‘Today I think of Gustavo, Gustavo Gutiérrez. A great man. A man of the Church....He knew how to remain silent when he needed to be silent; he knew how to suffer when he had to suffer... He managed to carry forward so much apostolic fruit and such rich theology. May he rest in peace’.

Gustavo was born on 8 June 1928 in the Montserrat district of Lima to mestizo parents of Hispanic and Quechua descent. Pope Leo also speaks Quechua as he ministered in an area where this indigenous language was spoken.

He suffered from osteomyelitis (infection of bone marrow) in his teens and was in a wheelchair from 12 years of age until he was 18, a period which he described as ‘formative’. After school, he studied medicine at university but then the call to the priesthood came and he was sent to Leuven in Belgium and Lyon in France, then to the Gregorian in Rome. He came under the influence of some of the theological giants of the age – Henri de Lubac and the Dominicans Yves Congar and Marie Dominique Chenu, two of whom were periti, experts, at the Second Vatican Council.

Gustavo was ordained in 1959. His studies covered secular modern thinkers of the age, especially Marx and Freud: Marx for his economic analysis of society which showed that addressing poverty means addressing the structural causes of economic inequality which was rife in Latin America.

Gustavo was one of the guiding lights behind the historic 1968 conference of Latin American bishops at Medellín, Colombia, which applied the teachings of Vatican II to the social reality of poverty and injustice in Latin America and the Caribbean. It was from that conference that a ‘preferential option for the poor’ entered the vocabulary of the Church.

Dr Duncan MacLaren KCSG is a former Executive Director of SCIAF and Secretary General of Caritas Internationalis.