Gustavo Gutiérrez, founding father of liberation theology, dies at 96

VATICAN CITY (RNS) — A towering figure in the Catholic theological landscape of the past century, the Rev. Gustavo Gutiérrez, known as the father of liberation theology, died Tuesday night (Oct. 22) at the age of 96. Described as a Marxist by his critics and under Vatican scrutiny for most of his career, he and his work were partly rehabilitated under Pope Francis.

Gutiérrez died at a nursing home in Lima, Peru, according to a statement by the Dominican Province of St. John the Baptist of Peru, which announced his passing.

In 1971, Gutiérrez published his defining work, “A Theology of Liberation,” born from his experiences as an adviser to the Latin American bishops in Medellín, Colombia. The book offered the foundation for liberation theology, a current that took over Latin America starting in the 1960s, focusing on the “liberation of the oppressed” and social justice for the poor.

Coming in the depths of the Cold War, liberation theology was met with criticism in the church and at the Vatican, which eyed with suspicion its perceived communist influences. Gutiérrez’s signature book “spawned many new theological voices from the margins, and ultimately it left a deep impact on the social teaching of the church, realized, finally, in (the) papacy of Pope Francis, who has fully embraced the language of the option for the poor,” said Robert Ellsberg, publisher of Orbis Books and the English-language editions of Gutiérrez’s work, in an interview with RNS.

In what is considered a historic moment, Francis celebrated Mass with Gutiérrez in 2013 at the papal residence home in the Vatican, accompanied by conservative Cardinal Gerhard Müller. The welcome shown the priest represented a shift in the Vatican’s attitude toward liberation theology.

In a statement to Vatican media on Wednesday, Müller remembered his “great friend” Gutiérrez as “one of the greatest theologians of this century,” saying, “He is the father of liberation theology in a Christian sense, not just a sociological, ideological, political sense, but an integral one. This will remain in the church.”

Gutiérrez was born in 1928 to family that was both Hispanic and Quechua, an Indigenous Andean people. He became a priest in 1959 after studying at the Catholic University of Lyon. His work as a theologian, writer and philosopher eventually ushered him onto the faculties of prestigious universities throughout the world, with him eventually becoming the John Cardinal O’Hara Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.

“He combined a profound sense of the unmerited gift of God’s love with the urgency of solidarity with those society considers the least important,” wrote the Rev. Daniel Groody, professor of theology and global affairs and vice president and associate provost for undergraduate education at Notre Dame, in a statement on Wednesday.

In Gutiérrez’s writings, he emphasized Christ’s message for the poor, especially the need for the church itself to be poor, and its duty to help those who live in poverty, citing especially the Beatitudes and the Book of Revelation.

“People might think of him as some kind of militant in the streets, but he was really initially a parish priest, who spent much of his life ministering among the poorest in Lima,” Ellsberg said.

Beginning in the 1950s, some theologians and priests in Latin America were seeking to ameliorate the causes of poverty, sometimes merging communist principles with Catholic social teaching to justify political activism and even armed rebellion.

Pope John Paul II, who had lived under communist rule in his native Poland, regarded these movements with skepticism. He called on the Vatican’s doctrinal department, led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who would succeed him as Pope Benedict XVI, to investigate these movements. The Vatican issued two formal documents, or instructions, in 1984 and in 1986.

The first criticized “certain forms of liberation theology which use, in an insufficiently critical manner, concepts borrowed from various currents of Marxist thought,” while the second laid out the church’s official understanding of social justice and liberation.

For decades, Gutiérrez’s writings were the subject of a dialogue between the Vatican and the Peruvian Bishops’ Conference, which in 2006 released a statement declaring that they had “concluded the path of clarification of problematic points contained in some works of the author.”

At age 70, Gutiérrez joined the Dominican order, welcomed by the Rev. Timothy Radcliffe, who is leading the spiritual reflections at this month’s Synod on Synodality at the Vatican and will be made a cardinal in December.

Archbishop Carlos Gustavo Castillo Mattasoglio of Lima, who will also be made a cardinal in December, attempted to reconcile the hardships Gutiérrez underwent during John Paul’s pontificate in a YouTube video after the Dominican priest’s death.

“Small, as he was, and with problems in his spinal column so he was very short, he knew with his smallness how to announce the gospel to us with strength and spirit, as John Paul II did,” he said, “So today we are sad because of his passing, and happy because we now have a person in heaven who will accompany us to continue on our mission, our work of the renewed church because it serves the small.”

Cecilia González-Andrieu, president-elect of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States, called Gutiérrez an “extraordinary influence on generations of theologians in this country,” in an interview with RNS.

Gutiérrez’s life had inspired U.S. Latino theologians “to be closer to the suffering of communities on the margins and the vulnerable and to keep connected always to how it is that our work impacts them and how they impact our work,” she said. 

In 2018, Francis canonized Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador, El Salvador, who is considered a representative of the ideals of liberation theology. A year earlier, the pope told Spanish newspaper El País that “liberation theology was a positive thing in Latin America.”

Francis wrote Gutiérrez a letter for his 90^th birthday thanking God “for what you have contributed to the Church and to humanity through your theological service and from your preferential love for the poor and discarded in society.” He also thanked the theologian for “challenging the conscience of each person, so that no one can be indifferent faced with the drama of poverty and exclusion.”