Gustavo Gutiérrez, Father of Liberation Theology, Dies at 96
Once considered revolutionary, his notion of empathy and advocacy for the poor has become a central tenet of Catholic social teaching.
Gustavo Gutiérrez, the Peruvian priest and scholar who was regarded as the father of Latin American liberation theology, a far-reaching school of thought and action born of solidarity with poor and marginalized people, died on Tuesday at a convent in Lima, Peru. He was 96.
The cause was pneumonia, said a friend and former assistant, Leo Guardado, who is now a theology professor at Fordham University.
Father Gutiérrez, a Dominican priest, was best known as the author of “Teología de la Liberación,” a landmark work of social and theological analysis originally published in Spanish in 1971 and first available in English in 1973 as “A Theology of Liberation.” In that book, he asserted that the God of the Jewish and Christian traditions exhibits a preferential commitment to the poor.
The book anticipated movements in the United States to establish housing and health care as basic human rights, and it continues to be taught in seminaries and universities.
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Father Gutiérrez argued that the salvation of the poor was not achievable only in an otherworldly afterlife, as the church had long taught, but could also be realized within history. To know God, he insisted, people must work to eliminate poverty and unjust conditions on earth. The church must concern itself with life in this world, not the next.
To speak of a preferential option for the poor was not “a question of idealizing poverty,” Father Gutiérrez wrote, “but rather of taking it on as it is — as evil — to protest against it and to struggle to abolish it.”
Once considered revolutionary, the notion of empathy and advocacy for the poor is now a central tenet of Roman Catholic social teaching.
“We love God by loving our neighbor,” Father Gutiérrez contended. “Only then will God be with us.”
Like the Jesus of the gospels, who lived with the outcasts of his day, he worked much of his life in the Rímac barrio of Lima, Peru’s capital, where, as a parish priest and the director of the Bartolemé de Las Casas Institute, he ministered to the poor.
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His experience amid the squalor of Rímac led him to view poverty as a form of evil that has not only an economic dimension but also a spiritual one. To be poor, he said in a 2016 interview with America, a magazine published by the Jesuits, is to be invisible and, all too often, to suffer a premature and unjust death.
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“A Theology of Liberation” immediately gained traction among clergy and lay people struggling against oppressive economic and political systems in Father Gutiérrez’s native Latin America. The book inspired multitudes in Asia and Africa as well.
His ideas even found resonance outside the church, in the work of global activists like Paul Farmer, the physician, Harvard University professor and United Nations deputy special envoy for Haiti, who founded the nonprofit organization Partners in Health, which provides health care to poor people throughout the world.
Father Gutiérrez’s theology was not without its detractors. It was criticized by scholars living in capitalist countries for its use of Marxist social analysis to expose unjust political systems in the third world, many of them supported by first world powers.
His work also came under fire from feminists for not explicitly addressing the sexual oppression of poor women in Latin America. And despite being steeped in the theological populism of the Second Vatican Council, sessions of which Father Gutiérrez attended in Rome in the early 1960s, his writings fell under the scrutiny of the Vatican for deviating from Catholic orthodoxy.
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More recently, his theology found favor with Pope Francis, the first Latin American pontiff, who invited him to a meeting at the Vatican in 2013. In L’Osservatore Romano, the semiofficial newspaper of the Vatican, the pope declared that liberation theology can no longer “remain in the shadows to which it has been relegated for some years, at least in Europe.”
Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino, a mestizo of Hispanic and Quechua Indian descent, was born on June 8, 1928, in the Montserrat barrio of Lima. He had polio as a child and spent most of his teenage years confined to bed. His infirmity inspired him to pursue a career in medicine — he earned a degree from the National University of Peru in 1950 — before ultimately choosing the priesthood.
Father Gutiérrez did his graduate work in Europe, where he studied philosophy, psychology and theology at universities in Belgium, France and Italy. Returning to the slums of Lima in the late 1950s, he discovered that the dominant theology of the Northern Hemisphere had little relevance in the context of Latin America.
“The history of humanity has been written ‘with a white hand,’ from the side of the dominators,” he observed, echoing the writings of his friend and fellow Peruvian José María Arguedas, to whom, along with the Brazilian priest Henrique Pereira Neto, “A Theology of Liberation” was dedicated. “History’s losers have another outlook.”
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“The theology of liberation,” Father Gutiérrez insisted, “begins from the questions asked by the poor and plundered of the world, by those ‘without a history.’”
This necessity of reading history from the underside, and of having theology issue from the perspective of oppressed people rather than being imposed from without by the academy or the church, became a hallmark of liberation theology. Likewise was Father Gutiérrez’s commitment to grass-roots ecclesial communities, as the locus of the struggle for liberation.
The fundamental themes of Latin American liberation theology were first given voice in documents drafted by Father Gutiérrez and Oscar Romero — the Salvadoran archbishop assassinated in 1980 for speaking out against social injustice — after a historic series of meetings of priests that culminated in a gathering of bishops in Medellín, Colombia, in 1968.
Father Gutiérrez also wrote much of what emerged from the Latin American Episcopal Council held in Puebla, Mexico, in 1979. Ironically enough, he would not receive his doctorate in theology, from the Catholic University of Lyon in France, until 1985, almost 15 years after the initial publication of “A Theology of Liberation.”
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Father Gutiérrez wrote more than a dozen books and taught at several institutions over the years, including the Pontifical University of Peru and the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, where he was the John Cardinal O’Hara professor of theology from 2001 until his retirement in 2018, when he was named professor emeritus. He was made a member of the French Legion of Honor in 1993 and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002.
Even into his 80s — and long after he was recognized as one of most influential theologians of the 20th century — Father Gutiérrez spent half of each year away from Notre Dame working in the slums of Lima.
He is survived by an older sister.
Father Gutiérrez always knew that his vision of human redemption, with its summons to political action in solidarity with the oppressed, would be controversial; he was, after all, calling the basic assumptions of the capitalist-bred churches of the United States and Europe to moral and political account.
“Latin American misery and injustice go too deep to be responsive to palliatives,” he wrote in 1983 in “The Power of the Poor in History.” “Hence we speak of social revolution, not reform; of liberation, not development; of socialism, not the modernization of the prevailing system. ‘Realists’ call these statements romantic and utopian. And they should, for the rationality of these statements is of a kind quite unfamiliar to them.”
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