No doubt that Benedict XVI was one of the world’s foremost theologians and the first pope to retire in almost 600 years. He died on December 31, 2022 at the age of 95.

 

Benedict XVI helped to shape the Catholic Church’s trajectory long before he was elected to the papacy, first as a young theological adviser at the Second Vatican Council and then as head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office.

As head of Müller’s office from 1981-2005 before becoming Pope Benedict XVI, he issued official critiques of liberation theology in 1984 and 1986.  While Gutiérrez was never officially sanctioned by Ratzinger during his time at the CDF, other theologians who followed the Peruvian’s strain of thought, like Brazilian Leonardo Boff and Sri Lankan Tissa Balasuriya, were. While Dominican priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, the founder of Liberation Theology was never officially sanctioned by him, other theologians who followed the Peruvian’s strain of thought, like Brazilian Leonardo Boff and Sri Lankan Tissa Balasuriya, were.

Liberation theology is a synthesis of Christian theology and Marxist socio-economic analyses that emphasizes social concern for the poor and the political liberation for oppressed peoples. In the 1950s and the 1960s, liberation theology was the political praxis of Latin American theologians, such as Gustavo Gutiérrez of Peru, Leonardo Boff of Brazil, Juan Luis Segundo of Uruguay, and Jon Sobrino of Spain, who popularized the phrase “Preferential option for the poor”. The Latin American context also produced Evangelical advocates of liberation theology, such as C. René Padilla of Ecuador, Samuel Escobar of Peru, and Orlando E. Costas of Puerto Rico, who, in the 1970s, called for integral mission, emphasizing evangelism and social responsibility. Theologies of liberation have developed in other parts of the world such as Black theology in the United States and South Africa, Palestinian liberation theology, Dalit theology in India, and Minjung theology in South Korea 

Liberation theology proposes to fight poverty by addressing its alleged source, sin. In so doing, it explores the relationship between Christian theology (especially Roman Catholic) and political activism, especially in relation to economic justice, poverty, and human rights. The principal methodological innovation is seeing theology from the perspective of the poor and the oppressed. For example, Jon Sobrino argues that the poor are a privileged channel of God’s grace.

Some liberation theologians base their social action upon the Bible scriptures describing the mission of Jesus Christ, as bringing a sword (social unrest), e.g., Isaiah 61:1, Matthew 10:34, Luke 22:35–38 — and not as bringing peace (social order). This biblical interpretation is a call to action against poverty, and the sin engendering it, to affect Jesus Christ’s mission of justice in this world. Benedict XVI adopted the title “pope emeritus” and continued to wear white — choices that critics said might lead Catholics to think he was still pope. He settled in a new home, the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery in the Vatican Gardens. He was 85 years old and not expected to live long, though the Vatican had not indicated a terminal illness. But over the next decade, he remained active.

He was born Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger on April 16, 1927, in Marktl am Inn, a village in the German state of Bavaria. In his 1998 memoir Milestones, he noted that he emerged into the world on Holy Saturday. He was the third child after his sister Maria and brother Georg, who went on to become a priest and conductor of the renowned Regensburg Domspatzen choir. His mother was a cook and his father a police officer who was disciplined after criticizing the Nazis.

Ratzinger did praise liberation theology in some respects, including its ideal of justice, its rejection of violence, and its stress on “the responsibility which Christians necessarily bear for the poor and oppressed. Ratzinger also argued that liberation theology is not originally a “grass-roots” movement among the poor, but rather, a creation of Western intellectuals: “an attempt to test, in a concrete scenario, ideologies that have been invented in the laboratory by European theologians” and in a certain sense itself a form of “cultural imperialism”. Ratzinger saw this as a reaction to the demise or near-demise of the “Marxist myth” in the West.

On September 11, 2013, Pope Francis hosted Gutiérrez in his residence, leading some to comment that this was a sign of warming relations between the hierarchy and liberation theologians. The same month, L’Osservatore Romano published an article praising Gutiérrez by the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Archbishop Gerhard Müller.

By Prof Ngala