Gustavo Gutiérrez
A ‘mestizo’ of Hispanic and Quechua Indian descent, the Peruvian priest known as ‘the father of liberation theology’ also co-authored a book with Cardinal Gerhard Müller.
Gustavo Gutiérrez, the Peruvian theologian known as “the father of liberation theology”, died in Lima on 22 October. Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino was born in Lima on 8 June 1928. On his mother’s side he was of indigenous Quechua heritage. From 12 to 18 he suffered from osteomyelitis and had to use a wheelchair. The condition left him with a permanent limp, though he later said that thanks to the support of family and friends it taught him hope, and led to his later book on Job. After studying medicine and literature at Lima’s San Marcos University, he decided he wanted to be a priest. After a period in a seminary in Chile, he studied at Leuven and the Gregorian University in Rome, and gained a PhD from the Institut Catholique in Lyon in 1958. He said later that the works of the Dominican exponents of the nouvelle théologie such as Marie-Dominique Chenu, Yves Congar and Edward Schillebeeckx made a great impression on him, and later led him to join the Dominicans.
Gutiérrez returned to Lima in 1959 and worked as chaplain to the National Union of Catholic Students and also as parish priest in Rimac, a poor district of the city. He was a theological adviser at the 1968 conference of Latin American bishops in Medellín, which endorsed the concept of the “preferential option for the poor”. In 1974 he helped to found the Centro Bartolomé de las Casas in Lima as a centre for leadership training for young people from disadvantaged communities by means of courses and publications. The centre also published his seminal work, A Theology of Liberation, in 1971. The book is very much written for a context, a period in which popular movements in Latin America were rebelling against injustice and inequality, with Peru about to face a 20-year violent insurgency led by the Maoist Shining Path movement, and Brazil suffering a brutal military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. In the first paragraph of the first edition Gutiérrez writes: “This book … is a reflection born of the experience of shared efforts to abolish the current unjust situation and to build a different society, freer and more human.”
Despite his careful attempts to describe the relationship between faith and politics, Gutiérrez attracted criticism from conservatives, notably from the Archbishop of Lima at the time, Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne, a member of Opus Dei. A longer interaction between the church authorities and Fr Gutiérrez took place between 1999 and 2004. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith asked Gutiérrez to submit an article on his ecclesiology to rebut errors that had arisen in some interpretations of his work. Gutiérrez did so, and the CDF sent the article to the Peruvian bishops to see what they thought of it. They felt that the article didn’t do what it was asked to do, and the CDF asked Gutiérrez to revise it. This time the verdict of the Peruvian bishops and the CDF was that there was “no theological or pastoral objection” to Gutiérrez’ text. Nevertheless in 2001 Gutiérrez did join the Dominicans at the invitation of the then master general, Fr Timothy Radcliffe, to put a shield between him and a disappointed and vengeful Cipriani.
The final recognition of Gutiérrez’ theology at the highest levels of the Church came in 2013 and 2014, due in part to a collaboration with Cardinal Gerhard Müller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from 2012 to 2017. Müller had been visiting Peru over 15 years and had become a friend of Gutiérrez. In 2004 they wrote a book together, later published in English as On the Side of the Poor: The Theology of Liberation. Gutiérrez was present at the launch of the Italian edition of the book in the Vatican in September 2013, and he and Müller later concelebrated Mass with Pope Francis.
Gutiérrez went on to write several other books, including a study of sixteenth-century Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas, who campaigned against the exploitation of indigenous peoples and Africans in Latin America. He was also for a number of years professor of theology at Notre Dame University in the US. Among the many honours Gutiérrez received was the Légion d’honneur awarded to him in 1993 for his “fight against exploitation and poverty”. Gutiérrez later summed up his work in his own way in the introduction to the fourth edition of A Theology of Liberation: “My book is a love letter to God, the Church and the people to which I belong.”
Gustavo Gutiérrez, priest and theologian, born Lima, Peru, 8 June 1928; died Lima, 22 October 2024.
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