Champion of liberation theology gets rehabilitation treatment

History of a particular kind was made yesterday in the Holy See, where Peruvian theologian Fr Gustavo Gutiérrez, one of the founding fathers of “liberation theology”, was unofficially “rehabilitated”.

Fr Gutiérrez (86), a Dominican, was on the panel at a Vatican press conference held to announce details of the current general assembly of the worldwide Catholic charity Caritas.

Liberation theology was essentially a Latin American movement that began in the 1960s as a moral reaction by some Catholic thinkers to the obvious social injustice and inequality in the region.

The term is credited to Fr Gutiérrez in his 1971 book A Theology of Liberation, in which he argued that Christians had a moral obligation to oppose unjust social and political structures.

For much of the past 30 years, traditionalist and conservative Catholic theologians opposed the movement, banning some of its proponents, including Fr Gutiérrez, and accusing it of being influenced by Marxism.

Fr Gutiérrez was asked whether his presence at the press conference marked a "rehabilitation" by Pope Francis.

Never disa

bilitated

“Liberation theology cannot be rehabilitated since it was never ‘disabilitated’,” he said. “The core notion of liberation theology was the preferential option for the poor. This is 90 per cent of it.

“I think that at this moment the ‘climate’ around liberation theology has changed,” he said. “But I understand the question. What is important, however, is the rehabilitation of the Christian message, the need for theology to understand what it can do. And in that context talking about the poor, talking about the periphery [as Pope Francis does], well, you can call that a rehabilitation if you like.”

Asked if he would go down the same polemical road now as he had in the 1980s, Fr Gutiérrez indicated that, while many things had obviously changed since then, he would still make the same choices.

Love letter to God

“Theology is a love letter to God, but obviously it changes,” he said. “In answer to this same question, I once said to my interlocutor, would you write the same love letter to your wife now as you would have done 30 years ago? You still love her, but things change.

“I still want justice, and justice is love that goes beyond legality . . . The question of the poor is fundamental to the mission of the Church . . . With reference to today, I hear people saying we live in post-socialist, post-capitalist, post-industrial times, but no one ever says we live in post-poverty times.”