No to hunger for bread, yes to hunger for God!
Monday, June 15, 2015
Antonio Fernandez
Recently, a number of Catholic theologians and apologists of the new generation have raised a stir in social media with a virulent attack on what they call MLT, or Marxist liberation theology.
The problem is that they call MLT to a movement that cannot fit such a label. There is nothing Marxist about the liberation theology that emerged in the 1980s in South America as a response to the conditions of a large part of the population of the continent.
It is, precisely, men of the Church, notable among them Dominican theologian Father Gustavo Gutiérrez, who discovered how these masses of men and women living in situations of extreme poverty in the plains and peripheries south of the Rio Grande, were fertile ground for Marxist-communist ideas, and decide to give a wake up call to the rest of the Church and the world.
The liberation theology developed specially by Father Gutiérrez emerges from a biblical analysis of poverty. Father Gutiérrez identifies two types of poverty: one is criminally scandalous and the other is of a spiritual infancy. While the first is not willed by God, the second has the value of an evangelical beatitude. One is characterized by a hunger for bread and the other by a hunger for God. No to the hunger for bread, yes to a hunger for God!
There is nothing about Communism-Marxism in the liberation theology that is founded on biblical texts, especially in the message of Jesus. It is true that some authors and followers of the liberation theology had problems in applying the theology. There was no error in theology but in its praxis, in the way that some put it into practice, specifically in the use of Marxist analysis and justification of violence, which were never present in the work of Father Gutiérrez or many other representatives faithful to the social doctrine of the Church.
There were several priests who went astray, as Ernesto Cardenal and Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann, or groups as Sacerdotes por el Socialismo (Priests for Socialism), just to mention a few.
Unfortunately, I recently read some reviews that hanged the communist tag on Archbishop Helder Camera — by the way, nothing new under the sun in this regard — and even criticizing "a conference of several bishops of Marxist tendency who met at Medellín in 1968."
The very ill willed fail to mention that they are referring to the II Conference of the Council of Latin American Bishops (Conferencia Episcopal Latinoamericana, CELAM) held in Medellín, whose works were published with the approval of Blessed Pope Paul VI. By the way, this is one of the best church documents written in our continent.
I think that the newly resurrected uproar resulted from the recent private audience where the Pope received Father Gutiérrez, who was in Rome to present the Italian edition of the book "On the Side of the Poor: Liberation Theology, Theology of the Church," written with Archbishop Gerhard Ludwid Müller, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
I would like to clarify that neither John Paul II or Benedict XVI ever condemned the theology of liberation as a whole, but only in its specifically wrong aspects, clearly leaving other positive elements such as the preferential option for the poor, which is a point very supported and proclaimed by Pope Francis at this time.
Many of these aspects of liberation theology stand out and are very significant in the Document of Aparecida and the Continental Mission, which expresses very clearly the thought of the current Pope, since he was its editor at the end of the V Conference of CELAM held in Aparecida in 2007.
We should be careful that by attacking the liberation theology again, we do not fall into positions that are contrary to the spirit and intentions of Pope Francis. Let us remember that the Pope is the visible head of the Church and has the assistance of the Holy Spirit to steer Peter’s boat into safe waters. If we do not believe this, we are on the wrong ship.
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