As I walked into the classroom of the Instituto Bartolomé de las Casas in Lima, Peru, my mind raced in anticipation of hearing directly from the legendary Gustavo Gutiérrez, the father of liberation theology. Our family had just moved to Lima a few months earlier, and I was hungry to immerse myself in what Peruvian Christians were thinking and talking about. At the suggestion of a friend, I had signed up for the Dominican priest’s five-day Holy Week class for “agentes pastorales” — women and men who led their local parishes with or without a priest.
Padre Gustavo’s presentations for the group of more than 200 lay parish leaders were brilliant, of course, and he had the effective, if somewhat unsettling, habit of answering a student’s question with a question of his own. On the last day of the class, I raised my hand to ask a question about “best practices” in working with the poor. Padre Gustavo paused, smiled and then answered with a question of his own: “If the poor, the oppressed, the marginalized were at the heart of Jesus’ ministry, why aren’t they at the heart of ours?”
It was a simple question with the power of a laser beam, focusing all the light of creation on this central contradiction of the American Church that had formed me. It was a question that changed the direction of my vocation.
Padre Gustavo died on October 22, 2024, at the age of 96. Yet his life, teaching and work leave us with several challenges that point us back to the heart of the gospel.
“If the poor, the oppressed, the marginalized were at the heart of Jesus’ ministry, why aren’t they at the heart of ours?” — Gustavo Gutiérrez
A “preferential option” and an “indelible imprint”
Padre Gustavo was only five feet tall due to a childhood bout with osteomyelitis that left him bedridden for six years. He walked with a limp throughout his adult life and these challenges may have helped shape his insistence on reading Scripture from the point of view of the poor and excluded.
In contrast to much of pre-Vatican II Catholic social teaching, the Peruvian theologian refused to glorify poverty or idealize the poor by ascribing to their material pove
rty a kind of spiritual strength in the same way a short-term missionary might return home, marveling over their host community, “they had nothing, but they were so content.” Poverty for Gutiérrez was intrinsically evil because, as he stated in a 2003 interview with America Magazine, “Material poverty means premature and unjust death” and reflects, as he said to José Manuel Vidal, “the shattering of Creation” (translation by author).
Gutiérrez often taught that throughout Scripture, and especially in Jesus’ ministry, God loves all people without exception, but God consistently shows a particular love for the poor and oppressed — those whose lives are ravaged by political and economic structures, leaving them bereft of power and agency. God is not the impartial, ethereal being often present in the Western imaginary, but the one who sides with the poor in their struggle for justice and dignity.
Padre Gustavo refused to allow a theological conversation to refer to the poor in the abstract. He would interrupt a question to insist that the questioner name a poor person who might be impacted by the question. His understanding of mission was one based on human relationships that took power seriously. As he wrote in his 1971 classic, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation: “The preferential option for the poor is ultimately a question of friendship. Without friendship, an option for the poor can easily become commitment to an abstraction (to a social class, a race, a culture, an idea). When we become friends with the poor, their presence leaves an indelible imprint on our lives, and we are much more likely to remain committed.”
Action before reflection: the first step of theology
Padre Gustavo’s second challenge to the church was a hermeneutical one. He upended the traditional method where theology begins with study — a practice often idealized in Western theologies. Instead, Padre Gustavo insisted that engaging theology must begin with critical reflection on historical praxis. He believed theology follows committed action that has entered into the world of the poor. The world of the poor and oppressed is the canvas upon which God’s love is painted and without which it cannot be understood.
This dogged insistence on the priority of action before reflection kept Padre Gustavo’s theology deeply rooted in the experience of his parish in Rimac, a tough, downtown Lima neighborhood known for its material poverty and violent crime. Why do we insist on keeping theology an exclusively intellectualized pursuit, divorced from its rootedness in the lives of the victims of the same economic systems that enrich us?
The call to integrity
A third challenge: for Gutiérrez, the integrity of the gospel required an integral, holistic response. With keen intellect and deep spirituality, Padre Gustavo rejected Western theology’s facile bifurcation of mind and spirit. This holistic perspective opened up a path for Latin American liberation theology – and all liberation theologies after it – to embody a deep spirituality, a quality not always associated with Western theologies.
In a similar way, for Gutiérrez, a commitment to the poor means denouncing the causes of poverty. The Peru of Gutiérrez’s childhood was a land where 2% of the population controlled 90% of the land. Thus, for him, the church that merely distributes bread to the hungry lacks integrity if it refuses to reflect on and address the structures and systems that cause this human suffering.
Padre Gustavo’s massively influential Theology of Liberation motivated thousands of priests and nuns to move into urban slums and catalyzed the development of Black, Minjung, Dalit, Palestinian, and other liberation theologies around the world. But the institutional response was swift: Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (who would become Pope Benedict XVI) and Lima’s Archbishop Juan Luis Cipriani initiated numerous inquiries into Gutiérrez’s work. In fact, in 2001 Gutiérrez joined the Dominican order to avoid the possibility of being defrocked by the archbishop. Religious orders like the Dominicans are independent of diocesan authorities and, therefore, offered some protection. Despite this, Padre Gustavo never publicly criticized the church hierarchy and insisted on working for the peace and unity of the church.
Perhaps he was simply a man ahead of his time: on Gutiérrez’s 90th birthday, Pope Francis wrote the aging Peruvian theologian and thanked God for what Gutiérrez had “contributed to the Church and to humanity through [his] theological service and from [his] preferential love for the poor and discarded in society.”
I heartily agree with the Pope’s assessment. Yet what still echoes in my heart is the way this five-foot-tall spiritual giant’s humble bearing planted a question that has never left me:
“If the poor, the oppressed, the marginalized were at the heart of Jesus’ ministry, why aren’t they at the heart of ours?”
I am convinced the relevance and faithfulness of our churches depend on how we answer that question.
