In accounts of the recent history of the Catholic Church, it is often written that Pope Benedict XVI effectively killed off progressive Latin American liberation theology in the 1980s and 90s, when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and the chief Vatican watchdog on orthodoxy.
He certainly spelt out in clear terms what he saw as its shortcomings in official documents published in 1984 and 1986, as well as disciplining its leading proponents, but reports of the death of liberation theology were wrong, said Father Gustavo Gutiérrez, the priest credited as the “father of liberation theology”, with its “preferential option for the poor”.
Gutiérrez, who has died aged 96, would point out that 90% of its teaching on social and structural sin eventually became part of mainstream Catholic thought. Why, he added, you could often hear Pope Benedict himself spouting it. And, as if to reinforce the point, in 2012 a former pupil of Gutiérrez, Gerhard Müller, was appointed by Benedict to his own old job, overseeing orthodoxy at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
There was also a belated personal rapprochement between Benedict and Gutiérrez. On Ash Wednesday 2007, when the pope visited the ancient Roman Basilica of Santa Sabina, Gutiérrez was one of a small number chosen to go forward and have the sign of the cross sketched on his forehead in ashes by the pontiff.
However, Gutiérrez had endured many trials in between, since publishing in 1971 his key work A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation. Though the thinking behind the book – that the gospels demand above all that the church should work in solidarity with the poor to improve their lot – influenced many in the Latin-American Catholic Church and beyond, it was regarded with suspicion in the Vatican.
Pope John Paul II, in particular, was concerned that liberation theologians were using Marxist analysis in their work and, having battled against Marxists in his native Poland, he was not about to tolerate any reference to them in his church.
Ratzinger, in March 1983, instructed the Catholic bishops in Gutiérrez’s native Peru to examine A Theology of Liberation for errors. The clear implication was that they would find some. The request, however, divided the bishops, many of whom supported Gutiérrez’s theological approach. A sub-committee was set up, but five of the six episcopal members ended up endorsing Gutiérrez’s writing as conforming to the norms of Catholicism.
Ratzinger then tried another approach. The Peruvian bishops were summoned to Rome and “invited” to reconsider their conclusions in the light of a critical analysis of Gutiérrez’s work he had had prepared for them. Again, they declined. Finally, in August 1984, Ratzinger himself had to act, issuing an “Instruction of Certain Aspects of Liberation Theology” that highlighted what he said were its “grave theological deviations”.
Some of the principal liberation theologians then fought a public battle with the Vatican, but that was never Gutiérrez’s style. Small in stature and self-effacing, he kept his head down, and published sparingly, but always argued patiently and passionately behind the scenes for his standpoint. His language was so measured that Rome struggled to find opportunities to take him to task.
Throughout this period, Gutiérrez continued to work as a parish priest in Lima, the Peruvian capital. However, pressure on him from within his national church was growing.
In 1990 his longtime admirer and defender, Cardinal Juan Landázuri Ricketts, retired as archbishop of Lima and was replaced by the much more traditionalist Cardinal Augusto Vargas Alzamora.
Against all predictions, Gutiérrez found a way of working with his new superior. However, when in 1998 the Vatican appointed as Alzamora’s successor Juan Luis Cipriani, a member of the ultra-orthodox Opus Dei movement, Gutiérrez decided to remove himself from diocesan control. He joined the international Dominican order.
Gutiérrez was born in the slums of Lima, to parents of mixed Hispanic and Quechuan Indian heritage. Between the ages of 12 and 18 he was confined to bed by osteomyelitis and ever after walked with a limp. His regular contact with doctors gave him an early taste for a career in medicine but, after completing his first degree at the National University of Lima in 1950, he decided to study for the priesthood.
Part of that training was spent in Europe, where he was inspired, he later recalled, by forward-looking Dominican theologians he met there such as Edward Schillebeeckx, Yves Congar and Marie-Dominique Chenu. “I was attracted to their profound understanding of the intimate relationship that should exist between theology, spirituality and the actual preaching of the gospel,” Gutiérrez said later. “Liberation theology shares that same conviction.”
He never liked being called “the father of liberation theology”. Its source lay in the gospels and its inspiration and focus, he always said, must be the people. However, it was his work with the poorest of the poor that encouraged him to link their material situation, the causes of their deprivation and suffering, and the word of God. “Poverty,” he said, “is more than a social issue. It poses a major challenge to every Christian conscience and therefore to theology as well.” His answer to that challenge was liberation theology.
As well as his hands-on parish and pastoral work in Lima, Gutiérrez was increasingly in demand in academic institutions in Peru and worldwide. He was a principal professor at the Pontifical University of Peru, a board member of the international theology journal Concilium, and in 1993 was appointed to the Légion d’honneur by the French government.
In 2001, he became John Cardinal O’Hara professor of theology at the Catholic University of Notre Dame in Indiana in the US. He was not a prolific writer – either by inclination or because of the Vatican scrutiny every appearance in print prompted – but his 1984 book, We Drink from Our Own Wells, set alongside the theology of liberation a “spirituality of liberation”.
Life became somewhat easier for him after the election of the Argentinian cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope Francis in 2013. At the time of the Vatican’s clampdown on Gutiérrez in the 80s and 90s, as a bishop and then archbishop in Buenos Aires Bergoglio had sided with his fellow conservative prelates in Latin America in questioning and resisting the insights of liberation theology.
But on the day of his election as pope, Francis revealed how his own thinking had changed in mature years and signalled his common ground with the liberation theologians when he gave a public commitment to building “a poor church for the poor”.
Once installed in Rome, he treated Gutiérrez with the respect he deserved as one of the great theologians of modern Catholicism, welcoming him in 2015 when he travelled to be key speaker at a conference there.
Three years later the pope sent him greetings on his 90th birthday, lavishing praise on his “theological service and … preferential love for the poor and discarded in society”.
He may even have been hinting at the impact Gutiérrez had had on his own changing theological position over the decades when he added: “Thank you for your efforts and for your way of challenging the conscience of each person, so that no one can be indifferent faced with the drama of poverty and exclusion.”
• Gustavo Gutiérrez, priest and theologian, born 8 June 1928; died 22 October 2024
