Taming the Liberation Theologians

• Share

In Nicaragua, four Roman Catholic priests remain as officials in the Marxist- led Sandinista government in defiance of canon law, which prohibits priests from holding public office. One of the priests was expelled from the Society of Jesus in December; the other three priests were forbidden in January by the Vatican to perform their sacerdotal duties if they did not resign in two weeks. Insists Fernando Cardenal Martinez, the former Jesuit and Nicaragua's Education Minister: "There is no basic religious problem between the church and the revolution. What exists is a political confrontation."

In Brazil, a mild-mannered Franciscan friar awaits a ruling from Rome over possible "theological errors" in his latest book, Church: Charism and Power, published in 1981. In the book, Theologian Leonardo Boff attacks the "monarchic and pyramidic" structure of the Catholic Church, which, he says, inevitably aligns the church with the rich. Father Boff wants the pyramid of power turned upside down, so that "the church would be, not for the poor, but by the poor."

In Peru, a diminutive parish priest chooses his words carefully as he discusses the controversy over his writings that virtually paralyzed the deliberations of his country's 54-member Episcopal Conference for 13 months. Father Gustavo Gutierrez, 56, is a psychologist and author of the 1971 seminal work A Theology of Liberation, which critics have said is imbued with Marxist concepts. Says Gutierrez: "I preach the gospel, nothing else."

When Pope John Paul II set foot on Venezuelan soil last week, a familiar challenge awaited him. On his sixth evangelizing mission to Latin America in six years, the Pope is once again being asked to put his formidable energies and charismatic appeal to work at resolving a conflict of potentially continent-wide proportions. John Paul is determined to prevent that conflict from distorting what he sees as the true nature of Catholicism. The challenge: liberation theology.

Originally minted in Latin America in the 1960s, liberation theology is a controversial current of religious thought that has, in less than two decades, gained widespread currency. To many, it is the duty of Christians to support the rights of the poor and oppressed. But among its extreme proponents, liberation theology has been used as an apologia for revolutionary upheaval in the Third World that strives to link the imperatives of Christian charity with the dictates of Marxist class struggle.

What distinguishes liberation theology from the mainstream of church thinking is its strong emphasis on social change in the process of spiritual improvement. As Father Jon Sobrino, a Jesuit liberation thinker living in El Salvador, puts it, the aim of liberation theology in Latin America is to "give a new form to a now wretched reality." In analyzing that social reality, some liberation theologians make heavy use of left-wing social science, and in that sense, writes Sobrino, "the influence of Marx on the conception of theological understanding is evident."