Gustavo Gutiérrez’s revolutionary mission
On 22 October, at the age of 96, one of the key figures of liberation theology passed away. Gustavo Gutiérrez was born and died in Lima, Peru. He was a philosopher, theologian and Dominican priest. Gutiérrez’s Theology of Liberation, published in 1971, remains a pivotal text, not only for Christianity, but for all theological reflection. Faith in the infinite justice of a god and their compassionate and loving solidarity with the downtrodden runs through many religious traditions and movements.
In my youth, I was a liberation theologist. We arrived in Australia exiled from Chile, and at a certain point our family’s lives inevitably became intertwined with the Catholic Church. Not just for food packages and other financial support, but for community and a sense of mission. Far from Latin America, while active in St Vincent de Paul Society as a teenager, I discovered Gustavo Gutiérrez and the Christian mission of liberation.
I was already familiar with many of the radical priests who had emerged in the context of postwar national liberation movements. I especially remember having many conversations as a kid with my father about Camilo Torres, an ordained Colombian priest, communist revolutionary and, together with Orlando Fals Borda, co-founder of the sociology faculty at the National University of Colombia. Torres died in 1966 in combat, as a member of the guerrilla organisation Ejército de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Army).
By the mid-1960s, the Second Vatican Council had opened the door to a widespread radicalisation among Christian communities throughout Latin America. The effects of this on the church hierarchy were almost immediate. In 1968, the bishops’ Second Episcopal Conference of Latin America recognised poverty and inequality as “institutionalised violence” and sanctified the church’s “preferential option for the poor”.
Gutiérrez’s Theology of Liberation explored the tensions in Christian theology between spiritualist and rationalist traditions, much as his Marxist contemporaries focused on debating subject versus structure. Gutiérrez drew on the so-called humanist Marxism of intellectuals such as Herbert Marcuse and Jean-Paul Sartre to argue for the centrality of the subject. The “preferential option for the poor” was a theological argument for revolutionary praxis:
“The social praxis of contemporary humankind has begun to reach maturity. It is the behaviour of a humankind ever more conscious of being an active subject of history, ever more articulate in the face of social injustice and of all repressive forces which stand in the way of its fulfilment; it is ever more determined to participate in the transformation of social structures.”
Liberation theology was part of the rise of the anti-Stalinist left throughout the continent. It aligned itself with movements that rejected the class collaborationist politics of the old Communist parties and sought to bring to bear the leadership of the working classes. Gutiérrez regarded “developmentalism” as “synonymous with reformism and modernization, that is to say, synonymous with timid measures, really ineffective in the long run and counterproductive to achieving a real transformation”.
In a sense, and perhaps knowingly, Gutiérrez interpreted the Christian mission through the lens of historical materialism. He understood that “to a large extent due to Marxism’s influence, theological thought, searching for its own sources, has begun to reflect on the meaning of the transformation of this world and human action in history”.
The “preferential option for the poor” was not just a moral or spiritual commitment. Gutiérrez understood class. He concurred with Marx that consciousness is “indissolubly linked to the transformation of the world through work”.
Gutiérrez’s Theology of Liberation was a revolutionary text, a call to arms:
“Attempts to bring about changes within the existing order have proven futile. Only a radical break from the status quo, that is, a profound transformation of the private property system [and] a social revolution that would break this dependence would allow for the change to a new society, a socialist society ... The goal is not only better living conditions, a radical change of structures, a social revolution; it is much more: the continuous creation, never ending, of a new way to be human, a permanent cultural revolution.”
In that postwar era of revolutions, many of the new left in Latin America, like Camilo Torres, interpreted the “option for the poor” as a calling, not just to guerrilla struggle but to a life lived for emancipation, echoing the words of Che Guevara:
“Vanguard revolutionaries must idealise this love of the people, of the most sacred causes, and make it one and indivisible. They cannot descend, with small doses of daily affection, to the level where ordinary people put their love into practice ... There is no life outside of the revolution.”
Many years after I read Theology of Liberation, I would come across a similar sense of conviction and commitment, written decades earlier. The American communist James P. Cannon never had any time for dilettantes. You cannot visit the revolutionary cause every now and then, descending from the comforts of another class. Revolutionaries must “merge themselves completely” with the working class, turning their “back on the bourgeois world and joining the proletarian revolutionary camp, that is, by ceasing to be a petty bourgeois”.
Capitalism has certainly changed in the last half century, but only now to reveal fully the human and ecological catastrophe it leads to. The sense of revolutionary mission seems as relevant to me as it did 40-odd years ago.
Jorge Jorquera is a Maribyrnong City councillor and member of the Victorian Socialists.
