Gustavo Gutiérrez

Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino was born in 1928 in Lima, Peru, into a family of mixed Quechua and Spanish descent. The family was poor; his childhood was substantially shaped by the experience of poverty and by the early-1940s onset of osteomyelitis that confined him to bed for nearly six years and left him with a permanent limp. The illness, the convalescence, and the family circumstances substantially shaped his subsequent theological sensibility — the question of innocent suffering, of poverty as social-structural fact rather than individual misfortune, of theology adequate to actual human conditions.

He studied medicine briefly at the National University of San Marcos before turning to philosophy and theology. He pursued seminary studies in Chile and then in Europe (Louvain in Belgium for philosophy and theology; Lyon for theology), where his contemporaries included substantial future-leadership figures of the European Catholic theological renewal (the nouvelle théologie) including Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac, and Edward Schillebeeckx. He was ordained a priest in 1959 and returned to Peru. He spent his entire pastoral life in the Rímac district of Lima — one of the poorest areas of [[san-francisco|the city]] — at the parish church of Cristo Redentor (Christ the Redeemer).

A Theology of Liberation

The foundational book — [[liberation-theology|Teología de la liberación]]: Perspectivas (1971) — emerged from sustained pastoral work in Rímac integrated with theological reflection at the Catholic University of Peru and at substantial conferences across Latin America. The Medellín Conference of 1968 (CELAM, the Latin American Episcopal Conference) had committed the Latin American church to engagement with poverty and structural injustice; Gutiérrez was one of the principal theological voices in shaping the Medellín documents. The book articulated systematically the theological position implicit in that work.

Several central claims:

• [[liberation-theology|The preferential option for the poor]]. The gospel is fundamentally good news for the poor and the oppressed; theology must take this as its starting point. To know God is to do justice (drawing on Jeremiah 22:16); the relationship between knowledge of God and the practice of justice is not external but internal.
• Salvation as integral. Salvation is not a separate spiritual category from political-economic life. The God of the Hebrew Bible is the God who liberated the Israelites from Egyptian slavery; the Christian gospel continues this liberatory work. Salvation is the integral liberation of the human person — spiritual, political, economic, social — and theology that separates these is mistaken.
• Theology as the second step. Gutiérrez articulated his methodological position in the famous formulation: theology is the second step; the first step is praxis, engaged Christian commitment to the struggle for liberation. Theology reflects on what is happening in praxis; it does not produce praxis from theoretical priority.
• The hermeneutical circle. Reading scripture with the lived experience of the poor, allowing the experience to give new questions to the text and the text to give new resource for the experience.

The book was decisive. Within a few years it had been translated into multiple languages; it was widely taught in seminaries (and as widely opposed in others); it shaped a generation of theologians and pastors across Latin America and beyond.

The Vatican investigations

Gutiérrez’s work was substantially investigated by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) in the 1980s under Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI). The CDF issued the Instruction on Certain Aspects of the “Theology of Liberation” in 1984, focused especially on what the CDF viewed as Marxist categories in some [[liberation-theology|liberation theology]]. Gutiérrez was investigated specifically in 1983 and 1985–87 and required to respond extensively. He was never formally disciplined; eventually the CDF concluded that his work — properly distinguished from the more politically radical articulations of some other liberation theologians — was substantially within Catholic theological orthodoxy.

The substantial subsequent shift came with Pope Francis (Jorge Bergoglio, elected 2013). Francis met with Gutiérrez early in his papacy and substantially aligned the Vatican posture with [[liberation-theology|liberation theology]]. Francis canonized [[oscar-romero|Oscar Romero]] in 2018; he has continued to use the preferential option for the poor as principal language; Laudato Si’ (2015) draws substantially on the broader liberation-theology framework.

The later work

Across more than fifty years of subsequent work, Gutiérrez deepened and refined his position. The principal later books:

• We Drink from Our Own Wells: The Spiritual Journey of a People (1984). Gutiérrez’s spiritual theology of liberation; emphasizes that [[liberation-theology|liberation theology]] rests on a sustained spirituality, not just political analysis.
• On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent (1986). Sustained engagement with the Book of Job and the question of how God can be addressed by the innocent who suffer.
• Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ (1992). Substantial study of Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1566), the Dominican defender of indigenous peoples in the Spanish colonial period; a piece of historical theology Gutiérrez worked on for many years.
• Sharing the Word Through the Liturgical Year (1995). Year-cycle homiletic-theological work.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Subset of: [[liberation-theology]]
• Member of: [[person]]

Sources

1. Gustavo Gutiérrez. A Theology of Liberation. Orbis, 1973 (rev. 1988). Source class: book / foundational primary.
2. Gustavo Gutiérrez. We Drink from Our Own Wells. Orbis, 1984. Source class: book / primary.
3. Gustavo Gutiérrez. On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent. Orbis, 1986. Source class: book / primary.
4. Gustavo Gutiérrez. Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ. Orbis, 1992. Source class: book / primary.
5. Gerhard Müller & Gustavo Gutiérrez. On the Side of the Poor: The Theology of Liberation. Orbis, 2015. Source class: book / dialogue with the German cardinal who later led the CDF.
6. Robert McAfee Brown. Gustavo Gutiérrez: An Introduction to [[liberation-theology|Liberation Theology]]. Orbis, 1990. Source class: book / accessible scholarly introduction.

Lenses still to grow

• The Rímac parish work as the substrate of his theology.
• The CDF investigations in detail.
• The Pope Francis–Gutiérrez relationship and its effect on contemporary Catholic theology.
• The Las Casas project as historical theology.
• Gutiérrez’s reception across Protestant theological traditions.