Pope: Liberation Theology "Still a Danger"

From Robert Mickens at The London Tablet:

Pope Benedict XVI has said that a Marxist-driven liberation theology is continuing to cause great harm to the Church in Brazil 25 years after he first tried to crack down on its proliferation.

“Its consequences, more or less visible, in the form of rebellion, division, dissent, offence [and] anarchy, are still being felt,” the Pope said last Saturday to the heads of some 28 dioceses in southern Brazil, including the metropolitan sees of Porto Alegre and Florianopolis. He told the bishops, who were in Rome for their five-yearly ad limina visit, that liberation theology was “creating great suffering and a serious loss of vital force in  [their] diocesan communities”. In 1984, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he was prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and issued an instruction, Libertatis Nuntius, which strongly condemned a number of elements in liberation theology.

In his meeting with the Brazilian bishops the Pope said it was “worth recalling” the twenty-fifth anniversary of that document. “It underlined the danger inherent in an a-critical acceptance by some theologians of theses and methodologies coming from Marxism,” he said. “I implore all those who in some way feel attracted, involved or intimately touched by certain deceptive principles of liberation theology to look again at the instruction and accept the benign light it offers with outstretched hands,” the Pope said.

Read the rest here.

James Martin, SJ