Has the Roman Catholic Church now come round in favour of revolution? It is in South America that the question arises above all. The multiplication of facts and declarations which provoke the question often incline one to give an affirmative answer. In order to see what’s what, it might be useful to review certain recent events that have been particularly noteworthy.

Most recent declarations rest on paragraphs 30 and 31 of Pope Paul Vi’s encyclical Populorum Progressio: ‘3o. There are certainly situations in which injustice cries to heaven. When entire populations, deprived of the necessities of life, live in a dependence that prevents them from exercising any initiative or responsibility, or from making any cultural advance or taking any part in social or political life, the temptation to remove such insults to human dignity by violence is great. 31. We know, however, that revolutionary insurrection—except in the case of manifest and prolonged tyranny that attacks fundamental rights of the person and endangers the common good of the country—engenders new injustices, brings in new imbalances, and involves new ruins. A real evil is not to be combated by a greater misery.’

These two paragraphs have in general been received as a faithful expression of the traditional thought of the Church. The new factor here is therefore not at the level of thought or of expression; it lies in the welcome it has received and in the way in which it has been interpreted at the hands of a Christian public that is as inclined to justify ‘revolutionary insurrection’ now as it was formerly to discourage or condemn it.