CELAM and the Alienation of the Church in Latin America: An Ex-Liberationist Speaks Out

“The error of Liberation Theology as it exists today, is that it put the poor in the place of Christ, making them a fetish and reducing Christ to a kind of co-worker.”

From Crisis

By Msgr Richard C. Antall

Liberation Theology has left such a deep mark upon the life of the universal Church that many can't distinguish it from Catholicism.

Clodovis Boff, the brother of the famous liberation theologian Leonardo Boff, recently wrote an open letter to the Latin American Bishops’ Conference (known as CELAM) in which he criticized what he called the same old music: “social, social, social.” He said the bishops neglected the basic religious message of Jesus. His words were very pointed: “Can’t you see that people are tired of the same old story?”

His message was a real example of pastoral theology, of how to preach the true Gospel. He asked, 

When will we give the Good News of God, of Christ and His Spirit? Of Grace and Salvation? Of conversion of heart and meditation of God’s Word? Of prayer and adoration, of pious love of the Mother of the Lord and other such themes? In short, when are we going to send a truly religious message, one that is spiritual?

I wonder what his brother Leonardo thinks. Despite his leaving the clerical state, Leonardo Boff is probably the most prominent liberation theologian, a man who studied and sparred with his former professor Joseph Ratzinger and was considered personally close to Pope Francis from the time the latter was archbishop of Buenos Aires. The letter is outspokenly open about seeing the failure of liberation theology to gain hold of the bulk of the faithful in Latin America.

This is not the first time that the friar of the Servants of Mary has taken a different tack from the school of theology that made his brother famous. In 2007, Clodovis (I cannot just put his last name for fear of confusing him with his brother) wrote an essay called “The Theology of Liberation and the Return to the Fundamental.” In that publication, he declared that “the error of Liberation Theology as it exists today, is that it put the poor in the place of Christ, making them a fetish and reducing Christ to a kind of co-worker.”

Clodovis Boff wrote his latest letter as a response to the 40th General Assembly of CELAM at the end of May. Even the secular world “is fed up with secularism,” said the friar. 

Souls beg for the supernatural and you insist in the natural. That paradox is seen even in parishes: as lay people tend to like to show signs of their Catholic identity (with crosses, medals, veils, shirts with holy pictures on them) the priests and religious sisters go against that trend and wear no distinctive signs of identity.  

The brother of the man who wrote so much liberation ecclesiology criticized the bishops—whose message concluding the 40th anniversary of the conference mentioned Jesus Christ only once in the context of the celebration of the anniversary of the Council of Nicaea—by affirming, 

Your excellencies are correct saying that you desire a Church that is a “house and school of communion,” and in addition, “merciful, synodal and extending itself outward.” And who doesn’t? However, where is Christ in this ideal image of the Church? 

The Church in Latin America is “bleeding,” losing blood and vitality. 

What is more evident here are empty churches, empty seminaries, empty convents—empty. Seven or eight Latin American countries are no longer majority Catholic. Even Brazil is on its way to being the greatest ex-Catholic country in the world…Nevertheless, this does not seem to worry our Venerable Brothers [the bishops] very much.
            

Friar Boff’s (his brother is no longer a religious) words reminded me of something that has greatly puzzled me in recent years. I saw the decline of the Catholic Church in El Salvador, where I worked for twenty years—but that seemed to be ignored by theologians and academics who were formed by an almost ideological approach to pastoral theology.

Clodovis lamented in his letter the lack of real eschatology in the preaching of the Church leaders. Their talk of hope is very general and seems to be limited to this world’s realities. “I don’t doubt, brothers, that heaven is also part of your ‘great hope,’ but why this diffidence to talk about [heaven] out loud and clearly.”

I remember being on a commission for a pastoral plan and having to appeal to the archbishop for the inclusion of the word “salvation” as a central theme. The ideologues of the Left who loved splicing words for major goals in the “five-year plans” of pastoral projection (and I intend the allusion to the Soviet plans) did not like eschatology. They were more worried about an eschatology that echoed the leftist intellectuals who were dominant in the universities of El Salvador. Their mantra of “see-judge-act” always seemed to end up sounding like position papers for a political party.

And what has been the result of all the pastoral theology of liberation. I know that we have to be careful of a “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” about extraordinarily complex social phenomenon, but the burgeoning Protestant sects did not worry about “social, social, social,” and they thrived. The latest study of religious identification in El Salvador shows an alarming growth of non-Catholic religious sensibility. What used to be a majority Catholic nation now approaches an evenly divided ecclesiastical panorama. What went wrong?

And this happened after the beatification and canonization of saints like Fr. Rutilio Grande and Archbishop Oscar Romero and after a pope from Latin America who clearly tried to revive liberation theology. When St. Oscar Romero was beatified, a massive number of people attended the open-air Mass celebrating the event. A woman who watched the swelling crowd from a nearby home said it was an apotheosis. 

However, priests ended up with thousands of consecrated hosts which had to be distributed to various parishes because great numbers in the crowd never received Communion. Was this about logistics or about something else, understanding a sacred happening in a political light? The famous liberal expectation of a “Francis effect” never came about, but why wasn’t there a “Romero effect”?

This is very puzzling and seems counterintuitive: a Church celebrating contemporary saints consistently losing ground to religious groups who resemble American Protestant “mega churches”; charismatic televangelists whose themes are very basic salvation orientation (“Are you saved?”) and personal prosperity, both of which contrast with the official magisterium of the bishops, have become national leaders, putting bishops in the shade. After all the noise about social structures and analyzing the “realidad” (a word that means reality as I see it, often through ideological lenses), individual salvation and individualist ambitions have trumped all the theological reflection. In El Salvador, the “liberationists,” who sometimes frankly opposed some of the bishops of the country, won the ecclesiastical field, but it was a Pyrrhic victory.

“The reason I have been so bold to address myself to you, my dear bishops,” said Clodovis Boff, “is because I have for a long time seen repeated signs that our beloved Church runs the grave risk of alienation from its own spiritual essence to the detriment of herself and of the world.”       

I believe that not only is the man brave, he is a prophet. May he be heard in Rome, and let us all remember our responsibility to the lost sheep of our house (Matthew 15:24).

Pictured: Fr Clodovis Boff, OSM