The TFP’s Luiz Sérgio Solimeo has written a brief piece on the attempted rehabilitation of “liberation theology” that is now taking place. Let it be said here that “liberation theology” is not Theology, since Theology is — as the name would suggest — the study of God. Many other “theologies of the genitive” (e.g., the “theology of the body”) could also be excluded for that very same reason. Liberation theology studies the class struggle and the liberation of the poor from the oppressive higher classes. That is not theology.
If Catholic statesmen in Latin America had successfully implemented the Church’s social teaching, the false dialectic of socialism and capitalism would not have spawned this aberrant “theology.” Of course, something similar could be said nearly everywhere in former Christendom and America, where that dialectic has produced a variety of undesirable political-economic disasters.
Writes Solimeo:
“Not only is participating in class struggle not opposed to universal love, but today, this commitment is the necessary and inescapable means of making this love concrete, as this participation is what leads to a classless society, a society without owners and dispossessed, without oppressors and oppressed.”
This statement is not found in the writings of “Che” Guevara or any manifesto of the Colombian FARC guerrillas or other group of revolutionary subversives.
It is found in the book A Theology of Liberation, by Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez, a Peruvian priest, who has been called the “father” of liberation theology.
