by Duncan MacLaren

Open House will celebrate the 50th anniversary of liberation theology with a conference in February to mark the publication of A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Gutiérrez in 1971, published in English in 1972. In fact, another leading liberation theologian, Juan Luis Segundo, wrote that Gustavo’s book was ‘a kind of baptism, but the baby had already grown old’.1 The real beginning had occurred at least ten years earlier (and therefore before the Second Vatican Council) in theological faculties in Latin American universities where lecturers and students, through their accompaniment of the poor, began to unmask the ideologies used by both governments and churches to make excuses for the dehumanising poverty of most of their populations

Liberation theology is in brief a theology of the irruption (or ‘breaking-in’) of the poor into the church and into their own reality of a poverty based on structural causes emitting from those who oppress them. To analyse this, there emerged a new way of reading the Bible, especially those parts that dealt with liberation such as the Book of Exodus in the Old Testament or the Acts of the Apostles in the New. The poor read and discussed these stories from the perspective of their own poverty to discern how they could transform their reality into a fairer, more equitable and dignity-filled existence.

The new basic ecclesial communities became, in Leonardo Boff’s phrase, an ecclesiogenesis, a new way of being and understanding Church. Boff states that the members of the base communities ‘seek to live the essence of the Christian message: the universal parenthood of God, communion with all human beings, the following of Jesus Christ who died and rose again, the celebration of the resurrection and the Eucharist, and the upbuilding of the Kingdom of God, already underway in history as the liberation of the whole human being and all human beings’.2 The people discovered that there was a phenomenon of social sin which became part of the structure of a society and from which they had to be liberated.

From Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educationalist, the people learned about critical consciousness or conscientisation which is ‘a process in which people are encouraged to analyse their reality, to become more aware of the constraints on their lives, and to take action to transform their situation’.3 Freire encourages them to become participatory subjects – ‘transformers of the world’ – rather than objects of pity or oppression

In this brief dip into the genesis of liberation theology, I leave the last word to the Boff brothers who were both Brazilian liberationist priests, Leonardo a Franciscan (though now a married layman) and Clodovis, a Servite. They talk about how liberation theology builds up ‘new syntheses of faith’ and gives practical answers to the ‘great challenges of the times’, ending paragraphs on ‘The Creative Task of Theology’ with these words:

‘By creatively bringing out or deducing the liberating content of faith, liberation theology seeks to produce a new codification of the Christian mystery, thereby helping the church to carry out its mission of liberative evangelization in history’.4

Critics of liberation theology

One image that always remains with me of Pope John Paul II is his arrival in Nicaragua in 1983 and castigating, in the full glare of global publicity, the saintly priest/politician Ernesto Cardenal who had gone down on one knee to kiss the pontiff’s ring. Instead of allowing this, the Pope lifted his finger like an old dominie and wagged it at the gentle priest, saying he should ‘regularise’ his situation, that is he should leave the Sandinista Government which at that time was genuinely trying to lift the poor out of poverty. Later that year, the Pope suspended his priesthood and this remained in place until Pope Francis lifted the ban in 2019. Ernesto died at the age of 95 in 2020.

That was how bitter Pope John Paul’s opposition was to liberation theology which he understood to be too influenced by the Marxism he had grown up with in Communist Poland and too close to treating the Church as a secular political institution which had replaced redemption from sin with the achievement of social justice.

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI who, as Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, had been Prefect of the formerly termed Holy Office and author of the ‘Instruction on Certain Aspects of the Theology of Liberation’, is famed for stating that all theology is liberating. His idea of a liberating theology was that, firstly, the supernatural realm was the most real level of existence; second, that individual transformation comes before social transformation; and thirdly, the Church should not dictate political solutions but increase a desire to know and love God among the poor.

Both popes undermined liberation theology and sanctioned even ‘liberationist’ priests in good standing with the Church such as Jon Sobrino SJ and Gustavo Gutiérrez OP, who left the diocesan priesthood to become a Dominican. They have all been reinstated, and all barriers have been removed to make one of the greatest martyrs of the option for the poor, Archbishop Óscar Romero, a saint, thanks to the pontificate of Pope Francis.

Sadly, many novices in religious orders for both men and women and seminarians throughout the world have also turned their backs on liberation theology and justice and peace as a central tenet of the faith. They prefer a more domesticated faith where piety is cherished and the poor are treated in an ‘assistentialist’ way which Freire refers to as ‘a term used in Latin America to describe policies of financial or social “assistance” which attack symptoms, but not causes, of social ills. It has overtones of paternalism, dependency and a “hand-out” approach. It contrasts with promocionalismo which, on the contrary, “promotes” people to a state of vigorous self-capacity to solve their own problems’.5

I can understand a reaction to those liberationist priests who took up arms against oppressive forces but cannot fathom why Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, who both wrote passionately about the rights of the poor, could not get over their prejudices and see liberation theology and its progeny such as black theology, political theology, and Minjung theology from the experience of the Korean marginalised as a new revelation of the faith. Fr David Tracy, an eminent, ‘orthodox’ American theologian wrote that Christian theology is ‘a discipline that attempts to correlate the meaning and truth of the Christian faith……with the meaning and truth of our contemporary experience’.6 Following Christ, one of the most important parts of that contemporary experience is the continued existence of a poverty which disfigures the lives of millions of poor people globally and which diminishes those who cause it.

Liberation theology in action One of the first programmes with a liberation theological flavour that I remember when I was with SCIAF was an offshoot of the ‘Training for Transformation’ programme designed by Anne Hope and Sally Timmel. The Africa-based authors admitted it was influenced by Latin American liberation theologians that ‘kept alive the hope and conviction that transformation is possible, that “the way things are is not the only way that they can be”’.7 SCIAF had a partnership with the diocese of Masaka in Kenya and the Bishop had asked us to design a programme which could change the lives of a group of women who had resorted to selling their bodies to survive. Having no skills, the women took to a lifestyle which they all abhorred.

Based on training for transformation methodologies, the women were given rice for the days of the programme so that they could feed their children. They were trained by the local facilitators how to come to their own solutions to escape from their dilemma. SCIAF then supplied the seed money to establish a cooperative to buy a piece of land so that they could grow vegetables and sell them in the market. Profits were shared and confidence in their own abilities increased.

The late Bishop John Mone and I went to a ceremony in the village to celebrate the success of the programme. One woman came up to me and told me, ‘It is wonderful that I can afford to feed my children and send them to school but the greatest thing for me is that I can hold my head high in church’. Her self-esteem had been restored and she had been transformed.

I remember also my SCIAF colleague, John Dornan, and myself going to Haiti to talk to the people working in a radio station established by Caritas Haiti and supported by SCIAF. It didn’t just give the news but truthful news about what the government was doing in the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. In a place where many were illiterate, the radio station broadcast programmes to help people read and write but also raised their awareness of the injustices foisted on them by a corrupt government. Unsurprisingly, they were violently shut down by the Government for speaking truth to power

I remember well the programmes to empower Catholic women in Eastern Africa and in Oceania by urging them to discuss the stories of strong women in the Bible such as Mary Magdalene, Mary, the mother of Jesus, Ruth, Esther, Judith and Susannah and to reflect on how Jesus as a man and rabbi related to women in a very different way from the patriarchy and toxic masculinity which they had experienced in their own lives.

In Cambodia, for Caritas Australia, I researched similar programmes to empower women, and soon they were being elected as convenors of the self help groups established to transform their villages economically and socially. In this Buddhist society, both men and women had become more human towards one another and had become transformed.

Integral Human Development: the new name for liberation theology?

Pope Francis changed the name of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace to the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development in 2016. He added dicasteries on refugees and migrants, health care, charitable works and the care of creation. His aim in the Motu Proprio setting up the new entity was to ‘promote the integral development of the human person in the light of the Gospel. This development takes place by attending to the inestimable goods of justice, peace and the care of creation’.

The teaching of Pope Francis on Integral Human Development contains the seeds of liberation theology. There is a focus on the poorest people in our world, those who are discarded like pieces of rubbish; an integrated approach to human development, dealing with the material and the sacred in all humans; a stress on the participation of the poor in society and that they should be dignified agents of their own destiny; a challenge to neoliberal capitalism which he calls an economy which kills in Evangelii Gaudium; a stress on the ‘option for the poor’ without the word ‘preferential’ inserted by Pope John Paul II to remove any perceived Marxist element. For Francis, integral development is focused on the human, on other creatures and on our ‘bonnie broukit bairn’, as Hugh MacDiarmid called the earth. This integrated teaching is, says Pope Francis, ‘the path of good that the human family is called to travel’.8 And that path is paved with a theology which is liberative and which had its glittering birth in Latin America.

1 Juan Luis Segundo, The Shift within Latin American Theology (Toronto: Regis College Press, 1983) 2. 2 Leonardo Boff, Ecclesiogenesis: The Base Communities Reinvent the Church, (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997 [fifth printing]) 4.

3 G. Kirkwood and C. Kirkwood, Living Adult Education: Freire in Scotland (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1989) 43.

4 Leonardo and Clodovis Boff, Introducing Liberation Theology (Tunbridge Wells, Kent: Burns and Oates, 1987) 39.

5 Paulo Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013 edition) 118 note 12.

6 David Tracy, On Naming the Present: God, Hermeneutics and the Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994) 95.

7 Anne Hope and Sally Timmel (eds.) Training for Transformation in Practice, (Rugby, UK: Practical Action Publishing, 2014) 3.

8 Pope Francis, Meeting with the Members of the General Assembly of the United Nations Organization, Address of the Holy Father, 25th September 2015. Retrieved from http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/ speeches/2015/september/documents/papafrancesco_20150925_onu-visita.html