By Paul Buhle

The passing of  Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, whose1971 Theology of Liberation was translated into English in 1973, reminds us of a grand moment in religious and political history. The impact of his call for a “preferential option for the poor” was most memorable in Latin America but deeply felt across wider parts of the world from West to East. Gutiérrez, the intellectual and spiritual visionary, seemed to offer the promise of escape from the ecological and social dilemmas that now threaten to overwhelm our hopes of a common future.

To understand its impact, we have to go back to the hope engendered in the Catholic Church by the Second Vatican Council of the early to mid-1960s and especially to the political world emerging beyond the threat of nuclear war and the optimistic hopes of a world revolution launched from the Global South. Nuclear war was averted, and the revolution was avoided (or voided). Contrary to socialist predictions of the early twentieth century and later communist predictions, it turns out that capitalism had no crisis that could not be averted. The Friedmanesque  (as in Milton Friedman) belief in “economic growth” as the answer to all social problems reinforced investors' rising expectations: the resources and workers of the Global South offered a “cure” that would overcome all other limitations. 

The Catholic hierarchy, universally conservative except for small-sized pockets of “worker priests” and others who followed Pope Leo XIII’s late-nineteenth-century call for  labor/capital amity, doubled down in the Cold War. But the spreading disaster of Latin American poverty recovered an older and often hidden tradition that had come with the Iberian invasion of the “New World” and differentiated it from the Protestant conquest to the north. Parts of the Church, faithfully serving the Conquerors in their mission of enslavement, theft, and exploitation, nevertheless had their own agenda. Service to the Latin American poor stood in outright contrast to the extermination of Indigenous peoples in North America. In embracing “the least of these” at the moment of accelerating crisis, a minority of priests and even the hierarchy began to think in a new way. 

This summary does little justice to the complexity of the Latin American initiative that (among other Church problems and opportunities, such as a shrinking white Christian presence in an increasingly non-white world) brought liberation theology into prominence. Vatican II had made a leap possible, but it is also true that internal pressures made Vatican II possible. Against a background of collaboration with the rich, favoritism toward those of European heritage, support of political repression by the U.S. State Department and CIA, it was a staggeringly courageous development. Let us not forget that in the same year that Gutiérrez’s major work appeared in English, the U.S. government was complicit in the overthrow of the democratically elected president of Chile, ushering in decades of terror and repression.

All this may well have been coming without Gutiérrez. But when he died last week at age 96, he would be remembered most for opening the floodgate with Teología de la liberación: Perspectivas (1971), considered “pivotal” to the development of liberation theology. Here, he said clearly what any searcher can find in Jesus’ words and in the life of St. Francis among others, but what had been so steadily ignored: God commands true followers to their task, a preferential commitment to the poor. By 1973, when the book reached the English-speaking world, it had a stunning effect upon theology teachers and students in particular. 

One could say that from the civil rights movement onward—not to mention local priests and some of the hierarchy to Cesar Chavez and the Grape Boycott—a part of the Church was ready. The very idea that housing and health care constituted basic human rights had been largely forgotten since the high days of the New Deal or treated, like the expansion of public housing, either as the right earned by white veterans for segregated developments or as an urgent effort to stave off urban crisis by building lesser “projects” for the new Black urban minorities.

More shocking would be the prospect of poor people in the Global South resisting the Monroe Doctrine. Gutiérrez did not need to spell this out. To know God was to resist poverty and to overcome suffering in the believers’ own lifetimes: this demanded sweeping social movements that would be treated as the enemies of the powerful classes in Latin America but also of the U.S. State Department. It was, directly and indirectly, to embrace a kind of subversion, even if the ideology seemed to have little in common with the communist movements that had emerged repeatedly in the region and, with the except of Cuba, been successfully repressed.

Obituaries to Gutiérrez insisted that his notions of empathy and embrace of the poor had become basic tenets of the Church. But the communities of the poor that embraced liberation theology proved just as likely to be assaulted as any other movement threatening property. “Rebel priests” died alongside or within guerrilla groups. Pope Francis, in his youth, found himself drawn to liberation theology and pulled back. He had another route in mind.

Gutiérrez himself continued to work with the poor in Lima, Peru, as a lowly parish priest and as director of the lima branch of the Bartolome de Las Casas Institute, itself one of the survivors of the liberation theology wave.

As a popularizer of liberation theology in the pages of the Nation magazine and the street-popular Village Voice during the 1980s, I happened across a local memory of my small-circulation magazine Cultural Correspondence. A Chicago native who had faithfully taken copies of issues around to sell in neighborhoods reported that the best responses came from the denizens of Punk Rock record stores and radicalized theological seminaries. There may no longer be  Punk Rock record stores, but there are seminaries. That is where the young rebels gathered then, and perhaps still today.

Paul Buhle, a DSA member since 1982 and an erstwhile popularist of liberation theology, once served on the Champaign-Urbana Youth Council of 1962 as a representative of the Christian Youth Fellowship from his church. He no longer goes to church but is the editor of Radical Jesus and many other graphic books.

Image credit: Orbis Books