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Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ
Theology Today, Oct 2000 by Brueggemann, Walter
Torture and Eucharist:
Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ
By William T Cavanaugh
Oxford, Blackwell, 1998. 286 pp. $28.95. This remarkable book, authored by a faculty member of the University of St. Thomas, revisits the territory of the earlier remarkable book by Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford University Press, 1985). In that book, Scarry had argued that torture conducted by totalitarian regimes is not designed to secure information, but is done to "unmake," destroy, and dismantle the human person. Scarry proposed, informed by biblical and Marxian thought, that it is heard speech that is the antidote to torture and that permits the "making," regathering, and recovery of the assaulted, dismantled person. Cavanaugh makes essentially the same argument but with two important differences that immensely advance our learning.
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First, his analysis is a closely disciplined, well informed study of the self-discernment and conduct of the Roman Catholic Church under the Pinochet regime in Chile. He traces the way in which the Church and its hierarchial leadership unwittingly ceded to that brutal regime unlimited authority that in turn caused the Church to vacate its proper authority and responsibility. From that it follows, second, that Cavanaugh advances beyond Scarry by a focus on community rather than the individual in an analysis that revolves around ecclesial issues. His thesis is that torture by the Pinochet regime was conducted to preempt everything for the state and to make any community outside the sphere of the state (including that of the Church) illegitimate and finally impossible. The antidote to such totalism, to which the Chilean Church came late but finally boldly, is the determined practice of the eucharist as an act of community that knowingly situates itself over against the brutalizing reach of the state. Thus the book is an advocacy for an ecclesiology that is knowing about the deep freedom and the costly responsibility that rightly belongs to the church in its sacramental practice and self-understanding.
The book is divided into three parts. The first part is a report on the torture that is an instrument of the state that not only reflected and served the brutalizing government but in fact produced that very regime. Cavanaugh's profound understanding of the case in Chile lets the reader come close to the impossible situation of dread that the terror produced. On the one hand, the state offered a deliberate rhythm of violence seen and felt visibly and violence threatened and withheld, so that the reality and the invisible threat together gave the state totalizing power and left the Church no viable sphere of operation. On the other hand, Cavanaugh pays attention to the "bodily" work of the regime, the abuse of bodies and the disappearance of bodies. The recovery of brutalized bodies could have made martyrdom possible for the Church, but disappeared, never-recovered bodies produced only victims with no chance of martyrdom. The presentation lets the reader sense the deep, deep evil and deathliness in the way the state defined reality: The imagination of the state has a tremendous power to discipline bodies, to habituate them and script them into a drama of its own making .... Torture is rather both the production of that threat and the response to it, and thus the ritual site at which the state produces the reality in which its pretentions to omnipotence consist. In the second part of the book, however, it is clear that Cavanaugh's preoccupation is not the regime but the role of the Church vis-a-vis the regime. This section reflects how it was that the Church in Chile easily fell into collusion with the regime and only late "learned how to be oppressed." The argument is that from Pius XI and more particularly from Jacques Maritain the Church in Chile adopted an inadequate ecclesiology that made compliance with the regime seem normal, and that robbed the Church of the nerve and energy for resistance for a very long time. This section of the book is especially closely argued and makes for dense reading. In sum, the ecclesial formula received from Maritain is that the state possesses the body and leaves the soul for the Church. It was belatedly, only when the Church recognized its responsibility for the body, that it was able to resist and only then became oppressed by the regime. In this section, the book speaks of a "disappearing Church," reduced by the regime and left mute and ineffective in the face of systemic brutality. Had the Church not finally broken with this ecclesiology it may have lasted for a very long time in collusion with the defining power of the -regime.
The third part of the book concerns the recovery of the Church through the recovery of eucharist as a bodily act. The two chapters in this section are tellingly entitled, "The True Body of Christ" and "Performing the Body of Christ." The eucharist is understood as an act eschatological and revolutionary that makes public the claim that the regime is not entitled to bodies or to the body politic. The story told is how the Church slowly but daringly found its voice and its courage for its true bodily, eucharistic work in Chile.
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