Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez O.P., 8 June 1928-22 October 2024

Father of Liberation Theology

Locating turning points in history is strangely attractive.  We like to account for them by the actions of great men (rarely women). Before it was like this, after it was like that, the story goes.  Though in reality many slow changes and complex dynamics come between before and after.

Peruvian Dominican priest Gustavo Gutiérrez who died on 22 October 2024 aged 96, for many in the Catholic Church, was such a man.  Born in the heart of Lima, wheelchair bound for much of his six teenage years, half Quechuan half Hispanic, he became known as the father of Liberation Theology.  His theology is the key to understanding the most important current in Catholicism worldwide since the 1960s.    To celebrate Gustavo’s life is to celebrate a key contributor to a gradual but vitally important change in the life of a global Church and its 1.36 billion members in the last half century.

From the circumstances of Latin America when he was writing, and Catholic tradition, came his vision of theology’s task, ‘el quehacer teologica’.  He posed two foundational questions that lay behind the re-discovery of the Church’s “preferential option for the poor” understood as its principal pastoral concern: “How do we convey to the poor that God loves them?” and “How to speak out of the suffering of the innocent about God?” ‘Hablar de Dios desde el sufrimeineto del inocente’, a task that has, to put it mildly, not become redundant with time.  

When it comes to acknowledging great men, a Peruvian theologian may sound a surprising choice.  Many of the world’s Catholics, at least the older ones, would understandably pick instead Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, John XXIII, born into a sharecropper family of thirteen children from a small village in Lombardy, the Pope who called the second Vatican Council (1962-1965).  This would be the turning point that – often forgotten – he opened with a speech underlining the Church’s concern for the poor and suffering.  A gathering that brought together bishops, leaders and theologians from around the world, largely from Western Europe, which sought to update and renew the life of the Church.

The great man story of historical change holds up quite well for the vision behind the Council.   But for – what was becoming – a truly global Church, the story neglects the long process of change that had been going on not only in Europe but notably in Latin America.  And the impact of the Council in many countries was muted and blocked by cautious bishops, the UK would be a good example, dashing many hopes.   Latin America proved more fertile soil.  Gutiérrez’s Theology of Liberation: Perspectives published in Spanish in 1971 by the Lima Centro de Estudios y Publicaciones, and in English by the Maryknoll Fathers’ Orbis in 1973, became the core inspirational text driving this process.

Latin America had a head-start in addressing the challenge of poverty.  In the 1950s, 60% of the population in Peru lived in poverty with 82% of these living in extreme poverty.  CELAM, the Bishops’ Conference of Latin America, held its first meeting in 1955, so ideas for action responding to such acute poverty on the continent, such as radio schools, could be shared.

Catholic Action officially defined as “the participation of the laity in the apostleship of the hierarchy” drew on the simple formula of see-judge-and-act in movements such as Young Christian Workers and Young Christian Students.  Gutiérrez’s recognition of the importance of the economic, social and political in a Christian understanding of the world around him, like that of several other priests, came through student life in Catholic Action, in his case at the National University of San Marcos in Lima.  “The poor are the by-product of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible”, he wrote later.  His vocation to the priesthood seems to have been in part a response to this responsibility.

Gutiérrez’s clerical training brought him to Louvain where he studied psychology and philosophy and, to Lyon, where he was introduced to ‘la nouvelle théologie’ and the European theologians who were later to influence the bishops in the Vatican Council.  Central to the thinking in Lyon were writings from the early Christian centuries, the ‘Church Fathers’, a time when the appointment of a bishop could be challenged if he were not ‘a lover of the poor’.  That, as Gustavo later put it, the Church must be “on the side of the oppressed classes and dominated peoples clearly and without qualification” was not some leftist novelty but rooted in Church history.

On his return to Peru, after ordination in 1959, he served in the small Church of the Holy Redeemer in Rimac, a working-class area to the north of downtown Lima.  This was the period when the Cuban revolution was putting Latin America into ferment.  Two major forces, Marxism and Catholicism, contended for hearts and minds.  In his exploration of a Christian account of liberation Gutiérrez along with other liberation theologians  rejected a binary conflict and borrowed some elements of Marxist analysis for description of the reality experienced by the poor.

The year 1968 for Latin America, as elsewhere, was something of a turning point.  Father Pedro Arrupe, the Superior-General of the Society of Jesus, called on his fellow Jesuits in Latin America to inform their ministry by ‘an option for the poor’.  In late July Gutiérrez presented a paper, ‘Towards a Theology of Liberation’ at a second continentwide meeting of priests and laity in the Peruvian coastal town of Chimbote.  It was one month before a major meeting of CELAM in Medellin, Colombia, which adopted the language of a preferential option for the poor.

Liberation theology saw liberation as a dimension of salvation, ‘a demand that we go and build a different social order’, part of building the kingdom of God of the Lord’s Prayer rather than an entirely separate secular project.  Gutiérrez understood full well that this could not be accomplished without conflict – deadly for many – after the succession of coups bringing to power the murderous US-supported military dictatorships and oligarchies of 1960s Latin America.  The National Security States branded pastoral workers amongst the poor as “communist infiltration of the Church”, and the military and death squads killed them with virtual impunity.  The martyr archbishop, Oscar Romero, came to personify their sacrifice.  Despite this, in the 1980s, the Vatican sought to censure liberation theology, though through dialogue conflict was to some degree resolved.  In the 1990s Gustavo was banned by the Opus Dei Archbishop of Lima from teaching at the Catholic University of Lima. It was after this that he decided to become a Dominican.

The pastoral concern and spirituality that Gutiérrez embodied had already entered the bloodstream of the global Church.  Features of it are seen in Pope Francis’ teaching and approach to the papacy.  It has motivated the work of countless Catholics finding their vocation in working with the poor and marginalised of their societies.

I’ve listened to Gustavo speaking on far too few occasions.  One anecdote has stayed with me.  To paraphrase what he said: “I have realised how different my life is from that of the poor.  I have enough money and not enough time.  They have time and not enough money”.  Perhaps less true in frantic 2024 Britain.  Amongst years of teaching and pioneering writing, finding time for the poor may have been his greatest gift.  May he rest in peace.

– Prof Ian Linden