Liberation Theology in Latin America

Fifty years ago the Catholic Church witnessed the blooming of a theological movement known as Liberation Theology. Drawing on the social concerns of the Church, those scholars created a blend of Christianity with Marxism that explain some current pastoral phenomena in Latin America.

Much of the current debate around the subject is a war between radical traditionalism and Marxism disguised as Catholicism. Although this piece focuses on liberation theology, I believe traditionalists created their own set of problems.

Both radical traditionalism and the Marxist forms of liberation theology are theological errors regarding the role of the Grace. In radical traditionalism, the sacramental grace is replaced by the Pharisaic observance to the ritual, as if the 1962 Ordo missae was the only way Christ becomes present in the Eucharist. In liberation theology, a political and social liberator replaces Jesus Christ as the author of grace and liberator from sin, as if Ché Guevara or another guerrilla leader could take the place of Jesus Christ. Thus the sacraments and the spiritual life are relegated to a remote or even inexistent place.

I can speak of Brazil in particular, but for the better part of the countries of South America, the side effects of the theological doctrine that spread like wildfire was felt in a practical way through lack of clergy, faithful leaving the Catholic Church for neo-charismatic churches, and the abandonment of the sacraments among those who remained in the Church, especially confession. You can pick any large city in Brazil and you’ll notice that finding a confessional with a priest in it is harder than getting water in the Sahara.

Although we in South America lack sound statistics, a circumstantial evidence to support my claim about the loss of priests in South America is the disparity in the number of Catholics per priest: the United States has 2,600 Catholics per priest, compared with Colombia (4,750), Chile (4800), Argentina (5,600), Brazil (7,000), Mexico (7.200), Peru (9,100), Venezuela (9,600), Ecuador (10,000), and Guatemala (10,000). Two stories from my personal experience may fill out this statistic.

Liberation Theology’s Impact

A few years ago I organized some volunteer camps in the Amazon region. In those trips I witnessed the impact of Liberation Theology in the existential periphery of the world. The two events happened in a diocese the size of the state of Utah that has only thirteen priests.

Every parish is spread across several thousand square miles and thus pastoral attention is, at best, scarce. My experience matches Pope Francis’s observations in the interview he gave for a Brazilian television days after the 2013 World Youth Days, where he addressed the problem of people leaving the Catholic faith due to lack of real pastoral care.

In the wilds of the Amazon region, a few kilometers from the border of Venezuela, I was walking down a dirt road in the village of Trairão, a tiny colony of five-hundred inhabitants in the municipality of Amajari, one of utmost regions of Brazil. I was accompanied by Fr. Michelino, who had volunteered during his vacations to provide pastoral care to that population, part of a parish the size of the state of New Hampshire.

In that village, a chapel in ruins served as the Catholic Church. Our engineering crew had brought tons of construction material in a time-worn KC-137 air force cargo jet. Their mission was to reform the chapel while our medical team provides basic healthcare and dental aid.

“I’m going to kill you!” Those were the greeting words of welcome I heard from the farmer sitting on the side of the road. Words not addressed to me, but to the priest who was walking with me dressed in his black clerical outfit beneath an intense equatorial sun.

Immediately, since we had logistical support from the Army, I asked for protection for the priest. Despite the scare, he remained serene and every day he celebrated Mass for the community, tended confessions and provided priestly services which that community only received from time to time.

On our last day of work on the village, we went to inaugurate the chapel, which from ruins had become, in two weeks, a beautiful church. After the Mass, I noticed, approaching the priest, the man who had threatened him on day one, and fearing for the life of Father Michelino, I ran over.

“I wanted to apologize to you for having said that I would kill you,” I heard the man say to the priest. “I was greatly mistaken. You are the first priest I’m acquainted with that talks of God. All the priests who passed here before preached hatred between indigenous communities and us. They said we were capitalists, they ignored our work. And you told us all these days, of Jesus Christ and the love of God, Our Lady and the love that we should have between us. I never imagined that a priest could address such subjects.”

Speaking of Jesus

The following year, after a six-hour flight to Boa Vista, the state capital of Roraima, we had another five-hour bus ride to reach the Trairão Camp where we would continue the work we had started. Beside me sat a pastor of a Neo-Pentecostal Evangelical church. In that Lilliputian village there were seven of them. He was interested in what I would do there, and hearing that among our various activities we planned to expand the chapel we had rebuilt a year earlier, he struck up with me the following dialogue:

“You’re fighting a losing war; do you realize it?”

“To my knowledge,” I said, “we are not in any war, we believe in the same Jesus. But why do you say it’s a lost war?”

“For starters,” he said, “in six months, we manage to form a pastor who knows how to preach the word of God, to teach the Bible. You take six, seven, or even eight years to train a priest, and all he knows to preach here is the class struggle, Marxism, and the divide between the poor and the less poor. People are tired of this; they want to hear of Jesus.”

The liberation theology motto: “the preferential option for the poor” seems interesting, but when it comes at the cost of forgetting the role of Jesus Christ in salvation and the sacraments as channels for the Grace we should remember the verse of St. Matthew: “The poor you will always have with you; but you will not always have me.” If we forget this, we turn Catholicism into a commodity and people will leave it for other Christian confessions that at least speak of Jesus.