Exile and the prophetic: Encountering Otto Maduro

This post is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.

When I heard of Otto Maduro’s passing, I remembered our first encounter in 1981.  I had just arrived at Maryknoll and its school of theology.  The Dean gave me the task of founding a program in Justice and Peace Studies.

Though most know Otto through his teaching at Drew Theological School in the 1990s and beyond, his introduction to North America and his most natural environment was Maryknoll in the 1980s.  I knew Otto before he mainstreamed into the higher education industry in America.

Though Maryknoll is headquartered in upstate New York, its reach is global.  As missionaries, Maryknoll has personnel in Africa, Asia and the Middle East but it is known mostly for its work in Latin America.   Because of the rise of liberation theology and Maryknoll’s publishing arm, Orbis Books, as well as the deteriorating political situation in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, Maryknoll’s name is known throughout the world. 

Over the years, Maryknoll underwent a transformation from an all-Catholic/convert the pagans and an all-American/CIA infiltrated missionary group, to become a conduit for the spread of liberation theology. 

Maryknoll went missionary rogue – or better – Maryknoll went missionary prophet. 

Maryknoll’s conversion to the poor was big news and deservedly so.  The Catholic Church in Latin America is historically a bulwark of the unjust status quo.  What are the political implications if the Church sides with the poor?  

Maryknoll’s transformation placed it at odds with American foreign policy.  These were the Reagan years.  American foreign policy has changed little since.

Maryknoll’s commitment proved costly.  Just months after I arrived at Maryknoll, two Maryknoll Sisters and a lay worker were murdered in El Salvador.  Maryknoll’s commitment was expanding.  The loss was enormous.

I remember the services held at Maryknoll in honor of the slain Sisters.  People referred to the Sisters as martyrs.  Their cause wasn’t converting the pagans.  Along with other Sisters, they were helping the poor and the abandoned. 

As a Jew, I come from a tradition of martyrs whose martyrdom often came at the hands of Christians.   I listened – and felt – intensely as the Maryknoll community grieved its loss.  However, the emphasis was on the unknown Salvadorans perishing at an alarming rate and the complicity of the United States government.  Later I learned – and wrote about – Israel’s involvement in arming the dictatorships in Central America. 

In my initial months at Maryknoll my understanding of martyrdom expanded.  Soon it included Palestinians martyred by Israel with the support of the American Jewish establishment. 

As a young director of a new program, Maryknoll sent me to see its work in Latin America.  My first stop was Colombia, then on to Venezuela, Chile, Peru and Nicaragua.  As a North American Jew, I was being educated to the global realities beyond the United States, Europe and Israel. 

In Latin America, I witnessed a radical side of Christianity I didn’t know existed.  It influenced me deeply.  It changed my life.

My eyes opened wide.  Raised in the tradition of the prophets, I was soon to go prophet too.  Liberation theology in Latin America was a good schooling for the prophetic reborn.

 As I immersed myself in the Christian world of liberation theology, I soon faced a perplexing and significant question.  After a long and bitter history, could Jews and Christians go prophet together?

Meeting Otto in his native Venezuela was an experience.  His long hair, bushy beard and wire rim glasses made a first impression.  The lasting impression was more important.  Anyone who ever met Otto knows how engaging and friendly he was.   Otto had a huge heart and appetite for life.  It brought others close to him. 

Otto was a sociologist of religion and I brought his book Religion and Social Conflicts along for my Latin American ride.  After reading parts of his book and listening to him lecture on Marxism, social engagement and religion, I knew Otto’s voice was important. 

Otto was the first Latin American intellectual I ever met.  Though a sociologist, he helped open the world of Latin American theologians to a searching Jew.  Unbeknownst to me at the time, meeting Otto was the first step on my journey toward a Jewish theology of liberation.

How so?  What I saw in Otto and others I met on my journey in Latin America was an engaged witness.  Thought, action and faith went hand in hand.  With this combination, Christian liberationists went to the root of their faith – the prophetic.  They saw their task as liberating Christianity from its captivity to power and empire. 

I was observing the Exodus story in modern times.  How could the poor be liberated when the Church was in bed with the oppressors?  Breaking free of captivity needed social analysis, sociology and philosophy as well as theology.

As Jews we have been seduced by power and empire.  When I listened to Otto and other Christian liberationists, I saw Jewish history flash before my eyes.  The Jewish community was drowning in its own power, especially in the oppression of the Palestinian people.   Our entire ethical tradition was at risk. 

Christianity lost its ethical impulse so early it’s hard for Christians to remember its roots.  Recovering Christianity’s prophetic roots entails calling on the Jewish prophetic tradition.  Listening to Otto, I asked myself how it was that Jews were backing away from the prophetic call.  Where were we as the prophetic call went out from Latin America?

Jews were going AWOL on the prophetic.  Deserting our prophetic post after the Holocaust was understandable.  Deserting our prophetic post after Israel – and what Israel is doing to the Palestinian people – is unforgivable.

Within months of my first encounter with Otto, Maryknoll brought him to New York to teach in my program in Justice and Peace Studies.  Together we developed the most innovative program in religious education in the 1980s.  To this day, it remains the only educational program in North America with liberation theology as its foundation. 

Sad to say, today’s seminary and university studies in theology and religion suffer in comparison.  Though some liberationist perspectives have been included, mostly we find a cooptation of liberationist language in the educational-industrial complex.  After all, most seminary and university sponsors are thoroughly imbued with an empire sensibility.   Buildings have to be funded.   Professors need to get paid.  The climb to full Professor is difficult if you tell the truth.

Our program’s most publicly-known accomplishment was the celebration of Gustavo Gutierrez’s life and work in 1988.  Otto and I worked on this celebration together, eventually co-editing a festschrift in Gustavo’s honor, The Future of Liberation Theology:  Essays in Honor of Gustavo Gutierrez.

Gustavo Gutierrez is the Peruvian founder of Latin American liberation.  He has had a profound effect on many around the world.  Gustavo was instrumental in convincing Otto that it was possible to be a radically engaged political thinker, activist and a person of faith at the same time.  In Latin America – indeed all over the world – this connection wasn’t obvious then.  It still isn’t.

I will never forget Otto standing on stage with Gustavo after presenting him with a bound copy of the papers from our conference in his honor.  When they embraced, I wept.

My tears were ones of joy and sadness.  I marveled at their camaraderie.  Still, I had a sense of foreboding.  How long could this camaraderie continue without the institutional Church breaking it apart?  Could Jews of Conscience experience this camaraderie and, if so, how long would it be before the Jewish establishment brought it to a halt?

After the publication of my Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation in 1987, Otto edited a book on my work, Judaism, Christian and Liberation Theology:  An Agenda for Dialogue.  The essays printed there were the first encounter of Latin American theologians with a Jewish theology of liberation.  As far as I know they remain the only published encounter. 

Recently I traveled to Puerto Rico celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Spanish translation of my Jewish theology of liberation, Hacia una teologia judia de la liberacion.   The people I met in Puerto Rico agreed that it’s time for a renewed dialogue and broadening of the interfaith dialogue into a solidarity of Jews, Christians and Muslims of Conscience.  Otto’s passing might provide such an occasion.

 What should we remember about Otto?  As a person he was many sided.  He was gregarious and loved to laugh.  He was thoroughly decent. 

Otto was guarded as well.  His openness was real.  Sometimes it was a deflection.

In the early years of our relationship, Otto told me of his life in Venezuela as a committed intellectual and activist.  This included being hunted by the authorities.  One day Otto was trailed by plainclothes police who called him out by name.  If Otto had turned to acknowledge his name, he would have been shot dead.

He also told me about torture, a particularly relevant topic in our post-September 11th world.  Otto knew friends who had been tortured.  He was a torture candidate himself.  Naturally, Otto was frightened of that possibility but also commented on the “advances” in the bureaucracy of torture.  Previously in Venezuela the person who captured you was the person who inflicted the torture.  You knew your torturer.  It was face to face.  Over the years, torture has become more specialized and distant.  As Otto commented, now you don’t even know who your torturer is.

Once hunted, you are never the same.  Otto had anxiety about his own life and the life of others.  When I embarked on a Jewish theology of liberation, Otto encouraged me.  His encouragement didn’t hide his concern.

Otto and I sometimes traveled together.  Once we went to Alaska to give lectures.  A Bishop there had a four seat plane he used to travel to outlying parishes.  As a courtesy, he had his pilot fly us over the mountains so we could see some of Alaska’s wilderness from the air.  In a jocular mood, the pilot asked if I would like to fly the plane for a while.  As I took the controls, I heard a guttural sound emanating from the back seat.  Otto wasn’t pleased.

Otto and I often laughed together, especially when the seriousness of the matter suggested the absurd.  One such time was when Otto was invited to appear on television in Miami. The host wanted Otto to share his reflections on Castro.  Otto declined. 

  When I protested that I had gone to Jerusalem, spoken there and survived, he smiled.   Otto thought Cubans and Castro in Miami was tougher than Israeli oppression of Palestinians in Jerusalem. After a few moments, we embraced and laughed about the absurdity of my lecturing in Jerusalem and his reluctance to be interviewed in Miami.

On Castro, Otto was tough and angry – in private.  Of course, Otto supported the Cuban revolution.  He knew of the severe strains the American government placed on Cuba.  Nonetheless, Otto was furious that Castro had developed a cult of personality and a dictatorial-style.  Otto was a democratic socialist.  He wanted justice and democracy.

Like other Latin American liberationists, Otto embraced my Jewishness and the long journey of the Jewish people.  Though the Jewish establishment often accuses liberation theology of being anti-Semitic, my experience is to the contrary.  Christian liberationists like Otto were thoroughly scandalized by the history of Christianity, especially its anti-Semitism.  Because of this history, they were reluctant to speak about Israel’s aggression against the Palestinian people.  They still are.

Some say that the post-Vatican II days of the Catholic Church are over.  Others say liberation theology is on its last legs.  Yes, the life of Otto Maduro is impossible to replicate.  There will be no more Gustavo Gutierrez’s.   The Dorothy Day I came to know in my Catholic Worker days was a one-off personality formed in a distinctive era.

The days of Maryknoll’s influence and subversive witness are receding.  The transformation of the Vatican II Church into a broad based interfaith movement of peoples of conscience has fallen on hard times.  Otto’s passing is symbolic of a great generation coming to an end.

Nonetheless, the remnants of this prophetic Catholic movement remain.  With all the complexities involved, I am grateful that as a Jew I encountered this altered face of the Christian witness.  It helped heal me heal from the wounds of the Christian anti-Semitic past.  It provided strength for my journey as a Jew of Conscience to confront the wrong turn in my own community.

Like Otto and the people I met through Maryknoll, Jews of Conscience have failed in our effort to turn the Jewish community toward justice.  We have failed together. 

But know this – and Otto’s life is a vivid testimony to this truth:  The prophetic voice will never die.  The prophetic voice remains.  It is exploding in our time.

In the last years I lost track of Otto.  Something happened between us.  Once he broached reconciliation but my situation had become difficult.  Such is life.

Those who reach out to others don’t always have the most peaceful relations with comrades.  But Otto didn’t turn his back on others.  He wasn’t a social climber like some in the justice, peace and conflict industry.  Nor did he abandon those down on their luck, another pitfall of those who are on their way up. 

With Otto, once a friend, always a friend.

Otto was an up-front person.   He knew what it was like to be hunted.

With Jews of Conscience, Otto longed for a world of mutual embrace and justice.

We honor his memory by deepening that embrace and struggle.