Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [58]
Born in 1927 in Isola d’Asti, Piedmont, Sodano was one of six children. His father had been a Christian Democrat elected to Parliament in the 1948 elections, serving until 1963. After attending the local seminary, Sodano earned doctorates in canon law and theology from Pontifical universities in Rome. At age thirty-two he joined the Vatican diplomatic corps. In 1978, after several Latin American postings, he was named papal nuncio in Chile amid one of South America’s worst dictatorships.
Chile had a history of economic stability and democratic governance when President Richard Nixon, in 1970, reacting to the election of Dr. Salvador Allende, a Marxist, told CIA director Richard Helms, Make the economy scream, in order to upend Allende.15 The CIA had entreated Christian Democrat leaders in Western Europe to pull out the stops in helping the Chilean counterparts defeat Allende. A CIA report says that a leading Italian Christian Democrat (his name redacted) “saw no point in risking his reputation in a lost cause.”16 Allende won in a plurality. Nixon authorized $10 million for the CIA to disrupt the economy.17 Three years later, a CIA-supported coup by General Augusto Pinochet drove Allende to shoot himself as troops stormed the presidential palace. Pinochet authorized kidnapping, torture, and murder of Allende supporters to solidify power. Military men took over universities and censored the press. Several prominent Chileans critical of the regime who were living abroad were murdered. Pinochet sold off public services in a free-market strategy inspired by University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman. The regime moved 28,000 poor people from scattered areas into slums that ballooned to 1.3 million people.18
In 1978, when Archbishop Sodano arrived as nuncio, the labor unions were surviving with the help of Cardinal Raúl Silva Henriquez.19 Center-right bishops were relieved Allende was gone; Silva and a few others pressed for human rights.20 Chile’s agony put in high relief Latin America’s chasm between traditional bishops, focused on personal piety, and the more activist bishops influenced by liberation theology’s idea of structural sin. The 1968 continental bishops’ conference in Medellín endorsed “a preferential option for the poor.” Castrillón was hostile to liberation theology; Sodano was in the same camp. John Paul II and Ratzinger, reacting to Communism as a monolithic evil, equated Soviet bloc dictatorships with the liberationists’ Marxist analysis of plantation-based poverty. But as journalist John Allen has learnedly written, older European currents shaped the Latin American theology, too.21 Scripture discussions permeated the Christian base communities, small groups of priests, nuns, and lay folk active in South America’s slums. Ratzinger investigated Father Leonardo Boff of Brazil in his tribunal and in 1985 imposed a yearlong “silence.” Six years later he banned Boff as a theologian. “Ecclesiastical power is cruel and merciless,” Boff bristled after quitting the priesthood.22
“It is in the poverty and exploitation of the Third World,” writes Paul Collins in The Modern Inquisition, a study of the CDF under Ratzinger,
where Boff finds the Church to be most truly itself. For him … it is only through reflection on living experience, on the “stuff” of history, that the Church can discover God’s will for itself.
For Ratzinger, the Church transcends history. It is not the Jesus of history who provides the CDF’s prefect primary theological focus. It is the risen and ascended Christ who stands in splendour outside the world-process, both as saviour and judge, who is the fundamental focus of Ratzinger.23
By 1980 more than eight hundred priests and nuns had been murdered by Latin American death squads. As Ratzinger punished more theologians like Boff, Sodano befriended the Pinochet family; he appeared at a televised rally where Chile’s dictator denounced the church