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Liberation Theology: the Option for the Poor
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
One fairly obvious difference between this paper and those you have heard so far is that liberation theology, whatever it means, is still being discussed, attacked, caricatured, and defended with great vehemence and passion. The theme does not possess the completeness and neatness that historians prefer. It sprawls and proliferates. The bibliography is immense. We have already reached the stage of the overarching survey. D. W. Ferm has provided a 150-page summary with a helpful ‘reader’ for the use of college students. Ferm’s survey includes African and Asian theologians as well as Latin Americans. I can understand his desire to include Archbishop-elect Desmond Tutu in South Africa and to provide some hints as to why President Marcos could be deposed in the Philippines. And there is indeed a body called the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians—its unfortunate acronym is EATWOT—which gives some substance to this universalizing claim. But I am going to confine myself to Latin America because it was there that the ‘option for the poor’ was first spoken about. The date was 1968. CELAM, the regional association of Latin American Bishops, met at Medellin in Colombia in August. Pope Paul VI was present, and was the first Pope to kiss the soil of Latin America. There was a feeling abroad that at the Second Vatican Council, which had ended three years before, an essentially European agenda concerned typically with ecumenism and Church structures (collegiality) had prevailed; the Council had yet to be ‘applied’ to the Latin American situation. One phrase, however, provided a stimulus and a starting-point. Gaudium etSpes, the pastoral constitution on the Church in the World of Today, begins with the ringing assertion that ‘the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the people of this time, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these too are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties, of the followers of Christ’.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1987
References
1 Fern, D. W., Third World Liberation Theologies, an Introductory Survey (New York, 1986) and ed., Third World Liberation Theologies, a Reader (New York, 1986).Google Scholar
2 Abbot, W.J. ed., Documents of Vatican II (New York, 1966), pp. 199–200.Google Scholar
3 Gutierrez, G., in La Reception de Vatican II, ed. Alberigo, G. and Jossua, J.-P. (Paris, 1985), pp. 239–40.Google Scholar
4 Ferm, Liberation Theologies, Reader, p. 25.
5 Ibid.
6 Camara, H., The Desert is Fertile (New York, 1974), p. 16.Google Scholar
7 The Argentinian, Enrique Dussell, who now teaches Church history in Mexico, is the President of the Commission for the Study of the Latin American Church (CEHILA). Pope John Paul II, launching the ‘Novena of years’ in preparation for the celebrations, denounced ‘a certain “black legend” which for a time marked not a few historical studies and concentrated primarily on aspects of violence in civil society in the period which followed discovery’. He urged Latin American historians to approach their task ‘with the humility of truth, without friumphalism or false modesty’, l’Osservatore Romano, Engl. ed. 19 Nov. 1984, p. 5.
8 R. Mousnier, Histoire Generale des Civilizations, iv, LesXVle et XVIIe Siècles (Paris, 1967), p. 374.
9 Norman, E., Christianity and the World Order (London, 1979)Google Scholar. A more moderate statement of the same thesis occurs in Christianity in the Southern Hemisphere (Oxford, 1981), p. 82. ‘Foreign priests, especially those trained in the social science faculty at Louvain, also contributed to the accumulating pool of progressive thinking.’
10 J. Sobrino, Archbishop Oscar Romero (London, 1982), pp. 48–9.
11 45, 000 religious men and 310, 000 religious women; Vida Nueva 27, p. 1419.
12 Hebblethwaite, P., The Runaway Church (London, 1975), p. 188.Google Scholar
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13 Companions of Jesus sent into Today’s World (Rome, 1983) 1, p. 28.
15 Eng. tr. entitled Saint Francis, a Modelfor Human Liberation (London, 1985).
16 Ibid., pp. 66, 68.
17 Ibid., pp. 75.
18 Radio San Miguel serves about 2 million of the Aymara peoples of the Altiplano. It is an indispensable source of advice on matters medical, agricultural, and economic. It also acts as a means of communications with sons doing military service. In the Philippines and in Haiti the Catholic radio stations played an important role in the overthrow of the dictators.
19 Whole congresses have been devoted to the study and prospects of ‘base communities’, see S. Torres and J. Eagleson ed., The Challenge of Basic Christian Communities (New York, 1981). As we meet here in Lincoln, representatives of about 100, 000 basic communities are meeting in Trinidade, Brazil.
20 For this account of San Salvador da Bahia I have to thank Father Jan de Bie, who served for many years in Brazil before becoming Rector of the Latin American College in Leuven, Belgium.
21 Pascal, B., Pensées (Paris, 1963), p. 618.Google Scholar
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23 However, liberation theologians do not shrink from such larger issues. See for example The Destabilising Poverty Crisis’, an address by Cardinal Paulo Arns to the 18th World Conference of the Society for International Development. Rome, 1 July 1985: printed in New Blackfiiars, April 1986, pp. 169–74. His letter on the problem of international debts, read out at a conference in Havana, Cuba, in August 1985, was applauded by the assembled delegates, who could not agree on a joint communiqué.
24 His book Teologia de la Liberacion (Lima, 1971) summed up what had been happening in Latin America in the previous decade. In particular the failure of the ‘decade of development’ led to a search for a more dynamic translation of salvation.
25 Quoted in Sobrino, J., The True Church and the Poor (London, 1985), p. 86.Google Scholar
26 IX, 10.
27 IX, 13.
28 Bollettino della Sala Stampa della Santa Sede, 12 Apr. 1986, p. 6.
29 Ibid., p. 2.
30 Ibid., p. 4.
31 Ibid., pp. 7, 9.
32 Compare the article by Mgr Peter Coughlan, ‘Quiet Breakthrough in Rome’, The Tablet, 5 Apr. 1986, pp. 356–7. His source was his former boss, the Brazilian Dominican Archbishop Moreira Neves Lucas, now Secretary of the Congregation of Bishops,
33 Vatican Press edn, p. 48.
34 Ibid., p. 62.
35 First published in a Brazilian newspaper, Follia de Säo Paulo, 11 May 1986, and then widely elsewhere, though I have not yet found a complete English translation.
36 Bollettino della Sala Stampa, 12 Apr. 1986, pp. 6–7.
37 Oddly enough, that Tory gentleman John Henry Newman had much the same appreciation of the role of the Vatican. In his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1900 edn. London), p. 273, he says: ‘It is hardly necessary to argue out so plain a point. It is individuals, and not the Holy See, that have taken the initiative, and given the lead to the Catholic mind in theological enquiry’. Nor did Newman complain about this. Like the Boffbrothers, he thought it was a useful and necessary brake on speculation.
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