Father Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino, seismic Catholic reformer who launched ‘liberation theology’

His movement was investigated by the modern equivalent of the Holy Inquisition under John Paul II, but his ideas entered the mainstream

Father Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino, who has died aged 96, was probably the most original and contested theologian of the 20th century, who made an enormous contribution to Catholic thought through liberation theology, a term he himself coined.
Though opposed by many within the Church itself, liberation theology still had a lasting effect on Catholic life as well as a profound influence well beyond the confines of Roman Catholicism.
Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino was born on June 8 1928 in Lima, Peru. He grew up in poverty, and in his teenage years was afflicted with osteomyelitis, a painful inflammation of the bone marrow, which meant that he was confined either to bed or to a wheelchair. He endured this thanks to prayer, reading, and the company of his family and friends, he later said. The poverty of his surroundings was to have a lasting effect on his thought.
Gustavo’s original ambition was to be a psychiatrist, and he first studied medicine and literature at the National University of Peru, while also being involved in Catholic Action, a group dedicated to spreading the ideals of Catholic social teaching. But he soon felt drawn to theology and the call of the priesthood. He was eventually ordained at the age of 30, by which time he had been to Europe, and studied at the Catholic University of Louvain, as well as the Catholic University of Lyons. 
During this period, he worked under or studied all the big names in contemporary theology such as Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Marie-Dominique Chenu, Edward Schillebeeckx, Karl Rahner, Hans Küng and Johann Baptist Metz, all of whom would go on to be the formative influences of the Second Vatican Council.
In addition, he became familiar with the work of the leading Protestant theologians of the day such as Karl Barth and Jürgen Moltmann, as well as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor who had been hanged for resisting Hitler. While the Catholic Church’s seminarians were still using outdated Latin manuals, generally written in the 19th century, Gutiérrez was way in advance of most of his contemporaries.
Gutiérrez was to spend most of his life in academic institutions, such as the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, with various visiting professorships in Europe and North America. His groundbreaking work, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation was published in 1971, an English translation appearing some two years later. It was this work that essentially launched the movement known as liberation theology.
Liberation theology was, and remains, a movement that works from the bottom up, using lived experience as a basis for theological reflection. The lived experience in question was that of the people of Latin America, the overwhelming majority of whom were mired in seemingly insoluble poverty.
Rather than theology originating in the cloister, it is theology originating in the slum. Poverty is by no means something to be accepted, but a challenge to be overcome, and the structures that bring about poverty are characterised as “structures of sin”. 
The essential watchword is that “True orthodoxy is orthopraxis”, or, in more accessible terms, that right beliefs must be put into practice. This approach was a useful antidote to a Catholic theology that often seemed cut off from the world and the experiences of ordinary people, or worse, which saw the problems of the world as something to be meekly accepted rather than changed.
Much of Gutiérrez’s writing was dense, erudite and somewhat inaccessible, but this did not stop non-theologians characterising him and other liberation theologians – for a movement was soon born – as Marxists, or, more critically, as Catholics who had imported Marxist concepts of class struggle and dialectical materialism into Catholic theology, and undermined it from within in the process.
This was in fact a caricature of what Gutiérrez was doing, but the oversimplified criticism stuck, and brought conflict with the authorities in Rome, as well as fierce opposition from those in Latin America who saw liberation theologians as turbulent priests fomenting rebellion against the landowning class and the interests of big business. Political opponents did indeed have a point: liberation theology, with its “preferential option for the poor”, was seeking to detach Catholicism from those who sought to maintain the status quo.
As the 1970s wore on, liberation theology became more and more popular, and entered the mainstream of Catholic institutions. Gutiérrez became a hero to those who were standing up for the oppressed in Latin America, in the Philippines, and to a lesser extent in Africa. In Europe, no theological course was complete without a reference to the theology of liberation. Liberation theology also became the one theology acceptable to European Leftists who were otherwise not enamoured of the Catholic Church. However, there were dissenting voices, and in high places too.
John Paul II, though a supporter of liberation in Poland and Eastern Europe generally, as well as a stern critic of unregulated capitalism in his social writings, was wary of the way liberation theology, as developed by Gutiérrez and his followers, was making seemingly uncritical use of Marxist categories of thought. This resulted in an investigation into Gutiérrez’s work by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Holy Inquisition), the Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog, leading to a report published in 1984 authored by Cardinal Ratzinger, later Benedict XVI, a theologian of similar calibre but very different bent to Gutiérrez himself.
This highly nuanced document took the emphasis on class struggle to task as incompatible with Christianity, while stressing the traditional doctrine of the Church as means of salvation. Yet it found many aspects of liberation theology of merit. It could hardly do otherwise, as concepts such as “structures of sin”, the belief that sin is not simply an individual act, but can become a corporate one too, were presupposed in the writings of John Paul II himself.
Gutiérrez, ever the faithful priest and servant of the Church, took these criticisms of his theology in good part. When Pope Francis, the first Latin American pope, succeeded the former Cardinal Ratzinger, the subject of liberation theology, thought by some to be a spent force, came to the fore once more, as it was widely thought that, as Cardinal Bergoglio, Pope Francis had been an opponent of liberation theology. Yet in September 2013, Francis received Father Gutiérrez in the Vatican, though what was said between them remained private.
This visit was interpreted as a coming in from the cold for the then 85-year-old theologian. But in 2015, at a press conference in the Vatican, Gutiérrez gently corrected this idea: liberation theology was not in need of rehabilitation, he said, because it had never been condemned in the first place. Indeed, many of the key concepts of liberation theology – a concern for the poor, the importance of social justice, and the idea that salvation was not purely otherworldly – had become mainstream, largely thanks to the pioneering work of Gutiérrez himself.
Father Gutiérrez was loaded with honours for his work: these included, apart from numerous professorships, election to the Peruvian Academy of Language, appointment to the Légion d’honneur and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as the Príncipe de Asturias award from the Spanish government.
In 1998, already an old man, Father Gutiérrez joined the Dominican order, motivated in part by his admiration for Bartolomé de las Casas, the 16th-century Dominican friar who had fought so strenuously for the rights of indigenous peoples in Latin America.
Father Gutiérrez was small of stature, unassuming and humble in demeanour, and gifted with a sense of humour. In an interview in 2013, he remarked of his difficulties with the Vatican in earlier decades thus: “I learnt that you ought not to lose your sense of humour, a virtue that helps you not to feel as if you are at the centre of the world or a perpetual exile; not to take myself too seriously, which keeps you from becoming bitter. I like to laugh a lot, and I think this has helped me in difficult times. One should get on with it, without feeling indispensable, because theological reflection will carry on without me too.”
Father Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino, born June 8 1928, died October 22 2024