Nicaragua Network

At this moment when Pope John Paul II has been declared a saint, it is useful to recall his all-out campaign against Liberation Theology in Latin America, a campaign which included his demand during his 1983 mass in Managua that Nicaraguan revolutionaries abandon their "unacceptable ideological commitments".  At the time of John Paul's second visit to Nicaragua in 1996, Nicaragua Network Co-Coordinator Katherine Hoyt posted to the old reg.nicaragua on Peacenet a letter she had written 13 years before about the 1983 visit.  

Here again is that letter:

March 16, 1983

Dear Folks--

Well, I promised to write about the Pope's visit and so I guess I must even though I would rather not even think about it much less write about it! I feel that the visit to Central America as a whole has meant a return to a pre-1967 Church: before Paul VI's encyclical "Popularum Progressio"--which specified the cases in which insurrection and rebellion would be justified--and the 1968 Latin American Bishops Conference at Medellin, Colombia, which gave the big push to liberation theology. 

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