The respected Catholic News Agency has published an interview with Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former general in Romania’s secret police who was one of the Eastern Bloc’s highest-ranking defectors in the 1970s. In it, he says that Soviet Union – and the KGB in particular – created liberation theology, the quasi-Marxist movement that flourished in Latin America from the 1960s to the 1990s and is still a powerful influence on the Catholic Left.
The interview provides fresh evidence of the infiltration of liberation theology by Russia – a subject Catholic liberals would much rather not discuss, just as they don’t want to know about the heavy Soviet investment in CND.
But first, some caveats. Pacepa, pictured above in specs that look as if they were designed by Dame Edna, is now well to the right of the American political spectrum. He’s not into nuance and he exaggerates. I don’t believe that the KGB ‘created’ a movement as complex as liberation theology and I’m far from convinced that its name was dreamt up in the Lubyanka.
But Pacepa – whose defection to the US in 1978 scared Ceausescu so badly that he reportedly tried to get Carlos the Jackal to kill him – makes detailed claims that the Soviets kick-started, funded and moulded liberation theology (some of whose priests, it must be conceded, worked heroically among the poor).
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