OPPOSITION TO LIBERATION THEOLOGY:

Criticism of liberation theology began immediately after the 1968 Medellín conference. The movement was growing rapidly, but conservative forces within the Latin American church tried to stem the tide. More traditional Catholic thinkers accused it of being unduly dependent on Marxism and of emphasizing the “horizontal at the expense of the vertical”; increasingly, Vatican authorities and conservative bishops criticized the base communities as a dangerous parallel church outside the hierarchy of papal authority.

Meanwhile, liberal theologians, both Catholic and Protestant, accused the movement of ideological bias and thin scholarship. Feminists, blacks, and some indigenous leaders criticized it for emphasizing economic forms of oppression at the expense of gender, racial, and ethnic discrimination. The liberation theologians themselves responded vigorously to these criticisms, wrote hundreds of books and articles, and made liberation theology one of the most provocative and original progressive movements of the second half of the century.

When the bishops’ council of Latin America convened for its Third General Conference in 1979 in Puebla, Mexico, opponents within the Church were determined to issue a stern warning against the movement and condemn the base communities outright. They did not succeed, however, as bishops sympathetic to the movement prevailed. Nothing was said about liberation theology in the final document, and base communities were actually endorsed. Nevertheless, Pope John Paul II, while issuing statements in support of the poor, clearly signaled that he disapproved of a people’s church and of liberation theology. One by one, bishops who supported base communities were replaced upon their retirement by churchmen antagonistic to them.

However, the opposition mounted by military regimes and paramilitary death squads was more crushing. Authoritarian governments feared the critical ideas of liberation theology and the activism of the base communities, especially after the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, who were directly influenced by liberation theology, successfully overthrew their country’s dictatorship in 1979. Priests, nuns, and catechists were arrested, tortured, and murdered throughout Latin America. The most vicious repression occurred in El Salvador, during the country’s civil war from 1979 to 1992. In March 1980 a paramilitary death squad assassinated Archbishop Romero, one of El Salvador’s most outspoken critics of the government and a respected figure, while he was conducting a church service. Then national guardsmen raped and murdered four American women—three nuns and a lay worker—in December of that year, attracting further international attention to the violence in El Salvador. Liberation theologians themselves also came under attack: In November 1989 an army unit invaded the Jesuit-run Central American University of José Simeón Cañas, where such noted liberation theologians as Ignacio Ellacuria and Jon Sobrino taught and wrote, and murdered six of the Jesuits as well as their housekeeper and her daughter.

In 1984, meanwhile, the antagonism between the Vatican and the liberation theology movement reached a crisis point. The crisis focused largely on the Brazilian church and on one particularly active liberation theologian, the Franciscan priest Leonardo Boff. It began in May of that year when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s official guardian of orthodoxy, summoned Boff to Rome. The Vatican further pursued a policy of direct confrontation when, in September, it promulgated a document entitled Instruction on Certain Aspects of the Theology of Liberation. This document condemned the movement for allegedly advocating class conflict and encouraging disregard for the authority of the church hierarchy. Finally, the Vatican imposed a period of silence on Boff in May 1985. Opposition to this silencing became a rallying point not only for liberation theologians and the church people who supported them, but also for many others who resented what they viewed as high-handed papal intrusion. Several bishops even complained publicly, and Boff became something of an icon and martyr of the movement.

In March 1986 the Vatican lifted the imposed period of silence on Boff. Opponents of liberation theology remained undeterred, however, and liberation theology continued to face harassment and exclusion within the church hierarchy. Conservative bishops warned priests in their dioceses against advocating its precepts. Seminaries where liberation theology had flourished were closed, and younger liberation theologians found it difficult to secure positions. The editorial policies of theological journals came under attack, and some journals were shut down or censored.

Other factors reshaped liberation theology as well. The replacement of military regimes by civilian governments in Latin America meant that community churches were no longer the sole bases for opposition. Unions, universities, political parties, and social movements began to play that role as well. In addition, criticisms by Latin American feminist theologians such as Ivone Gebara in Brazil and by black theologians such as James Cone forced the largely male and white liberation theologians to reconsider their lack of emphasis on gender and race. The spectacular growth of Pentecostal Christianity in the 1980s and 1990s made many Latin American liberationists wonder if their approach had been too political and analytical and not sufficiently spiritual and emotional (see Protestant Church in Latin America and the Caribbean). Meanwhile, the Vatican under Pope John Paul II actively resisted secularization in the Church and opposed direct political participation by priests.

At the same time, however, liberation theology began to flourish in other regions of the world and in other religions. Books and articles developing Jewish, Buddhist, and Muslim liberation theologies appeared. In South Korea in the 1970s and 1980s a movement developed, largely under Latin American influence, called minjung theology (Korean for “ordinary people”). In Germany, when the pastors who led the nonviolent marches in Leipzig that contributed to the toppling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 were asked about what had influenced them, they mentioned Martin Luther King Jr., the German resistance pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Latin American liberation theology. In the United States, Roman Catholic bishops issued their pastoral letter on the economy, “Economic Justice For All,” which explicitly credited the Latin American church for contributing the preferential option for the poor to their thinking. Bishop Desmond Tutu and other religious leaders in South Africa were also inspired in part by the movement, and a specifically black South African school of biblical interpretation has emerged in scholarly works such as Itumeleng J. Mosala’s Biblical Hermeneutics and Black Theology in South Africa (1989). More recently, Asian liberation theologian Tissa Balasuriya’s Mary and Human Liberation (1997) drew sharp criticism from the Vatican, and Balasuriya was for a time excommunicated for his views.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, some observers have suggested that liberation theology is in decline. Another, and perhaps more accurate, view is that it is going through a period of transition, enlarging and refining its perspectives and continuing to influence similar movements in many parts of the world.