The Hope of Liberation in World Religions

1: Catholicism

13 1 CathoLICIsM —Rosemary Radford Ruether Latin american Liberation theologies In this essay I will analyze the development of Catholic-based Latin American liberation theology in the 1970s and 1980s in what I will call its “classical” phase, and then describe the crisis of that stage of liberation theology and the emergence of a new stage of liberation theologies that focus on new constituencies: women, Afro-Latin peoples, and indigenous communities; and new issues, especially ecology. I will then do an in-depth discussion of two Catholic liberation theologians , Ignacio ellacuria, a Spanish Jesuit martyred in el Salvador in 1989, and the leading Latin American feminist theologian, Brazilian Ivone Gebara. Latin American liberation theology emerged in the mid-1960s as a theological response to the crisis of poverty and political oppression happening during that period. The nations of Central and South America had been struggling, especially since World War II, with a multifactoral crisis: a neocolonial form of industrialization that widened the gap between rich and poor, growing unemployment in festering urban slums, aggravated by expanding population, growing inflation, and staggering national debt. In the 1950s the approved international answer to these trends was “development.” Advanced industrial countries, Western europe and the United States, must provide aid through public and private sources to help “underdeveloped” countries achieve the buildup of capital for 14 — Rosemary Radford Ruether industrialization. The assumption behind this approach was that the United States and Western europe provided the models for the normative pattern of modernization and industrialization. other countries of the “Third” or formerly colonized worlds of Latin America, Asia, and Africa could be judged by how far along the road they were moving toward realizing this same model. In the 1960s some Latin American economists began to dissent from this model. They argued that Latin America was not suffering from “underdevelopment” but from mis-development. Latin Americans were not slumbering for four centuries whileYankees were hard at work pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. Rather LatinAmerican poverty is the underside of a process by which wealthy industrialized countries built up their capital base through the extraction of resources through the low-paid or slave labor of colonized regions. The gold and silver that financed European and North American capitalism was extracted from the mines of Mexico and peru by slave labor, shipped by galleons to Spain, stolen by english pirates, and deposited in banks in Amsterdam and London to be used by merchants in these countries to finance trade and industry. Beginning with the colonization of Central and LatinAmerica in the sixteenth century with the gold mines, the slave trade, and the exchange of commodities such as sugar from Latin American plantations for manufactured goods from europe, there began a history, continuing in new stages to the present, that shaped the relationship of industrialized and colonized regions of the world into patterns of exploitation and dependency. To put it succinctly, Latin America is poor because it was and is so rich: rich in metals, minerals, temperate climates, and fertile land. Its wealth has been extracted through the labor of slaves and low-paid workers by colonizing powers that used this wealth to finance the industrialization of europe and North America, leaving Central and Latin America and the Caribbean stripped and depleted.1 To these critical economists of the 1960s and 1970s, it became apparent that more “development” coming from these same colonizing centers of power only increased the structural dependency of Latin America and the impoverishment of the majority of its people . The public and private agents of North American and european corporations and banks planning this type of industrialization were not concerned with an integral development to meet the needs of the masses of Latin American people. Rather they went about the business of using the resources and labor of Latin America cheaply to Catholicism — 15 make money for the wealthy of the North. Sociologists and economists critical of this pattern of dependent “development” began to speak of “liberation.” By liberation they meant revolutionary changes in the political dependency of Latin American nations on the elites of the North. This meant nationalizing the ownership of the resources of Latin America, taking them from foreign ownership or control, and creating a new plan of integral development to meet the needs of the Latin American masses, starting with their basic need for affordable food and housing, health services and education, and better-paid jobs...