I cannot imagine a happier place in which to say a few words about the church and the social revolution in Latin America. To be here this evening, in the company of the Archbishop of Lima, Peru and the Archbishop of Chicago, U.S.A., might seem a random selection. But it is more than that. And it may even indicate some serious advance planning on the part of the architects of this conference. For it would be difficult to find two urban areas in which the church has been more closely involved with the social revolution of America -- North and South -- than Chicago and Lima, -- and hard to find two better apostles of that work than Cardinal Meyer and Cardinal Landazuri. I hope that in the social revolution on both these continents, the Peace Corps has something in common with both these great men. Listen to these words by one social revolutionary, Peace Corps Volunteer, Tom Carter, who served in Chimbote, Peru.
“My job is to get these people, my neighbors, organized to make them better able to compete in the city for their rights and to try and get them to raise their standard of living back to the human race. I teach in the local school during the days, and I teach carpentry to adults at night. Both are important jobs, but I consider them only a tool. Teaching kids, while fun for me and hilarious for the rough- housing students, is only an excuse for being in the Barriada.
“For example, our school has no roof. It would be a $10 project and about one day’s labor of two or three Peace Corps men to build that roof. Yet we don’t do it. If we gave my school a roof it would always be that, a gift, the Gringos’ roof. When it needed fixing, no one could fix it. If it takes me a year to talk my neighbors into putting on that roof, it will be worth it. Because it will then be their roof on their school. It would be a small start, but in the right direction. Maybe then we would take on a little harder project, and step by step build up a powerful organization interested in progress and strong enough to do something about it. It has to be an organization that does not need me, otherwise it would collapse when I leave.”
Tom Carter’s story is a typical one. Peace Corps Volunteers do not go to Latin America, -- or anywhere else -- bearing gifts. Even for a $10 roof repair job. They do not live apart. They live a country not off it. They live in a culture not despite it. They drink the same water, eat the same food, live in the same kind of houses, use the same transportation, and speak the same language. Tom Carter, and 5,000 Peace Corps Volunteers like him in Latin America have taught us an important lesson applicable here in the U.S.A. At a time when bigness is an important selling point here in America, we in the Peace Corps are saying: “If you want to change the world, start small.” We have incorporated that slogan into our nation-wide recruiting campaign. Our recruiting posters are almost un-American With their legend, “Start Small.” But we believe we are helping to build new societies in the best way -- the Way President Weizsman of Israel once described in these words: “The only way a new society can be built is brick by brick.”
President Johnson however, has asked us to double the Peace Corps in size. From 10,000 Volunteers to 20,000. But this does not create a paradox for us. We still say “If you want to change the world, start small.”
Our approach is surely one familiar to Catholics. It is the same spirit which animated our Lord. He was content with twelve apostles to start the greatest social revolution of all time. He instructed his followers to concentrate “the least of these, my brethren.” The Peace Corps, above all in Latin America, recognizes that we can’t transplant institutions, we cannot change a way of life, we cannot substitute one culture for another and we don’t want to. We only want to help those who are ready to remake their own societies.
Three years ago I stood in the slums of an enormous city in northeast Brazil. There, with Bishop Eugenio Sales, I saw the work he had begun in the area around a half-finished church, with the poor, and forgotten.
With people and in places where the government of Brazil had never reached, he was publishing newspapers and newsletters, organizing cooperatives and credit unions, strengthening labor unions and “Campesino” organizations, running a rest camp, strengthening medical care for expectant mothers, and organizing day-care and child-care centers and playgrounds. No Peace Corps Volunteer could have carried on such work without the dynamism and revolutionary spirit of the Bishop. And this story can be duplicated in many places -- but too few – throughout the Hemisphere.
In Cardinal Landazuri’s Lima, I have seen some of the most terrible slums of the Hemisphere. I have climbed on “El Monton,” a mountain where thousands of people live amid indescribable poverty and in what must seem hopeless conditions. “El Mouton” is a mountain, but a mountain of garbage. And yet, in these “Barriadas,” as Cardinal Landazuri knows, hundreds of thousands of decent, respectable, hard- working people, live their lives seeking only the recognition and the opportunity to do useful work and to improve their position in society. There are worker-priests among them, Canadians, Americans, Peruvians, Belgians, but there are too few. There are also Peace Corps Volunteers among them, Protestants, Catholics and Jews, but there are too few. For too long, both the U.S. and the church have turned away from the poor. We have thought of the forgotten masses of Latin America as “those people” or “the others” for whom, something must be done, but by someone else. When our Peace Corps Volunteers first went to Latin America, we were told by well-meaning public officials from North and South America, that the PCVs could not live in the city slums or small rural villages.
“No one lives there,” one “expert” told us. Yet our eyes told us that hundreds of thousands did live there.
The same “experts,” ours and yours, made many flat predictions when we began in 1961. They told us that a bunch of kids couldn’t change the image of the commercial “Gringo” exploiter.
But the experts were wrong. We have changed that image, not completely but significantly.
They said we couldn’t send girls into the back country or into the urban slums. I heard a lot about machismo. But the experts were wrong.
They said we couldn’t send Protestants to Catholic villages in South America. But the experts were wrong.
When our Peace Corps Representative in one of the Latin American countries first paid his courtesy call on the Papal Nuncio, our Peace Corps Director said that many of our Peace Corps Volunteers were not Catholics. He asked whether they would have any problems in the small’ villages of the country. The Nuncio leaned forward, confidentially, and said, “Only from the Spanish priests.”
They said we couldn’t send amateurs without special training in engineering or agriculture or community development. But they were wrong. The “amateurs” were right. And the world -- developed and under-developed -- is better off. Because the amateurs, with faith and trust in mankind, did not listen to the experts, who had lost both. Today, Peace Corps Volunteers are living and making common cause in Latin America with the people who are the object of the social revolution. Our girls are in the slums and the remote villages. Protestant and Jewish volunteers are functioning, successfully, at the community levels, often with the enthusiastic collaboration of the village priest. Volunteers of both sexes, and all races, and religions, are living at the level of the people they have come to help-- and to love. The Peace Corps has become “the largest sit-in demonstration in the world.”
Who are these amateurs? In Colombia, for example, the director of our Peace Corps program is a former Protestant minister, and school headmaster, with a Ph.D. in Spanish Literature from the University of Madrid plus a license to captain a 3-masted schooner on the high seas.
In Bolivia, our Peace Corps Director is a former airplane bush pilot in Central America whose last job before the Peace Corps was “Professor of Economics” at the University of New Mexico.
In Honduras, the Peace Corps Leader is a Naval Academy graduate who, one year ago, guided the nuclear submarine “Woodrow Wilson”, under the North Pole. After 18 years as an officer in the United States Navy, Joe Farrell thought he could serve the cause of peace better in the Peace Corps. And so it goes. Protestant ministers, submarine commanders, bush pilots, Wall Street Lawyers, mountain climbers – all amateurs -- and all willing to try new approaches and new directions to reach out to Latin America.
One characteristic appears in all of our successful volunteers and staff: A commitment not just to service, but to learning!
The former Ambassador from Bolivia to the United States told me last year that he was astonished at the success of the Peace Corps Volunteers in his country. He told me: “The reason your volunteers have reached my people is because they came to learn. For the first time we were confronted with ‘Gringos’ who wanted to learn from us! They wanted to learn about our history, our ‘culture, or-language, our way of doing things. And in teaching them, we grew, quite unconsciously, softly, quietly, psychologically ready to accept instruction from them! These are `our social revolutionaries, of all races, creeds, colors, and occupations. Amateurs all, and imbued with the understanding that the best way to teach is to learn.
This learning experience is an important one. But why must it always take place in Latin America? If Peace Corps Volunteers learn as they teach, if our common problems have common solutions, why must all the traffic be one way? Why shouldn’t Papal Volunteers, for instance, come to North America as well as South America? Why not a corps of Papal Volunteers -- or Peace Corps Volunteers from Latin America -- to work in the U.S.? I have proposed before, and I propose again, a “Reverse peace Corps” of South America Volunteers. These volunteers, working under the same conditions as our Peace Corps, could work in our urban slums and through our Southwest, for instance, teaching Spanish, and teaching literacy. Some Latin American countries have more advanced programs in literacy training than any in .the world. In the field of co-ops and credit unions, there is valuable work to be done here and we have much to learn. As we and you face our common problems, we should share the human resources available to solve them. Here is a personal “Alliance for Progress” which would reach the people. The people from your pueblos and great cities could be directly involved. As we would learn once again this time from you right here in the U.S.A. Maybe we need to re-learn some revolutionary principles from you.
As Arnold Toynbee said: “The American Revolution has gone thundering on. Nothing can stop it, not even the American hands that first set it rolling.” Toynbee could have speculated on the meaning of revolution itself. For it can be many things to many people. Revolution is a word given sometimes to squalid overturns of one corrupt regime in favor of another. It is sometimes little more than a “Palace Revolt,” whether in a real or metaphorical palace. It is frequently the name given to a long and bloody spirit of physical and intellectual pillage, and murder. It can be violent or peaceful, long or short, and it can, in the long sweep of human affairs, serve a good or an evil purpose.
There is nothing magic about revolutions, they are neither good nor bad, permanent or transitory, elevating or debasing, simply because they are revolutions. In our time we have had all kinds.
But whatever the word means, it means change. It means convulsive and major change. In Chicago it means incorporating hundreds of thousands of Negro and white immigrants into the social, economic and political life of our community. In Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, or Chile, it may mean the integration and inspiration of thousands of squatters in the Barriadas. And the struggle may be easier in Latin America than in North America. Last week two returned Peace Corps Volunteers, one Negro and one white, were attacked by five white men as they entered a motel in Tallahassee, Florida. They were a part of a Peace Corps recruiting team visiting Florida State University. The Negro volunteer had .served two years in the Philippines Without an incident or discrimination of any kind; but he was attacked on the border of a university campus in his homeland!
I’m pleased to say, however, that in the best Peace Corps tradition, the other ex-Volunteer succeeded in knocking to the ground all five of their attackers, while suffering only minor injuries, This tragic event reveals that we will not understand the social revolution in the U.S.A. or in ‘Latin America unless we reflect on their sources. .
The conditions and situations which have led to the present ferment, arise in substantial part from failures of the Catholic Church and of us here in North America. The former President of Colombia, Lleras Camargo, said last month: “The new generations of the Latin American clergy have become deeply involved with a more inspiring and profound mission than their predecessors...they are concerned with the social order which in their eyes has become petrified and unjust...(they) have no desire to continue protecting this system by remaining allied with landowners and old-fashioned businessmen in a manner which worked to the Church’s disadvantage.” ,
But according to President Lleras, this has not, alas, always been the mission of the clergy in Latin America. The mission of the church today, he says, is “very distinct from that which, by the proper performance of the appropriate ritual, converts a churchman into an asidious dispenser of passports to eternity while he remains a pious and impotent bystander amid the misery around him.” Now the young church is on the side of change. As President Lleras concluded, “These young priests have decided to work for the transformation of landholding and farm systems in the teeth of opposition from local bosses and landowners who traditionally have supported the clergy. It can fairly be said today that the Catholic Church is no longer a reactionary and capitalistic element of society, which was its image a mere ten to fifteen years ago.”
And if Peace Corps Volunteers are needed today in the social struggle in Latin America, it is at least in part because of my country’s record.
In the mountainside slums outside of Rio and Caracas, I have stood at night, and looked down upon sights as fabulous as anything in
