Liberation theology is a movement within Catholic theology, not a church or a party, and it began as a description of what Latin American priests were already doing rather than as a programme handed to them.
Its founding text is Gustavo Gutierrez's A Theology of Liberation of 1971, which named the movement. Its institutional moment was the meeting of the Latin American bishops at Medellin in 1968, applying the Second Vatican Council to a continent where most Catholics were poor and many lived under military governments. Its central formula is the preferential option for the poor: that God is not neutral between the poor and those who impoverish them, and that theology must be done from where the poor stand rather than about them. Its characteristic institution was the base ecclesial community, small lay groups reading scripture together and organising around land, wages and disappearance.
The controversial element was analytical. Some liberation theologians used Marxist categories (class, structural conflict, ideology), as tools for describing what they saw, while denying that this committed them to Marxist atheism or to revolution. Their critics denied the separation was possible.
Rome responded twice, both times through the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Cardinal Ratzinger, and the two documents are not the same document.
- Libertatis Nuntius (1984) was the sharp one. It attacked the use of Marxist analysis as inseparable from Marxist ideology, warned that reducing salvation to political liberation empties it, and criticised a reading of the church itself as divided by class. It also stated explicitly that the phrase "theology of liberation" is a thoroughly valid term and that the aspiration behind it is legitimate.
- Libertatis Conscientia (1986) was the constructive one, setting out a positive Catholic doctrine of freedom and liberation, affirming the preferential option for the poor, and defending the right of the poor to organise.
Individual theologians were disciplined. Leonardo Boff was silenced for a year in 1985 and eventually left the priesthood. Others, including Gutierrez, were investigated and not condemned.
The later history complicates the usual story. Gutierrez was received warmly at the Vatican in 2013 and co-wrote a book with Gerhard Muller, then prefect of the same congregation that had investigated him. Pope Francis, the first Latin American pope, canonised Oscar Romero in 2018 and made economic justice and the condition of the poor central to his teaching, without adopting the movement's analytical apparatus.
The movement's numerical decline in Latin America owes less to Roman discipline than to two things it did not control: the fall of the military governments it had defined itself against, and the very large migration of the poor it addressed into Pentecostal churches.