Word: latinized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When Pope John Paul II set foot on Venezuelan soil last week, a familiar challenge awaited him. On his sixth evangelizing mission to Latin America in six years, the Pope is once again being asked to put his formidable energies and charismatic appeal to work at resolving a conflict of potentially continent-wide proportions. John Paul is determined to prevent that conflict from distorting what he sees as the true nature of Catholicism. The challenge: liberation theology...
Originally minted in Latin America in the 1960s, liberation theology is a controversial current of religious thought that has, in less than two decades, gained widespread currency. To many, it is the duty of Christians to support the rights of the poor and oppressed. But among its extreme proponents, liberation theology has been used as an apologia for revolutionary upheaval in the Third World that strives to link the imperatives of Christian charity with the dictates of Marxist class struggle...
What distinguishes liberation theology from the mainstream of church thinking is its strong emphasis on social change in the process of spiritual improvement. As Father Jon Sobrino, a Jesuit liberation thinker living in El Salvador, puts it, the aim of liberation theology in Latin America is to "give a new form to a now wretched reality." In analyzing that social reality, some liberation theologians make heavy use of left-wing social science, and in that sense, writes Sobrino, "the influence of Marx on the conception of theological understanding is evident...
...intensity of that contest varies widely in Latin America, the home of 42% of the world's 810 million Catholics. Strikingly diverse in political circumstances, geography and ethnic makeup, the countries of the area share staggering social dislocations caused by rapid modernization, near intolerable combinations of inflation, unemployment and foreign debt, and enormous economic disparities. Says Radomiro Tomic Romero, a former Christian Democratic candidate for President in still dictatorial Chile: "We see a region crossed with injustice. Then we ask ourselves: Is this what God wanted...
Answering this question has divided the Latin American church. The struggle harks back to 1968, when the second Latin American Bishops' Conference met in Medellin, Colombia. A liberal minority at the conference won approval of a series of documents supporting the church's newly stated "preferential option for the poor," which denounced "institutionalized violence" and other social ills, thus providing the opening wedge for liberation theology. In the '70s, as armed insurrection and military dictatorship spread across Latin America, liberation theology took on a more explicitly political dimension. The radical fringe of liberation theology eventually seemed to find its model...