When Traditionalists attack Liberation Theology, I often wish they would take the trouble to make distinctions. For example: between the two very differently focussed CDF statements on the subject. Between those parts of LT which are within the Tradition, and those which manifestly derive from the transient silliness of Cultural Marxism. It is worth remembering that Cardinal Mueller is an expert in just this subject. It is not, and should not be, a dead theological topic.
Father Ernesto Cardenale sought from PF and was granted the restoration of his priestly faculties. He has recently died; his funeral was disgracefully disrupted by manic lefties who regard him as a Traitor.
My generation remembers the memorable scene when, as a Sandinista cabinet minister, he knelt to be blessed by S John Paul II ... and received instead a paternal admonition to 'regularise' his relationship with the Church. But this hero of the liberationists, when the time came, saw that Liberation Theology had been manipulated into being just another cheap Latino tyranny. And he condemned it strongly.
Hence the shouts of "Traitor".
I think we should be open to those parts of PF's Amazon Exhortation which touch upon the ruthless exploitation of the Amazon lands by financial interests. It is a shame that the current Deutsche Christen campaign to replace Catholicism with a Volksreligion based on Liberalism, Relativism, the Zeitgeist, and a sexually promiscuous bourgeois lifestyle, has so successfully focussed discussion on ridiculous irrelevancies like 'Women Deacons'. It is, of course, yet another example of the skill of the Enemy.
It is not for us to Judge the balance between the good and the evil in any human life. But I pray that the good which Ernesto Cardenal did; his own priestly offering of the August Sacrifice; the boundless merits of the Redeemer; may intercede for this priest of God before the Throne of Mercy.
God bless him; God purge him; God rest him.
And may he pray for us.
The lack of either the effort or ability to make distinctions is an enduring human weakness. When it is a matter of not making an effort combined with an attack on another person, it leads to a more culpable calumny.
ReplyDeleteFather, Excellent reflection on a fellow priest from your priestly heart.
ReplyDeleteFr. Richard McNally ss.cc.
Amen to that!
ReplyDeleteThe late Canon Professor E. L. Mascall devoted a chapter to "Liberation Theology" (Ch. V., "Is Liberation Theology Really Necessary?") in his last, alas unpublished, book, the manuscript of which now rests in the archives of Pusey House: The Overarching Question: Divine Revelation or Human Invention. In it, after a general survey of LT, he analyses the Christologies of two of the principal liberation theologians of the time: Leonardo Boff and Jan Sobrino. He concluded that the former's was orthodox (whatever view one might hold of its "application") while the latter's was, at best, adoptionist and jettisoned orthodoxy in favor of a Marxist political hermeneutic. He ended the chapter by opining that Chalcedonian orthodoxy offers a better basis for a "liberationist" application of Theology, than any form of "reduced Christology." From internal evidence, the manuscript appears to have been completed by 1984.
ReplyDeleteGerhard Ludwig Cardinal Müller (former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) states:
ReplyDelete"We must not confuse the Church’s proclamation with politics. But in El Salvador (and in many other countries), priests and bishops who stood up for justice, opposing right-leaning and left-leaning dictatorships, were wrongly accused of promoting Marxism and communism—or, on the other hand, of being capitalist pawns."
Cardinal Müller discusses liberation theology in this article published in First Things at https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/05/oscar-romero-martyr-and-saint.
Your views and Cardinal Müller's views are virtually identical.
Needless to say, I greatly admire you both.
Dear Father,
ReplyDeleteThose of us who have lived under Marxism, Leninism, Communism or Socialism beg to differ with you. It is black and white.
I refused to be a useful idiot for the Party. They seek your destruction, Father. Always have, always will.