Church in the World

Liberation theology ‘is still a danger’

Pope Benedict XVI has said that a Marxist-driven liberation theology is continuing to cause great harm to the Church in Brazil 25 years after he first tried to crack down on its proliferation.

“Its consequences, more or less visible, in the form of rebellion, division, dissent, offence [and] anarchy, are still being felt,” the Pope said last Saturday to the heads of some 28 dioceses in southern Brazil, including the metropolitan sees of Porto Alegre and Florianopolis. He told the bishops, who were in Rome for their five-yearly ad limina visit, that liberation theology was “creating great suffering and a serious loss of vital force in  [their] diocesan communities”. In 1984, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he was prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and issued an instruction, Libertatis Nuntius, which strongly condemned a number of elements in liberation theology.

In his meeting with the Brazilian bishops the Pope said it was “worth recalling” the twenty-fifth anniversary of that document. “It underlined the danger inherent in an a-critical acceptance by some theologians of theses and methodologies coming from Marxism,” he said. “I implore all those who in some way feel attracted, involved or intimately touched by certain deceptive principles of liberation theology to look again at the instruction and accept the benign light it offers with outstretched hands,” the Pope said.

Pope Benedict appeared particularly concerned that Brazil’s Catholic universities were teaching “deceptive principles” of liberation theology. He told the bishops these institutions were “not the property of those who founded or frequent them [i.e. religious orders], but an expression of the Church and her patrimony of faith”.

He did not mention any universities by name, but Brazil has more Vatican-established universities – six – than any other single country except Italy. One of them, the Pontifical Catholic University of the State of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, has been the headquarters of the “World Forum on Theology and Liberation” since 2003. The WFTL brings hundreds of theologians together every two years just before the World Social Forum to discuss ways that Christian faith can help bring justice to the poor and oppressed.

The Pope may be concerned about liberation theology because it still has many adherents in Brazil, even though today it has a strong ecumenical flavour. After the Vatican started challenging Catholic liberation theologians in the 1980s Protestants, especially Lutherans, started to embrace its ideas. Last month one of Brazil’s leading Lutheran theologians, the Revd Dr Walter Altmann, said liberation theology’s “death certificate has been issued prematurely”. In an article published on 19 November by the World Council of Churches, he said: “It is true that [some] liberation theologians  used Marxist categories for socioeconomic analysis and for a critique of capitalism’s evils.” But Dr Altmann said the core of liberation theology had never been Marxist. “It is rather the compassionate identification with the poor and their struggle for justice, inspired by the life and teachings of Jesus himself, which is at its heart,” he said.