The Father of Liberation Theology Is Dead

“Gustavo was for me a priest who gave his life for love of Christ, of the Church, of humanity, especially the poor.” Peruvian Cardinal Pedro Barreto reacted with emotion to the news of the death of his mentor, Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez, O.P. The senior prelate spoke from Rome, on the sidelines of the second session of the XVI Synod Assembly, which he is attending.

Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez, who became a Dominican later in life, was trained at the theological schools of Louvain and Lyon, which played a leading role in the new ecclesiology developed at the time of the Second Vatican Council.

In 1968, Fr. Gutiérrez, then a chaplain to Peruvian students, published the work A Theology of Liberation, a movement of thought that claims to manifest Christ's message to the poorest in terms of liberation from the various social evils that afflict them.

“The creation of a just and fraternal society is the salvation of human beings, if by salvation we mean the passage from the less human to the more human. One cannot be a Christian today without a commitment to liberation,” Gustavo Gutiérrez writes. But he defined his thinking as follows: “What we mean by liberation theology is participation in the revolutionary political process.”

He explains this participation. “Only in overcoming a society divided into classes, [...] and in abolishing the private ownership of wealth created by human labor, will we be in a position to lay the foundations for a more just society. This is why efforts to establish a more just society in Latin America are increasingly oriented toward socialism.”

This school of theology, born in a continent with its own particular problems, has since taken root in the universal Church. In 1984, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, intervened for the first time to denounce the Marxist leanings at work in this new school of thought, without condemning Fr. Gutiérrez.

A second instruction from the same Dicastery appeared a year later, more mitigated, seeking to identify certain aspects of so-called liberation theology that were deemed positive, while warning against the ideological temptation it bears if left unchecked.

Subsequently, some members of the Roman Curia, such as Cardinal Ludwig Müller, who is both an ardent defender of Fr. Gutiérrez and an outspoken critic of disciplinary developments under the current pontificate, have claimed to be followers of this theological school.

Pope Francis himself paid tribute in June 2018 to the founder of liberation theology, “for his contribution to the Church and his preferential love for the poor,” as the Vatican News reported at the time. However, the Argentine Pontiff is not an unconditional enthusiast of Fr. Gutiérrez's movement.

Isabelle Schmitz, a former Radio Vatican reporter for Le Figaro, recalls that Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, before his election to the pontificate, “warned against the temptation to ideologize the Gospel message through a ‘socializing reduction,’ ‘an interpretative claim based on a hermeneutic according to the social sciences, [which] covers the most varied fields: from market liberalism to Marxist categories.’”

In fact, the current Roman Pontiff’s theology is more akin to the so-called “people's" theology, a movement tinged with Peronism that emerged in Argentina in the wake of liberation theology with Fr. Lucio Gera, which takes up the preferential option for the poor, while rejecting the class struggle and preferring to focus on popular culture, seen as a true path to liberation.

Fr. Gutiérrez's death comes at a time when South American Catholicism is being challenged by Pentecostal sects and growing secularization: if there has been liberation, it is rather in the sense of a growing loss of influence of the Church.