Gustavo Gutiérrez: 'Father of Liberation Theology Dead' at Age 96

Gustavo Gutiérrez, Radical priest, towering prophet, has left us. His Liberation Theology, a slap in the face of church complacency, drew the wrath of the Vatican and Washington alike. Heaven is not a distant dream, but a battle fought here, for justice. The poor have lost a friend.

Gustavo Gutiérrez is gone, but the fire he helped ignite will not fade. Liberation theology did not emerge from seminaries; it was born in the dust of Latin American streets, where faith met hunger. It came from the mouths of campesinos, miners, and mothers who prayed for their children, disappeared by dictatorships. It was whispered in the pews of churches as a call not just to salvation in the next life, but to justice in this one.

This was a theology that broke from the cold marble of cathedrals, returning to the heat of human struggle. 

In the 1960s, Latin America bled under the weight of military regimes, foreign exploitation, and brutal poverty. And while the Church once stood silent or complicit, figures like Gutiérrez chose to listen not to kings but to the cries of the oppressed.

He and others believed that God was not distant, watching from a gilded altar, but walked alongside the poor, the broken, the dispossessed. In the favelas and villages, faith became a shield for the weak, a weapon against empire.

Liberation theology flipped the gospel on its head, or perhaps it turned it right-side up. 

No longer was Christ a passive figure hung on the cross, but a revolutionary in the streets, leading protests, occupying land, defending workers. It was a faith that called for political action, for solidarity, for the overthrow of systems that perpetuate misery.

This was not without danger. Priests who preached liberation were jailed, exiled, or murdered by death squads. But they did not stop. Because the truth of liberation theology was simple: to be human is to demand dignity, and to be Christian is to fight for it. 

Gutiérrez, in his quiet wisdom, knew this. He saw that the Church had a choice: serve power, or serve the people. He chose the latter, and for that, I will remember him as one who gave voice to the voiceless and dared to believe in a world redeemed by justice.

Preferential Option for the Poor

The Option for the Poor, as Gutiérrez put it involved "a commitment that implies leaving the road one is on" in order to enter the world of an "insignificant" person; It is not charity but a conscious choice to stand with the poor, the forgotten, the disrespected. It is to see the world through their eyes, to feel their hunger, and to share their struggles. This option demands more than compassion—it calls for action, for tearing down the structures that create poverty and oppression. For Christians, it is a summons to walk beside the marginalised, not as saviours but as comrades in the fight for justice

Christian Base Communities

Supporters of liberation theology wanted to create a popular, grassroots church through establishing "base communities" among the poor.  These were small, humble gatherings, local Christian cells—ten, maybe thirty souls—meeting once or twice a week in cramped homes or makeshift chapels 

Here, the forgotten learned that their suffering was not destiny but a call to rise. Christians would not only pray and sing and read the Bible, they would learn a new revolutionary way to read the Bible in the light of their own lives and suffering, asking the ancient texts and their fellow Christians: How do we survive? How do we fight?

The base communities became more than places of worship. They were schools of liberation. Together, they planned how to bring food and water to their families, how to organise against the forces that kept them down, and how to reclaim their dignity. In a world ruled by dictators, where even speaking out could mean death, these gatherings became sanctuaries of resistance.

Under dictatorship, religious spaces were one of the few spaces people could meet, becoming laboratories of democracy. The poor found strength in each other, plotting small revolutions of survival—sometimes through protests, sometimes through whispered prayers. Tragically, across Latin America, thousands of defenceless base community members would be murdered by death squads and state repression.

See, Judge, Act

The See, Judge, Act method became a cornerstone of liberation theology and the base communities, urging everyday people to transform their reality.

First, we see. Not with detached, academic eyes but through active immersion in the struggles, suffering and lives of the poor. It’s about understanding their conditions firsthand. It is to look at the world not from above, but from the ground, feeling the weight of inequality on one's shoulders.

Next, we judge. Here the heart and mind engage in dialogue. Teachings of justice, Christian ethics, and Bible verses, are applied to the concrete situation. This is where theology meets the streets, where the gospel is reclaimed as a force for the liberation of the marginalised. The judging process calls for an ethical examination of power structures, asking where society has fallen short and why.

Finally, we act. Without action, seeing and judging are empty. Liberation theology embraces this, turning reflection into organised resistance for justice and dignity

In liberation theology, this step is where the church, once a passive institution, transforms into a revolutionary force. It embraces solidarity with the oppressed, organising, resisting, and demanding that systems of injustice fall.

Exodus

The Book of Exodus would be the heartbeat of liberation theology, its key text. The Biblical story tells the journey of the Israelites, out of slavery in Egypt, through the wilderness, to the promised land.

Here, the oppressed find a voice, the enslaved rise, and a people walk toward freedom. Pharaoh’s whip cracks, but it is no match for the cry of the suffering. God is not in the palace but with the slaves, marching through the desert.

For liberation theology, Exodus is proof: God sides with the poor. It tells them that to fight for justice is holy, that liberation is not a dream but a covenant. It is the promise that the chains will break, and the land of oppression will be left behind.

Iconic Figures

In 1971, when as a Catholic priest living in a poor shanty-town in Peru, Gustavo Gutiérrez, published A Theology of Liberation. It would lead to the new emergent movement of politicised Christianity across Latin America being baptized with the name of 'Liberation Theology'.

Gutiérrez would be part of a diverse group of Christian intellectuals including Leonardo Boff, Frei Betto, Leonardo Boff, Juan Luis Segundo and Jon Sobrino appalled by living in the midst of some of the most extreme poverty in the world, who believed their Christian faith had something to say about it. It was theology of those who held the newspaper in one hand and a Bible in the other.

"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist," quipped Dom Hélder Câmara, a Catholic Archbishop living under Brazil's dictatorship.

In his book, Spiral of Violence, Hélder Câmara, mapped out three violences: the first, institutional violence, crushed millions in its  machinery of domination. The second, revolutionary violence, was born of the will to abolish the first. The third, repressive violence, shielded the institutions by crushing revolutions, 'making itself the helper and accomplice of the first violence- the one that causes all the others

Camilo Torres, a Colombian priest, believed a Christian who wasn’t a revolutionary was living in sin. He saw "a revolution as an expression of Christian love, a means to get a government that feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, and teaches the ignorant".. He would controversially die in combat with the ELN, a left-wing guerilla group.

Ernesto Cardenal, a poet and one of two priests who participated in the Nicaraguan Revolution would serve as Minister in the Sandinista government.

He would write “I am a revolutionary. Revolutionary means that I want to change the world.The Bible is full of revolutions." He added, "The prophets are people with a message of revolution. Jesus of Nazareth takes the revolutionary message of the prophets. And we also will continue trying to change the world and make revolution. Those revolutions failed, but others will come".

Continuing in this vein he would say that Christ led him to Marx and he saw all four gospels as equally communist, "I’m a Marxist who believes in God, follows Christ, and is a revolutionary for the sake of his kingdom.”

Cardenal would write up an extraordinary and beautiful book,The Gospel in Solentiname, of conversations between workers, labourers, peasants, mothers and the poor as they read through the Bible collectively under dictatorship interpreting the messages of the text in the light of state repression, class war, the new society and the action needed to arrive there, the book argued that the God of the Bible is a God that sides with the poor.

Oscar Romero, an Archbishop, would be gunned down by a death squad while saying Mass in El Salvador, killed in 1980 for preaching "Thou Shalt Not Kill" in a nationwide broadcast.

Romero had implored rank-and-file soldiers to listen to their consciences and stop the repression. Before his assassination he had begun to infuse the institutional structures of the church with popular participation. The cathedral would be transformed into a refuge for the poor to come for relief, food and medical assistance, he would connect with the masses through weekly national broadcasts, his life would be spent in poor areas meeting grassroots Christians and learning from them, and he would become known as the 'voice of the voiceless' as he amplified the stories of the families whose members were disappeared, tortured and killed.

Echoing the line of Jesus Christ that he had not come to bring peace, but a sword, some Liberation Theologians believed the Bible was teaching Christians not to uphold the social order, but to detonate social unrest. 

If the Church was to answer God's call and the cries of the people, Gustavo Gutiérrez argued, theology could no longer be shaped by scholars in air-conditioned ivory towers, salvation could no longer just be otherworldly, blind to the pain of the slums. Theology must rise from the dirt, from the shanties where hunger and despair gnawed. It could not come from the eyes of the rich but from the "underside of history." For it is there, among the suffering, he believed that God walked.

Quotes from A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Gutiérrez 

“But the poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny. His or her existence is not politically neutral, and it is not ethically innocent. The poor are a by-product of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible. They are marginalized by our social and cultural world. They are the oppressed, exploited proletariat, robbed of the fruit of their labour and despoiled of their humanity. Hence, the poverty of the poor is not a call to generous charity, but a demand that we go and build a different social order.” 

“If there is no friendship with them the poor and no sharing of the life of the poor, then there is no authentic commitment to liberation, because love exists only among equals.” 

“Neighbour is not the one whom I find in my path, but rather the one in whose path I place myself, the one whom I approach and actively seek.” 

"In the final analysis, poverty means death: lack of food and housing, the inability to attend properly to health and education needs, the exploitation of workers, permanent unemployment, the lack of respect for one's human dignity, and unjust limitations placed on personal freedom in the areas of self-expression, politics, and religion.” ■

Adam Johannes