Liberation Theology

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.

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.