[Black Pope of Liberation][22nd March 1991]

[Redbook8:358][19910322:1201f][Black Pope of Liberation ][22nd March 1991]

19910322.1201

[continued]

[A press-cutting inserted in the ms from the Guardian 19910207:39 but not reproduced in the ts, headed: ‘Obituary: Father Pedro Arrupe: Black Pope of liberation’ , by Richard Gott, includes the following text highlighted in the ms:]

‘“At that moment,”* recalled Arrupe, “a blinding flash like a magnesium flare ripped across the blue of the sky. I was in my office at the time with another Jesuit and I immediately jumped up and put my hand out of the window. A muffled and continuous roar, more like a distant waterfall than a bomb that had just exploded, reached us with terrifying force. The entire house began to shake. The windows splintered and fell in, the doors came off their hinges, and the thin Japanese partition walls of mud and wattle shattered like a deck of playing cards flattened by some gigantic hand. This terrifying force, that we felt was going to tear the building from its foundations, threw us to the floor... a continuous shower of debris rained down on our bodies stretched out immobile on the ground.”’

‘Subsequently in 1968**... he published another letter sketching the outlines of the new liberation theology....’

‘In retrospect, that meeting [of the Latin American bishops’ conference at Medellin in Colombia in 1968] was. Perhaps, the high water mark of radicalism in the [Roman] Catholic Church in this century.’

* 'At 8.15 in the morning of August 6, 1945' [in Hiroshima]

**{64G~1968}

[PostedBlogger04022024]