IN A poor barrio in Peru, in the 1940s, a young boy fell ill and was confined to a wheelchair throughout his teenage years. Apart from the physical pain of a debilitating illness, this boy was his parents’ only son, and his illness was another blow to the family’s already precarious life. From the midst of poverty and suffering, he went on to become one of the most influential figures in the life of the 20th-century Roman Catholic Church.
Fr Gustavo Gutiérrez OP, who died last week, aged 96 (News, 25 October), has been called the father of liberation theology: a movement that emerged in Latin America, but which has shaped theology and pastoral practice in churches all over the world. The impact of Gutiérrez on the Church has been felt not because of, but rather despite, the poverty and suffering of his childhood.
The ministry of Gutiérrez was shaped by a desire to serve those whose lives were gripped by the hardships that he himself knew. While others may have wrestled with how to speak of God in cultures that had become secular, Gutiérrez recognised that the challenge before him was how to speak of God in communities that were suffering. To put it in his own words, in The Power of the Poor in History: “The question here will not be how to speak of God in a world come of age, but rather how to proclaim God as Father in a world that is inhumane. What can it mean to tell a nonperson that he or she is God’s child?”
The legacy of Gutiérrez lies not simply — or even primarily — in the answers that he offers to this question. The impact of Gutiérrez is found in the fact that he moved the Church to ask this question at all.
GUTIÉRREZ was born on 8 June 1928, and grew up in Rímac, a deprived community in the north of Lima, the capital of Peru. The illness that dominated his teenage years motivated him to study medicine at San Marcos University, where he developed a particular interest in psychiatry.
During this time, Gutiérrez became increasingly involved in politics, and his work with the Catholic Action and Catholic Students’ movements led him to leave his medical studies to train instead for the priesthood. His training took him first to Chile, and then Europe, but, after nearly a decade away, he returned home in 1959 to be ordained and teach theology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru.
During this time, the RC Church embarked on a period of reflection and renewal catalysed by the Second Vatican Council. As pastors and theologians in Latin America thought together about how to make the aspirations of Vatican II a reality in their communities, it was clear that they needed to think and speak in new ways.
Over the course of the 1960s, Gutiérrez wrestled with this challenge, and, in the run-up to the bishops’ conference at Medellín in 1968, Gutiérrez called the Latin American Church to a “theology of liberation”. This term expressed many of the concerns that Gutiérrez had been exploring over the previous years, and provided an influential framework for the bishops at Medellín, and for the Latin American Church in the years to come.
Gutiérrez continued to develop his thinking over the subsequent years, and drew his reflections together in the book A Theology of Liberation, which was published in Spanish in 1971. Reprinted multiple times, and translated into many languages, the book has become a manifesto for a new theological method.
AS COMMENTATORS look back on Gutiérrez’s life and ministry, much will be written about the different themes that emerge in his writing. There is much to be said about his account of human liberation, his call to a preferential option for the poor, and his characterisation of a truly loving Christian praxis.
But it is important to not lose sight of how Gutiérrez himself described his work. In the introduction to the revised edition of his most famous book, A Theology of Liberation: History, politics, and salvation, published in 1988, Gutiérrez explains: “My book is a love letter to God, to the Church, and to the people to which I belong.”
This love for the Church and for people is the distinctive mark of his theology — and a central reason for its enduring impact. Despite his prominence within the Church and his influence around the world, he returned to Rímac, in 1980, to serve for 20 years as a priest in the community from which he came.
For all the tensions that existed between them in the 1980s, Gutiérrez was embraced by the institutions of the RC Church in the final stages of his ministry. He was honoured by Pope Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis paid tribute to him at his funeral as “a great man of the Church” whose ministry bore “so much apostolic fruit and so much rich theology”.
In the poor barrios of Peru — and throughout the world — there are many children who fall ill. There are many families who suffer. While we know the name of Gustavo Gutiérrez, he would want us today to remember those whose names we do not know: those who live and die unknown and unvalued by the world. He would want us to listen to the gospel and to look at the world — and to proclaim to that world, marred by inhumanity, how, in Christ, they, too, might be children of God.
The Revd Dr Luke Foster is Tutor in Systematic Theology and Church History at Oak Hill College. He spent seven years in Chile, teaching at the Centre for Pastoral Studies. His book Gustavo Gutiérrez and the Liberative Sight of Christ (SCM Press) is reviewed here.