The father of liberation theology leaves an enduring legacy

With the passing of Dominican Father Gustavo Gutiérrez, who died in October at the age of 96, the Church has lost a prophet and groundbreaking theologian who substantially enlarged its social teaching. The poor of the world have lost an advocate. And Maryknoll has lost a great friend.

Father Gutiérrez, a Peruvian priest who studied in France, was one of the guiding lights behind the historic 1968 conference of the Latin American bishops at Medellín, Colombia, which applied the teachings of Vatican II to the social reality of poverty and injustice in their continent. It was from that conference that a “preferential option for the poor” entered the vocabulary of the Church. In 1971 he published his classic work, A Theology of Liberation. Translated into English by Orbis Books in 1973, it became the foundation of a whole school of theology and, incidentally, the cornerstone of our publishing program.

To celebrate Father Gutiérrez’s 60th birthday, in 1988 Maryknoll and Orbis sponsored a symposium that attracted many of the great theologians from Latin America and around the world. By this time, his influence was without question. But his theology also raised alarms in both political and Church circles. Two documents from the Vatican scrutinized the theology of liberation, and many of his fellow theologians — though not Father Gutiérrez himself — were subjected to investigation and discipline.

What was the dangerous content of his work? Like all great theologians, Father Gutiérrez wrestled with the problem of how to talk about God in terms of the questions posed by the historical moment. For many modern theologians, that involved the meaning of faith in an age of reason and skepticism, the challenge of the “nonbeliever.” For Father Gutiérrez the question was how to talk about God in relation to the suffering of the poor, the challenge of the “non-person.”

This was not an academic question; it was posed by the reality outside his window in the parish of Rímac, a poor neighborhood in Lima, where Father Gutiérrez served for many years as a pastor. This was a vantage point shared by most of the world’s population, and by the Maryknoll missioners with whom he worked. Yet, for most theologians from Europe and North America this reality remained under their radar screens.

For some philosophers the suffering of the innocent called into question the existence of God. But for Father Gutiérrez this reality instead called into question the injustice of the world’s social structures and the shameful complaisance of the Church. The God of Life, revealed fully in Scripture and in Jesus Christ, challenged all Christians to make a “preferential option for the poor.”

Who are the poor? In an interview some years ago, Father Gutiérrez answered this question: “The poor are those who are treated as non-persons, those who are considered insignificant from an economic, political, and cultural point of view. The poor count only as statistics; they are the nameless.” But, as he went on to remind us: “Even though the poor remain insignificant within society, they are never insignificant before God.” And this bears concrete implications for all those who call themselves disciples of Jesus.

Father Gutiérrez often visited Maryknoll and enjoyed close friendships with many Maryknollers who worked in Peru, including during the terrible times of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) terrorist insurgency of the 1980s and early 1990s and the government repression in response to it.

Maryknoll Father Stephen Judd, who served in Peru, knew him well. Father Judd remembers: “Without a doubt the enduring impact of the life of Gustavo Gutiérrez comes from the words he used for an article in 1986 during those most troublesome times in Peru: ‘We still have time.’ That phrase closely defines a pattern in Gustavo’s life of always finding and having time for each person who graced his path, no matter the person’s social or class standing, be they colleagues, strangers, rich or poor, bishops or anyone he just met.”

Father Gutiérrez’s relationship with Orbis Books extended over decades of writing and many publications, including We Drink from Our Own Wells: The Spiritual Journey of a People; On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the People; and, recently, Gustavo Gutiérrez: Spiritual Writings, a contribution to our Modern Spiritual Masters Series. In 2023 we published a 50th anniversary edition of his seminal A Theology of Liberation, an occasion that was celebrated widely around the world. 

Through Father Gutiérrez’s work the “preferential option for the poor” became a hallmark of the Latin American Church and eventually the official magisterium of the Church. It has been embraced by Pope Francis, who welcomed Father Gutiérrez to the Vatican, and who responded to his death by calling him “a great man, a man of the Church who knew how to be silent when he had to be silent, who knew how to suffer when it was his turn to suffer, who knew how to carry forward so much apostolic fruit and so much rich theology.” Father Judd speaks of Father Gutiérrez as a pioneer of the “synodal” path that Pope Francis has set for the Church.

At many points over the past 50 years critics wrote the epitaph for liberation theology. (Father Gutiérrez quipped that if liberation theology was dead, why was he not invited to the funeral?)

Nevertheless, when it came to the future of his theology, he remained remarkably detached. As he wrote in the conclusion to his great first book: “All the political theologies … are not worth one act of genuine solidarity. … They are not worth one act of faith, love, and hope, committed — in one way or another — in active participation to liberate humankind from everything that dehumanizes it and prevents it from living according to the will of God.”

He would surely agree that the best way to honor his memory is not through words, but through action; his hope was that those who read his books might take one step further in friendship and solidarity with the poor.

Robert Ellsberg is the publisher of Maryknoll’s Orbis Books.

Featured Image: Joseph Hahn/Maryknoll Mission Archives