Discussion for article #236117
This could be fairly big. In the past 30 years or so (ever since bishops started getting assassinated), the church has gone pretty much all out for recruiting rich right-wing types. Not sure what will happen, might be schism, but likely will be something.
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Hmm, so anytime the Pope talks about the poors its gotta be because liberation theology is reascending? I think this article conflates the issue of talking about inequality with liberation theology. The Catholic world is not divided up like an American style black and white class struggle, where if you talk about redistribution for example, you must be a libtard. Talking about the poors or inequality doesn’t make you a dead ringer as a liberation theologian. As many would argue, Catholicism has a long history of concern and preference for the poors, predating, unbelievably, the existence of liberation theology. You could perhaps more accurately say that Pope Francis is rehabilitating franciscanism, but I know it doesn’t fit the narrative need for right/left eliminationist conflicts and death struggles. Please do more research before you apply kneejerk beltway critiques to those things that exist outside of the beltway.
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I am no Catholic, but: I have a hard time believing that a Peruvian theologian, never sanctioned by the Vatican, does not come out of a Liberation Theology (LT) background.
As does, quietly, Francis, who came of age in an Argentina and larger Latin America wracked by bloody turmoil and class-based repression, with substantial intellectual involvement by the LT movement, and including in-church murders of LT affiliated senior clerics, specifically Archbishop Romero, radicalized by the murder by the thugs of his Jesuit friend (“LT” is pretty much synonymous with “1970s Latin American Jesuit”, which is pretty different from “Franciscan”), murdered by Jesse Helms’ clients and catspaws in 1980, on his way to thoroughly deserved sainthood, already known as San Romero in El Salvador.
A discussion of the differential impact of climate change on the poorest amongst us sounds more like a Jesuit interest (they have tended to serve the rich in order to get them to behave a little more like Christians) than a Franciscan, who are more likely to succor those many unfortunates who get run over.
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Nice reasoning; important reminders. But @Brainpicnic seems not to have actually read the story, which clearly identifies Rev. Gutierrez as the founder of liberation theology. Which indeed he is:
So many people bought the right’s Cold-War propaganda that it’s a violent ideology that they hear the term and reflexively recoil. Francis’ apparent effort to correct that misapprehension is most welcome, and even brave. May he be with us for a long time to come, and his impact be lasting.
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“misinterpreted Jesus’ preference for the poor” Yep, sounds like Ratzi the Natzi fer sure
Francis ain’t no Oscar Romero thats for damned sure.
Thanks for giving the origin of Liberation Theology. Disclosure: I’m not Catholic but I did attend a lecture by a Jesuit priest from South America in or about 1980 at the Aquarius Newman Center at UNM Albuquerque. After reading the article here, I found this:
Perhaps Pope Francis should stop by Albuquerque or Santa Fe some time and have a talk with Archbishop Michael Sheehan.
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Indeed – though I fear the conservative/liberal (accept/reform?) tension will always be with us, in every endeavor that involves organized groups of humans. I wish the Newman Center’s parishioners well; thanks for the link.
(BTW, I’m not Catholic either, but you might say I long lived amongst them as one of their own – honorary Mass. Irish – and almost converted once upon a time. And Archbishop Romero’s murder in El Salvador in 1980 was a major political event for me, and led me to learn more about him, conditions in Latin America, and liberation theology.)
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I believe this to be the most important shift in Catholic ideology since it discarded the Divine Right of Kings paradigm in favor of democratic process.
I noticed you got likes from two of my more respected commenters, so I tread carefully as only a child of a lapsed Catho, but I would suggest that you are muddying the waters. I have listened to right-wing Catholic radio (Relevant Radio from Chicago, a favorite of the late Cardinal George) quite a bit, and it’s my distinct impression that in fact they have followed until this Pope a pretty predicable right/left ideological split mirroring the Fox News/the rest of us split in the US. If I may be so bold, you are undercutting the radicalism of Pope Francis vis-à -vis the past couple of Popes in your attempt to make a coherent narrative of papal action. Your suggestion that The Church has somehow been consistent over time in its support of the down-trodden seems not to be born out by the previous persecution of liberation theologians and of the witch hunt of American nuns, both of which this pope has thankfully stopped.
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Do tell.
Romero was a crusader, in the best sens of the word, and died as such.
Francis survived the purges and, it appears this atheist with SDA roots, to support and carry on Romeros’s, the same struggle that in his wash-the-feet-of-the-poor way his namesake Francisco did,
What, @Calgary_Dan, are the significant differences from Romero that we should damned sure not continue to ignore?
Beats hell out of Mr. Natzi who came before, seems to me. Not that it’s my tribe we’re talking about, of course.
Thank you. Good reading material
If she weren’t so busy I would have asked my old friend, and "god"mother of my only sprinkled-upon child (by an Episcopalian woman priest a long tie ago, Mary Ellen O’Connel, Professor of Human RIghts Law at Notre Dame, and she would have given me as much… While cheering.
The abuses wreaked upon the peasantry of Central America in particular, and upon those whe dared to stand with them, is one of the many black marks of the 20th Century. Encouragement and even direction of these abuses by the American state, icarrying names such as Oliver North, Ronald Reagan, and Jesse Helms but always in Our Name, has blackened further the dubious title of Norteamericano (including our Canadian friends, sorry, unless you have a language excuse your stuck in our tribe) everywhere south of the Rio Grande.
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