Catholic church warms to liberation theology as founder heads to Vatican
The church has not formally embraced the progressive movement, but
Gustavo Gutiérrez’s upcoming visit another sign of rehabilitation under Pope Francis
For decades, Gustavo Gutiérrez, a Peruvian theologian and Dominican priest, was treated with suspicion and even contempt by the Vatican’s hierarchy, which saw him as a dangerous Marxist firebrand who used faith as an instrument of revolution.
Gutiérrez was the founder of a progressive movement within the Catholic church known as liberation theology, and while he was never censured in the manner that some of his philosophical compatriots were, there were often rumblings that Gutiérrez was being investigated by Pope John Paul II’s doctrinal czar, a German cardinal named Joseph Ratzinger who would later become Pope Benedict.
But when the 86-year-old Peruvian arrives in Rome this week as a key speaker at a Vatican event, he will be welcomed as a guest, in a striking show of how Pope Francis – the first Latin American pontiff – has brought tenets of this sometimes controversial movement to the fore of his church, particularly in his pronouncements against the blight of poverty and
the dangers of capitalism.
The theology was so divisive during the cold war that, even today, there are claims – which experts thoroughly refute – that the movement was an invention of the KGB as a way to turn the Catholic church in Latin America against the United States.
Pope Francis has never proclaimed himself to be a liberation theologian and was even a critic of aspects of the movement when he was still known as Father Bergoglio in his native Argentina, according to papal biographers. But since his election as pontiff in 2013, Pope Francis’s insistence that the church be “for the poor”, and
his pointed criticisms of capitalism and consumerism have gone a long way to rehabilitate the liberation theology movement and incorporate it within the church
http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...tavo-gutierrez