Nicaragua: An Unfinished Canvas

When a revolution takes place, people look for the ideology that guides the building of the new society. Sometimes revolutions can be embarked upon rather hastily, and people may think the essence of a revolution is to overthrow a government. That is not the revolution. That is something that has to.happen prior to the revolution.

If, due to political myopia, the people decide that the revolution is the overthrowing and they do not carefully consider beforehand what they will do after the overthrow, they may run in haste to the international supermarket of ideological formulas to see which best fits their situation. Well, thank God, in Nicaragua, in the varying trails of our mountains and valleys and in our cities there has been in gestation for more than half a century a true Nicaraguan ideology, which we call Sandinismo.

Sandino was not a philosopher; he did not sit down to explain in a systematic way his political thought. He was a person endowed with a great amount of popular wisdom, and although he was without formal education, he synthesized the common denominator or the end result of Nicaraguan political thought, the result of our experience.

Sandinista thought rests on four fundamental pillars. The first is nationalism. We are not talking about chauvinism here, but about a nationalism that is manifested in the will of our people to regain sovereignty, to determine our own destiny, even to have the right to make our own mistakes and learn from them--and to determine what system of government we will opt for to best meet the needs of our people.

Sandinismo is not nationalistic in any sense that leads us to believe that we have discovered a formula that is good for any other country. We believe that, just as we are looking for our own way, every other country has to look for its own way. This is why for us it seems strange that we might be intent on exporting our revolution.

A revolution is not an exportable item. Revolutions can take place only when a people decides to make it possible, as happened in Nicaragua. Without broad popular participation, our revolution would not have been possible. And this participation was not only because of antagonism to Somoza. Many political groups during this half century tried to change the established order, but they never got wide popular support.

The natural wisdom of the people wants more than a negative plan to overthrow; the people want to know what we are going to do afterwards. Therefore, it was only when the Sandinista Front emerged that the popular support was captured that was indispensable in the overthrow of Somoza.

Another of these four pillars of Sandinista thought is a democratic aspiration. Now, you ask, why should we aspire to democracy if we never had it? Well, it is natural to humankind. We believe that humanity has been created in the image and likeness of God, created to be a co-creator with God in the unfinished task of making this a world after God's own design.

I am reminded of a marvelous painting of the baptism of Christ in a gallery in London. It was painted by Leonardo da Vinci's teacher, Verrocchio. In it you see John the Baptist pouring water over our Lord in the river. An angel stands by the side holding the garments of our Lord.

Verrocchio had great love and admiration for Leonardo, his young disciple, and he wanted him to participate in this masterpiece. So he asked Leonardo to paint the angel. Of course, the disciple was better than the teacher, and what is most interesting in that picture is the angel, although the whole work is very good.

And so our Lord also made us co-creators, wanting us to participate and share in the canvas. God initiated a process, and in his great love for humankind, decided not to do it all. Having been given that orientation, we cannot accept being reduced to the level of simple spectatorship in a game in which only a few play. We have a built-in need to actively participate with our God-given lights in the common task of searching for a more human and just society.

This democratic aspiration is not to be confused with an aspiration to have just the formality of democracy; we are talking about real participation. We are quite aware that democracy entails social democracy, economic democracy, political democracy, and many rights, such as the right to work, to a family wage, to learn, to read, to write--all those different rights that provide us with an opportunity to participate and not be manipulated.

We are moving in every direction to develop our new democratic Nicaragua. We are not going to fall to what Somoza did. He tried to give a shellac of democracy by having controlled elections from time to time, so that the United States could say that his regime was democratic. The U.S. is saying this about El Salvador and a great many other governments it wants to support.

The third pillar of Sandinista thought is its Christian element. Despite many deficiencies in the work of evangelization in Nicaragua, Christian evangelical gospel values have permeated down deep, and they are reflected in one of the main characteristics of Sandinismo.

I first realized this years back reading the things that Sandino wrote. In spite of the fact that he was fighting in the mountains of Nicaragua against interventionist American Marines and that the United States had imposed a National Guard on Nicaragua, which from the very beginning was the tool of American domination, Sandino always manifested love for the American people. He had a Christian attitude and did not wrap up in one package the people of the United States.

As much as two years before the triumph, we were afraid that after Somoza was overthrown there would be a popular reaction that we could not control and that the people would take justice into their own hands, taking revenge for the many grievances they had suffered for such a prolonged time. So we created a slogan and repeated it all the time: "Relentless in the struggle, but generous in victory." The Front was trying to prepare the people so that they would look upon generosity as a virtue. Few revolutions do that. Many would try to get people to understand why you should have mass killings or mass executions.

This reservoir of Christian values became apparent to the world after the revolution, when a great amount of forgiveness was manifested. Immediately after the overthrow, Commandante Tomas Borge decided to free every one of the former National Guardsmen in Matagalpa. Of course, we had to pay dearly for this because they went to the other side of the border and formed the nucleus of those who from Honduras are working against the revolution.

Soon after the overthrow I went with Tomas to visit the jail. The jail had a special area where former Somozan torturers were held, including the man who had tortured Tomas and who was most notorious.

Tomas said to him, "Remember when I told you I would take revenge when I was free? I now come for my revenge. For your hate and torture I give you love, and for what you did I give you freedom." And the man went free.

The fourth pillar of Sandinista thought is a further clarification of the second, which I said was a democratic ideal: we aspire to a system of social justice. This is a revolution that is being made to create a democratic system that has meaning and consequence for the people. And by "the people" I mean everyone, not just an elite, but everyone.

Sandinismo is not static. It develops and is enriched by new generations of Sandinistas.

As a 20th-century revolution, we are definitely influenced by Marxist thought. I certainly am, as many modern people are--maybe they don't know it--but they are influenced too. For example, the emphasis on conceptualizing the present as an historical trend to better understand it is one of the contributions of Marxism.

But also our understanding of capitalism is a contribution of Marxism. History will condemn the Catholic church for this particular myopia or blindness: we were never able to detect, until now, that there has never been in the history of Christianity anything more diametrically opposed to Christian values than liberal philosophy.

The underlying anthropological conception of liberalism is that humanity is fundamentally selfish, and if you want to have people working and producing you must cater to that selfishness. Anything else is unrealistic and idealistic. The liberal believes therefore that humanity is doomed to suffering.

The other terrible thing about liberalism is that it splits the person. It says that there are three separate realms: political, economic, and religious. Our Christian philosophical tradition says that the person is a whole and responsible agent. But the liberals say that if we go to church on Sunday, we are religious animals for that day. But on the next day, I may be a political animal or an economic animal.

So don't come to me, the owner of an enterprise, you priests, and tell me that I have to pay just wages. Don't intrude with your theological discipline into something that is autonomous--theology is a different realm. Don't talk to me about justice; that is an intrusion. The slogan is, "The business of business is business," which is to say, profit. Liberalism, then, supports capitalism with values that are certainly not Christian.

Every human being has to have ambition; ambition cannot be condemned. On the contrary, we Christians ought to be the most ambitious of all, because our Lord said that we should love one another as he loved us. That is quite an ambition, to love as Christ loved. Lest we miss the point, our Lord also said that we must be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect. In other words, always aspire to be more. But the question is, to what do we aspire?

Because capitalism is the economic expression of liberalism, when it comes to getting people to work, capitalism develops systems only for material incentives. People can be motivated materially, but we have two buttons, and if we only push the material incentive button, we will atrophy the moral incentive button. The liberal thought of being more through having more instead of being more through loving more, which is the Christian position, constitutes the greatest contradiction to Christianity.

When we develop a social situation in which we foment the idea that being more is having more, we are producing a cirrhosis of the heart. In time the heart becomes so hardened that the Word of God will not be able to permeate it; so much so that sometimes I ask myself, will it be possible to be Western and to be Christian? Oh, I could keep the mitre and the cross and the incense, but there will be no Christianity if we continue on this terrible course.

From a philosophical perspective, of course, Marx helps us understand the connection between liberal philosophy, capitalism, and imperialism, and the connection between liberal thought, capitalism, and racism. Sure, no one really believes that someone is inferior because of color, but a different pigmentation helps you justify exploitation.

So in the Sandinistas, we have been very much aided by Marxist thought to understand some great problems. But we have been equally or more influenced by Christian thought.

In Latin America the church had been for so long identified with the powers that be, with an established order that was not a Christian established order. We had been preaching resignation and helping the rich to continue exploiting, telling the people that later they would be rewarded if they accepted this exploitation. We were preaching a kind of idolatry toward the system just because it was.

To preach resignation indiscriminately is very dangerous. Resignation in the face of the inevitable is oftentimes a virtue, but some types of resignation are sinful. To resign yourself to the point that you become an accomplice with crime, with exploitation, is a total refusal to do the will of God and become a leavening and transforming agent in society.

A process of renewal in the Catholic church began after Vatican II permeated our reality through the historic meeting of Latin American bishops in 1968 in Medellin, Colombia. It filtered down and reached Catholic schools, where they began to have qualms of conscience that they were educating only the elite and helping them to live in a bubble separate from the rest of their brothers and sisters.

The schools began to foment the idea that young students should voluntarily help out in the poor barrios, in the poor neighborhoods, with parish priests who were working among the poor. That's how the students discovered the plight of their brothers and sisters and began to search for what to do. From there they went to the mountains and joined the Sandinista Front. Very many of these students who are in high government positions today are very young, because this all happened in the early '70s. The great growth in the Sandinista Front occurred when the church began this process of renewal in Nicaragua and consciences began to open. Commandante Daniel Ortega publicly has said that he went to the revolutionary struggle because he understood that was what was demanded if he was to be faithful to Christ.

Do you know the apostle Thomas? Most people are like Thomas. They can't simply accept that the Lord was resurrected, and so the Lord says to them, "Come and put your finger in my wounds." Christ wanted to show Thomas his credentials, because Thomas demanded to inspect them. We preach the message of our Lord. But the people want credentials. Where are our wounds, what are we suffering? In every Gospel you will see what our Lord is promising you: persecution. The inevitable consequence of doing the Father's will is the cross. And the Father's will is that we proclaim the brotherhood and sisterhood of all of us under God and therefore necessarily denounce whatever stands in the way of achieving this brotherhood and sisterhood. Do that, and our Lord says that we will be persecuted as he was persecuted; the disciple is no greater than the Master.

Eight years before the insurrection, after the earthquake, I talked to the archbishop. And I said, "Archbishop, don't you see how this is going to explode?" To me it seemed inevitable that sooner or later in spite of the great patience of our people--everything human is limited--that patience would run out. I said, "Bishop, it is going to be terrible, there will be so many dead people, so much destruction and death. Why don't we go into the streets? You lead us, armed with the rosary in our hands and prayers on our lips and chants and songs in repudiation for what has been done to our people. The worst that can happen to us is the best, to share with Christ the cross if they shoot us.

"If they do shoot us, there will be a consciousness aroused internationally. And maybe the people in the United States will be alerted and will pressure their government so that it won't support Somoza, and then maybe we can be freed without the destruction that I see ahead."

And the archbishop said, "No Miguel, you tend to be a little bit idealistic, and this destruction is not going to happen." And then when it did happen, the church insisted on nonviolence. To be very frank with you, I don't think that violence is Christian. Some may say that this is a reactionary position. But I think that the very essence of Christianity is the cross. It is through the cross that we will change.

I have come to believe that creative nonviolence has to be a constitutive element of evangelization and of the proclamation of the gospel. But in Nicaragua nonviolence was never included in the process of evangelization.

The cancer of oppression and injustice and crime and exploitation was allowed to grow, and finally the people had to fight with the means available to them, the only means that people have found from of old: armed struggle. Then the church arrogantly said violence was bad, nonviolence was the correct way.

I don't believe that nonviolence is something you can arrive at rationally. We can develop it as a spirituality and can obtain the grace necessary to practice it, but not as a result of reason. Not that it is anti-reason, but that it is not natural. The natural thing to do when somebody hits you is to hit them back.

We are called upon to be supernatural. We reach that way of being, not as a result of nature, but of prayer. But that spirituality and prayer and work with people's consciences has never been done. We have no right to hope to harvest what we have not sown.

Our Lord never said that we should take our cross and walk. He said, "Take your cross and follow me." Our Lord was the first to be nailed, spat upon, and crowned with thorns. He led as Martin Luther King led. That is why I always look upon King as the Christian who most exemplifies what it means to follow our Lord today.

No one has influenced my own life more than Martin Luther King. For years and years it was his book The Strength to Love that I used in chapel for meditation. I gave a copy to many priests. And it was Martin Luther King's picture that hung in my office when I was in New York. But I used to look upon the picture with a certain amount of guilt or shame, because I admired him so much and wanted to follow what he had done, but I. was afraid.

And then it came to me one day as we were preparing for Lent and I was alone in my office thinking, "Well, another Lent, and the same old mediocre me. What am I to do? You may say you are not going to eat hot dogs or do a particular thing; well, that doesn't help anyone. So what am I going to do for this Lent?"

I stayed there for a long time oblivious to everything, and then a prayer formulated: "Lord, help me to understand the mystery of your cross. Help me to love the cross and give me the guts to embrace it in whatever shape or form it comes."

And everything was different all of a sudden because the cross became to me a symbol of life, the beginning of life. I began to see it inseparable and indistinguishable from resurrection. Why? Because we come to understand in John that life is love, and greater love has no one than to give his or her life. The cross is the greatest act of love, and therefore the greatest manifestation of life.

During the revolution I was greatly uplifted by the experience of praying and offering the sacrifice of the Mass, celebrating the Eucharist with people who were in the struggle. It was a wonderful experience because for the first time I realized that we were not only repeating the words of Christ, "This is my blood, this is my body, which is shared, which is offered for all." Our Lord didn't want us only to repeat those words, he wanted us to repeat them after we had made them our own.The people who were participating in those prayers were making them real, because we didn't know if at that celebration or immediately afterwards, we would share our own blood and give our life--and many people did.

I remember that one day, late in the evening, I came to a camp where some combatants for the revolution were sitting in the grass under a tree having a conversation. They saw me coming and asked me to celebrate the Eucharist. I had no bread or wine, but I was able to respond to their request to "give us some uplifting words from the gospel of our Lord."

As I talked I noticed that one young man was fidgeting and seemed very uneasy. Finally I said, "Hernand, it looks to me as if you want to say something."

"You are always talking about the Lord," he replied. "Who is this Lord? The Lord People?"

"No, not the Lord People," I answered, "although he is identified with the people and is the Lord of many."

At this point an older man broke in, "Father, don't be upset with this young companero. He is a good boy, he's just very revolutionary and has gotten himself confused by reading a book written by that Spaniard."

"What Spaniard?" I asked.

"Karl Marx."

No one laughed, and the man continued, "I don't know how to read. But I can tell this little fellow who the Lord is, because my grandfather used to tell us about him."

At that everyone hushed, because they knew that the older man's grandfather had been a lieutenant with Sandino. The man continued, "I don't want to brag, but I remember what my grandfather said. He said it was all in the book--the Bible. There it says that God is the Father of all of us and that Christ is his Son and is both God and man. We are all brothers and sisters, and we must be willing to give our lives for one another.

"So that's why when I was at home in my little town near Honduras and we heard on the radio that we must go to free our people, all of us Christians knew that we were supposed to be willing to risk our lives. And so we went in obedience to the Lord."

My father died three months before the triumph. He knew he was dying, because his heart was getting bigger and bigger and this was making it difficult for him to breathe.

I was living clandestinely at the time and couldn't visit him. But I heard that a bomb had been placed in his house, and it exploded where he usually sat. Somoza's people were looking for me, and after the bomb exploded, 36 armed men came and threw my father to the floor and demanded to know where I was.

After the men left, my father called me because he was afraid that news of this event would weaken me, make me worried. And he said, "I want you to know that your mother and I wanted to call and tell you not to worry about us because no one can really kill us." This is a new understanding of death: they can shoot our bodies but they cannot kill us.

And he said, "Don't be afraid yourself to die. I am praying with your mother one more rosary." (By now they were up to about six, because for every thing that I got involved in he was praying another rosary.) "I am praying with your mother that you have the Christian guts to accept Calvary, if that is what the Lord wants."

But our struggle didn't end with the overthrow of Somoza, because we are still working for Patria Libre o Morir, a free country or death--free from internal tyranny, from external oppression, domination, and control; free to do what we believe is in the best interest of our people and will result in a social situation that will be certainly compatible with our Christian faith and belief. And in that commitment we continue.

Lopez Portillo, the former president of Mexico, met with Reagan not too long ago, and he said to me after the meeting that he told President Reagan he should not make a mistake in evaluating Nicaraguans. He said to Reagan, "You have to understand that those people in Nicaragua are just crazy enough to mean it when they say 'a free country or death.' They are not afraid to die for the sake of keeping this freedom."

In fact, that freedom began when the inner shackles of fear were broken, by the grace of God. All liberation must be first spiritual and internal. A free people can then proceed to free a nation, with freedom to do what it feels is the right and the just thing to do, regardless of the consequences.

What we are striving to do is to create a new Nicaragua, a Nicaragua that is really a Nicaragua of all of us, not just of a certain class. One doesn't choose the cradle; one chooses only the alliances that one makes.

I happened to be born into a class that enjoyed everything, which the majority of my brothers and sisters in Nicaragua did not. We could not continue to pray the Our Father because the hypocrisy of saying it became very repugnant. I can only say Our Father if I am concerned for the lot of every individual as if he or she really were my brother or sister. I could not honestly pray or go to communion. Then I realized that "I" was "we," we Nicaraguans, because this is a collective experience that led us to assume this position that took us to where we are now and for which we are being penalized. Pray that we can embrace the cross and endure being penalized for doing the Father's will, for proclaiming in word and deed the universal brotherhood and sisterhood of all of us.

Nicaragua has embarked on a project destined to secure for the first time real autonomy, sovereignty, and independence for our nation so that we can create a social, political, and economic situation that would allow us to live as brothers and sisters and respect the God-given dignity of each individual. Now we are confronted with this very aggressive attitude from people and governments that prior to this time were able to get along so well with the system that oppressed our people and condemned us to a most inhuman existence.

In their effort to discredit Nicaragua, some in the United States have tried to manipulate a presumed bad situation between church and state, and have launched allegations of religious persecution. Not that they ever cared much for religion, but if they can make these allegations to the people of their country, they can reduce any resistance to their political objectives against Nicaragua. This is why it is for us vital that our Christian brothers and sisters in the United States and elsewhere actively protest against this manipulation of the religious feelings of the people at home.

The triumph over Somoza has come, and we can begin, as patriots and Christians, to build this new country. It is only natural for the church to participate by developing the inner spiritual disposition among the people, so that their generosity would be up to par with what the revolution demands. The revolution demands that we abandon ideas of only ourselves becoming better off. It demands a great amount of brotherhood and sisterhood and sharing and thinking not only of myself but of us.

But soon after the revolution I saw that unfortunately there were some members of our church in very high and prominent places who opted to side with the small minority, who could not be satisfied by a popular revolution because they could not retain the privileges and prerogatives that they had enjoyed of old. And we had some inner church conflicts, which not only involved us as priests sympathetic with the revolutionary process, but at this point in time, as those exercising positions of responsibility within our government. It was alleged that we were doing something not in keeping with our responsibility as priests. It was even pretended that our actions were somehow against our Christian and priestly commitment.

But thank God we have the Gospels and the parables and the many ways in which our Lord tried through different means to clarify his message. When these conflicts arose I began to think more and more about the good Samaritan, because, like him, and the priest who went ahead and the other religious man who followed him, I was on the way to Jericho. My life had a very specific agenda. I had my work cut out for me, but all of a sudden the unexpected happened. There was my fellow countryman bleeding by the roadside, and I had to get off the beast and forget, for the time being, going to Jericho.

We go and we do, not what the priest did or the second man, but the one whom the Jews said could not be saved--the Samaritan. And so, we must be obedient to the Lord who calls us in many ways, and sometimes through events in which you, all of a sudden, find yourself immersed.

I am a man, a Nicaraguan, a Christian, and a priest, all of which demand of me certain things, but not contradictory demands. Being a Christian and being a priest means that I have to fulfill even more abundantly and completely the demands made upon a man and a citizen of a country. And I would never, by the grace of God, for fear of any reprisals, betray the people, who must be always the most important thing--the people for whom our Lord became incarnate, lived, died, and was resurrected.

And if, in trying to be faithful to what I believe is what our Lord demands of us in unusual circumstances, I suffer consequences, I will accept them. I have been told that I cannot celebrate the Holy Eucharist in public or private because somehow I'm supposed to be a scandal. It was the very center of my life. Well, I accept that. But when I was told that, I cried the whole night.

So, we go back to prayer: only to understand it, to love it, and to embrace it. You must join me in prayer that I will never betray the people, that I will accept the consequences of solidarity with the people who hunger for justice and for peace and for brotherhood and sisterhood.

Miguel D'Escoto was Nicaragua's foreign minister and a Maryknoll priest at the time this article appeared. This article was taken from an interview.