True liberation is grounded in truth

Last month saw the passing of a famous Roman Catholic theologian and the release of a papal encyclical. There are substantive connections between the two and important lessons to be learned about the relationship between love and the truth of God’s law. Christians face the perennial temptation to separate law and love. And we find this temptation at work among progressives who desire to recast the moral teachings of Scripture to accord with contemporary culture, as well as among legalists who, like the Pharisees, emphasize external adherence to the law as a substitute for true holiness.

Two days after the death of the Peruvian Dominican priest and theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, who is recognized as the founder of liberation theology, Pope Francis promulgated his latest encyclical letter, Dilexit nos. Papal encyclicals are usually named for their opening words, most often rendered in Latin, and this one takes its name from the opening reference to Christ in Romans 8:37: “He loved us.” Looking at Francis’ encyclical on the human and divine love of Jesus Christ in light of Gutiérrez’s liberation theology can help us understand that we need not only love but love grounded in the truth to set us free.

Gutiérrez’s groundbreaking 1971 work, A Theology of Liberation, is considered a founding document of liberation theology, particularly in its Latin American expression. Inspired by a Marxian analysis of the global relationship between the rich and the poor, Gutiérrez argued that God sides especially with the poor in their inevitable conflict with the rich. The reception of liberation theology into the mainstream of Roman Catholic theology is complex—to say nothing of its influence on other Christian traditions, as well, particularly the mainline ecumenical movement. But one of Gutiérrez’s lasting legacies is the adoption of the “preferential option for the poor” as a lens for Christian social thought.

Popes John Paul II and Benedict VI, both conservatives, rejected liberation theology as a thinly disguised form of Marxism. The relationship between Pope Francis and liberation theology is also complicated. Francis has affirmed, “The preferential option for the poor is at the centre of the Gospel.” But even if this teaching is the offspring of liberation theology, in a different form, it has largely been taken over into Catholic social teaching. When it is taken as a statement of God’s special concern for the vulnerable, His care for the poor, and His regard for the weak, then it is a necessary and worthy dimension of Christian social thought.

The problem is when this preferential “option” becomes an absolute mandate and the poor as a class are seen as righteous and the rich as unrighteous. Gutiérrez concludes that the Church has “to be on the side of the oppressed classes and dominated peoples, clearly and without qualifications” to such imbalance.

Francis is not primarily concerned with economic injustice, even if there are mentions of consumerism, materialism, and commodification. The pope’s main concern is to restructure and recenter Christian social thought in a view of the human person that prioritizes the “heart.” As Francis writes, “Only the heart is capable of setting our other powers and passions, and our entire person, in a stance of reverence and loving obedience before the Lord.”

Our love for others must be rooted in our love for God and even more importantly in God’s transformational love for us. But this love cannot be confused with a simple sentimentality or sappy sweetness that so often passes for it today. Rather, our love has to be formed by and founded in the truth about the human person and God the creator, redeemer, and sustainer. The call to love cannot blind us to the frailties and failures of all human beings, whether rich or poor. And neither can it lead us to cheapen charity by affirming sin. True love, as Thomas Aquinas teaches, leads us to will and do the good of our neighbor, and the truth about what is good for human beings must therefore be determinative of our love just as it is determined by God’s love for us.