A Lima priest asked how to tell the poor that God loves them
Confined to a wheelchair from age 12 to 18 by a bone infection, Gustavo Gutierrez said those years taught him hope. He grew into a Peruvian priest whose 1971 book A Theology of Liberation launched a movement insisting that salvation must reach empty stomachs as well as souls.
Gutierrez was born in the Montserrat district of Lima on 8 June 1928 to mestizo parents with Hispanic and Quechua roots. Osteomyelitis kept him bedridden for long stretches as a teenager. He first enrolled in medicine at the National University of San Marcos, aiming to become a psychiatrist, and joined Catholic Action, but during medical school he decided on the priesthood instead.
Theology took him to Leuven in Belgium and to Lyon in France, where his teachers included Henri de Lubac and Yves Congar, and absorbed thinkers the church usually kept at a distance, including Freud, on whom he wrote a philosophy licentiate, and Marx. He was ordained in 1959 and returned home to parish work, later serving as pastor of the Church of Christ the Redeemer in Rimac. He described coming from a continent where more than 60 percent of people were poor and 82 percent of those lived in extreme poverty, and he said his Lima parishioners taught him volumes about hope amid suffering.
At a gathering of priests and laity in Chimbote, Peru, in July 1968, he sketched the ideas that became his landmark book three years later. He distinguished poverty as a scandalous state, which God abhors, from poverty as spiritual childhood, which God values, matching them to Luke's blessing of the poor and Matthew's blessing of the poor in spirit. Liberation, he argued, works on three linked levels: political, psychological and theological. His vision openly favoured socialism and drew on a humanist strand of Marxism, and historian Edward Norman called him the most distinguished Marxist theologian in South America. His 1986 book On Job explored suffering and faith.
In 1974 he founded the Lima branch of the Bartolome de Las Casas Institute. Criticism, including from the archbishop of Lima, eventually led him to join the Dominicans and teach at the University of Notre Dame, where he held the John Cardinal O'Hara Professorship. He died on 22 October 2024.
Source: Gustavo Gutiérrez
