Memento of the Living and the Dead: A First-Person Account of Church, Violence, and Resistance in Latin America by Phillip Berryman (review)

Few scholars have been as prolific as Phillip Berryman, including those who have spent entire careers within the confines of the formal academy. Yet Berryman, like many of the liberation theologians whose work he has chronicled, writes out of his personal experience, and it is only fitting that he would eventually gather the breadth and depth of that experience together in a memoir. The 1973 essay “Latin American Liberation Theology” in Theological Studies introduced many readers—particularly in the United States—to liberation theology as a subject of critical inquiry, and his subsequent monographs and translations of classic theologians like José Comblin, Leonardo and Clodovis Boff, and Ignacio Ellacuría evince a remarkable and consistent productivity over the past half-century. Not every scholar’s life would make for a compelling memoir, but Phillip Berryman’s is completely cinematic.

One of the features that consistently amplifies Berryman’s narrative is that he repeatedly finds himself within some version of an inner sanctum, on the cusp of world-historical events: the Second Vatican Council, the rise of liberation theology in Latin America, the Cold War. Of course, generations of people lived through these events, but relatively few have had Berryman’s level of access to major players, nor the capacity to tell us about it. Throughout the memoir, Berryman weaves in and out of worlds: ordained to the priesthood in 1962, he spent upwards of a decade in Panama and other parts of Latin America living among base communities and serving as a grassroots pastor before discerning a vocation to family life, and then continuing his work on human rights, most prominently under the auspices of the Philadelphia-based American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). The memoir is punctuated by an enduring sense of liminality, that Berryman is a sojourner—albeit a thoroughly engaged one—which affords him a unique insider/outsider perspective: in but not wholly of the communities he chronicles. Even by the time his family returns to the United States for good, he had spent so many years in Latin America that he finds himself estranged from his home country.

For someone who has lived such a big life, Berryman’s writing exudes a sense of calm that contrasts with the intensity of the very different environments he found himself inhabiting: the enclosed pressure-cooker clerical world of preconciliar seminary life and Latin American revolutionary movements responding to structures of oppression and empire. Even the litany of theological icons who make casual appearances in the text is dizzying: Paulo Freire, Ivan Illich, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Ernesto Cardinal, Juan Luis Segundo, Jon Sobrino, Oscar Romero. As Berryman himself notes, much of this text is a “necrology of the fallen.” There is so much death and dispossession during some parts of the memoir: in some cases it seems like no sooner do characters enter the story than they are exiled or assassinated. Even though you know what is coming—particularly for the more prominent figures—it is shocking nonetheless. The martyrs who composed Berryman’s friends and colleagues throughout Latin America are a powerful reminder of the high stakes of resisting authoritarianism. Berryman himself was the subject of repeated episodes of government surveillance, which escalated dramatically in 1980 when he and his family had to escape back to the United States to avoid detention by the Guatemalan military. He subsequently returned to Central America repeatedly, sometimes reporting on conditions using a pseudonym to protect his identity.

Throughout the bulk of his memoir, Berryman excavates the complexities of internal distinctions within revolutionary movements, as well as the fallout from U.S. policies in Latin America. However, in the final chapter, “The View from Eighty,” he pivots to a reflection on the current political climate and contemporary justice movements, informed by his abundant experience of both practical organizing and critical...