He also supported the concept of the “New Man” defended by Che Guevara
14ymedio, Havana, 25 October 2024 — Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, an admirer of Fidel Castro and father of Liberation Theology – a theoretical-religious approach that sympathizes with Marxism – died Tuesday in Lima at the age of 96. Involved in multiple controversies, he was criticized by the Vatican but rehabilitated in 2013 by Pope Francis, who after learning of the death defined him with an enigmatic expression: “he knew how to be silent when he had to be silent.”
Indeed, Gutiérrez was not the most publicized theologian of his time – if compared with others in his context, such as Camilo Torres, Leonardo Boff or Frei Betto, the latter an inveterate apologist for the Cuban regime – but he did lay one of the most important theoretical foundations for Liberation Theology, collected in his book of the same name, published in 1971.
In those pages, Gutiérrez praised the Cuban Revolution and applauded the measures taken by Fidel Castro, in whom he saw a leader who had reconciled the Marxists and Christians of his country. The leader had endowed tropical communism with a “solid and proper theory,” full of “historical realism,” and which could serve as a model for other movements on the continent.
He also subscribed to the concept of the “New Man” defended by Ernesto Guevara, in which he recognized a Christian inspiration, and recommended following the opinions of the Argentine to sustain “the effort of liberation of Latin American man” that Cuba, according to Gutiérrez, was leading.
He suggested that, on the island, Fidel Castro had been right to point out a common enemy of Christians and Marxists
He suggested that, on the island, Fidel Castro had been right to point out a common enemy of Christians and Marxists – the capitalist “oppressors” – against whom they could take up arms, as Torres, a Colombian priest and guerrilla, had done. Gutierrez cited a 1969 speech by Castro in which he called Torres a “symbol of Latin American revolutionary unity.” During the decade in which he uttered those words, the leader had persecuted and imprisoned dozens of the Catholic religious and “put in check” the Episcopal Conference, which was critical of its rapprochement with Soviet communism.
The reality of the island – which Gutiérrez ignores or pretends to ignore in his book – is also not present in his account of “subversive priests,” who denounced the dictators of the region or supported the opposition militias. Several Cuban priests, who ended up imprisoned and then expelled from the country, played the same opposition role, supporting the militia uprisings in the Escambray or the invaders of Playa Girón (Bay of Pigs).
With the passage of time and the formal condemnations of the Vatican – Francis’s predecessor in the papacy, Joseph Ratzinger, was one of his most famous opponents as prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – Gutiérrez moderated his speech and passed to a secondary plane in public. Ratzinger signed a series of documents condemning the attachment to communism of Liberation Theology, and warning the priests about the “deviations” of their approach, for resorting, “in an insufficiently critical way” to “concepts taken from various currents of Marxist thought,” disguised as a “preferential option for the poor.”
In 2013, when Ratzinger – who had become pope under the name of Benedict XVI – had already retired, Francis received Gutiérrez at the Vatican in a kind of official rehabilitation. In public speeches, years later, he declared that Liberation Theology had been “a positive thing” in Latin America. He mocked the fact that several books of condemnations by the Vatican contained “80% of their notes in German” – an allusion to Ratzinger’s language – and that the Latin American “telluric path” was ideologized according to European parameters.
Unlike in other Latin American countries, Liberation Theology failed to take root in Cuba. Castro’s persecution of Catholic communities since the first decades of the Revolution meant that, on the rare occasions when Latin American missionaries sympathetic to this doctrine tried to spread it on the island, they found an audience that was very unreceptive to the Marxist approach.
Betto, author of the interview ’Fidel and Religion’, is a systematic defender of the Cuban Government
Another factor that influenced the rejection of Liberation Theology in Cuba was the caution that the Episcopal Conference took in the reception of missionaries enthusiastic about Marxism. However, important figures within the doctrine never renounced their old enthusiasm for the Cuban Revolution and several, such as Betto and Boff, have remained close to Havana. Betto, author of the interview ’Fidel and Religion’, is a systematic defender of the Cuban government and a columnist in its main propaganda media.
After his death, Gutiérrez’s detractors and admirers have offered their opinions on his life and work. Many have even tried to disassociate it from its Marxist theoretical roots. Boff said this week that it was an unfair “accusation” against the Peruvian priest, and that Francis had offered him “apologies” on behalf of the Catholic hierarchy for the “sufferings he endured in life.”
Gutiérrez was born on June 8, 1928 in Lima. He studied medicine and the humanities, and was ordained a priest in 1959. He belatedly joined the Dominicans in 2001 – an order from which other liberation theologians, such as Betto, come – and founded the Bartolomé de las Casas Institute in 1974.
He received a solid theological training in Louvain (Belgium) and Lyon (France), and was a professor at several prestigious universities, such as Cambridge, Harvard and Comillas. He was a pupil of important theologians and intellectuals of the time, such as Yves Congar and Henri de Lubac, and had contacts with Karl Rahner, Hans Küng and Jürgen Moltmann. In 2003, Gutiérrez received the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and the Humanities in Spain.
Until this Friday, only the Cienfuegos newspaper 5 de Septiembre, among the newspapers of the Communist Party of Cuba, had reported the news of his death.
Translated by Hombre de Paz
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