you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]alannato 5 points6 points


Liberation theology is awesome! I never thought I would read about it on reddit. Upvote!

Liberation theology arose as a response to several phenomena. The Catholic Church in general began to take a turn toward more openness to social change and social analysis at the Second Vatican Council in 1962. The leaders of the council committed themselves to being attuned to "the signs of the times," quite revolutionary for a church that had locked itself in a box of rather irrelevant denial since the Enlightenment. After the council, the bishops of Latin America held a conference in Medellín, Colombia, where they attempted to apply the insights from the council to their own historical contexts. In Latin America, the signs of the times included large-scale poverty and repression by the state. Liberation theology arose out of this mentality, as young priests spread throughout Latin America, countering the long-held belief that poverty was the will of God with the image of the God of the Exodus, who delivers his people from slavery and oppression. While they were not necessarily the ones encouraging revolution from the start, they were encouraging peasants to organize into cooperatives, and that in itself was revolutionary. These activities cost many of them their lives. Rutilio Grande, Oscar Romero, Ignacio Ellacuria, Segundo Montes, Ignacio Martín-Baró to name a very few. While liberation theology employs Marxist social analysis, it is not in itself Marxist.