The Vatican's reception of liberation theology was neither immediate condemnation nor open embrace, but shifted markedly across two pontificates. Under John Paul II, whose own experience of communist rule in Poland shaped his wariness of any theology drawing on Marxist categories of class analysis, the Vatican's doctrinal office, then led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, issued formal instructions in 1984 and 1986 criticizing what it judged an uncritical borrowing of Marxist concepts while explicitly affirming the legitimacy of the preferential option for the poor itself, a distinction that liberation theologians and their critics often described very differently in the years that followed, one side hearing mainly the warning and the other mainly the affirmation.
Pope Francis, elected in 2013 as the first Latin American pope, changed the relationship substantially without formally reversing his predecessors' documents. He rehabilitated figures earlier viewed with suspicion, most visibly through a public and personal warming toward Gustavo Gutierrez, concelebrating Mass with him at the Vatican and seeing his own doctrinal chief co-author a book with him, a change in tone rather than the lifting of any formal measure, since Gutierrez, unlike Leonardo Boff, formally silenced by that same office for a year in 1985, had never been placed under one for Francis to lift. His own priorities as pope, an emphasis on economic inequality, environmental degradation and what he has called a poor church for the poor, echo liberation theology's core concerns closely enough that commentators across the theological spectrum have described his papacy as the moment the movement moved from suspicion to something closer to influence at the church's highest level.