Pope Francisco reactives the theology of liberation

The election of the first Latin American pope, born region where the theology of liberation was born, would be the opportunity for the rehabilitation of that doctrine, described as leftist and therefore rejected by the Vatican.

Yesterday, the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano devoted considerable space to the theology of liberation, commenting on the publication next Monday, in Italian, of a book that already appeared in 2004 in Germany, written by Archbishop Gerhard Ludwig Müller, current prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF, former Holy Office), and the Peruvian Dominican Gustavo Gutierrez, one of the founders of this important stream of the Latin American Church. The book is titled “On behalf of the poor, liberation theology, theology of the Church.”

The publication joins the resumption of the process of beatification of martyred bishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, assassinated in 1980 by a right-wing command, and who was a defender bishop of the poor without belonging to the theology of liberation, but  the interest of Pope Francisco is another sign of the opening of the Vatican to the theology of liberation.

The disagreement between the Vatican and the liberation theology came from the pontificate of John Paul II, who had said in 1979 that a “conception of Christ as a politician, revolutionary, as a subversive of Nazareth, doesn’t correspond to the church catechism.”

In Ecuador, Monsignor Leonidas Proaño, called “Bishop of the Poor” practiced a church identified with the liberation theology. José Gómez Izquierdo and Luis Luna Tovar are other clergy, who by his speeches and actions,  have been identified with that stream.