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.