Colombian Catholicism has occupied every position in the country's armed conflict, and the positions are not reconcilable into a single story.
Camilo Torres Restrepo was a priest and a founding figure of Colombian sociology who concluded that the structures he was studying could not be changed by the means available, left the priesthood, joined the ELN guerrilla and was killed in his first combat action in 1966. He became an emblem for liberation theology across the continent and an embarrassment to a hierarchy that was, at that point, closely aligned with the Conservative order.
Clergy were also killed in large numbers by every armed actor. Bishop Jesus Emilio Jaramillo was murdered by the ELN in 1989. Bishop Isaias Duarte Cancino, who had denounced the entry of drug money into politics, was shot outside his church in Cali in 2002. Priests in rural parishes were killed by guerrillas for cooperating with the state and by paramilitaries for sheltering the displaced.
And the church was central to ending it. Catholic bodies provided mediation and back channels over decades, and in the Havana negotiations with the FARC they helped organise the victim delegations that were flown to Cuba to speak directly to the negotiators, a procedural innovation widely regarded as decisive. The Truth Commission established under the 2016 agreement was presided over by a Jesuit, Francisco de Roux, and delivered its final report in 2022.
Three roles, then: insurgent, victim and mediator, held by the same institution within a single lifetime. Colombian accounts of the war that mention only one of them are describing a part.