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Forty years of Liberation Theology and of “Jesus Christ Liberator”

Leonardo Boff2 Comentários

The 40th anniversary of the birth of the Theology of Liberation was celebrated from the 7th to the 11th of October in the Humanitas Institute of the Unisinos University of the Jesuits, in São Leopoldo, Brazil. The principal representatives of Latin America, especially, its first formulator, Peruvian Gustavo Gutierrez, were present. Curiously, in that same year, 1971, unaware of each other, Gutierrez in Peru, Hugo Assman in Bolivia, Juan Luis Segundo in Uruguay, and I in Brazil, considered the founders of this type of theology, published our writings. Was it not the presence of the Spirit that inspired our Continent, marked by so much oppression?

To outwit the organs of control and repression of the military, I published an article titled: Jesus Christ the Liberator, (Jesucristo el Liberador), every month of 1971 in Sponsa Christi (The Spouse of Christ), a magazine for women religious. On March of 1972 I gathered those articles and dared publish them as a book. I had to go into hiding for two weeks, because the political police were searching for me. The words, «liberation» and «liberator», had been banned, and could not be used publicly. Editora Voz’s lawyer had a hard time convincing the vigilant agents that it was a book of theology, with many footnotes to German literature, and that it was not a threat to the National Security of the State.

Why is the book (now in its 21st edition) so unique? Founded on a rigorous exegesis of the Gospels, it presented Jesus of Nazareth as liberator of the many human oppressions. He had to directly confront two of them: the religious in the pharisaical form of the strict observance of religious laws. The other, political one, was the Roman occupation that implied recognizing the Roman emperor as «god» and witnessing the penetration of pagan Hellenistic culture in Israel.

Against religious oppression, Jesus posits a major «law»: unconditional love of God and thy neighbor. The neighbor is to Jesus every person with whom one comes into contact, especially the poor and the invisible, those who do not count socially.

To the political he posited, instead of submission to the empire of the Caesars, announcing of the Kingdom of God, a crime of lese majesty. This Kingdom implied an absolute revolution of the cosmos, of society, of each person, and a redefinition of the meaning of life in the light of God, called Abba, namely, loving father full of mercy, that would make everyone feel like His sons and daughters, and brothers and sisters of each other.

Jesus acted with the authority and conviction of one sent by the Father to liberate a creation wounded by injustice. He displayed the power to placate tempests, cure the sick, resurrect the dead and fill all people with hope. Something truly revolutionary was going to happen: the emergence of the Kingdom that is of God and also, through His commitment, of humans.

The conflict Jesus created on these two fronts led Him to the cross. He did not die in His bed surrounded by His disciples, but was executed on the cross, as a result of His message and practice. Everything indicated that His utopia had been frustrated. But something unheard of happened: the grass did not grow on His grave. Some women announced to the apostles that He had been resurrected. The resurrection must not be identified with the reanimation of a corpse, as in Lazarus, but as the appearance of a new being, no longer subject either to time-space, or to the natural entropy of life. This is why He could go through walls. He would appear and disappear. His utopia of the Kingdom as a transfiguration of all things, not being realized globally, became concrete in His person through the resurrection. It is the Kingdom of God concretized in Him.

The resurrection is the main event without which Christianity cannot be sustained. Without that blessed event, Jesus would be just one of the many prophets sacrificed by the systems of oppression. The resurrection means the great liberation and also an insurrection against this type of world. The one who was resurrected was not a Caesar or a High Priest, but one who had been crucified. The resurrection gives meaning to all those crucified throughout history for justice and love. The resurrection assures us that the executioner does not triumph over the victim. It means the realization of the hidden potentialities in each of us: the appearance of the new man.

How do we understand that person? The disciples called Him by every title; Son of Man, Prophet, Messiah, and others. In the end they concluded: a human such as Jesus can only be God. And they began to call Him, Son of God.

To announce Jesus Christ as liberator in the context of the oppression that existed and still persists in Brazil and in Latin America was and is dangerous. Not only for the dominant society but also for the type of Church that discriminates against women and the laity. This is why His dream will always be retaken by those who refuse to accept the world as it exists now. Perhaps this is the secret meaning of a book written 40 years ago.

Leonardo Boff

Prosperity: with or without Growth?

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The socio-ecological crisis encompassing all the countries of the world forces us to rethink growth and development, as occurred in Rio+20. There we empirically experienced the limits of the Earth. The prevailing models are unsustainable.

For this reason, many analysts assert that the developed countries must get over their fetish of sustainable development/growth at all costs. They no longer need it, because they have accumulated practically everything necessary for a decent life, free from need. Consequently, instead of growth/development, a socio/ecological vision must prevail: prosperity without growth (improving the quality of life, education; the intangible goods). It is the poor and emerging countries that need prosperity with growth. For them, it is urgent to satisfy the needs of their impoverished populations (80% of humanity).

It no longer makes sense to pursue the central purpose of economic industrialist/consumerist/capitalist thought, that used to pose the question: how can we earn more?, and that presupposed dominating nature for economic benefit.

Now that conditions have changed, the question is different: how can we produce and live in harmony with nature, with all living beings, with human beings and with the Transcendent?

The response to this question will determine if there is to be prosperity without growth for the developed countries, and properity with growth for the poor and emerging countries.

To better understand this equation, we should distinguish four types of capital: natural, material, human and spiritual. Whether prosperity is with or without growth is determined by the manner that these four forms are developed. Natural capital consists of the goods and services that nature offers gratuitously. Material capital is produced by human labor. And here we must consider the conditions of human exploitation and the degradation of nature by means of which this material capital has been built. Human capital consists of culture, arts, world vision, and cooperation: properties that pertain to the essence of human life. Here, it is important to recognize that material capital has distorted human capital, because it has turned cultural goods into merchandise. As David Yanomami, shaman and cacique, recently denounced in a book published in France, and titled The Fall of Heaven, (La caída del cielo): «you, the Whites, are the people of merchandise, those who do not listen to nature because your only interest lies in economic benefits» (desinformemonos.org).

The same must be said of spiritual capital. It also pertains to the nature of the human being, who wonders about the meaning of life and the universe, what to expect after death, the values of excellence such as love, friendship, compassion and openness to the Transcendent. But given the predominance of the material, the spiritual is anemic, and still cannot realize its capacity for transformation, and for creating equilibrium and sustainability of human life, society and nature.

The challenge now is how to move from material capital to human and spiritual capital. Logically, the human and spiritual do not exclude material capital. We need some material growth in order to assure, sufficiently and decently, the material sustainability of life.

However, we cannot limit ourselves to growth with prosperity, because this is not an end in itself. The integrated development of the human being is required.

Recently, Amartya Sen, from India, 1998 Nobel laureate for economics, helped us to better understand what kind of human development can be sustainable and bring prosperity. The title of his book defines its central thesis: Development as Freedom, (Desarrollo como libertad, Companhia das Letras, 2001). The author grounds himself in the heart of human capital, when he defines development as «the process of expanding the substantive liberties of the people» (p. 336).

Brazilian Marcos Arruda, economist and educator, also suggested a means of transforming education, starting from the practical, and the democratic exercise of all liberties, (Education for an economy of love: education for a practical and solidarian economy, Idéias e Letras, 2009).

It is not just a question of addressing nourishment and health, basic conditions for any prosperity. What is decisive is the transformation of the human being. To Amarthya Sen and to Arruda, education and participatory democracy are fundamental. Education is not to be transformed into an article of merchandise (professionalization), but must be the means of revealing and developing the potentialities and capabilities of the human being, whose «ontological and historical vocation is to be more… which implies to excel, to go beyond oneself, to activate the latent potentialities in the human being» (Arruda, Educación para una economía del amor, pag.103).

Thus the growth/development that prosperity seeks presupposes broadening the opportunities to determine life’s path, and define one’s destiny. The human being discovers himself as a utopic being, that is, a being always under construction, possessed of infinite potential. To create the conditions for this potential to be revealed, and implemented, is the purpose of human development as prosperity.

It is about humanizing the human. In service of this end are the ethical-spiritual values, the sciences, technologies and our modes of production. Besides education, the best political way of facilitating a prosperous and sustainable human development is, according to Sen and Arruda, participatory democracy. Everyone must feel included in, and united for, building the common good.

The more it is used, the more human and spiritual capital grows, contrary to material capital, that decreases as it is used. Perhaps this is the great legacy of the present crisis.

What type of Church has salvation?

Leonardo Boff2 Comentários

The core of the preaching of Jesus of Nazareth was not the Church, but the Kingdom of God: a utopia of total revolution/reconciliation of the whole of creation. This is so true that the Gospels, with the exception of St. Matthew, never speak of the Church, but always of the Kingdom. With the rejection of the person and message of Jesus of Nazareth, the Kingdom was also gone. Instead, the Church appeared as a community of those who gave witness to the resurrection of Jesus and kept His legacy, trying to live it throughout history.

From the beginning, a bifurcation was established: the bulk of the faithful took Christianity as a spiritual path, in dialogue with the cultural environment. Another, much smaller, group, under the control of the Emperor, took over the moral leadership of the severely decadent Roman Empire. In organizing the community of faith, this group copied the imperial juridical-political structures. This group, the hierarchy, structured itself as «sacred power» (sacred potestas). This was a very risky path, because if there is one thing that Jesus always rejected, it was power. To Him, the three expressions of power, as they appear in the temptation of the desert –prophetic, religious and political–, when they reflect domination rather than service, belong to the sphere of the diabolical. Nevertheless, this was the path followed by the Church -a hierarchical institution, modeled on an absolutist monarchy that refuses to allow the laity, the great majority of the faithful, to participate in that power. The Church thus comes down to us under a cloud of very deep distrust.

It so happens that love disappears when power predominates. In effect, the organizing principle of the hierarchical Church is bureaucratic, formal and often inflexible. In the hierarchical Church, everything has a price; nothing is either forgotten or forgiven. There is practically no space for mercy, or for a true understanding of the divorced and of the homo-affectionate. Its imposition of priestly celibacy, deeply-rooted anti-feminism, distrust of everything related to sexuality and pleasure, the cult for the personality of the pope, and its pretense of being the only true Church and the «unique guardian of the eternal, universal and immutable natural law established by God», brought it, in words of Benedict XVI, to «assume a directive function over the whole humanity». In 2000, then cardinal Ratzinger repeated in the document, Dominus Jesus, the medieval doctrine that «outside the Church there is no salvation» and that those who are outside «are in grave risk of damnation». This type of Church surely does not have salvation. It is slowly losing sustainability all over the world.

What would be a Church worthy of salvation? It would be one that humbly returns to the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth, the simple and prophetic laborer, incarnated Son, imbued with the divine mission of announcing that God is here, with divine grace and mercy for all; a Church that recognizes other Churches as different expressions of the sacred inheritance of Jesus; that is open to dialogue with all religions and spiritual paths, seeing therein the action of the Spirit that always arrives before the missioner; one that is ready to learn from the accumulated wisdom of all of humanity; that renounces all power and spectacularizing of the faith, such that it is not a mere facade of a non-existent vitality; one that appears as «advocate and defender» of the oppressed of any class, that is willing to suffer persecution and martyrdom, as did her founder; where her pope would courageously renounce the pretense of juridical power over everyone and instead would be a symbol of reference and of unity of the Christian Proposal, with a pastoral mission of strengthening all in faith, hope and love.

Such a Church is in the range of our possibilities. We need only to immerse ourselves in the spirit of the Nazarene. Only then would it be the Church of humans, the Church of Jesus of Nazareth, of God, the corroboration of the truth of Jesus’ utopia of the Kingdom. It would be a place for realizing the Kingdom of the liberated, to which all of us are called.

Leonardo Boff

The Origin of the Pope’s Monarchic-Absolutist Power

Leonardo Boff4 Comentários


We have previously written that the crisis of the institution-hierarchy-Church is rooted in the absolute concentration of power in the person of the pope, power exercised in an absolutist form, with no participation of the Christians. This creates practically insurmountable obstacles for ecumenical dialogue with other Churches.

It was not that way at the beginning. The Church was a fraternal community. The figure of the pope did not yet exist. The Church was led by the emperor, rather than by the bishops of Rome or of Constantinople, the two capitals of the empire, because he was the Supreme Pontiff (Pontifex Maximus). Thus, emperor Constantine called the first ecumenical council of Nice (325) to resolve the question of the divinity of Christ. Even in the VI century, the primacy of right was claimed by emperor Justinian, who reunited the Western and the Eastern sections of the Empire, rather than the bishop of Rome. Nonetheless, since the tombs of Peter and Paul are in Rome, the Roman Church had special prestige. Her bishop, before the others, had the “presence in love” and “performed Peter’s service,” that of “confirming in the faith”, but not Peter’s supremacy in leadership.

Everything changed with pope Leo I (440-461), a great jurist and statesman. He copied the Roman form of power, namely, the emperor’s absolutism and authoritarianism, and began to interpret strictly in juridical terms the three texts of the New Gospel related to Peter: Peter as the rock on which the Church would be built (Mt 16,18), Peter as the one who confirms in the faith (Lk 22,32), and Peter as Shepherd, who has to care for His flock, (Jn 21,15). The biblical and Jesuanic meaning follows a totally different path: one of love, service and renunciation of any honor. But the absolutist reading of Roman law predominated.

Consequently, Leo I assumed the title of Supreme Pontiff and Pope in the proper sense. Thereafter, other popes began to use the imperial insignia and apparel, the purple, the mitre, the golden throne, staff, stoles, pallium, and cape. Palaces with their courts were established, and palatial habits were introduced that cardinals and bishops still retain to the present. This scandalizes more than a few Christians, who read in the gospels that Jesus of Nazareth was a poor laborer, without pomp. Thus it began to be clear that the leaders are closer to Herod’s palace than to Bethlehem’s manger.

But there is a phenomenon that is hard to fathom: in the drive to legitimize this transformation and guarantee the absolute power of the pope, a series of false documents was forged. First, a purported letter from pope Clement (+96), Peter’s successor in Rome, addressed to James, the brother of the Lord, the great pastor of Jerusalem, in which he said that before he died, Peter had determined that he, Clement, and evidently the others who would come after, would be the sole legitimate successors. A still greater falsification was the famous Gift from Constantine, a document forged in the period Leo I, according to which Constantine made a gift of the entire Roman empire to the pope of Rome. Later on, during the disputes with the French kings, there was another great fabrication, the Pseudo decrees of Isidore, a collection of false documents and letters that reinforced the juridical primacy of the Roman pope, presented as if they were from the first centuries. It all culminated in the XIII century with the Codex of Gratian, that became the basis of canon law, but which derived from falsifications and norms that reinforced the central power of Rome, together with actual canons that had circulated among the churches. Of course, this was all unmasked later on, but without a single modification of the absolutism of the popes. Still, it is lamentable, and mature Christians should know the tricks used and conceived to create a form of power that is totally contrary to the ideals of Jesus, and that obscures the fascinating Christian message,which is the carrier of a new type of exercise of power, one that is helpful and participative.

Subsequently there was a crescendo of the power of the popes: Gregory VII (+1085) in his Dictatus Papae (The Pope’s Dictatorship) proclaimed himself to be the absolute lord of the Church and of the world; Innocence III (+1216) declared himself the vicar-representative of Christ and finally, Innocence IV (+1254) elevated himself to the representative of God. As such, under Pius IX in 1870, the pope was proclaimed infallible in the areas of doctrine and morality.

Curiously, none of these excesses has ever been denounced or corrected by the hierarchical Church, because they benefit the hierarchy. They continue to be a source of scandal for those who still believe in the Nazarene, a poor, humble artisan and Middle Eastern peasant, persecuted, crucified and resurrected to rise up against all grabs for power and more power, even within the Church. The contrary understanding clearly omits something: the true vicars-representatives of Christ, according to the Gospel of Jesus of Nazareth (Mt 25,45) are the poor, the thirsty and the hungry. And the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church exists to serve them, not to take over from them.