Yale history professor Greg Grandin has written a long essay for The New York Review of Books (“The Education of Pope Leo XIV”) about how Leo’s experiences in Peru, especially battles over Liberation Theology, have shaped his skeptical attitude toward the Church’s more “traditionalist” forces, as well as toward U.S. foreign policy. In that light, Grandin understands Leo to be following in Pope Francis’s footsteps, moving the “Church away from culture-war preoccupations with sex and abortion and toward the defense of the poor, the prisoner, the migrant, the executed, the abused and battered, the sick.” There is truth in that formulation, but it is also incomplete.
Grandin is a distinguished expert on Latin America history. He is well acquainted with the malign role the United States has played in supporting authoritarian movements and governments in the region. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (2019). His NYRB essay focuses on the emergence of Liberation Theology in the 1970s and ’80s and the Vatican’s criticism and suppression of that Marxist-influenced religious and political philosophy under Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Grandin understands Leo to have carved out a middle course between Liberation Theology’s most radical expressions and its often-authoritarian critics within the Church. Leo did that first as a priest and then as a bishop in a Peru torn between murderous Marxist guerrillas and government death squads. In his conclusion, Grandin references the philosopher Sidney Hook’s description of the Catholic Church as the “oldest and greatest totalitarian movement in history” and notes the irony that under Leo the Church “has become perhaps the only global force capable of mounting a moral challenge to a rogue United States, and it is in no small part because of Latin America.”
Let’s hope Grandin is right when it comes to Leo’s approach to a rogue United States. I am not competent to question the details of his characterization of the roles played by Opus Dei and the Sodalicio de Vida—groups he depicts as “even more extreme form[s] of the Catholic right”—in steering the Church in Peru away from Liberation Theology. Both groups, Grandin argues, were embraced by John Paul and Benedict. As a consequence, they came to dominate the Peruvian hierarchy and clergy. Eventually, both movements were also wracked with scandal. During that period, prominent exponents of Liberation Theology such as the Peruvian Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez and the Brazilian Franciscan Leonardo Boff were essentially persecuted by the Vatican, according to Grandin. Boff eventually left the priesthood. “Rome and Washington perceived the movement as a threat” to the intensifying U.S. struggle against communism in the Western hemisphere, Grandin writes. The Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith under Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict, “opened a multi-decade investigation into Gutiérrez’s writings in search of doctrinal errors.” With a heavy hand, Grandin observes that the CDF “traced its lineage to the Inquisition,” and calls Ratzinger a “cardinal inquisitor.” “Ratzinger and John Paul continued to press Peruvian bishops to question [Gutiérrez], forcing him to exhaust himself defending and revising his writings,” Grandin adds. He concedes that Ratzinger did not object to Gutiérrez’s understanding of the Church’s need to adopt a “preferential option for the poor.” What troubled the cardinal was Gutiérrez “assign[ing] Christ’s crucifixion a primarily worldly meaning.”
If that indeed was Gutiérrez’s position (more on that below), it is not hard to understand John Paul and Ratzinger’s reservations. After all, handing on the faith with all its metaphysical claims is one of the papacy’s fundamental functions. Questioning pioneering theologians who seem to challenge some of those claims is part of the job. As far as inquisitions go, I don’t believe the CDF has tortured or burned any theologians at the stake, and to analogize its inquiries to the Inquisition is anachronistic at best. To be sure, silencing people is wildly counterproductive; in the contemporary world, being silenced is a sure ticket to greater notoriety. Certainly, under John Paul the CDF could be heavy-handed, but its concerns were not entirely unjustified. A number of priests had been seriously compromised by their work with the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, and, as Grandin himself points out, some Maryknoll missionaries in Guatemala left their order and joined a Cuba-backed insurgency.
Grandin writes about theological issues almost exclusively from a political perspective. To be fair, he is trying to explain how the history of Liberation Theology in Latin America influenced Leo’s understanding of the polarizing forces within Catholicism, which are often driven by political disagreements. My point, however, is that to understand that history you need to take seriously the theological disputes on their own terms. Despite their political and temperamental differences, all the popes Grandin writes about share the belief that the death and resurrection of Jesus two thousand years ago revealed the true nature of God and the meaning and purpose of human life. To cast John Paul as an opponent of democratization because he thought elements of Liberation Theology were heterodox is a category mistake. John Paul lived under both Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism and believed strongly that both fascism and communism were incompatible with human dignity and political liberty. If he was deeply skeptical of Liberation Theology as it was understood by many in Latin America, he was nevertheless an outspoken proponent of democracy around the world. He arguably played an essential role in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Poland and the other captive nations of Eastern Europe. He did not suddenly become an authoritarian when turning to Latin America. To be sure, he and Benedict made serious mistakes in placing the defense of Catholic orthodoxy in the hands of groups like Opus Dei and Sodalicio de Vida. But it is reductionist to cast those popes as advocates of “a more doctrinaire faith” and architects of “the right’s final victory,” or to claim they were opposed to “the ethical imperative of liberation theology’s commitment to the poor” and a more “humanist Church.” If Ratzinger’s goal was to “chill liberals who wanted to reform Catholic doctrine on issues related to birth control, women’s ordination, celibacy, and divorce,” he wasn’t much of an “inquisitor.” Catholic liberals have hardly been silenced.
Nor was Gutiérrez the essentially political figure Grandin portrays him as. His writing, according to the theologian John Cavadini, was in fact “irreducibly social and spiritual at the same time,” and his “attention…firmly settled in God.” When Cavadini was chairman of the theology department at the University of Notre Dame, he hired Gutiérrez. In a tribute to the Peruvian theologian upon his death, Cavadini confessed that he was initially skeptical of certain aspects of Liberation Theology. But in getting to know the priest and his work, he came to understand that “the caricature of him as primarily a political activist based in irreducibly secular categories could not have been more misplaced. He was an evangelist, first and foremost.” For Gutiérrez, “the dignity of the poor, as human beings, transcended all social and political reductionism and not only transcended materialism but resisted it.” Cavadini notes that some advocates of Liberation Theology did adopt Marxist premises and the Vatican understandably objected to their writing. But the CDF ultimately cleared Gutiérrez of theological error. In fact, Cavadini reveals that over dinner shortly after Gutiérrez arrived at Notre Dame, the founder of Liberation Theology showed him a handwritten letter he had received from Cardinal Ratzinger. The letter assured Gutiérrez that Ratzinger “had found nothing in his theology to criticize and indeed in this letter he warmly congratulated Fr. Gustavo on his achievements. Fr. Gustavo,” Cavadini writes, “was very proud of this letter.”
Ratzinger’s letter is hardly the work of an apparatchik in a rigidly “totalitarian” institution, and the Catholic Church is far more complex and dynamic than Grandin’s article allows. At its best, the Church can hold the seemingly contradictory inclinations of different popes in a fruitful tension. Above all, it is a mistake to reduce theological thought to its political or moral implications, important as these may be. What the Church teaches about how this world relates to the world to come may be of little interest to its secular critics, focused as they are on its political influence, but for Catholics, it is the heart of the matter.
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