Part Two – The beginnings of “Appalachian liberation theology”
Before examining the two Appalachian pastoral letters in more detail, it is important to understand their context as an outgrowth and application of the teachings of the Second Vatican Council. Vatican II marked a new stance of the Church in relation to the modern world and a new historical consciousness in the Church’s social teaching that acknowledged the need to let the Gospel speak to and transform specific historical moments and contexts.[10] The most famous early example of the application of this new insight was the Latin American Bishops Conference (CELAM) meeting at Medellín, Colombia in 1968 and the irruption of Latin American and other liberation theologies. Influenced by the vision of Vatican II and his encounter with Latin American liberation theology, Paul VI affirmed for the first time in an official way the need for contextual approaches to social ethics, first in the encyclical Populorum Progressio and later, and more explicitly, in the apostolic letter Octogesima Adveniens which was issued on the 80th anniversary of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, widely considered the inaugural document of modern Catholic social teaching. In that letter, Paul VI wrote
In the face of such widely varying situations it is difficult for us to utter a unified message and to put forward a solution which has universal validity. Such is not our ambition, nor is it our mission. It is up to the Christian communities to analyze with objectivity the situation which is proper to their own country, to shed on it the light of the Gospel’s unalterable words and to draw principles of reflection, norms of judgment, and directives for action from the social teaching of the Church…. It is up to these Christian communities, with the help of the Holy Spirit, in communion with the bishops who hold responsibility and in dialogue with other Christian brethren and all men (sic) of good will, to discern the options and commitments which are called for in order to bring about the social, political, and economic changes seen in many cases to be urgently needed” (n. 4).
OA also marked the first official Church document to take up the explicit language of the need to make a preferential option for the poor, a concept developed by Latin American liberation theologians, as well as the recognition of the epistemological privilege of the poor, i.e. the insight that the poor and oppressed peoples have a special knowledge of God and of the social reality due to their oppressed status. These insights encouraged a method of ethical reflection that includes the poor within the process of their liberation as “agents of justice,” rather than mere recipients.[11] This basic liberative method, advocated by Paul VI in Populorum Progressio,[12] took the form of a three-step hermeneutical circle of “seeing, judging, and acting,” i.e. using social analysis to gain a deep understanding of the concrete social reality, letting the Gospel and social teaching make a radical judgment of these conditions, and discerning the best course of engaged political praxis.[13] Liberation theologians of Latin America became well known for their advocacy of this method and inspired the emergence of countless forms of contextual theology, not only in the so called “Third World,” but among oppressed peoples in “First World” contexts.[14]
A lesser known example of this localized pastoral approach to injustice is the work of the Catholic Committee of Appalachia (CCA), a grassroots organization that was founded after Vatican II to work with the bishops of the region to encourage action on behalf of social justice. Working in conjunction with another Catholic social justice group called the Center of Concern,[15] the Catholic Committee of Appalachia heard the call of Paul VI to engage in social ethics on a local level, and set out to develop what would become the first “regional” pastoral letter issued in the United States. Over the course of three years, the CCA held over twenty listening sessions with individuals, church leaders, and community agencies throughout Appalachia to hear the people’s experience of injustice. Three drafts were circulated back out into the community for further critique and development. The result is a reflection that represents a dialogue between the people and church leaders rather than a magisterial decree coming down from above.[16] All twenty-five bishops of the region signed the letter, titled This Land is Home to Me, and it was promulgated at Wheeling College (now Wheeling Jesuit University) on February 1, 1975.[17] The document has been included in several key collections of Catholic social teaching, and theologians have praised the documents for their explicit implementation of the directives of Vatican II.[18] The letter, as well as its twentieth anniversary sequel, At Home in the Web of Life, both explicitly follow the “seeing, judging, acting” method and are each arranged in three parts that correspond to each step in the hermeneutical circle. The sketches of the documents that appear below, as well as my own reflection on the current reality in Appalachia, will follow the same three-fold format.
Next: Part Three – This Land is Home to Me
Previously: Part One
______________________________
[10] Charles E. Curran, Catholic Social Teaching, 1891-Present: A Historical, Theological, and Ethical Analysis, Moral Traditions Series (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2002), 60. In addition to Curran, there are many good overviews of the development of Catholic social thought since Vatican II, such as Gregory Baum, Amazing Church: A Catholic Theologian Remembers a Half-Century of Change (Toronto: Novalis, 2005), Peter J. Henriot, Edward P. DeBerri, and Michael J. Schultheis, Catholic Social Teaching: Our Best Kept Secret (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1987), and Kenneth Himes, ed., Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries & Interpretations (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005).
[11] Christine Gudorf, “Commentary on Octogesima Adveniens (A Call to Action on the Eightieth Anniversary of Rerum Novarum),” in Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries & Interpretations, ed. Kenneth Himes (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005), 323.
[12] Allan Figueroa Deck, “Commentary on Populorum Progressio (On the Development of Peoples),” in Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries & Interpretations, ed. Kenneth Himes (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005), 299–300.
[13] For a more detailed description of the hermeneutical circle see Joe Holland and Peter Henriot, Social Analysis: Linking Faith and Justice, Revised and enlarged ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983); Miguel A. De La Torre, Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins.
[14] Two well-known descriptions of different approaches to contextual theology are Robert J. Schreiter, Constructing Local Theologies (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1985); Bevans, Models of Contextual Theology.
[15] Holland and Henriot, Social Analysis, 92.
[16] Chuck Smith, “The Church of the Poor,” in Redemption Denied: An Appalachian Reader, ed. Edward Guinan (Washington, D.C.: Appalachian Documentation, 1976), 87.
[17] Tricia T. Pyne, Faith in the Mountains: A History of the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston, 1850–2000 (Strasbourg, France: Éditions du Signe, 2000), 67.
[18] For example, Gregory Baum, “The Christian Left at Detroit,” in Theology in the Americas, ed. Sergio Torres and John Eagleson (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1976), 399–429.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In