Figure · 1928

Gustavo Gutiérrez

Gustavo Gutiérrez (1928–2024), Peruvian Catholic priest and theologian, later a Dominican. His A Theology of Liberation (1971) gave Liberation Theology its name and its central idea of God’s preferential option for the poor.

History

Roots

Gutiérrez was born in Lima on 8 June 1928, of mixed Spanish and Quechua descent. Osteomyelitis kept him largely in bed or a wheelchair from age 12 to 18, and he later said the years of reading and pain shaped how he thought about suffering. He began medicine at the National University of San Marcos, meaning to become a psychiatrist, then turned to the priesthood. He studied in Europe: philosophy and psychology at Louvain, where he wrote on Freud, and theology at Lyon, with time in Rome. The French Catholic revival was at its height, and he absorbed its return to the sources and its interest in history and the world (biography, secondary).

He was ordained in 1959 and came back to teach at the Catholic University of Lima and to work as a pastor in Rímac, a poor district of the city. The theology he had learned in Europe answered the questions of educated unbelievers. His parishioners were asking a different question: how to speak of a loving God to people whose lives were being shortened by poverty.

Causes

Three things met in the 1960s. Latin America lived with mass poverty under oligarchies and, increasingly, military governments. The Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) told the Church to read “the signs of the times” and opened it to the modern world. And the dominant economic language of the day, “development,” was failing: a generation of Latin American social scientists argued that the region’s poverty was the product of dependence on richer nations, not a stage on the way to wealth.

In July 1968 Gutiérrez gave a talk to priests in Chimbote, a Peruvian fishing port, under the title “Toward a Theology of Liberation.” A month later the Latin American bishops met at Medellín, Colombia. Gutiérrez served there on the theological commissions (America, secondary), and the Medellín documents on justice, peace and poverty took up the language of liberation and of a Church in solidarity with the poor. He expanded the Chimbote talk into Teología de la liberación: Perspectivas (Lima, 1971), translated by Orbis Books as A Theology of Liberation (1973) and reissued with a new introduction in 1988.

Influence

The book became the founding text of a movement. Its method was taken up by Leonardo Boff, Jon Sobrino, Juan Luis Segundo and others across Latin America, and its central idea spread well beyond Catholicism into Black Theology, feminist theology and Asian and African contextual theologies. In 1974 Gutiérrez founded the Bartolomé de Las Casas Institute in Lima, named for the sixteenth-century Dominican who defended the Indigenous peoples of the Americas against the conquistadors; his long study Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ (1992) presented Las Casas as a forerunner.

The 1980s brought Vatican scrutiny (below). Gutiérrez stayed within the Church, revised some formulations, and was never censured. He joined the Dominican Order around 2001 (sources differ on the year) and spent much of his later career teaching at the University of Notre Dame. The pontificate of Francis, an Argentine who spoke of “a Church which is poor and for the poor” (Evangelii Gaudium, 2013, §198), was widely read as a reconciliation. In 2004 Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, who became prefect of the doctrinal congregation in 2012, published a jointly written book with him, later translated as On the Side of the Poor: The Theology of Liberation (2015). Gutiérrez died in Lima on 22 October 2024, aged 96.

Key ideas and contributors

Theology as a second step. Gutiérrez’s best-known definition is that theology is “critical reflection on Christian praxis in the light of the Word.” The first act is commitment: prayer and action alongside the poor. Theology comes after, as reflection on that practice, and it is tested by whether it serves it. This reverses the classical order, in which doctrine is settled first and then applied.

Three levels of liberation. A Theology of Liberation distinguishes liberation from oppressive social and economic structures, liberation as the human being becoming the agent of their own history, and liberation from sin, which is the root of all the others and is accomplished only by Christ. Gutiérrez insisted the three form one process without collapsing into one another: political change is not the Kingdom of God, but the Kingdom is not unrelated to it. Sin, for him, is personal and also built into structures.

One history. Against a sharp split between sacred and secular history, he argued that there is one history in which God saves. Salvation is not only the soul’s destiny after death; it reaches the whole person here and now. This is why Salvation in his work includes justice (Luke 4:18–19).

The preferential option for the poor. God’s love is universal, but it has a preference: in Scripture God takes the side of the oppressed, from the Exodus to the prophets to Jesus’ identification with “the least of these” (Matthew 25:31–46). The Church must make the same choice. The phrase was adopted by the Latin American bishops at Puebla (1979) and, in modified form (“love of preference for the poor”), entered official Catholic teaching through the Vatican’s Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation (1986, §68) and John Paul II’s Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987, §42). Gutiérrez stressed that the preference rests on who God is, not on the moral virtue of the poor.

Spirituality and suffering. His later books answered the charge that liberation theology was politics in theological dress. We Drink from Our Own Wells (1983) set out a spirituality of the poor, and On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent (1986) asked how one can speak of God at all in the face of unjust suffering, answering through prophecy and contemplation together. The God of Life (1989) followed.

Key controversies

Marxism. The central charge was that Gutiérrez borrowed Marxist social analysis and, with it, Marxist assumptions. In 1984 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger issued its Instruction on Certain Aspects of the “Theology of Liberation”, warning of “the deviations, and risks of deviation” in some liberation theologies. It argued that Marxist analysis cannot be separated from its ideology, since “the ideological principles come prior to the study of the social reality,” and called class struggle as a road to a classless society “a myth which slows reform and aggravates poverty and injustice.” The document named no theologian, but it was widely read as aimed at Gutiérrez among others. He answered that he used social science as a tool for understanding poverty, not as a philosophy, and that the 1988 introduction to his book dropped dependency theory as outdated.

Faith reduced to politics. Critics, including the Vatican document, worried that reading salvation as liberation turns the Kingdom of God into a political program and Jesus into a revolutionary. John Paul II told the bishops at Puebla that the idea of “Christ as a political figure, a revolutionary, as the subversive man from Nazareth” did not tally with the Church’s catechesis (opening address, 1979, I.4). Gutiérrez’s defenders point to his insistence that liberation from sin is the deepest level and to his later work on spirituality.

Class and the Church. The 1984 instruction also criticized talk of a “Church of the People” understood as “a Church of the class, a Church of the oppressed people” (IX.12), set against the hierarchy. Gutiérrez rejected that reading of his work and stressed the base communities’ place within the Church. The same instruction reaffirmed “the ‘preferential option for the poor’” (VI.5), so the dispute was over interpretation, not over the option itself.

The investigation in Peru. In 1983 Ratzinger wrote to the Peruvian bishops asking them to investigate Gutiérrez. Karl Rahner wrote shortly before his death that “the theology of liberation that he represents is entirely orthodox,” and the bishops’ eventual compromise document “never accused Gutiérrez of error and did not impose any sanction” (Angelus, secondary). Tension continued in Lima under Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani, an Opus Dei archbishop hostile to liberation theology, which preceded Gutiérrez’s move to teaching abroad.

From the other side. Some liberationists judged Gutiérrez too cautious, especially as later writers moved toward ecology, race and gender. Protestant evangelicals in Latin America, such as René Padilla and Samuel Escobar, shared his concern for the poor but questioned whether his hermeneutic let social analysis rather than Scripture set the agenda.

What remains unresolved

The option for the poor won: it is now ordinary Catholic language, used by popes. What remains disputed is how far theology may take its starting point from social analysis and political practice, and whether the salvation the Church announces is weakened or completed when it includes justice in this world. Gutiérrez’s own late answer was that the question of the poor is finally a question about God.