Liberation Theology

The Religious Context

LT emerged from a context distinguished by contemporary Christian renovation—the political-ideological effects of Latin American Cold War bipolarization and the global ferment of a generational culture of emancipation. Within Catholicism, the renovation movement culminated in Vatican Council II (1962–1965) and, in Latin America, the Second Latin American Episcopal Conference in Medellín, Colombia (1968). The Council invited Catholics to read the “signs of the times” and proposed a modernization or aggiornamento of the Catholic Church in the sense of the rationalization of doctrine and its greater compatibility with the modern world. The axis of renovation consisted of incorporating into the Catholic doctrine the modern values of progress and liberty, the challenges of social justice, and the latest developments of the human sciences. Nevertheless, this movement did not renounce placing the spiritual and communitarian principles of their ideal Christian society in opposition to the materialism and individualism of modern rationalism. On the Protestant side, in addition to the dynamism of theological thought, the renovation was characterized by the creation of the international ecumenical movement as institutionalized by the World Council of Churches (WCC) in 1948. The Catholic renovation movement worked closely with the WCC to promote the progress of developing nations within the framework of a more just international order, which was considered a necessary condition for world peace. The most important document of the Catholic developing-nation policy was the encyclical Populorum Progresio, published in 1967 by Pope Paul VI, which was inspired by Louis Lebret, the French Dominican founder of the Economy and Humanism movement, influential in South America.

The Sociopolitical Context

LT was mostly a product of the aforementioned Catholic renovation but was opposed to developmental reform. For LT's authors, except the “populist” faction in Argentina (Juan Carlos Scannone and Lucio Gera), the sociopolitical challenges of Latin America left no choice but to opt for revolutionary socialism. At that time, the Latin American context was characterized by the crises of development projects aimed at modernization and national integration as well as the multiplication of insurgencies and revolutionary movements inspired by the Cuban Revolution of 1959. The nationalpopulist governments, often supported by the Catholic Church and reformist Catholic parties (e.g., Christian Democrats [CD]), had promoted [Page 707]the search for a third path to development as an alternative to both capitalist and socialist industrialization. The goal was to forge an alliance between social classes by invoking the defense of the national culture against the imposition of external models of modernization. The revolutionary radicalization process sought to develop, from a Marxist-Leninist perspective, the struggle against imperialism and class capitalism. The socialist option did not exclude nationalist ambitions of promoting a Latin American alternative to development in opposition to Western models of modernity; in fact, the intention was to deepen and establish the two paths of social progress and national identity in Latin American nations. From this perspective, the decisive influence of dependency theory in the social sciences exercised on LT during its formative years must be highlighted. Dependency theory did not analyze Latin America's underdevelopment as a lack of modernization but, rather, as a product of a dependent type of capitalism whose attempts at modernization fostered the very underdevelopment it was supposed to alleviate. LT's radical elements defended the path of revolutionary socialism, presenting it as the way to overcome the illusory attempts to reconcile the defense of national culture with self-sustaining capitalist modernization, condemned as accomplices to the imperialism of foreign capital and the conservative social order, respectively.

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