General
Gustavo Gutiérrez, Father of Liberation Theology, Dies at 96
Once considered revolutionary, his notion of empathy and advocacy for the poor has become a central tenet of Catholic social teaching.
Gustavo Gutiérrez, the Peruvian priest and scholar who was regarded as the father of Latin American liberation theology, a far-reaching school of thought and action born of solidarity with poor and marginalized people, died on Tuesday in Lima, Peru. He was 96.
The Dominican Order in Peru announced the death, in a convent, The Associated Press reported.
Father Gutiérrez, a Dominican priest, was best known as the author of “Teología de la Liberación,” a landmark work of social and theological analysis originally published in Spanish in 1971 and first available in English in 1973 as “A Theology of Liberation.” In that book, he asserted that the God of the Jewish and Christian traditions exhibits a preferential commitment to the poor.
The book anticipated movements in the United States to establish housing and health care as basic human rights, and it continues to be taught in seminaries and universities.
Father Gutiérrez argued that the salvation of the poor was not achievable only in an otherworldly afterlife, as the church had long taught, but could also be realized within history. To know God, he insisted, people must work to eliminate poverty and unjust conditions on earth. The church must concern itself with life in this world, not the next.
To speak of a preferential option for the poor was not “a question of idealizing poverty,” Father Gutiérrez wrote, “but rather of taking it on as it is — as evil — to protest against it and to struggle to abolish it.”
