What’s wrong with Liberation Theology?

July 5, 2012 By

Liberal Catholics have scored a major coup at the Vatican, the Guardian reports as a defender of “liberation theologists” and former student of Gustavo Gutiérrez has been appointed head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the Vatican.

This extraordinary news can be found in an article entitled “Pope appoints doctrinal watchdog with links to ‘Marxist’ Catholics”. For a religion reporter this is a great headline and it is followed by a great lede sentence. Think what fun the tabloids would have — Reds in the Vatican. Pinko Papal Prelate Promoted.

There is a problem, however — the remainder of the article contradicts this grand opening. After reading through the story a few times, I am unsure whether the Guardian thinks the appointment of Archbishop Gerhard Ludwig Müller to the top job at the CDF a good or a bad thing. The former Bishop of Regensburg is said to have links to the liberation theology movement, but he is also identified as a conservative and protégé of Pope Benedict XVI.

Also, I’m unsure what being a defender of liberation “theologists” entails as I don’t know what they might mean by this phrase. A theologist is a theologian my dictionary tells me, but I have never heard this term used before in conjunction with the Liberation Theology movement (nor have I come across the word in my reading.)

There is much that is unclear in this story as one gets the sense the author does not understand the terms he uses or the issues under consideration. What is clear, however is that Liberation Theology is a bad thing in the mind of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. But the explanation why it is a bad thing is very thin – almost a caricature – as is the explanation as to how someone linked to Marxist thought is now the number three man at the Vatican. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, nor do they like Liberation Theology.

Let’s begin with the lede:

Pope Benedict on Monday appointed as the Roman Catholic church’s doctrinal watchdog a fellow German with links to liberation theology, the interpretation of Christianity that conservatives have deplored as Marxism with a cross in place of a hammer and sickle.

Gerhard Ludwig Müller, 64, the bishop of Regensburg in Bavaria, is to take over the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the direct successor of the department created in the 16th century to manage the Inquisition.

So is Archbishop Müller a crypto-Communist? Has the Vatican’s doctrinal office taken a sharp turn to the political left? What exactly is the Guardian implying when it says he has “links” to liberation theology? Has he now, or has he ever been a member of the Communist Party?

The comment about Marxism with a cross is a strong line. But it does need to be sourced to someone. However a scan of the article shows no quotes from cranky conservatives seeing reds under the bed to justify this assertion.

The story continues with a description of the CDF’s responsibilities:

The congregation’s primary role is to keep a beady eye on the writings and teachings of Catholic theologians. But in recent years it has acquired responsibility for dealing with two of the most sensitive issues facing the Vatican – the scandal of clerical sex abuse, and efforts to heal the breach with breakaway ultra-conservative Roman Catholics.

“Beady eye”? Is that the correct phrase? Eagle eye implies keeping a sharp watch. Jaundiced eye implies prejudice . Beady eye implies malice — is that editorial comment appropriate here?

Etymology is not my chief concern, however. I am troubled by the article’s arrangement of the facts and by the way it framed the story. It states Pope Benedict served as head of the CDF under Pope John Paul II. During his tenure Benedict:

… spent much of his time bringing to heel Latin-American liberation theologists. The late John Paul II repeatedly accused priests inspired by liberation theology of having lost sight of their spiritual mission in their concern for poverty and human rights.

This sentence is problematic. JPII “repeatedly accused” liberation theologists of concentrating too much on poverty and human rights at the expense of spiritual matters? What exactly does that mean – did they abandon their sacramental ministries to engage in political struggles? Was their pastoral work devoid of spiritual content?

At the next jump the Guardian unseats the unwary reader. After opening with assertions about Müller being a man of the left, it then states he “is unquestionably a conservative” and offers comments from liberal Catholics who say he was more interested in “the enforcement of church discipline more important than changing obvious wrongs” while bishop of Regensburg.

Immediately after describing him as a man of the right, it notes he was trained in the schools of the left.

He was a student of Father Gustavo Gutiérrez, the author of the seminal 1971 work, A Theology of Liberation. And only eight years ago, Müller and Gutiérrez co-authored a book entitled On the Side of the Poor.

The Vatican’s new guardian of orthodoxy has on more than one occasion defended liberation theologists, arguing that their outlook is consistent with Catholic teaching.

The article begins with a colorful crack about Liberation Theology being a form of Christian Marxism, but offers no voices or sources to defend this view. Müller is portrayed as having been a man of the left – a defender of liberation theologists and a student of its most influential advocate within the church. Yet he is also described as a conservative. Are we to interpret this to mean that Müller is an ex-liberation theologian? Has he seen the light, or has he traded in his principles for preferment?

Which also begs the question why would the pope appoint a man with ties to a school of theology that has been rejected by the last two popes to oversee the church’s doctrine office? What exactly were these links? Who really is Archbishop Müller and what is so bad about Liberation Theolology that it would require stamping out?

This article reads as if it were written on the back of an envelope in a taxi ride to the airport. It is unstructured, unfocused, un-sourced and unintelligible.

However, I bring to this article a degree of knowledge about Liberation Theology and its acolytes that the general reader would not have. Am I seeing this article through my biases and finding fault where there is no fault? What say you GetReligion readers, does this story do the job? Or should it define its terms — especially the precepts of Liberation Theology?

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  • http://www.post-gazette.com Ann Rodgers

    I agree that the writer knew little or nothing of the topic or people involved. John Paul II — often acting through Ratzinger — criticized certain liberation theologians in instances when he believed that they encouraged class warfare rather than reconciliation, and that they looked for political salvation rather than salvation through the cross of Jesus. In other aspects of liberation theology — particularly the preferential option for the poor — he affirmed their work.
    I’m most puzzled by the statement that Benedict has spent much of his tenure dealing wiht liberation theology. Certainly Ratzinger spent his early tenure doing so. But liberation theology faded considerably after the fall of the Soviet Union. If Benedict has said anything about it since his election seven years ago, it hasn’t registered with me.
    All of that is to say that you are dead on in your analysis. This needed explanation both of what liberation theology is and of its historical context.

  • Carl Diederichs

    The line “wishful thinking” comes to mind here. It is impossible for me to believe that B16 would not have vetted his man to the point of inquisitional thumb screwing.

  • Newark

    What actual good can be stated concerning LT….but hey, remember the Missa Luba.

  • http://authenticbioethics.blogspot.com AuthenticBioethics

    I don’t think you’re seeing things. There are certainly aspects of liberation theology that are consistent with orthodox Catholic doctrine, and it would be helpful to know what they are. And there are aspects of liberation theology — generally in terms of how it manifested as a movement rather than a line of theological inquiry — where certain aspects of the theology were over emphasized and led to actions inconsistent with Catholicism. It is possible, therefore, to be simultaneously sympathetic with and critical of liberation theology, depending on what dimension of the theology is being considered.

    A Prefect of the CDF with “ties” to liberation theology is rightly a topic of investigation by the media. The investigation falls flat, however. And of course, such an investigation may uncover the fact that there is no controversy to exploit in a dramatic headline or lede.

    So my question is whether or not the investigation falls flat by intent.

  • http://www.virtue-quest.com/ Robert King

    I’ve seen “theologists” occasionally used by self-described atheists on blogs. (Sorry, can’t find specific instances just now.)

    My handful of web searches points to it being a legitimate, if archaic, English word with no nuanced difference from “theologian.” “Theologist” is derived directly from Latin, while “theologian” comes to us through French.

    That said, I’m not sure if it’s an intentional use, or if it’s an ignorant person’s attempt to find the right word. (Someone who does theology… well, “theology” sounds like “biology”, and we have “biologists”, so … “theologist” sounds pretty professional. Right?)

    If it’s intentional, I’m not sure what the implication is meant to be. Perhaps it acknowledges that theology really is the queen of the sciences after all? Hm… not getting my hopes up on that theory.

  • Martha

    Is it possible that a “theologist” is someone who’s ready to move with the times and not stuck in the Middle Ages, cracking down on nuns and priests working for social justice and forcing Catholic women to have twenty-three children, like those old-fashioned conservative celibate clergymen “theologians”?

  • Martha

    To be serious, I wondered if someone had said “I’m a theologist, not a theologian” and yep, apparently at least one person has done so:

    “I’ve been asked why I call myself a theologist and not a theologian. It’s simple enough: theologian feels wrong — too high-falutin’, too posh, too domineering. It allows of no accident or serendipity. It’s altogether too damned intimidating.

    The dictionaries have both words meaning the same thing, though the OED seems to think that theologist is rarely used nowadays. If so, it’s way past time to resuscitate it. Theology for the people, you might say.

    There’s that “ian” ending to theologian, to start with. I trained as a psychologist, not as a psychologian; a close friend is a sociologist, not a sociologian. Stick that “ian” on to the end, and whatever it is seems to become more a matter of belief than of study or observation. As in Christian.

    So perhaps it’s inevitable that when I think of a theologian — with apologies to the many fine theologians I know — I still tend to think of a black-robed divine closeted away in his (always his) study or cell, reasoning out the dictates of his faith. The word is somehow redolent with churchness, with the smell of incense and beeswax, the chants of monks and the echo of cold stone floors. There’s a kind of whispery reverence to it.

    A theologist, on the other hand, feels far more secular. The word feels right for someone like me, an outsider with a strong sense of the inside, an agnostic freelancer in the world of religion, exercising her right to equal-opportunity criticism and/or appreciation.”

    So if we see increasing use of “theologist” in news reports, we may take it that it means someone outside the formal hierarchy and/or church structure, not a ‘dusty divine’, someone secular like, say, a feminist professor in a big-name university?

  • Amy

    It’s like the writer doesn’t know anything about liberation theology but wants to stick to the Popes/Vatican=bad and movement Pope’s criticize=good line of thinking, which is hard to reconcile when someone who supports the “good” movement becomes part of the “bad” Vatican.

  • Julia

    This article helps explain why the new appointee’s version of Liberation Theology is OK.

    http://vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/en/homepage/inquiries-and-interviews/detail/articolo/teologia-della-liberazione-muller-16500/

    And here’s John Allen:

    Moreover, Müller is also a close personal friend of Guttierez, widely seen as the father of the liberation theology movement in Latin America. Every year since 1998, Müller has travelled to Peru to take a course from Guttierez, and has spent time living with farmers in a rural parish near the border with Bolivia.

    In 2008, he accepted an honorary doctorate from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, which is widely seen as a bastion of the progressive wing of the Peruvian church. On the occasion, he praised Guttierez and defended his theology.

    “The theology of Gustavo Gutiérrez, independently of how you look at it, is orthodox because it is orthopractic,” he said. “It teaches us the correct way of acting in a Christian fashion since it comes from true faith.”

    http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/german-friend-liberation-theologian-named-vatican-doctrinal-czar

    I’m sure I read a longer article not long ago that differentiated Gutierrez from other Liberation theologians who were determined to have gone over the line. I believe those priests were more Marxist and advocated getting the church actually involved in politics and military situations. Guttierez was never told by the CDF not to teach and was only asked to make some small revisions in his writings over the years.

  • Jerry

    When coming across an unfamiliar word such as “theologist”, I highly recommend actually searching for the word on the internet before commenting on its usage. There are 132,000 hits on the word. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/theologist http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/theologist#English http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=1567311 and others state that theologist is a synonym or close to that for theologian although one site had an assertion of a negative connotation.

  • asshur

    Somewhere on the web (At Sandro Magister’s site, with complementary info there is an article by one Fr. Boff (Clodovis )He was one of the second-tier Liberation Theologians.
    It is an autocritical reflection on what went wrong with LT in its theological core. It’s worth read to understand the nuances around LT
    There should be also a response by his brother Leonardo -not a catholic anymore, at least he is sincere-

    I never liked LT (just happened by then to revert from standard Marxism and wouldn’t touch it for my life), and I found the few i read from Leonardo Boff (in the early 80′s its most popular figure) really “beyond the pale” theological

    On another take. Bishop Müller’s appointment seems to have upset both dissident camps (the traddis and the modernists alike). This is usually a good sign

  • Thomas A. Szyszkiewicz

    You are right, geoconger. For instance, the fact that Archbishop Müller wrote a book only eight years ago with Gutiérrez called “On the Side of the Poor” should require, I think, some explanation. I’m sure there’s some cleric or “theologist” in London who has read the book and can offer cogent commentary on it. My guess is that it was a book about the preferential option for the poor and what that does — and doesn’t — mean. But we don’t know that from reading The Guardian.

    And by the way, why is it that almost every mention of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith has to state that it is the successor office of the Inquisition? The implications, of course, are obvious, but the last time I checked, no one’s been burned at the stake, no thumbscrews have been turned and no racks have been pulled out of dusty Vatican basements for at least a couple of centuries. No one’s even been pilloried, for heaven’s sake. So really, do we need to say that anymore?

    As to “theologist”, it just sounds ugly. This is the second time I’ve come across the term and the first time it was also used by some ignoramus. OK, so some dictionaries have it, but when I put it into this text box, Firefox gives it the red squiggly underline and for good reason — no one uses it and it shouldn’t be in anyone’s style book.

    As a relevant aside, when I was in Mexico for a conference on NAFTA in 1999 for Catholic journalists, we took a day trip to Cuernavaca and there ran into liberation theology head on. For those who want, you can read it about here and here.

  • Julia

    A

    nd by the way, why is it that almost every mention of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith has to state that it is the successor office of the Inquisition? The implications, of course, are obvious, but the last time I checked, no one’s been burned at the stake, no thumbscrews have been turned and no racks have been pulled out of dusty Vatican basements for at least a couple of centuries. No one’s even been pilloried, for heaven’s sake. So really, do we need to say that anymore?

    My county regularly seats a jury for an inquest which is an inquiry into the cause of death of someone dying outside a hospital. It’s an investigation. The word inquisition is just another way of describing an inquiry. When there were enough negative complaints coming into the Papacy, somebody would be sent to check out the problem- called inquisitions, which we would call investigations.

    Today when a number of complaints to the CDF seem to have merit or otherwise need an inquiry, a visitator is sent to investigate and report back what is going on. How each of these inquiries turn out depends on what was found and the particular circumstances. An example is the current situation with the LCWR or Archbishop Chaput’s recent visit to Ireland followed by a report to Rome.

    “Inquisition” got a bad name from the Cathar situation and in Spain where the investigations were actually run by the Spanish government. There’s still a lot of misunderstanding about CDF inquiries. Our Congress has investigative hearings where people are subpoena’d, like Galileo was summoned to Rome. I’ve not heard any of those summoned to US hearings having been hung by their thumbs, either.

  • Dan Crawford

    I’m delighted that at least one person in this thread took some pains to distinguish Gutierrez from some of the other liberation theologians. I remembered how astounded I was when I read his seminal work – it bore little resemblance to the rather hysterical criticisms of certain people on the Catholic Right. The Peruvian priest has actually taught in at least one of the Vatican’s seminaries in Rome. Fr. Gutierrz is an orthodox theologian, and I suspect Archbishop Muller had no difficulty coauthoring a book with him.

  • http://ecben.wordpress.com Will

    Julia, the Albigensian Crusade and following crackdown was in France, not Spain. The only Spanish king who had anything to do with it was King Pedro of Aragon who intervened on the Occitan side (and got killed). The Spanish Inquisition did not EXIST until Isabella founded it.

    As for “theologists”, I suggest following Chesterton’s example and telling them that “his trouble was tomfoolerism, otherwise called tomfoolerity, and I felt an impulsion to pummel his physiognomics out of all semblity of humanitude.”

  • Julia

    Will:

    I didn’t say the Albigensian/Cathar situation was in Spain.

    And I did say the Spanish Inquisition was run by the govt.

  • Julia

    Should have said the Spanish Inquisition was mostly run by the Spanish government and not Rome. There were Spanish clerics involved.

  • asshur

    Re the Spanish Inquisition. It was a strange beast,because in modern terms it was an organ of the state not a canonical institution, but their judges where clerics (mostly canonic lawyers) and his original matter of concern was religious. OTOH it was authorized by a papal bull.

    There is a lot of modern scholary (in this case after 1905 -when Lea finished his work) around it, and the image is coming out might surprise a lot …
    Only two details: It was very usual that defendants under ordinary jurisdiction tried to have their cases transfered to the Inquisition, expecting a fairer trial. This was specially true of those acussed of sodomy. It has been estimated that (in the XVI century) under civil jurisdiction circa 90% of the defendants ended at the stake; but only 15% of those under the Inquisition. Sadly for them, the Inquisition only had jurisdiction over this felony in some areas, and not always exclusive …

  • Thinkling

    Interesting piece in Catholic Herald:

    Is the new Prefect of the CDF really not a man of ‘secure doctrine’? Some in Rome think so, and he does defend liberation theology: so what’s going on?

    Besically, if the Pope trusts him, there is probably no there there. But he does suggest some things to improve his effectiveness at his new post.

    William Oddie is better than many religion reporters across the Pond.

  • DanielDaniel

    Yes, this article should below the bare minimum have made at least a passing show of attempting to “define its terms — especially the precepts of Liberation Theology.” But it should have contextualized correct definitions by giving cogent examples to clarify the story. This should not have been all that hard to do if the author had any intention of helping his readers to grasp the significance of his report. We see here where snarkiness outweighs usefulness.

  • Newark

    Another thought: “nothing infuriates a person as much as there own lack of spiritual insight” Spark, “the Prime of Miss Jean Brody”

  • c matt

    There may be some slight theoligist/theologian nuance.

    Although not exclusive, the “ist” seems to refer those who study a subject as an academic enterprise – somewhat detached from the use of the subject itself. Thus, biologist. Whereas the “ian” seems to apply more to those who not only study, but make use of the knowledge as a way of practice. Thus, you have “physicians” (you also have physicists, but that is a completely different category). Of course you have crossover – psychologists, chemists, musicians (you don’t refer to musicists), historian. But in modern day practice, this distinction does not seem to be used. I would sort of view it as the difference between say, a chemist who studies chemistry for the purpose of gaining the knowledge only, versus a chemical engineer, who then takes that knowledge (or develops it himself as well) and then puts it to some practical use. As I said, though, this distinction seems to be pretty much unused.