Postscript: Pope resurrects liberation theology
FRANCIS-TAGLE DYNAMICS were such that the so-called “Francis effect” was enhanced and enriched by the Tagle charm. EDWIN BACASMAS
VATICAN CITY—When he was elected in the extraordinary papal conclave of March 2013, Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, Argentina, was considered an enigma. Hardly on the list of papabile, or papal prospects, drawn up by the hard-nosed press pretending to divine the workings of the Holy Spirit, Bergoglio naturally surprised everyone for having been elected at all.
Just as surprising was his choice of papal name, Francis, after the very popular saint of Assisi who, together with St. Dominic, pioneered and led the mendicant movement that reformed the Church in the high medieval era by embracing poverty.
It is said that Cardinal Claudio Hummes of Sao Paulo, Brazil, himself a Franciscan, was beside Bergoglio after he was elected, and giving the new Pope a fraternal embrace, was said to have whispered, “Remember the poor.”
That he took his name from a saint of the Middle Ages should already signaled the confusion that his papacy was bound to cause. After all, who among the press and much less the general public fed on a steady diet of soft-porn and gory episodes of “Game of Thrones,” “The Tudors” and “The Borgias” could really understand the Middle Ages and distinguish that period from, say, the Dark Ages? What does religious poverty mean? What’s the mendicant movement? How could enhanced religious poverty reform the Church? How could it overhaul society?
How could “mercy and compassion” toward the poor, the theme of his Asian visit, improve the Church’s image already tarred and scarred by the bruising “culture wars”? Do works of mercy and the “preferential option for the poor” mean a retreat from the culture wars?
With his second Asian tour this month, in which he got the biggest crowds so far of his two-year papacy, Pope Francis has cleared the confusion about the directions he was perceived to have taken at first. He has unleashed the forces of change that will define not only his papacy but the Church and the world as well.
Force for liberation
Perhaps the most evident force for change that the Pope’s visit has released would be that of liberation. Especially during his Philippine visit, the Pope drew everyone’s attention to the scandal of poverty.
“The great biblical tradition enjoins on all peoples the duty to hear the voice of the poor,” he told Philippine officialdom and the diplomatic corps in Malacañang last Jan. 16. “It bids us break the bonds of injustice and oppression, which give rise to glaring and, indeed, scandalous social iniquities.”
The remark, along with other key statements during the Pope’s Philippine tour, are re-expressions of the theology of liberation, the homegrown Latin American theology pioneered by the Peruvian Dominican Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez. The theological approach refuses to romanticize poverty and instead sees it as an injustice and an evil perpetuated by social structures from which the poor should be liberated.
Not surprisingly, it was reported that only a few months after he was elected, the Pope had a personal meeting with Gutierrez. Moreover, Gutierrez is close to German Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the head of the very important Vatican doctrinal office. The two, in fact, had collaborated on the 2004 book, “On the Side of the Poor: Liberation Theology, Theology of the Church.”
‘Preferential option for poor’
Gutierrez and other liberation theologians taught that theology is developed and determined in the context of history and should promote action (“praxis”) as much as correct teaching (“orthodoxy”). It radicalized the key theological virtue of charity. “Charity is today a ‘political’ charity,” Gutierrez wrote, “it means the transformation of a society structured to benefit a few who appropriate to themselves the value of the work of others.”
Situated amid the military dictatorships and lingering feudalism of Latin America, liberation theology became controversial because it critiqued the established order. It recast the image of Christ into someone who would fight for the poor and the oppressed.
In the council of Latin American bishops in 1968 in Medellin, Colombia, liberation theology achieved perhaps its biggest triumph. The final document said the Church, while not withholding charity and pastoral ministry to the rich and the status quo, would side with the poor; she declared “a preferential option for the poor.”
Shorn of Marxist stigma
In the 1980s, the Vatican doctrinal office headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI, did not suppress liberation theology but heavily criticized Marxist aspects of it, especially those that cast political theology in a purely revolutionary light and chart a utopian vision that makes the political order absolute in denial of the Christian revelation of a transcendental, higher order.
But the intervention was enough to tame its spread. Liberation theology fell into decline.
With his election in 2013 as Pope, the first bishop from the Americas to become so, Bergoglio signaled the resurrection of liberation theology by taking on the name of one of the leaders of the medieval mendicancy movement for reform, St. Francis of Assisi, the apostle of poverty.
It is true that what has been revived is shorn of its Marxist revolutionary stigma, since the long dry years of its suppression also saw churchmen like Bergoglio, who as Jesuit provincial of Argentina condemned the radical and overtly political activities of his confreres, purifying it.
In the Philippines during his apostolic visit, the first since 1995 when St. John Paul II, who suppressed liberation theology, attended the World Youth Day in Manila, Pope Francis signaled in his strong statements made before political and Church leaders, the rehabilitation and rebirth of liberation theology.
Force for integrity
Fighting unjust social structures that perpetuate poverty also means fighting corruption in government. As the Pope noted about the declaration by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) of 2015 as the Year of the Poor, everyone is welcome to the fight against corruption, which is nothing less than a “prophetic summons … to reject every form of corruption which diverts resources from the poor.”
The “prophetic summons” is vintage liberation theology, which often reads Old Testament passages in a radical light. But the Pope stops short of making a rousing call against the status quo since the Church ministers as well to the establishment and seeks its conversion. As Pope Francis told the Malacañang assembly, “As many voices in your nation have pointed out, it is now, more than ever, necessary that political leaders be outstanding in honesty, integrity and commitment to the common good.”
Force for social change
The call to save the poor from structurally determined injustice is balanced, if not preceded, by the call for spiritual reform. Social liberation presupposes internal conversion. “Reforming the social structures, which perpetuate poverty and the exclusion of the poor, first requires a conversion of mind and heart,” the Pope said in his Malacañang address.
But the exhortation is directed as well to the Church. The Pope told the clergy and religious at Manila Cathedral on Jan. 16: “[T]he Church in the Philippines is called to acknowledge and combat the causes of the deeply rooted inequality and injustice, which mar the face of Filipino society, plainly contradicting the teaching of Christ.”
Although he was not able to read his message before the clergy and religious at the Cathedral of Palo because he had to cut short his trip due to bad weather, the Pope’s address was ordered released. “Our treatment of the poor is the criterion on which each of us will be judged,” he said in his prepared address. “I ask all of you, and all responsible for the good of society, to renew your commitment to social justice and the betterment of the poor, both here and in the Philippines as a whole.”
Force for Church reform
The call for conversion applies as well to the Philippine Church, particularly its hierarchy, its clergy and religious. At Manila Cathedral, the Pope urged a life of prayer and simplicity for those in the ecclesiastical service and the religious life.
“The great danger … is a certain materialism, which can creep into our lives and compromise the witness we offer,” the Pope said.
To serve the poor, Francis indicated, means living out one’s vow of poverty.
“Only by becoming poor ourselves, by stripping away our complacency, will we be able to identify with the least of our brothers and sisters,” he explained.
The Church cannot reject the status quo because she needs as well to minister to the spiritual needs of the establishment and pray and work for their conversion. But the Church should be conscious that it cannot tolerate the depredations of the establishment.
“The denunciation of injustice implies the rejection of the use of Christianity to legitimize the established order,” Gutierrez said.
‘Spiritual worldliness’
In the same way, the Church should not tolerate her own depredations. “As ambassadors of Christ, we bishops, priests and religious, ought to be the first to welcome his reconciling grace into our hearts,” the Pope said at Manila Cathedral. “… It means rejecting worldly perspectives and seeing all things anew in the light of Christ. It means being the first to examine our consciences, to acknowledge our failings and sins and to embrace the path of constant conversion.”
Touching on one of the themes of his 2013 apostolic exhortation on the church’s primary mission of evangelization in the modern world, “Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel),” the Pope warned the clergy and the religious against “spiritual worldliness.”
Force for devolution
“Constant conversion” and performing pastoral ministry in a historical and cultural milieu, or what theologians call as “contextual,” should result in a reform of ecclesiastical structures and unleash a centrifugal movement from the center (Vatican) to the periphery (national episcopal conferences and even the lowly local diocese).
With the Philippine visit, in which Manila Archbishop Luis Antonio Cardinal Tagle and the CBCP played very prominent roles, this should mean greater devolution from Rome to the local churches.
Indeed, Tagle’s profile and prestige have increased as a result of the papal visit. In press conferences at the end of every day during the visit, Tagle summarized the events and the main points of each papal activity. He took note of details that could have escaped the press.
For example, when the Pope made a vigorous defense of Blessed Paul VI’s “Humanae Vitae” (Of Human Life) and the traditional Church ban on contraception, Tagle made note of the “nuances” mentioned by the Pope in “particular,” or borderline cases in which maternal health considerations may exempt the woman from the prohibition.
Simply put, devolution would mean local churches applying the work of salvation in what Hyppolite Taine would call as the troika of “moment, race and milieu.”
Force for dialogue
In both Sri Lanka and the Philippines, the Pope made broad and very particular gestures of dialogue with non-Catholic denominations and non-Christian religions. This in itself takes its spirit from liberation theology, which situates the necessity of dialogue and reconciliation in a specific historical context in which cultural and religious differences may result in tension and even collision.
What the Pope’s apostolic tour in fact has revealed are the rich resources for ecumenism and interreligious dialogue of liberation theology. As Gutierrez wrote: “The unqualified affirmation of the universal will of salvation has radically changed the way of conceiving the mission of the Church in the world. … The work of salvation is a reality [that] occurs in history.”
“Culture wars”
Going by press reports, the main points of the Asian apostolic tour—mercy and compassion—may have been lost amid the Pope’s surprisingly insightful but controversial remarks on sexuality, maternity and Paul VI’s controversial 1968 encyclical.
But the contextual thrust of liberation theology should mean that whatever remarks he might have made on “nonpolitical” issues were really based on “contextual” and ultimately geopolitical grounds. This is really the impetus behind his introduction of the very colorful phrase and concept, “ideological colonization.”
The Pope cited the culturally and historically specific context of the African bishops who complained during the equally controversial Synod on the Family last October that Western nations and their aid agencies were imposing conditionalities on the grant of aid to Africa and the Third World, conditionalities that would insinuate Western materialistic values on sexuality and mores that run counter to the “culture and identity” of the aid recipients.
Critiques from feminists
The papal remarks in the Philippines and aboard the papal plane taking him from Manila to Rome this week have drawn criticism from feminists and liberals. Not surprisingly, Gutierrez himself had long ago been criticized by feminists and liberals for his theology’s silence on so-called gender rights and women’s empowerment.
Gutierrez himself has not disabused his critics’ thinking, saying at one time that the specific historical context in which liberation theology should work would mean a focus, quite without attention to sexual rights, on liberating the poor from social injustice, and on another, that feminism is “alien” to Latin America.
North American issue
One of his critics, Joyce Murray, seems to have agreed with him and indicated that gender rights are a North American issue. “I have been inspired and challenged by Latin American liberation theology, and by the work of Gustavo Gutierrez in particular,” she said. “While North American and Latin American realities differ in significant ways, and one cannot import the whole of Latin American liberation theology, in my view there continue to be important continuities and connections.”
Of course, Murray’s remarks should warn everyone that even the Pope cannot import and apply wholesale liberation theology to a specific historical context like the Philippines. But liberation theology would do for now if only it has recast the “soteriological,” or salvific, mission of Christianity.
As Murray pointed out, liberation theology provides a “soteriological communion” with which to address poverty and social injustice, concerns that were painted in broad, insightful dimensions during the visit to the Philippines of His Holiness Pope Francis.
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