inside america

A return to
the beginning
We pick up where we left off in the last column on the relationship between the spiritual and temporal. A closer exploration of the history of Liberation Theology brings us to today’s acutely needed New Evangelization, which now includes a truly lived preferential option for the poor.

by lorenzo albacete

For those at all familiar with the recent history of the Church’s encounter with modernity, the election of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope (and the name of Francis that he took) was not surprising. Neither was his agenda for this moment in the history of the Church.
For the past few decades, the Church in Latin America has been agitated by the issue of the incompatibility between the faith as proclaimed by the Church and the devastating poverty of so many of the people. Many theologians and pastoral leaders eventually concluded that the problem was located in the way Christian theology had come to understand and teach the nature of faith, making it an instrument of resignation instead of what it is, an instrument of liberation.

This conviction was the cradle of Liberation Theology (LT).The problem was seen not only as merely an intellectual theological issue, but above all it was seen as a pastoral issue–namely, how to preach and educate Catholics in a way that the inseparability between the Gospel and the struggle for social justice become the basis of all evangelization.
Evangelization: that is how LT entered the life of the Church. The Church in Latin America has been pastorally guided by the teachings of seven General Conferences of the Latin American (later, “and Caribbean” was added) Episcopacy, or CELAM: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Medellin, Colombia; Puebla, Mexico; Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; and, most recently, Aparecida, Brazil. These meetings are generally known by the name of the place where they were held.
The issue of LT and injustice was a clear concern in these meetings, raising questions about the proper interpretation of Scripture, the relation between the Old and New Testaments, the sociological and philosophical basis for LT, the role of Marxism in said sociological and philosophical basis, and all kinds of fascinating subjects that showed that the Church in Latin America had truly run into the modern world and its secularistic way of seeing and understanding reality.

This had not yet come to pass in the United States (except in the Latino or Hispanic apostolate which began to divide the pastoral programs between the West and East of the country).
Most American Catholics had no idea that all of this was taking place, based on the at best skimpy and often erroneous coverage in the secular media, while other times fearing a Communist infiltration of the Church.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio was fully a part of all of this. This was his life as a scientist, as a priest, as a Jesuit scholar, and as the Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires. He must have worried about the increasing concerns of the Holy See regarding the orthodoxy of LT, but realized that an orthodox way had to be found to preserve its valid insights, especially in the area of the relation between the faith of the Church and the (at times even revolutionary and violent) thirst for social justice.
In a sense, a way had been found to outline and develop a path for Catholic theology and pastoral life that took seriously the essentials of the Church’s mission in order to respond to the challenge of modernity and the preoccupations of LT. This was the way of the New Evangelization, which would take us to the beginning of faith. A return to the beginning is what conversion means: the awareness of our poverty, awareness that everything is grace. This required turning towards the poor, joining them, loving them by building, like St. Francis, a Church of the poor. This would be the reply to Liberation Theology: the truly lived preferential option for the poor.