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05/08/2005:

"Peru's Catholics Brace for Fissures in Their Church"

LIMA, Peru - This is the country where a radical, left-leaning "theology of liberation" first emerged 35 years ago. But it is also the place where, four years ago, a member of the Roman Catholic Church's profoundly conservative Opus Dei movement was for the first time elevated to cardinal.

Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne, the archbishop of Lima, has accused some bishops of engaging in a campaign to undermine him.
Now, with the ascension of Pope Benedict XVI, the longstanding divide between conservatives, emboldened by the choice of a kindred spirit, and liberal clergy here and throughout Latin America could intensify. If Peru's recent past is any measure, such a competition, even if the two sides are not evenly matched, is certain to be fierce.

Today, the priest who coined the term "liberation theology," the Rev. Gustavo Gutiérrez, spends much of his time teaching in the United States, in what some of his admirers describe as a kind of exile. The bishop who was elevated to cardinal, Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne, now archbishop of Lima, has accused fellow bishops of a smear campaign of forged letters to undermine him.

How the tensions between those camps play out could affect not only issues of theology, but also how the church addresses related matters like the centralization of authority, the role of lay people, the decline in priestly vocations and the mounting challenge of evangelical Protestant groups in a region where nearly half the world's 1.1 billion Catholics live.
Full: nytimes