A Bishops' Conference and a Book That Named a Movement

In 1968, Latin American Catholic bishops gathered at Medellin, Colombia, for the Second General Conference of Latin American Bishops, and issued documents that broke with a cautious, largely spiritual reading of poverty in favor of naming it as a form of institutionalized violence the church had a duty to actively oppose, not merely alleviate through charity. The conference's language of structural sin and its call for the church to take what came to be called a preferential option for the poor gave Latin American clergy and theologians already working in this direction an official platform to build on.

Three years later, the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutierrez published A Theology of Liberation, the book that gave the emerging movement its name and its first fully worked out systematic statement, arguing that authentic theology could not be done from a position of comfortable neutrality but had to begin from engagement with the poor's actual struggle for liberation, understood as encompassing economic and political freedom alongside spiritual salvation rather than treating the two as separate categories. Gutierrez's book, along with the work of theologians including Leonardo Boff in Brazil and Jon Sobrino in El Salvador, established liberation theology as a distinct and influential current within Latin American Catholicism through the 1970s and beyond.