The Peruvian priest and theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, considered the father of liberation theology – which proposes commitment to the poor as an evangelical task of liberation – has died at the age of 96.
Born on June 8, 1928 in Lima (Peru), to a modest family, Gustavo Gutiérrez suffered osteomyelitis in his adolescence that forced him to stay in bed for a long time and led him to read a lot. When he recovered, he began to study medicine and philosophy with a view to becoming a psychiatrist. But at the age of 24, he decided to become a priest. His bishop considered him too old for the seminary and sent him to Europe. At the Catholic University of Louvain, in Belgium, he learned French and wrote a thesis on Sigmund Freud, then went on to the Catholic University of Lyon, where he studied theology.
There he met the Sulpician exegete Albert Gelin, as well as the theologians Gustave Martelet (Jesuit) and Marie-Dominique Chenu (Dominican), the latter one of the experts of the Second Vatican Council. He was also influenced by other Dominicans such as the theologians Christian Duquoc and Claude Geffré, as well as Louis-Joseph Lebret, who inspired Pope Paul VI’s 1967 encyclical Populorum Progressio on human development.
Ordained a priest in 1959, he was curate in a parish in the poor district of Rímac, in Lima. At the same time, he taught at the Pontifical University of Peru and at universities in Europe and North America. In May 1967, two years after the end of the Second Vatican Council in which he had participated in the last session, he raised the question of how to be able to tell the poor that God loves them, to the students of the University of Montreal, distinguishing for the first time the dimensions of poverty.
At this point, he detailed real and everyday poverty, which “is not a fatality, but an injustice”; as well as spiritual poverty, “synonymous with spiritual childhood,” which “consists in putting one’s own life in the hands of God”; and poverty as a commitment, which “leads one to live in solidarity with the poor, to fight poverty with them, to announce the Gospel from them.”
The following year, he was invited to speak about the concept of development theology at a conference in Peru where he explained that “a theology of liberation is more appropriate.” This theological language, which takes into account the suffering of the poor, inspired the bishops gathered in Medellin (Colombia) at the second conference of the Latin American Episcopal Council (CELAM) to debate the application of Vatican II.
There they began to denounce the “institutionalized violence” of the regimes in force on the continent and recognized, in certain circumstances, the legitimacy of the revolutionary insurrection. They also affirmed for the first time the “preferential option for the poor.”
HE WROTE HIS MASTERPIECE IN 1971: ‘THEOLOGY OF LIBERATION’
In May 1969, Gustavo Gutiérrez travelled to Brazil, which was then experiencing the darkest hours of the military dictatorship. In this country he met students, Catholic Action activists and priests, whose testimonies enriched his thinking, which led to his masterpiece: ‘Theology of Liberation’ (published in 1971).
The liberation that Gustavo Gutiérrez speaks of develops on three interrelated levels: the economic level (the causes of unjust situations must be tackled); the human level (it is not enough to change structures, people must be changed) and the deepest level, the theological (freeing oneself from the sin of refusing to love God and one’s neighbour).
As for theology, it is the means of verifying that commitment to the poor is an evangelical task of liberation, a response to the challenge that poverty poses to the language of God.
In a South American Church with few priests, the movement – which mobilized other theologians such as Leonardo Boff, Juan Luis Segundo and Dom Helder Camara – gave rise to more than 80,000 base communities in Brazil alone and more than a million biblical groups. And it proved contagious in other places: in the United States among the black minority, in Africa and Asia theologies of the Third World were awakening.
In any case, this movement encountered strong opposition in Latin America and the United States. But also from some Catholics who accused him of using the theory of dependency, which uses concepts of Marxist analysis, to analyze certain aspects of poverty.
Despite the criticism he received, especially during the pontificate of St. John Paul II, Gustavo Gutiérrez always maintained a position of dialogue with the Church. He was never sanctioned in a context in which some of his colleagues, such as the theologian Leonardo Boff, suffered harsh reprisals.
The arrival of the Argentine Jorge Mario Bergoglio to the papacy, who had a special closeness and a clear option for the poor, was in a certain way a relief for those who, like him, had fought for a Church more committed to the most vulnerable and discarded in history.
