Opinion

Remembering Gustavo Gutiérrez

(RNS) — A group of priests, most of us working in parishes in the slums, met with Gutiérrez to talk about our experiences. Only later did we realize that what he told us in return were the first moments of what would come to be called liberation theology.

Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez attends a news conference at the Vatican, May 12, 2015. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Joseph Nangle
October 30, 2024

(RNS) — On an ordinary weekday in the basement of a downtown church in Lima, Peru, in the late 1960s, a gathering of priests, most of them working in slum parishes, heard theology being done in an entirely new way: from the bottom up, based on day-to-day events, working from practice to theory.

Only later did we realize that something quite remarkable was taking place, and that we were experiencing the first moments of what would come to be called liberation theology.

The leader of the group was the Rev. Gustavo Gutiérrez, a Catholic priest who was leading the discussion that day. It was there that I first heard Gutiérrez, who died Oct. 22, say, “I think the Exodus story in the Hebrew Scriptures has much to do with what we are doing here — the movement of a people from slavery to freedom: liberation.”

For several months he had invited us to meet with him weekly and share our pastoral experiences from the slum parishes where most of us we worked. Gustavo would simply listen as we spoke of the events taking place in our ministries, then, at the end, sum up what he had been hearing. We never sensed he was there to instruct or correct us. In fact, he sometimes remarked that the events we were describing were “the raw material for his theologizing.”

As the term “liberation theology” went viral, Gustavo expanded his initial reflections on this process, saying we were grappling with a fundamental question: Does God’s Word (the Holy Scriptures) have anything to say to the poor of the earth? The best way to begin answering that question, he said, was to look at the experience all around us in the so-called Third World of poor, marginalized, oppressed human beings.

Today the answer to that question and its instinctive affirmative reply is readily agreed upon: “Yes, of course, a principal theme in God’s Word to us concerns the poor among us.” At that time and place, however, this answer was not so clear. The institutional Catholic Church in Latin America was identified with powerful forces – economic, political and military elements that maintained an iron grip on the generally impoverished lives of its citizens. One archbishop in Peru celebrated the fact of so many poor, saying “this allowed the church the opportunity to be charitable toward them!”

The question about God’s Word and the recognition of victims of “institutionalized oppression” — another insight of liberation theology — were keys to understanding this “new grace” in theological terms, and, more importantly, in Catholic spirituality and pastoral practice. It turned the entire process of theologizing on its head, from ethical and doctrinal propositions to a new beginning place: reality. One can make the case now that this process has become a norm in most theological circles, even without labeling it liberation theology.

Gutierrez’s instinct about reflecting and acting on human experiences as the starting place for understanding God’s Word to humanity ran into serious obstacles. The most famous of these was the reaction of St. John Paul II and then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) at the Vatican. As the inevitable consequences of entire communities of oppressed people beginning to learn of God’s liberating Word, the Vatican leaders reacted sometimes violently against their status quo.

One can conjecture that the Polish pope and his German theologian moved from their deeply felt opposition to communism. They felt that poor people were being incited to Marxist-style revolution such as those the hierarchs had experienced, particularly in Soviet-dominated countries.

This attitude was 180 degrees apart from the intent of liberation theology. One cannot continue to oppress a people. They will protest. In the Bible’s Book of Exodus, we hear the Lord say, “I have heard the cry of the poor,” and Moses say, “Let my people go.” Liberation theology brought this consciousness of God’s will ever more clearly to oppressed human beings in Latin America and eventually far beyond. This is Gutierrez’s lasting and glowing legacy.

Sometime after my return from Peru to the United States in 1975, Gustavo called me to ask if I would approach an American religious superior and urge him to intervene with a member of his congregation in Peru. The superior was influential in many circles there and was undermining liberation consciousness among the people. Gustavo’s comment on that occasion is significant: “What’s important is not some arcane argument among armchair theologians, but essential for the popular organizations being moved by this new understanding of their religion.”

This request speaks of the importance that liberation theology has come to represent not only for marginalized people but for the Catholic Christian world and beyond. Judging, challenging, interpreting the Word of God by its relevance in ordinary life is a new spirituality. Gustavo was very strong on this point, often insisting with us who were engaged in ministry that the message of a liberating God was essentially a pastoral task.

In that and many other ways, Gustavo was a dedicated and faith-filled son of the Catholic Church. His adherence to it, despite official opposition from the highest levels of that institution, speaks volumes about his integrity as a loyal member of the church.

As a Christian, a Catholic, a member of the Franciscan order and an ordained priest in those institutions, I can say with utter honesty that Gutierrez has been the most important influence in my life. From a typically conservative cradle Catholic, educated theologically in the decade of the 1950s, I had my eyes opened to a whole new way of praying, celebrating the Catholic sacraments and above all engaging in pastoral work.

I began as a popularizer who saw his vocation as making people happy, without addressing the underlying causes of deep, widespread tragedies in the world. Gustavo opened my eyes. I was never the same again. He showed me that the Hebrew Scriptures and the gospel of Jesus Christ come with an expensive price tag, that of standing with and speaking on behalf of the millions who are denied a voice. And without promoting it, that view of Christianity inevitably provokes deep opposition.

In the words of another “liberationist,” Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “It is the cost of discipleship.”

(The Rev. Joseph Nangle is a Catholic Franciscan priest. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)

Gutiérrez's liberation theology still inspires young Latin American theologians

(RNS) — While liberation theology has been criticized for a view of oppression that is too simplistic, young Latin American theologians say Gutiérrez opened the doors for new movements in Catholic thought, even as the Vatican warmed to his legacy.

Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez speaks during a news conference at the Vatican, May 12, 2015. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino, File)
Eduardo Campos Lima
October 29, 2024

SÃO PAULO (RNS) — The death of the Rev. Gustavo Gutiérrez, called the “father of liberation theology,” at age 96 on Oct. 22 has set off a reconsideration of the theological and pastoral movement spawned by the publication of the Peruvian priest’s 1971 book, “A Theology of Liberation.”

Once a powerful influence on both faith and politics in Latin America, liberation theology grew out of Gutiérrez’s concern for the poor amid the collapse of political projects in the 1960s that tried to modernize the region’s economies, exacerbated by the political repression by military juntas in several South and Central American countries.

The result was widespread violence and poverty — something that, for Gutiérrez and his colleagues, was not natural, but produced by severe social and economic inequality.

“That was the innovation introduced by Gustavo Gutiérrez and others – including myself – when we conceived theology starting from the suffering and oppression faced by the great majority of the Latin American people. The poor are oppressed, and all oppression cries for liberation,” said Leonardo Boff, a Brazilian theologian and a prominent proponent of liberation theology himself, who called Gutiérrez “a dear friend.”

Before writing his book, Gutiérrez had visited Brazil, where a new kind of church organization was already being set in motion by urban and rural workers: so-called basic ecclesial communities, known by their Portuguese and Spanish acronym CEBs, which gathered workers in a given neighborhood into a single community where they could discuss their lives and their faith.

The CEBs inspired Gutiérrez, and his writings spread the CEB model to peasants, landless rural workers, members of Indigenous groups, factory workers and the unemployed.

Liberation theology, however, encountered criticism from Catholic Church leaders, especially in Europe, who said it owed too much to Marxist ideas in its analysis of poverty and was too sympathetic to ideas about violent revolution. Boff recalled that “Gutiérrez’s work was seen as a kind of Trojan horse designed to promote Marxism in Latin America.”

At the same time, the early years of liberation theology were also a time of intense debate as the church absorbed the changes of the Second Vatican Council, and Gutiérrez’s thought was not given its due. “Europeans couldn’t care less about the thought coming from the peripheries, especially about theological or philosophical thought,” Boff said.

But under Pope John Paul II and his doctrine watchdog, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), the Vatican would closely monitor liberation theology. Boff described how Gutiérrez once had to clarify some of his ideas for Vatican officials and the whole Peruvian episcopate. In 1984, liberation theology was officially censored, and though he was never silenced by Rome himself, Gutiérrez was relegated to the fringes of the church’s theological debates. Meanwhile, the Latin American church saw many of its most progressive leaders replaced by conservative prelates.

With the end of the Cold War a few years later, new ideas changed how Latin American thinkers, especially conservatives, saw politics and societal transformation. New generations of progressive theologians also found themselves rejecting liberation theology’s view of the poor and oppressed.

Over the past few decades, the fragmentation of categories such as “the poor” into smaller social groups and identities has been leading to several new theological movements in Latin America, more focused on the needs and realities of specific segments. Works like Gutiérrez’s may be seen by younger generations as classics from the past in that context.

“We realized that such rhetoric was too broad and nonspecific. Those ‘poor’ had no color. We’re all poor, but some of us are racialized, some of us are Black or Indigenous, some of us are women,” Colombian theologian Maricel Mena López, a professor at the Santo Tomas University in Bogota, told RNS.

A proponent of Black feminist theology, Mena said that, little by little, younger theologians also came to see liberation theology as patriarchal. “Apparently, women’s issues were not important in that theology,” she said.

Bolivian theologian Heydi Galarza, an expert in biblical studies, told RNS that the first generation of liberation theology thinkers “had great difficulty grasping the relevance of women’s issues.”

“That has been and continues to be a strong criticism,” Galarza said. “Latin American theology has gone a long way since then, with the development of new schools of thought.”

Both Mena and Galarza agree, however, that Gutiérrez opened the doors for those new movements.

“His theological work made other ones possible. I consider myself to be a liberation theologian – as well as a Black feminist theologian,” Mena said, adding that in her opportunities to talk with Gutiérrez at academic events, he always listened with great attention to all she had to say.

“He was very welcoming of feminist ideas, for instance. I never felt he was critical of them. He even told me, on one occasion, that he was glad that we were seeing things they couldn’t see back then,” she said.

The fact that his theological work started from the reality of social groups and from the practical experience with them still forms the basis for new theological approaches, Galarza said. “That nonspecific view of the poor has been overcome, but the way his theological work related to them — starting from the praxis — is still valid and can be applied to all social groups,” she said.

Pope Francis’ pontificate has also returned some vigor to liberation theology. A longtime acquaintance of Gutiérrez, the pontiff has always rejected what he considers to be “excess” in liberation theology, referring to its Marxist tendencies. But Gutiérrez’s focus on the poor and his preference for concrete theology directly connected to the people are ideas close to the pope’s own.

Indeed, under Francis the Vatican “rehabilitated” Gutiérrez, and he was invited to take part in official meetings there.

Bolivian theologian Tania Avila, a member of the women’s and Indigenous’ hubs of the Catholic Church’s Pan-Amazon Ecclesial Network, known as REPAM, writes on “integral ecology,” a holistic approach to thinking about the environment that Francis included in his 2015 environmental encyclical, “Laudato Si’.” Avila told RNS that she considers Gutiérrez a “brave theologian who challenged his own time’s limitations to see the social context.”

Avila also agreed that Gutiérrez and some of his colleagues “made an effort to recognize, decades later, that they failed to take into consideration the feeling and thinking of the women in their theological work.”

Francisco Bosch, a young Argentine theologian who has been accompanying the Latin American CEBs as an adviser to the Episcopal Conference of Latin America, said he feels close to Gutiérrez. “Theology, for him, is a love letter between God and his people. The work of the theologian is about that letter. And we’re living amid projects of hatred in Latin America,” Bosch told RNS.

In a time of political crisis and a general feeling of lack of representation, of economic hardships and environmental catastrophes, “Gutiérrez’s words are more urgent than ever,” Bosch said.

“His thought is part of the great Judeo-Christian tradition, which still has much to offer to humankind, especially in times of disorientation,” said Bosch. The “struggles of different social groups — Blacks, Indigenous, women and so on — converge and strengthen each other, telling the same narrative of emancipation when their agents discover that God walks with them.”

Gustavo Gutiérrez, founding father of liberation theology, dies at 96

Islamic Liberation Theology as Critique: 

Critical Islamic Political Thought in the Age of Systemic Racism and Exclusion

You are cordially invited to a webinar talk by Dr. Farid Esack, Professor in the Study of Islam in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Johannesburg - South Africa, entitled Islamic Liberation Theology as Critique:

Critical Islamic Political Thought in the Age of Systemic Racism and Exclusion.


This talk is sponsored by the ECMC Chair in Islamic Studies, Department of Political Science, Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities, and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies (MEIS) research group:

Islamic Liberation Theology as Critique:

Critical Islamic Political Thought in the Age of Systemic Racism and Exclusion


When: Saturday, November 28, 2020, 1:00 – 2:30 PM

Where: Zoom Webinar
For Registration Please CLICK HERE





Abstract:

Islamic liberation theology is a critical expansion of both Islamic political thought and liberation theology in terms of the preferential option of the oppressed. In this presentation, Professor Esack will speak about the history and principles of Islamic liberation theology by focusing on themes such as the preferential option for the oppressed, praxis over doxy, pluralism, post-essentialism, and the mediation of social analysis and theology.

One of the key projects of social analysis in contemporary Islamic liberation theology is the reconceptualization of race as the power to critique the world. A decolonial approach to the power of race is central to the social analysis of contemporary Islamic liberation theology. This presentation will argue that that the approach to racism has shifted between the postcolonial theory and decolonial theory which in turn is based on a shift towards coloniality as a world system connected to the history of modern racism as an all-encompassing power. The power of racism is not only connected to the western and northern world. It is also internalized and entrenched in the social and political life of the global south. A decolonial critique proposed by Islamic liberation theology takes this challenge seriously by offering a critique of racism both within and outside Islam.

Bio:

Farid Esack is a Professor in the Study of Islam in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Johannesburg - South Africa, and a South African Muslim liberation theologian. He studied in Pakistan, the UK, and Germany and is the author of Qur’an, Liberation, and Pluralism, On Being a Muslim: An Introduction to the Qur’an, and with Sarah Chiddy, the co-editor of Islam, HIV & AIDS –Between Scorn Pity & Justice (all by Oxford: Oneworld). He has published on Islam, Gender, Liberation Theology, Interfaith Relations, and Qur'anic Hermeneutics and currently works on the Qur’an and socio-economic justice, and in developing a niche at the University of Johannesburg for the Study of Islam, Decolonization and Liberation. Professor Esack served as a Commissioner for Gender Equality in South Africa, and has taught at the Universities of Western Cape, the College of William & Mary and Union Theological Seminary (NY), and at Xavier University in Cincinnati. Before his appointment at the University of Johannesburg, he served as the Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal Professor of Contemporary Islam at Harvard University.


For more information and registration please visit the MEIS website HERE

All Welcome
For Registration Please CLICK HERE

Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies
Research Group


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The University of Alberta respectfully recognizes it is located in ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ (Amiskwacîwâskahikan) on Treaty 6 territory of the Papaschase, and the homeland of the Métis Nation.



L’Université de l’Alberta reconnait respectueusement qu’elle est située à ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ (Amiskwacîwâskahikan) sur les terres du Traité 6, le territoire du Papaschase, et les territoires de la nation Métis.

Gustavo Gutiérrez, founding father of liberation theology, dies at 96

(RNS) — Once criticized by Catholic conservatives and the Vatican, Gutiérrez and his emphasis on caring for the poor were rehabilitated by Pope Francis.

Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez attends a news conference at the Vatican, May 12, 2015. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Claire Giangravé and Aleja Hertzler-McCain
October 23, 2024

VATICAN CITY (RNS) — A towering figure in the Catholic theological landscape of the past century, the Rev. Gustavo Gutiérrez, known as the father of liberation theology, died Tuesday night (Oct. 22) at the age of 96. Described as a Marxist by his critics and under Vatican scrutiny for most of his career, he and his work were partly rehabilitated under Pope Francis.

Gutiérrez died at a nursing home in Lima, Peru, according to a statement by the Dominican Province of St. John the Baptist of Peru, which announced his passing.

In 1971, Gutiérrez published his defining work, “A Theology of Liberation,” born from his experiences as an adviser to the Latin American bishops in Medellín, Colombia. The book offered the foundation for liberation theology, a current that took over Latin America starting in the 1960s, focusing on the “liberation of the oppressed” and social justice for the poor.

Coming in the depths of the Cold War, liberation theology was met with criticism in the church and at the Vatican, which eyed with suspicion its perceived communist influences. Gutiérrez’s signature book “spawned many new theological voices from the margins, and ultimately it left a deep impact on the social teaching of the church, realized, finally, in (the) papacy of Pope Francis, who has fully embraced the language of the option for the poor,” said Robert Ellsberg, publisher of Orbis Books and the English-language editions of Gutiérrez’s work, in an interview with RNS.

In what is considered a historic moment, Francis celebrated Mass with Gutiérrez in 2013 at the papal residence home in the Vatican, accompanied by conservative Cardinal Gerhard Müller. The welcome shown the priest represented a shift in the Vatican’s attitude toward liberation theology.

In a statement to Vatican media on Wednesday, Müller remembered his “great friend” Gutiérrez as “one of the greatest theologians of this century,” saying, “He is the father of liberation theology in a Christian sense, not just a sociological, ideological, political sense, but an integral one. This will remain in the church.”

Gutiérrez was born in 1928 to family that was both Hispanic and Quechua, an Indigenous Andean people. He became a priest in 1959 after studying at the Catholic University of Lyon. His work as a theologian, writer and philosopher eventually ushered him onto the faculties of prestigious universities throughout the world, with him eventually becoming the John Cardinal O’Hara Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.

“He combined a profound sense of the unmerited gift of God’s love with the urgency of solidarity with those society considers the least important,” wrote the Rev. Daniel Groody, professor of theology and global affairs and vice president and associate provost for undergraduate education at Notre Dame, in a statement on Wednesday.

In Gutiérrez’s writings, he emphasized Christ’s message for the poor, especially the need for the church itself to be poor, and its duty to help those who live in poverty, citing especially the Beatitudes and the Book of Revelation.

“People might think of him as some kind of militant in the streets, but he was really initially a parish priest, who spent much of his life ministering among the poorest in Lima,” Ellsberg said.

Beginning in the 1950s, some theologians and priests in Latin America were seeking to ameliorate the causes of poverty, sometimes merging communist principles with Catholic social teaching to justify political activism and even armed rebellion.

Pope John Paul II, who had lived under communist rule in his native Poland, regarded these movements with skepticism. He called on the Vatican’s doctrinal department, led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who would succeed him as Pope Benedict XVI, to investigate these movements. The Vatican issued two formal documents, or instructions, in 1984 and in 1986.

The first criticized “certain forms of liberation theology which use, in an insufficiently critical manner, concepts borrowed from various currents of Marxist thought,” while the second laid out the church’s official understanding of social justice and liberation.

For decades, Gutiérrez’s writings were the subject of a dialogue between the Vatican and the Peruvian Bishops’ Conference, which in 2006 released a statement declaring that they had “concluded the path of clarification of problematic points contained in some works of the author.”

At age 70, Gutiérrez joined the Dominican order, welcomed by the Rev. Timothy Radcliffe, who is leading the spiritual reflections at this month’s Synod on Synodality at the Vatican and will be made a cardinal in December.

Archbishop Carlos Gustavo Castillo Mattasoglio of Lima, who will also be made a cardinal in December, attempted to reconcile the hardships Gutiérrez underwent during John Paul’s pontificate in a YouTube video after the Dominican priest’s death.

“Small, as he was, and with problems in his spinal column so he was very short, he knew with his smallness how to announce the gospel to us with strength and spirit, as John Paul II did,” he said, “So today we are sad because of his passing, and happy because we now have a person in heaven who will accompany us to continue on our mission, our work of the renewed church because it serves the small.”

Cecilia González-Andrieu, president-elect of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States, called Gutiérrez an “extraordinary influence on generations of theologians in this country,” in an interview with RNS.

Gutiérrez’s life had inspired U.S. Latino theologians “to be closer to the suffering of communities on the margins and the vulnerable and to keep connected always to how it is that our work impacts them and how they impact our work,” she said.

In 2018, Francis canonized Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador, El Salvador, who is considered a representative of the ideals of liberation theology. A year earlier, the pope told Spanish newspaper El País that “liberation theology was a positive thing in Latin America.”

Francis wrote Gutiérrez a letter for his 90th birthday thanking God “for what you have contributed to the Church and to humanity through your theological service and from your preferential love for the poor and discarded in society.” He also thanked the theologian for “challenging the conscience of each person, so that no one can be indifferent faced with the drama of poverty and exclusion.”

Benedict’s Passing: No Tears for ‘God’s Rottweiler’

BY BRIAN KELLY

 JANUARY 4, 2023
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Photograph Source: Fabio Pozzebom/ABr – Agência Brasil – CC BY 3.0br

The long-anticipated death of Josef Ratzinger—head of the Catholic Church between 2005 and 2013 as Pope Benedict XVI—has led to a deluge of the kind of vacuous eulogising that accompanies the passing of any leading pillar of the establishment. One can detect in some of the commentary the terms of a debate over Benedict’s legacy that has been underway for some time—particularly over his role in the crisis brought on by revelations of widespread sexual abuse within the Church. Given the deep political polarization in the top echelons of the Catholic hierarchy and the likely prospect of a bruising confrontation over Pope Francis’s successor in the very near future, Benedict’s embrace by an aggressive Catholic Right in recent years means that these controversies are bound to continue.

For now, however, mainstream pundits seem inclined (as they were following the recent death of the British monarch) to forgive Ratzinger’s worldly offenses, and focus instead on an ostensibly benign theological legacy. In many quarters he is credited with “finally facing up to” the problem of sexual abuse. Given the scale of his partisan involvement in the major battles within the Church over many years, this is an excessively generous approach that lends itself to apologetics or, worse, to cover-up. Confronted with soft platitudes and insipid eulogising on one side and a looming clash with a resurgent Catholic Far Right on the other, socialists need a sober and hard-headed appraisal of Benedict’s role.

Youth and Background

Ratzinger was born into a pious, middle-class family in Marktl am Inn, a Bavarian village along Germany’s border with Austria. Much has been made of his membership of the Hitler Youth movement in his teens, but this seems to have been obligatory: his family were moderately hostile to the Nazis, mainly because of the restrictions they imposed on German Catholicism. By the age of 12 he was enrolled in a junior seminary at Traunstein, and after the war entered a Catholic seminary in Freising, later attending university in Munich.

Ratzinger’s early reputation as a liberal within the German Church is well known, as is his support for Vatican II—the internal reforms initiated from Rome beginning in 1962—which called on a Church seen as distant and lifeless to “open the windows…so that we can see out and the people can see in”. Most accounts of his Munich years paint Ratzinger as a progressive who executed an about-face when confronted with the excesses of 1968, and while there is an element of truth here, the reality is that Ratzinger’s early enthusiasm was always conditional.

He took part in the Vatican II sessions at the age of 35 as an academic theologian who had little contact with lay Catholics. While one faction at Rome—the aggiornamento movement—pushed for embracing the modern world and “integrating the joys and hope, the grief and anguish, of humanity into what it means to be Christian”, Ratzinger leaned toward the backward-looking faction grouped around ressourcement—a ‘back to basics’ impulse that pushed for a return to early tradition. Still, his writings at the time “breathe[d] with the spirit of Vatican II,” one critic wrote, “the spirit that Ratzinger…would later denigrate”.

Vatican II represented a compromise between Church liberals and traditionalists—a fudge that makes it possible even to this day for both conservatives and a dwindling core of Church progressives to claim it as its own. Both Francis and his right-wing opponents, for example, declare themselves to be faithful inheritors of Vatican II.

Turning Point in 1968

Even given this ambiguity, there is no doubt that the effect of the social upheavals around 1968 drove Ratzinger toward a fundamental social and theological conservatism, and to a deep hostility against what he saw as the evil influences of secularism and modern life. This bedrock rejection of the sixties legacy has informed virtually every area of Ratzinger’s public role, from his appointment as cardinal of Munich in 1977 to his handling of the sexual abuse scandals in recent years.

In 1966 Ratzinger took up a teaching post at the University of Tubingen, then a “flagship of theological liberalism”. When student protests reached the campus in 1968, Ratzinger reacted with marked hostility, indignant that students would dare to challenge him in class, and shocked that his colleagues didn’t share this resentment. When protesting students disrupted the faculty senate, Ratzinger reportedly walked out rather than engage the students, as other faculty did. Stunned that the radicalisation had made inroads among even among Catholic staff, Ratzinger placed his faith in Protestant theological students to provide a ‘bulwark’ against the left, but even they let him down. Setting himself against the “fanatical ideologies” circulating across the world, he wrote dejectedly (if prematurely), “The Marxist idea has conquered the world”.

Simultaneously, conservatives within the Church scored a major victory in the internal conflict over the implications of Vatican II, when in the same year Pope Paul VI issued his encyclical Humanae vitae, reiterating Rome’s traditional ban on artificial contraception. The Church’s unwillingness to shift on the issue of birth control deflated not only many lay Catholics, but even a substantial layer of clergy, who had signalled support for the “rights of individual conscience” and who had assumed, naively perhaps, that the lofty rhetoric of Vatican II would be accompanied by deeds. The abrupt turn to the right was “even more disheartening” for many believers because it “followed a moment of such optimism and new life”.

The ban on contraception has to be seen in the context of a deeply conservative reaction against the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and Ratzinger was at the centre of the panic it induced among Church conservatives. He later recalled being repulsed by a movie billboard showing “two completely naked people in a close embrace”. Rejecting “all-out sexual freedom [which] no longer conceded any norms”, Ratzinger blamed the new permissiveness for a “mental collapse” across society, linking it to a new “propensity for violence” and—curiously—to the outbreak of fistfights during air travel. Eccentricities aside, this signalled the beginning of a major offensive to roll back sexual freedom, and in later iterations would include an obsessive targeting of LGBTQ rights.

John Paul II, The Challenge of Secularism and Liberation Theology

By the late 1970s Ratzinger had rejected even the tepid liberalism of his younger days, and it was this turn that brought him into collaboration with the Polish-born cardinal Karol Wojtyła, later Pope John Paul II. At the core of John Paul’s tenure in Rome was a sustained campaign to finish the hollowing out of Vatican II and consolidate conservative control over the global Church. His appointment as prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith made Ratzinger John Paul’s leading heresy-hunter, earning him a reputation as ‘God’s Rottweiler” for his role in a series of brutal purges—including of his own former close friends from Germany. The “freedom to explore, which Ratzinger had once demanded for theologians,” one biographer writes, “was now being rapidly eroded by his own hand”.

The rise of Liberation Theology in Latin America presented the most formidable challenge facing Rome in the early 1980s. In a desperately poor region where the Catholic hierarchy had consistently aligned itself with corrupt US-supported regional oligarchs—including right-wing military dictatorships reliant on torture—a challenge had begun to emerge in the late 1960s, led initially by grassroots missionaries among Jesuits and the other religious orders, including large numbers of women.  By the mid-1970s these had won wide influence among workers and the poor, organized into ‘base communities’ that operated outside the control of the upper levels of the hierarchy.

John Paul’s iconic finger-wagging at the poet-priest and Sandinista Minister of Culture Ernesto Cardenal on the airport tarmac at Managua in 1983 gave a clear indication of Rome’s attitude to ascendant left-wing Catholicism in Latin America. The campaign then underway was a comprehensive one, involving high-level collaboration between Rome and the Reagan administration at Washington, and included generous support from the CIA and the targeting of the religious orders for murder and assassination.

The scale of the purge can be seen in Brazil, where under a military regime Liberation Theology had sunk deep roots among a new generation of industrial workers, in the favelas and among the rural poor. There John Paul II replaced progressives with conservative religious leaders in nine of Brazil’s thirty-six archdioceses, a ‘dismantling’ that continued under Benedict’s reign. Rome oversaw a multi-faceted campaign against the Catholic Left, involving an intense centralization, bureaucratic high-handedness and tacit support for military repression. But it was Ratzinger who prosecuted the ideological campaign to recapture the Church for the Right.

Here John Paul’s rottweiler turned his theological training to rooting out the ‘heresy’ of the Liberationists’ “preferential option for the poor”. In 1984 he issued his Instruction on Certain Aspects of Theology of Liberation, which argued predictably that biblical refences to the poor referred to a ‘poverty of the spirit’ rather than material inequality. Wielding a ‘perverted’ concept of the poor and inciting envy of the rich, liberation theology represented in his eyes a “negation of the faith”.  Ratzinger countered with a ‘theology of reconciliation’, following the Pope’s admonition that “a more harmonious society” would “require both forgiveness from the poor, for past exploitation, and sacrifice from the rich”.

Ratzinger oversaw the purge of liberation theology’s leading exponents, including Brazilians Leonard Boff and the nun Ivone Gebara, whose work had  “linked liberation theology with environmental concerns” and who “defended poor women who had abortions in order not to endanger existing children”.  At the same time he drew close to right-wing organizations like Opus Dei and brought the Latin American bishops’ conference [CELAM] directly under Rome’s control. In the face of wide-ranging repression and a comprehensive purge led by Ratzinger, by the early 1990s liberation theology was in full-scale retreat.

Sexual Abuse, Homophobia and Misogyny

With this major confrontation behind him and the ‘liberal voice’ of the Church in retreat all along the line, Ratzinger was well-placed to take over when John Paul II died in 2005. By now a “consummate insider”, and with a curia mostly hand-picked by his predecessor, his ‘election’ as Pope Benedict XVI was in the bag before voting began. The “victories already achieved in the last decades of the 20th century [around] questions of sexual morality, clerical celibacy, the place of women and religious freedom [were] secure,” Peter Stanford writes, and his papacy represented “an extended postscript to the one that had gone before”.

There was one major complication that threatened to disturb Benedict’s rule: the revelation of widespread sexual abuse by clergy across the Church had been continually swept under the carpet by John Paul II—sometimes with Ratzinger’s support. Continuing the trend toward intense centralization, as prefect in 2001 he had ordered all reports of sexual abuse forwarded to Rome, with strict penalties against leaking—including the threat of excommunication. Investigations were to be carried out internally, behind closed doors, and any evidence was to be kept confidential for up to 10 years after victims reached adulthood. His clear priority was damage control for the Church’s reputation. Victims rightly characterized this as a “clear obstruction of justice”.

By the time he assumed the papacy in 2005 avoidance was no longer an option. A major scandal had erupted in 2002 when Cardinal Law of Boston—John Paul’s “favourite son in America”—was revealed to have “secretly shuffled abusers from one parish to another”. Similar revelations emerged in Ireland and Australia. Described by victims as “the poster child for covering up sexual abuse crimes against children”, Law not only avoided reprimand but was promoted to a $145,000 a year post in Rome. Obituaries have drawn attention to Benedict’s willingness to censure Marcial Maciel, the millionaire priest-founder of the powerful Legionnaires of Christ who had fathered multiple children and was accused of widespread abuse of minors. Maciel was untouchable under John Paul II, and Benedict’s mild censure was long overdue.

Media attention made it impossible for Benedict to dodge the issue any longer: clearly it was these pressures, and not any change of heart on his part, that compelled him to take limited action. Even minimal scrutiny, however, shows the same priorities—defence of the Church’s reputation and its finances— were evident in every aspect of Benedict’s response. His own carefully-crafted image as a credible mediator was severely tarnished when it was revealed that Ratzinger himself had been involved in covering up such crimes while a cardinal in Munich, and in 2022 he was compelled to admit to providing false information to an inquiry there.

More significant is the ideological content of Benedict’s attempt to rescue the Church. The problem of sexual abuse and its systematic coverup became, in Benedict’s hands, further confirmation of the depravity brought on by sexual permissiveness and, unsurprisingly, an opportunity to rail against the evils of homosexuality. There was little tolerance for a frank discussion of problems inherent in clerical celibacy, or of the costs of sexual repression more generally. Over and over again Benedict and his closest aides attempted to link the horrific abuse carried out under their watch to a specific inclination toward paedophilia they attributed to “homosexual cliques” and “gay lobbies”. This was the basis for his admission of “how much filth there is in the church [even among] the priesthood”, and it won Benedict the endorsement of the Catholic Right, who were relieved to return to the offensive after so long on the back foot. It was a despicable attempt to deflect the Vatican’s responsibility for crimes carried out under its watch.

The scapegoating of the LGBTQ community was rooted in a more general misogyny underpinning the Catholic Right’s response to even the most moderate demands by female congregants to assume a larger role in Church life. In 2003 Ratzinger had denounced civil partnerships for same-sex couples as “the legislation of evil”, and on the cusp of his papacy in 2004, his Letter on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World defined the role of women in terms of virginity followed by marriage, motherhood and support for the male head of family, citing Genesis 3:16: “Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”

Under both popes, the Vatican became obsessed with policing dissent around its teachings on sex, and women have paid an especially high price. In Latin America the hierarchy welcomed a turn away from social and economic justice and toward a fixation with sexual morality and holding the line on abortion. In the US—apparently at the instigation of Cardinal Law—the Church carried out a clampdown on nuns accused of promoting “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith”. Hailing from religious orders with experience in Latin America, they were charged with “‘corporate dissent’ on homosexuality and failure to speak out on abortion” and criticized for supporting socialized health care. Elsewhere a nun was excommunicated for supporting a pregnant woman whose doctors believed she would die if they did not terminate her pregnancy”. Priests were removed from teaching positions for questioning Church teaching on birth control.

Benedict’s Legacy: A Church in Freefall

Underneath the sound and fury, the whole period between the ascendancy of John Paul II and Francis’ papacy is marked more by continuity than rupture. Although the mood music has changed, there is no prospect of a fundamental change of direction, and despite the invective from the Catholic Right, the reality is that Francis has only tinkered at the edges of a deep, possibly existential crisis facing the Church. Ratzinger himself acknowledged that to hold fast to its dogma the Church might have to accept a sharp decline in numbers and influence, and this is clearly the preferred trajectory of the Catholic Right, who have made of Benedict’s orthodoxy “a kind of Tea Party Catholicism”: they wield considerable influence, and seem keen to purge all who dissent from its backward social teaching and its warped take on sexual morality.

They may not have a choice. In the traditional heartlands of Catholicism—notably Ireland and Spain in western Europe, but in urban immigrant neighbourhoods in the US as well—the Church is in freefall, with no signs of recovery. In Latin America, where it once enjoyed a religious monopoly—and across Asia and Africa—Benedict’s war on liberation theology opened the door to grassroots evangelicals and Protestant sects, who are growing by leaps and bounds among the dispossessed in places like Brazil. The deep inadequacy of its response to the sexual abuse scandal has shaken many religious believers and lifted the veil on the endemic sexism and authoritarianism at the heart of the Church, and in the US an especially deranged hierarchy has hitched its fortunes firmly to Trump, Bannon and the brutality of the far Right. Those hungry for the meaningful solidarity and full flowering of humanity that the Church promises—but is incapable of delivering—will have to seek solutions elsewhere.

A version of this essay first appeared on the Irish website Rebel News. 

Brian Kelly is an award-winning historian of race and labor in the post-emancipation United States.

'Our Work Is Helping People Find Happiness.' Meet the Leftist Nuns Helping Migrants at the U.S.-Mexico Border

Lily Moore-Eissenberg, Time•January 7, 2020

On a sweltering morning in August, Sister Maria Antonia Aranda, a 60-year-old nun from Mexico, navigated her silver Ford Escape into a border checkpoint in Ciudad Juárez. She was dropping off two asylum-seekers who had hearings across the border that day, at the federal immigration court in El Paso. Fatima Rodriguez, a 19-year-old from Nicaragua who had been separated from her 5-year-old daughter by American authorities, anxiously texted her lawyer from the passenger seat. Her companion, a Salvadoran woman in her early 20s, sat in the back seat, adjusting and re-adjusting her waist-length hair. Her eyelids shone with silver glitter, a special touch for the occasion.

After Aranda parked, they all paused for a moment, as if to draw a collective breath. Then, at Aranda’s signal, they got out, walked to the entrance of the Lerdo International Bridge, and kissed each other’s cheeks. Aranda watched as the two young women each fed ten pesos—fifty American cents, the toll to cross by foot—into a turnstile. Within seconds, they disappeared into the crush of pedestrians bound for the U.S. Aranda hoped to God she would never see them again.

Over the past three years, priests, bishops, and Pope Francis have condemned U.S. immigration policy under the Trump Administration and entreated Catholics around the world to stand up for the rights of migrants. But along the U.S.-Mexico border, it’s women like Aranda—leftist Catholic nuns, most of them middle-aged or elderly and many of them first- or second-generation Americans—who have actually built a mass movement.

It began in the summer and fall of 2018, when the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), an association of American nuns, publicized requests for volunteers and financial support—a “call to the border,” as many sisters describe it. Since then, more than 700 nuns from the organization’s 300 member congregations have volunteered their services, some traveling hundreds of miles to join sisters who already lived in border towns. Most of this new influx of nuns began work on the U.S. side of the border—in New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California—but others, like Aranda, are scattered from Mexico to Honduras. And that’s only counting nuns whose congregations are American and LCWR members.

Nuns now occupy major leadership positions on the border: Sister Norma Pimentel, who has gained national recognition for her immigration advocacy, directs Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, and an Irish nun named Beatrice Donnellan runs a shelter for migrant women in El Paso. Some of the sisters have arrived at the border with no previous experience in immigration work, while others have already devoted their lives to it. Sister Gloria Rivera, a Detroit-based nun from Mexico, served as a translator in immigration court and directed a migrant shelter in Michigan before traveling to El Paso to volunteer in January 2019. The nuns’ congregations fund their travels largely on donations. Since the summer of 2018, congregations have given more than 1.5 million dollars to immigration-related nonprofits, according to the LCWR.

“The fact that these sisters are joining other members of their order, or other people with whom they’re networked, means they’re more able to avoid the pitfalls of the ignorant do-gooder,” said Eileen Markey, author of A Radical Faith, a biography on the political transformation of nuns in Latin America. “They’re connected to people who are embedded and who have a long-term perspective. In many cases, they have backgrounds in Central America or on the border.” She added, “In some ways, it’s like a return.”

Many of the nuns working at the border today are in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. They bring a work ethic and philosophy shaped by their own experiences living under Central American dictatorships in the 1980s, when more than a million Central Americans fleeing civil wars in the Northern Triangle sought refuge in the U.S. At the time, hundreds of nuns were living in the conflict zones and sheltering refugees who had been denied asylum by the Reagan administration. The so-called sanctuary movement of the 1980s and today’s religious movement to support migrant rights at the U.S. border are similar, says Amanda Izzo, a professor at Saint Louis University who studies religious feminism and liberal Christianity. “Both come out of the same impulse: people groping towards critiques of structural forms of power,” she says. “It’s small groups of people in impoverished places thinking about what the stories of the Gospel can mean in the context of their lives.”

In 2018 and 2019, waves of Catholic sisters showed up in Juárez and El Paso, bringing laundry detergent, baby wipes, duffel bags of second-hand clothes, and a powerful concept of what it means to serve God: Catholic liberation theology. The leftist strand of Catholicism first bloomed in Latin America under the dictatorships of the 1970s and 80s and has enjoyed a resurgence since Pope Francis, a follower of liberation theology, became the first Latino pope in 2013. The philosophy, which encourages a broad-based, deeply historical understanding of modern problems, advocates for radical egalitarianism and the liberation of the poor from oppressive political and economic systems.

Nuns have traditionally enjoyed very little formal power in the Catholic Church—they are not allowed to become priests and are excluded from most leadership roles. But they have became some of Catholicism’s most vigorous, progressive, and accessible representatives on the ground. “Women religious do not have the authority that men do in the church,” said Izzo, the Saint Louis University professor, but “they’ve carved out these places of autonomy.” For nuns who follow liberation theology, economic and social equality have become priorities on par with religious conversion and worship.

“They are radicalized because of their experiences,” said Margaret McGuinness, a professor at La Salle University who studies the history of American nuns. “They’re not just saying ‘Let’s help the poor,’ but ‘Why are these people poor?’”

For many leftist nuns, the most important answer to that question is neither Central American gang violence nor the Trump administration’s immigration policies. Their answer, derived from decades of experience, tends to be more historical: people are poor because of systemic inequalities between groups, states, and hemispheres. Sister Beatrice Donnellan argues that American economic interests and military interventions in Latin America in the 1980s are chiefly responsible for the economic and political instability driving migration to the U.S. today. Aranda often cites the Bible: “Starting from Genesis, we’re talking about migration, no? The people of Israel, the Hebrews, they walked through the desert,” she said. “We can talk about Leviticus, who invites us not to oppress foreigners. Matthew speaks of love for the needy. ‘I was hungry, and you fed me. I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger, and you stayed with me.’”

A former engineer, Aranda decided to become a nun in her 40s. She took her final religious vows at age 50 and expected to spend the rest of her life tending to the needs of her local community—working with couples on their marriages, teaching children to read biblical stories into their own experiences, leading a humble and just life in accordance with the egalitarian values of liberation theology. But then, last January, Aranda heard that a local priest named Francisco García had begun taking in migrants under the newly-implemented Migrant Protection Protocols, also called the “Remain in Mexico” policy. She drove to the church to offer help.

Even at that point, the church’s capacity to house migrants was stretched, and García was beginning to feel overwhelmed. While the local community supported the migrants, they also needed the church to perform baptisms, communions, weddings, funerals, and weekly services. The congregation needed its priest, so García asked Aranda to help care for the couple dozen migrants already living in his church, particularly the women, who feared for their safety on the streets. Aranda accepted, not yet fully grasping what that meant. Between January and August, the migrant population in Juárez swelled from a couple hundred people to more than ten thousand, and Aranda was swamped. She began spending her days shuttling migrants to and from medical appointments, law offices, and border checkpoints, eventually earning the nickname Hermana Uber.

“It’s distressing to not have the human and material resources to assist them all,” Aranda says, speaking in Spanish. “More than tiredness, though, is a feeling of despair, anguish, helplessness because of the failure of governments to negotiate better immigration policies.” Recently, she has observed an increase in migrants from southern Mexico as well as from Central America, putting additional strain on the city’s shelters. “But knowing that the migrants are joining their families is always a great joy and satisfaction,” she added. “Knowing that, in some way, our work is helping other people find happiness.”

Many of the women that Aranda works with have faced gender-based violence in their home countries. Since 2018, when the Justice Department eliminated domestic and gang violence as grounds for asylum—a decision that disproportionately affected women—the rate of asylum approvals for Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala plummeted by nearly ten percentage points, according to the advocacy organization Human Rights First. When migrant women arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border, many are then forced to remain in Juárez, a city known for femicide. In 2015, at the peak of the violence, an average of six women were killed each day in Juárez, and the United Nations called the femicide a “pandemic.”

The day before she dropped off Fatima Rodriguez at the border, Aranda found her in a small meeting house beside the church, sitting with a friend on benches painted the color of robin eggs. “Hola, Madre,” Rodriguez said, addressing the nun with a traditional term of respect—“Mother”—that the equality-minded Aranda has never gotten used to.

Rodriguez, an activist, fled political violence in Nicaragua after the government started arresting and killing college students like herself for protesting. American authorities separated Rodriguez from her daughter in May because Rodriguez’s parents’ names, not her own, were listed on her daughter’s birth certificate, she explains. (When Rodriguez was a teenager, the family made this arrangement for her protection, after she became pregnant as a result of a rape, she says.) When she arrived at the border, U.S. officials sent her daughter to a shelter and then a foster family in New York City, and returned Rodriguez to Mexico, she says.

Rodriguez was one of the earliest arrivals at the church, which regularly houses people from El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Cuba. She quickly learned how to navigate the politics of floor space and food. In group therapy sessions, led by a psychologist Aranda recruited, she held ice in her hands until it melted in order to build psychological endurance and practice calming her mind. She narrated her traumas often, for American journalists Aranda brought to the shelter and for an American judge in El Paso. She drank cheap soda and texted her family from the blue benches.

Rodriguez’s story ends more happily than most of the stories Aranda steps into. With the help of a lawyer that Aranda knew, Rodriguez proved that she was her daughter’s mother, and a U.S. immigration court judge decided to allow her to wait in the U.S. with her daughter for her asylum hearing.

A few days after Aranda dropped Rodriguez at the border, over a breakfast of salted avocados and hard-boiled eggs, Aranda played a song on the guitar called El Puente, or The Bridge. “Never mind that the pain of a thousand footsteps leaves bloody footprints on it…Lord, make that bridge not break,” she sang, in Spanish. She told me, “Any people can be like the people of Israel. Any person, too, who walks through the desert looking for a better life.”

A week later, Aranda heard the news from one of the secretaries at the shelter: Rodriguez had made it to New York City.

“I only ask God to continue helping her,” Aranda told me. As for the thousands of others still waiting to cross the border: “They speak of leaving a place where they were stripped of their homes and where their relatives were killed,” Aranda said. “They no longer speak of the American dream.”

This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Sister Maria Antonia Aranda in the Juárez church where she works with migrants. | Courtesy of Lily Moore-Eissenberg

Sister Beatrice Donnellan talks with a pair of visitors dropping off donations at Casa Vides in El Paso, Texas in August 2019. | Courtesy of Lily Moore-Eissenberg
 

Sister Caroline Sweeney, a volunteer, makes calls to the families of recent arrivals in Casa Vides in El Paso, Texas in August 2019. | Courtesy of Lily Moore-Eissenberg
 

San Juan Apostol Evangelista church, where Sister Maria Antonia Aranda works, doubles as a migrant shelter in Juárez, see here in August 2019. | Courtesy of Lily Moore-Eissenberg

No justice, no peace: Why SOME*** Catholic priests are kneeling with George Floyd protesters

Anna L. Peterson, Professor of Religion, University of Florida,
The Conversation•June 15, 2020

Bishop Mark Seitz and priests from his diocese knelt for 8 minutes and 46 seconds to honor George Floyd, El Paso, June 1, 2020. Courtesy of Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matters, CC BY-ND

Two days after the Catholic bishop of El Paso, Mark Seitz, knelt with a dozen other priests in a silent prayer for George Floyd holding a “Black Lives Matter” sign, he received a phone call from Pope Francis.

In an earlier era Seitz, the first known Catholic bishop to join the anti-racism protests spurred by Floyd’s killing, might have expected censure from the Vatican, which is often associated with social conservatism.

Instead, Steitz told the Texas news site El Paso Matters, the pope “thanked me.”

Days earlier Pope Francis had posted a message to Americans on the Vatican’s website saying he “witnessed with great concern the disturbing social unrest” in the United States and calling Floyd’s death “tragic.”

“My friends,” he wrote, “we cannot tolerate or turn a blind eye to racism and exclusion in any form and yet claim to defend the sacredness of every human life.”

Francis is seen as a progressive pope, but these are not isolated examples of his personal values. As a scholar of religion and politics, I recognize that both Steitz’s actions and the pope’s approval reflect a distinctive commitment to social justice that has entered the Catholic mainstream over the past 50 years.

Changing social role

This commitment has transformed a millennia-old Catholic tradition of valuing peace over justice.

Writing in the chaos surrounding the fall of the Roman Empire, the prominent fifth-century theologian St. Augustine asserted that peace was the greatest good humans can attain on Earth. While both peace and justice are valuable, Augustine believed, peace – meaning civil order – takes priority. He thought justice could not be sustained amid violence.

Many bishops, priests and theologians since Augustine have used similar arguments to criticize social changes and legitimize the status quo, insisting that the faithful should bear worldly injustices and seek their reward in heaven. This moral theology provided justification for the church to ally with economic, political and military elites, from medieval kings to Latin American dictators.

That began to change with the Second Vatican Council of 1962 to 1965, which brought together bishops from around the world to reevaluate the church’s role in modern society. The council’s final document sided firmly with social justice.

Inverting Augustine’s thinking, Catholic bishops asserted that peace cannot “be reduced to the maintenance of a balance of power between enemies.” The only way to achieve lasting peace, they asserted, was to address the sources of unrest.

As Pope Paul VI stated in 1972: “If you want peace, work for justice.”

Fr. Joseph Rahal of Washington, D.C. honors George Floyd on Friday, June 5, 2020. Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

Liberation at any cost  BUT NOT LIBERATION THEOLOGY

Pope Paul’s rhetoric echoed a core principle of liberation theology, a Catholic movement that was emerging from Latin America around the same time.

Liberation theologians see violence not as an individual flaw but as a feature of unjust social or political structures. This “institutionalized violence,” as the Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez termed it, is the root cause of all violence – including government repression and popular uprisings against that repression.

The best way to avoid violence, as the Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador wrote in 1979, is “to guarantee a truly democratic state, one that defends the fundamental rights of all its citizens, based on a just economic order.”

Under Romero’s leadership, large sectors of the Salvadoran Catholic Church backed the popular uprising against the country’s oppressive military regime in what became the Salvadoran Civil War. Catholic leaders and laypeople also supported opposition movements in Nicaragua, Brazil, Chile and other Latin American countries.

Romero, who was assassinated in 1980, became a Catholic saint in 2018.
Not ‘both sides’

Liberation theologians believe that those seeking change should employ peaceful methods whenever possible. But when nonviolent protests and legislative channels prove fruitless or are met with violence, new tactics might be necessary.

“The church cannot state, in a simplistic fashion, that it condemns every kind of violence,” Romero wrote.

Romero criticized Salvadoran “moderates” who saw violence on both sides of the country’s civil war as equally wrong, implying a moral equality between those who uphold injustices and those who challenge them. The church, he insisted, must side with the victims of institutionalized violence.


This principle, known as the “preferential option for the poor,” guided Bishop Seitz’s decision to protest in El Paso.

“When religion becomes stagnant, we can forget that the Word always comes to us crucified and powerless,” Seitz told the National Catholic Reporter on June 4 to explain his silent protest. In Christian tradition, “the Word” refers to Jesus, the word of God incarnate.

Seitz then cited the prominent midcentury theologian James Cone, who said U.S. Christians must fight for racial justice because, “In America, the Word comes tortured, black and lynched.”

This isn’t the first time Seitz has sided with society’s most marginalized. In March 2019, he apologized to migrants for their treatment at the U.S.-Texas border.

“To say…that black lives matter is just another way of repeating something we in the United States seem to so often forget,” Seitz continued: “That God has a special love for the forgotten and oppressed.”

[Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.

*** THIS DOES NOT INCLUDE AMERICAN CARDINALS OR ARCHBISHOPS WHOSE REIGN IS IN THE MATERIAL WORLD RUNNING VATICAN CORPORATE AND BANKING INTERESTS.

Pope Francis to update landmark document on world environmental crisis

Philip Pullella
Mon, August 21, 2023 

FILE PHOTO: Pope Francis holds weekly general audience at the Vatican

(Reuters) - Pope Francis said on Monday that he was writing a follow-up to his landmark 2015 encyclical on the protection of the environment and the dangers of climate change "to bring it up to date".

He made the surprise announcement in a brief, unprepared addition in a speech to a group of lawyers from Council of Europe countries.

In 2015, Francis wrote Laudato Si (Praised Be), a major document on the need to protect the environment, face the dangers and challenges of climate change and reduce the use of fossil fuels. An encyclical is the highest form of papal writing.


"I am writing a second part to Laudato Si to bring it up to date with current problems," Francis told the group, without elaborating.

The encyclical, which made Francis a hero to many climate activists, was seen to have influenced the decisions taken later that year at the Paris climate conference that set goals to limit global warming.

At the time it was issued, some conservative Catholics allied with conservative political movements and corporate interests fiercely criticised the pope for backing the opinion of a majority of scientists who said global warming was at least partly due to human activity.

U.S. climate envoy and former secretary of state John Kerry told Reuters in an interview in June after meeting the pope that the encyclical had a "profound impact" on the Paris conference.

In his comments on Monday, Francis did not specify what form the second part of Laudato Si would take, when it would be released or how it would elaborate on the original.

In the eight years since the document was published, the world has seen an increase in extreme weather events such as more intense and prolonged heat waves, more frequent wildfires and more severe hurricanes.

Last year, a senior Vatican official whose brief includes the environment said such events had become the "new normal" and had shown that the time for climate change denial and scepticism was over.

(Reporting by Philip Pullella; Editing by Gareth Jones)




What the pope’s visit to Mongolia says about his priorities and how he is changing the Catholic Church

Kristy Nabhan-Warren, Associate Vice President of Research, University of Iowa
Mon, August 21, 2023

Pope Francis' upcoming visit to meet the tiny Catholic community of Mongolia is drawing considerable interest. Filippo Monteforte/AFP via Getty Images


Pope Francis’ upcoming visit to Mongolia, which is home to fewer than 1,500 Catholics, has elicited curiosity among Catholics and non-Catholics alike.

This will be the pope’s 43rd trip abroad since his election on March 13, 2013: He has visited 12 countries in the Americas, 11 in Asia and 10 in Africa.

What do these visits tell us about this pope’s mission and focus?

As a scholar of Roman Catholicism, I have studied Catholicism’s appeal for immigrants and refugees, and I argue that the pontiff’s official travels since 2013 are part of his decadelong effort to rebrand the Roman Catholic Church as a religious institution that centers the poor.

Prioritizing the poor

While previous popes have included the poor in their speeches, what has distinguished this pope is that he has focused on the Global South and prioritized immigrants, refugees and the less privileged, from Bolivia to Myanmar to Mongolia.

At his July 2013 visit to the Italian island of Lampedusa to commemorate migrants who had drowned in the Mediterranean Sea, Francis gave a blistering critique of the world’s failure to care for the poor: “In this globalized world, we have fallen into globalized indifference. We have become used to the suffering of others: it doesn’t affect me; it doesn’t concern me; it’s none of my business!”

Three years later, the pope flew 12 Syrian Muslim refugees from a Greek refugee camp to Rome. Francis is the first pope to relocate refugees and to work with groups like The Community of St. Egidio charity in Rome that have successfully resettled thousands of refugees.

During my own interviews with Central American Catholic immigrants and refugees in central and eastern Iowa between 2013-2020 for my book, “Meatpacking America,” I heard from women and men who fled violence and poverty in their home nations that they look up to this pope “because he cares about us,” as Fernando said. And Josefina told me back in 2017 that this pope is “the real deal” in terms of supporting immigrants and the poor.

Francis and liberation theology

His predecessors – Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict – specifically condemned liberation theology, a philosophy rooted in Catholic social teachings that calls for a preferential option for the poor and an embrace of Marxist ideology.

According to Austen Ivereigh prior to his becoming pope, Francis — then Jorge Mario Bergoglio – condemned liberation theology as well. He would say “that they were for the people but never with them,” wrote Ivereigh, in his biography of Pope Francis.

Since his election as pope, however, Francis has undertaken what I call “people-focused” liberationism. In one of his first official announcements in 2013, “Evangelii Gaudium,” or “The Joy of the Gospel,” the pope wrote about the essential inclusion of the poor in society, arguing that “without the preferential option for the poor, the proclamation of the Gospel, which is itself the prime form of charity, risks being misunderstood or submerged by the ocean of words which daily engulfs us in today’s society of mass communications.”

In other words, the Gospel’s message that all Christians proclaim doesn’t mean a whole lot if the poor are not central to the goal of personal as well as collective salvation.
Journeying to Mongolia

How does the pope’s upcoming visit to Mongolia factor into this decade-spanning trajectory of his people-focused liberation?

Food service for homeless children in a shantytown in Mongolia.

Michel Setboun/Corbis via Getty Images

Christianity has been present in Mongolia since the seventh century. Nestorianism, an Eastern branch of Christianity named after the Patriarch of Constantinople Nestorius, who lived from 386 C.E. to 451 C.E., coexisted alongside an even older religious practice, shamanism, which emphasized the natural world and dates to the third century. Nestorians believe that Christ had two natures – one human and one divine. While Mary was seen as important within Nestorian theology as Christ’s mother, she is not seen as divine. In Roman Catholicism, Mary is believed to be divine and born free from sin.

According to historian Robert Merrihew Adams, the missionary activity of Nestorian Christians in central Asia from the seventh to the 13th centuries was “the most impressive Christian enterprise” of the Middle Ages because of its rapid spread and influence.

Adams argues that Nestorianism’s spread was in part because of its belief that Christ was a two-natured individual – one divine and one human. These two natures in one body meshed well with preexisting shamanic beliefs, as shamanism sees individuals as able to harness the supernatural.

In addition to this branch of Eastern Christianity, Tibetan Buddhism came to Mongolia in the 13th century, as did Islam. Today, Buddhism is the dominant religion of Mongolia, while Islam and Christianity remain very small percentages at 3% and 2.5%.

THE GREEK ORTHODOX CHURCH AS WELL AS THE CATHOLIC CHURCH VIEWED THE NESTORIANS AS THEIR GREATEST IDEOLOGICAL COMPETITION BECAUSE IT ALSO APPEALED TO ZORASTRIANS, SABAN, MEDAN, MAGI RELIGIONS IN THE EAST.

THIS MADE NESTORIANS THE GREATES CHRISTIAN HERESY OF ITS AGE

Pope Francis has made it clear throughout his tenure that interfaith dialogue is an essential remedy to division. During his visit he will preside over an interfaith gathering and the opening of a Catholic charity house.

A strategic visit

The past decade has brought rapid urbanization and growth in major cities such as the capital of Ulaanbaatar, along with high rates of unemployment and Covid-era economic downturn.

And yet, according to the World Bank, the economic forecast for Mongolia remains “promising” because of its rich natural resources, such as gold, copper, coal and other minerals.

However, extraction of Mongolia’s resources is occurring at a rapid pace – so much so that the country, according to the Harvard International Review, has been called “Minegolia.” The United States has made significant investment in Mongolia’s mining industry, and China is a major importer of Mongolian coal. Two rail lines connecting Mongolia to China were installed in January 2022 and a third is being built.

In the past, Francis has made strong comments against corruption and environmental degradation, and it would not be surprising if he addressed the challenges of the mining industry during his trip. During his trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2023, he critiqued the Global North that contributed to “the poison of greed” that has “smeared its diamonds with blood.” In 2018, the pope spent a few hours in Madre de Dios, an area in the Peruvian Amazon, where mining has led to large-scale environmental degradation.

The pope’s visit will be bold given the challenges before Mongolia and its geographic location between Russia and China. A peace delegation on behalf of Pope Francis for the war in Ukraine, led by Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, that visted Russia this summer is likely to head to China in the coming months.

As Italian Cardinal Giorgio Marengo, a missionary in Mongolia for two decades, has emphasized, Pope Francis’s visit to this country with a tiny minority of Catholics will “manifest the attention that the (pope) has for every individual, every person who embarks in this journey of faith.”

This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. 

It was written by: Kristy Nabhan-Warren, University of Iowa.

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