Gustavo Gutierrez. Photo: AFGJ/File photo.
By James Phillips – Nov 20, 2024
Gustavo Gutierrez died on October 22, 2024, in Lima, Peru, at the age of 96. His death will not occasion headlines in the world’s major news media, but it should.
Gutierrez is not well known in the United States, but in the history of human liberation he has a place alongside Martin Luther King, Jr., and others whose words and work have both inspired and uplifted the struggles of the oppressed for what King called freedom and what Gutierrez called liberation. Like King, Gutierrez understood that religious faith and history are not separate realms, but are intimately connected. For both of them, faith was a powerful force that could be employed either to control or to liberate people in both body and soul. For them, “faith” was both spiritual and political at once.
Gustavo Gutierrez was born in 1928, a Peruvian who became a Catholic priest and, later in life, entered the Dominican Religious Order. He was a scholar, a theologian who spent much time as a priest among the people, the poor. In 1971, after years of reflection and experience of the reality of life around him, he published A Theology of Liberation, which became a groundbreaking book. He wrote it at a time when dictatorships and military rule, complete with severe poverty and repression, were the lot of millions in Latin America. He began the Introduction to A Theology of Liberation with this (translated here from the Spanish):
“This book is an attempt at reflection, based on the gospel and the experience of men and women committed to the process of liberation in the oppressed and exploited land of Latin America. It is a theological reflection born of the experience of shared efforts to abolish the current unjust situation and to build a different society, freer and more human. Many in Latin America have started along the path of a commitment to liberation, and among them is a growing number of Christians; whatever the validity of these pages, it is due to their experiences and reflections.”
To some, theological reflection might seem like a rather tame, even counter-intuitive place to promote human liberation—spiritual perhaps, but not physical, political, societal liberation. But Gutierrez showed that such an attitude was based on a false assumption (encouraged by both church and state) that the “spiritual” was somehow distinct and separate from the rest of daily life. The traditional theology of the Catholic Church and much of Christianity depicted God as a great king, or judge overseeing the lives of individuals and separating the good from the bad. Punishment and reward were integral to this traditional theology. Gutierrez insisted that theology begin where people live, not in abstract philosophical principles. For him, understanding liberation started with recognizing that God is found in the streets and the fields, present and struggling alongside the people in community, rather than in the heavens judging people from on high. The God of liberation was neither judge nor ruler, but rather one who encouraged and inspired humans in their struggles for a better society, who changed tires, washed laundry, and taught in school.
For the theologians of liberation, the salvation promised by Christianity was not confined to saving one’s soul. It included the entire human, body and soul. It was not enough for religion to encourage charity for the poor and oppressed while remaining silent about the systems that oppressed the poor. Liberation was not simply individual salvation in isolation from participation in community. Liberation was essentially social. Gutierrez saw that we saved and liberated each other together in community. This also implied engagement in the political situation of society.
This understanding of God as one with the people, especially the poor and oppressed was not entirely new. In parts of Latin America, especially Central America, in the 1960s and 1970s, small groups of people (comunidades eclesiales de base—Christian base communities) were beginning to meet to reflect on the meaning of the Christian gospels in the light of their own daily experiences and of the political realities and movements around them. They did not merely accept the interpretations of church authorities. The idea of the kind of new and just society that arose from these biblical reflections led many to seek ways to make real such a society by joining or supporting political, even revolutionary movements that seemed to be seeking the same kind of society. They knew that these political and revolutionary movements were not perfect, only human, made of people like them seeking a better, more just society. Political movements could be practical vehicles toward a more just and free society.
In Nicaragua, many Christians joined the Sandinista-led revolution to depose the brutal dictatorship of the Somoza family. When Somoza fled, in 1979, the new revolutionary government included many who had embraced the theology of liberation, including at least three Catholic priests as cabinet ministers in the revolutionary government. This involved much soul-searching, especially about the morality of joining a movement that included violent means to overthrow a repressive reality. This alliance of Christians with a secular revolutionary movement was seen as a new phenomenon. Revolutionaries were supposed to be secular atheists and communists, but now people of faith were also revolutionaries alongside and in common cause with the others. Those who used only peaceful means and those who took up arms both worked to find a better society. Nicaragua exemplified this different reality, one that was evolving also in countries like El Salvador. The Nicaraguan revolution invited participation of atheists, religious people, young guerrilla fighters, and people who engaged in all sorts of more peaceful means to support the revolution. It is doubtful that Gutierrez foresaw all of this in 1971 as he wrote A Theology of Liberation, but his ideas and those of other liberation theologians helped prepare the way.
Others certainly saw the power of liberation theology. Gutierrez and the idea of liberation he promoted were threats to traditional church and state authorities who had colluded for centuries in maintaining control of societies for their own profit. The Vatican censured Gutierrez personally and issued statements condemning liberation theology as Marxist. This was the time of the Cold War, and the Marxist label was a catch-all for anything that seemed to threaten the position of the privileged. The Reagan Administration saw liberation theology as a threat to US. interests, and said so openly. Reagan knew that to destroy the Nicaraguan revolution he must destroy not only the Sandinista government but also the theology of liberation. He did this in part by claiming falsely and repeatedly that the Sandinista government was persecuting religion. Those of us in Nicaragua at the time (1980s) saw no such persecution, but rather free expressions of faith and religion everywhere.
So, Gutierrez and others incurred the wrath of both church and state, in this case the United States. Priests and others who embraced a theology of liberation in Latin America were removed by the Vatican or their bishops, or were targeted and killed. “Be a patriot, kill a priest,” was the alleged chant of the Salvadoran military that killed priests, nuns, and Archbishop Oscar Romero, in El Salvador, even as the U.S provided millions of dollars in aid to the Salvadoran military. In revolutionary Nicaragua, no priests or nuns were killed by the Sandinista government.
Despite being targeted and denounced by some powerful authorities, Gutierrez continued to write and speak about liberation, along with others who added their insights to the reality he had opened. The fundamental insights of liberation theology have survived. Much of its influence is felt and expressed now quietly and without fanfare. Many Christians in Latin America have internalized their faith and express it in work for the community and for others, building what MLK might have called a “beloved community” that they consider more important than church services or obedience to church hierarchy.
We in the United States are seeing the resurgence of a so-called Christian nationalism that is the opposite of the theology of liberation promoted by Gutierrez. Christian nationalism divides, condemns, and targets people and whole communities who challenge the kind of exclusive and punitive nation that Christian nationalists seem to want. We need to be reminded that an alternative vision of faith, politics, and society already exists and has been powerful before, one described and promoted by MLK and Gustavo Gutierrez. May they rest in peace as their work continues among us. Gustavo Gutierrez, presente!
James Phillips is a cultural and political anthropologist and a former Jesuit with forty years as a student of Central America.
