Introduction: As it was in the beginning?

Pablo Bradbury and Niall H. D. Geraghty

It is now more than fifty years since liberation theology emerged from Latin America with a prophetic vision for the Catholic Church that would alter its social mission, as well as its relationship with the laity, with other religions and with the world. With the benefit of historical hindsight, however, it can seem that the first wave and the high watermark for the discourse were one and the same. If, amidst the febrile revolutionary atmosphere of 1968, the second meeting of the Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano (Latin American Bishops Conference, CELAM) in Medellín proclaimed the influence of liberation theologians on the institutional Church, the publication of Gustavo Gutiérrez’s seminal Teología de la liberación: Perspectivas in 1971 seemed to cement its importance. What was being proposed was not merely a new theological movement but, in Gutiérrez’s famous words, a ‘new way of doing theology’ (Gutiérrez 1988, 12).

Such bold claims seemed matched by a wave of clerical innovations and a groundswell of radicalism across the continent whose ethic and aesthetic brought together both revolutionary Marxists and Catholic militants. By the CELAM meeting in Puebla in 1979, however, the tide had seemingly turned. Key liberation theologians who had done so much to shape Medellín were sidelined from Puebla, the result of a concerted effort by an unsympathetic Latin American episcopal leadership. Exiled to a convent a few blocks from the conference proceedings, a large group of liberation theologians managed to interact with participating bishops and influence the tightly guarded discussions indirectly, however, resulting in a mixed final document demonstrative of the divergent theological interests and influences of different members of the Church (Smith 1991, 209–21).

Although key figures sought to claim Puebla and its final document as a victory for liberation theology, in retrospect it appeared to be confirmation of its declining status in the institutional Church, and its proponents were increasingly on the defensive. Pope John Paul II (1979) himself looked with suspicion toward the idea of a Church ‘taking concrete form in the poor’ as being ideologically conditioned, warning that any ‘magisteria other than the Church’s Magisterium’ was ‘ecclesially unacceptable’. His very public rebuke of Ernesto Cardenal in 1983 for assuming office in the revolutionary Sandinista government, and the subsequent prohibition imposed on Cardenal administering the sacraments, seemed to cement an emboldened institutional backlash against liberation theology’s political articulation. In 1985, Leonardo Boff was instructed to observe a period of obsequious silence following the publication of his book Igreja: Carisma e poder (1981), and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued its (in)famous ‘Instructions’ on the theology in 1984 and 1986. In one of the most shocking setbacks in El Salvador, a country that had already witnessed the murder of Archbishop Óscar Romero after delivering a sermon calling on the armed forces to stop carrying out government repression, a group of renowned Jesuit liberationists were massacred at the Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas (UCA) in 1989. Considering these reactions against liberation theology collectively seems to sketch out a picture of decline, of a theology subdued by institutional discipline and smashed by violent repression. By linking such events with broader historical trends, it is with good reason that Luis Martínez Andrade comments that: ‘With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of the socialist bloc, the declaration of the “end of history” and the verbiage on the inevitable victory of the free market, some thinkers – such as Jozef Stanislaw Tischner – declared that liberation theology was mortally wounded’ (2015, 109). However, by returning to the central question of praxis – that is, the lived experiences and spiritual and embodied practices of all those engaged in social action in the region – this book seeks to challenge the narrative that suggests that liberation theology had reached its twilight by the end of the 1970s. Instead, across the chapters it contains, it will be shown that this theological and socio-religious movement cannot be reduced to a single grand narrative or confined to an easy linear periodisation.

Global perceptions of liberation theology often rely on rather generalised frameworks and spectacular events, and, in that regard, there can be no doubt that recent events have rekindled interest in the movement. While it is too early to tell if (or, perhaps, too optimistic to presume that) the conflict between liberation theology and the Vatican has been fully resolved (Løland 2021), the election of Pope Francis certainly seemed to augur a more sympathetic reproachment from the Holy See. Since his investiture in the diocese of Rome, Francis oversaw the canonisation of Archbishop Romero and the beatification of Argentina’s Enrique Angelelli (another prelate close to the movement and assassinated by a military regime), as he also granted Ernesto Cardenal absolution from his censorship. Moreover, the critique of capitalism in his encyclical Evangelii Gaudium (2013), and his turn to ecological concerns in Laudato Si’ (2015), echoed the economic and environmental focus of theologians such as Gutiérrez and Boff. Indeed, it would also seem that the Amazon Synod of 2019 and the clamour for reform of the Curia confirm the importance of liberationist approaches to ecology and radical ecclesiology. Similarly, secular social movements such as those against feminicide and for the decriminalisation of abortion have precipitated considerable advances in women’s theology in Latin America, not least by such movements as Católicos por el Derecho a Decidir (Catholics for the Right to Choose), while building on the base constructed by early liberation theologians.

What we want to propose, however, is that such developments may not signal a return of liberation theology but rather indicate that its impact reached deep into and altered the religious and social life of the continent, albeit in multiple forms and iterations. Thus, this book seeks to re-evaluate the history and legacy of liberation theology by examining religious praxis in the region from the 1960s to the present day. To cite but one example, in the book’s Foreword, Martha Zechmeister looks back to the murder of the liberation theologians in El Salvador and calls for future theologians to take up the challenge of ‘doing theology in the footsteps of the martyrs’. For her part, in the book’s Afterword, Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo responds by reminding us of the contemporary martyrdom of environmental and human rights defenders across Latin America to reinforce the immediacy, urgency and importance of liberation theology today. And across the intervening chapters, a picture emerges of liberationist Christianity (the term employed by Michael Löwy to denote a wider network and praxis in addition to a well-known theological production) that is at once more diverse and internally conflicted, more widely resonant outside ecclesial confines and more interconnected over time than often allowed (Löwy 1996). That is to say, a vision of liberationist Christianity that is more vibrant and alive than generally recognised.

A variety of scholarly analyses have sought to capture the historical evolution of liberation theology, offering interpretations and syntheses of the myriad changes occurring across a diverse continent since the 1960s. For example, Iván Petrella’s thesis maintained that liberation theology suffered essentially from the end of history consensus that characterised the end of the Cold War in 1989, citing the abandonment of the historical project (originally socialism) as its crucial weakness from the 1990s (Petrella 2016). Liberation theology was born in the 1960s at a time of Church renewal and socio-economic ferment, as many sought more radical solutions in the context of the exhaustion of developmentalist projects and the so-called institutionalised violence of capitalism and dependency. Certainly, in many cases, socialist revolution offered a vision that allowed liberationists to move from the purely prophetic dimension to a transformational project inspired partly in the example of the Cuban Revolution. No doubt, the US’s Cold War triumph and the neoliberal hegemony post-1989 limited liberation theology’s disruptive energy, and it simultaneously appeared unable to retain the capacity to attach itself coherently to a positive political project. But we might question the simplicity of this narrative that folds a complex region into a rather simple historical sequence. For example, in many places, it was arguably the intensification of polarising Cold War dynamics – rather than their end – coupled with the proliferation of repressive anti-communist military regimes of the 1970s, that disarticulated and disoriented the wider organisational networks of the movement, bringing with it a shift away from discourses of socialist revolution. The Cristianos por el Socialismo (Christians for Socialism) movement in Chile, for instance, represented one of the more politically bold initiatives, resonating internationally in the midst of Salvador Allende’s socialist government, until it dissolved faced with the crushing repression of General Augusto Pinochet’s regime from September 1973 (Amorós 2005).

In a related note, Christian Smith, in his insightful work on liberation theology as a continental social movement, claimed, paradoxically, that violent repression in the 1970s and 1980s actually rescued a movement perturbed by, and on the defensive because of, a conservative reaction from the Church’s hierarchical leadership, enabling it confidently to reattach itself to the downtrodden (1991, 192–8). Nevertheless, the dissemination of liberation theological discourses across Latin America did not necessarily translate to organisational vitality, which varied between countries. Neither, it might be said, did the association with victims of state violence result in liberationists cohering around a positive and concrete political project. In fact, the impact of state terrorism on the wider liberationist Christian movement was uneven: while in Brazil, the base ecclesial movements offered a critical space for protest against a hardening military dictatorship in the early 1970s, in other places martial rule annihilated the radical initiatives of liberationists. In Chile, the famous Vicaría de la Solidaridad (Vicariate of Solidarity) may have emerged as a thorn in the side of Pinochet’s regime, but it was less straightforwardly tied to liberation theology than was Cristianos por el Socialismo. At a similar conjuncture, mounting repression in mid-1970s Argentina devastated the (albeit already divided) Movimiento de Sacerdotes para el Tercer Mundo (MSTM; Movement of Priests for the Third World). Thus, the cult of martyrdom and the discourses of ‘captivity’ that characterised liberation theology in the years of lead in Argentina may well, as Smith affirms, have given the movement a greater claim to identification with the suffering and persecuted, particularly as the institutional Church came to be seen as a vital strand of what is often referred to as a dictadura cívico-eclesiástico-militar (civil-ecclesiastical-military dictatorship) due to its close collaboration with the military (1991, 201).¹ However, this surely produced shifts towards a more narrowly prophetic function of denunciation and affirmation of a discourse of human rights, as it signalled a move away from the concrete historical project of social and political revolution.

A second, connected observation about liberation theology’s evolution relates to the move from integral narratives of social revolution to an increasing engagement with other forms of marginalisation and subjugation, especially regarding questions of identity and other cleavages not strictly limited to the figure of the poor. As the cycle of revolutionary mobilisation abated in the 1970s, beaten back by vicious anti-communist forces and crippled by the exhaustion of popular movements, and as neoliberal hegemony appeared unrivalled in the 1990s, the ‘liberation’ in liberation theology assumed new meanings. For David Tombs (2002), this represented the expansion of the movement, which in the 1980s and 1990s started to engage with other dimensions of oppression. In a similar key, Mario I. Aguilar (2007, 12), employing Karl Mannheim’s theory of generations, claimed that liberation theology became a ‘diversified subject’, as new waves of intellectuals responded to changing social contexts. Such analyses emphasise the multiple perspectives taken up by inheritors of the movement’s legacy, seemingly shifting the focus away from a sense of universality in the liberation of the poor to more particular questions of indigeneity, ethnicity, race, gender and ecology.

Diego Irarrázaval, for instance, in the 1990s, explored the theology of inculturation and the syncretic forms of Christianity generated by Indigenous peoples, offering a framework that could contain the diverse cultural expressions of Christianity in the continent (Irarrázaval 2000).² Responding particularly to local and Indigenous movements for land and rights, this emphasis coincided with a series of reflections, in and leading up to 1992, on 500 years of colonialism in the Americas and the complex consequences of evangelisation. Gutiérrez himself had identified ‘the racial question’ as a major challenge, calling the anniversary an ‘occasion for an examination of conscience regarding the immense human cost historically connected with that evangelisation – I mean the destruction of individuals and cultures’ (Gutiérrez 1988, xxii). Leonardo Boff’s Nova evangelização: perspectiva dos oprimidos (1990) is one such examination which simultaneously strives radically to reconceptualise evangelisation due to this very legacy. However, the engagement with race and ethnicity was not simply a reflection of colonialism in Latin America but also the result of a wider global interaction with experience elsewhere, including the diverse manifestations of faith in Africa and interfaith dialogues in Asia. In previous years, Latin American liberation theologians, particularly following the ‘Theology in the Americas’ conference in Detroit (1975), had also begun to pay more attention to Black theologians in the United States who had emerged simultaneously in the 1960s, rooted in the historical experience of racial oppression of African Americans (Torres and Eagleson 1976). However, although this has often been portrayed as a new development generated by the meeting in 1975, attentiveness to the broad and varied histories of liberation theology might point us towards earlier interactions, especially through the World Council of Churches (WCC). The WCC, which elected its first Black general secretary in 1972, offered a shared space for Christians from the Global North and the Global South. Indeed, in the wake of dramatic processes of decolonisation and revolutionary effervescence, the 1960s was a formative period for a new global ecumenism that foregrounded racially oppressed and Third-World voices. Protestants (especially from Brazil and the Southern Cone), in the context of a Latin American evangelical ‘boom’ characterised by ‘revolution, liberation and exile’, participated fully in this process, and, for them, 1975, as the year of another significant WCC assembly in Nairobi, was more of a culmination of this dialogue rather than a starting point (Schilling 2018).

If the 1970s have been understood as a launchpad for engaging with questions of racial oppression, the 1980s have been perceived as a period of emergent feminist challenges, a development that assumed a variety of forms (Tombs 2002, 256–70). For some, this involved highlighting the gendered dimensions of, and commitment among, women religious in liberationist Christian struggles, even if not always strictly assuming a feminist paradigm.³ The sharp writings of thinkers such as Ivone Gebara (1999) and Marcella Althaus-Reid (2000), on the other hand, pushed feminist and queer theology to the forefront of theological debates, and their analyses mounted scathing criticisms of liberation theology while remaining at least partially within its tradition. For instance, Althaus-Reid pointedly reproached Enrique Dussel as developing a straightforwardly homophobic framework (2006, 10–13). Thus, the engagement with gender, feminism and sexuality was not just a significant development within liberation theology but a major critique. However, as with race and ethnicity, we must be careful about the extent to which we declare such developments in the 1980s to be totally novel or as deriving from a single source.

One notable feature of the final document from the CELAM meeting in Puebla was the specific recognition of the condición doblemente oprimida y marginada (doubly oppressed and marginalised condition) of women in Latin America (CELAM 1979, §1135n297). While it is inescapable that gender had been overlooked in the most influential publications of the movement in the 1960s and 1970s, the marginalisation of women and the reproduction of patriarchal structures and narratives had not passed unnoticed. For example, one contribution of Claudia Touris’s recent work on the tercermundista ‘constellation’ is that it captures a component of liberationist Christian history in Argentina during the 1960s and 1970s – the agency of women religious – hitherto almost entirely ignored by scholarly and popular histories, which focus mostly on the mobilisation of priests (2021, 353–429). Although not explicitly a feminist rendering of the movement, tercermundista nuns were deeply concerned about the role and situation of women, and Touris finds in the discourse and practice of these women religious an unresolved tension between different models of women’s involvement in the public sphere, one centred on the personage of Marianne (the embodiment of the values of the French Revolution) and one on María.⁴ Such research bluntly reveals the reproduction of gendered hierarchies and clerical masculinity in early liberation theology, as well as the inadequacies of our understandings of the wider liberationist movement: although nuns made up three-quarters of religious in Argentina, the MSTM was the fulcrum of liberationist Christianity in the country and has been the subject of most research on the phenomenon.

More broadly, there is no question that women made up much of the grassroots membership of wider liberationist movements across Latin America. Ana María Bidegaín (1989) made similar points, indeed, about the importance of women’s participation in the wider life of liberationist Christianity, particularly Catholic Action and the youth branches crucial to the movement’s emergence in the 1950s and 1960s. Bidegaín and Althaus-Reid, both participants in liberationist circles, each recalled how grassroots networks often suffered from hostility to questions of gender emancipation. If Bidegaín sustained, however, that Latin American feminist theology only began to be publicly sketched out later in the 1980s, Althaus-Reid (2000) claimed that even these theological discourses sometimes reproduced machista assumptions about sexuality and gender, reinforcing traditionalist concepts of complementarity rather than disrupting hierarchical gender constructions. Thus, at the turn of the twenty-first century, Althaus-Reid played a key role in taking liberation theology into new territory, advancing a radicalisation of such themes by developing a queer and ‘indecent’ theology. As regards this current volume, in keeping with its aims, it contributes to our understanding of feminist liberation theology in two ways. First, Natalie Gasparowicz returns to 1979 and the CELAM conference in Puebla to recover the history of the off-site event Mujeres para el Diálogo (Women for Dialogue), arguing that it constitutes a key moment in the development of new perspectives on gender and sexuality within liberation theology. Second, Ely Orrego Torres examines new ecofeminist theologies that have emerged from previous liberationist discourse, expanding its remit in order to respond to the contemporary climate crisis. Where Gasparowicz thus re-examines the praxis and agency of women in the late 1970s, Orrego Torres focuses instead on the praxis of contemporary social movements that have emerged from this tradition, notably the Chilean collective Con-spirando.

As previously noted, another feature of liberation theology’s evolution was the apparent engagement with discourses of human rights, which began to supplant ‘revolution’ as the key watchword for activist collectives and social movements across Latin America. At a basic level, this may be understood as a defensive move, responding to the massive violations of basic rights and the state violence against left-wing movements in the 1970s and 1980s. In much of Latin America, hopes of revolution faded as military and paramilitary forces persecuted those defined as enemies by the national security doctrine, and the global human rights movement came to be seen as a critical ally against such violence. Some have noted that liberation theology was initially suspicious of the human rights paradigm that emerged as a global force especially in the 1970s, understanding it as reflecting a bourgeois liberalism that sidelined the deeper questions of socio-economic inequalities and legitimising the structural violence that characterised Latin America (Engler 2000). After a period of avoidance and critique, however, liberation theologians from the late 1970s undertook a nuanced theological appropriation of human rights.

Once again, however, recent research has challenged an easy periodisation. In fact, various liberation theologians of the first generation, heavily influenced by the invocation of dignity and human rights in papal encyclicals Pacem en Terris (John XXIII, 1963) and Populorum Progressio (Paul VI 1967), affirmed that neocolonialism violated basic human rights (Lantigua 2020). It is certainly the case that influential figures remained suspicious of the Carter administration’s attempt to advance human rights as the moral core of a politics that lambasted violent dictatorships but reproduced neoliberalism. Analytically, many remained suspicious of the utopian claims to universality of such a discourse advanced from the Global North in a world marked by dependency, institutionalised violence and structural sin. However, many liberationists also employed human rights language and discourse as a weapon against the patchwork of regimes imposing state terror across Latin America, encountering strategic allies among certain international institutions and networks critical of repressive authoritarian regimes.

The assumption of some iteration of human rights politics was indeed a more general development among the wider left from the 1970s and 1980s. A qualitative shift from the radical transformation of society via supporting revolutionary capture of the state to the more defensive posture centring on protection of life and liberty from the state and other powerful actors could be identified among some liberationist sectors (Bradbury 2023, 194–220). And the denunciation of human rights violations would often assume a prophetic tone, somewhat in line with much previous liberationist discourse. But liberationists also attempted to make their own contribution to human rights, foregrounding the poor and collective rights, destabilising an apparently legalistic and apolitical paradigm. And one might even posit an interconnection between this critical politics of human rights and the move toward group-based struggles, such as those of race, ethnicity and gender. In other words, whereas integral affirmations of liberation as revolution and the poor as the authentic historical subject often enabled a folding and flattening out of identity-based oppressions, the critical alternative view of human rights generated an inevitable follow-up question: rights for whom?

One may also wonder whether the human rights paradigm had some connection to emerging ecological concerns. In recent years, after all, a range of political movements have raised the possibility of the rights of nature, even succeeding in enshrining them in law (if with relatively little practical success in halting ecological destruction). Indeed, it is particularly notable that it was the Inter-American Court of Human Rights which issued an opinion affirming the autonomous right to a healthy environment in 2017.⁵ Ecological issues, in fact, increasingly became a dimension of struggle in some liberationist circles and followed many of the same patterns of critique. The most well-known example of this in terms of intellectual production came from Leonardo Boff, who emphasised the fundamental link between human suffering and the destruction of the earth. Of course, the assumption of ecological concerns mounted a profound critique of dominant models of development. At the same time, Boff’s outline of the ‘planetary community’ extended the elimination of false dualisms – so prominent in Gutiérrez’s work, rejecting the clean separation of temporal and the spiritual planes – to condemn the anthropocentrism of modernity that rendered nature a mere resource for humanity. Boff affirmed that this had to be broadened to include all creation, in an analysis that not only condemned the ecological destruction driven by global accumulation but also advanced a non-anthropocentric Christology that linked the crucifixion of Jesus with the divinisation and liberation of all beings in the universe (1997, 110–14). While Boff may have been the most prominent proponent of this ecological liberation theology, there are striking comparisons with Ernesto Cardenal’s mystical poetry (and poetry in prose) written throughout his life which provided a vision of God’s love as the unifying driving force of all creation throughout the universe and the fount of human liberation (or salvation history, as Gutiérrez would name it) on earth.

This emerging ecological cosmology redefined the epistemological focus from the colonial periphery to a planetary perspective (and even interplanetary, in the case of Cardenal), bringing to mind the tension between contextualism and universality. It is true that Gutiérrez’s early writings reproduced certain elements of the utilitarianism that Boff denounced, when he affirmed that humankind ‘is destined to dominate the earth’ and ‘fulfills itself only by transforming nature and thus entering into relationships with other persons’ (Gutiérrez 1988, 165). Nevertheless, Gutiérrez’s emphasis on the intimate interrelation between, or rather unity of, creation and salvation, which collectively constitute God’s active role in history, was essentially more fully developed by liberationist engagements with ecology in theology (such as those developed by Boff) and mysticism (as in Cardenal). For Boff in the 1990s, liberation theology had now to support ‘a new covenant between human beings and other beings, a new gentleness toward what is created, and the fashioning of an ethic and mystique of kinship with the entire cosmic community’ (1997, 112). More recently, of course, Pope Francis thrust the environment to the centre of his public agenda, tying it closely to social and political justice and emphasising the disproportionate impact of environmental destruction on the poor in his encyclical Laudato Si’ (2015), and reaffirming its central importance to his papacy in the Apostolic Exhortation Laudate Deum (2023). This has strong theological associations too: even if the pope refrained from going as far as Boff in his rejection of anthropocentrism, his identification with Saint Francis of Assisi foregrounded a prioritisation of the vulnerable, a love of creation and an ‘integral ecology’, with which we might draw parallels with Gutiérrez, Boff and Cardenal (Francis 2015).⁶

A final observation about liberation theology’s evolution is the apparent move away from clericalism. The very methodology of the movement has frequently appeared to elevate (at least rhetorically) lay actors, emphasising the agency and self-liberation of the poor and even the evangelisation of the Church by the oppressed – a theme later restated in Francis’ Evangelii Gaudium (Francis 2013; Gutiérrez 1990). However, while recognising that liberationist Christianity has been much too varied a phenomenon to cast simple generalisations about its clerical-centric character, many of the major first-generation liberation theologians and key figures were members of the clergy, rooted in academic settings or reflecting on pastoral practice. The relationship between a social movement stressing grassroots mobilisation and proximity to a hierarchical Catholic Church has generated debates and disputes, with much of this focusing on popular religiosity and ecclesiological organisation. For some, the ecclesial base communities (Comunidades Eclesiales de Base, CEBs), an innovation originally introduced by the hierarchy to respond to shortages of priests but which in the 1970s became associated with liberation theology, were models for decentring clergymen and emphasising the self-organisation of lay Catholics (Hebblethwaite 1994).⁷ For his part, Boff took this to a radical conclusion when he located the true vitality of the Church as born of the faith of the people, highlighting the CEBs as authentically communitarian in contrast to the alienating hierarchical structures of the institutional Church – a move that ran directly counter to John Paul II’s 1979 address in Puebla (Boff 1984; John Paul II 1979). Boff’s formulation, identifying a communitarian Church in dialectical tension with a Church institution, may at first appear analogous to the notion popular in New Christendom ecclesiology of the corpus mysticum (the mystical body of Christ, held to be interior and invisible) in contradistinction to the juridical Church (Cavanaugh 1998, 205–52). Liberationist ecclesiological perceptions of the popular or communitarian Church, however, rejected the separation of spiritual and temporal planes, instead critiquing a politico-juridical institution tied up with the oppressive social structures of capitalist society and imperialism. The CEBs, for Boff, were the authentic communitarian counterpoint to a bureaucratising tendency.

In addition to an institutional-popular tension within liberationist ecclesiology, we should also raise liberation theology’s presence outside the Catholic Church as such. On the one hand, despite Catholicism’s dominance (albeit diminishing in recent years) over religious identity in Latin America, Protestant spaces and churches incubated similar and connected movements and discourses. Although the dominant histories and major milestones of liberation theology tend to contain the phenomenon as a Catholic development, a point which also relates to the clericalism associated with the movement as priests’ groups such as ONIS (Oficina Nacional de Información Social, Peru), Golconda (Colombia) and the MSTM (Argentina) served as major reference points for liberationist practices and mobilisation. Nonetheless, a significant number of the major theologians and figureheads were Protestants,⁸ and liberationist initiatives often found stronger support in the ecumenical world, for which reason in the 1980s and 1990s ecumenism became a central theme for liberation theology across the region. This was particularly promoted through initiatives such as the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT) established in 1976. Although more recently the explosion of charismatic evangelical and Pentecostal church communities has often been associated with reactionary politics, ecumenical movements have frequently been at the forefront of liberation theology’s new developments across such issues as human rights, gender and anti-racism.⁹

Recent years have also witnessed further appeals for liberation theology to transgress and supersede its earlier clericalism (raising questions over the Church’s relationship to the theology) and to advance the movement’s insights and dynamism outside of the religious sphere altogether. Such is the case, for instance, with Iván Petrella’s ‘liberation theology undercover’ (2017), which affirms that the movement’s ‘preferential option for the poor’ should be reproduced in public policy, planning and the wider professional sectors. For Petrella (2017, 332–3), liberation theology’s key insights include an epistemological shift – which anchored thinking to the reality of deprivation and marginalisation – and the identification of the body as the locus of salvation, reflected for instance in the renowned health practices of Paul Farmer. In this way, the critical reflection on praxis can be turned to challenge the ‘idolatries that need to be unmasked’ and, we might extrapolate, the reproduction of structural sin (Petrella 2017, 337). Such a rendering of the movement’s insights outside strictly religious communities chimes with the participation of many liberationists in the professionalisation of social action, especially from the 1980s, which generated a plethora of NGOs, associations and organisations (Catoggio 2016, 203–10). And it incites further reflection on the scope of the Church from a liberationist perspective, as well as liberation theology’s relation to both secularisation and the secular sphere.

This volume offers new insights and research that cut across and connect the themes discussed above. Running through the contribution is the fundamental question of praxis as an integral and necessary part of theology from the liberationist perspective. The book begins with Martha Zechmeister CJ’s reflections on the martyrdom of Ignacio Ellacuría and seven colleagues at the Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas, reaffirming the centrality of place and context in liberation theology. She affirms the liberationist call to attend to concrete experience, foregrounding the perspective of the victims and the oppressed as the fundamental subject of theology. Liberation theology’s insight, Zechmeister argues, is precisely this temporality, offering a starting point for praxis as situated action.

A variety of the contributions touch upon or confront directly ecclesiological themes and the clerical-centric character of liberation theology. Pablo Bradbury’s research on the Movement of Third World Priests in Argentina in the 1960s and 1970s analyses some of the early ecclesiological debates, centred on the institutional-popular tension later echoed in writings such as Boff’s Ecclesiogenesis. Bradbury argues that the notion of the Church as people of God, rooted in the conciliar document Lumen Gentium, became entangled in the vexed intra-ecclesial conflicts between liberationists and their critics. Motivated by a post-conciliar atmosphere of innovation, the legitimising force of the 1967 ‘Manifesto of Third World Bishops’ that advocated a form of socialism and popular mobilisation against an authoritarian dictatorship girded by the ecclesial leadership, priests experimenting with participatory pastoral praxis and politicised discourses clashed with traditionalist sectors. Borrowing analytical tools from social movement theory and anthropology, Bradbury claims that such disputes were understood in terms of containment within or transgression of an institutional Church, and they were visualised partly in terms of a negotiation between horizontalism and verticalism. Within this framework, the bitter disagreements in the mid-1970s within the MSTM over celibacy and the acceptance of married priests in the movement can be better comprehended as fundamentally ecclesiological and rooted to some extent in structurally determined stances towards apostolic obedience.

Rich in thick description, Patrick O’Hare observes similar tensions between hierarchies and social cleavages in his ethnographic account of pastoral and religious-inspired social work in contemporary Uruguay. Exploring the praxis of acompañamiento – rooted in the preferential option for the poor – in the context of the COVIFU (Cooperativa de Vivienda de Familias Unidas) housing cooperative, O’Hare shows how ecclesial spaces shaped by liberation theology can mediate between upper and lower classes. Although frequently cast as a manifestation of revolutionary politics within Christian spaces, liberation theology contained little consensus over the precise social meaning of the preferential option for the poor – and was often ambivalent about an unqualified attachment to social revolution and class politics. O’Hare’s chapter speaks to a manifestation of the movement arguably more in tune with a form of class reconciliation associated with much of Catholic Social Doctrine. He pays close attention to the influence of Padre Cacho, noting how such ecclesial spaces provide affluent Uruguayans a form of access to the poor and a channel to enact charitable practice. However, the acompañamiento of the priests and nuns of the Church community manifests here not as conventional charity but a praxis imbued with an integral commitment to share the life of the marginalised, mixed with popular education and participatory democratic themes. The ecclesial actors in this way both act out the liberationist principles of living with and empowering the poor while acting as a bridge to enable cross-class engagement.

Such contributions capture attempts by ecclesial actors informed by liberation theology to overcome what they understand as alienating frameworks and traditionalist structures. In a similar way, Juan Mario Díaz-Arévalo’s essential chapter emphasises the role that nascent liberation theology in the 1960s played in attempts to move beyond functionalist social science. Díaz-Arévalo teases out the cross-fertilisation of ideas and forms of practices between the influential ‘guerrilla-priest’ Camilo Torres and the prominent (and Presbyterian) sociologist Orlando Fals Borda – representing, respectively, the belligerent and civic-resistance intellectual tendencies of the origins of Participatory Action Research (PAR). Díaz-Arévalo’s close examination of Fals Borda’s break with functionalist social research centres on ‘subversion’ as a framework of social analysis, with Torres occupying the role of path-breaking archetype of resistance to social injustice that reveals the contradictions within a social order and sheds light on new utopian values. In doing this, Díaz-Arévalo captures one aspect of liberation theology’s wider impact in Latin America, which we can see echoed in Petrella’s appeal to undercover theology, as the specific participatory and immersive form of commitment to the poor is extended beyond the religious sphere. Indeed, the chapter reveals how the practical-theoretical elements of liberation theology – insertion into the conflictive social process, the objective to facilitate communal self-empowerment and the commitment to the struggle of the oppressed – shaped Fals Borda’s PAR. As such, the well-trodden debates over the role of the social sciences in liberation theology are reversed, demonstrating the mutual impact of liberation theology in the social sciences.

In a similar vein, Fernando Luis Lara also emphasises the wider impact of liberation theology’s participatory nucleus through an analysis of architectural practices developed across Latin America. Drawing on decolonial literature examining the ontological effects of the colonisation of the Americas, Luis Lara emphasises that the emergence of abstraction as an architectural approach tacks closely to the conquest. Nonetheless, his central provocation is that Latin American architectural insights in recent decades have subverted such methods of abstraction, reclaiming a relational approach inspired by liberationist hermeneutics. Parallel to developments in Anglo-architectural scholarship in the 1950s and 1960s focusing on self-help, in Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico and other parts of the continent a new generation of architects emerged with a more participatory focus. Luis Lara suggests that the architectural models of relational engagement in opposition to abstraction share common roots with the participatory and contextual emphases of liberation theology, both of which decentre the dominant colonial subject. In doing so, following Enrique Dussel and other thinkers on the coloniality of power, he refocuses our attention on liberation theology’s relationship with the ontology and epistemology of the longer process of colonisation, in addition to placing the movement within a wider shift in praxis that cuts across both religious and secular spheres.

Díaz-Arévalo’s and Luis Lara’s contributions read together thus present an interesting counterpoint to Petrella’s ‘liberation theology undercover’. It is notable in this regard that Petrella directly discusses architecture as one sphere of intellectual and practical development that would benefit from liberationist insights. Notable, too, is the fact that Petrella’s article is rather more pedagogical than historical and takes a contemporary architectural organisation in Rwanda that set out ‘to design and build a hospital based on liberation theology’s principles’ as case study. According to Petrella, this organisation recognised ‘that a finished hospital, beautifully designed, that contributes to the dignity of the patient, can be empowering. But the process of building the hospital, the involvement of the community, its history and skills, also dignifies and empowers’ (Petrella 2017, 334). Nonetheless, his article is composed with a certain naivety, citing little of the extensive literature on participatory co-design and vernacular architecture, especially that developed over the course of the twentieth century in Latin America. It is precisely this absence which Luis Lara addresses, thus suggesting (as Díaz-Arévalo also does) that the application of liberation theology’s insights in the social sciences and professional vocations may not merely be a possible project for the future but rather that its epistemological break was, from the beginning, something enacted in dialogue with intellectuals, students, popular movements and local communities across Latin American society, and that this history must be recovered.

Whereas Díaz-Arévalo and Luis Lara look at the reverberations of liberation theology’s insights in social science and the arts, Anna Grimaldi revisits the ambivalent relationship between the theological movement and the international human rights movement. Challenging previous periodisations of liberationist engagements with Western human rights that locate a positive assumption of human rights later in the 1970s, Grimaldi highlights an earlier dialogue located on a transnational plane in the 1960s in the context of Brazil’s authoritarian military dictatorship. She posits a reciprocal exchange shaped by structural and contingent factors: a global Catholic network with the Young Christian Workers (Jenunesse Ouvriere Chretiènne, JOC) in Europe as its pivot; the ‘incidental exile’ of liberation theology, as Brazilians fleeing persecution brought with them nascent liberationist ideas; and the resonance that certain high-profile figures, particularly Dom Hélder Câmara, attained in Western European media. What emerges here is a dialectical relationship: from Brazil, the critical stance toward a global economy marked by capitalist dependency and the identification of Christ with the oppressed and suffering of the existing world; and, from Europe, the human rights paradigm that offered an internationally recognised lexicon, opened access to institutions and offered a global audience. The result was an early example of a framework of human rights not reduced to individual rights but which incorporated values of solidarity and equality and, partly through shining a spotlight on the plight of Indigenous populations, recognised the coloniality of power.

If Grimaldi’s account forces us to rethink liberation theology’s complex relationship with human rights, Natalie Gasparowicz revises our understanding of the feminist challenge, identifying the little-studied Catholic Women’s Conference running parallel to the CELAM meeting in 1979 as a turning point for diverging feminist liberation theologies. She analyses materials produced by Mujeres para el Diálogo (MPD) that placed women as a historical subject at the centre of struggles for liberation, even while refraining from explicit identification with feminism. Perhaps the most contentious issue here was that of reproductive rights, particularly the birth control pill and abortion, which confronted the liberationist focus on the body and material suffering. Here, Gasparowicz perceives a tension between, on the one hand, family planning programmes as a form of population control imposed on dependent regions that do not address the root causes of gendered dynamics of poverty and, on the other, birth control methods as a powerful tool that enable women to control their own bodies. Nonetheless, her close reading of a key MPD pamphlet circulated among CELAM’s participants in Puebla notes that the question of abortion was left untouched, and claims that the issue is defined implicitly ‘more as a tragedy rather than a right’. The question of abortion occupied highly contentious terrain, a cornerstone for the feminist movement more widely but anathema to the Catholic Church. The MPD meeting at Puebla may have witnessed differing opinions and the leading figures may have tread carefully to avoid a major confrontation. Nonetheless, Gasparowicz identifies the event as formative, investing an emergent Christian feminism with a political character providing a launchpad for elaborations that increasingly enshrined contraceptive and abortion rights as pillars of liberation.

While Gasparowicz examines a formative historical experience for feminist liberation theology, Ely Orrego Torres’s chapter picks up more recent developments in ecofeminism, interrogating its potential to reformulate political theology and to challenge anthropocentrism and androcentrism. Orrego Torres affirms that the Schmittian concept of political theology, that all modern conceptions of the state are secularised theological ideas, does not merely reduce theology to dominance and violence but also imbues it with possibilities of redemption and liberation. Thus, in similar ways to liberation theology, ecofeminist theology is held to disrupt and subvert the notion of the sovereign and concepts of authority and hierarchy (both social hierarchies and those between humans and non-humans). In contrast to Gasparowicz, however, Orrego Torres is concerned with tracing the ways in which this new ecofeminist theology emerged yet also critiqued and diverged from the liberation theology tradition, whose preference for the poor is seen as purely socio-economic. Ecofeminist theology, she argues, following Ivone Gebara and others, centres on the ways in which women and nature constitute the subjects of subjugation in the vision beginning in Genesis. This is not merely abstract theorising, as Orrego Torres explores the influential example of Con-spirando, a prefigurative movement that seeks to subvert hierarchical and patriarchal forms, re-signifying Christian rites with reference to ecological cycles.

Ending with this chapter presents a challenge to the ‘pluralisation’ narrative of David Tombs and Mario I. Aguilar. Are developments such as ecofeminist theologies elaborations of a liberation theological root or do they represent something apart? Do the later developments that are explored in this volume represent an extension of the original core of liberation theology, a critical reflection on praxis and an option for the oppressed, or are they sufficiently distinct to be considered separate phenomena? How much differentiation can we allow within liberation theology without the term losing its meaning? Certainly, a number of key themes run through the book’s contributions, of which three are central. First, the relationship between praxis or situated realities – the specific forms of violence, social organisation and political contingencies – and theological, theoretical or artistic production. Second, the destabilisation of hierarchies, whether that be in terms of ecclesial structure, between the secular and the spiritual, between classes and gender, or between the human and the non-human. And finally, the appeal to participatory forms and the self-realisation of liberation of the oppressed, attempting to move beyond paradigms of passivity and objectivity, whether in terms of agency manifests in terms of gender, class, community, social research or architectural production. With these in mind, themes present even in the nascent stages of the movement, we can pose the question as to whether liberation theology is as it was in the beginning. Thus, with perfect circularity, our book closes as it began with a theological reflection on martyrdom in Latin America. In this instance, and as previously intimated, Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo responds to Zechmeister’s challenge to produce theology in the footsteps of the liberationist martyrs of the past, by reflecting theologically on the martyrdom of environmental and human rights defenders of the present. O’Donnell Gandolfo’s insistence ‘that martyrdom in Latin America was not and is not a thing of the past, but rather a very real and present experience’ reminds us that, its objectives as yet unrealised, liberation theology remains as vital for society, as it is dangerous for those committed to its praxis, as it ever was in Latin America.