MAY 23, 2015
Archbishop
Óscar Romero, assassinated in 1980, was beatified on Saturday in San
Salvador after many years of stalling by conservative Catholic
officials.
Credit Meridith Kohut for The New York Times
VATICAN CITY — Six months after becoming the first Latin American pontiff,
Pope Francis
invited an octogenarian priest from Peru for a private chat at his
Vatican residence. Not listed on the pope’s schedule, the September 2013
meeting
with the priest, Gustavo Gutiérrez, soon became public — and was just
as quickly interpreted as a defining shift in the Roman Catholic Church.
Father Gutiérrez is a founder of liberation theology, the Latin American
movement embracing the poor and calling for social change, which
conservatives once scorned as overtly Marxist and the Vatican treated
with hostility. Now, Father Gutiérrez is a respected Vatican visitor,
and his writings have been praised in the official Vatican newspaper.
Francis has brought other Latin American priests back into favor and
often uses language about the poor that has echoes of liberation
theology.
Now, Francis speaks of creating “a poor church for the poor” and is
seeking to position Catholicism closer to the masses — a spiritual
mission that comes as he is also trying to revive the church in Latin
America, where it has steadily lost ground to evangelical congregations.
For years, Vatican critics of liberation theology and conservative Latin
American bishops helped stall the canonization process for Archbishop
Romero, even though many Catholics in the region regard him as a
towering moral figure: an outspoken critic of social injustice and
political repression who was assassinated during Mass in 1980. Francis
broke the stalemate.
“It is very important,” Father Gutiérrez said. “Somebody who is
assassinated for this commitment to his people will illuminate many
things in Latin America.”
The beatification is the prelude to what is likely to be a defining period of Francis’ papacy, with trips to South America,
Cuba and
the United States; the release of a much-awaited encyclical
on environmental degradation
and the poor; and a meeting in Rome to determine whether and how the
church will change its approach to issues like homosexuality,
contraception and
divorce.
By advancing the campaign for Archbishop Romero’s sainthood, Francis is
sending a signal that the allegiance of his church is to the poor, who
once saw some bishops as more aligned with discredited governments, many
analysts say. Indeed, Archbishop Romero was
regarded as a popular saint in El Salvador even as the Vatican blocked his canonization process.
“It is not liberation theology that is being
rehabilitated,” said Michael E. Lee, an associate professor of theology
at Fordham University who has written extensively about liberation
theology. “It is the church that is being rehabilitated.”
Liberation theory includes a critique of the structural causes of
poverty and a call for the church and the poor to organize for social
change. Mr. Lee said it was a broad school of thought: Movements
differed in different countries, with some more political in nature and
others less so. The broader movement emerged after a major meeting of
Latin American bishops in Medellín, Colombia, in 1968 and was rooted in
the belief that the plight of the poor should be central to interpreting
the Bible and to the Christian mission.
But with the Cold War in full force, some critics denounced liberation
theology as Marxist, and a conservative backlash quickly followed. At
the Vatican, John Paul II, the Polish pope who would later be credited
for helping topple the Soviet Union, became suspicious of the political
elements of the new Latin American movements.
“All that rhetoric made the Vatican very nervous,” said Ivan Petrella,
an Argentine lawmaker and scholar of liberation theology. “If you were
coming from behind the Iron Curtain, you could smell some communism in
there.”
John Paul reacted by appointing conservative bishops in Latin America
and by supporting conservative Catholic groups such as Opus Dei and the
Legionaries of Christ, which opposed liberation theology. In the 1980s,
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — later to become Pope Benedict XVI, but then
the Vatican’s enforcer of doctrine — issued two statements on liberation
theology. The first was very critical, but the second was milder,
leading some analysts to wonder if the Vatican was easing up.
From his 1973 appointment as head of the Jesuits in Argentina, Francis,
then 36 and known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, was viewed as deeply
concerned with the poor. But religious figures who knew him then say
Francis, like much of Argentina’s Catholic establishment, thought
liberation theology was too political. Critics also blamed him for
failing to prevent the kidnapping and torture of two priests sympathetic
to liberation theology.
Some in the church hierarchy considered Francis divisive and autocratic
in his 15 years leading the Jesuits. The church authorities sent him
into what amounted to stretches of exile, first in Germany and then in
Córdoba, Argentina, a period in which he later described having “a time
of great interior crisis.”
He practiced spiritual exercises and changed his leadership style to
involve greater dialogue. When he was named archbishop of Buenos Aires,
his focus became those left behind by Argentina’s economic upheaval.
“With
the end of the Cold War, he began to see that liberation theology was
not synonymous with Marxism, as many conservatives had claimed,” said
Paul Vallely, author of “Pope Francis: Untying the Knots.” Argentina’s
financial crisis in the early years of the 21st century also shaped his
views, as he “began to see that economic systems, not just individuals,
could be sinful,” Mr. Vallely added.
Since becoming pope, Francis has expressed strong criticism of
capitalism, acknowledging that globalization has lifted many people from
poverty but saying it has also created great disparities and “condemned
many others to hunger.” He has warned, “Without a solution to the
problems of the poor, we cannot resolve the problems of the world.”
In Argentina, some critics are unconvinced that Francis’ outspokenness
about the poor represents an embrace of liberation theology. “He never
took the reins of liberation theology because it’s radical,” said Rubén
Rufino Dri, who worked in the late 1960s and 1970s with a group of
priests active in the slums of Buenos Aires.
To him, Francis’ decision to expedite Archbishop Romero’s beatification
was a political one, part of what Mr. Rufino Dri views as a “superficial
transformation” of the Catholic Church as it competes in Latin America
with secularism as well as other branches of Christianity.
“It’s a populist maneuver by a great politician,” he said.
Others offered a more nuanced view. José María di Paola, 53, a priest
who is close to Francis and once worked with him among the poor of
Buenos Aires, said the beatification reflected a broader push by Francis
to reduce the Vatican’s focus on Europe. “It’s part of a process to
bring an end to the church’s Eurocentric interpretation of the world and
have a more Latin American viewpoint,” he said.
Father di Paola added that while Francis had never proposed evangelizing
under the banner of liberation theology during his time in Argentina,
his commitment to the poor should not be questioned. “Francis’ passage
through the slums of the capital influenced him later as a bishop and
pope,” he said. “Experiencing the life values of the poor transformed
his heart.”
As pope, Francis has expanded the roles of centrists sympathetic to
liberation theology, such as Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga of
Honduras, in contrast to the clout once wielded in Latin America by
conservative cardinals like Alfonso López Trujillo of Colombia, who
died in 2008.
“Trujillo represented the thinking that liberation theology was a Trojan
horse in which communism would enter the church, something that is
finally coming undone with Pope Francis,” said Leonardo Boff, 76, a
prominent Brazilian theologian who has written on liberation theology.
Many analysts note that John Paul and Benedict
never outright denounced liberation theology and slowly started to pivot
in their views. In 2012, Benedict reopened Archbishop Romero’s beatification case. Cardinal Gerhard Müller, a staunch conservative
who heads the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s
enforcer of doctrine, became a proponent of liberation theology after
working in Peru, where he met Father Gutiérrez. The two men have since
written books together.
“There was no rehabilitation because there was
never a ‘dehabilitation,’ ” Father Gutiérrez said, contesting the idea
that liberation theology was ever cast out of the church. “In past
years, there was talk of condemnation, and people believed it. What
there was was a critical dialogue, which had difficult moments but which
really was clarified over time.”
Francis often urges believers to act on behalf of the poor, saying if
they do, they will be transformed. For those who knew Archbishop Romero
in El Salvador, this transformation was notable. Once considered a
conservative, he began to change in the mid-1970s, when he was the
bishop of a rural diocese where government soldiers had massacred
peasants. Shortly after he became archbishop of San Salvador, he was
horrified when a close friend, a Jesuit priest, was murdered, and he
soon began to speak out against government terror and repression.
“He began to surprise people,” said Jon Sobrino, a prominent liberation
theologian who became close to Archbishop Romero and credited his
transformation to his embrace of the poor.
“They made him be different, be more radical, like Jesus,” Father
Sobrino said. “He drew near to them, and they approached him, asking for
help in their suffering. That was what changed him.”
In 2007, Father Sobrino had his own clash with the Vatican when the doctrinal office
disputed some of his writings. He refused to alter them and attributed the freeze on Archbishop Romero’s beatification partly to Vatican hostility.
“It has taken a new pope to change the situation,” he said.
Jim Yardley reported from Vatican City, and Simon Romero from Rio de
Janeiro. Elisabeth Malkin and Gene Palumbo contributed reporting from
San Salvador, and Jonathan Gilbert from Buenos Aires.
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