Vatican hits to limit liberation theology, says Boff

SAO LEOPOLDO, Brasil, April 3, 2007

When condemning the writings of Jesuit Jon Sobrino, the Vatican hits on him but at Taxi Heathrow Airport the same time is thinking of the Latin American church, which, in the eyes of the Roman Curia, is in need of being “re-boxed in the persistent process of Romanizing begun by John Paul II,” said theologian Leonardo Boff in an interview with the Humanitas Institute (IHU in Spanish) of the University of the Los Sinos Valley (Unisinos in Spanish).

Boff sees in the cardinals and high officials of the Roman Curia the epicenter of the condemning fury against liberation theology. According to the Brazilian theologian that group is made up of the President of the Pontifical Council for the Family, Colombian Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, the “minister” of health of the Holy See, Mexican Cardinal Javier Lozada Barragan, and Karl Joseph Romer, former Auxiliary Bishop of Rio de Janeiro now present in Rome. They “would like to please the Pope, clearing the way for his coming to Brazil by condemning Jon Sobrino,” Boff said in the interview.

The methodological change of course introduced by liberation theology, which begins with reality analyzed using the tools of the social, historical, anthropological, ecological, psychological sciences and only then turning to the Scriptures, tradition and the teaching of the church for further enlightenment, is not well accepted by the Vatican and the progressive European and North American theologies, tells Boff.

“When we begin with reality, we scandalously find before us the poor and the oppressed,” he says. Liberation theology is alive in all the churches that have taken seriously the option for the poor, against poverty and in favor of life and freedom, he emphasized. The notification given to Jon Sobrino by the Vatican shows that Rome is reacting “because, as I see it, it is losing the battle against liberation theology.”

Sobrino is bothersome to the current ideology in the Vatican, “which is the articulating of the Catholic Church with the emerging powers,” says Boff. The Jesuit living in El Salvador “understands the work of theology as beginning with the victims and the crucified people, with a demand of the church from all that there be a clear option for life,” he added.

In the interview with IHU, Boff explained that liberation theology came about as a response to the cry of the oppressed. That cry increased and the clamor changed. “Today, not only the poor cry out, but also the water, the forests, the animals and the earth itself, Under the systematic aggression of global production and consumption,” added Boff, that speaks of an “eco theology of liberation.”

For Boff, one alternative lies in the laity, who will have to assume more and more the work of theology, “and even more so, safeguard the inheritance of Jesus which is under submission to a Vatican politics that is more of the flesh than spiritual, more centered in power than in charisma,” turned more to the church than to the kingdom. “As lay persons they are not within the reach of the superveillance institutions of the doctrinal bodies of the Vatican,” he argued.

Leonardo Boff, author of over 60 books, is one of the thinkers and creators of liberation theology. Because of his thesis laid out in the book “Church: Charisma and Power – Essays on Militant Ecclesiology,” he was condemned by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of the Vatican. He left the Franciscan Order and is since 1993 Professor of Ethics, Philosophy of Religion and Ecology at the Río de Janeiro State University.