Sir, – Geraldine Mitchell Devlin (July 24th) protests that “priests who live out the teaching of the founder of the Christian faith are invariably labelled ‘rebel and maverick’ when surely the very opposite is the case. Or am I missing something?”
Perhaps she is. In my experience priests dubbed “rebel” or “maverick” are so labelled by journalists, predominately in the so-called red tops. – Yours, etc,
TOM STACK
Milltown,
Dublin 6.
Sir, – Geraldine Mitchell Devlin asks why “the very priests who live out the teaching of the founder of the Christian faith are invariable labelled ‘rebel’ and ‘maverick‘ when surely the very opposite is the case”. The writer was referring to a report on the church of San Carlos Boromeo in Madrid (World News, July 20th).
The Rev Leonardo Boff was one such who endeavoured to live out the teaching of Jesus Christ and was quickly perceived by the Vatican as a rebel and a maverick.
Boff’s crime was to bring back to South America the teaching of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). Progressive leadership had emerged in the Latin America church and following a meeting in Medellín in 1968, the bishops had formulated a programme of preferential option for the poor and a repudiation of unjust structures that restrict the benefits of society to the few and maintain the vast majority of its people in poverty and powerlessness. Liberation theology was born and quickly perceived by the United States and Rome as Marxism.
In 1984 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome, led by Josef Ratzinger, later to become Pope Benedict, accused liberation theology of departing “from the faith of the church and in fact constitutes a practical negation of it”. The rebels and mavericks were under threat.
Silenced in 1985 and banned from his position as theological lecturer in Rio de Janeiro, Boff accused the Vatican of being afraid of change.
Later in his book Church: Charism and Power, Boff wrote that the church "follows the criteria of pagan power in terms of domination, centralisation, marginalisation, triumphalism and human pride, all under a cloak of divine power". He was eventually forced to resign. – Yours, etc,
JOHN T KAVANAGH,
Braemor Road,
Dublin 14.