As President Bush visits Mexico, Central, and South America he will encounter a region grown much friendlier to Castro's legacy of Latin American Marxism than when he took office. Not only in the Venezuela of Hugo Chavez but also in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua the sons and daughters of Castro have mounted an insurgence.

None of these countries, unsurprisingly, is on the President's agenda.

Yet, the spreading power of the revolutionary populism will be evident throughout the countries visited by Bush because one of the principal vehicles for Marxism is still, unfortunately, the Catholic Church.

One of the first, and most public, actions of John Paul II was his 1979 rebuke of liberation theologian Ernest Cardenal at the Managua airport in Nicaragua. However, with the passing of John Paul II, Catholic Marxists are organizing to reassert the dominance of liberation theology.

Their efforts will culminate at the upcoming May 5th meeting of the General Conference of Latin American Bishops in Aparacida, Brazil. The event will be inaugurated by Pope Benedict XVI and will define pastoral trends for the Church in Latin America for decades to come.

Aparacida is a National Marian shrine two hours from São Paulo, the second largest archdiocese in the world. According to sources in South America, the Latin American bishops don't realize that liberation and feminist theologians are preparing to hijack the Conference. These old left-wingers, who are virulently anti-American, hope to control the agenda with a "Theology of the Excluded" infused throughout all the conference documents.

If these documents emerge unchanged from the Aparacida Conference they will be given pastoral and moral authority throughout Latin America -- the result will be a disaster for orthodox Catholic teaching. The issues directly affected will be Church governance and authority, women's ordination, priestly celibacy, abortion, and homosexuality. Also included in the documents are a rejection of capitalism and a healthy dose of anti-American hatred.

The bishop who secured permission for the Conference from John Paul II - Cardinal Francesco Xavier de Errazuriz of Santiago, Chile - according to my sources, is unaware of these preparations and is "being used" by Marxist theologians and activists.

Some liberation theologians have made no effort to cloak their intentions. The July-August 2006 issue of the Mexican theological journal Christus was devoted to what should happen during the 5th Conference of Latin American Bishops in May at Aparacida. Christus is the flagship magazine of Jesuit publications in Mexico and Central America.

The authors of the Christus essays propose:

• The re-birth of liberation theology, this time to fight against the dominance of a free market and the U.S. in Latin America.
  
   
• The reduction of the Catholic Church to a political and social organization.
  
   
• The "redefinition" of the Church's teachings on family, life and marriage in line with "gender" ideology.
  
   
• The renewed push for married priests and women priests.
  
   
• The "democratization" of the Church in both its administration and selection of its authorities.
  
   

The editorial "introduction" makes the agenda of liberation theology clear: The Church needs "to break with the church-centered spirit that breathes in many environments. The community of followers of Jesus is not in the world to be in charge of its own growth and perpetuation…it is rather a matter of being in the service of human beings, of a clear option for the poor, so that they all have life."

The lead article in Christus magazine is indicative of what is in store for the bishops at the Aparacida Conference. The author is a Brazilian Jesuit, Fr. Joao Batista Libiano. Fr. Libiano is the author of several books criticizing Pope John Paul II, a national advisor to the Brazilian "Ecclesial Base Communities" (CEBs,) as well as a founding member of SOTER, a liberal Catholic think tank based in Northern Brazil, mainly dedicated to promoting liberation theology. (These Latin American think tanks that keep liberation theology alive receive their funding from the United States and Europe.)

Fr. Libiano insists the Church must "Revisit the issue of ordained ministry in light of the options of the Second Vatican Council..." He then proposes reincorporating the ordination of married men, women, and those priests who have been previously liaised. "The celibate clergy hardly manages to grasp many of the problems that affect the family." He also includes the importance of "taking into account the new forms of the family that escape the traditional model."

In classic dissenting fashion, Fr. Libiano takes aim at the authority structure of the Church: He writes that, "The relationship between the Bishops' Conferences and the diocesan bishops requires a binding character on certain subjects; that the selection of pastors and bishops be done in a mandatory way with a greater participation of those faithful interested; that the diocesan advisors, including people from the community, may assume, not the role of a merely decorative and consultative forum, but one with the power to make decisions."

In other words, the power to pick bishops and place pastors should be made "democratically."

Fr. Libiano also writes scathingly about the influence of the United States: "In the field of economics, we find a despotic, solitary reign [referring to the U.S.], and of neo-liberalism, with the terrible consequences that we all know. Democracies were established in replacement of military regimes in Latin America, but they were put in the service of neo-liberalism [capitalism], with few changes in favor of the popular classes."

The other authors of the articles from this issue include: Fr. Agenor Brighenti, Brazilian Franciscan theologian, and author of the "The Future of the Church and the Church of the Future," which was highly critical of the current Catholic leadership; Fr. Sebastián Mier, a Spanish Jesuit with a doctorate in Biblical studies; Fr. Francisco Lucas Núñez, Mexican priest and pastor in the diocese of Tarahumara, Northern Mexico; Rosemari de Almeida, Lay leader involved in women's organizations in Brazil and a member of the leadership of the "Movimento Sem Terra," the left-wing organization of "landless" peasants.

The Aparacida Conference will be a vital meeting for the Church in Latin America, where almost half of all Catholics in the world reside. What direction the Church takes in Latin America has immediate consequences for the Church Universal and for the United States in particular. An emboldened core group of liberation theologians in Latin America will spread dissent and Marxist social theory around the world and throughout the Church.

There has not been such a meeting of Latin American bishops since 1992. And as one of my sources puts it, "In 1992 there was no Internet and cell phones were a rarity: the Bishops are convening in a whole different world!" What he means, of course, is that Catholic Marxists are using the new technology to control the agenda and outcome of the Aparacida Conference.

Pope Benedict XVI, however, can be counted upon to call the Marxists to task in no less a pointed way than his predecessor. Let's hope that his intervention reaches down to the level of the official documents adopted at the Aparacida Conference.

Catholic Marxists are hoping those documents will legitimize their efforts to undermine Church teaching on core issues of morality and authority.