A decade or so ago, I boarded a Miami flight headed for Detroit and found myself sitting next to a short, elderly, Latin American gentleman. Throughout the flight, we exchanged the usual pleasantries that characterize such travel. But I could not shake the sense that I knew who he was.
Upon deplaning in Detroit, I walked out the plane door and immediately encountered wheelchairs for those who are elderly or experience difficulty walking. Next to one of the wheelchairs was an attendant holding a sign with the name of the passenger he was designated to assist. The name read “Gustavo Gutiérrez.” It turned out that I had just spent a two-hour flight sitting next to the Peruvian priest widely regarded as the father of liberation theology.
I thought of that flight recently when reading that Father Gutiérrez had died on October 22, 2024, at the age of 96. Some obituaries verged on the hagiographical—something with which I suspect Gutiérrez himself would have been ill at ease. But virtually every obituary stressed the importance of Gutiérrez’s 1971 book, A Theology of Liberation, in shaping liberation theology as a set of ideas and as a religious and political movement that exercised significant influence inside and outside the Catholic Church as well as on Latin American politics.
Many regard that influence as positive insofar as liberation theology, at least as Gutiérrez understood it, purports to remind Christians of the special place that those on society’s margins should have as they think about social, political, and economic questions. But it has never been evident to me that the Catholic Church ever lost sight of that imperative.
Certainly, plenty of Catholics have neglected this responsibility throughout history. Others have been complacent about various expressions of injustice, or sometimes too close to those responsible. Nonetheless, a concern for the poor has been a consistent part of Christian thought and action from the Church’s very beginnings. The work of millions of Catholics with those in need over two millennia underscore how consistently this commitment was given practical expression centuries before the phrase “liberation theology” was coined.
Gutiérrez never questioned such facts. His point was that Christianity’s commitment to the poor must be read in the context of the realities in which people find themselves. In Gutiérrez’s case, that meant the context of Latin America of the late-1960s.
Facts and context, however, do not explain themselves. They need an interpretive lens. Gutiérrez’s search for such a framework began during his studies in Europe in the 1950s as a seminarian. This exposed him to the thought of some of the most important thinkers who would influence Vatican II, such as Henri de Lubac, S.J. But Gutiérrez was also shaped by German theologians like Karl Rahner, S.J., and Johann Baptist Metz. They looked to continental European Enlightenment sources for inspiration and, in some cases, seemed anxious to deemphasize any truth of Catholic faith that clashed with modernity.
One problem with this line of thought is that the revelation entrusted to the Church precedes and transcends modernity. And while the modern world has given us new insights into various aspects of reality, the Church is as much in the business of transforming the modern world as it is in shaping any historical period so that it better anticipates Christ’s Kingdom. Put another way: It is the Church’s ambition to transform the world, not the other way around.
A second problem is that modernity is a mixed bag. It has brought forth much good, such as the radical diminishment of poverty in those countries where the economic ideas pioneered by Adam Smith took hold. But modernity has also produced considerable errors, whether it is the false conceptions of human nature integral to Freudian psychology or Benthamite utilitarianism, or the destruction and death that flowed inexorably from the translation of Marxist beliefs into political action and economic policy.
Like many clergy of his generation, Gutiérrez studied Marxist ideas during his time in Europe. This should not surprise us. As the French liberal philosopher Raymond Aron observed in his 1955 book, The Opium of the Intellectuals, Marxism became a type of secular religion in Western European intellectual circles following World War II. European Catholic theological faculties were not immune to this trend—something that, as one prominent critic of liberation theology, Joseph Ratzinger, later noted, became evident during the 1968 student uprisings in Europe.
Through reading Marxist thinkers like Herbert Marcuse, Gutiérrez became interested in the possibilities offered by a dialogue with Marxism. This did not mean that Gutiérrez took the scriptures and then read everything that they say about the poor through a Marxist filter. Nonetheless, one can find traces of the influence of Marxist ideas upon aspects of Gutiérrez’s thought.
Gutiérrez’s ascription of a special status to the poor as a source for interpreting the scriptures, the content of Christian faith, and poverty itself is an example. As Gutiérrez wrote in A Theology of Liberation, “Only authentic solidarity with the poor and a real protest against the poverty of our time can provide the concrete, vital context necessary for a theological discussion of poverty.” There is a parallel here with Marx’s privileging of the proletariat as having a special role in driving the course of history.
Such conceptions of the significance of the poor for theological reflection took on more charged forms in the works of other liberation theologians. In a 2008 article in Revista Eclesiastica Brasileira, one former liberation theologian, Clodovis Boff (brother of one of the most famous liberation theologians, Leonardo Boff), suggested that many liberation theologians ended up substituting “the poor” for Jesus Christ as the “first operative principle of theology.” The effect was to marginalize Christ from the substance of Christian faith and its expressions.
Gutiérrez also believed that Marxist analytical methods offered insights into understanding reality. One critic of liberation theology, Michael Novak, once told me that in conversations with Gutiérrez, the latter mentioned that Marxism was widely regarded in the late-1960s as a useful analytical tool for understanding social and economic reality.
Marxist thought was certainly flourishing in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s. But Gutiérrez’s willingness to engage with Marxist analytical methods played a role in encouraging Catholic thinkers throughout Central and South America to draw extensively upon Marxist analysis to identify the “structures of sin,” as the liberationists described them, that were at the root of injustice.
But as no less than the then father-general of the Jesuits, Pedro Arrupe (hardly a “conservative”), wrote in a 1980 letter to his fellow Jesuits, Marxist analysis “implies in fact a concept of human history which contradicts the Christian view of humankind and society, and leads to strategies which threaten Christian values and attitudes.” In short, you cannot buy into Marxist analytical methods without accepting a Marxist understanding of human nature and history, which, given their grounding in materialist philosophy, are irreconcilable with Christian anthropology and faith.
The same logic is also likely to incline those who embrace it to engage in activities that Marxists regard as imperative for confronting oppression. In A Theology of Liberation, Gutiérrez wrote:
Attempts to bring about changes within the existing order have proven futile. Only a radical break from the status quo, that is, a profound transformation of the private property system [and] a social revolution that would break this dependence would allow for the change to a new society, a socialist society. … The goal is not only better living conditions, a radical change of structures, a social revolution; it is much more: the continuous creation, never-ending, of a new way to be human, a permanent cultural revolution.
In this light, it is hardly surprising that some Latin American theologians started proposing in the 1970s that the Church itself must become an instrument for political liberation from injustice and that Catholics must commit themselves to revolutionary action. From there it was a short step to Catholic priests involving themselves in left-wing revolutionary movements like the Marxist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who waged war on the Church soon after taking power in 1979.
The collapse of Communist systems in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union put a major dent in such schemes. But the damage to the Catholic Church had been done.
For one thing, many of the economically poor in Latin America turned out to be not especially interested in liberation theology. Nor were they necessarily impressed by Catholic clergy engaging in political activism. Latin America had long been overendowed with political activism, often from the extremes of the left and the right.
This helps to explain why liberation theology’s rise throughout Catholic Latin America went hand in hand with the spread of Evangelical Christianity throughout the region. As the oft-cited line goes: “The Church opted for the poor, and the poor opted for the Evangelicals.” And so they did—in droves.
Some of that shift owes something to the popularity of the Prosperity Gospel and its seductions that have been peddled by some Evangelical pastors. But many Latin Americans were also attracted to Evangelical movements by the focus of many Evangelical preachers on the need to develop a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and to change one’s life, instead of investing all one’s hopes in politics or continuous revolution. The same preachers were also proficient at helping people on the margins to transform their lives by getting jobs, starting businesses, breaking addictions like alcoholism, and being faithful to their wives. Such praxis was real and far more effective in changing lives for the better than impassioned urgings to revolutionary confrontations.
What then, 53 years after the publication of A Theology of Liberation, remains of Gustavo Gutiérrez’s vision and project?
In the first place, liberation theology helped turned some Latin American Catholic clerics into left-wing activists. That inevitably compromised the Church’s ability to witness and minister to all segments of society and all shades of political opinion. If, for example, you were a Catholic small-business owner and regularly heard your parish priest use his sermons at Sunday Mass to denounce private enterprise as “lords of capital” or “capitalist exploiters,” the temptation to start attending an Evangelical church or abandon Christianity altogether would be strong, if not overwhelming.
Second, there is little evidence that liberation theology has done much to take people out of poverty in Latin America and elsewhere. As Michael Novak pointed out in his 1986 book, Will It Liberate?, liberation theologians were notoriously vague about their concrete proposals for economic and political reform. Utopian vision-casting and revolutionary rhetoric was more their thing.
More generally, many liberation theologians long ago shifted their focus away from questions of economic poverty. Instead, some of them have embraced the type of liberations that tend to preoccupy middle-class secular progressives. Precisely how that helps people who live in los barrios of Latin America today is not obvious.
None of this is to disparage Gutiérrez. While the flaws of liberation theology are profound, I have no reason to doubt his goodwill or desire to help the Church think more deeply about the place of the poor in our understanding of revelation and the world. But the fruits of liberation theology, I would submit, have been meagre, and the costs far more evident. That, I believe, will be the long-term verdict.
