Throughout the Catholic world there has been extensive discussion of the differences in tone, emphasis and sympathy between the two documents on the theology of liberation issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—the cautionary Instruction on Certain Aspects of the Theology of Liberation of 1984, which was primarily concerned with drawing attention to ‘deviations and risks of deviation damaging to the faith’, and the Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation of 1986. The concern of this article is not so much with the contents themselves of these two documents as with the different ecclesiologies which appear to have shaped those contents. The prime object is to discern what the differences between them have to say to us about the place of ecclesiology in the Church’s mission today.

The ecclesiology of the first Vatican Instruction is present more by inference than direct reference. The danger points in contemporary ecclesiology are identified as a dismissal of the hierarchical nature of the Church as the People of God, and an ecclesiology that has become too immanentist. The document admits that it is not really interested in giving a positive theology—it leaves that task to the later document. Nevertheless one can discern an emerging ecclesiology underlying the text.

At about the same time that the Instruction was released, the text of an interview given by Cardinal Ratzinger, the Prefect of the Congregation, was also published. Many of the ideas in the Instruction are the same as those in the interview.