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The Clergy and the Coup
November 20, 2009
by Daniel AltschulerEarlier this week, Mary Anastasia O’Grady shamelessly pulled the God card to defend the Honduran coup. Specifically, she handed her Wall Street Journal column over to the coup-supporting Cardinal Rodriguez to curry favor for the June 28 ousting of President Manuel Zelaya from power. Her article ignores the Church’s troubling historical role in Honduran politics, instead granting this institution legitimacy as the defender of democracy. O’Grady should have known better.
O’Grady’s piece is one in a long line of conservative attempts to justify the overthrow of a democratically-elected president. Christopher Sabatini and I have already debunked these arguments, so I will not do so again here. But this week’s novelty was O’Grady’s use of a deeply controversial Church leader as a mouthpiece for the argument she has been making for months. In her article, she explains why Cardinal Rodriguez supported the coup—what he argues was a “constitutional succession”—namely, that Zelaya undermined the rule of law and therefore lost the “moral authority” to govern the nation.
The Cardinal’s concerns with the rule of the law are legitimate. Manuel Zelaya did not respect the principle of horizontal accountability—a central tenet in liberal democracies. But using the rule of law to justify forcibly removing a president without due process is deeply contradictory. Worse still is the Cardinal’s retreat to “moral authority”—should the military also remove a president at gunpoint for infidelity, supporting abortion rights or promoting secular education?
But the biggest problem with O’Grady’s piece is her uncritical acceptance of the
No one can deny that clergy played an important role in confronting certain military regimes in
Unfortunately, the
The Church in
Even in countries where clergy provided legitimacy for authoritarian rule, however, the Church has retained a great deal of popular legitimacy because of Catholicism’s numerical dominance (increasingly challenged by Evangelicals) and the Church’s considerable charitable infrastructure. The countless Catholic schools and hospitals for the region’s poor have been an important part of this story. In
But charity and humanitarian assistance do not make an institution democratic. The
Daniel Altschuler is a contributing blogger to americasquarterly.org conducting research in
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Many thanks for your
Many thanks for your message. I found what you wrote insightful, interesting, and helpful.
I think you're entirely correct that there's a more nuanced picture. There always is, and it's a challenge of the journalistic medium where to draw the line.
I think, though, that I make pretty clear in the article that the Church has done both good and bad in the region (and Honduras specifically), and of course it is involved in all sorts of development activities and democracy initiatives (I hear Caritas's name down here a lot). And I also do appreciate the differences that exist (and have long existed, going back at least as far as the 1960s) between Central American-born clergy and their international counterparts (who have often been at the forefront of pushing a more progressive agenda). And, of course, there are always the divisions (which were strong in Central America in the 1970s and 1980s) among those at the very upper ranks of the Church and between those upper echelons and those further down the ladder. In the current context, I think the cardinal has undermined a lot of the good work being done by others, and I wonder what the impact will be on the Church's legitimacy down the line.
All this is to say that, while I recognize that there's always more detail and nuance that one could add, I stand by the original argument, which is that analysts cannot simply assume that Church leaders are a pro-democracy force and that "moral authority" arguments are very weak in political analysis. In Honduras, the Church's historical record has been mixed, and I think that history is relevant to the Cardinal's response to the current situation. Mary O'Grady, whose piece I was rebutting, ignores all of this history and gives the Church a free pass, so I see my piece as a corrective to her decontextualized analysis.
In any event, many thanks for sending along this information and for writing. Many times, new media formats lend themselves to hostile and anti-intellectual exchanges, so I appreciate the opportunity to exchange thoughts and ideas in a more constructive way.
Not quite the way I see it
The role of the Catholic Church in Honduras is a lot more nuanced than you present it. I don't think Honduras has a conservative church that is merely involved in charity and humanitarian assistance. A friend of mine who has been here longer than I told me a few years ago that this was the most progressive hierarchy in Central America. You can look at the history and see that there has been a fair amount of identification with the poor, especially on the part of religious women and the clergy. (I think of the role of the Jesuits in Yoro and Olancho in the 1970s and 1980s as one example, as well as the role of the diocese of Santa Rosa.) The hierarchy has a mixed history. But earlier in this decade even Cardinal Rodriguez was out in the streets protesting against the mining interests. In 2006 the bishops released a strong statement on the political and social situation. And for several years Caritas Nacional and the diocesan Caritas offices have had programs of citizenship participation which have trained and empowered Hondurans to challenge corruption. One should also note that except for the archdiocese of Tegucigalpa and the diocese of Santa Rosa de Copán, the bishops are not native Hondurans. This almost assuredly affects how they respond to the political and economic situation. I know that the bishop of Santa Rosa and many of his clergy have been very opposed to corruption, mining interests, and the coup and some of them have been very good in trying to conscienticize their parishioners. (I am a volunteer with the diocese and see this first hand.) But I think that recently the archbishop and his auxiliaries have become very critical of Zelaya (and thus appear - and may be - supporters of Micheletti). But I do think that the cardinal does have a rightful reputation to being somewhat progressive. But the difference is that it is more like a "liberal" position that may not be willing to take the risks that Bishop Santos in Santa Rosa is willing to take. He also may be more a theoretical and bookish progressive in social matters, as even Pope Benedict appears. In contrast, the church in the diocese of Santa Rosa is more liberationist, that progressive. These are some preliminary thoughts in response to your article, but I think it's a little unfair to paint the church in Honduras as "tied to the country’s right-wing elites and marginal to the country’s struggle for democracy." It's more complicated.