporary accusation of “communism” and that they actually began before the most intense years of violence instigated by Shining Path. Once Shining Path made its presence felt in the Sur Andino, sectors of the church found themselves under attack by PCP-SL and local elites and governing officials. In March 1981 Shining Path began setting off bombs in Cuzco every weekend on the same day at the same time against specific authorities seen by local communities as abusive. Some segments

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of society immediately blamed church authorities for these attacks, prompting pastoral agents of the region to submit a letter to the bishops of Peru denouncing the attacks on their character.50 Even when Shining Path directly attacked church structures, officials blamed Catholic agents. On the Feast of the Assumption, August 15, 1981, forty masked people attacked IER in Palermo, which was directed by Maryknoll. Power holders in the community blamed Maryknoll for a “selfsabotage,” while those affiliated with the church and others alternately blamed either Shining Path or the military. Only the subsequent capture of Shining Path leaders who acknowledged responsibility made evident who attacked IER. But the uncertainty reflected the precarious position of the church. The accusations against the church appeared to result much more from the preceding years, when pastoral agents were associated with promoting indigenous culture and rights, than with the advent of the Shining Path. While Maryknoll promoted indigenous culture at its centers in the Juli prelature, the Centro de Formación Campesina (CFC) in the prelature of Sicuani became actively engaged in promoting campesino leadership. CFC’s leaders formed the core of the Federación Departamental de Campesinos del Cuzco. At the same time, IER Waqrani in Ayaviri became known as the “Campesino University Waqrani” and was made up of more than 1,500 indigenous leaders whose work extended throughout the provinces of Melgar, Azángaro, and Carabaya.51 These church-affiliated programs became actively engaged in facilitating campesinos’ struggle for land, bringing them into tension if not outright conflict with both traditional landowners (even those who had already lost their land during the agrarian reform) and the government. When the history of these efforts was combined with a new emphasis on promoting “human rights” in the context of the violence of Shining Path, the church found itself under direct attack. On May 29, 1981, when local leaders of Shining Path were arrested and tortured by government forces, CEAS protested against the violation of human rights. Just a few months later, on September 19, there was another Shining Path attack on Maryknoll. This time the target was Monseñor Koenigsknecht. The members of Shining Path threw a dynamite charge

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against the door of the Juli prelature. The Guardia Civil not only refused to allow the bishop to denounce the act but also again blamed the church. When an investigation was finally undertaken, a letter was found attacking the church and threatening Koenigsknecht and the pastoral agents of the prelature with death. Again, no one knew if Shining Path or the armed forces were responsible. The bishop could only denounce the threat by “unknown agents” and speculate that the responsible parties were “those who don’t accept the ideals of the Second Vatican Council, Medellín and Puebla. Or perhaps those who don’t know or don’t want to accept the documents of the Peruvian episcopate of the Sur Andino.”52 These attacks against the church prompted the first communal responses to the violence, which were coordinated by the church through its vast network of religious agents in the country. On November 15, 1981, a mass march of some seven thousand people, most reported to be campesinos from various popular organizations of the Sur Andino, took to the streets. Delegations came from Arequipa, Lima, Callao, Tacna, Moquegua, Ica Chulucanas, Chiclayo, and Bolivia, as well as from all the religious jurisdictions of the Sur Andino. The march testified to the church’s power to convoke the population of the entire country — power that the government lacked entirely at the time. The clergy appealed for “peace and reconciliation,” which became the watchwords of the church’s engagement in human rights for the next two decades. The public protest did not put an end to the attacks by either Shining Path or the armed forces. In 1982, after a series of Shining Path attacks on police posts in northern Puno just after the Feast of the Virgin of the Assumption, the church again found itself under attack, this time by the government. The director of IER Waqrani was arrested and accused of being a terrorist. A military patrol and police entered IER Waqrani and forced all the workers to stand against a wall while accusing them of being terrorists. When the prelate of Ayaviri, Francisco d’Alteroche, protested to the police, he was told that the church was responsible.53 In 1983 there was another attack against Monseñor Koenigsknecht in Chucuito. In the middle of the night someone came into the prelature and opened fire against the prelate, seemingly in an unsuccessful attempt to kill him.

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The attacks against the church by both Shining Path and the government continued unabated even as the attacks by the government on local communities intensified. In response to both, in 1985 the Committee for Defense of Human Rights in Puno (CODDEH-Puno) began to actively defend campesinos against human rights abuses and advise them of their rights through radio programs and religious agents. Also in 1985 the bishops of the Sur Andino presented a document explicitly blaming the violence on the scarcity of land for campesinos. As a follow-up to this appeal, in 1986 Monseñors Metzinger and Koenigsknecht met with the then new president, Alan García, to appeal for a change. While Metzinger emphasized the problem of the land, Koenigsknecht focused on education.54 A short time later, on July 28, 1986, García did, for the first time, distribute 1.1 million hectares to campesinos. Monseñor Koenigsknecht’s car accident followed on the heels of this visit and appeal. While the verbal and other attacks against the church by Shining Path and the armed forces continued, CODDEH-Puno and other structures of the progressive church, almost all of which were linked to the movements of the preceding decades, grew increasingly active in their response. In 1986 CODDEH-Puno organized a meeting to analyze conditions and consider ways to fulfill what the organizers declared was Puno’s desire for peace.55 Four Vicarias of Solidaridad were founded in the Sur Andino, the only centers of their kind in the country, each with a lawyer, a social worker, and a teacher. They began to collect information from the victims of human rights abuses. The effort to record the violations was made whether the victims attributed them to Shining Path or the armed forces. This enterprise, made possible by the Iglesia del Sur Andino’s earlier role the preferential option for the poor, contributed to a sense that victims had some recourse and thereby may even have minimized the appeal of Shining Path. Repression by the armed forces could have driven impoverished indigenous people into the arms of PCP-SL, but by providing at least the appearance of a check on the worst violations of human rights and by maintaining a distance both from the government and Shining Path, the progressive Catholic Church in Peru may have helped to maintain stability in the department of Puno and to a lesser extent Cuzco. The violence in these departments never reached the same

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intensity it did in Ayacucho, where the Opus Dei Archbishop Richter Fernández-Prada actively prevented the presence of both the social pastoral and the human rights efforts of the church.56 The activities of the Iglesia del Sur Andino were linked to and complemented by CEAS in Lima, which became the center of the human rights movement. In 1985 a national march for “Life and Peace” was organized, demanding “immediate clarity regarding the fate of people who had been victims of forced disappearance and judgments and punishment for those responsible for this crime.” In 1987 the National Coordination of Human Rights organized a campaign for the detained and disappeared, raising awareness about the number of people whose fates were unknown during these years.57 In 1988 CEAS began organizing occasional meetings that brought together representatives of human rights commissions in Lima and Callao. And in 1989 these commissions and CEAS provided the foundation for discussions on how to engage in promoting a peace process in the country. The Catholic Church’s role in ending the conflict was limited. Changes in military and social strategy initiated by President García in the late 1980s and reinforced by Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s and the arrest of Abimael Guzmán on September 12, 1992, brought the conflict practically to an end.58 But they did not bring “peace” to Peru. Fujimori oversaw an increasingly dictatorial regime that actively violated human rights and curtailed political liberties. Indeed, the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation in Peru ultimately conflated (whether justifiably or not) the violence of the Shining Path years with the political repression of the Fujimori years, concluding that “peace and democracy” were not really restored in Peru until 2000, when Fujimori finally lost power. By that time, Peru had undergone twelve years of military dictatorship, from 1968 to 1980, followed by sixteen years of devastating conflict, followed by eight years of authoritarian rule. By the time elections were held in 2000, the Fujimori government had lost credibility. One of the first acts initiated by the newly elected government of Alejandro Toledo was to facilitate the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, whose report was finally issued nearly a decade after the “conclusion” of the armed conflict. If, as Greg Grandin argues, truth

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commissions serve principally to restore the legitimacy of governments, thereby making possible a transition toward orderly, democratic society, then the church in Peru was essential to this transformation.59 The Truth and Reconciliation Report (for better or worse) quite simply could not have been undertaken without the structures of the church that had remained in place during the preceding decade. In Peru the church, it seemed, had again saved a relatively weak state. The Maryknoll Catholic missionaries played an important but invisible role in this salvation.

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Epilogue

That which is good for communities in America is good for the Armenians and Greeks and Mohammedans of Turkey. —American Board of Foreign Missions, 1881

In the realm of ideas and ideals, American policy is guided by three conceptions. One is the warm, generous, humanitarian impulse to help other people solve their problems. A second is the principle of self-determination applied at the international level, which asserts the right of every society to establish its own goals or objectives, and to realize them internally through the means it decides are appropriate. These two ideas can be reconciled; indeed, they complement each other to an extensive degree. But the third idea entertained by many Americans is one which insists that other people cannot really solve their problems and improve their lives unless they go about it in the same way as the United States. —William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy

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First appearances would suggest that the Maryknoll Catholic mission movement represented the paradigmatic case of Williams’s The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. Maryknoll’s founding in 1911, expansion during World War II, and decline in the early 1970s conforms to the American Century. Maryknollers and their supporters believed that by introducing their religious faith abroad they would help to establish the foundations necessary to enable people to achieve the American dream. Although they recognized Latin Americans as Catholics, the missionaries believed that their American form of Catholicism was superior to that of their southern neighbors. In 1899 even the Vatican had castigated American Catholics for assuming that theirs was the only valid form of practice. A papal encyclical, Longinqua oceani, of 1895 followed by a letter from Pope Leo to Cardinal Gibbons in 1899 gently admonished that “the American way of doing things . . . must not be suggested as the best possible ordering of the church universal.”1 Yet Maryknoll missionaries did at first seem to want to order the Catholic world, especially Latin America, in conformance with their ideal Catholicism. For Maryknoll, however, proselytizing meant more than converting people to their religious faith and practices. Religious conversion was both an end in itself and a means of introducing an American way of life. By providing material aid in conjunction with spiritual aid, the missionaries would promote this American ideal. Yet this goal required that America conform to the missionaries’ ideal. Maryknollers’ goal was as much to convert the United States to their ideal of Christian practices of business and politics as it was to convert the world to American ideals. Indeed, the two goals were inextricably bound. One could not be achieved without the other. In this sense, the Maryknoll mission endeavor did not conform to that which Williams identified as the “tragedy of American diplomacy.” Williams emphasized the contradiction between the “American” impulse to aid and its compulsion to control. Moreover, he decried the tendency of American policy makers and citizens to assume that theirs was the only solution to the world’s problems and to disregard the influence of the profit motive in their actions. For Maryknoll missionaries and their supporters, the world’s problems could be

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solved by replicating their particular experience of America abroad. Catholicism, union activism, and New Deal programs were foundational to this experience, though they did not conform to what Williams identified as components of American diplomacy. Maryknoll missionaries often were keenly aware of the impact the profit motive had on business and the government. In many cases their ancestors had been subjected to exploitative labor practices and in the 1930s had participated in union movements to regulate those practices. The missionaries and their supporters seemed to believe, however, that this exploitation was not a necessary component of capitalism and democracy. Wealth was acceptable as long as excess was minimized and generosity maximized. The missionaries believed implicitly that Christian values would moderate the demands of capitalism while at the same time ensuring that people throughout the world enjoyed its material benefits. President Kennedy appeared to the missionaries as the realization of this ideal. Kennedy’s Catholicism seemed to guide his policies, promoting both his anti-Communist zeal and his support for reformist programs, especially the Alliance for Progress and the Peace Corps. Kennedy’s assassination was emblematic of the failure of this vision. Conditions had not improved in Latin America but instead had worsened. At the same time, the Second Vatican Council called into question Maryknoll’s Catholicism. It suggested that salvation might occur outside the church and that the people rather than the hierarchy were the church. For Maryknollers (and other Catholic clergy and laity) these twin blows were devastating. Many chose to leave mission; those who remained sought to redefine their ideal of faith and nation and the relationship between them. In the period up to 1964, the missionaries sought to use their mission labor abroad to exemplify Christian values of generosity and faith, which they suggested were representative of American values. After 1964, they used their mission experience to educate the American public about the country’s failure to promote these values. In this sense, the fundamental goals of mission— to promote the missionaries’ ideal of the United States and to establish Catholicism abroad— had not changed. But the means to achieve these ends were reversed.

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By the 1980s the potential for achieving these goals seemed to have dissipated. Ronald Reagan’s election as U.S. president in 1980 marked the rise of neoliberalism and the decline of reform. In Latin America it also marked the culmination of a fundamental change in the status of Catholic clergy and the church. By the 1980s it seemed that Catholic clergy and churches had lost their immunity from direct persecution and thus their unique space for voicing protest.2 In 1980, a few weeks after Reagan’s election, the Salvadoran military raped and murdered three nuns (two of them Maryknollers) and a lay woman.3 In the same year the country’s bishop, Óscar Romero, was shot in a church while saying mass. In the 1981 massacre of the villagers at El Mozote in El Salvador, the church, historically a sacred site of refuge, became the center of death. The military ordered all the community’s men into the church, where they were interrogated and then dragged out to be killed. Many of the children of the community were herded into the church and massacred by the military.4 In the United States, Catholic clergy, whose labor in Latin America had once seemed a potential bulwark against communism, were increasingly identified as Communists. Maryknoll missionaries, who had started their labors with the intention of illustrating the central role Catholics could play in the United States, thereby establishing their place in society, were by the 1980s increasingly out of step with that society. From Maryknoll’s founding until the late 1960s the missionaries’ values and ideals, though not in accord with the dominant American Protestant ideal, were shared by the country’s European immigrant Catholics and their descendants. By the 1980s, however, the last vestiges of Catholic communities seemed to disappear. The missionaries’ closest association came to be with progressive elements of the church and with people who identified themselves as political rather than religious activists. During this decade Maryknollers, in conjunction with these groups, played an important role in obstructing Reagan’s policies in Central America by making the U.S. public aware of their country’s violations of human rights. In this sense, the missionaries continued to labor to promote their ideal of what America and its role in the world should be.

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The Maryknoll movement, however, had continued an irreversible decline that started in the late 1960s. A 1993 survey to determine the readership of Maryknoll, the mission magazine, revealed that 52 percent of respondents were sixty-five or older. Some of the readers’ comments offer insight into how U.S. Catholicism had changed from Maryknoll’s peak years in the 1940s and 1950s to the present. The apparent homogeneity of the religion had been replaced by a heterogeneity that seemed to undermine the mission movement. Some readers simply carried forward a tradition of supporting Maryknoll as they had done in their youth. As one man representative of an older generation observed: I first became exposed to the Maryknoll mission as a young soldier in the Far East during the Korean War. I respect what they do and feel that whatever small contribution I have made monthly for the many years I have given, will be used to help those less fortunate than myself. I began giving in fulfillment of a vow I had made some twenty years ago. Since I am only an occasional reader of the magazine I cannot in all fairness comment on it.5

Another older reader, apparently dissatisfied with the changes in the magazine’s perspective, wrote: Maryknoll is unable to comprehend that people can love Christ simply through simple faith. Maryknoll equates love of Christ with social action, left-wing, liberal, socialistic, neo-Communist social action. I wonder how much Maryknoll believes in Catholic doctrine unless it is socially-oriented. Prayer, contemplation, meditation have no place in Maryknoll’s work. Just social action, that’s all!6

A more succinct version of this complaint stated simply, “Clean up the Order!!! Go back to Roman Catholicism.”7 Ironically, while contemplation had been part of the Maryknoll movement, the emphasis had always been on social action. The form of that action had changed as the missionaries’ concluded that they could not promote an American ideal that did not exist, and as their ideal of faith changed in

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response to their experience of mission and to the mandates of the Second Vatican Council. Other readers seemed to appreciate Maryknoll’s efforts to make the country’s Catholics aware of their government’s actions. One older reader observed: I have enjoyed its commitment to peace and justice. It has been a disturbing magazine to some (according to the Letters to the Editor) but truth must be told and that is what you have done. Jesus said, “Love one another.” That isn’t practiced by torture, killing, or war. We, as a nation, will live to regret our military involvement in Central American countries and in other parts of the world where we’ve supported military dictatorships.

If letters from the older generation of readers revealed fragmentation, those of the younger generation were hardly evident. Only 13 percent of the respondents to the survey were under the age of forty-four. But the few comments from these readers also are revealing. One writer notes that she is married and expresses interest in Maryknoll’s lay mission work.8 Two others appear to be politically active, or at least interested, as one describes himself as a community organizer and another suggests, “The best improvement you could make would be to walk El Papa Juan Pablo into retirement and replace him with a Maryknoll sister.”9 Finally, another respondent’s comments suggest that the appeal to adventure and heroism that had been Maryknoll’s hallmark in the 1940s might not work as well in contemporary society. This reader wrote, “I think about how wonderful it would be to participate in a mission, but getting past the ruggedness of it would be repulsive to me. I don’t even like to go camping.”10 Although these same sentiments were surely felt if not expressed by an earlier generation, there were a sufficient number of Catholics for whom the sacrifice and potential for martyrdom were not only not repulsive but compelling that the Maryknoll mission movement could and did flourish. In 2000, when I was doing research, the Maryknoll Center looked abandoned. The vast grounds and large buildings were well maintained, but one encountered few missionaries and no seminarians or novices.

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The sense of emptiness was enhanced on entering the main seminary building. A lone receptionist sat in front of an antiquated switchboard answering the occasional call. Strolling through the vast, darkened hallways, one might encounter a solitary retired missionary ambling along to the library or dining hall. Although they no longer wear cassocks or collars, these men seemed still to bear an indelible mark that identified them as priests. A trip downstairs to the first floor revealed row upon row of individual altars, where during Maryknoll’s heyday in the 1950s young seminarians waited their turn to practice the sacred ritual of Mass. Recently, proposals have been made to transform these altars into a storage facility for Maryknoll archives. Documents and publications far outnumber seminarians. Many missionaries maintain the hope that the resurgence in mission interest they have been awaiting will come, and these altars and hallways will again be filled with enthusiastic young seminarians. A stroll across the road takes one to the Maryknoll convent. In contrast to the priests, who enjoyed the opportunity to offer mass and use sermons to supplicate parishioners for support, the nuns had to find other means (often less successful) of fund-raising. The differences in means translated into a disparity of resources, such that the sisters’ center was haphazardly constructed, giving the appearance of new wings and sections being added as necessity dictated and finances allowed. The result was an exterior with a series of seemingly separate buildings joined together by glass hallways and a mazelike interior. In the 1950s, when the last additions were constructed, the number of novices was so large that they could hardly be contained within the confines of the building. Hallways were transformed into rooms with beds so close as to make it nearly impossible to walk around them without brushing against the curtains separating one bed from another. Today the convent is home to elderly returned missionaries, many of whom continue to work in “home mission” by assisting their aged sisters or impoverished citizens of the United States.

In Peru in 2008, Bishop José María Ortega Trinidad, who was appointed in 2006 to direct the prelature of Juli, asked Maryknoll missioners to

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leave the diocese. Some 1,200 people signed an appeal asking that the missionaries be allowed to continue their dedicated labor. It had no effect. Ortega did not explain his decision not to renew Maryknoll’s contract with the diocese they had served for sixty-five years. No explanation was necessary. Ortega represents a conservative Catholic force driven by the church hierarchy to counteract the influence of progressive clergy who were defined by the Second Vatican Council and liberation theology. In addition to asking Maryknoll to leave Juli, Ortega has acted in other ways to reverse the progressive position of the Catholic Church and to undermine its orientation to valorization of indigenous culture and support for human rights. At a memorial mass for Father Domingo Llanque, Juli’s first Aymara priest, Ortega questioned whether “the priest was in hell or in purgatory,” implying that his service to the church might somehow be condemned by God. A seminarian with a physical disability was dismissed from seminary studies by the conservative bishop, who indicated that while canon law did not prohibit ordination of people with “physical defects” they could be made fun of as priests and would “have a very difficult character.”11 Communicants at Ortega’s masses are asked individually if they are married in the church and if they have confessed. A negative response results in dismissal without receiving the Eucharist.12 Similar changes are occurring in the neighboring diocese of Ayaviri. In 2007 conservative bishop Kay Schmalhausen of the prelature of Ayaviri demanded that French Father Francisco Fritsch renounce his position after thirty-three years of service in the prelature. Fritsch made the mistake of suggesting that “after five hundred years of evangelization [the Quechua people] deserved a Quechua bishop.” His removal led to the resignation of four more progressive clergy in the Ayaviri prelature. The Instituto de Pastoral Andina, renamed the Instituto Sur Andino de Investigación y Acción Solidaria (ISAIAS), has been condemned by these new conservative bishops of the Sur Andino for promoting politicization. The actions undertaken to vitiate the changes brought about by nearly three quarters of a century of efforts to promote social transformation and participation in an integral Catholic faith that recog-

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nized and valorized indigenous culture is one component of a larger transformation of the Catholic Church in Peru, Latin America, and the world. In Peru, where arguably the greatest number of bishops and archbishops embraced the preferential option for the poor, Pope John Paul II and his successor, Benedict XVI, have worked actively to eliminate this influence. Each resignation or retirement of a progressive member of the hierarchy has resulted in the appointment of an ultraconservative replacement often affiliated with Opus Dei. This change occurred even as the Peruvian Commission for Truth and Reconciliation recognized the crucial role that progressive clergy and their programs in the Iglesia del Sur Andino played in counteracting the influence of Shining Path. The legacy of the twentieth-century Catholic transformation in Peru will not disappear, but for those who participated in these changes and witnessed the results, the current reversal may be devastating. For others, it is one more cycle in the long history of the Catholic Church and its relationship with indigenous people in Peru.

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APPENDIX

Foreign-Controlled and Progressive Dioceses in Peru

COLOMBIA

ECUADOR

24

22 25 29

7

20 28 10

4 18

BRAZIL

3 27

14 9

23

15

26 1 13

16 21

12

PACIFIC OCEAN

17 5

19

BOLIVIA

2 8

6

11

CHILE

Foreign-Controlled and Progressive Dioceses in Peru by Department. Ecclesiastical jurisdictions did not conform directly to departmental boundaries. Source: Conferencia episcopal peruana: Directorio eclesiástico, 2002 (Lima: Conferencia Episcopal Peruana, 2002), 209. 240

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Progressive Peruvian-Directed Dioceses 1. Archdioceses of Lima, created in 1541. Cardinal Juan Landázuri Ricketts, O.F.M., 1954 –90. Obispos Coadjutores y Obispos Auxiliares • Luis Bambarén Gastelumendi, S.J., 1967 • Germán Schmitz, 1970 2. Archdiocese of Cuzco, created in 1537. Ricardo Durand Flórez, 1966–75; Luis Vallejos Santoni, 1975–82. 3. Archdiocese of Trujillo, created in 1606. Carlos María Jurgens Byme, C.S.S.R., 1965–76. 4. Diocese of Cajamarca, created in 1908. José Dammert Bellido, 1962–92. 5. Diocese of Puno, created in 1861. Julio González Ruiz, S.D.B., 1959–72; Jesús Mateo Calderón Barrueto, O.P., 1972–98. 6. Diocese of Ica, created in 1946. Cardinal Juan Landázuri Ricketts, apostolic administrator, 1958–59; Alberto María Dettman y Aragón, O.P., 1959–73; Jesús Calderón Barrueto, O.P., 1969–72; Guido Breña López, O.P., 1973–present. 7. Diocese of Chiclayo, created in 1956. Daniel Figueroa Villón, 1956–67; Ignacio María de Orbegozo y Goicoechea, 1968–98. 8. Diocese of Abancay, created in 1958. Carlos María Jurgens Byrne, C.SS.R. (Archbishop Cuzco), apostolic administrator, 1958–62; Alcides Mendoza Castro, 1962–67; Enrique Pélach y Feliu, 1968–92.

Foreign Prelatures Nullius and Apostolic Vicariates (not all progressive) 9. Dioceses of Chimbote, created as prelature nullius in 1962. James Edward Charles Burke, O.P. (U.S.), prelate and bishop prelate, 1962 –78; Luis Armando Bambarén Gastelumendi, S.J., bishop prelate, 1978–83, and bishop, 1983.

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Appendix

(Prelatures,territories that could be directed by foreign clergy) 10. Prelature of Moyobamba, created in 1948. Martín Fulgencio Elorza Legaristi, C.P. [Spain], 1953–66; Venancio Celestino Orbe Uriart, C.P. [Spain], 1967–77. 11. Prelature of Juli, created in 1957. Eduardo L. Fedders, M.M. [U.S.], 1963–73; Alberto L. Koenigsknecht Thelen, M.M. [U.S.], 1974 –86. 12. Prelature of Caravelí, created in 1957. Federico Kaiser Depel, M.S.C. [Germany], 1957–71; Bernardo Kuhnel Langer, M.S.C. [Germany], 1972–present. 13. Prelature of Yauyos, created in 1957. Ignacio María de Orbegozo y Goicochea, Opus Dei [Spain], 1957–63; Luis Sánchez-Moreno Lira [Arequipa, Peru], 1968–present. 14. Prelature of Huari, created in 1958. Marcos Libardoni, O.S.J. [Italy], 1958–67; Dante Frasnelli Tarter, O.S.J. [Italy], 1967–2001. 15. Prelature of Tarma, created in 1958. Antonio Kuhner, M.C.C.J. [Germany], 1958–64. Elevated to diocese, 1985. 16. Prelature of Ayaviri, created in 1958., Luciano M. Metzinger Greff, SS.CC. [France], 1964 –71; Luis Dalle Perier, SS.CC. [France], 1971–91. 17. Prelature of Sicuani, created in 1959. Nevin William Hayes, O. Carm. [U.S.], 1959 –70; Albano Edward Quinn Wilson, 1971– 98. 18. Prelature of Huamachuco, created in 1961. Damian Nicolau Roig, T.O.R. [Spain], 1967–81. 19. Prelature of Chuquibamba, created in 1962. Redento M. Gauci, O.C. [Malta], 1962–77; Luis Baldo Riva, C.SS.R. [Cagliari], 1977–83. 20. Prelature of Chota, created in 1963. Florentino Armas Lerena, O.A.R. [Spain], 1963–76; José Arana B., O.A.R. [Spain], 1979–92. 21. Prelature of Chuquibambilla, created in 1968. Lorenzo Miccheli, O.S.A. [Italy], 1976–1986.

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(Apostolic vicariates, designated mission territories within Peru) 22. Apostolic Vicariate of Iquitos, created in 1900. Gabino Peral de la Torre, O.S. [Spain], 1966–91. 23. Apostolic Vicariate of San Ramón, created in 1925. Buenaventura León de Uriarte y Bengoa, O.F.M. [Spain], 1956–70; Luis Maestu Ojanguren, O.F.M. [Spain], 1971–83. 24. Apostolic Vicariate of San José Amazonas, created in 1945. José Damase Laberge, O.F.M. [Canada], 1946 – 68; Lorenzo Rodolfo Guibord Levesque, O.F.M. [Canada], 1969–98. 25. Apostolic Vicariate of San Francisco Javier de Marañón/Jaén, created in 1945. Antonio de Hornedo Correa, S.J. [Spain], 1963–71; Antonio de Hornedo Correa, S.J. [Spain], 1971–77. 26. Apostoic Vicariate of Puerto Maldonado, created in 1900/1949. Javier Miguel Ariz Huarte, [Spain], 1952–80. 27. Apostolic Vicariate of Pucallpa, created in 1956, Foreign Mission Society of Quebec. José Gustavo Prévost Godard, P.M.E. [Canada]. Apostolic vicariate, 1956. Named bishop, 1957–89. 28. Apostolic Vicariate of Requeña, created in 1956. Luis Valeriano Arroyo Paniego, O.F. [Spain], 1957–71; Odorio Saiz Pérez, O.F.M. [Spain], 1974 –87. 29. Apostoic Vicariate of Yurimaguas, created in 1960. Eliaz Olazar Muruaga, C.P. [Spain], 1957–72; Miguel Irizar Campos, C.P. [Spain], 1972–89.

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N OT E S

Abbreviations Used in Notes AAL AOJ BNP CVR MFBA MMA UARM USCMA/ MMA

Archivo Arzobispal de Lima Archivo del Obispo de Juli Biblioteca Nacional del Perú, Sala de Investigaciones, Lima Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers Archive, Maryknoll, New York Maryknoll Mission Archives, Maryknoll, New York Universidad “Antonio Ruiz de Montoya” U.S. Catholic Mission Associates/Maryknoll Mission Archives, Maryknoll, New York

Introduction 1. From the beginning, Maryknoll was devoted to disseminating knowledge of mission and the world to Catholics in the United States. Maryknoll’s publicity magazine, the Field Afar (later Maryknoll ), had a circulation of over 300,000 in 1951–78, over 800,000 in 1979–83, and over 1.2 million in 1984–85. William D. McCarthy, M.M., provided me with these statistics obtained from the Catholic Press Directory (annual publication of the U.S. Catholic Press Association, Ronconkoma, NY ). In 1970 Father Miguel d’Escoto, editor of the Maryknoll magazine, founded Orbis Books with the goal of bringing “Third World theological thought to English-speaking countries.” James P. Noon, M.M., “Mission Is for All,” Maryknoll (April 1981): 10. The 1980 Orbis catalog listed 184 books, more than half of which dealt with issues of justice and peace and more than 50 of which were written by third world theologians. Latin America was represented in 61 titles, among whose authors were Leonardo Boff, Dom Helder Camara, Ernesto Cardenal, Joseph Comblin, Enrique Dussel, Gustavo Gutiérrez, and Jon 244

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Sobrino. Al Imfeld, S. M. B., “Books Bridge Different Worlds,” Maryknoll (April 1981): 53–55. Monsignor George Higgins, retired labor and interreligious affairs expert for the U.S. Catholic Conference, observed in 1981, “It is literally true to say, I think, that if Orbis had not made these volumes available (at a very reasonable price, I might add), most of us in the United States, including specialists, would never have had access to them and, in fact, might never even have heard of them.” George C. Higgins, “Orbis Leads Its Chosen Field,” Maryknoll (April 1981): 55–57. Orbis would also publish the documents of the 1968 Medellín Conference of Latin American Bishops. Angelyn Dries, O.S.F., The Missionary Movement in American Catholic History (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998), 214. 2. Donna Whitson Brett and Edward T. Brett, Murdered in Central America: The Stories of Eleven U.S. Missionaries (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988); and Phillip Berryman, The Religious Roots of Rebellion: Christians in Central American Revolutions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984). 3. Marjorie Melville and Thomas Melville, Whose Heaven, Whose Earth (New York: Knopf, 1971); César Macias, Mi camino: La guerrilla (Mexico City: Editorial Planeta Mexicana, 1998), 160; Philip Berryman, Christians in Guatemala’s Struggle (London: Catholic Institute for International Relations, 1984); Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, “From Symbols of the Sacred to Symbols of Subversion to Simply Obscure: Maryknoll Women Religious in Guatemala, 1953–1967,” Americas 61, no. 2 (October 2004): 189–216. 4. Philip Berryman, Liberation Theology: The Essential Facts about the Revolutionary Movement in Latin America and Beyond (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987); Edward L. Cleary, ed., Born of the Poor: The Latin American Church since Medellín (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990). 5. Gustavo Gutiérrez, Teología de la liberación (Lima: Editorial Universitaria, 1971); Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1973). Gustavo Gutiérrez’s A Theology of Liberation had sold some 70,000 copies by 1985, becoming Orbis’s best-seller. Adam Liptak, “The Greening of Orbis Books,” New York Times, January 6, 1985, Sunday Late City Final Edition, sec. 11WC, p. 1, col. 1, Westchester Weekly Desk. 6. Nelson A. Rockefeller, The Rockefeller Report on the Americas: The Official Report of a United States Presidential Mission for the Western Hemisphere (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969); Committee of Santa Fe, A New Inter-American Policy for the Eighties (Washington, DC: Council for Inter-American Security, 1980). The result of this perception in many Central and South American countries was a devastating repression of Catholic clergy and laity. Frank Maurovich, “Option for Poor Angers the State,” Maryknoll (April 1981): 22–27. Maurovich reported that since 1976 “some 1000 bishops, priests and nuns have been arrested, tortured, exiled or murdered in Central and South America” (22). Berryman, Christians in Guatemala’s Struggle, Liberation Theology, and The Religious Roots of Rebellion; Theresa Whitfield, Paying the Price: Ignacio Ellacuría and the Murdered Jesuits of

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Notes to Pages 3– 4

El Salvador (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); Anna L. Peterson, Martyrdom and the Politics of Religion: Progressive Catholicism in El Salvador’s Civil War (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); Daniel H. Levine, ed., Religion and Political Conflict in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Cleary, Born of the Poor; Ricardo Falla, Masacres de la selva: Ixcán, Guatemala, 1975– 1982 (Guatemala: Editorial Universitaria, 1992); Roger N. Lancaster, Thanks to God and the Revolution: Popular Religion and Class Consciousness in the New Nicaragua (New York: Colombia University Press, 1988). 7. A CIA report written in 1988 correlated the presence of Maryknoll missionaries and Jesuits in Central American nations with “turbulence” and their absence with “social peace.” Teresa Whitfield, Paying the Price, 308, citing CIA Directorate of Intelligence, “The Political Role of the Catholic Church in Central America,” December 1988, 5, U.S. document declassified November 1993, Washington, DC. 8. Fitzpatrick-Behrens, “From Symbols of the Sacred to Symbols of Subversion”; and “Knowledge Is Not Enough: Creating a Culture of Social Justice, Dignity, and Human Rights in Guatemala: Maryknoll Sisters and the Monte María Girls,” U.S. Catholic Historian 24, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 111–28. 9. Jeffrey Klaiber, S.J., La iglesia en el Perú: Su historia social desde la independencia, 3rd ed. (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Fondo Editorial, 1996), 363. 10. Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough, eds., Latin America between the Second World War and the Cold War, 1944–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 11. Abraham F. Lowenthal, “Peru’s Ambiguous Revolution,” in The Peruvian Experiment: Continuity and Change under Military Rule, ed. Abraham F. Lowenthal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 7–11. 12. Klaiber, La iglesia en el Perú, 404; Thomas James Maloney, “The Catholic Church and the Peruvian Revolution: Resource Exchange in an Authoritarian Setting” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, Austin, 1978); Michael Gregory Macaulay, “Ideological Change and Internal Cleavages in the Peruvian Church: Change, Status Quo and the Priest. The Case of ONIS” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 1972); Julio Cotler, “Democracy and National Integration in Peru,” in The Peruvian Experiment Reconsidered, ed. Cynthia McClintock and Abraham F. Lowenthal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 15. 13. Klaiber, La iglesia en el Perú, 497–98. 14. Carlos Iván Degregori, Ayacucho 1969–1979: El surgimiento de Sendero Luminoso (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1990); Steve J. Stern, ed., Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980 –1995 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); Gustavo Gorritti Ellenbogen, Sendero: Historia de la guerra

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milenaria en el Perú (Lima: Editorial Apoyo, 1990); David Scott Palmer, ed., The Shining Path in Peru (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992). 15. Klaiber, La iglesia en el Perú, 341, 375–91. 16. U.S. Catholics Overseas: A Statistical Directory (Washington, DC: Mission Secretariat), various years, MFBA/MMA. 17. Gerald M. Costello, Mission to Latin America: The Successes and Failures of a Twentieth-Century Mission Crusade (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1979), 47– 48; Angelyn Dries, O.S.F., “The Legacy of John J. Considine, M.M.,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research (April 1997): 80 –84. 18. The number of U.S. clergy working in Latin America increased from 222 in 1940 to 3,391 in 1968, after which it began to decline. A Missionary Index of Catholic Americans: Catholic Priests and Religious of the United States in Missionary work outside the USA (Cincinnati: Catholic Students’ Mission Crusade, 1946); and U.S. Catholic Overseas Missionary Personnel (Washington, DC: Mission Secretariat, 1968), MMA. Klaiber reports that “since 1940 a total of 42 new religious congregations, orders, and associations arrived in Peru of which 25 arrived after 1960.” La iglesia en el Perú, 376. Almost all of these clergy came from North America or European countries. He also asserts that Pope Pius XII issued the first appeals to send foreign clergy to Latin America in the 1940s and that Pope John XXIII echoed this appeal more insistently in the 1960s (376 –78). 19. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Richard Madsen, Democracy’s Dharma: Religious Renaissance and Political Development in Taiwan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Steve Bruce, Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 20. Peter Beyer, Religion and Globalization (London: Sage, 1994); Thomas J. Csordas, Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Oliver Compagnon, “L’Inversion des termes d’un échange culturel: Regards croisés sur les catholicismes francais et latino’américan dans les années 60 et 70,” in Maitre de conférences en histoire á l’Université Paris III–Sorbonne Nouvell (Institut des Hautes Études de l’Amérique latine), provided to author by Catherine LeGrand. 21. Maryknoll’s Superior General, James E. Walsh, was insistent in his assertions that the selection of Central and South America as mission fields was not simply the result of necessity. “Maryknoll is going to Central and South America because the Holy See desires us to go. Maryknoll is not going to Central and South America because some of our missioners were excluded from the Japanese Empire, or because the lands of the Western Hemisphere alone remained accessible for travel. We would not go for either or both of these reasons.

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The return of some of our missioners simply permitted a more extensive beginning than would have been possible without their assistance.” “Memorandum for Latin American Maryknollers,” by Bishop James E. Walsh, Superior General, January 21, 1943, Regional Superiors’ Monthly Informational Reports to the General Council, MMA; James F. Garneau, “The First Inter-American Episcopal Conference, November 2 – 4, 1959: Canada and the United States Called to the Rescue of Latin America,” Canadian Catholic Historical Review 87, no. 4 (October 2001): 662 – 87. 22. “Heathen” was replaced in the Maryknoll constitution and mission by “abandoned and needy” peoples. William D. McCarthy, M.M., “Elements of the Foundational Charism of Maryknoll: An Historical Perspective, 1990,” 18; and William D. McCarthy, M.M., “Documentation Relative to the Justification by the Maryknoll Society of Its Decision to Accept Parts of Latin America as Mission Fields,” 5–6. Citations provided to author by William D. McCarthy, M.M. 23. Henry W. Kelly, “Latin America Needs Better North Americans,” America (March 14, 1932): 628–29. 24. “Father Ambassador,” Field Afar (April–May 1945): 6–8. 25. When U.S. missionaries’ participation in Central and South America peaked in 1968, Peru supported 693 priests, nuns, and brothers. The only South American country to receive a larger number of missionaries from the United States was Brazil, another bastion of progressive Catholicism, which had 699 priests, nuns, and brothers the same year. The next largest contingent of U.S. missionaries in South America was in Bolivia, but the 346 clergy in this country represented just half the number in either Peru or Brazil. Dries, The Missionary Movement. 26. Costello, Mission to Latin America, 53: “Peru, for example, received a disproportionately large number of missioners in the sixties. Its success in attracting so many men and women is directly traceable to the efforts of the man to whom one U.S. bishop referred smilingly as ‘a supersalesman in every sense of the word’: the apostolic nuncio to Peru, Archbishop Romolo Carboni.” Maryknoll Father Vincent Mallon acted as personal secretary to Carboni from 1960 to 1965. Mallon’s service overlapped with Maryknoll Father John Considine’s service as director of the National Catholic Welfare Conference’s Latin American Bureau (1960 –68). Monsignor Carboni’s predecessor as papal nuncio, Archbishop Fernando Cento, with whom Maryknoll Superior General James E. Walsh negotiated the first mission to Peru, seemed equally adept at negotiating the incorporation of foreign clergy to Peru. 27. Klaiber, La iglesia en el Perú, 97–99. 28. Ibid., 257: “According to statistics from the year 1940, of the 673 parishes in the country, 222 were vacant, and the greatest number of these was in the Sierra.”

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29. William D. McCarthy, M. M, “Notes for a History of the Maryknoll Society in Peru” (unpublished manuscript), indicates that initial inquiries about work among the Chinese population in Latin America were made in 1938. “1938 July 12. Apos Nuncio in Lima, Peru, Fernando Cento, writes to JEW [ James E. Walsh] Superior General, indicating he has been informed by Rome that MM has been given permission of Congregation of Propaganda, to accept works among Chinese in North and South America.” In 1939 Walsh responded to Cento, declining to accept mission among Chinese in Peru. 30. Jean-Paul Wiest, Maryknoll in China: A History, 1918–1955 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997). 31. William D. McCarthy, M.M., “Notes for a History,” James Anthony Walsh, July 27, 1942, unpublished manuscript. 32. Father Garvey, 5/18–6/6/43, Puno Priests diaries Peru, MMA. 33. See Cotler, “Democracy and National Integration,” 10–13, on the change in class structures resulting from political and economic changes in Peru in the 1950s and 1960s. 34. David Collier, Squatters and Oligarchs: Authoritarian Rule and Policy Change in Peru (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Carlos Iván Degregoria, Cecilia Blondet, and Nicolás Lynch, Conquistadores de un nuevo mundo: De invasores a ciudadanos en San Martín de Porres (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1986). 35. Maryknollers were not alone among foreign clergy pushed into the barriadas, where their wealth offered a substitute for a weak Peruvian state. Klaiber, La iglesia en el Perú, 388– 89: “Often the economic factor was decisive: the foreigners, with more resources, could sustain the pueblos jóvenes [a name adopted by the Velasco government for the barriadas] in the poorest parts of the Sierra, while the national clergy could not.” 36. Klaiber, La iglesia en el Perú, 381. Maryknoll Father William McCarthy directed the Cáritas office in Lima from 1962 to 1974. 37. Ibid., 340, 353. See also Milagros Peña, Theologies and Liberation in Peru: The Role of Ideas in Social Movements (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995); Catalina Iguiniez Romero, Iglesia en el Perú: Compromiso y renovación (1958–1984) (Lima: Instituto de Bartolomé de Las Casas, 1987). 38. Klaiber, La iglesia en el Perú, 385–87. 39. Peruvian clergy who studied in Europe were especially influenced by the transformative theologies of Europeans, including Jacques Maritain, the French Jesuit Henri de Lubac, the French Dominican priests Yves Congar and Marie-Dominique Chenu, and the German Jesuit Karl Rahner, all of whom, with the exception of Maritain, were “born between 1895 and 1904 . . . and were disturbed by what the political crisis of the 1930s and then the second world war revealed about their church, many of whose members (and leaders) seemed

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to understand religion as either a pious afterthought to daily life or a reliable bulwark of any social order.” John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: Norton, 2003), 194. See also Jeffrey L. Klaiber, S.J., “Prophets and Populists: Liberation Theology, 1968–1988,” Americas, 46, no. 1 ( July 1989): 3. 40. One of the first meetings among liberation theologians held in preparation for the CELAM meeting of 1968 took place at the Center for Intercultural Formation (CIF), renamed the Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC), at Petropolis. Dries, “The Legacy of John J. Considine, M.M.,” 82. This center and its counterpart in Cuernavaca, Mexico, for Spanish-speaking regions had been established in 1961 to prepare foreign clergy for mission in Latin America. The director of the center in Cuernavaca, Ivan Illich, would become known for his outspoken criticism of U.S. mission to Latin America, yet CIDOC provided a key meeting place for Latin American, European, and U.S. liberation theologians. Both sites were supported by the U.S. National Catholic Welfare Conference and U.S. bishops. In other words, an infrastructure was essential even if those who provided it were criticized for their expansionism. Ivan Illich, “The Seamy Side of Charity: An Authority on the Church in Latin America Makes Some Blunt Statements about American Missionary Work in South America,” America, January 21, 1967, 88–91. In some cases, this was also a site where people engaged in revolutionary movements encountered concerned Catholics. Yolanda Colom, interview by author, Guatemala City, July 28, 2004. 41. Luís Pásara, Radicalización y conflicto en la iglesia peruana (Lima: Ediciones El Virrey, 1986), 38– 46. 42. Joseph Love, “The Origins of Dependency Analysis,” Latin American Studies 2 (1990): 143– 68; Fernando Enrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, The Colonial Heritage of Latin America: Essays on Economic Dependence in Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). 43. Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Nick Cullather, Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952–1954 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Susan Jonas, The Battle for Guatemala: Rebels, Death Squads, and U.S. Power (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991); Pierro Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944 – 1954 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Jim Handy, Gift of the Devil: A History of Guatemala (Boston: South End Press, 1984); Richard Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982); Steven Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (New York: Doubleday, 1982).

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44. L. Ronald Scheman, “The Alliance for Progress: Concept and Creativity,” in The Alliance for Progress: A Retrospective, ed. L. Ronald Scheman (New York: Praeger, 1988), 3–62, 5. 45. In 1960 Father Considine, in his capacity as director of the Latin American Bureau of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, wrote to James Norris of Catholic Relief Services providing him with information from the NCWC “preparatory to Congressional action in January on the $500,000,000 in Latin American aid.” Letter from John J. Considine to James Norris, Catholic Relief Services, November 8, 1960, MFBA/USCMA, Box 10, Folder 1, MMA. Considine suggested, “It would appear that we should make remote plans for the establishment in Latin American countries of properly structured organizations that strive to secure substantial sums for operations in given individual countries. You and I should, I think, take the first steps in proposing which such entities should be initiated and guided by Catholic Relief Services and which might be initiated by the Latin American Bureau.” Memorandum From: Mr.[Harmon] Burns, To: File, February 10, 1961, MFBA/USCMA, Box 10, File 1, MMA. In 1961 Father Considine, William Considine, and Burns met with “Mr. Milton Borall, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs, . . . to apprise the responsible policy officers at the Department of State of the mutuality of interest of the United States Bishops and the Government of the United States respecting assistance to Latin America.” “Father Considine and Mr. Considine both explained in general the existing facility in Latin America of Catholic Relief Services, with emphasis on the ability of the Church to reach isolated people in remote areas of the continent. It was made clear that to the extent NCWC can be of assistance and service to our Government in carrying out aid to Latin America we stand ready to help in all ways possible.” 46. Scheman, The Alliance for Progress; Stephen R. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Jerome Levinson and Juan de Onís, The Alliance That Lost Its Way: A Critical Report on the Alliance for Progress (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970); Jeffrey F. Taffet, Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy: The Alliance for Progress in Latin America (New York: Routledge, 2007). 47. U.S. President, “Address at a White House Reception for Members of Congress and for the Diplomatic Corps of the Latin American Republics,” in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States (Washington, DC: GPO, 1963), 170 –75. 48. “Appeal of the Pontifical Commission to North American Superiors,” Address of Monsignor Agostino Casaroli, August 17, 1961, Appendix I, in Costello, Mission to Latin America, 273–82. 49. Ibid., 54; and Latin American Bureau, 1962 – 63, Box 10, Folder 2, MFBA/USCMA, MMA.

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50. “Entre los pastores y fundadores de la Iglesia surandina, se encuentran, en el Cusco, los arzobishpos Ricardo Durand ( jesuita: 1966 –75) y Luis Vallejos (diocesano: 1975–82); y en Puno, los obispos Julio González (salesiano, 1959–66), y Jesús Calderón (dominico: 1972–98). Asimismo, en el impulse de esta Gelesia con sensibilidad social, los extranjeros constituyen un grupo significativo: en Juli, los prelados norteamericanos Eduardo Fedders (1963–73) y Alberto Koenigsknecht (1973–86); en Ayaviri, los prelados franceses Luciano Metzinger (1958–71), Luis Dalle (1971–82) y Francisco d’Alteroche (1982–92); en Sicuani los carmelitas canadienses Nevin Hayes (1959–70) y Albano Quinn (1971–99); en Chuquibambilla, el agustino italiano, Lorenzo Michelli (1968–86).” Lupe Jara, “El Sur Andino, una iglesia que responde a los signos de los tiempos,” in Ser iglesia en tiempos de violencia, ed. Cecilia Tovar (Lima: Instituto Bartolomé de Las Casas, 2006), 407. 51. Macaulay, “Ideological Change and Internal Cleavages in the Peruvian Church,” 56–85. 52. Carlos Iván Degregori, “Identidad étnica, movimientos sociales y participación política en el Perú,” in Democracia, etnicidad y violencia en América Latina (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1993), 113–33; and Carlos Iván Degregori, “El estudio del otro: Cambios en los análisis sobre etnicidad en el Perú,” in Peru: 1964 –1994: Economía, sociedad y política, ed. Julio Cotler (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1995), 303–32. 53. Andrew Orta, Catechizing Culture: Missionaries, Aymara, and the “New Evangelization” (New York: Colombia University Press, 2004), demonstrates that a similar process was occurring among clergy on the Bolivian side of the Aymara Catholic Church. 54. “In 1965 Maryknoll converted its language training center in Cochabamba into a language institute that became the best mission formation center for languages in all of Latin America because of the professionalization of language study, the use of the best available methods and texts, and the preparation of indigenous professors who designed original methods of analysis and teaching of Quechua and Aymara.” F. T. McGwynn, “Historical Description of the Instituto de Idiomas on its Thirtieth Anniversary,” in Diccionario histórico de Bolivia, 2 vols. (Sucre: Grupo de Estudios Históricos, 2002), 1:1086. Thank you to Nicanor Domínguez for this reference. 55. Ironically, this point came out indirectly in declarations by Cardinal Landázuri following the pope’s expression of concern that liberation theology was creating a parallel, autonomous, popular church. Landázuri affirmed in statements to the press that in “Peru there was no popular church in terms that the pope had identified as unacceptable. In effect, the Christian communities in Peru developed through direct ties with parishes and with the hierarchy.” Romero, Iglesia en el Perú, 59.

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56. Proceedings of the Lima Methods Conference of the Maryknoll Fathers: Maryknoll House, Lima, Peru, August 23– 28, 1954 (Maryknoll, NY: Maryknoll Fathers, n.d.). 57. William J. Coleman, Latin American Catholicism: A Self-Evaluation (Maryknoll, NY: World Horizon Books, 1954).

Chapter 1. Maryknoll and the New Deal for Latin America 1. “Number of Sisters in the Congregation, Decade by Decade,” June 12, 1955. Lists: Membership Statistics, H1.4. See also U.S. Catholic Overseas Missionary Personnel, Mission Secretariat, (Washington, DC), MFBA/MMA. 2. Rev. Joseph A. Hahn, “Twenty More Priests to Latin America,” Field Afar (May 1943): 23. 3. Jay Dolan, In Search of an American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in Tension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 90 – 91, reports that between 1865 and 1895 some 25 million immigrants arrived in the United States. Initially Irish and Germans dominated, but by 1915 some twenty-eight different language groups constituted the Catholic population. James Hennesey, S.J., American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 207– 21. Hennesey reports that by 1920 some 85 percent of Catholics were estimated to be descendants of immigrants who arrived after 1820. 4. See Maryknoll seminary catalogs and the Field Afar/Maryknoll June ordinations. This dominance reflected the general population of U.S. Catholic missionaries working abroad. Thomas J. Bauer, M.M., “The American Missioner,” Maryknoll ( June 1957): 12–16, reported that four U.S. ecclesiastical territories supplied nearly one-third of all foreign missionaries. New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Illinois together provided the overwhelming majority in numbers proportional with those of the Maryknoll clergy. 5. Lizbeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1996); Robert A. Slayton, Back of the Yards: The Making of a Local Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); George Lipsitz, Class and Culture in Cold War America: Rainbow at Midnight (New York: Praeger, 1981); David R. Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White. The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2006). 6. The 1930s were also a crucial period for the Catholic Church in Peru. Many of the Peruvian clergy who studied in Europe and returned home in the

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1950s to become the foundation for liberation theology trace their activism to the 1930s and the development of Catholic Action. The representatives of the Peruvian hierarchy who became key advocates of liberation theology and the progressive Catholic Church also cut their teeth in Catholic Action programs in this period. Klaiber, La iglesia en el Perú, 298–306. 7. The Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America was not a religious order or congregation. Instead it was composed of secular priests, “representatives of the American clergy as whole, who were banded together for foreign mission work.” Nevins, Meaning of Maryknoll, 44. 8. Field Afar (April 1920): 79. 9. James A. Walsh, Field Afar ( January 1907): 1; original emphasis. 10. Price, who developed a profound devotion to Mary of Lourdes during this time, became progressively less visible in the organization. He was often identified as the more contemplative of the founders, while Walsh was seen as a pragmatic man of action. Nevins, Meaning of Maryknoll, 48. 11. Penny Lernoux, Hearts on Fire: The Story of the Maryknoll Sisters (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 21– 43. 12. Rev. James A. Walsh, Superior General of Maryknoll, “About Maryknoll Sisters,” Field Afar ( June 1935): 172; original emphasis. 13. Lernoux, Hearts on Fire, xxxii; Joan Chatfield, M.M., “First Choice Mission: The Maryknoll Sisters, 1912 –1975” (Ph.D. diss., Graduate Theological Union, 1983), 7–8: “The women who chose Maryknoll chose mission. Those who entered other groups chose to be religious, to do a particular work or have a particular prayer life. Being a religious was paramount in their reasons for entering a religious community. Within the study of Maryknoll Sisters it was eminently clear that being a religious was a conditional aspect of their life. . . . Being a missioner, going to missions, having a part in the entire missionary enterprise: that was their first choice.” 14. “Maryknoll Spirit,” The Maryknoll Sisters Spiritual Directory, MMA. 15. Good Manners, pt. 1, The Maryknoll Sisters Spiritual Directory, MMA. 16. Sister Rose Timothy, interview by author, Lima, Peru, March 29, 1996; and Sister Patricia Ryan, interview by author, Puno, Peru, July 2, 1996. 17. The Maryknoll Fathers Spiritual Directory (n.p., 1947), 12. 18. Ibid., 27. 19. “Knoll Notes,” Field Afar (March 1944): 30 –31. 20. Raymond A. Lane, M.M., D.D., The Early Days of Maryknoll (New York: David McKay, 1951), 48. 21. The Maryknoll fathers cofounder, Thomas F. Price, appealed to have the Catholic Foreign Mission Society engage in mission work at home and abroad. At the time, however, it seemed more important to the U.S. Catholic Church and to Father Walsh to send priests abroad.

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22. “Mr. Q Man Comes to Maryknoll,” Field Afar (April –May 1945): 38 – 39. By 1956 the number of seminarians influenced by the Field Afar had increased to 35 percent, while those attracted by personal contact declined to 23 percent. “Why Maryknoll,” Glen Echo (1956). 23. Forty-five percent of the respondents’ fathers and 46 percent of the respondents’ mothers had not completed high school; for 20 percent of the fathers and 23 percent of the mothers high school was the highest level of education achieved. Chatfield, “First Choice Mission,” 10, 129, 130. 24. Rev. Francis A. McKay, “You, Too, Can Change the World,” Field Afar ( June 1943): 34. 25. Charles F. McCarthy, “Someone Like You,” Field Afar ( June 1945): 40 – 41. 26. John Joseph Casey, “A Historical Study of a Recent Model of PreProfessional Catholic Clerical Education in the United States” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1971), 151–52. 27. New Horizons (1947), Formation Program Vocational Literature, A10, Box 8, MMA. 28. Maryknoll Sisters Directory (1952), 1, MMA. 29. “Reception-Profession Questionnaire,” Reception-Profession Social Conventions, H7, Box 4, MMA. 30. “Number of Sisters in the Congregation, Decade by Decade,” June 12, 1995. Lists: Membership Statistics, H1.4, MMA. 31. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 87. 32. Ibid.; original emphasis. “A survey of 5,000 women who graduated from college between 1946 and 1949 found that two-thirds had married within three to six years after graduation. Only half these women had been able to find the kind of work they had wanted and for which they had been prepared.” 33. Ibid., 79. For women/gender and Catholicism, see Robert Anthony Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880 –1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Robert A. Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Mary Gordon, “Father Chuck: A Reading of Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary’s, or Why Priests Made Us Crazy,” in Catholic Lives, Contemporary America, ed. Thomas J. Ferraro (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 65 –75; James K. Kenneally, The History of American Catholic Women (New York: Crossroad, 1990). For fascinating cases of people who seemed to defy all established gender norms but still function within the framework of the Catholic community, see James Terence Fisher, The Catholic Counterculture in America: 1933– 1962 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), especially the chapter on Dorothy Day; and James Terence Fisher, Dr. America:

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The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927– 1961 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997). 34. In 1960 there were 1,430 Maryknoll sisters. Sisters by Decade, MMA. In 1964 there were 959 priests and 187 brothers. Fathers by Decade, MFBA, Box 1, 1955–87, MMA. 35. George Q. Flynn, Roosevelt and Romanism: Catholics and American Diplomacy, 1937–1945 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), 4. The Catholic press in 1937 had 134 local or diocesan papers that were read by some 2,396,516 subscribers and 197 periodicals or journals that reached 4,604,141 Catholics. Hennesey, American Catholics, 187, 237. Catholic schools had more than doubled, from 2,246 with 405,234 students in 1880 to 4,845 with 1,237,251 students in 1910. These schools were staffed by nuns whose number had grown from 1,375 in 1850 to almost 40,000 in 1900. The number of colleges and universities increased from 130 in 1921 to 163 by 1928. Dolan, In Search of an American Catholicism, 118. 36. Flynn, Roosevelt and Romanism, 6. 37. Lloyd W. Warner and Leo Sroe, The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1945). 38. Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World, 9: “Catholicism served as the central focus of the Enlightenment critique of religion. It offered for centuries the most spirited, principled, fundamentalist, and apparently futile resistance to modern processes of secularization and modernization in all spheres. It fought capitalism, liberalism, the modern secular state, the democratic revolutions, socialism, the sexual revolution. In brief, it has been the paradigmatic form of anti-modern public religion.” 39. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965), 8–25. 40. Lyman Beecher, Plea for the West (Cincinnati, 1835), cited in Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style, 47, 62–63. 41. Leslie Woodcock Tentler, “Present at the Creation: Working-Class Catholics in the United States,” in American Exceptionalism? US Working-Class Formation in an International Context, ed. Rick Halpern and Jonathan Morris (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 134 –57, 139– 40. 42. Dolan, In Search of American Catholicism, 130 –31. 43. Ibid., 139; Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street. 44. John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 6–53. 45. This distance is evident in “Mr. Q Man Comes to Maryknoll.” Maryknoll seminarians responding to a survey to determine the characteristics of the “typical Maryknoll seminarian” consistently asserted that when he decided to go

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to Maryknoll he mentioned the fact to a priest with whom he was acquainted but did not approach his pastor because he was “a little afraid of him.” 46. “We Thank You,” Field Afar (April 1943): 44. “From the hundreds of Catholic schools over the country have come practically all of our 789 priests, Brothers, and students.” 47. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries, 56, 48. Hennesey, American Catholics, 188. 49. Ibid., 284. 50. Cohen, Making A New Deal. 51. Denning, The Cultural Front. 52. Hennesey, American Catholics, 207. 53. George Q. Flynn, American Catholics and the Roosevelt Presidency, 1932–1936 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1968); Flynn, Roosevelt and Romanism; David J. O’Brien, American Catholics and Social Reform: The New Deal Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). 54. Hennesey, American Catholics, 260. 55. Cohen, Making a New Deal, 256. 56. Flynn, American Catholics and Roosevelt, 50–52. John Tracy Ellis, American Catholicism, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 151: “Between 1789 and 1955, there have been only fourteen Catholics in cabinet posts, and ten of those received their appointments after 1933.” 57. Hennesey, American Catholics, 259. 58. “New Deal for Latin America,” America (August 5, 1933): 412. 59. Declaration of Principles of the Good Neighbor League, quoted in Donald R. McCoy, “The Good Neighbor League and the Presidential Campaign of 1936,” Western Political Quarterly 13, no. 4 (December 1960): 1013. 60. John A. Ryan, Social Reconstruction: A General Review of the Problems and Survey of Remedies (Washington, DC: Committee on Special War Activities, National Catholic War Council, 1919), 24. 61. Edwin Ryan, Ph.D., “A Catholic Pan-American Society,” America (October 3, 1931): 611; see also “A New Deal for Latin America,” America (August 5, 1933): 412. 62. “Announcement of Formation of the Latin American Bureau,” NCWC R 13, no. 3 (October 1931). 63. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1999); Benjamin M. Friedman, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth (New York: Knopf, 2005), identifies the division of benefits during the New Deal between urban and rural communities as a Southern Democratic agreement that allowed urban laborers to benefit while retaining the racialized structure of labor in the South. Urban “white ethnics” thus benefited disproportionately from the reforms of the New Deal, while

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African American rural workers suffered continued social, political, and economic exclusion. 64. Ellis, American Catholicism, 125–26. 65. John LaFarge, S.J., “Two Catholic Conventions,” America (November 9, 1929): 104 –6; Christopher S. Hamlin and John T. McGreevy, “The Greening of America, Catholic Style, 1930 –1950,” Environmental History 2, no. 6 ( July 2006): 464 –99. 66. Edward Skillin Jr., “Antigonish Ten Years After,” Commonweal (December 18, 1942): 232–33; Catherine LeGrand, “The Antigonish Movement in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic,” panel on Cross-Cultural Catholic Development from Antigonish, Nova Scotia, to the United States, the Dominican Republic and Guatemala, presented at the American Society of Church History meeting at the American Historical Association, Atlanta, GA, January 6, 2007; Moses Coady, Masters of Their Own Destiny: The Story of the Antigonish Movement of Adult Education through Economic Cooperation (New York: Harper, 1939). For a wonderful analysis of a parallel Canadian movement to Latin America influenced by similar factors, see Catherine LeGrand, “L’Axe missionnaire catholique entre le Québec et l’Amérique latine: Une exploration préliminaire,” Globe: Revue Internationale d’Etudes Québécoises 12, no. 1 (2009): 43–66. 67. Cohen, Making a New Deal, 252–58. 68. “To Those Who Love God All Things Work Together for the Good: The Reason Why,” Field Afar (October 1941): 15. 69. Peter Cosmon, “World Christianity,” Field Afar (February 1945): 40 – 41. 70. “After the War,” Field Afar (April 1943): 32–33. 71. Senator Dennis Chavez, “Hemisphere Peace by Catholic Culture,” America (October 19, 1940): 35. 72. Rev. Alonso E. Escalante, M.M., “South America to the World,” Field Afar (May 1942): 4. 73. “Father Ambassador,” Field Afar (April–May 1945): 6–8. 74. Rev. Joseph A. Hahn, M.M., “Twenty More Priests to Latin America,” Field Afar (May 1943): 23. 75. Field Afar (April–May 1945): 42– 43. 76. Ibid.; Henri Goudreault, O.M.I., “Les missionaries canadiens à l’étranger au XXe siècle,” CCHA Study Sessions 1, no. 50 (1983): 361– 80; Michael James O’Hearn, “The Political Transformation of a Religious Order” (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1983); Edward L. Cleary, Crisis and Change: The Church in Latin America Today (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 195); Dries, The Missionary Movement in American Catholic History. 77. Costello, Mission to Latin America, 47. 78. U.S. Catholics Overseas: A Statistical Directory, January 1, 1968 (Washington, DC: Mission Secretariat, August 1968), MFBA/MMA.

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79. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., Foreword to Costello, Mission to Latin America, ix. 80. Greg Grandin, “Your Americanism and Mine: Americanism and AntiAmericanism in the Americas,” American Historical Review (October 2006): 1042–66. Grandin traces this process to the 1930s and earlier. 81. L. Ronald Scheman, The Alliance for Progress: A Retrospective (New York: Praeger, 1988), 5. 82. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 194. 83. Klaiber, “Prophets and Populists.” 84. Cleary, Crisis and Change; Ana María Bidegain, “Medellín” (unpublished paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, 2007). 85. Costello, Mission to Latin America, 109, 113–14. 86. Wilfred Parsons, S.J., “Does Latin America Love us?” America (February 1, 1930): 403– 4. 87. Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, 10. 88. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness; Friedman, Moral Consequences of Economic Growth; Mathew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 89. Field Afar (April–May 1945): 42.

Chapter 2. First Impressions 1. Informal conversation, Juan Domingo Cáceres Olazo, Archivo Regional de Puno, December 24, 2002. 2. William D. McCarthy, M.M., “Notes for a History of the Maryknoll Society in Peru” (unpublished manuscript). 3. Dan Chapin Hazen, “The Awakening of Puno: Government Policy and the Indian Problem in Southern Peru, 1900 –1955” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1974), 5, 14, 379. 4. McCarthy, “Notes for a History,” 43. The number of priests in Peru declined dramatically following independence, and this decline was even more marked in remote provinces like Puno where access to resources was limited and living conditions were difficult. The diocese of Puno had 92 priests in 1866. Historiográfica de Puno, Iltmo. y Rdmo. Sr. Dr. D. Juan Ambrosia Huerta, Dignisimo Obispo de la Diocesis, 163, UABM. In 1900 the number had declined to 51 priests all of whom were from either southern Peru or Bolivia. Anexos de la Memoria del Prefecto del Departamento de Puno, Puno, 9 de Junio, 1900, E834, 30 ff., BNP. 5. Of the 13 priests who settled in Puno in 1943, 7 were in their twenties, 5 in their thirties, and only one over forty. Robert Kearns, M.M., Maryknoll Fathers in Peru, 1943–1953, vol. 1 (Maryknoll: privately printed, n.d.), 131– 46.

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Notes to Pages 48–50

6. J. Lloyd Mecham, Church and State in Latin America: A History of Politico-Ecclesiastical Relations, rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, [1934] 1966), 160. 7. Two of the original thirteen priests stayed in Puno for eight years, the others were there from two months to three years, with the average length of stay being 2.85 years. In 1945 Maryknoll established a policy of mandatory altitude leave after each six-month period in Puno in the hope of reducing the number of illnesses. Kearns, Maryknoll Fathers in Peru, vol. 1, 40. 8. Klaiber, La iglesia en el Perú, 375: “In all the pueblos jóvenes and in many rural areas, especially in the Sur Andino, the majority of the religious personnel of the church were new missionaries.” 9. Nils Jacobsen, Mirages of Transition: The Peruvian Altiplano, 1780 –1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 208, provides a table, partially reproduced below, detailing land transfers in Puno’s province of Azángaro, which reveals what is described as the “avalanche” of hacienda expansion:

1886–90 1891–95 1896–1900 1901–5 1906–10 1913 1914 1918 1919

Purchases from Indigenous Peasants

Purchases from Intermediate Group

Value

Number

Value

Number

46 81 230 385 672 140 24 81 53

2,058 8,335 17,891 17,963 48,451 760 2,200 3,650 11,477

11 16 35 33 85 3 7 8 8

6,917 12,894 37,274 66,768 143,873 28,517 3,005 14,144 16,410

10. Jacobsen, Mirages of Transition, 4. 11. Klaiber, La iglesia en el Peru, 285– 86. This role conformed with a long tradition dating at least to the colonial period when clergy and the bishop of Cuzco were the key forces in quieting the Túpac Amaru rebellion. Scarlett O’Phelan Godoy, La gran rebelión en los Andes: De Túpac Amaru a Túpac Catari (Lima: Petroperu, 1995), 64; Leon G. Campbell, “Church and State in Colonial Peru: The Bishop of Cuzco and the Tupac Amaru Rebellion,” Journal of Church and State 22, no. 2 (1980): 251–70. 12. Nils P. Jacobsen, “Civilization and Its Barbarism: The Inevitability of Juan Bustamante’s Failure,” in The Human Tradition in Latin America: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Judith Ewell and William H. Beezley (Wilmington, DE:

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Scholarly Resources, 1987), 82–102, 98. In 1867 Juan Bustamante, a Puneño who served as senator for the department, created the Sociedad Amiga de los Indios whose goal was to reform laws in congress, protect indigenous people against abuses, and defend them in courts. Although it was not terribly effective, the association was the first of its kind and “signaled the beginning of awareness among enlightened citizens in the capital of the serious problems faced by the Andean peasantry.” Bustamante subsequently led one of the first large-scale indigenous rebellions centered in Huancané in Puno. The movement was violently repressed, and Bustamante was decapitated. 13. José Luis Rénique, La batalla por Puno: Conflicto agrario y nación en los Andes peruanos, 1866–1995 (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2004), 59–60. 14. Ibid., 64. 15. Hazen, “Awakening of Puno,” 46. 16. Rénque, La batalla por Puno, 81. 17. Hazen, “Awakening of Puno,” 94. 18. Ibid., 15. 19. Ibid., 124. 20. Klaiber, La iglesia en el Perú, 140. 21. Marcela Calisto, “Peasant Resistance in the Aymara Districts of the Highlands of Peru, 1900 –1930: An Attempt at Self-Governance” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego, 1993), 24. 22. Rénique, La batalla por Puno, 83. 23. Jacobsen, Mirages of Transition, 345. 24. Rénique, La batalla por Puno, 84 –88. 25. Hazen, “Awakening of Puno,” 128. 26. Jacobsen, Mirages of Transition, 209. 27. Rénique, La batalla por Puno, 21. 28. Jacobsen, Mirages of Transition, 337. 29. Rénique, La batalla por Puno, 26. 30. Ibid., 55. 31. Exposicion del Capítulo metropolitano de Lima a la convención nacional, sobre la exclusión de los falso cultos y sobre los derechos de libertad y de propiedad de la Iglesia (Lima: Impreso por Francisco Solis, 1855), 5. UARM, Lima Vargas Ugarte Colleción, Peru Iglesia 39b, doc. 44. 32. Fundamentos en que se apoya la resolución suprema expedida en 20 del actual sobre el enjuiciamiento del obispo de Puno y su vicario general (Lima: Imprenta del Estado, 1869), 18–19, X262.7 P4 1869, BNP. 33. Arthur Kiernan, M.M., to James E. Walsh, M.M., April 16, 1943, Puno, MMA. 34. Ibid. 35. Kearns, Maryknoll Fathers in Peru, vol. 1, 54 –55.

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Notes to Pages 58–64

36. Interview with Father McIntire, quoted in Costello, Mission to Latin America, 30. 37. Arthur C. Kiernan, M.M., Puno, February1944, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 38. Ibid. 39. Arthur Kiernan, M.M. letter to James E. Walsh, April 1943, Puno, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 40. Nevins, The Meaning of Maryknoll, 57; original emphasis. 41. Arthur C. Kiernan, M.M., letter to James E. Walsh, Puno, April 1943, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 42. Francis Garvey, M.M., Puno, May 18–June 7, 1943, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA; original emphasis. 43. Arthur C. Kiernan, M.M., Puno, February 1944, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 44. Arthur C. Kiernan, M.M., letter to James E. Walsh, Puno, April 1943, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 45. Anthony M. Michalik, M.M., Puno, July 13, 1944, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 46. Donald Cleary, M.M., Another trip to Ayaviri, September 1943, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 47. Francis X. Lyons, M.M., Puno, April 31–May 18, 1943, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 48. “Mr. Cavadine of the Arequipa U.S. Vice-Consulate calls. He is of our faith and a Georgetown graduate. Later in the day he called again with Dr. and Mrs. Tschoppic, American citizens who are in this part of the world for research work in Anthropology and Archaeology.” Raymond C. Hohlfeld, M.M., May 1943, Puno, MMA. “We meet an Italian who runs a general store in Puno who speaks perfect English. His father sent him to England to learn banking and he and his cousin end up in Puno with a general store. This Mr. Perodi was destined to help us on many occasions when our Spanish would not get us through. In another store we meet a Scotchman who runs a large hacienda some 40 miles from here. He introduced himself and told us that he had heard of our coming and that after we got settled he wanted us to come up and meet his Peruvian wife and children. He is just beginning the manufacture of butter and promises to keep us on his list when he starts selling it.” Arthur Kiernan, M.M., April 1943, Puno, MMA. 49. Donald Cleary, M.M. Puno, December 1943, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 50. Arthur C. Kiernan, M.M., Puno, April 1943, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 51. Donald Cleary, M.M., Trip to Ayaviri, 1943, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 52. Donald Cleary, M.M., Puno, 1943, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA.

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Notes to Pages 64–66

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53. Anexo de la Memoria del Prefecto del Departamento de Puno, Puno, 9 Junio de 1900 (E834 30 ff.), BNP; and Emilio Romero, Monografía del departamento de Puno (Lima: Torres Aguire, 1928), 327, 348. 54. Informe: Que de la Santa Visita Pastoral Presenta el ltmo. Y Rvmo. Mons. D.D. Valentín Ampuero, Obispo de Puno, al Supremo Gobierno 1912 (Visitas: XXVII:24), AAL. See also “El señor Ministro de Estado en el Despacho de Trabajo y Asuntos Indígenas me ha dirigido una comunicación manifestándome que ha dispuesto comisionar al Ingeniero don Moisés Zamudio, Jefe de la División de Asuntos Técnicos de la Dirección General de Asuntos Indígenas, para que organice una campaña que fortifique los sentimientos nacionalistas de la masa indígena en la zona fronteriza de Bolivia, y me solicita que considere la forma en que podría colaborar el clero de la región para el mejor éxito de la comisión encomendada.” Alejandro Freundt y Rosell, Ministro de Justicia y Culto á Ilustrísimo Mons. Alberto M. Dettmann, Obispo de Puno, 7 de diciembre de 1953, Lima. 55. Código Civil, Sección Sexta de los registros del estado civil, in Eduardo García Calderon, Constituciones códigos y leyes del Perú (Lima: Librería e Imprenta Gil, 1935), 90 –95. See also William P. Mitchell, Peasants on the Edge: Crop, Cult, and Crisis in the Andes (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 133. Mitchell reports of a province in Ayacucho in Peru’s central highlands, “People need marriage and baptismal records often: to obtain identity documents, to contract marriage, to enter school. . . . The church was the only source of birth records in Quinua until 1935, when the civil register was established. The church continued as an important source of such documentation until 1960, when Quinueños began to register births systematically in the municipality rather than the church.” Conditions seem to have been similar in the department of Puno and especially in remote provinces like Carabaya and Sandia. 56. Thomas J. Carey, M.M., Cuyocuyo, Puno, January 1944, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 57. Kearns, Maryknoll Fathers in Peru, vol. 1, 61. 58. Thomas J. Carey, M.M., Cuyocuyo, January 1944, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 59. For an excellent analysis of this desexualized masculine power, see Gordon, “Father Chuck.” 60. Joseph P. Meaney, M.M., Ayapata, January 1–February 15, 1945, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 61. Ibid. 62. Donald Cleary, M.M., Holy Week in Macusani, April 1944, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 63. Joseph P. Meaney, M.M., Ayapata, February 1945, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA.

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Notes to Pages 67–73

64. Ibid. 65. Donald Cleary, M.M., Macusani, April 1944, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 66. Donald Cleary, M.M., Puno, December 1943, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 67. Ibid. 68. Cargo literally means “burden” and was used to describe responsibilities for the community’s annual fiesta. 69. The mandate that indigenous people accept fiesta cargos was eliminated by law on September 2, 1914. Stahl, En el país de los Incas, 141; Wilfredo Kapsoli, Los movimientos campesinos en el Perú: 1879–1965 (Lima: Ediciones Atusparia, 1977), 22; Roca, Por la clase indígena, 201–2. 70. Allyu is a Quechua term for a territorial group organized in a segmentary system and a rule of endogamy. Brooke Larson and Olivia Harris, with Enquique Tandeteo, eds., Ethnicity, Markets, and Migration in the Andes (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 391. 71. Joseph P. Meaney, M.M., Ayapata, January 1–February 15, 1945, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 72. Joseph P. Meaney, M.M., December 1944, Ayapata, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 73. Joseph P. Meaney, M.M., May 1945, Ayapata, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 74. Ibid. 75. Donald Cleary, M.M., Holy Week Macusani, April 3, 1944, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 76. Stephen Foody, M.M., Macusani, April 1944, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 77. Thomas J. Carey, M.M., Cuyocuyo, February 1944, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 78. Thomas J. Carey, M.M., January 1944, MMA. 79. Kearns, Maryknoll Fathers in Peru, vol. 1, 39. 80. Ibid., 85. 81. Joseph P. Meaney, M.M., San Juan, Puno, March 1947, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 82. Ibid. 83. William D. McCarthy, M.M., phone conversation with author, May 6, 1999. 84. Joseph P. Meaney, M.M., San Juan, Puno, March 1947, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 85. Interview with Joseph Early, M.M., related to me by William J. McCarthy, M.M., in phone conversation, May 6, 1999. 86. Kearns, Maryknoll Fathers in Peru, vol. 1, 98.

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Notes to Pages 74–78

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87. Ibid. 88. Joseph P. Meaney, M.M., San Juan, Puno, April 1947, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 89. MFBA, General Council, Puno, 1947, MMA. 90. “A letter from Fr. Kiernan brings the joyful news that serenity is in the offing. Father met a number of Peruvian officials who expressed great interest in the school to be conducted by the Padres Norteamericanos. Different men of the education department assisted Fr. Kiernan and were gushing in their promises to assist us in any way possible. I don’t know, but as the man says, ‘It seems to me I’ve heard that song before.’ ” Joseph B. Donnelly, M.M., January 1944, Puno, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA; William D. McCarthy, M.M., “Notes for a History.” 91. James M. O’Brien, M.M., San Ambrosio, August 1952, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 92. McCarthy, “Notes for a History.” 93. John Waldie, M.M., San Ambrosio, November 1951, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 94. McCarthy, “Notes for a History.” 95. Daniel B. McLellan, M.M., San Juan, Puno, May 1952, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 96. James M. O’Brien, M.M., San Juan, Puno, January 1951, Peru priests’ diaries. See also in Peru priests’ diaries, MMA, James M. O’Brien, M.M., San Juan, Puno, August 1950; Thomas W. Verhoeven, M.M., Puno, March 1950. 97. Daniel B. McLellan, M.M., San Juan, Puno, July 1952, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 98. Thomas W. Verhoeven, Azángaro, December 1952, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 99. Thomas Higgins, M.M., San Juan, Puno, November 1952, Peru priests’ diaries. See also Daniel B. McLellan, M.M., San Juan, Puno, May 1952, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 100. Daniel B. McLellan, M.M., San Ambrosio, May 1951, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 101. Albert I. Koenigsknecht, M.M., Puno, May 1950, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 102. McCarthy, “Notes for a History.” Within a few years Maryknoll Father John Considine would call into question the value of the parochial school in Latin America, arguing that it would never be possible for national clergy to support the expense of the schools. Arthur F. Allie, M.M., “Schools and Religious Instruction, Parochial Schools,” in Proceedings of the Lima Methods Conference, 110 –19. Ironically, a few years later the national government of Peru would try to institutionalize parochial education. Jeffrey Klaiber, “The Battle over Private Education in Peru, 1968–1980: An Aspect of the Internal Struggle in the Catholic Church,” Americas 43, no. 2 (October 1986): 137–58.

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Notes to Pages 82–85

Chapter 3. The Transformative Power of Tradition, 1954– 1967 1. Sister Maria Rubina, interview by author, Lima, Peru, January 8, 2003. 2. McCarthy, “Notes for a History”; Jara, “El Sur Andino,” 406–7. 3. Collier, Squatters and Oligarchs, 68–72; José Matos Mar, Desborde popular y crisis del estado: El nuevo rostro del Perú en la década de 1980 (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1984); Degregori, Blondet, and Lynch, Conquistadores de un nuevo mundo. Originally even more disparaging words were used for these “squatter settlements”: “belt of misery,” “clandestine housing developments,” “social aberrations,” “social cancer.” David Collier, “Squatter Settlements and Policy Innovation in Peru,” in Lowenthal, The Peruvian Experiment, 137. 4. McCarthy, “Notes for a History.” 5. Cotler, “Democracy and National Integration in Peru,” 13–18, provides a concise synthesis of changes in Peru during this crucial period. 6. Julio Cotler, Clases, estado y nación en el Perú, 6th ed. (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1978), 286–87. 7. Klaiber, La iglesia en el Perú, 351–91; Romero, Iglesia en el Perú, 7–35. 8. Costello, Mission to Latin America, 47– 48. 9. When U.S. missionaries’ participation in Central and South America peaked in 1968, Peru supported 693 priests, nuns, and brothers; Brazil, 699 priests, nuns, and brothers. The next largest contingent was in Bolivia, with just 346 clergy. U.S. Catholics Overseas: A Statistical Directory, January 1, 1968, Mission Secretariat, Washington, DC, August 1968, MFBA-MMA. 10. Klaiber, La iglesia en el Perú, 65–66. 11. “The Catholic Church’s pastoral activity in [Peru] is organized by ecclesiastical jurisdictions defined territorially. Peru is divided into seven archdioceses — Lima, Arequipa, Ayacucho, Cuzco, Huancayo, Piura and Trujillo — eighteen dioceses, eleven prelatures, and eight vicariates in the jungle, there is also one bishop castrense of the personal prelature of Opus Dei. A prelature is an ecclesiastical jurisdiction created by special circumstances and granted to a prelate who presides over and governs the other pastoral agents.” Felipe Portocarrero S., Hanny Cueva B., and Andrea Portugal D., La iglesia católica como proveedora de servicios sociales: Mitos y realidades (Lima: Universidad del Pacífico, 2005), 18. 12. Catholic Church, Archdiocese of Lima (Peru), Conferencia Episcopal Peruana, Anuario Eclesiástico del Perú (Lima: Talleres Gráficos de la Editorial Lumen, 1964). 13. Klaiber, La iglesia en el Perú, 389. 14. Ibid., 375– 91. William Mangin, “Latin American Squatter Settlements: A Problem and a Solution,” Latin American Research Review 2, no. 3

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(Summer 1967): 65 – 98, observed that “most of the Catholic priests working in barriadas are North American, Irish, or French, and offer temporal programs based on social action rather than the Peruvian and Spanish emphasis on reward in Heaven” (81). 15. William B. Taylor, “Between Global Process and Local Knowledge: An Inquiry into Early Latin American Social History, 1500 –1900,” in Reliving the Past: The Worlds of Social History, ed. Oliver Zunz (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 115– 89, suggests the importance of “in-between people.” See also Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men; Metcalf, GoBetweens and the Colonization of Brazil; Berta Ares Queija and Serge Gruzinski, coords., Entre dos mundos: Fronteras culturales y agentes mediadores (Sevilla: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1997). 16. Cotler, Clases, estado y nación, 274 –75. 17. Memorandum from: Mr.[Harmon] Burns, To: File, February 10, 1961, MFBA/USCMA, Box 10, File 1, MMA. 18. LeGrand, “L’Axe missionnaire catholique. See also Goudreault, “Les missionaires canadiens,”; Chanoine Lionel Groulx, Le Canada français missionaire: Une autre grande aventure (Montréal and Paris: Fides, 1962); and Jean Hamelin and Nicole Gagnon, Histoire du catolicisme québecois, 2 vols. (Montréal: Boréal Express, 1984). On Canadian Catholics, see Terrence J. Fay, A History of Canadian Catholics: Gallicanism, Romanism, and Canadianism (Montreal/Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2002). For an early study of Canadian missionaries in Latin America, see J. C. M. Ogelsby, “The Canadian Catholic Effort in Latin America, 1853 –1970,” “Protestant Missionaries in Latin America,” “Canadian Baptists in Bolivia,” and “The Canadian Mennonite Emigrations,” in Gringos from the Far North: Essays in the History of Canadian-Latin American Relations, 1866–1968 (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1976). 19. “Editorial: The Latest Development in Aiding the Needy,” Maryknoll (February 1963): 38–39. 20. Proceedings of the Lima Methods Conference. 21. Coleman, Latin American Catholicism. 22. Proceedings of the Lima Methods Conference, 7–8. 23. Ibid., 55–56. 24. Ibid., 135. 25. Ibid., 46. 26. Ana Maria Bidegain de Urán, “La organización de movimientos de juventud de Acción Católica en América Latina: Los casos de los obreros y universitarios en Brazil y en Colombia entre 1930 –1955” (Ph.D. diss., Université Catholique de Louvain, 1979). Catherine LeGrand, “Catholic Crossings between Quebec and Latin America: A Preliminary Exploration of the Missionary Connection” (paper presented at the 27th International Congress of the Latin American

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Notes to Pages 89–100

Studies Association, Montreal, September 6, 2007; LeGrand, “L’Axe missionaire catholique.” 27. Proceedings of the Lima Methods Conference, 63. 28. Ibid., 60 –61. 29. Ibid., 136, 149. 30. Ibid., 153. 31. Ibid., 107. 32. Ibid., 59. 33. Ibid., 80. 34. Ibid., 79. 35. Ibid., 164. 36. Ibid., 136. 37. Ibid., 134. 38. “Puno tiene el nivel de vida mas bajo del mundo,” El Comercio, August 10, 1961, Archivo de El Comercio. 39. Proceedings of the Lima Methods Conference, 166. 40. Ibid., 271. 41. Ibid., 165. 42. Degregori, “El estudio del otro,” 304 –8. 43. Kearns, Maryknoll Fathers in Peru, vol. 1, 37– 40. 44. Norman Meiklejohn, La iglesia y los lupaqas durante la colonia (Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Rurales Andinos “Bartolomé de Las Casas” and Instituto de Estudios Aymaras, 1988), 193– 246; José de Acosta, S.J., Obras del Padre Jose de Acosta, Estudio preliminar y edición del P. Francisco Mateos, S.J. (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, t. 72, 1954). 45. Thomas W. Verhoeven, M.M., “Catechetical School Diary,” January 1961, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 46. James M. O’Brien, M.M., interview by author, Pamplona Alta, Lima, May 29, 1996. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Thomas Verhoeven, M.M., Azángaro, July 1956, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 50. Charles Girnius, M.M., Azángaro, September 1956, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 51. Ibid. 52. Vincent B. McConaughy, M.M., Ayaviri, July 1955, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 53. Ibid. 54. Martin Murphy, M.M., Ilave, April 1956, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 55. Huancané Diary, November 1955, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 56. Pauline Frei, M.M., interview by author, Maryknoll, NY, July 15, 1997.

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Notes to Pages 100 –105

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57. La Escuela de Catequización de los Padres de Maryknoll, Prelature de Juli, Puno, Peru, Resumen por R. P. Norman Meiklejohn, A. A., March 31, 1978, MMA. 58. Ibid. 59. William Bergan, M.M., Puno, September 1955, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 60. Puno Diary, 1955, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. See also Father John Schiff ’s description of “rural missions”: “Each director works a certain number of days a week preparing an ‘estancia’ for a mission. Each director has a number of ‘estancias’ in his care, and these he hits with a mission once a year. Hence, the director always has one going. He works intensively with the local volunteer in a given ‘estancia’ for about a month depending on the religious state of the ‘estancia.’ Some might need less, others might need more than a month. He visits all the houses, lines up matrimonies (takes testimony), arranges for adult and infant baptisms, prepares First Communions, visits and instructs the sick, etc. [W]hen all is ready, he advises the priest a week beforehand and the date is set. The priest then takes care of Mass, confessions, instructions, matrimonies, baptisms, and sick calls on that day.” John Schiff, M.M., “Catechetical Follow-up in the Parish,” paper presented at the Puno Rural Catechetical Conference: October 22–23, 1963,” cited in Kearns, Maryknoll Fathers in Peru, vol. 3, 204 –20, 217. 61. James M. O’Brien, M.M., Azángaro, March 1955, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 62. Robert Kearns, M.M., Maryknoll Fathers in Peru: 1954 –1959, vol. 2 (Maryknoll, NY: privately printed, n.d.), 69. 63. Schiff, “Catechetical Follow-up in the Parish,” 213. 64. Richard M. Quinn, M.M., San Miguel, Ilave, Juli, April 1959, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 65. James M. O’Brien, M.M., Azángaro, June 1955, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 66. Thomas W. Verhoeven, M.M., Puno, August 1960, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 67. Huancané, November 1955, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 68. James Stefaniak, M.M., Huancané, January 1956, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 69. Pedro S. Rodríguez, “La raza indígena a traves del derecho en el Perú 1941” (Bachelor’s thesis, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos), E2165, 587 ff., 1946, BNP; Clorinda Matto de Turner, Birds without a Nest: A Novel (1889), trans. J. G. H. (1904); emended by Naomi Lindstrom (1995) (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996); Jacobsen, Mirages of Transition, 5. 70. James M. O’Brien, M.M., Azángaro, March 1955, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 71. Thomas W. Verhoeven, M.M., Azángaro, February 1953, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA.

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270

Notes to Pages 105–110

72. Richard C. Frank, M.M., Azángaro, November 1955, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 73. Robert Kearns, M.M., Maryknoll Fathers in Peru: 1965–1977, vol. 4 (Maryknoll, NY: privately printed, n.d.), 535. 74. James M. O’Brien, M.M., Carta á Ilustrísimo Monseñor Alberto M. Dettman, Obispado, Puno, March 18, 1955, Archivo del Arzobispado de Puno (AOP). 75. Thomas W. Verhoeven, M.M., Carta á Exmo. Monseñor Fr. Alberto M. Dettman, Obispado, Puno, January 17, 1956, AOP. 76. Thomas W. Verhoeven, M.M., Catechetical School Diary, January 1961, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 77. Catechists Department of State, General Records, 1964 –66, Box 2030, Folder “POL 18,” To: Department of State, Info: LIMA, From: Amconsul AREQUIPA, DATE: January 23, 1965, Subject: Communists Oppose American Trained Catechists in Cuzco, Ref: Consulate’s A-36, April 8, 1964, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Thanks to Angela Vergara for this reference. 78. El Comercio, December 21, 1956, Archivo de El Comercio, Lima, Peru. 79. Azángaro, February 1956, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 80. Hugo Carbajal, “Las sequias y heladas en Puno ofrecen un cuadro espantoso,” El Comercio, August 10, 1961, Archivo de El Comercio, Lima, Peru. 81. “Nueva calamidad en el departamento de Puno,” April 28, 1961; “Puno tiene el nivel de vida mas bajo del mundo,” August 10, 1961, El Comercio, Archivo de El Comercio, Lima, Peru. 82. Harvey J. Tessier, M.M., Puno, October 1956, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 83. H. Bradford Westerfield, The Instruments of America’s Foreign Policy (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1963), 356–57. 84. National Catholic Welfare Conference, Report to Board of Trustees War Relief Services–NCWC, October 1, 1953, to September 30, 1954, printed but not for publication, Administrative Board, Washington, DC, p. 2, Catholic Relief Services Archives (CRS). 85. In 1970 Cáritas Peru reported that there were twelve regional Cáritas offices in the country serving 479,387 people. Cáritas del Perú: Obra de los Obispos Católicos Peruanos, Folleto, Archivo de El Comercio, Lima, Peru. 86. Charles F. Girnius, M.M., Azángaro, November 1956, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 87. Charles F. Girnius, M.M., Azángaro, February 1957; and Rene P. Archambault, M.M., Ayaviri, July 1957, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 88. Father Phillip Erbland reported that the pastor of Juli, Father Tony Macri, used víveres (food provisions) extensively to build roads and even prisons.

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Notes to Pages 110 –112

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Phillip Erbland, M.M., interview by William D. McCarthy, M.M., tape recording, Lima, February 11, 1996, courtesy of the Maryknoll Society History Project. Martin Murphy, M.M., recounted that Father Charles Girnius would advise communities that Cáritas food was available. “But,” he reported, “[he would say] ‘I can’t get out to your community to give it to you because there’s no road.’” Then the priest would “take [the food] out to the end of the road they were building and give it out there . . . so he got good roads built all over the place.” Martin Murphy, M.M., interview by author, December 21, 1997, Lima, Peru. Cáritas Peru reported in 1970 that “in the past four years, an average of about forty thousand people a year have benefited from the aid that Cáritas has provided to promote the construction of roads to reach outlying areas. The projects have been developed in three regions of Peru. Among the areas assisted are Cajamarca, Chiclayo, Huanuco, Huacho, Huari, Huaraz, Lima, Chachapoyas, Chota, Chulucanas, and Puno.” In Puno the regional office constructed 1,400 kilometers of roads. Cáritas del Perú, Folleto, Archivo de El Comercio. 89. Charles F. Girnius, M.M., Azángaro, February 1957, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 90. Charles F. Girnius, M.M. Azángaro, September 1956, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 91. Carmen LaMazza, M.M., Azángaro, November 1959, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 92. Maryknoll Sisters, Azángaro Convent Diary, August 1962 –August 1963, Peru sisters’ diaries, MMA. 93. Robert Kearns, M.M., San Juan Parish, January 1961, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 94. Gilbert J. De Ritis, M.M., San Juan Bautista, October 1961, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 95. Anthony G. Macri, M.M., Puno Catechetical School, July 1961, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 96. Richard C. Frank, M.M., Azángaro, November 1955, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 97. Catherine J. Allen, The Hold Life Has: Coca and Cultural Identity in an Andean Community (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988); Joseph W. Bastien, Healers of the Andes: Kallawaya Herbalists and Their Medicinal Plants (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1987); Karen Olsen Bruhns and Karen E. Stothert, Women in Ancient America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999); Irene Silverblatt, Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). 98. Thomas W. Verhoeven, M.M., February 1958, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA.

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Notes to Pages 113–122

99. Robert Hoffman, M.M., Informal conversation with author, Puno, Peru, January 24, 1996. 100. Joseph B. Arsenault, M.M., “Re-evaluation Report of the Catechetical Program on the Altiplano of Peru,” December 1967, in Kearns, Maryknoll Fathers in Peru, vol. 4, 541– 42. 101. Harvey J. Tessier, M.M., Puno, February 1955, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 102. Interview by author, Pauline Frei, M.M., Maryknoll, NY, July 15, 1997. 103. Charles A. Murray, M.M., Carta á Monseñor Alberto M. Dettman, O.P., October 21, 1956, Archivo del Obispo del Puno (AOP). 104. Harvey J. Tessier, M.M., Puno, February 1955, Peru priests’ diaries. 105. Quoted in Costello, Mission to Latin America, 30. 106. Richard M. Quinn, M.M., Ilave, November 1958, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 107. Maryknoll Sisters Convent Diary, Puno, March 12, 1955, Peru sisters’ diaries, MMA. 108. Harvey J. Tessier, M.M., Puno, February 1955, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 109. Ibid. 110. Charles Cappel, M.M., Puno, December 14, 1946, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 111. Joseph R. Lang, M.M., Puno, August 1956, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. “Since the establishment of a native clergy is one of the principal aims of all mission endeavors, the priests are greatly interested in increasing vocations in this area. They hope that the school, by giving a good basic education and sound moral training, will act as a ‘feeder’ for their Minor Seminary. It is also expected that our contact with the families of the children will prepare them to give their boys and girls to religious life, if God gives the vocation. One of the big obstacles to possible vocations is the opposition attitude of parents who do not have a very exalted conception of our state of life. We pray that God will shower His blessings on our work in this corner of His vineyard.” December 1955, Maryknoll Convent Diary, Puno, Peru, Peru sisters’ diaries. 112. Pauline Frei, M.M., interview by author, Maryknoll, NY, July 15, 1997. 113. Puno Convent Diary, May 31, 1956, Peru sisters’ diaries, MMA. 114. Ibid., December 16, 1957. 115. Domingo Llanque, interview by author, Puno, Maryknoll Center House, December 26, 2002. 116. Proceedings of the Lima Methods Conference, 27–28. 117. Harvey J. Tessier, M.M., Puno, February 1955, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 118. Proceedings of the Lima Methods Conference, 161.

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Notes to Pages 122–126

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119. Carlos A. Bareda, “Sociedad cooperativa de Ahorro y Crédito en Puno,” El Comercio, October 21, 1960, Archivo de El Comercio, Lima, Peru. 120. Albert J. Nevins, M.M., “Why Latin-American Men Avoid the Church,” Maryknoll (August 1955): 8–12. 121. Kearns, Maryknoll in Peru, vol. 2, 95. 122. “Editorial: People are the Way to Success,” Maryknoll (September 1963): 34 –35. 123. Joseph F. Murray, M.M., Yunguyo, November 1960, Peru priests’ diaries, MMA. 124. Alfonso Miró Quesada de la Fuente, “Lo que ud. debe saber de Puno: Drama de un departamento,” El Comercio, March 20, 1960. 125. Nomina de los Asociados Cooperativa de Crédito “San Pedro de Juli, Ltda.,” 1959, Archivo del Obispo de Juli (AOJ), Puno. Interview with Fr. William Bergan by Jean-Paul Wiest, November 11, 1993, Los Altos, CA (side A, tape 1 of 1), compliments of the Maryknoll Society History Project: “I suppose it wouldn’t be the common Indian that would be in the credit union, now that you mention it. It was more the townspeople. And there’s a lot of working Indians, they were townspeople and they could speak Spanish. I don’t know how many of the Indians got in, I never knew, averted to it. But they were in on it and could be, and some of the Indians were even lawyers, had gone to the university and things like that. But most of them were the simple country people.” 126. “Puno tiene el nivel de vida mas bajo del mundo,” El Comercio, August 10, 1961, Archivo de El Comercio. 127. Kearns, Maryknoll in Peru, vol. 2, 20. 128. Ibid., 43, 72, 93. 129. Ibid., 95. 130. Oficina Central, Cooperativas de Crédito Parroquiales, Memoria Para La Asamblea Episcopal Peruana, 1959, Archivo del Obispo de Juli, AOJ, and Federación Nacional de Cooperativas de Crédito del Perú, Estadísticas 1966, AOJ. 131. Cotler, Clases, estado y nación, 276–77. 132. Ibid., 97. Daniel B. McLellan, M.M., was subsequently named director of the Institute of Human Relations and Production at San Marcos University as well. 133. Memoria para la Asamblea episcopal peruana sobre el desarrollo de cooperativas de crédito parroquiales en al año 1959, AOJ. 134. Kearns, Maryknoll in Peru, vol. 3, 85. 135. Memoria para la Asamblea episcopal peruana. 136. Kearns, Maryknoll in Peru, vol. 2, 20. 137. Palabras del R. P. Daniel McLellan, Presidente de La A. M. C. V, El Pueblo de Lima, Perú: A la primera reunión interamericana de ahorro y préstamos, Lima, January 23, 1963, AOJ.

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Notes to Pages 126–134

138. Scheman, “The Alliance for Progress,” 5. 139. Levinson and Onís, The Alliance That Lost Its Way; Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World; Scheman, The Alliance for Progress; Taffet, Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy. 140. Memorandum To: Mr. Considine From: Mr. Burns, November 3, 1960, Subject: Latin-American Coordination–Government Funds, MFBA/USCMA, Box 10, Folder 1, MMA. 141. Ibid. 142. Palabras del R. P. Daniel McLellan, Lima, January 23, 1963, AOJ. 143. Informal conversation by author, Thomas L. Melville (former Maryknoll priest), San Diego, CA June 17, 2004. 144. “De la parroquia a la banca social,” El Comercio, July 24, 1988, Archivo de El Comercio. 145. Carlos Torres and Torres Lara, “Un modelo de participación corporativa democrática: Las cooperativas de credito,” El Comercio, June 12, 1988, Archivo de El Comercio. 146. Maryknoll Sisters, Juli, January 1962 –December 31, 1962, Peru sisters’ diaries, MMA. 147. Maryknoll Sisters, Juli, January 1, 1964 –December 31, 1964, Peru sisters’ diaries, MMA. 148. Assumption Convent, Azángaro, March 1958, Peru sisters’ diaries, MMA. 149. Assumption Convent, Azángaro, May 1, 1958, Peru sisters’ diaries, MMA. 150. Pauline Frei, M.M., interview by author, Maryknoll, NY, July 15, 1997. 151. Ibid. 152. Carta á Julio González de Carlos Murray, July 12, 1961, Azángaro, AOP. 153. Carta á Julio González de Richard Frank, M.M., July 25, 1961, AOP. 154. Maryknoll Sisters, Azángaro Convent Diary, April 15, 1958, Peru sisters’ diaries, MMA. 155. Our Lady of the Assumption Convent, Azángaro, Period covering October 1958 to August 1959, Peru sisters’ diaries, MMA. 156. Our Lady of the Assumption Convent, Azángaro, Period covering August 1959 to August 1960, Peru sisters’ diaries, MMA. 157. Ibid. 158. Ibid. 159. Patricia Hennessey, M.M., interview by author, Lima Center House, December 27, 1997. 160. Our Lady of the Assumption Convent, Azángaro, Period covering August 1960 to August 1961, Peru sisters’ diaries, MMA. 161. “Carítas ha curado a 6,500 enfermos de TBC en 4 años,” La Crónica, July 13, 1966.

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Notes to Pages 134–148

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162. Klaiber, “The Battle over Private Education in Peru.” 163. McCarthy, “Notes for a History,” St. Rose of Lima, Peru, Lima Diary, October 1954, Peru sisters’ diaries, MMA. 164. Sister Rose Dominic, interview by author, Lima, Peru, March 29, 1996. 165. Gustavo Gutiérrez, seminar, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, Fall 2006. 166. St. Rose of Lima, Peru, Lima Diary, October 1954, Peru sisters’ diaries, MMA. 167. Ibid. 168. Ibid. 169. St. Rose of Lima, Peru Diary, July 1956, Peru sisters’ diaries, MMA. 170. St. Rose of Lima, Peru Diary, October 1958–July 1959, Peru sisters’ diaries, MMA. 171. St. Rose of Lima, Peru Diary, November 1955, Peru sisters’ diaries, MMA. 172. St. Rose of Lima, Peru Diary, November 13, 1956, Peru sisters’ diaries, MMA. 173. St. Rose of Lima, Peru Diary, October 1958–July 1959, Peru sisters’ diaries, MMA. 174. St. Rose of Lima, Peru Diary, July 1957, Peru sisters’ diaries, MMA. 175. Santa Rosa Diary, August 1961–August 1962, Peru sisters’ diaries, MMA. 176. Pásara, Radicalización y conflicto en la iglesia peruana. 177. Costello, Mission to Latin America, 39. 178. Proceedings of the Lima Methods Conference, 9. 179. Lisa L. North, “Ideological Orientations of Peru’s Military Rulers,” in McClintock and Lowenthal, The Peruvian Experiment Reconsidered, 248. Chapter 4. The Limits of Alliances, 1968– 1976 1. Maloney, “The Catholic Church and the Peruvian Revolution,” 145–53. Most military officials who backed the Velasco military coup and supported reforms studied in these centers during the years of progressive Catholic influence. 2. Informal conversation by author with Pedro De Guchteneere, director, Centro de Estudios y Publicaciones (CEP), Lima, Peru, January 7, 2003. 3. Maloney, “The Catholic Church and the Peruvian Revolution.” 4. Most researchers identify the period from 1968 to 1975, when General Juan Velasco Alvarado was in power, as the time of radical reform, while the subsequent rule by the more conservative General Francisco Morales Bermúdez marked not a complete reversal of reforms but a return to a more authoritarian and repressive military structure. McClintock and Lowenthal, The Peruvian Experiment Reconsidered.

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Notes to Pages 148–158

5. This observation has been made repeatedly by Peruvian researchers, especially Julio Cotler and Alberto Flores Galindo. These authors argue that by eliminating the hacendados without creating an alternative political structure through which campesinos could access national political power, the Velasco government created a vacuum that would later be filled by the Shining Path. I am using their research as a point of departure, but suggesting that church structures had created an alternative to hacendados in the preceding decades, and their disintegration during this crucial period also contributed to this vacuum. Cotler, Clases, estado y nación; Flores Galindo, Buscando un Inca. 6. Cited in Dolan, In Search of an American Catholicism, 72. 7. Garry Wills, Bare Ruined Choirs: Doubt, Prophecy, and Radical Religion (New York: Doubleday, 1972), 74. 8. Ibid., 85. 9. “Editorial: People Are the Way to Success,” Maryknoll (September 1963): 34 –35. 10. Wills, Bare Ruined Choirs, 95. 11. William J. Wilson, “The Poor Church,” Maryknoll (May 1968): 20. 12. Mary Early O’Keefe, “The Peruvian Polity and the Church: The Adaptive Role of Maryknoll, 1963–1973” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1976), attributes the changes within Maryknoll in Peru exclusively to a younger generation of clergy. But I believe that while the new clergy were instrumental, they could not have implemented changes without the structures established by preceding generations and without the support of the older clergy. 13. Inocente Salazar, “Me? A Missionary,” in Happy Potatoes, Papas felices (n.p., nd.). Special thanks to Salazar for providing me with this unpublished work. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 6. 16. “Father Martin Murphy, M.M., Regional Superior Interviews Father Salazar on ‘Aymara Rites,’ ” September 3, 1971, in Kearns, Maryknoll Fathers in Peru, vol. 4, 265. 17. Father Inocente Salazar, M.M., “The Missioner as Symbol-Maker,” October 20, 1971, in Kearns, Maryknoll Fathers in Peru, vol. 4, 274. 18. Ibid. 19. Father Joseph B. Arsenault, M.M., “Re-Evaluation Report of the Catechetical Program on the Altiplano of Peru, December 1967,” in Kearns, Maryknoll Fathers in Peru, vol. 4, 542. 20. Jay P. Dolan, R. Scott Appleby, Patricia Byrne, and Debra Campbell, Transforming Parish Ministry: The Changing Roles of Catholic Clergy, Laity, and Women Religious (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 8. 21. Ibid., 253–54. 22. In 1970 Maryknoll Bishop Fedders of Juli submitted a proposal to the pope requesting that he consider ordaining married men in Puno, with the hope

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Notes to Pages 159–169

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of promoting the best catechists to the status of priests. “The Question of Married Clergy: Juli, Peru (1969 –1972),” documents reproduced from Latinamerica Press (Lima, November 8, 1973). 23. John Schiff, M.M., “Catechetical Follow-up in the Parish,” paper presented at the Puno Rural Catechetical Conference: October 22 – 23, 1963. Kearns, Maryknoll Fathers in Peru, vol. 3, 215. 24. Kearns, Maryknoll Fathers in Peru, vol 4. Edward Cookson, M.M., interview by author, tape recording, Yunguyo, 10 February 1996. “It [the catechetical system] was a fascinating way to become present in the communities. But I didn’t feel that it was going anywhere because you could only say that many Our Fathers and then? You could only have that many sacraments. But to build a church as a people of God was a [different experience]. [The catechetical system] could only take you so far. It couldn’t go very much further.” Arsenault, “Re-Evaluation Report of the Catechetical Program on the Altiplano of Peru,” 538. 25. Kearns, Maryknoll Fathers in Peru, vol 4, 533. 26. Interview with Robert Hoffmann, M.M., by William D. McCarthy, M.M., Lima, Peru, February 12, 1996. Compliments of the Maryknoll Society History Project. 27. Phillip Erbland, M.M., interview by William D. McCarthy, tape recording, Lima, February 11, 1996; original emphasis. Compliments of the Maryknoll Society History Project. Original emphasis. 28. Obviously, in non-Catholic countries, where the goal was conversion, priests did not have to perform sacraments to fulfill their role. This difference was among those that distinguished mission in Catholic countries from that in non-Catholic countries. 29. Evaluation of Lampa Chica Given to Juli Deanery, December 1968. Provided to author by Aurelia Atencio, M.M. All material in this account is from this source. 30. James Madden, M.M., interview by author, Lima, May 23, 1998. 31. James Madden, M.M., interview by author, Lima, April 23, 1998. 32. Ibid. 33. Jaime Madden, Pilar Desmond, and Bárbara Cavenaugh, ¿Dónde esta tu pueblo? Experiencia pastoral en Juli (extractos) (Lima: Comisión Episcopal de Acción Social, 1983), 64. 34. Ibid., 65. 35. Ibid., 70. 36. Ibid. 37. James Madden, M.M., interview by author, tape recording, Lima, May 23, 1998. 38. Ibid. 39. Madden, Desmond, and Cavenaugh, ¿Dónde esta tu pueblo? 75, 97.

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Notes to Pages 169–193

40. Ibid., 98. 41. Ibid., 104. 42. Ibid., 114 –15. 43. Ibid., 119. 44. Michael Briggs, M.M., interview by author, Puno, December 2, 1996. 45. Michael J. Briggs, “A Missioner’s Search,” in “Theme — Vocation — A Call to Serve,” Maryknoll (October 1978): 12–15. 46. Raymond Finch, M.M., interview by author, Lima, February 29, 1996. 47. Raymond Finch, M.M., interview by William D. McCarthy, M.M., tape recording, February 28, 1996. Compliments of the Maryknoll Society History Project. 48. Ibid. 49. Michael Briggs, M.M., interview by author, Puno Center House, December 2, 1996. 50. Nathan Wachtel, Gods and Vampires: Return to Chipaya (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Mary J. Weismantel, Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the Andes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 51. Raymond Finch, M.M., interview by author, Lima, February 29, 1996. 52. In 2008 Maryknoll was asked by Juli’s conservative Opus Dei bishop, José María Ortega, to leave the diocese. See the epilogue. 53. Ibid. 54. Patricia Ryan, M.M., interview by author, Puno, February 17, 1996. 55. Aurelia Atencio, M.M., interview by author, Pilcuyo, Puno, August 19, 1996. All material in this account comes from this interview, which was not taped. Sister Atencio reviewed the transcription of the author’s notes and made comments. 56. María Zeballos, M.M., interview by author, Puno Maryknoll Center House, December 30, 2002. All material from this account is from the cited interview, which was not taped. 57. Patricia Ryan, M.M., interview by author, Puno, Peru, July 2, 1996. 58. Patricia Ryan, M.M., interview by author, Puno, Peru, February 17, 1996. 59. In 1964 an Instituto de Educación Rural (IER) was also founded in Cajamarca at the invitation of the progressive bishop José Dammert Bellido. This IER also came into conflict with the Velasco government when it tried to reorganize communities through SINAMOS and met with resistance from community leaders educated at IER. Klaiber, La iglesia en el Péru, 373–74. 60. Patricia Ryan, M.M., interview by author, Puno, Peru, February 2, 1996. 61. Informal conversation with one of the older Maryknoll priests, Huancané, Puno, Peru, January 26, 1996. 62. Gerard McCrane, M.M., interview by author, Ilave, Puno, Peru, February 6, 1996.

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63. American Catholic Mission Secretariat, Washington, DC, 1968 and 1979 respectively, MMA. 64. Klaiber, La iglesia en el Perú, 458– 62; Franz Riedel, coord., Una iglesia en marcha con el pueblo: Prelatura de Sicuani: 40 años, 1959–1999 (Lima: Centro de Estudios y Publicaciones, 1999), 138– 49. 65. Jaime Ponce G. and Daniel Roach, Los Maryknoll en el Perú: Estudio de opiniones y actitudes (Lima: IBEAS, 1968). 66. Ibid., 6. 67. Héctor Maletta, “Perú, ¿Pais campesino? Aspectos cuantitativos de su mundo rural,” Análisis, no. 6 (1978): 2– 49. 68. Misha Kokoktovic, The Colonial Divide in Peruvian Narrative: Social Conflict and Transculturation (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005), 9–31. 69. Degregori, “El estudio del otro.” 70. Matos Mar, Desborde popular y crisis de estado; Carlos Franco, La otra modernidad: Imágines de la sociedad peruana (Lima: CEDEP, 1991); Degregori, Blondet, and Lynch, Conquistadores de un nuevo mundo; Aníbal Quijano, Dominación y cultura: Lo cholo y el conflicto cultural en el Perú (Lima: Mosca Azul Editores, 1980). 71. Macaulay, “Ideological Change and Internal Cleavages in the Peruvian Church,” 113. 72. Raúl Nechochea López, “Priests and Pills: Catholic Family Planning in Peru, 1967–1976,” Latin American Research Review 43, no. 2 (2008): 34 –56. 73. Rosemary McCormack, M.M., informal conversation with author, Maryknoll Center House, Maryknoll, NY, July 8, 1997. 74. Laura Vargas Valcárcel, director, Comisión Episcopal de Acción Social (CEAS), interview by author, Lima, Peru, January 7, 2003. 75. Klaiber, La iglesia en el Perú, 421–22. 76. Ibid., 497–500. 77. CVR, “La iglesia católica y las iglesias evangélicos,”in Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación: Informe final (Lima: CVR, 2003), 6. Cited hereafter as CVR. Chapter 5. Reform, Violence, and “Reconciliation,” 1976– 1989 1. Jara, “El Sur Andino,” 397– 632, 438–39, 484 – 85. This chapter relies almost entirely on this essay and Pilar Coll, “Coordinación de Pastoral de Dignidad Humana,” 37–77, in the same volume. It could not have been written without the research presented by these authors and the editor. 2. Andrés Gallego, ed., La señal de cada momento: Documentos de los obispos del Sur Andino, 1969–1994 (Cuzco: Instituto de Pastoral Andina, 1994). 3. These observations derive from casual conversations with a range of pastoral agents affiliated with the Sur Andino and the progressive Catholic Church in Lima.

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Notes to Pages 206–207

4. “Final Report of Peru’s Truth Commission Declares 69,000 Dead, Calls for Justice,” www.wola.org/andes/Peru/truthcomm_release_0829_eng.htm. The Peruvian Truth Commission Report actually conflated the period of violence characterized by the conflict between the Shining Path guerrilla movement and state-supported armed and civilian forces from 1980 to 1996 with the political repression during the authoritarian regime of Alberto Fujimori, who won a democratic election in 1990 but then assumed authoritarian control in 1992 by disbanding the Congress. The report also affirmed that the church was “caught between two fires” and suffered attacks on and assassinations of clergy by both PCP-SL and the government. “La iglesia católica y las iglesias evangélicas,” in Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, 385– 490, 385–96. 5. P. Bernardo Majournal, Cuzco, May 2005, cited in Jara, “El Sur Andino,” 444. 6. Carlos Iván Degregori, “The Origins and Logic of Shining Path: Two Views,” in Shining Path of Peru, 2nd ed., ed. David Scott Palmer (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 51–62. 7. Interviews with pastoral agents from Ayacucho and the Sur Andino suggested that Shining Path consistently sought to infiltrate Catholic parish networks, which led ultimately to the elimination of many pastoral programs. 8. The Peruvian Commission on Truth and Reconciliation concluded that PCP-SL identified the church as an enemy because (a) PCP-SL viewed religion as the opiate of the masses; (b) it considered the church “an enemy institution” and part of the “old state”; and (c) it opposed all ameliorative social programs like those introduced by the liberation theology– inspired church. PCP-SL also recognized that the church’s popularity made direct attacks on it difficult, so it identified annihilation as the final state in the conflict. CVR, 386–90. 9. CVR, 391–96. 10. Ibid. The correlation with liberation theology meant that Catholic support for human rights was specific to progressive dioceses. CVR details the distinct responses of each diocese and archdiocese (421–60). 11. Laura Vargas Valcárcel, director, CEAS, interview by author, January 7, 2003, CEAS, Lima, Peru. 12. Klaiber, La iglesia en el Perú, 284 –86. 13. Stern, Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest, 53–66; Jan Szeminski, “Why Kill the Spaniard? New Perspectives on Andean Insurrectionary Ideology in the 18th Century,” in Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries, ed. Steve Stern (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 166–92; Leon G. Campbell, “Ideology and Factionalism during the Great Rebellion, 1780 –1782,” in Stern, Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness, 110 – 42; Mons. Severo Aparicio, O. de M., “La actitud del clero frente a la rebelion de túpac amaru,” in Actas del Coloquio Internacional:

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Notes to Pages 210 –217

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“Tupac Amaru y su tiempo” (Lima: Comisión del Bicentenario de la Rebelión Emancipadora de Túpac Amaru,1980). 14. Proceedings of the Lima Methods Conference of the Maryknoll Fathers: Maryknoll House, Lima, Peru, August 23– 28, 1954 (Maryknoll, NY: Maryknoll Fathers, n.d.), 156. 15. Raymond Finch, M.M., interview by William D. McCarthy, M.M., February 28, 1996, Lima. Provided to author by William D. McCarthy, M.M. 16. Jara, “El Sur Andino,” 412. 17. Ibid., 408. 18. Curt Cadorette, M.M., interview by author, Lima, Peru, June 29, 1998. 19. Steve Judd, M.M., interview by author, Puno, Peru, March 12, 1998. 20. Klaiber, La iglesia en el Perú, 363. 21. Raymond Finch, M.M., interview by William D. McCarthy, M.M., February 28, 1996. 22. Steve Judd, M.M., interview by author, Puno, Peru, March 12, 1998. 23. Inés Callalli Villafuerte, interview by author, South Bend, IN, November 25, 2005. Callalli subsequently served as a visiting assistant professional specialist teaching Quechua at the University of Notre Dame. 24. Apuntes para una historia de CEAS: 23 años en la construcción de la Pastoral Social ( July 1988 [CEAS], stamped, unofficial document), 7. 25. Ibid., 41. 26. Thomas Burns, M.M., informal conversation with author, Lima, Peru, December 18, 2002. 27. Thomas Burns, M.M., informal conversation with author, Lima, Peru, December 18, 2002. 28. McClintock and Lowenthal, The Peruvian Experiment Reconsidered. 29. Nelson Manrique, El tiempo del miedo: La violencia política en el Perú, 1980 –1996 (Lima: Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Perú, 2002), 14 –16. Manrique observes that these strikes and the power of well-organized leftist labor and popular groups forced the military to abandon power and return to democracy in 1980. But in Manrique’s words they “paid a very high price for this triumph.” In subsequent years some five thousand of the best labor leaders in the country were disappeared, leaving a further vacuum of social authority and power that made it impossible to respond to Shining Path or government repression. 30. Thomas Burns, M.M., informal conversation with author, Lima, Peru, December 18, 2002. 31. Pilar Coll, “Coordinación de Pastoral de Dignidad Humana,” in Tovar, Ser iglesia en tiempos de violencia, 41; Coletta A. Youngers and Susan C. Peacock, Peru’s Coordinadora Nacional de Derechos Humanos (Washington, DC: WOLA, 2002). 32. Apuntes para historia de CEAS, 51.

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282

Notes to Pages 217–229

33. Coll, “Coordinación de Pastoral de Dignidad Humana,” 60. 34. Jara, “El Sur Andino,” 428. 35. Apuntes para historia de CEAS, 73. 36. Manrique, El tiempo del miedo. 37. Degregori, “The Origins and Logic of the Shining Path,” 51–52. 38. Shining Path was the only leftist guerrilla organization in Latin America that turned overwhelmingly against the indigenous people in whose name it claimed to be fighting. Central to leader Abimael Guzman’s ideology was the idea that a “quota of blood” was essential for the victory of the revolution. See Gustavo Ellenbogen Gorriti, “The Quota,” in Orrin Starn, Carlos Iván Degregori, and Robin Kirk, eds., The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 316–27. 39. Cited in Carlos Iván Degregori, “Harvesting Storms: Peasant Rondas and the Defeat of Sendero Luminoso in Ayacucho,” in Stern, Shining and Other Paths, 143. 40. CVR, “El Partido Comunista del Perú Sendero Luminoso,” in Informe final (Lima: CVR, 2003), 15–27, 17. 41. José E. Gonzales, “Guerrillas and Coca in the Upper Huallaga Valle,” in Palmer, Shining Path in Peru, 123– 43. 42. Jara, “El Sur Andino,” 413. 43. CVR, “La iglesia católica,” 423. 44. Degregori, “The Origins and Logic of the Shining Path” and “Harvesting Storms.” 45. Interview with Frank McGourn, n.d., Maryknoll Society History Project. 46. Curt Cadorette, interview by author, Lima, Peru, June 29, 1998. 47. Jara, “El Sur Andino,” 436. 48. Ibid., 435. 49. Ibid., 485. 50. Ibid., 445. 51. Ibid., 425–26. 52. Ibid., 452. 53. Ibid., 450 –57. 54. Ibid., 447. 55. Ibid., 496. 56. CVR, “La iglesia católica,” 421, 430 –34. 57. Coll, “Coordinación de Pastoral de Dignidad Humana,” 63. 58. Carlos Iván Degregori et. al., Las rondas campesinas y la derrota de Sendero Luminoso, 2nd ed. (Lima: Impresa en el Perú, 1996). 59. Greg Grandin, “The Instruction of Great Catastrophe: Truth Commissions, National History, and State Formation in Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala,” American Historical Review 110, no. 1 (February 2005): 46–67.

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Notes to Pages 232–238

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Epilogue 1. Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street, 62. The admonition was made in response to conflicts within the United States among European Catholics who felt they were being subsumed by the dominant Irish model of Catholicism, the model that dominated Maryknoll practices. 2. Jean Franco, “Killing Priests, Nuns, Women, and Children,” in Critical Passions: Selected Essays, ed. Mary Louise Pratt and Kathleen Newman (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 9–17. 3. The church women were killed on December 4, 1980. Lernoux, Hearts on Fire, 242. 4. Mark Danner, “The Truth of El Mozote,” New Yorker, December 6, 1993, 50 –134. 5. Maryknoll Magazine 1993 Readership Study, 22. Provided by Father Steve DeMott. 6. Ibid., 52. 7. Ibid., 54; original emphasis. 8. Ibid., 63. 9. Ibid., 60. 10. Ibid., 52. 11. “Sacerdotes del Sur Andino denuncian abusos de obispos del Sodalicio y Opus Dei,” Caretas ( January 2007), www.cajamarca.de/aktuell/caretas-surandino .pdf. 12. Hildegard Willer, “Pecados cardenales: La iglesia del Sur Andino en peligro,” ideele, no. 180 (March 2007): 79.

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Flores Galindo, Alberto. Buscando un Inca: Identidad y utopia en los Andes. 4th ed. Lima: Editorial Horizonte, 1994. Flynn, George Q. American Catholics and the Roosevelt Presidency, 1932–1936. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1968. ———. Roosevelt and Romanism: Catholics and American Diplomacy, 1937–1945. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976. Franco, Carlos. La otra modernidad: Imágines de la sociedad peruana. Lima: CEDEP, 1991. Franco, Jean. “Killing Priests, Nuns, Women, and Children.” In Critical Passions, ed. Mary Louise Pratt and Kathleen Newman, 9–17. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Friedman, Benjamin M. The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. New York: Knopf, 2005. Frye Jacobsen, Matthew. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Gallego, Andrés, ed. La señal de cada momento: Documentos de los Obispos del Sur Andino, 1969–1994. Cuzco: Instituto de Pastoral Andina, 1994. Garcia Calderon, Eduardo. Constituciones, codigos y leyes del Perú. Lima: Libreria e Imprenta Gil, 1935. García Jordán, Pilar. Iglesia y poder en el Péru contemporáneo, 1821–1919. Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos “Bartolomé de Las Casas,” 1993. Garneau, James F. “The First Inter-American Episcopal Conference, November 2 – 4, 1959: Canada and the United States Called to the Rescue of Latin America.” Canadian Catholic Historical Review 4 (October 2001): 662–87. Gleijeses, Pierro. Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Gonzales, José E. “Guerrillas and Coca in the Upper Huallaga Valley.” In The Shining Path in Peru, ed. David Scott Palmer, 123– 43. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Gordon, Mary. “Father Chuck: A Reading of Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary’s, or Why Priests Made Us Crazy.” In Catholic Lives, Contemporary America, ed. Thomas J. Ferraro, 65 –75. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Gorritti, Gustavo Ellenbogen. “The Quota.” In The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics, ed. Orrin Starn, Carlos Ivan Degregori, and Robin Kirk, 316 – 27. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. ———. Sendero: Historia de la guerra milenaria en el Perú. Lima: Editorial Apoyo, 1990. Goudreault, Henri, O.M.I. “Les missionnaires canadiens à l’étranger au XXe siècle.” CCHA Study Sessions 1, no. 50 (1983): 361–80. Grandin, Greg. Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006.

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Jameson, Fredric. “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue.” In The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Myoshi, 54 – 80. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Jara, Lupe. “El Sur Andino, una iglesia que responde a los signos de lostiempos.” In Ser iglesia en tiempos de violencia, ed. Cecilia Tovar, 397–632. Lima: Instituto Bartolomé de Las Casas, 2006. Jonas, Susan. The Battle for Guatemala: Rebels, Death Squads, and U.S. Power. Boulder: Westview Press, 1991. Jordan Rodriguez, Jesús. Pueblos y parroquias de el Perú. Vol. 2. Lima: Sociedad Geográfica, 1950. Judd, Stephen P., M.M. “The Emergent Andean Church: Inculturation and Liberation in Southern Peru, 1968–1986.” Ph.D. dissertation, Graduate Theological Union, 1987. Kaplan, Steven J., ed. Indigenous Responses to Western Christianity. New York: New York University Press, 1995. Kapsoli, Wilfred. Los movimientos campesinos en el Perú: 1879–1965. Lima: Ediciones Atusparia, 1977. Kearns, Robert, M.M. Maryknoll Fathers in Peru: 1943–1953. Vol. 1. Maryknoll, NY: privately printed, n.d. ———. Maryknoll Fathers in Peru: 1954–1959. Vol. 2. Maryknoll, NY: privately printed, n.d. ———. Maryknoll Fathers in Peru: 1960 – 1964. Vol. 3. Maryknoll, NY: privately printed, n.d. ———. Maryknoll Fathers in Peru: 1965–1977. Vol. 4. Maryknoll, NY: privately printed, n.d. Kelly, Henry W. “Latin America Needs Better North Americans.” America (March 14, 1932): 628–29. Kenneally, James K. The History of American Catholic Women. New York: Crossroad, 1990. Klaiber, Jeffrey, S.J. “The Battle over Private Education in Peru, 1968–1980: An Aspect of the Internal Struggle in the Catholic Church.” Americas 43, no. 2 (October 1986): 137–58. ———. La iglesia en el Perú: Su historia social desde la independencia. 3rd ed. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru, Fondo Editorial, 1996. ———. “Prophets and Populists: Liberation Theology, 1968–1988.” Americas 46, no. 1 ( July 1989): 1–15. Klarén, Peter F., and Thomas J. Bossert, eds. Promise of Development: Theories of Change in Latin America. Boulder: Westview Press, 1986. Lancaster, Roger N. Thanks to God and the Revolution: Popular Religion and Class Consciousness in the New Nicaragua. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.

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Lane, Raymond A., M.M., D.D. The Early Days of Maryknoll. New York: David McKay, 1951. Larrain, Jorge. Theories of Development: Capitalism, Colonialism, and Dependency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971. LeGrand, Catherine. “L’Axe missionnaire catholique entre le Québec et l’Amérique latine: Une exploration préliminaire.” Globe: Revue Internationale d’Etudes Québécoises 12, no. 1 (2009): 43–66. Lernoux, Penny. Hearts on Fire: The Story of the Maryknoll Sisters. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993. Levine, Daniel H. Popular Voices in Latin American Catholicism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. ———. Religion and Politics in Latin America: The Catholic Church in Venezuela and Colombia. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. ———, ed. Religion and Political Conflict in Latin America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Levinson, Jerome, and Juan de Onís. The Alliance That Lost Its Way: A Critical Report on the Alliance for Progress. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970. Levy, Daniel C. Building the Third Sector: Latin America’s Private Research Centers and Nonprofit Development. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999. Lewin, Boleslao. La rebelión de Túpac Amaru y los orígenes de la independencia de Hispanoamérica. 3rd ed. enl. Buenos Aires: Sociedad Editora Latino Americana, 1967. Lipsitz, George. Class and Culture in the Cold War: Rainbow at Midnight. New York: Praeger, 1981. ———. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. Llanque, Domingo. “‘Sacerdotes’ y ‘médicos’ en la sociedad Aymara.” In Medicina Aymara. La Paz: Hisbol, 1994. Loayza, Francisco A. Estado del Perú: Códice escrito en 1780 y que contiene datos importantes sobre la revolución de José Túpac Amaru. Lima: D. Miranda, 1944. Love, Joseph. “The Origins of Dependency Analysis.” Latin American Studies 2 (1990): 143–68. Lowenthal, Abraham F. “Peru’s Ambiguous Revolution.” In The Peruvian Experiment: Continuity and Change under Military Rule, ed. Abraham F. Lowenthal, 7–11. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. Macaulay, Michael Gregory. “Ideological Change and Internal Cleavages in the Peruvian Church: Change, Status Quo, and the Priest. The Case of ONIS.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 1972. Macias, César. Mi camino: La guerrilla. Mexico City: Editorial Planeta Mexicana, 1998.

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Ricard, Richard. The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An Essay on the Apostolate and the Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain, 1523–1572. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. Riedel, Franz, coord. Una iglesia en marcha con el pueblo: Prelatura de Sicuani: 40 años, 1959–1999. Lima: Centro de Estudios y Publicaciones, 1999. Roca S., P. Erasmo. Por la clase indígena. Ed. Pedro Barrantes Castro. Lima: Compañia de Impresiones y Publicidad, 1935. Rockefeller, Nelson A. The Rockefeller Report on the Americas: The Official Report of a United States Presidential Mission for the Western Hemisphere. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969. Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Rev. ed. New York: Verso, 1999. ———. Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White. The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs. New York: Basic Books, 2006. Romero, Catalina Iguiniez. “Church, State, and Society in Contemporary Peru, 1958–1988: A Process of Liberation.” Ph.D. dissertation, New School for Social Research, 1989. ———. Iglesia en el Perú: Compromiso y renovación (1958–1984). Lima: Instituto de Bartolomé de Las Casas, 1987. Romero, Emilio. Perú: Una nueva geografía. Lima: Librerium Stadium, 1999. ———. Monografía del departamento de Puno. Lima: Torres Aguire, 1928. Rostow, W. W. Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960. Ryan, John A. Social Reconstruction: A General Review of the Problems and Survey of Remedies. Washington, DC: Committee on Special War Activities, National Catholic War Council, 1919. Salomon, Frank. “Ancestor Cults and Resistance to the State in Arequipa, ca. 1748–1754.” In Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries, ed. Steve J. Stern, 148–65. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. Scheman, L. Ronald, ed. The Alliance for Progress: A Retrospective. New York: Praeger, 1988. ———. “The Alliance for Progress: Concept and Creativity.” In The Alliance for Progress: A Retrospective, ed. L. Ronald Scheman, 3–62. New York: Praeger, 1988. Schlesinger, Stephen, and Stephen Kinzer. Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. New York: Doubleday, 1982. Secretariado del Episcopade Peruano. Anuario eclesiástico del Perú. Lima: Secretariado del Episcopado Peruano, 1947. ———. Directorio eclesiástico del Perú. Lima: Secretariado del Episcopado Peruano, 1987.

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Seligman, Linda J. “To Be in Between: The Cholas as Market Women.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31 (1989): 694 –721. Severo Aparicio, O. de M., Msgr. “La actitud del clero frente a la rebelión de Túpac Amaru.” In Comisión Nacional del Bicentenario de la Rebelión Emancipador de Túpac Amaru, Colección documental del bicentenario de la Revolución emancipadora de Túpac Amaru, vol. 2. Lima, 1980. Silverblatt, Irene. Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. Slayton, Robert A. Back of the Yards: The Making of a Local Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Sleeper-Smith, Susan. Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. Smith, Christian. Resisting Reagan: The U.S. Central America Peace Movement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Stahl, F. A. En el país de los Incas. Buenos Aires: Casa Editora, n.d. Stein, Stanley J., and Barbara H. Stein. The Colonial Heritage of Latin America: Essays on Economic Dependence in Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970. Stern, Steve J. Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640. 2nd ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993. ———, ed. Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980 –1995. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Steward, Julian, ed. The Handbook of South American Indians. 1944. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Stoll, David. Is Latin America Turning Protestant? Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Suenens, León Joseph. The Nun in the World: Religious and the Apostolate. Westminster: Newman Press, 1963. Szeminski, Jan. “Why Kill the Spaniard? New Perspectives on Andean Insurrectionary Ideology in the 18th Century.” In Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries, ed. Steve J. Stern, 166–92. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. Taurel, R. M. Colección de obras selectas contemporaneas del Perú. Vol. 2. Paris: Libreria Mézon, 1853. Taylor, William B. “Between Global Process and Local Knowledge: An Inquiry into Early Latin American Social History, 1500 –1900.” In Reliving the Past: The Worlds of Social History, ed. Oliver Zunz, 115–89. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Tentler, Leslie Woodcock. “On the Margins: The State of American Catholic History.” American Quarterly 45, no. 1 (March 1993): 104 –27.

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Whitfield, Theresa. Paying the Price: Ignacio Ellacuría and the Murdered Jesuits of El Salvador. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994. Wiest, Jean-Paul. Maryknoll in China: A History, 1918–1955. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997. Wightman, Anne M. Indigenous Migration and Social Change: The Forasteros of Cuzco, 1570 –1720. Durham: Duke University Press, 1990. Williams, William Appleman. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1959. Wills, Garry. Bare Ruined Choirs: Doubt, Prophecy, and Radical Religion. New York: Doubleday, 1972. Youngers, Coletta A., and Susan C. Peacock. Peru’s Coordinadora Nacional de Derechos Humanos. Washington, DC: WOLA, 2002.

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INDEX

Act of Bogotá, 12, 126–27, 150 Aguilar, Luis Felipé, 51 alcoholism, 115, 130 Alliance for Progress, 126, 127, 140, 150 and John Kennedy, 12, 40, 44, 86, 107, 151, 233 Allie, Fr. Arthur, 92 Álvarez Calderón, Fr. Carlos, 13, 138, 140, 165, 196 Álvarez Calderón, Fr. Jorge, 13, 138, 140, 165, 196 Ambrosio Huerta, Bishop Juan, 56 Ampuero, Bishop Valentín, 52, 64 Anne Marion, Sr. See Frei, Sr. Pauline Aráoz, Maria Rosario, 135, 138 Arbenz, Jacobo, 2, 11–12 Archdiocese of New York, 25 Argentina, 145 Arrigoni, Archbishop Luigi, 74 Arsenault, Fr. Joseph B., 105, 113 Arsenault, Fr. Rene, 156–57, 159 Artola, Armando, 200, 201 Asociación Pro-Indigena (API), 50 –51 Atencio, Sr. Aurelia, 179–83, 186, 278n55 as agronomist, 180 –81, 182–83 early life, 179 potato project, 182–83

Augustine, St., 24 Auxiliary Brothers of St. Michael, 21–22 Balaúnde Terry, Fernando, 145 Bambarén, Bishop Luis, 13, 141, 201, 215, 216 as bishop of the barriadas, 200, 212, 214 barriadas, 13, 141, 146, 147, 206, 208, 260n8, 266n3, 266n14 Ciudad de Dios, 82, 135, 136, 139, 165, 196, 197–200, 216 in Lima, 3– 4, 9, 76, 82, 126, 135, 136, 139, 149, 165, 186, 187, 195–201, 202, 216, 221 Pamplona Alta, 198–200, 215 Velasco government policies regarding, 3– 4, 195, 198, 200, 249n35 See also poverty Barry, Monsignor William, 39 Batista, Fulgencio, 12 Bauer, Fr. Thomas J., 253n4 Belaúnde Terry, Fernando, 3 Belgium, 86 Benedict XVI, 239 Bergan, Fr. William, 273n125 Billinghurst, Guillermo, 52, 54 Boff, Leonardo, 244n1

300

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Index Bolivia, 64 – 65, 73, 131, 145, 218, 226 Cochabamba, 14, 252n54 vs. Peru, 14, 183, 248n25, 252n53, 266n9 Bourgeois, Roy, 1 Bowles, Charles, 111 Bradley, Fr. John J., 90 Brazil, 40, 84, 90 –91, 145, 248n25, 266n9 Briggs, Fr. Michael, 172–77, 181, 182, 222 Brophy, Fr. Edward P., 95 Brown, Fr. Charles, 90 Burns, Fr. Tom, 215, 216 Bustamante, Juan, 260n12 Cadorette, Fr. Curt, 211, 222–24 Calderón Barrueto, Bishop Jesús Mateo, 194, 209, 212, 252n50 Callalli Villafuerte, Inés, 213, 281n23 Callo Mamani, José, 182 Cama, Lyma, 99 Cameron, Fr. Jean, 101 Campo Abierto (Open Horizons), 137 campo teams, 154, 161, 166–77, 178, 181, 183, 192, 208 Canada Antigonish movement, 36, 91–92 Catholic Church in, 86, 88, 141 Nova Scotia, 36, 91–92 Capelo, Joaquin, 50 capitalism, 34, 44, 45, 122, 195, 215, 233 Cappel, Fr. Charlie, 117 Carboni, Archbishop Romulo, 13, 248n26 Cardenal, Ernesto, 244n1 Cardign, Fr. Joseph, 186 CARE, 137 Carey, Fr. Thomas, 8, 65, 70, 71, 96

301

Cáritas, 10, 110, 134, 138, 153, 191, 207, 270n85, 270n88 Carmelites, 107, 252n50 Casanova, José: on Catholicism and the Enlightenment, 256n38 Casey, John Joseph, 27–28 Castro, Fidel, 12 Castro Pozo, Hildebrando, 52 catechism, 87, 123, 125, 130, 136, 141 catechetical programs in Lima, 196, 216–17 catechetical system in Puno, 77, 79, 94 –107, 108, 110 –14, 115, 132, 135, 148, 149, 153, 158, 159–60, 161, 166–67, 182, 190, 191, 196, 202, 277n24 catechists, 16, 42, 70, 77, 79, 90, 96, 97–103, 105, 107, 109, 110, 111–13, 132, 139, 149, 156, 157, 159–60, 161–62, 166–67, 192, 202, 269n60, 276n22 Maryknollers’ attitudes regarding, 5, 8, 77, 90 –91, 94, 96, 98, 99, 102, 103, 107, 108, 111–12, 153, 161 Catholic Action, 89, 141, 253n6 Catholic Inter-American Cooperation Program (CICOP), 42 Cavanaugh, Sr. Barbara, 166, 168, 184 –85 CELAM. See Conference of Latin American Bishops celibacy, 158 Center for Advanced Military Studies (CAEM), 146 Center for Intercultural Formation (CIF)/Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC), 250n40 Cento, Archbishop Fernando, 248n26, 249n29 Centro Artesanal José Mauri, 211 Centro de Capacitación Agro Industrial Jesús Obrero (CCAIJO), 211

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Centro de Estudios Rurales Andinos Bartolomé de las Casas, 14, 210, 213 Centro de Estudios y Publicaciones (CEP), 146 Centro de Formación Campesina (CFC), 211, 225 Centro de Promoción y Capacitación Campesina, 211 Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC), 149 charity, 21, 60, 77, 88, 161 Chatfield, Sr. Joan, 254n13 Chavez, Dennis, 38 Chenu, Marie-Dominique, 41, 249n39 Chile, 14, 92, 93, 145, 178 cooperatives in, 123 unionization in, 89–90 China, 8, 27, 96, 159 Christiansen, Fr. Jim, 182 Chuqiwanca Ayulo, Francisco, 51 Cleary, Fr. Donald, 62, 63–64, 66, 67, 70 Cohen, Lizabeth, 33 Coleman, Fr. William J., 88, 89 Coll, Pilar: “Coordinación de Pastoral de Dignidad Humana,” 279n1 Collier, Dave, 266n3 Colombia, 91, 111 Comblin, Joseph, 244n1 Committee for Defense of Human Rights in Puno (CODDEHPuno), 226–27 common good, 146 vs. profit, 39, 45 communion, 31, 67, 70, 156–57, 159, 164, 238 communism, 107, 109, 122, 234 as threat, 5, 12, 19, 84, 89, 106 See also Shining Path community-based faith, 21, 103

Index Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM), 41, 140, 143, 210 Medellín conference of 1968, 2–3, 18, 21, 42, 93, 113, 145, 146, 147, 152, 201, 207, 244n1, 250n40 Puebla conference of 1979, 207, 212, 214 Congar, Yves, 41, 249n39 Connors, Fr. Francis J., 27 Considine, Fr. John, 5, 139 and call for ten percent, 12, 13, 39– 40 and Lima Mission Methods Conference, 18, 86, 87, 90, 92, 93 as NCWC-LAB director, 12, 126, 140, 149–50, 248n26, 251n45 on parochial schools in Latin America, 265n102 Cookson, Fr. Edward, 277n24 cooperatives, 77, 87, 89, 91–93, 121–29, 130, 141 credit cooperatives 10, 12, 83, 85, 91–92, 93, 114, 121–25, 127, 140, 153, 273n125 housing cooperatives, 10, 12, 83, 85, 121–22, 125–26, 127, 140, 153 Maryknollers’ attitudes regarding, 36, 92–93, 94, 114, 121–22, 149, 153, 201 Coordination of the Pastoral of Human Dignity (CPDH), 217 Coordination of the Pastoral of Human Rights (CPDH), 214 Cotler, Julio, 84, 105, 125, 276n5 Credit Union National Association (CUNA), 92, 125 Cuban Revolution, 12, 40 Cueva B., Hanny, 266n11 Cursillos de Cristiandad, 146

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Index Cushing, Richard Cardinal, 33, 119 Cuzco, 58, 211, 218, 220, 221 catechetical system in, 107, 120 Catholic Church in, 14, 107, 141, 194, 205, 209, 213, 227–28 Centro de Estudios Rurales Andinos Bartolomé de las Casas, 14, 210, 213 intellectuals in, 51 Shining Path in, 224 –25 Dalle Perier, Bishop Luis, 194, 205, 209, 212, 252n50 d’Alteroche, Bishop Francisco, 226, 252n50 Dammert Bellido, Bishop José, 141, 212, 278n59 Deber Pro-Indigena, El, 51 De Guchteneere, Fr. Pedro, 146 de la Cruz, Sr. María, 130 –31 Denning, Michael, 33 dependency theory, 11, 40 d’Escoto, Fr. Miguel, 1, 244n1 Desmond, Sr. Pilar, 166 Dettman, Bishop Alberto, 94, 106 Diaz de León, Sr. Guadalupe, 162–64 Dolan, Jay, 253n3, 256n35 Dominican Republic, 92 ¿Dónde está tu pueblo?, 167–68 Donnelly, Fr. Joseph B., 71, 96, 265n90 Dries, Angelyn, O. S. F., 244n1, 248n25 Durand Flórez, Archbishop Ricardo, 209, 252n50 Dussel, Enrique, 244n1 Early, Fr. Joseph, 73 Easter, 60 –61, 67, 100, 224 Ecuador, 14 Eisenhower, Dwight D.: and Act of Bogotá, 12, 126

303

Ellis, John Tracy, 257n56 El Salvador El Mozote massacre, 234 Maryknoll sisters murdered in, 1, 234, 283n3 Encinas, José Antonio, 53, 55 Episcopal Commission of Social Action (CEAS), 198, 207, 214, 215, 217, 225, 228 Erbland, Fr. Phillip, 160, 270n88 Escalante, José Angél, 51 Eucharist. See communion European Catholic Church, 86, 141 family life, Christian, 36, 89 Fedders, Fr. Edward L., 82, 88, 100, 154, 209, 276n22 and Iglesia del Sur Andino, 13–14, 210, 252n50 Federación Departamental de Campesinos del Cuzco, 225 Fernández Maldonado, Jorge, 145, 146 Field Afar/Maryknoll, 17, 24, 109, 119, 172, 235–36 circulation, 244n1 influence of, 23, 26, 186, 255n22 on Latin America, 20, 39, 122–23 Maryknoll advertisements in, 26–27, 28–29, 186 on United States, 20, 22, 37–38, 39, 151–52 Walsh as publisher of, 22–23 fiesta celebrations, 91, 100 Easter, 60 –61, 67, 100, 224 Maryknollers’ attitudes regarding, 61–63, 77–78, 103, 113, 175, 191 masses at, 67, 71, 75, 96, 101, 102, 113, 169–70, 175, 223–24 Finch, Fr. Raymond, 160, 172–77, 181, 210, 212, 222 Fisher, James Terence, 255n33

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Flores Galindo, Alberto, 276n5 Food for Peace program, 9–10, 86, 108–9, 111, 136–37, 150 Foody, Fr. Stephen P., 96 France, 86 Franco, Francisco, 211 Franco Hinojosa, Alejandro, 53 Frank, Fr. Richard, 105, 112 Frei, Sr. Pauline, 100, 114, 118, 130 –31, 133 Friedman, Benjamin M., 257n63 Frisancho, José, 51 Fritsch, Fr. Francisco, 238 Fujimori, Alberto, 228, 280n4 Galvin, Mary Bernadine. See Rose Timothy (Mary Bernadine Galvin), Sr. gamonales, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55 García, Alan, 175–76, 227, 228 Garvey, Fr. Francis, 8, 59–60, 71 Gibbons, James Cardinal, 232 Girnius, Fr. Charles, 110, 270n88 globalization of Catholic Church, 6, 10, 13, 22, 150, 207 González Ruiz, Bishop Julio, 106, 131, 141, 205, 209 Grandin, Greg, 228–29 Granja Escuela Pumamarka de Yucay, 211 Great Depression, 20 –21, 33–34, 36, 42– 43, 54 Gress, Lucien Metzinger, 100 Guatemala Arbenz government, 2, 11–12 Catholic Church in, 2, 3, 4 Colegio Monte Maria, 2 Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes (FAR), 2, 3 indigenous population, 123 Maryknoll sisters in, 2, 3, 183 Maya catechists in, 90 Maya cooperatives in, 123

Index vs. Peru, 4, 14, 93–94, 123, 183 relations with United States, 2 Totonicapán, 90 Gutiérrez, Gustavo, 13, 140, 196, 212–13, 244n1 on explosion of the poor, 135, 141 A Theology of Liberation, 3, 14, 148, 152, 165, 179, 214, 245n5 Gutiérrez Cuevas, Teodomiro, 51, 52, 54 Guzmán, Abimael, 219, 228, 282n38 hacendados in Puno, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 61, 71, 79, 83, 105, 222–24, 260n9 relations with Catholic Church, 50, 55 relations with indigenous people, 50, 51, 52, 53–54, 55, 79, 83–84, 85, 105–6, 148, 220, 221, 223–24, 260n9 relations with Maryknollers, 71, 105–6, 147, 154 and Velasco’s agrarian reform, 195, 215, 220, 221, 276n5 Hayes, Fr. Nevin William, 209, 252n50 Haymarket Square riot, 33, 165 Healer, The, 158 Helder Camara, Dom, 244n1 Hennesey, James, S.J., 253n3 Hennessey, Sr. Patricia, 133 Herrera, Bishop Salvador: relations with Maryknollers, 47, 57, 58–59, 60 –61, 64, 65, 72, 74, 75, 95, 116, 154 Hesburgh, Fr. Theodore: on the Peace Corps, 40 Higgins, Fr. Thomas, 77–78, 108, 155 Higgins, Monsignor George, 244n1 Hoffman, Fr. Robert, 113, 160 Hofstadter, Richard, 30 –31

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Index Hohlfeld, Fr. Raymond C., 262n48 human rights, 18, 206–8, 214 –18, 225–26, 227–28, 234 –35, 280n10 Iglesia del Sur Andino, 194, 205–6, 209, 210, 213–14, 227–28, 239 and Fedders, 13–14, 210, 252n50 and Koenigsknecht, 13–14, 194, 212, 215, 252n50 Recogiendo el clamor, 218 Illich, Ivan, 138, 149, 250n40 Imfeld, Al, 244n1 indigenous people Aymara language, 8, 9, 14, 47, 52, 63, 77, 78, 81, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 111, 119, 120, 123, 155–56, 158, 160, 166, 169, 172–73, 174, 184, 192, 193–94, 211, 219, 221–23, 238, 252nn53–54 indigenous identity, 4, 8, 9, 14 –15, 17 Maryknollers’ attitudes regarding, 8, 14, 62–63, 67–70, 71, 77–78, 79, 81–83, 92–94, 96–98, 103–5, 110, 111–13, 116, 117–19, 123–24, 132–33, 149, 153, 155–62, 165–68, 171, 172–73, 176, 180 –81, 182–85, 195, 202, 207, 208, 225, 238–39 migration to cites, 3–4, 9, 10, 82, 84, 85, 93, 134, 141, 195, 196, 217–18 Peruvian government policies regarding, 52–53, 55, 56, 83–84, 110–11, 188–89, 195–96, 206–7 in Puno, 4, 8, 9, 47, 48, 49–57, 66–67, 68–70, 71, 77–78, 78, 81–82, 96–106, 116, 119–20 Quechua language, 4, 8, 9, 47, 52, 63, 69, 70, 76, 77, 78, 81, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 111, 112, 120, 123, 145– 46, 194, 211, 213, 219, 220 –21, 222, 252n54

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relations with hacendados, 50, 51, 52, 53–54, 55, 79, 83–84, 85, 105–6, 148, 220, 221, 223–24, 260n9 spiritual guides ( yatiris) among, 158, 168, 169, 170 –71 tenientes among, 101, 103–5, 190 Instituto Cooperativo Interamericano (ICI), 92 Instituto de Educación Rural (IER), 178–79, 180 –81, 183, 187–88, 191–92, 208, 219, 225, 278n59 IER Waqrani, 211, 225, 226 Instituto de Estudios Aymaras (IDEA), 14, 193–94, 208, 210, 211, 221–23 Instituto de Pastoral Andina (IPA), 14, 194, 210, 211–13, 238 Instituto Sur Andino de Investigación y Acción Solidaria (ISAIAS), 238 Inter-American Development Bank, 12, 126, 127, 140 International Cooperation Administration, 126 Ireland, 86 Ireland, Archbishop John, 150 Jacobsen, Nils, 49, 54, 260n9 Jara, Lupe: “El Sur Andino,” 252n50, 279n1 Jesuits, 5, 41, 43, 96, 136, 146, 149, 211, 249n39 John Paul II, 239 John XXIII, 107, 247n18 call for ten percent, 12, 39– 40, 84, 86 Second Vatican Council summoned by, 40 – 41 Juan Bustamante rebellion, 207 Judd, Fr. Steve, 211–13 Juventud Agrícola Católica ( JAC), 42 Juventud Estudiantil Católica ( JEC), 140

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Juventud Obrera Católica ( JOC), 42, 140, 165, 198 Juventud Universitaria Católica ( JUC), 42, 165, 196 Kearns, Fr. Robert E., 96, 111, 123, 259n5, 260n7 Kennedy, John F. and Alliance for Progress, 12, 40, 44, 86, 107, 151, 233 assassination of, 152, 233 and Peace Corps, 86, 233 Kennedy, Robert, 128, 152 Kenny, Fr. John R., 75 kharisiris, 175–76, 177 Kiernan, Fr. Arthur C., 57, 58–59, 61, 96, 262n48, 265n90 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 152 Klaiber, Jeffrey, 207, 247n18, 248n28, 249n35, 253n6, 260n8, 265n102 Knights of Labor, 33 Koenigsknecht, Fr. Albert I., 78, 154, 209, 223 attacks on, 225–26 death of, 205, 224, 227 and Iglesia del Sur Andino, 13–14, 194, 212, 215, 252n50 Kramar, Fr. Cyril J., 95–96 Kubitschek, Juscelino, 40 labor unions in Latin America, 87, 89–90, 94, 210, 281n29 in United States, 20 –21, 32–33, 36, 38, 44, 45, 233 Lake Titicaca, 95 LaMazza, Fr. Carmen, 110, 200, 201 Lampa Chica experiment, 162–64 Landázuri Ricketts, Juan Cardinal, 3, 13, 15, 141, 146, 201 on liberation theology, 252n55 and Mission to Lima, 10, 138, 179, 196, 214

Index Lane, Bishop Raymond A., 74, 75, 76 Lang, Fr. Joseph, 118 Latin America Catholic Church in, 2, 7–8, 13, 15–16, 19, 20, 37–39, 41– 42, 44, 48, 113, 114, 122, 140, 141, 142, 143, 147, 207, 234, 238–39, 259n4 democracy in, 44 Liberal reforms in, 7, 114 shortage of clergy in, 7–8, 19, 20, 39, 48, 114, 259n4 Lawler, Fr. John “Red,” 78, 94, 134, 210 lay involvement, 21, 42, 89, 90 –91, 96–101 See also catechism lay leadership, 89, 91–92, 96–97 lay sodalities, 31, 32 Leahigh, John, 109 Leo XIII, 232 liberation theology, 21, 88, 250n40, 280n8 and CELAM, 140 Gutiérrez’s Theology of Liberation, 3, 14, 148, 152, 165, 179, 214, 245n5 Maryknollers’ attitudes regarding, 1–2, 4 –5, 14, 21, 44 – 45, 179–80, 192, 193, 202, 210, 238 and Peruvian Catholic Church, 4, 13, 15, 136, 147, 212, 213–14, 253n6, 280n10 and the Vatican, 3, 252n55 Lima, 106, 143, 148, 226, 228 barriadas in, 3– 4, 9, 76, 82, 126, 135, 136, 139, 149, 165, 186, 187, 195–201, 202, 216, 221 catechetical programs in, 196, 216–17 Catholic Church in, 7–8, 11, 13, 15, 85, 129, 142, 195–96, 214–18 and Catholic human rights network, 214 –18

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Index Centro Bartolomé de Las Casas, 14, 148, 164 childcare centers in, 197–98 Ciudad de Dios, 82, 135, 136, 139, 165, 196, 197–200, 216 El Comercio, 17, 108, 122, 124, 128 indigenous people in, 82, 84, 139, 195–97 La Prensa, 51 middle class in, 134 Mission to Lima, 10, 138, 179, 196 Pamplona Alta, 198–200, 215 Peruvian Credit Union League, 125 San Marcos University, 179–80 SCISP (Instituto Nacional de Salud Pública), 132 St. Rose of Lima Parish, 78, 94, 134 –35, 136–37 Villa El Salvador, 198–200 Lima Methods Conference, 18, 86–94, 96, 98, 111, 120 –21, 122, 141, 210 Lippencot, Sr. Lois, 173, 174 Liptak, Adam, 245n5 Little Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, 135 Llanque, Fr. Domingo, 119–20, 238 Loebe, James, 111 Loher, Sr. Audrey, 166 Longinqua oceani, 232 Longres, Sr. Doreen, 162–64, 189 Lowenthal, Abraham, 275n4 Lubac, Henri de, 41, 249n39 Luna, Humberto, 53 Luna Victoria, Fr. Romeo, 14, 146 Lynch, Bernie, 28 Lyons, Fr. Francis X., 63, 92–93 MacIntire, Fr. William J., 116 Macri, Fr. Anthony, 111–12, 192–93, 270n88

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Madden, Fr. James, 164 –71, 172, 173, 185 on catechists, 166–67 on “firm line,” 168–69 on indigenous culture, 165–66 liturgical innovations of, 166, 170, 174 Malcolm X, 152 Maletta, Héctor, 195 Mallon, Fr. Vincent, 248n26 Mangin, William, 266n14 Manrique, Nelson, 281n29 Marátegui, José Carlos, 219 Marian Peter (Margarita Melville), Sr., 2, 3 Maritain, Jacques, 41, 249n39 Mary Joseph, Mother (Mary Josephine “Molly” Rogers), 23, 24 Maryknoll Center, 63, 236–37 Maryknoll en el Perú, Los, 194 –95 Maryknollers’ attitudes regarding catechism, 5, 8, 77, 90 –91, 94 –107, 96, 98, 99, 102, 103, 107, 108, 111–12, 153, 161 Catholic society, 36, 38 charity, 60, 77 cleanliness, 59, 60, 66, 72–73 cooperatives, 36, 92–93, 94, 114, 121–22, 149, 153, 201 doctrine, 5, 8, 60, 67, 77, 85, 94, 96, 98, 99, 102, 103, 107, 112, 159, 161 education, 94, 110 –11, 114, 118–19, 130 –31, 153, 272n111 elites, 63–64, 65–66, 67, 68, 69 female dominance in Latin American church, 122–23 human rights, 18, 208, 225–26, 227–28, 234 –35, 238 Indian Apostolate, 8, 63, 68, 75

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Maryknollers’ attitudes regarding (cont.) indigenous people, 8, 14, 62–63, 67–70, 71, 77–78, 79, 81–83, 92–94, 96–98, 103–5, 110, 111–13, 116, 117–19, 123–24, 132–33, 149, 153, 155–62, 165–68, 171, 172–73, 176, 180 –81, 182–85, 195, 202, 207, 208, 225, 238–39 labor unions, 20 –21, 33, 38, 45, 89–90, 94, 210, 233 liberation theology, 1–2, 4 –5, 14, 21, 44 – 45, 179–80, 192, 193, 202, 210, 238 local Catholic clergy, 58–60, 70, 74, 78, 79, 95, 114 –16, 154 local culture, 155–64, 165–66, 167–68, 171, 172–73, 193–94, 195, 202, 203, 211, 221–23, 224, 225, 238–39 local elites, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 105, 222, 223–24 local practices of faith, 5, 17, 20, 49, 59, 61–63, 66–67, 77–78, 91, 113, 115, 149, 155–56, 157, 160 –61, 166, 167–69, 173, 191, 232 material assistance, 7, 9, 21, 37–38, 57, 68, 79, 82, 85, 86, 108–10, 153, 160, 161, 162, 170, 174, 182, 197, 202, 270n88 middle class, 82–83, 94, 113–14, 116–18, 123, 149 mission, 6–7, 8, 10, 16, 21–22, 25, 26, 36, 37–38, 81, 82–83, 86–94, 97, 114, 120 –21, 140, 148–50, 152–54, 159, 162–63, 172–73, 179, 186, 186–87, 192–93, 194 –96, 201–2, 208, 215, 233, 235, 247n21, 254n13 politics, 208, 210, 211

Index poverty, 5, 13–14, 16, 20 –21, 76–77, 88, 152, 153, 179, 186, 192, 202 prayer, 5, 7, 8, 60, 77, 85, 88, 94, 96–97, 98, 99, 102, 103, 107, 108, 112, 161, 163, 164 Romanized Catholicism, 5, 8, 10, 17, 20, 48, 56, 62, 63, 71, 114, 155–57, 159–60, 193, 232 sacraments, 5, 7, 8, 16, 20, 24 –25, 48– 49, 56, 60, 63, 66–67, 68, 70, 76, 77, 87–88, 96–97, 98, 102, 107, 108, 114, 115, 134, 155, 156–57, 159, 161, 163, 166, 169–70, 175 social distinctions, 81–82, 83 social justice, 88, 105, 179 U.S. policies in Latin America, 1, 7, 20, 37–39, 42– 45, 86, 140, 150, 151–52, 201–2, 232, 233, 234 –36, 246n7, 251n45 Maryknoll fathers entrance requirements, 27, 28 founding of Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America, 17, 21–22, 23, 254n7, 254n21 Maryknoll Fathers Spiritual Directory, 24 vs. Maryknoll sisters, 15–16, 24, 25–26, 27–28, 129, 130, 134, 154, 161, 166, 173, 177–78, 237, 256n34 See also Puno Maryknoll sisters, 18, 117, 118–19, 254n13 entrance requirements, 28 in Field Afar/Maryknoll, 28–29 founding of Catholic Foreign Mission Sisters of St. Dominic, 17, 21–22, 23 in Lima, 7, 134 –39

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Index vs. Maryknoll fathers, 15–16, 24, 25–26, 27–28, 129, 130, 134, 154, 161, 166, 173, 177–78, 237, 256n34 medical services provided by, 28, 129, 130, 131–33, 166, 168, 173, 174 –75, 177, 178, 183–85 murders in El Salvador, 1, 234, 283n3 in Puno, 129–34 religious education programs of, 28, 130 –31, 133 roles of, 129, 161, 166, 173, 177–79 and St. Rose of Lima Parish, 78, 134 –35, 136–38 work with the poor, 134, 138–39 Maryknoll Society, 150 History Project, 17 Maryknoll Spirit, 24 mass, 68, 70, 88, 97, 104, 108, 115, 120, 166, 167–68, 200, 201, 237 at fiestas, 67, 71, 75, 96, 101, 102, 113, 169–70, 175, 223–24 Wills on, 151 Maurovich, Frank, 245n6 May Day, 33, 165 McCarthy, Fr. William D., 244n1, 248n22, 249n29, 265n90 McClear, Fr. J. Edmund, 90 McClintock, Cynthia, 275n4 McConaughy, Fr. Vincent, 99 McCormack, Sr. Rosemary, 197, 199–200, 201 McCrane, Fr. Gerard, 154, 192–93 McGourn, Fr. Frank, 221–22 McGreevy, John T., 249n39 McGuinness, Fr. Edward J., 90 McGwynn, F. T., 252n54 McLellan, Fr. Daniel B., 12, 76, 77–78, 124, 125–26, 127, 128 McNiff, Fr. James, 92, 122 Meaney, Fr. Joseph, 66–67, 68–69, 71, 72–73

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Melville, Margarita. See Marian Peter (Margarita Melville), Sr. Metzinger Greff, Bishop Luciano, 209, 211, 212, 214, 227, 252n50 Meyer, Dora, 50 Meyer, Fr. Bernard, 88, 89, 98, 99, 100 Miccheli, Fr. Lorenzo, 209, 252n50 Michalik, Fr. Anthony, 62, 65, 96 middle class mistis/mestizos, 134, 142 Maryknollers’ attitudes regarding, 82–83, 94, 113–14, 116–18, 123, 149 in Puno, 48, 54 –55, 63, 64, 75, 78, 79, 82, 116–17, 120, 121, 124, 191 Milroy, Fr. Frank, 75 Misereor, 86, 207 Mitchell, William P., 263n55 Morales Bermúdez, Francisco, 148, 215–16, 218, 275n4 Murphy, Fr. Martin, 76, 154, 215, 270n88 Murphy, Fr. William, 95, 99 Murray, Fr. Charles, 75, 124, 131 National Catholic Rural Life Conference (NCRLC), 36 National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC), 30, 137, 250n40 Bishops Plan of 1919, 34 Latin American Bureau (LAB), 12, 13, 36, 42, 126, 140, 150, 248n26, 251n45 National Coordination of Human Rights, 228 National Housing Foundation, 127 National Office of Development of the Pueblos Jóvenes (ONDEPJOV), 200 National Office of Social Information (ONIS), 14, 146, 210

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National System of Social Mobilization (SINAMOS), 200, 278n59 Nevins, Fr. Albert, 122–23 Nicaragua, 1 Nixon, Richard, 11 Noon, Fr. James P., 244n1 Norris, Frank, 12 Norris, James, 126, 251n45 O’Brien, Fr. James, 75, 76–77, 97, 98, 101, 103, 105 O’Brien, Rev. John A., 157 Office of Catholic Education, 138 O’Keefe, Mary Early, 276n12 Opus Dei, 228, 239, 266n11 Orbis Books, 1, 148, 244n1, 245n5 Orta, Andrew, 252n53 Ortega Trinidad, Bishop José María, 237–38 Overseas Training Program (OTP), 172, 173 Panama, 92, 145 Papal Volunteers for Latin America (PAVLA), 139 Parsons, Wilfred: “Does Latin America Love Us?,” 43 Partido Communista del Peru–Bandera Roja (PCP–Bandera Roja), 219 patriarchy, 15, 22, 25, 123, 129, 178 Peace Corps, 40, 86, 139, 140 Pélach y Feliu, Bishop Enrique, 209 Peru Abancay, 107 agrarian reform in, 3, 142, 147, 148, 188, 189–90, 195, 215, 220, 221, 225, 227 Arequipa, 9, 18, 47, 58, 78, 82, 139, 148, 183, 201, 226 Ayacucho, 219–21, 228, 263n55 vs. Bolivia, 14, 183, 248n25, 252n53, 266n9

Index Cajamarca, 278n59 Callao, 217, 226, 228 Center for Advanced Military Studies (CAEM), 141 Chiclayo, 226 Chimbote, 18, 87 Chinese population, 8, 249n29 Chuquibambilla, 14, 252n50 Cutini Capilla, 17 elections of 1980, 218–19 government-Maryknoll relations, 9, 10, 48, 65, 74, 79, 82, 83, 106, 110, 111, 126–27, 129, 130, 132, 139– 40, 149, 153, 160, 171, 183–84, 196, 197, 198, 201–2, 207, 218, 223, 225, 226–27, 265n90 government policies regarding indigenous population, 52–53, 55, 56, 83–84, 110 –11, 188–89, 195–96, 206–7 vs. Guatemala, 4, 14, 93–94, 123, 183 Ica Chulucanas, 226 Iglesia del Sur Andino, 14 industrialization in, 83, 85, 125, 134 International Petroleum Company (IPC), 4 Juliaca, 14 Langui, 224 Moquegua, 226 national strike of 1977, 216–17, 218, 281n29 number of foreign clergy in, 5, 12, 40, 84, 141, 248nn25–26, 266n9 papal nuncios in, 7, 8, 9, 13, 47, 74, 82, 136, 137, 248n26 poverty in, 4, 5, 9, 10, 11, 15, 18, 64, 82–83, 134, 135– 41, 142– 43, 145, 195–96, 206, 208, 213 relations with United States, 9 San Marcos University, 11, 50

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Index Tacna, 226 urbanization in, 9, 10, 82, 83, 85, 134, 195 Yauri, 224 See also Cuzco; Lima; Peruvian armed forces; Peruvian Catholic Church; Puno; Velasco Alvarado, Juan Peruvian armed forces: human rights abuses by, 206–7, 226–27 Peruvian Catholic Church, 140 – 43, 220 –21, 260n11, 266n14 Episcopal Assembly, 124, 125, 212, 213, 213–14 Episcopal Commission of Social Action (CEAS), 198, 207, 214, 215, 217, 225, 228 Episcopal Conference, 84, 212 Iglesia del Sur Andino, 13–14, 194, 205–6, 209, 210 –11, 212, 213–14, 215, 218, 227–28, 239, 252n50 and liberation theology, 4, 13, 15, 136, 147, 212, 213–14, 253n6, 280n10 in Lima, 7–8, 11, 13, 15, 85, 129, 142, 195–96, 214 –18 Prelatures Nullius in, 84 relations with hacendados, 50, 55 relations with Maryknollers, 6, 10 –11, 13–14, 47, 48, 57, 58–59, 60 –61, 64, 65, 72, 74, 75, 79, 82, 84, 87, 95, 106, 113–14, 116, 135, 136, 138, 148, 152–53, 154, 237–39 relations with Peruvian government, 4, 7–8, 9, 55–56, 85, 145, 146– 48, 200 –1, 202, 203, 206–7 return of clergy from study in Europe, 10, 11, 41, 140, 249n39, 253n6

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shortage of clergy in, 7–8, 259n4 targeted by Shining Path, 4, 18, 203, 206–7, 208, 225, 227, 280n4 Peruvian Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, 18, 228, 228–29, 239, 280n4, 280n8 Peruvian Credit Union League, 125 Pius XII, 247n18 Portocarrero S., Felipe, 266n11 Portugal D., Andrea, 266n12 poverty Maryknollers’ attitudes regarding, 5, 13–14, 16, 20 –21, 76–77, 88, 152, 153, 179, 186, 192, 202 in Peru, 4, 5, 9, 10, 11, 15, 18, 64, 82–83, 134, 135– 41, 142– 43, 145, 195–96, 206, 208, 213 preferential option for the poor, 3, 15, 21, 42, 44, 93, 146, 147, 148, 152, 192, 202, 212, 214, 227, 239 See also barriadas Powderly, Terence, 33 Prado, Manuel, 60 Prebisch, Raúl: dependency theory of, 11, 40 preferential option for the poor, 3, 15, 44, 148, 152, 192, 202, 227, 239 declared by Medellín Conference of Latin American Bishops, 21, 42, 46, 93, 146, 147, 212, 214 Price, Fr. Anthony F., 22, 254n10, 254n21 prostitution, 133 Protestantism, 25, 41, 74, 137, 234 Seventh Day Adventists, 52, 53, 55, 112, 119, 177 as threat, 5, 19, 84, 89, 106 in United States, 22, 23, 30 –31, 234 pueblos jóvenes. See barriadas

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Puno altitude, 8, 47, 49, 58, 95–96, 115, 192, 260n7 Asillo, 211 Ayapata, 67, 68, 69 Ayaviri prelature, 106, 107, 120, 194, 205, 209, 212, 226, 238, 252n50 Ayaviri province, 14, 53, 99, 100, 120, 194, 211, 221, 225 Azángaro province, 51, 52, 53, 54, 78, 95, 97–100, 106, 110, 124, 129, 130 –31, 133, 211, 218, 221, 225, 260n9 Carabaya province, 57, 64, 64 –71, 74, 77, 78, 79, 225, 263n55 catechetical system in, 77, 79, 94 –107, 108, 110 –14, 115, 132, 135, 148, 149, 153, 158, 159–60, 161, 166–67, 182, 190, 191, 196, 202, 277n24 Catholic Church in, 9, 14, 47, 48– 49, 50, 52, 54, 55, 56–57, 58–59, 60 –61, 64, 65, 72, 74, 75, 78, 87, 95, 114 –15, 116, 154 Chacamarca, 53 Chacapampa, 174 –76, 177, 181, 183 Chucuito, 14, 52, 54, 165, 189, 210, 221, 222–24, 226 climate, 8, 47, 49, 58, 70 –71, 108–9, 182 Colegio Nacional San Carlos, 57 Cupsco, 53 Cuturapi, 162 Cuyocuyo, 224 description of, 8–9, 47 drought of 1956, 108–9 drought of 1982, 182 economic conditions, 49–50 Huancané, 53, 54, 99, 101, 104, 120, 124, 192, 260n12 Ilave, 99, 120, 155, 159, 160

Index indigenous population, 4, 8, 9, 47, 48, 49–57, 66–67, 68–70, 71, 77–78, 78, 81–82, 96–106, 116, 119–20 Juli prelature, 13, 17, 18, 82, 84, 94, 98, 100, 106, 107, 115, 119, 124, 129, 160, 162, 166, 172, 182, 187, 192, 194, 208, 209, 210, 212, 221–22, 225–26, 237–38, 252n50 Lampa, 54, 162–64 Melgar province, 225 middle-class mistis/mestizos in, 48, 54 –55, 63, 64, 75, 78, 79, 82, 116–17, 120, 121, 124, 191 Mocachi, 166–71, 173, 185 Ollachea, 66–67 Palermo, 178, 225 Pilcuyo, 177 Puno prelature, 98 radio schools, 10, 91, 111, 148, 153 riot of 1947, 72–74 San Ambrose elementary school, 118–19 San Ambrosio minor seminary, 57–58, 60, 74, 75, 87, 116, 117–20, 121, 129, 153, 201, 272n111 Sandia province, 54, 57, 64, 64 –71, 74, 77, 78, 79, 224, 263n55 San Juan Bautista Parish, 57, 60, 64, 71, 72–78, 87, 124, 153 Santiago, 54 Sicuani, 14, 211 Sicuani prelature, 107, 209, 212, 225, 252n50 social conditions in, 50 –57, 64, 68, 70, 76–77 Utawilaya, 52 Yunguyo, 51, 124 Zepita, 51

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Index Quadragesimo Anno, 33, 34 Quinn, Fr. Richard, 102–3, 116 Quinn, Monsignor William, 42 Quinn Wilson, Bishop Albano Edward, 194, 209, 212, 224, 252n50 racism, 154 –55, 195, 206–7 Radio Onda Azul (Blue Wave), 111 Rahner, Karl, 41, 249n39 Ravissin, Harry, 137 Reagan, Ronald, 234 Rénique, José Luis, 54 Rerum Novarum, 32–33 Richter Fernández-Prada, Archbishop Federico, 220, 228 Ríos Palacios, Juan, 55 Roca, Erasmo, 53, 55 Romanized Catholicism vs. local practices, 17, 20, 48– 49, 62, 66–67, 112, 155–57, 159–60, 169–70, 174, 232 Maryknollers’ attitudes regarding, 5, 8, 10, 17, 20, 48, 56, 62, 63, 71, 114, 155–57, 159–60, 193, 232 Romero, Óscar, 234 Roosevelt, Franklin D. Good Neighbor policy, 7, 11, 12, 34 –36, 38, 39, 40, 44, 151 New Deal, 34, 36, 38, 44, 45, 150, 151, 233, 257n63 relations with Catholics, 34 –35, 36 Rose Dominic (Marie L. Trapasso), Sr., 134 –39, 179, 187 Rose Timothy (Mary Bernadine Galvin), Sr., 136, 139, 179, 187 Rubín, Enrique, 53 Rubina, Sr. Maria, 81–82, 114, 124 Rumi Maki rebellion, 54, 207 Ryan, Fr. John A. Plan for Social Reconstruction, 34 on wealth and profit, 35

313

Ryan, Sr. Patricia “Pat,” 178, 185–92 early life, 186 on living conditions, 186–87 sacraments, 31–32, 101, 129, 238, 277n28 baptism, 31, 67, 68, 96, 103, 115, 117, 164, 166, 167–68, 177, 263n55 confession, 70, 76, 97, 115, 159 last rites/sick calls, 32, 64, 67, 68, 70, 71, 96, 99, 101, 103, 112, 115, 116, 151, 166 marriage, 31–32, 76, 99, 101, 102–3, 112, 115, 117, 164, 177, 238, 263n55 Maryknollers’ attitudes regarding, 5, 7, 8, 16, 20, 24 –25, 48– 49, 56, 60, 63, 66–67, 68, 70, 76, 77, 87–88, 96–97, 98, 102, 107, 108, 114, 115, 134, 155, 156–57, 159, 161, 163, 166, 169–70, 175 See also communion; mass Salazar, Fr. Inocente, 154 –62, 172 early life, 154 –55 on local indigenous culture, 155–58 Schiff, Fr. John, 269n60 Schmalhausen, Bishop Kay, 238 Schmitz, Bishop Germán, 13, 200, 201 School of the Americas Watch, 1 Second Vatican Council, 88, 131, 135, 151 and Latin American church, 2, 13, 15–16, 41, 42, 44, 113, 140, 141, 142, 147, 207 and Maryknoll, 15–16, 21, 24, 113, 134, 148– 49, 150, 152–53, 159, 160, 163, 177–78, 179, 185–86, 192, 202, 210, 233, 238 summoned by John XXIII, 40 – 41 Semana Pastoral of 1954, 18

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314

Semanas de Estudio (Study Weeks), 91 Seventh Day Adventists, 52, 53, 55, 112, 119, 177 Shining Path, 206–8, 224 –27, 239, 280n7 Catholic Church targeted by, 4, 18, 203, 206–7, 208, 225, 227, 280n4 and indigenous people, 4, 206, 282n38 origin of, 202–3, 219–21, 276n5 Sobrino, Jon, 244n1 social aid programs, 77, 79, 82, 91, 266n14 social justice, 2–3, 37, 86, 142, 146, 179 Sociedad Amiga de los Indios, 260n12 Society for the Propagation of the Faith, 22 Solidarity Action, 215 South China: Maryknoll leper asylum in, 27 Spain, 86 Civil War, 211 Spellman, Francis Cardinal, 139 Stahl, Ferdinand A., 52, 53, 55 Steele, Fr. Harvey, 91–92 Stefaniak, Fr. James, 104 Taki Onqoy rebellion, 207 Tentler, Barbara Woodcock, 31 Tessier, Fr. Harvey, 108, 114, 116, 117, 121 Third Inter-American Catholic Action Week, 87 Thomas Aquinas, St., 157 Toledo, Alejandro, 228 Tompkins, Fr. Jimmie, 36 Trapasso, Marie L. See Rose Dominic (Marie L. Trapasso), Sr. Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report (CVR), 206 Túpac Amaru rebellion, 207, 260n11

Index Unión Nacional de Estudiantes Católicos (UNEC), 140, 196, 213 United Fruit Company, 2 United Nations, 125, 197–98 Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA/CEPAL), 11, 40 United States Catholic Church in, 6, 7, 12, 17, 19, 20, 22, 30, 31–32, 37–38, 42– 43, 44 – 45, 88, 150 –51, 164 –65, 254n21, 256n35, 283n1 Catholic immigrants in, 20 –21, 22, 26, 30, 31–32, 34, 36–37, 44, 45, 88, 151, 234, 253n3 Catholic Relief Services (CRS), 9–10, 12, 86, 108–10, 126, 136, 137, 140, 182, 251n45 Catholic schools in, 1, 23, 26, 30, 32, 36, 256n35, 257n46 CIA, 246n7 civil rights movement, 151, 186 Food for Peace program, 9–10, 86, 108–9, 111, 136–37, 150 labor unions in, 20 –21, 32–33, 36, 38, 44, 45, 233 Latin America policies, 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 9–10, 11–12, 16, 19, 21, 34 –36, 38–39, 42– 45, 86, 108–10, 111, 125, 126–28, 129, 136, 137, 140, 171, 201–2, 232, 233, 234 –35, 236, 246n7, 251n45 Protestantism in, 22, 23, 30 –31, 234 relations with Guatemala, 2 relations with Peru, 9 State Dept., 107, 111 USAID, 40 Vietnam War, 151, 186 See also Kennedy, John F.; National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC); Roosevelt, Franklin D.

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Index University of Notre Dame, 40 Uruguay, 145 Urviola, Ezequiel, 53, 55 Valcárcel, Luís E., 51 Vallejos Santoni, Archbishop Luis, 141, 194, 205, 209, 252n50 Vargas Varcárcel, Laura, 198, 207 Vatican appeal for clergy in Latin America, 12–13, 39– 40, 84, 86, 247n18, 247n21 and liberation theology, 3, 252n55 nuncios in Peru, 7, 8, 9, 13, 47, 74, 82, 136, 137, 248n26 papal encyclicals, 32–33, 34, 232 and preferential option for the poor, 3, 239 See also Second Vatican Council Velasco Alvarado, Juan, 3– 4, 18, 179, 215–16, 275n1, 275n4 agrarian reforms, 147, 148, 188, 189–90, 195, 215, 220, 221, 276n5 and class identities, 14 policies regarding barriadas/pueblos jóvenes, 3– 4, 195, 198, 200, 249n35 policies regarding Quechua, 145– 46 policies regarding the poor, 145– 46, 147– 48, 149, 187, 188, 195–96, 198–201 relations with Peruvian Church, 145, 146, 147– 48, 153

315

Verhoeven, Fr. Thomas, 77, 97, 98–99, 103– 4, 105, 106–7, 112 Vicarias of Solidaridad, 227 víveres, 160, 161, 162, 270n88 Waldie, Fr. John, 75–76, 131 Walsh, Fr. James E., 19, 57, 248n26, 249n29 “About Maryknoll Sisters,” 23 on Central and South American mission, 247n21 as cofounder of Maryknoll, 22, 254n10 on Maryknoll’s mission emphasis, 6–7, 254n21 on neatness, 59 in Peru, 8, 47 as publisher of Field Afar/Maryknoll, 22–23 on the Resurrection, 59 West German Catholic Church, 86 Whitfield, Teresa, 246n7 Williams, William Appleman: The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 231, 232, 233 Wills, Garry, 151, 152 World War II, 19, 37, 41, 45, 150, 249n39 Yupanqui, Marcelino, 182 Zeballos, Sr. María, 173, 174, 175, 181, 183–85 Zulen, Pedro, 50 Zuñiga Camacho, Manuel, 52

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S U S A N F I T Z PAT R I C K - B E H R E N S is an associate professor of history at California State University, Northridge.