Liberation Theology: Dissident Leo Boff Says Oscar Romero and Pope Francis Lived It

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Paragon of FrancisChurch Theology

Paragon of FrancisChurch Theology

The HuffPo has an brief interesting study about now beatified Archbishop Oscar Romero and his importance to FrancisChurch.  It’s notable because it’s fairly honest and it has some actual information about these much cloaked and propagandized subjects.

A golden thread links Pope Francis to Oscar Romero, the murdered archbishop whose beatification the Pope ordered to take place last weekend, to the rapturous acclaim of the people of El Salvador and the wider world.

The thread is that of liberation theology, the movement that swept through Latin America, and then other parts of the world, 40 years ago. It maintains that the Gospel contains a preference for poor people — and insists that the Church has a duty to work for political and economic as well as spiritual change.

That’s exactly true.  Liberation Theology maintains the blatant lie that the Gospel contains a preference for poor people.  It doesn’t.  The Gospel proclaims and exemplifies the discipline of poverty and the virtue of charity.  A preference for poor people would be a cruel bigotry on God’s part.

The second lie of Liberation Theology is this worldly agenda for ‘political change’ which is beneath the Gospel and more akin to the Theology of Judas.

Conservatives in the Catholic Church do not like this. They have taken to asserting that Romero was not a liberation theologian. There is an irony in that, for they had spent the previous three decades blocking Romero’s path to sainthood by arguing the opposite. Then they said that to canonize the murdered cleric would effectively endorse liberation theology too.

It is ironic but it’s not conservative.  Any writers who’ve read Romero’s actual words know he had some affinity with the Liberation Theologists, but professional catholics often pretend otherwise.  The popes in our generation were wise and correct to suppress the Romero cause.  Pope Francis has not been so.

Conservatives saw this radical pro-poor movement, at the height of the Cold War, as a Marxist Trojan horse that would allow communism into South America through the back door. Its followers saw it as the words of Jesus in action.

Which was right?  It’s not just a matter of who holds the papacy.

In the years that followed, the mainstream Catholic Church took on board many of the insights of liberation theology. But conservatives in the Vatican and in the Latin American hierarchy worked behind the scenes to counter its influence — and block any attempts to move Romero along the path to becoming a saint.

There is an effective answer to these machinations and manoeuvrings. It is the one given by the man who is indisputably one of the founding fathers of liberation theology, Leonardo Boff, a former Franciscan friar who left the priesthood after the Vatican ordered him to a period of “obsequious silence” under the conservative papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

When asked if Pope Francis was a liberation theologian, Boff gave an answer that would apply as aptly to Romero. “The important thing is not whether he is for liberation theology but [whether he is] for the liberation of the oppressed, the poor and the victims of injustice. And that he is without question. Pope Francis has lived liberation theology.”

Oscar Romero lived it too. He was not a theoretical theologian. He stood unflinchingly by the poor — and died for it.

Standing for the poor is not Catholicism.  It’s love.  Dying for the poor, if such a thing were to happen, is not martyrdom.  It’s getting murdered.  Dying for the robbed or the oppressed is even better, but it’s not necessarily dying for the poor.  But most importantly, living and dying for Liberation Theology does nothing but hurt the poor and endanger their souls as well with a ruthless and materialist heresy.

If that, as Leo Boff asserts, is what both Romero and Pope Francis lived out in their words and deeds, then he’s right.  It doesn’t really matter.

 

 

 

Cardinal Kasper catholicism at Georgetown

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Porous and non-institutional

Porous and non-institutional

They love Cardinal Kasper in American faux-catholic academia.  He was unloading at Georgetown recently.  The go-to source for all things Francis, Jesuit AmericaMag, has the report.

Cardinal Walter Kasper offered the highlight speech of this Memorial Day weekend’s Georgetown University/Marymount University conference marking the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council. He spoke Saturday morning at Washington’s National Cathedral, the event’s third sponsor and chief ecumenical partner. 

The President Emeritus of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity offered new hope for the unity of Christians in the 21st century. Quoting Isaiah 43, “Behold, I do something new,” the cardinal explained, traditional ecumenism is being transformed by the rise of the Evangelical and Pentecostal churches. Compared to the Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches, these churches are mostly non-dogmatic and less institutionalized expressions of the Gospel. 

Is it bad to have something be an institution?  Doesn’t that just mean it’s both old and effective?  Are we all Rousseauian radicals and romanticists now?  Must everything be reduced to nothing before these men are satisfied?

Yes.  It must.

These younger, growing churches are more emotional in their worship styles and more voluntarist in their organization. Their members don’t so much belong to a church, as members of the older churches do, but choose their churches. In that respect they represent a contemporary social development in which religious identities are more transitory and church boundaries more porous. 

All churches must face that porosity as a sign of the times, Kasper suggested; and the older churches must examine themselves as to what they can learn from the younger Evangelical and Pentecostal ones. The growing importance of Evangelicals and Pentecostals, he suggested, will re-shape and renew 21st century ecumenism.

This is Christian leadership?  The emotions of the times drive the Church.  The Church doesn’t drive the times…unless something really bad happens.  Then it’s the Church’s fault.  Right, Diarmuid?

Can the doctrine. Shelve the rubrics. Make everything voluntary. Be porous.

The rise of the Evangelicals and Pentecostals, the cardinal said, constitutes a fourth stage in the history of the churches. The first was the divergence of the Oriental  churches from the Mediterranean churches (Greek and Latin) after the Councils of Nicea and Chalcedon. These ancient churches of the Middle East, which lay beyond the bounds of the Roman Empire, never accepted the doctrines of the great councils, and so are sometimes called Non-Chalcedonian.

The second phase was the break of the Orthodox East from the Latin West in the Great Schism in 1054. The third was the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, which split Western Christianity into Protestant and Catholic branches.

Look to the history of schism and heresy for guidance.  There’s a magisterium Cardinal Kasper can obey.

Distant Memories Evoked of Christian Foreign Policy

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Which one is our friend?

Which one is America’s friend?

In a Breitbart report presidential candidate and Hillary scourge, Carly Fiorina, takes us down memory lane to a time when the Middle East was not a living Hell, when Islam wasn’t conquering the West, and ancient Christian enclaves were protected.  After reminding voters that Hillary’s record is mainly one of hype and failure, she makes a few helpful suggestions.

“I would do very specific things. First, instead of having a Camp David conference to talk our Arab allies into a bad deal with Iran, I would have had a Camp David conference to talk with our Arab allies about how we can support them to fight ISIS. Let me give you very specific examples. The Kurds have been asking us to arm them for three years, we still have not. The Jordanians have been asking us to provide them with bombs and materiel. We know King Abdullah of Jordan, I’ve known him for many years. He took the appropriate leadership steps when a Jordanian pilot was burned alive. He was here in this country asking us for bombs and materiel, we haven’t provided him with any of them. He’s now looking to China for that. The Egyptian president, a very brave and pious Muslim, who has said there is a cancer in the heart of Islam, has asked us to share intelligence. We are not. The Turks have asked us to help them topple Bashar al-Assad, we are not. There are a whole set of things that we’ve been asked to do by our allies who know this is their fight, and we’re not doing any of them.”

Assad is the enemy of ISIS and ISIS is the enemy of Christ, so it’s hard to see why we should bolster an Islamist tyrant like Turkey’s Erdogan by attacking Syria.  Still it’s hopeful to hear someone willing to support protectors of Christians and other historic American allies here and there for a change.