To find Christ we must join the poor and take up their cause. This is not the assertion of radical theologians, but the official teaching of the Latin American Catholic bishops.
The classical expression of this comes from the 1979 general conference of Latin American bishops in Puebla: * ‘We affirm the need for conversion on the part of the whole Church to a preferential option for the poor, an option aimed at their integral liberation’ (Puebla 1134) * ‘The evangelical commitment of the Church, like that of Christ, should be a commitment to those most in need’ (Puebla 1141) * ‘The poor challenge the Church constantly, summoning it to conversion’ (Puebla, 1147) And, at the latest in the series of these general conferences, at Aparecida, Brazil, in May 2007, Pope Benedict XVI, to the surprise of many, declared: ‘The preferential option for the poor is implicit in Christological faith in the God who became poor for our sake, to enrich us by his poverty (2 Cor 8.9).’ The Pope’s statement came as a surprise because, in his previous role as the Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog, the then Cardinal Ratzinger had issued a highly critical assessment of liberation theology. Even in Latin America, the ‘preferential option for the poor’ has been controversial, and at the Puebla conference liberation theologians were banned from the conference venue, and bishops who wanted to consult them had to meet them unofficially off-site. Episcopal appointments under Pope John Paul II favoured conservatives, and experiments such as programmes to have seminarians live in parish communities during their training were closed down.
Liberation theology nevertheless continued, attempting to maintain its dual character as faith reflection on the experience of poverty and an academic discipline. In some versions, it attempted to reshape the whole of theology. In particular, some theologians attempted to write christologies in a liberationist mode. The best known of these are perhaps, Jon Sobrino, the Basque-born Jesuit who has worked in El Salvador since 1957, and the Brazilian Leonardo Boff.1 Christology is also at the centre of a controversy that broke out unexpectedly in Brazil after the Aparecida conference. Clodovis Boff, a Servite priest highly regarded for his work on methodology in liberation theology, attacked liberation theologians in general for putting the poor in the place of God and turning the Church into an NGO. Spice was added to this debate when Clodovis’ brother Leonardo publicly attacked him. Leonardo, a better known liberation theologian, was banned by the Vatican from making public statements after his 1984 book Church, Charism and Power applied the principles of liberation theology to the decision-making structure of the Roman Catholic Church. In 1992 Leonardo left the Franciscan order and the priesthood and, as he says, now shares his life with a human rights campaigner, Marcia Maria Monteiro de Miranda, and her six children; he still contributes to debates on liberation theology.
What particularly angered Leonardo was that Clodovis had singled out Jon Sobrino for criticism. Six of Sobrino’s Jesuit community were murdered by the Salvadorean military in 1989: had not Sobrino been abroad, he would have shared their fate. Not only had Clodovis criticised a theologian who was risking his life, but he had even endorsed a Vatican criticism of Sobrino, made in 2006, when the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had accused him of substituting ‘the Church of the poor’ for ‘the apostolic faith transmitted through the Church’.
Christ,the Poor and Humanity Francis McDonagh writes about the quarrel between two brothers, theologians Leonardo and Clodovis Boff, about where Christ is to be found.
Leonardo Boff Clodovis Boff Clodovis Boff’s position, a retreat from his previous insistence on the political implications of faith, seems to have much to do with a need to distinguish himself from his brother’s faith journey, but his dissection of the argument usefully identifies some of the issues involved, and prompted a collective reply from a group of Brazilian liberation theologians. Clodovis eventually answered his critics in October 2008.2 Sobrino, meanwhile, has continued to develop a radical version of his thesis that solidarity with the poor is essential for knowledge of Christ and therefore for salvation. He has recently summed up his view in the phrase extra pauperes nulla salus, ‘no salvation apart from the poor’,3 of course a play on the famous dictum extra ecclesiam nulla salus, once used to imply that those not in communion with Rome had reason to fear for their eternal destiny.
In this article I am not going to discuss the argument that ‘the Church has become an NGO’. Whatever validity it may have, Clodovis’ Brazilian respondents rightly point out that misuse of theology for political campaigning doesn’t mean that the theology is wrong, nor has it historically been the monopoly of the Left.
More central issues that emerge in this discussion include the following: * It is accepted, including by Pope Benedict, that faith in Christ leads to concern for the poor, but does concern for the poor lead to Christ? * Ultimately, what does it mean to say that in Christ God became human? * Has modern Catholic theology, notably that underpinning the Second Vatican Council (196265), become ‘a hermeneutic of human existence’ and therefore not a reflection on Christian revelation?
On the first point, Clodovis starts off with some fun: ‘Why the devil do Christians discover Christ in the poor and not Marxists and other philanthropists? The poor don’t have “Christ” written on their foreheads, as the liberation theologians imagine.’ He suggests that to believe that commitment to the poor leads to Christ requires a theory of ‘anonymous Christians’ such as that associated with Karl Rahner, which few people today find satisfactory. He then makes the point that finding Christ in the poor depends on faith, apparently because of the degrading quality of the life of the poor: ‘Any pastoral worker knows from experience that work with the poor is so challenging that it breaks down or loses its quality if it is not supported by a spirituality well nourished from the sources of the Word and prayer, since it is only this that makes the poor transparent to reveal Christ, who is already present in them, if anonymously.’ There is general agreement that the reason the poor are important for Christians is not because they are good.
Sobrino even says that the main problem for the option for the poor is the presence of evil among the poor, and that it is important not to idealise them. On the other hand, he argues that there are important values among the poor, such as solidarity and creativity, that are often ignored. Sobrino’s most important argument, however, is that the poor reveal what is wrong with the world as it is: ‘our civilisation is very sick’. Drawing on the arguments of his martyred friend Ignacio Ellacuría, Sobrino contrasts capital-civilisation or wealth-civilisation, which ‘has offered no adequate solution to the basic needs lacked by most people on this planet, nor has it accorded them human fellowship’, with a work-civilisation or poverty-civilisation whose ‘guiding principle is the universal satisfaction of basic needs and it sees the growth of shared solidarity as fundamental to the making of humanity’ (pp 17-18).
Christ and the Poor Clodovis takes the liberation theologians to task for being sloppy in describing Christ’s relationship with the poor: ‘Christ’s close relationship with the poor is not directly because of his poverty, but first because of his humanity.
Faith in the incarnation does not, strictly, say that Christ became poor, but that he became human: et homo factus est.
For one who was ‘in the form of God’ the greatest kenosis is to become ‘human flesh’, even if, hypothetically, as Caesar.
Between God and Caesar there is a greater difference (a qualitative one) than between Caesar and a poor person (a difference merely of degree).’ Clodovis is no doubt right in interpreting Philippians in this way, but the glaring defect in this representation of Christ is how it ignores what may be the one piece of historical knowledge we have about Jesus, that he ‘suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried’, and the social and political implications of this fact.
The great creative achievement of liberation theology has been to rescue Jesus’ ‘real presence’ from that of the ‘prisoner in the tabernacle’ and give him back his historical context in a form relevant to our own day, thus rescuing him also from the tomes of historical criticism. Sobrino even speculates about whether Christ could have learned from the poor of his day.
Especially in his reply to his critics in October 2008, Clodovis insists that theology must be based on faith, specifically on confessing that ‘Jesus is Lord’, which he implies that liberation theologians do, if at all, only formally. The repeated insistence on this point gives this part of his argument an oddly un-Catholic air, more in the style of a Pentecostal preacher. It also laid him open to a sharp rebuke from another Brazil-based theologian, José Comblin. Having described this assumption about the faith of liberation theologians as ‘arrogant’, Comblin says: ‘Clodovis wants to stress that the basis of theology is professing, “Christ is Lord.” I think all theologians know this and no-one will dispute it. But the problem is a different one. The problem is who is saying, “Christ is Lord,” where and when. 11 sofia 91 March 2009 Ultimately, what does it mean to say that in Christ God became human? ‘General Videla in Argentina used to say, “Christ is Lord.” In Chile Pinochet used to say, “Christ is Lord.” Was that faith or blasphemy? The Latin American elite that persecuted the poor for 500 years always used to proclaim, “Christ is Lord.” Was that an act of faith? Is it an act of faith today? This is our problem… The powerful proclaim, “Christ is Lord,” but their lives say, “I am the Lord!” Paul’s cry, “Christ is Lord,” is a protest against all “Lords”, a condemnation of oppression, a challenge to all those think they are Lords. It is a rejection of all oppressive powers.
There is only one Lord! ‘The role of theology is not to look for the right words to express faith but to determine what it is really to live faith.’ 4 Comblin takes the argument back to the distinction between orthodoxy and ‘orthopraxy’, the point made trenchantly in 1 John 4:20: ‘Those who say “I love God,” and hate their brothers and sisters, are liars.’ Of course, Clodovis defends the option for the poor, but his concern is that unless it is guided by genuine faith it will defraud the poor, and become a vessel to be filled by specious ideologies. He accuses liberation theology of neglecting the non-material needs of the poor: ‘The liberation people today (and always) most long for is liberation from absurdity.’ This matches his approval of the conclusions of the Latin American bishops at Aparecida, where the option for the poor was vindicated, but in perhaps a more institutionalised and tamed version, more charity than solidarity. In contrast, Sobrino insists that the non-poor have things to receive from the poor, and in particular that ‘from the standpoint of the poor we come to know Christ better’.5 Christianity and Humanism One element of Clodovis’ thesis is that liberation theology is heavily influenced by the ‘modernism’ condemned in the Catholic Church by Pope Pius X in 1907, which, however, he says, came back and infiltrated the Church, triumphing at the Second Vatican Council. It was, he says, a ‘Copernican revolution’. ‘Theology was modernised, becoming anthropological: human beings as the sun and God their satellite. Omnia ad maiorem hominis gloriam, etiam Deus: All to the greater glory of man, God included.’ Perhaps not surprisingly, Sobrino has a radically different position. He recalls the phrase of the Dutch Dominican theologian Edward Schillebeeckx, also in the context of Vatican II: extra mundum nulla salus, ‘no salvation outside the world’. Schillebeeckx explained: ‘The world and human history, in which God wants to bring about salvation, are the foundations of faith’s whole reality: we are saved or lost, first and foremost, in the world.’ Sobrino comments: ‘That new formula avoids the rigorist interpretation’s danger of exclusivism: not just the Church, but also the world is the setting for salvation. It also avoids the danger of reductionism: salvation is not only religious, but it also has a historical and social dimension.’6 But embracing the world, the secular, history as the field of God’s saving action, was not the attitude of a few radical theologians in the 1960s; it was the central impulse of the Second Vatican Council. From Pope John XXIII’s eloquent gesture of throwing open the windows closed to the world by the Counter-Reformation there is a direct line to the opening declaration of the Council document on the Church in the modern world, ‘The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the people of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts.’ There was opposition to this at the Council, not least from the Curia, but John’s successor, Paul VI, reaffirmed the change of attitude in his closing address to the Council: ‘It might be said that all this and everything else we might say about the human values of the council have diverted the attention of the Church in council to the trend of modern culture, centred on humanity. We would say not diverted but rather directed.’ Latin American liberation theologians see their theology, also ‘centred on humanity’, as an application of the Second Vatican Council to their continent. In very different times, marked by the restoration of the Tridentine mass and the rehabilitation of a bishop excommunicated for rejecting Vatican II, who also denies the Holocaust,7 the humanity of the Church and its theology is once more a site of struggle. 1 For example, Jon Sobrino, Christology at the Crossroads (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books and London: SCM Press, 1978), Jesus in Latin America (Maryknoll, NY:
Orbis Books, 1987), Jesus the Liberator (Maryknoll, NY:
Orbis Books, 1993, and London: Burns & Oates, 1994); Leonardo Boff, Jesus Christ Liberator, Maryknoll, NY:
Orbis Books, and London: SPCK, 1974). 2 See Francis McDonagh, ‘The Struggle Continues – in the Family’, The Tablet, 3 January 2009. 3 See Jon Sobrino, The Eye of the Needle, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2008. 4 José Comblin, ‘As estranhas acusações de Clodovis Boff’ www.adital.com.br, December 2008. 5 Sobrino, Jesus the Liberator, p. 35. 6 Sobrino, Eye of the Needle, p. 75. 7 ‘Pope readmits Holocaust-denying priest to the church’, Independent, 25 January 2009.
Francis McDonagh writes on LatinAmerica for TheTablet.
He is the author of Dom Hélder Câmara: SelectedWritings, to be published by Orbis Books later this year.
The reason the poor are important for Christians is not because they are good.