Why liberation theology is heresy

The errors of liberation theology have been well-documented and censured by the Magisterium. But since there have been renewed efforts to whitewash its past, those missteps bear repeating. T he first offense of liberation theology was one of presumption.

The second error of liberation theology has been its repeated calumnies. Although liberation theologians often complained—and still complain—of being unfairly treated, they have been in the forefront of launching reckless, ad hominen attacks against their critics.

Roger Vekemans, an outstanding Belgian Jesuit who spent decades supporting the poor in Latin America, was demonized by left-wing clergy because he refused to incorporate Marxism into his social justice teachings, and remained faithful to the Church.

Similarly, when the Vatican issued two corrective documents on liberation theology at the instruction of St. And the list goes on. Gustavo Gutierrez —one of the founding fathers of liberation theology who has, to his credit, welcomed counsel from the Holy See: Liberation theology needs to repudiate Marxism, and reorient itself towards transcendence, if it is to have any future.

As the Church moves forward under Francis, who fought dissident liberation theologians long before he became pope, it is important to remember their sins and errors, lest a new generation of Christians be led astray. William Doino Jr. His previous articles can be found here. Although the pope does not say it explicitly, the logic embedded in his reflection seems to be that there is room for an authentic liberation theology cleaned of Marxist contaminations. Although there is no official record of it, the story Leonardo Boff tells about being contacted by Pope Francis and encouraged to send material for the elaboration of the Laudato Si encyclical, is another gesture that signals reconciliation.

Footnote 98 In one sense, the impression left by the official involvement of Boff in drafting a papal encyclical indicates an even stronger willingness to solve the long conflict between the Vatican and the liberation theologians. Second, the power to lift sanctions against a suspended Catholic priest is another instrument a pope possesses to signal closeness or distance to a person that once entered priesthood, like the liberation theologians.

The lifting of such sanctions is an authorization that can signal interest in dialogue, community, and even reconciliation. He served as a foreign minister in the Sandinista government of Nicaragua from until , but asked the Vatican for permission to say Mass a few years before he died.

In February , the Vatican also allowed the liberation theologian and poet Ernesto Cardenal — to celebrate Mass. Third, through his politics of canonization, Pope Francis has signaled an approximation to liberation theology and recognition of some of its key figures never seen before on part of the Vatican in this area of ecclesial politics since the rise of liberation theology in the s.

What is more, many of them considered it a scandal that an Archbishop who died for the sacred cause of the liberation of the poor was denied a regular canonization process in the church. Footnote Pope Francis has surely not limited the canonization processes during his pontificate to figures linked to liberationist Christianity.

The cult around Archbishop Romero was also an expression of a less theologically articulated and more popular form of Catholicism practiced among wider parts of the Catholic population in Central America than those who identified themselves with liberation theology. Footnote That said, the pope could hardly have been unaware of the recognition of some of the legacy of Latin American liberation theology caused by his papal authorization of the initial opening of the canonization process in , the beautification decision in , and the final sanctification in Liberation theology can be understood as a series of attempts to radicalize the Social Doctrine of the Catholic church for the cause of the poor.

Likewise, the intellectuals of the movement also sought to reformulate theological disciplines like Christology. Through a postconciliar return to the sources of Scripture and tradition, liberation, theologians contributed to new readings of the Gospels in particular that were more attuned to modern biblical criticism. Pope Francis tends to emphasize the role of the theology of the people when confronted with the question the Latin American sources of his theology.

Through this negotiation, some elements characteristic to Latin American liberation theology are rejected by the pontiff while others are appropriated and integrated into the papal discourse without explicitly referring to the liberation theologians. The Argentinian reiterated the warning from his predecessors of reducing the gospel to an ideology and made it clear that this was a particular danger when applying the see-judge-act methodology, without mentioning that this has been a cornerstone of liberation theology.

This is the most readily available means of making the message an ideology. At certain times it has proved extremely influential. It involves an interpretative claim based on a hermeneutics drawn from the social sciences. It extends to the most varied fields, from market liberalism to Marxist categorization.

Pope Francis is eager to distance himself from any ideology and to criticize different models for politics, whether it is economic liberalism or Marxism. Footnote His theology serves primarily to delegitimize political powers and ideologies, not to legitimize concrete new policies.

The viewpoint of Pope Francis as leftist, Footnote or the impression of the pope as more critical of the political right than the left, is misguided. This impression is partly due to the post-cold war context in which the pope addresses social concerns for the poor and where capitalism is the dominant economic reality.

So what is the Latin American effect on the papacy after with regard to this particular topic? Here, the pope draws connections between the realities of economic inequalities and deaths of the poor on one hand, and the idolatry of money and the literally deadly logic of the market economy on the other:. Such an economy kills… The worship of the ancient golden calf cf. Ex has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose.

The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack of real concern for human beings. Footnote Here, the traditional criticism of capitalism from the social doctrine of the Catholic church is articulated as a denouncement of a practice of idolatry attested to in the Bible. Footnote In this way, modern market economy becomes absolutized in a way that effectively kills in the form of social exclusion.

As liberation theologians would say, it kills the poor that dies before their time. A liberation theologian like Jon Sobrino has called for a focus on idolatry rather than atheism as the real threat of the poor and therefore of the church. The denouncement of idolatry is more biblical and more relevant to the sinful state of the world, according to Sobrino.

Footnote In a notable contrast to Benedict XVI, and in reminiscence of liberation theology, Pope Francis focuses on idolatry at the expense of atheism.

In , a group of Argentinians Jesuits close to the current pope published an anthology with theological and ethical perspectives on market economy and neoliberalism. Among the editors was the theologian of the people, Juan Carlos Scannone. Footnote But it does indeed figure in the DEI school of liberation theology of the s, as also pointed to by Allan da Silva Coelho. Footnote In works of the mentioned liberation theologians of this school, an innovative theological analysis of the inherent logic of a laissez-affaire market economy is formulated.

Hence, the denunciative aspect of liberation theology proves to be attractive to a pope ready to denounce economic injustice without embracing a concrete model as alternative to it. Pope Francis takes a step further in his interpretation of the social teaching in the church with his encyclical Laudato Si. In this text, the denunciative tone of negative effects of the market economy is extended to the theme of ecology. It is a document that is structured with the methodology of the see-judge-act-scheme.

Moreover, the intimate link between the cause of the poor and the protection of the environment reminiscent of the s ecologically oriented liberation theology is fundamental to the argument.

Today, however, we have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor. Footnote Nonetheless, the shift in Latin American Catholic theology with regard to ecology occurred already in the s liberation theology.

It is highly likely that there were influential bishops present at the CELAM meeting in Aparecida familiar with the ecological theology of the Brazilian liberation theologians Leonardo Boff and Ivone Gebara. The conflict between liberation theology and Rome seems to have been solved through the charismatic enactment of the church of the poor in the person of Pope Francis, but also through the adjustments of the theology of various actors.

In the post-cold war era, Jorge Mario Bergoglio is confronted by the overwhelming reality of poverty and dominance of capitalism in a world where Communism is no longer a threat and Marxism no more attractive to intellectuals in the church. But interestingly, Pope Francis absorbs elements from new directions taken within liberation theology in the s, such as the theological criticism of neoliberal market ideology and the ecotheology. Jon Sobrino is one of the few profiled liberation theologians that has not only praised Pope Francis but also made some of his criticism public.

Sobrino admits having been positively surprised by a person that within the Jesuit Society was known for his controversial role as provincial in Argentina during the s. Nonetheless, he notes that the tone in the theology of the pope is quite traditional and without a historical-critical awareness of the biblical texts.

This lack of historical awareness is reflected in the Christology and martyrology of the Aparecida document, which Bergoglio had a key role in the final editing of. The Aparecida document does not insist on the historical conflicts that led to the execution of Jesus and of the Latin American martyrs of the twentieth century such as Archbishop Romero.

It alludes to the martyrdom, as if it had a value in and of itself, according to Sobrino. Footnote The official hagiography of a victim of such a dense moment in the history of Latin American Christianity was limited in scope and content.

The claim that Pope Francis is some sort of a political leftist seems greatly exaggerated. In light of the critical appraisal of some elements of liberation theology, Pope Francis appears more of a figure of a selective integration of symbols and groups connected to the liberation theology movement. He is not so much one of them as a figure of reconciliation between formerly oppositional groups within Latin American Catholicism. The post-Cold War context makes his approximation to liberation theology less controversial and his liberationist accentuation of traditional Catholic anticapitalism more understandable, particularly when he connects it to the deterioration of the environment.

Through headlines in the media and some rather uncritical works, Pope Francis has gained a reputation as a radical reformer and even as a revolutionary pope. Footnote But it is unlikely that the Catholic church has been governed by a revolutionary pope for the past eight years. The solved conflict with liberation theologians does not confirm such portrayals. Pope Francis does not call for any of the sort of political revolutions that some liberation theologians agitated for and even participated in in the s and s.

Footnote With time, it will become clear which of them that proved to be most influential in the history of the Catholic church. The decision of Pope John XXIII to convoke a council and announce that it would be a council of aggiornamento rather than condemnation in the typical anti-modernist fashion of the past proved to be historical.

Robert S. Pelton Scranton: University of Scranton Press, , Robert A. Krieg and James B. Nickoloff Maryknoll: Orbis Books London: Bloomsbury, , Stephen Hunt Leiden: Brill, The movement is ecumenical and has not consisted exclusively of Catholics.

Timothy J. Steigenga and Edward L. Activists from unions and church groups such as base communities were the primary social base for the party in Feminist theology and indigenous theology also deserve to be mentioned in this context of Latin American schools of theology. Brian Yong Lee and Thomas L. Thomas R. See ibid. Virginia R. Juan Luis Segundo, Liberation of Theology , ed.

Martin's Press , Published in Norwegian. Kenneth R. Himes et al. Washington D. C: Georgetown University Press, , Alfred T. Hennelly Maryknoll: Orbis Books , According to Agenor Brighenti, about modifications of the text approved by the Latin American bishops were made by the Vatican before final publication.

Jeffrey L. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, , John W. New York: Oxford University Press , Gender and sexuality is another field with which liberation theologians engaged and which led to innovative contributions in the s.

These significant contributions met more resistance in official Catholic teaching, however. Rio de Janeiro: Sextante, , Robert R. The book, co-authored with four other cardinals, consisted of a criticism of the idea that divorced could receive communion.

Pelton Scranton: University of Scranton Press , 2. Hennelly Maryknoll: Orbis Books , — Dinah Livingstone Maryknoll: Orbis Books , Reyes Alcaide, Papa Francisco. Madrid: Trotta, , Nevertheless, there are some indications that the Pope calls for more state regulations of the economy.

The state needs to regulate a little bit. Planeta, Buenos Aires. Google Scholar. Similarly, refusing to excise the theological from black radical thought would go a long way toward resolving the anxiety around religion, spirituality, and the mythic in historical materialist circles.

But it is precisely his understanding of these mystical and mythic elements of the tradition, not as signs of a primitivism, but as key elements of the historical material mode of refusal and resistance to racial capitalism that makes it so insightful.

Rather than seeing black religiosity and black theological production as at odds with historical materialism, we, following Robinson, might see them as ways into the historical struggle over the matters of authority and order. The socialist tradition that Robinson uncovers and which finds its exemplar in medieval heretical radicalism was indeed more than an opposition to capitalist exploitation. It issued a morally authoritative analysis of the corrosive abuse of power, the indignities of unrelieved poverty, and the sacrificial value of private property ownership.

Refusing to excise the theological from black radical thought would go a long way toward resolving the anxiety around religion, spirituality, and the mythic in historical materialist circles. At the same time, refusing orthodoxies requires taking seriously heretical approaches to reading Cone and Robinson.

What would it mean to take seriously those readings of Robinson and Cone that do not simply bolster a claim to the black radical tradition as already worked out in advance? Such readings can undercut the making of the black radical tradition, positioning it as supernaturally always already the fulfillment of a promise rather than the work of the people. In some sense, resisting such comforting readings would embrace the demand of these authors to be attentive to the immanent irruptions that produce heretical knowledge and challenge the sedimentation of authority.

But such a view makes it appear as though God has always sided with the oppressed in history or makes the black radical tradition an ontological totality whose preservation requires a pure reproduction of itself.

Such assumptions are inadequate to the reality of black existence and epistemology. We are able to read Cone both in terms that take seriously his theology and his critique of redemption history as the production of an anti-black salvation history. If all Western fields of knowledge have served to constitute an antiblack world, there is no other site from which to produce a counter-insurgent form of knowledge.

Instead, the heretical appropriation of materials is necessary.