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Liberation Theology
Liberation theology
By BBC Team
Love for the poor must be preferential, but not exclusive.
Liberation theology was a radical movement that grew up in South America
as a response to the poverty and the ill-treatment of ordinary people.
The movement was caricatured in the phrase If Jesus Christ were on Earth
today, he would be a Marxist revolutionary, but it's more accurately
encapsulated in this paragraph from Leonardo and Clodovis Boff:
Q: How are we to be Christians in a world of
destitution and injustice?
A: There can be only one answer: we can be
followers of Jesus and true Christians only by making common cause with
the poor and working out the gospel of liberation.
Liberation theology said the church should derive its legitimacy and
theology by growing out of the poor. The Bible should be read and
experienced from the perspective of the poor.
The church should be a movement for those who were denied their rights
and plunged into such poverty that they were deprived of their full
status as human beings. The poor should take the example of Jesus and
use it to bring about a just society.
Most controversially, the Liberationists said the church should act to
bring about social change, and should ally itself with the working class
to do so. Some radical priests became involved in politics and trades
unions, others even aligned themselves with violent revolutionary
movements.
A common way in which priests and nuns showed their solidarity with the
poor was to move from religious houses into poverty stricken areas to
share the living conditions of their flock.
The Pope disagrees
The late Pope John Paul II was frequently criticized for the severity
with which he dealt with the liberation movement.
His main object was to stop the highly politicized form of liberation
theology prevalent in the 1980s, which could be seen as a fusion of
Christianity and Marxism. He was particularly criticized for the
firmness with which he closed institutions that taught Liberation
Theology and with which he removed or rebuked the movement's activists,
such as Leonardo Boff and Gustavo Gutierrez.
| No more exploitation of the weak, racial discrimination
or ghettoes of poverty! Never again! These are intolerable
evils which cry out to heaven and call Christians to a
different way of living, to a social commitment more in
keeping with their faith. –Pope
John Paul II at Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mexico,
1999 |
John Paul II disagreed. To make the church into a secular political
institution and to see salvation solely as the achievement of social
justice was to rob faith in Jesus of its power to transform every life.
The image of Jesus as a political revolutionary was inconsistent with
the Bible and the Church's teachings.
He didn't mean that the Church was not going to be the voice of the
oppressed, was not going to champion the poor. But it should not do it
by partisan politics, or by revolutionary violence. The Church's
business was bringing about the Kingdom of God, not about creating a
Marxist utopia.
Nicaragua was a particular hot-spot. Priests had been active in the
overthrow of a dictator, and had taken jobs in the revolutionary
government that followed, despite being forbidden to by the Pope.
What the Church should be doing
In 1984 and 1986 the Church issued major documents on the theme of
Liberation. They echoed John Paul's view that the Church should work for
the liberation of the poor, but do so in an appropriate way for a
church, inspired not by a political vision of a perfect world, but by
helping each human being to find their freedom by redemption from sin -
the church's job was to bring people into personal contact with God.
The Pope stated this clearly in a sermon in Mexico in 1990:
...When the world begins to notice the clear failures of
certain ideologies and systems, it seems all the more
incomprehensible that certain sons of the Church in these
lands - prompted at times by the desire to find quick
solutions - persist in presenting as viable certain models
whose failure is patent in other places in the world.
You, as priests, cannot be involved in activities which
belong to the lay faithful, while through your service to
the Church community you are called to cooperate with them
by helping them study Church teachings...
...Be careful, then, not to accept nor allow a Vision of
human life as conflict nor ideologies which propose class
hatred and violence to be instilled in you; this includes
those which try to hide under theological writings.
–Pope John Paul II, 'Option for the Poor' sermon in Mexico,
1990 |
This didn't exclude social action - far from it, but the social action
should be in the image of the gospel and the gospel was open to
everyone.
| Jesus makes it a condition for our participating in his
salvation to give food to the hungry, give drink to the
thirsty, clothe the naked, console the sorrowing, because
"when you do this to one of my least brothers or sisters you
do it to me" (Mt 25:40). |
Papal motivation
Some say that there was a clear political motivation behind the late
Pope's actions. He was fervently opposed to the communist hold on
Eastern Europe, and so he could not possibly show any sympathy with the
priests in South and Central America who were working with communist
revolutionaries - such inconsistent behaviour would have destroyed his
credibility.
This is too cynical a view. John Paul II was, as always, ruled by his
faith and belief. He genuinely thought that the Liberationists were
distorting Christianity, and he was determined to get the Church in
South America back on the rails of redemption. For John Paul II, God's
essential act was entering into our time and our humanity and
transforming "our history into the history of salvation". It was through
salvation that the poor and oppressed were to be raised up.
Modern liberation theology
On the occasion of Pope Benedict XVI's first official visit to the
Americas, Trevor Barnes went to meet modern Brazilian supporters of
liberation theology.
|