Mario Aguilar is Professor of Religion and Politics at the University of St Andrews. There are pages of his book that light up with the excitement of his subject. There is the poetry of the names of the indigenous peoples of Chiapas in his discussion of Bishop Samuel Ruíz:
Tzotzil, Tzelbal, Tojolabal, Chol, Mam, Zoque, Mixe, Kakchiquel, Lacandon. Another strength of the book is that it casts its net wider than academics and includes practitioners of liberation theology, that is prophetpastors: Archbishop Oscar Romero, Bishop Ruíz, Bishop Pedro Casaldáliga. There are also non-Catholics: José Miguez Bonino and Elsa Támez, and an agnostic, Iván Petrella. Ignacio Ellacuría is known as one of the six Jesuit martyrs of El Salvador, but to have his intellectual development analysed is valuable. And Aguilar naturally discusses key figures from the earliest days of this tradition: Gustavo Gutiérrez and Jon Sobrino, and Leonardo Boff.
The key concern of this work is to relate Latin American liberation theology to its social and political context, from the dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s to the economic dictatorship of the age of globalisation, ‘from the military dictatorships to the macrodictatorship of the neoliberal empire,’ as Pedro Casaldáliga puts it. A second discussion is whether liberation theology still exists, and the relation between the original emphasis on social and economic liberation and ‘theologies of inculturation, feminist and queer theologies, ecological theologies’. Aguilar plumps for pluralism – ‘liberation theologies’ – within a tradition.
Later writers ‘continue using the methodologies of Gutiérrez or Sobrino to address new injustices… Liberation theology is not dead; it has diversified to include the suffering people of God, located in many churches, many mosques and many secular spaces.’ The present two volumes are due to be completed by a third, so any assessment is bound to be provisional, but some questions are clear. Perhaps the main one is what this book sets out to do, and who it is aimed at.
The author describes it as academic, and certainly the volume of references in Spanish and Portuguese points to very serious students. More significant is Aguilar’s use of Karl Mannheim’s concept of social generations to structure his analysis. While he stresses that this is not a strictly one-directional chronological concept – younger thinkers can influence older – it doesn’t fit too easily the fact that Gutiérrez and Sobrino have continued in theological activity throughout the period under discussion. Aguilar is also forced to admit that Casaldáliga ‘represents continuity’, although he wants him to represent the ‘new’ issue of ecology.
Unfortunately, at the same time as defending the rainforest, Casaldáliga also continues to defend the Cuban regime, a decidedly ‘old’ position. For this reader, at least, this analytical framework felt like a straitjacket. I was also not convinced by the argument that Samuel Ruíz’s ‘support for civil society was different from other…responses throughout Latin America’: The tradition of the Brazilian Church has many examples of this, from Hélder Câmara to Paulo Evaristo Arns. The discussion of the place of theology in the university is interesting, but occasionally degenerates into agonising about the relation of middleclass academics to the political process, and especially to the poor. This is rescued to some extent by Aguilar’s presentation of his own position, and his ventures into theology, but it leaves the reader puzzled about what sort of book this is.
The book reflects the author’s Chilean origins, good on Chile, a sense of less familiarity with Brazil. While the basic historical background is well presented, in some cases the argument relies more on theory than on historical research, most notably in the case of the chapter on the Jesuits, which depends on an argument about the relationship between the Spiritual Exercises and the option for the poor, but doesn’t provide evidence for Aguilar’s claim that the Jesuits were the driving force of liberation theology and the option for the poor throughout Latin America. In Central America this is beyond doubt, there was Segundo in Uruguay, but in Brazil, for example, it is far from clear.
These two volumes suffer from lamentable editing and proof-reading. It may be too much to expect a publisher to smooth out an author’s Hispanic and academic style, but it is unforgivable for Segundo to turn into Sobrino in the same paragraph (vol. II, p. 73), or for us to be faced with ‘the sole of their daily life’ (vol. II, p. 144). Let us hope that the final volume receives more TLC.
Francis McDonagh is Programme Manager for the Andes Region for the Catholic development agency, CAFOD. He has covered events in the Latin American Church as a journalist for over 20 years, and has translated works by Oscar Romero, Jon Sobrino and Pedro Casaldáliga.
Review of The History and Politics of Latin American Theology by Mario Aguilar, SCM Press (London), vol. I, 224 pages, 2007, ISBN: 9780334040231; vol. II, 256 pages, 2008, ISBN: 9780334041603, £22.99 each