“A teologia da Libertação não é uma teologia de escolha, mais uma dentre outras. Não! A teologia da libertação, tal como a conhecemos, é onde fe, discurso de Deus e vida real encontramos para proteger e expandir as possibilidades da vida, na eco-bio-diversidade do planeta e na possibilidade de justiça para o pobre.”
From Religiões Negras No Brasil, March 2017 (340)
Despite liberation theology having roots in the very earliest history of the church, with the work and Word of Christ and his disciples, and the significant contributions to discourses of liberation made by thinkers from the colonial period like Bartolome de las Casas, Gustavo Gutierrez is credited with coining the term “theology of liberation” in 1968 at a conference of Catholic priests in Peru. This new articulation would prove instrumental in religious responses to the modern issue of exploitation, oppression, and capitalism. Gustavo Gutierrez was approaching this not only as a theological discourse but as a meaningful attempt to put into practice the declarations of the Church in the post-council (the Second Vatican Council, that is) encyclical Populorum Progressio, which outlined a future path for a Catholicism which would support “democracy, human rights, social justice, and political pluralism (Kirylo 176).” Gutierrez and his new theological articulations would have an incredible effect on Latin American Catholics, clergy, and political movements that still affects us today. Not only this, but this new “theology of liberation” would pose a challenging new theological premise for the Vatican itself, one that the Church is still contending with and trying to reconcile.
After decades (if not centuries) of the church cozying up to various states and power structures across places like Latin America and Europe, and sitting comfortably in a pacifist position of a kind of apolitical aloofness, the Second Vatican Council and the liberation-focused conferences of clergy in Latin America lit a fire of urgency that propelled the church forward, finally, into the modern reality at the end of the millennium. The neutral position was at this point untenable to maintain, particularly as the question of whether Latin America would be exploited by larger economic powers and gobbled up internally by capitalism and exploitation or pursue a different social and economic model came to the forefront. Los Textos de Medellîn, profoundly influenced by the work of Gutierrez state that:
If Christians believe in the fecundity of peace for the pursuit of justice, they believe as well that justice is an inevitable condition for peace. They see pre- vailing in many parts of Latin America an unjust situation that can be called institutionalized violence. Because of the defects in the structures of agricul- tural and industrial enterprise, of national and international economies, and of cultural and political life, entire populations lack basic necessities… This situation violates their fundamental rights and urgently demands global courageous and profoundly renovating transformations. It should not surprise us, therefore, that the "temptation of violence" arises in Latin America. We should not try the patience of a people which for years has endured conditions which would be unacceptable to anyone with a greater awareness of human rights. (37)
By 1971, three years after initially bringing the term into discourse at a conference, Gutiérrez published A Theology of LIberation, his seminal work on the topic, leading to an immense and prolific outpouring of work from other theologians and writers at the time, such as Jose Bonino, Enrique DUssel, Hugo Assmann, Juan Luis Segundo, Jon Sobrino, and Leonardo and Clodovis Boff (Kirylo 176).
This explosion in thought was, in its own way, a kind of peaceful revolution like the one we now see with the movement for socialism in Bolivia. It was a revolution that shook the church to its core as members and priests on the ground committed themselves to fighting for justice and liberation, putting on their boots and stepping into the mud. There is no better example of this revolution than the internal transformation that occurred for Oscar Romero.
Monseñor Romero, as he was known and is lovingly referred to now, was named archbishop of El Salvador in February of 1977, and was chosen as somewhat of a safe bet, since he seemed to the oligarchs of El Salvador to be a rather simple, meek and conservative theologian, very committed to Rome and tradition, and not particularly interested in politicking or anything outside the norm. Soon after, his dear friend the Jesuit Rutilio Grande was assassinated by the military, and his radicalization became apparent to the public as he confronted the government over their violence and oppression of the people of El Salvador (Castro 19). The naming of Oscar Romero came, as it soon turned out, at a pivotal and revolutionary moment in the history of El Salvador, right at the onset of what would end up being a long, brutal, and bloody civil war, killing 70,000 people.
However, this radicalization process did not occur overnight for Oscar Romero. The archbishop is sometimes characterized by biographers and depictions as someone who was completely clueless about politics and liberation theology going into his time as archbishop, and while it is true that he was not an outspoken participant in politics, he was aware of liberation theology and a discourse of liberation took some time to form and evolve in his sermons. In his critique of the way the American-Mexican film Romero depicts the archbishop, James Roth writes that, after studying in Rome during a tumultuous theological revolution within the Vatican, and then being a committed and studious theologian, and a friend of liberation theologian Rutilio Grande, he would have absolutely known about liberation theology and its wide adoption in Latin America and “it is likely that he even accepted a good bit of it, even if he did not speak or write openly about it.”
Further evidence of this revolutionary and radicalizing process is evident in a quantitative sociological study published by Sociology of Religion in 2001 and authored by Timothy Shortell, in which Shortell analyzed the occurrence of the themes and words “FAITH, HOPE, SIN, SALVATION, LOVE, CONVERSION, CHURCH, POOR, OPPRESSION, JUSTICE, and LIBERATION” in the homilies of Oscar Romero. These homilies were grouped into early, middle, and late periods in Romero’s ministry in order to illustrate the transformation of Romero’s theology. In his conclusions, Shortell notes that “there is a marked radicalization in the discourse between the two latest points.” The mention of the concepts of HOPE and LIBERATION moved into the most positive space toward the end in Shortell’s analysis, and the discourse around “POOR” became “the most concrete of all themes at time C.” Thus, as soon as the political situation heightened, Oscar Romero was ready to apply a theology that centered on the preferential option for the poor, the concept of liberation, and, through hope, the idea that humans must engage in activity in order to achieve Catholic ideological and religious goals.
Returning to James Roth, he writes:
That Romero knew a great deal about liberation theology and had given some thought to the earthly role of the Church is revealed by the forceful nature of statements he began making as soon as he became archbishop. He certainly did not know what to do about the repression, violence, and poverty in El Salvador. Few did. But he did know how to describe it and where to place the blame for it. His statements condemning repression and economic injustice began to appear only a month after he became archbishop. These were not warm-fuzzy statements about loving one another and being more willing to share, either. He was a bit slower to become confrontational with political authority, but that, too, began to emerge in his second month as archbishop, when he refused to attend a new (unelected) president’s inauguration.
Romero was negotiating between, on the one hand, the Marxist Leninist revolutionary project of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), and on the other hand the dictatorial repression of the capitalist regime of El Salvador. It might be easy to say that his righteousness was in his pacifist neutrality between these two groups in the moments before a bloody war, like that of Dorothy Day or Gandhi, but this would be untrue. Romero called out, first and foremost, the injustice that the government and the exploiters that oppressed the people of El Salvador. And then, only weeks before his murder, Romero said that “Christians do not fear combat; they know how to fight…. The church speaks of the legitimate right of insurrectional violence.” This seems not at all to be the pushover theologian that the oligarchs of El Salvador expected, and could be interpreted as an ethical stance on behalf of the Marxist revolution of the FMLN. The immense power of the counterrevolution, seen immediately at the start of his time as archbishop through the murder of his dear Jesuit friend, could have been overwhelming, and yet in a revolutionary fashion, Romero accepted this risk in order to remain committed to his values of liberation and the word of Christ. Jaume Castro writes that “una de las grandezas de Romero fue su aceptación de la muerte inminente…. Era consciente del peligro que corría. Las últimas semanas antes de morir conducía solo su coche por miedo a que un posible atentado hiciera daño a alguien más.” For his people and for the necessary revolutionary social transformation that he was called upon to support by his Chrsitian faith, he was willing to die, even after being offered safe escape to Rome by that Vatican. “Quiso estar cerca de su pueblo (20).”
In the decades since the murder of this revolutionary martyr, the church has struggled to follow the example of Oscar Romero and to make sense of his heroism in his final days. As Matthew Philipp Whelan points out in Oscar Romero, Catholic Social Teaching, and Land Reform, “it also became clear that not any and every part of the church was attacked, but especially practitioners of the politics of common use.” Oscar Romero was willing to lay down his life and put everything at risk in the name of what was right, exactly as he learned to do from the teachings of Christ, an idea that he articulated many times when reflecting on the martyrdom that was clearly coming for him in his final days. He wrote about John 15:13 “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” This great sacrifice posited an answer to the questions of what the church can or should do when it comes to matters such as agrarian reform, state violence, and economic injustice. It should do everything in its power, up to and including risking their own lives, in a way analogous to the sacrifice of Christ on the cross.
The cause for Romero’s canonization faced trials, including questions about whether this theology was in agreement with doctrine. For years it was risky in El Salvador to properly recognize and remember Romero, even at his funeral, where a huge massacre was orchestrated by the right wing. In any case, Pope Francis finally facilitated the canonization and in 2018 the martyred Archbishop Romero became Saint Oscar Romero, affirming his theology, his sacrifice, and his revolutionary ideology as part of a meaningful expression of God’s purpose for creation.
1. In the first centuries
of Christianity
the hungry were fed
at a personal sacrifice,
the naked were clothed
at a personal sacrifice,
the homeless were sheltered
at personal sacrifice.
2. And because the poor
were fed, clothed and sheltered
at a personal sacrifice,
the pagans used to say
about the Christians
"See how they love each other."
3. In our own day
the poor are no longer
fed, clothed, sheltered
at a personal sacrifice,
but at the expense
of the taxpayers.
4. And because the poor
are no longer
fed, clothed and sheltered
the pagans say about the Christians
"See how they pass the buck."
1. Karl Marx soon realized
that his own analysis
of bourgeois society
could not be the basis
of a dynamic revolutionary movement.
2. karl Marx soon realized
that a forceful Communist Manifesto
was the necessary foundation
of a dynamic Communist Movement.
3. Karl Marx soon realized,
as Lenin realized,
that there is no revolution
without revolutionary action;
that there is no revolutionary action
without a revolutionary movement;
that there is no revolutionary movement
without a vanguard of revolution
and that there is no vanguard of revolution
without a theory of revolution.