Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez died on 22 October at the age of 96. (Catholic Register)
The Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez radicalised Catholicism, enabling a flourishing of emancipatory energies from Latin America to the Caribbean and South Africa
Karl Marx did not only say that religion is “the opium of the people”. He preceded that observation by describing religion as “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions”.
The death of Gustavo Gutiérrez, on 22 October in Lima, Peru at the age of 96, brings to an end a long sequence of work to mobilise the soul against soulless conditions.
Born into a family of modest means in 1928, in the city where he died, Gutiérrez suffered as a child. A chronic bone infection kept him bedridden for years and led him to reading, reflecting and developing empathy with others who suffer.
After beginning, and then abandoning, the study of medicine he entered a seminary in Lima and was ordained as a priest in 1959, at the age of 31. When he returned to Peru after further study in Europe Gutiérrez worked in the poorest neighbourhoods of Lima, the barriadas, and became known as the “shanty town priest”.
Peru, like much of Latin America, was in ferment and Gutiérrez began to develop a theology that moved beyond charity and towards solidarity, including solidarity with the struggles of oppressed people.
In a series of lectures he developed a theology grounded in the lived experience of the oppressed and committed to the struggle to transform unjust social and political structures.
This work came together in A Theology of Liberation, published in 1971. It became the founding text of what became liberation theology. The liberation theology which was developed in the life and struggle in the barriadas was strikingly different to the theology developed over centuries in the measured monastic silence of libraries.
The book opens with dedications to José María Arguedas, the mestizo Peruvian novelist who vividly portrayed the circumstances of indigenous Andean peoples, and Henrique Pereira Neto, a black Brazilian priest who was kidnapped and tortured under the country’s military dictatorship.
It argued for an understanding of impoverishment as a result of structural oppression rather than individual failings: “The poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny; his or her existence is not politically neutral and it is not ethically innocent.”
Gutiérrez also argued for theology rooted in a commitment to work with oppressed people, on the basis of mutual respect, against oppression. These were not abstract commitments. His famous challenge to abstraction: “You say you love the poor, then name them,” insisted that the ethical be realised in the realm of the concrete, before the face of the other.
Gutiérrez understood salvation as a collective project, not a matter of individual redemption. He also took on, directly, the use of Christianity to legitimise, or even sanctify, oppression insisting that, “The denunciation of injustice implies the rejection of the use of Christianity to legitimise the established order.”
The leaders of the Catholic Church were not impressed but Gutiérrez’s ideas swiftly gained traction with struggles, movements and radical intellectuals across Latin America.
Liberation theology became central to radical politics in Latin America and in other parts of the world too. The response was often brutal. In El Salvador Óscar Romero, an archbishop, was assassinated in 1980 while celebrating mass.
In 1988 the St Jean Bosco church in Haiti was attacked by paramilitary forces while priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide was giving a sermon against the US-backed dictatorship that had ruled Haiti for decades. The following year, six Jesuit priests, along with their housekeeper and her daughter, were murdered by Salvadoran military forces.
The essential ideas of liberation theology arrived in South Africa in secular form through Paulo Freire, the Brazilian theorist of education. Freire made a sustained argument for forms of education premised on mutuality between the educator and the educated.
There are very strong resonances with Gutiérrez’s argument for “doing theology” from the perspective of the poor, an assertion that the oppressed have the right to reflect on their faith and interpret their relationship based on their own experiences of life, struggle and aspirations for liberation.
After being introduced to the political scene in South Africa by Steve Biko in the early 1970s Freire, who was also deeply inspired by secular thinkers like Frantz Fanon, became a central thinker for the Black Consciousness Movement, among the intellectuals in the trade union movement and, later, the United Democratic Front.
By the 1980s, clerics like Desmond Tutu and Allan Boesak, both influenced by liberation theology, were at the centre of the popular struggle in South Africa and some churches had factions with a strong commitment to be in solidarity with the oppressed.
For Boesak, a charismatic leader in the United Democratic Front, “Faith is more than pious protest. It is resistance. And resistance, if it is to be real and meaningful, must be rooted in a radical analysis of the causes of oppression, poverty and suffering.”
In 1984, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, led an attack on liberation theology worrying that it would lead to a politicisation of the gospel and was potentially compatible with Marxism.
A number of priests committed to liberation theology were defrocked or forced out of the Catholic congregation including, in 1985, Leonardo Boff in Brazil and Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann in Nicaragua. Aristide was removed from the Salesian order in 1988.
But 1984 was also the year in which the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem (MST), the Landless Workers’ Movement, was founded in Brazil. Many of its leaders were influenced by liberation theology and it was supported by progressive currents within the Catholic Church. Today, it is the largest popular movement on the planet and is connected to similar movements around the world, including Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa.
The MST offers secular political education to its members and leaders from organisations around the world within which it is in solidarity. At its political school the day is started with The Internationale but space is kept open for expression of faith within the movement.
The pressures on liberation theology from within the Catholic Church eased when Jorge Mario Bergoglio from Argentina became Pope Francis in 2013. In 2016 he, on the recommendation of the MST, invited S’bu Zikode from Abahlali baseMjondolo to the Vatican.
To his surprise Zikode was invited for a personal audience and to his further surprise asked to receive confession from Francis for his failures to take a sufficiently committed position in solidarity with the poor. Francis is not without his limits and contradictions but this act, among others, places him far to the left of Ratzinger and others in the church
The rise of Pentecostalism across Latin America has provided a potent challenge to liberation theology as personal access to wealth and power are deemed to be signs of God’s favour and impoverishment the consequence of a lack of faith. These prosperity cults, which fester in much of the world, have become a central base for far right forces, such as those that supported Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.
In South Africa, the commitment to what liberation theology calls the “preferential option for the poor”, to be in solidarity with the oppressed, has largely been abandoned as many churches have, following a broader retreat from a politics of unmediated solidarity, been absorbed into the liberal elitism of the NGO networks that call themselves “civil society.
Religion is not required for a militant insistence on the humanity of the dehumanised and the central ethics of liberation theology can easily be brought into secular forms of politics. The liberation theology developed by Gutiérrez, and expanded by others, has been of profound import for the secular left as well as people whose commitment to affirm the humanity of the dehumanised is grounded in faith
Richard Pithouse is a distinguished research fellow at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies in Dublin and New York, an international research scholar at the University of Connecticut and an extraordinary professor at the University of the Western Cape.