In 1981 the Institute on Religion and Democracy was founded largely to combat Liberation Theology, which melded Christianity with Marxist revolution in the Third World as a remedy for poverty and oppression.
The recent death of paramount Liberation Theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez has ignited glowing tributes. Some praise him as a “prophet.” He was an enormously influential Peruvian Catholic priest and brilliant thinker who fused Marxism and Christianity to help the poor. Eulogists rightly praise his empathy with the poor but mostly ignore his destructive advocacy for eliminating private property.
Gutiérrez did not identify as a Marxist-Leninist or a Communist. He remained a Roman Catholic. But supporters of Marxist-Leninist regimes, whether in Nicaragua or Cuba, cited his work. And Gutiérrez was reluctant to critique the abysmal disregard for human rights, including religious persecution, by Communist regimes. He praised Fidel Castro as a “model” for Latin America.
Like more conventional Marxists, Gutiérrez believed some were poor because others were wealthier. The economic pie was limited, and only the state could potentially redistribute the slices justly. Poor nations, he said, are the “historical subproduct of the development of other countries.” The “capitalist system” creates a “center and a periphery, simultaneously generating progress and riches for the few, and social disequilibrium, political tensions and poverty for the majority.”
Gutiérrez largely ignored that new wealth is generated through ingenuity, creativity and entrepreneurship, which thrive in civil society, apart from the state, when private property is protected. The world continues to grow wealthier, especially since the peak of his influence in the 1980s, thanks largely to free market economies. Formerly socialist and Marxist nations, like Poland, became rich. Once wealthy nations, like Venezuela, have become poor under socialism. Hardcore communists like North Korea stay poor. Communist run nations that economically liberalized, like China and Vietnam, have become wealthier, even as they remain politically repressive.
But Gutiérrez preferred thinking wealth grew through colonialism and exploitation. There were Western victimizers and Third World victims. But the wealth of the West, especially the United States and Britain, arose thanks to the industrial revolution, and owed little to imperialism. The Protestant Work Ethic, theorized by Max Weber, is often mocked.
But indisputably Protestant cultures like Britain and America were especially powerful wealth generators by upholding property and patent laws, honoring instead of stigmatizing banking, investment and industry, and by culturally advocating delayed gratification in favor of long-term benefit. Traditional cultures around the world had esteemed hereditary stasis, aristocracy, patriarchal family clans, large agricultural property holdings and “honor” over progress. Capitalism and free markets disrupted this traditional perspective that predominated for millennia. And it lifted millions, and then billions, out of chronic poverty.
Gutiérrez experienced in Latin America traditional cultures that were static and stratified, governed by ruling classes across generations. The poor stayed poor, and the rich governing elites protected their privilege. Often the Catholic Church, deferential to the governing elites, was comfortable with this stasis. Gutiérrez understandably was distressed by this status quo. But instead of seeing free market economies in North America and Europe as models, he faulted them as oppressors. He glamorized Marxist revolutions in Cuba and Nicaragua, whose poverty and repression exponentially exceeded problems in capitalist countries. Gutiérrez focused on “dominated peoples.” He did not imagine that such peoples could be empowered through property ownership, investment and entrepreneurship, if allowed the freedom to practice.
For Gutiérrez, self-empowerment for the poor was not an option. Working among the Peruvian poor, he pronounced they were a “class” captive to “social injustice” who could only be liberated through a “class struggle” to “build a socialist society.” He sought the “emancipation of man through history” and “building a new man.” Quoting Ernesto “Che” Guevara, he called for the “audacity to face the task of the development of a new human being.” Guevara, of course, is the communist revolutionary who murdered and tortured on behalf of Fidel Castro’s Cuban dictatorship.
Gutiérrez was contemptuous of U.S. “liberalism” that promised “liberty” and “democracy,” but which for Latin America only meant “new oppression.” He noted with approval in 1973 Marx’s admonition that “class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat,” with a “classless society.”
Of course, Gutiérrez already knew by then that “dictatorship of the proletariat” entailed torture, mass imprisonment, secret police, and privileged party members amid chronic poverty. In 1984, the Vatican, under Pope John Paul II, faulted Liberation Theology for its “disastrous confusion between the ‘poor’ of the Scripture and the ‘proletariat’ of Marx,” turning “the fight for the rights of the poor into a class fight within the ideological perspective of the class struggle.” The Polish pope knew the consequences of Marxism. But in 2018 Pope Francis commended Gutiérrez for his “theological service” to the church and “preferential love for the poor and the discarded of society”.
Gutiérrez portrayed the poor as a category whose plight could only be alleviated by a political theory that actually amplified poverty and created tyranny. Wiser Christian political counsel offers liberty and opportunity. One of the best alternatives to Gutiérrez was The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism by IRD co-founder Michael Novak.
Novak wrote that God did not design His creation as “coercive” but as an “arena of liberty” in which sinners are free to follow their vocations to the benefit of all. Their works, he wrote, ultimately will be judged not by the state but by God.
Comment by Wilson R. on November 12, 2024 at 3:18 pm
Could it be that both popes captured something important and true?
JP II’s statement that liberation theology represents a “disastrous confusion between the ‘poor’ of the Scripture and the ‘proletariat’ of Marx,” turning “the fight for the rights of the poor into a class fight within the ideological perspective of the class struggle” — captures my sentiments pretty well.
But it’s also not wrong for Francis to praise a commitment to God’s “preferential love for the poor and the discarded.” It echoes Jesus’ statements that he came to “bring good news to the poor”—and it was always interesting to me, well before Liberation Theology came along, that not once but twice Luke quotes Jesus’ particular concern for the poor. (As we see elsewhere in Luke’s gospel, notably in the story of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus, the rich are not regarded as less beloved, but they already have had their good news).
Mark Tooley writes: “Gutiérrez experienced in Latin America traditional cultures that were static and stratified, governed by ruling classes across generations. The poor stayed poor, and the rich governing elites protected their privilege. Often the Catholic Church, deferential to the governing elites, was comfortable with this stasis. Gutiérrez understandably was distressed by this status quo.”
So it sounds like we agree on that.
But then he says: “He [Gutierrez] did not imagine that such peoples could be empowered through property ownership, investment and entrepreneurship, if allowed the freedom to practice.”
Well, sure. In theory. In practice, when 3% of the population owns 90+% of the property and wealth—as was true in Salvador and under the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, for example—then the “freedom to practice” investment and entrepreneurship are basically meaningless, even if they existed, because most of the people have no wealth to invest. And if they advocate for the rights of the poor, to borrow John Paul II’s words, then they meet the fate of Bishop Oscar Romero, or Pope Francis’ own brother in Argentina.
Is a dictatorship of the proletariat wrong? Absolutely. Gutierrez was badly misguided about that–and, of course, about his faith in such a dictatorship to ensure equity for all.
But it’s also not wrong to recognize that the so-called free market has functioned very differently in oligarchical dictatorships like those that predominated in Central and South America than in the freer societies of the US and Western Europe. Their experience is different from ours. In Latin America, they still remember that the US organized a coup of a freely elected leader in Guatemala (Jacobo Arbenz) because a US-based corporation (United Fruit) viewed him as unfriendly to their business interests and to their practices that could be fairly described as “colonial” and exploitative.
I came to abhor the Sandinista regime as much as the Somoza regime (can’t help but think of Pete Townshend’s line, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”). But I’m also haunted by a factoid I read years ago. For all the evil they did, the Sandinistas in short order all but wiped out the leading cause of death—dysentery and diarrhea—among poor rural children. Once the disease cycle started, children would get dehydrated and die for lack of simple and inexpensive medications. The “free market” had no incentive to do anything for public health among the poor, and the government of the rich oligarchs didn’t care. The Sandinistas implemented a public health campaign that changed all that.
The lesson, I think, is not that the Sandinistas were good, but that the old regime our country and the Catholic Church supported was so bad that even the politically oppressive “new boss” delivered a type of liberation (from disease) that the old boss refused to offer.
And shame on those who let things get that way. As John Kennedy said, with Latin America in mind: “Those who make peaceful evolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.”
Comment by John on November 12, 2024 at 9:29 pm
“But the wealth of the West, especially the United States and Britain, arose thanks to the industrial revolution, and owed little to imperialism.”
That’s not true at all. The Industrial Revolution began as a way of addressing the increasing global demand for manufactured goods made possible only by the colonization of the New World and the Far East. The British borrowed techniques for manufacturing textiles from Mughal India, which remained the largest producer of cotton clothes until the Late 18th Century. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin was based on earlier models invented in India in the 13th Century. You can’t separate the Industrial Revolution from European imperialism.
Comment by Thomas on November 12, 2024 at 10:18 pm
The problem with Gustavo Gutiérrez is that he was partially rehabilliated by the Vatican, specially by his friend, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, despite the fact that he never retracted from his previous Marxist views. In fact, he even denied ever being a Marxist or had Marxist views. Mark Tooley does have a point about the social injustices in Latin America. However, the solution for these injustices isn`t revolution, its the Catholic social doctrine and redistribution of wealth. Not a fight but an agreement of classes. Despite claiming being an orthodox Catholic, Gutiérrez gave support to apostate theologian Leonardo Boff, who was more than worthy of being excommunicated by the Vatican and went to deny basic tenets of Christianity, including Jesus divine nature. It was Clodovis Boff who got the things right when he rejected Liberation Theology and gave reason to Pope Benedict XVI for condemning it in the past.
Comment by Tim Ware on November 13, 2024 at 12:48 am
If you went to a mainline seminary in the 1990’s or 2000’s, chances are that Gutierrez and Freire were shoved down your throat ad nauseum.
Comment by John on November 13, 2024 at 11:18 am
Part of my problem with this article is that Tooley condemns the actions of “traditional elites” in Latin America who oppressed the masses for centuries and caused them to turn to Marxism. What he refuses to acknowledge is the manner in which American capitalist forces have been historically complicit in that oppression, more than happy to get in bed with dictators and oligarchs for the right price. The United Fruit Company, the Batista regime in Cuba, the Contras, etc. It’s hard to get the masses excited about American-style capitalism when their oppressors are carrying American-made rifles.
Comment by Wilson R. on November 13, 2024 at 12:31 pm
To add to that, John: The US military trained militaries from Central and South America in specific torture techniques that were used against anyone who was deemed a dissident. We brought their officers to the infamous School of the Americas in Georgia and taught them how to torture.
And I think you have to factor all of that into the legacy of Liberation Theology. I read about the Archbishop of Sao Paolo, Paulo Arns. He espoused Liberation Theology, so many would count that as a blot against him. He praised Castro for ending prostitution, illiteracy, and the worst levels of misery in Cuba. (As with the Sandinistas, bad as they were, not everything the Cuban Revolution did was bad, and some of the good things were things the previous regime never would have done.)
On the other hand, Arns was the only voice in the leadership of the Brazilian Catholic establishment condemning torture and political violence. When the military regime arrested and tortured a young priest who had organized a campaign to increase wages for workers. The priest was one of thousands of Brazilians who were tortured, and many were killed. When the regime arrested a prominent journalist and tortured him to death, Arns had every church in the archdiocese read a statement condemning torture as illegal and immoral. When human rights lawyers illegally copied government files documenting specific instances of torture, Arns used his contacts in the US to get them published in a book, Brazil: Never Again, that named names and took the country by storm. Arns told the lawyers not to share what they knew with anyone else in the hierarchy of the Brazilian church, because they were all in cahoots with the regime.
This story is chronicled in a remarkable book by Laurence Weschler called “A Miracle, A Universe.” Weschler interviewed Arns and asked him why he got involved in this effort, risking arrest and imprisonment. He cited the first chapter of Genesis. Because human beings are made in the image of God, torture is an offense against the Creator.
But this basic theological insight had been ignored or rejected by most of the Catholic bishops of Brazil — and, by extension, ignored by the Vatican, which was much more outspoken against offenses by leftist governments than by right-wing military regimes.
So this should be factored into the legacy of Liberation Theologians like Arns. Balanced against what we think he got wrong about Liberation Theology, we also need to acknowledge what he got right while so much of the rest of the Church was wrong.
Comment by Thomas on November 14, 2024 at 10:24 am
Liberation Theology is nothing but a fraud. I would have respected more Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns if he hadn`t written a letter to Fidel Castro in 1989, praising him and wishing he remained in power for life! Liberation Theology is a modernist heresy because it interprets the Catholic faith ideologically. Its time for the next pope to condemn it foor good.
Comment by TLouise on November 15, 2024 at 6:56 pm
If capitalism and owning private property didn’t lift people out of poverty, Heifer International, WorldVision, OxFam, and Samaritan’s Purse wouldn’t have programs where people can donate so livestock and poultry are given to families so they can sell milk, eggs, and meat and earn their own money, and thus rise up out of poverty.
Comment by Salvatore Anthony Luiso on November 16, 2024 at 3:50 am
A “prophet” who “praised Fidel Castro as a ‘model’ for Latin America”?
Oy vey!
Comment by David Gingrich on November 16, 2024 at 7:01 am
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those others that have been tried.” – Winston Churchill
Ditto for Economic Freedom.