Gustavo Gutiérrez, “father” of liberation theology, dies at the age of 96

Peruvian priest and theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, considered the “father” of liberation theology, died on October 22 at the age of 96. On his 90th birthday in 2018, Pope Francis thanked the priest “for all your efforts and for your way of challenging everyone's conscience so that no one remains indifferent to the tragedy of poverty and exclusion.”

Born into a humble family in Lima, Peru on June 8, 1928, Gutiérrez suffered from osteomyelitis (bone infection) as a teenager, which often confined him to bed and led him to read extensively, including Pascal and Giovanni Papini History of Christand the psychiatrists Karl Jaspers and Honorio Delgado. After his recovery, he began studying medicine and philosophy with the intention of becoming a psychiatrist.

Theology at the Catholic University of Lyon

As a member of the Catholic University Movement, however, he was troubled by “questions about his faith,” and so at the age of 24 he decided to become a priest. His bishop, thinking he was too old for the seminary, sent him to Europe. He learned French at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium and wrote a dissertation on Freud before continuing his theological studies at the Catholic University of Lyon.

There he met the Sulpician exegete Albert Gelin as well as theologians such as the Jesuit Gustave Martelet and the Dominican Marie-Dominique Chenu, who would become one of the experts on the Second Vatican Council. He was also influenced by other Dominicans such as theologians Christian Duquoc and Claude Geffré, as well as Louis-Joseph Lebret, the inspiration for St. Paul VI's encyclical. from 1967 Populorum Progressiowhich dealt with human development.

How can you tell the poor that God loves them?

Gutiérrez was ordained a priest in 1959 and became a priest in a parish in the poor Rimac district of Lima. At the same time he taught at the Pontifical University in Peru and at various universities in Europe and North America. One question was constantly on his mind: How to tell the poor that God loves them?

In May 1967, two years after the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council, in which he had participated (in its last session), he addressed this question to students at the University of Montreal, distinguishing for the first time three dimensions of poverty: actual poverty, daily experiences what is “not a fate, but an injustice”; spiritual poverty, “a synonym for spiritual childhood,” which “means entrusting one’s life to God”; and poverty as a commitment that “leads to living in solidarity with the poor, fighting with them against poverty and proclaiming the Gospel from them.”

Taking into account the suffering of the poor

The following year, when he was invited to speak at a conference in Peru on “theology of development,” he declared that “a theology of liberation was more appropriate.” This theological language, which takes into account the suffering of the poor, inspired the bishops who met in Medellín, Colombia, for the second conference of the Latin American Council of Bishops (CELAM) to discuss the implementation of the Second Vatican Council.

They condemned the “institutionalized violence” of regimes on the continent despite the strong Catholic presence and recognized the legitimacy of revolutionary uprisings in certain circumstances. For the first time they affirmed the “preferential option for the poor”.

“A sign of the times that needs to be questioned”

In May 1969, Gutiérrez visited Brazil and experienced the darkest hours of the military dictatorship. There he met students, Catholic Action activists, and priests whose testimonies enriched his thinking and culminated in his groundbreaking work, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation (published in 1971).

“Before the Council,” he explained, “John XXIII. proclaims: “The church is and wants to be the church of all, especially the church of the poor,” as he said in 2012 La Croix. “Some of us saw this as a sign of the times that needed to be questioned, like the apostolic constitution Gaudium et Spes demands. Because of my age and my presence at the Council and in Medellín, I was the one who formulated this theology. It could have been someone else.”

No political program

The liberation that Gutiérrez spoke of was not a political program. It operates at three interrelated levels: the economic level, which addresses the causes of unjust situations; the human level, which says that changing structures is not enough; People have to change too; and finally and most profoundly, the theological level, which involves deliverance from sin, which is the refusal to love God and neighbor.

As for theology, it ensures that caring for the poor is a liberating task of the gospel, a response to the challenge that poverty poses to the language about God. In a Latin American church facing a priest shortage, this movement, which also included theologians such as Leonardo Boff, Juan Luis Segundo and Father Helder Camara, spawned over 80,000 grassroots congregations and more than a million Bible study groups in Brazil alone. And elsewhere it became contagious: Third World theologies began to emerge among black minorities in the United States, Africa, and Asia.

Strong resistance

However, it also faced strong resistance. The most violent were the economic, political and military powers in Latin America and the United States. But there was also resistance from Catholics, who accused the movement of using ideas from Marxist analysis to interpret certain aspects of poverty.

During the CELAM conference in Puebla (1979), resistance arose within the Latin American Church itself, supported by St. John Paul II, who had been elected five months earlier and was making his first trip to Latin America. While calling on the bishops to “take as a starting point the Medellín conclusions with all their positive aspects,” including the preferential option for the poor, emphasized John Paul II – a Pole from a communist regime and therefore very critical of any reference to them Marxism – urged them “not to ignore the false interpretations that have sometimes been made and which require clear distinctions, timely criticism and clear positions.”

Criticism of John Paul II

The new Pope particularly criticized “reinterpretations of the Gospel that are based more on theoretical speculation than on an authentic meditation of the Word of God and a genuine evangelical confession.” He warned against portraying Jesus as politically active, as a figure who fought against Roman rule and Roman powers and was thus involved in the class struggle. “This idea of ​​Christ as a political figure, as a revolutionary, as a subversive of Nazareth is not consistent with the catechesis of the Church,” he emphasized.

In 1984, liberation theology was sharply criticized by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under the leadership of then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI. Gutiérrez had to defend his ideas together with others. In March 1986, a second instruction offered a much more positive reinterpretation. And in 2004, at the end of a 20-year “dialogue process,” Gutiérrez received a letter from Cardinal Ratzinger expressing his gratitude to the Almighty for the satisfactory conclusion of this journey of clarification and deepening.

Entry into the Dominicans

Three years earlier, Gutiérrez had entered the Dominican Order, where he made his solemn profession on October 24, 2004, at the Holy Name Monastery in Lyon, France. When he announced his decision to join the Order of Preachers, the Flemish Dominican theologian Edward Schillebeeckx wrote him a letter that began with the words: “Finally!”