Why Ratzinger and Wojtyła were correct about liberation theology

The death of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI on the final day of 2022 presents a continued opportunity to revisit and evaluate his legacy as a theologian, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and pope.

Undoubtedly, one of the most widely criticized aspects of Benedict’s legacy is his role as architect of the Vatican’s response to liberation theology. A closer look what he wrote and said about this Marxist-inspired theology shows that although its intentions were undoubtedly noble, it was inherently harmful and destined for failure.

A saintly collaboration

Although the Joseph Ratzinger and Karol Wojtyła participated in the Second Vatican Council, they did not personally meet then. In the late 1960s, Cardinal Karol Wojtyła of Krakow read Joseph Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity and was greatly impressed. In 1974, the two began writing to one another. Three years later, Pope Paul VI appointed the latter as Archbishop of Munich and Freising, giving him the red hat the same year. The following year, Paul VI died; after John Paul I’s thirty-three-day pontificate, the world was in shock as Karol Wojtyła became the first non-Italian pope since the Renaissance. It is widely known that the cardinals from the German-speaking nations, including Ratzinger, were among the most influential kingmakers at the second conclave of 1978.

In 1981, Pope John Paul II appointed Cardinal Ratzinger as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, an office he would hold for twenty-three years. John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger did not agree on everything; for example, the latter was quite critical of the pope’s initiative to hold a prayer for peace with representatives of many of the world’s religions, from the Dalai Lama to Native American shamans, together at one altar, suggesting that all religions are equal, at Assisi in 1986.

But on the fundamentals, John Paul II and Ratzinger shared a common vision of the Church and of Catholic theology. Evidence of this is that as Ratzinger was approaching the retirement age of bishops (seventy-five years), John Paul II rejected his requests to retire. Undoubtedly, this prolonging of Ratzinger’s tenure—as well as his summoning the German prelate to Rome in the first place—greatly increased the odds that he would be elected as John Paul’s direct successor in 2005.

A controversial Vatican Instruction

I distinctly remember being an undergraduate at a Jesuit university in the Midwest in 2008 and taking a course on Latin American history. During a lecture, the professor, a well-fed gringo, angrily criticized the Vatican’s decision to waive the traditional five-year waiting period after the death of a candidate for canonization in John Paul II’s case. He stated that John Paul II was colored by his experiences in Poland and so had misunderstood Marxism; thus, the Latin American episcopate under his watch had become conservative and averse to liberation theology.

I am curious what this professor now thinks of Pope Francis; Jorge Mario Bergoglio was one of those supposedly obscurantist Latin American cardinals appointed by John Paul II. In any case, the argument that a Pole who spent more than thirty years living under a Marxist dictatorship was unqualified to understand Marxism but Western European and Latin American theologians who were privileged to never experience communist tyranny were is not a convincing argument.

Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Marxist liberation theology was becoming increasingly popular in Latin America, a continent then under the yoke of many military dictatorships (often backed by the United States) and the site of obscene inequalities in wealth distribution. Peruvian Dominican Gustavo Gutierrez is credited with coining the term “liberation theology;” Gutierrez himself studied Marxism in France, which inspired him to find a new framework for understanding the causes of poverty.

In its most radical forms, liberation theology advocated class struggle for the overthrow of the oppressive rich; interpretations of the Gospel through a political lens; and even the excommunication of the wealthy. Rather than pointing towards individual selfishness, greed, and other personal sins as the cause of poverty, liberation theology diagnosed immoral impersonal social and political structures.

In response, in 1984, the Vatican published the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s Instruction on Certain Aspects of the “Theology of Liberation”.

A common point of departure

In the instruction, Ratzinger acknowledges that liberation theology arose out of truly deplorable and immoral social phenomena:

This warning should in no way be interpreted as a disavowal of all those who want to respond generously and with an authentic evangelical spirit to the “preferential option for the poor.” It should not at all serve as an excuse for those who maintain the attitude of neutrality and indifference in the face of the tragic and pressing problems of human misery and injustice. […] More than ever, the Church intends to condemn abuses, injustices, and attacks against freedom, wherever they occur and whoever commits them. She intends to struggle, by her own means, for the defense and advancement of the rights of mankind, especially of the poor.

Elsewhere in the document, Ratzinger condemns “[t]he scandal of the shocking inequality between the rich and poor.” In this, he echoes John Paul II’s encyclical Laborem exercens, written on the ninetieth anniversary of the publication of Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum. Leo’s breakthrough document condemned both the unfair treatment of industrial workers and the false promises of Marxism; Leo explicitly encourages workers to unionize and peacefully fight for better treatment. In noting the industrial progress made since Leo XIII’s time, John Paul nonetheless notes:

Unfortunately, for millions of skilled workers these changes may perhaps mean unemployment, at least for a time, or the need for retraining. They will very probably involve a reduction or a less rapid increase in material well-being for the more developed countries. But they can also bring relief and hope to the millions who today live in conditions of shameful and unworthy poverty.

It is not for the Church to analyze scientifically the consequences that these changes may have on human society. But the Church considers it her task always to call attention to the dignity and rights of those who work, to condemn situations in which that dignity and those rights are violated, and to help to guide the above-mentioned changes so as to ensure authentic progress by man and society.

In other words, Cardinal Ratzinger, John Paul II, and Leo XIII all condemn the greed that has led to a pauperization of the working classes. Indeed, while anthropologically flawed and bringing catastrophic fruits, Marxism did not appear in a void. Living in England during the Industrial Revolution, Marx directly saw the exploitation of the working poor. Social injustice needed a remedy, but Marxism would prove a poisonous remedy.

“An Impossible Dialogue”

In 1985, the Italian journalist Vittorio Messori published The Ratzinger Report, a record of his conversations with the then-prefect of the CDF. One of the chapters deals with liberation theology; the sub-chapter devoted to attempts at reconciling Marxism and Christianity is titled: “An Impossible Dialogue.”

There is nothing novel or intrinsically wrong about Catholic thinkers being influenced by non-Christian philosophical tendencies. Famously, St. Thomas was greatly indebted to Aristotle, while in his Divine Comedy Dante expressed concern that his beloved Virgil, living before Christ, would not be saved. More recently, as a professor of philosophy at the Catholic University of Lublin the future Pope John Paul II combined classic Thomism with the methodologies of the twentieth-century philosophical current of phenomenology when writing his works such as Love and Responsibility, The Acting Person, or The Lublin Lectures.

However, Marxism results from assumptions that are not only contrary to Christianity; they are, in fact, hostile to them. Marx famously called religion the “opium for the masses.” He believed religion to be an obstacle to the progress of the working class, who rather struggling for better treatment in their temporal existence (the only form of existence that Marx, an atheist, recognized) was drugged by fantasies of the afterlife. Unsurprisingly, wherever Marxism gained power, it brutally oppressed religion; by far the most anti-religious communist regime was Enver Hoxha’s Albania, which banned all forms of worship and cruelly persecuted those who engaged in them.

In the second volume of his magisterial biography of Pope Benedict XVI, journalist Peter Seewald argues that the German pope’s skepticism about liberation theology resulted from memories of his childhood. As the Nazi Party gained power in Ratzinger’s homeland, some Christians made the blasphemous mistake of trying to reconcile the thoroughly anti-Christian, pagan, and racist ideology with the Gospels. Furthermore, Seewald argues, Ratzinger remembered the anarchic chaos sown by students possessed by Marxism in the late 1960s at the University of Tubingen.

It is likely that John Paul II also remembered attempts by the communist regime in his native Poland at creating collaborationist organizations within the Church, like the Pax Association or the “Patriot Priests” movement. These groups were simply used by communists to divide the Church, while they betrayed the Gospels and worked to harm brave defenders of the Polish nation against Marxist tyranny like Cardinals Stefan Wyszyński or Adam Stefan Sapieha.

No, it won’t liberate

I believe that dialogue between Christianity and Marxism is not only impossible, it is undesirable. I am quite skeptical of the late Michael Novak’s attempts at reconciling Thatcherite neoliberalism with Catholic social teaching. However, I found his study on liberation theology, Will It Liberate?, to be a brilliant critique of the controversial theology.

Novak writes that liberation theology’s very assumptions were flawed. He notes that liberation theology saw capitalism as the source of Latin America’s misery. However, Novak argues that in the 1970s and 1980s, Latin America was not capitalist; it was feudal.

Before El Salvador’s brutal civil war, during which the nation’s peasants fought for ownership of the land they worked, all of its land was in the hands of the proverbial “fourteen families.” (By the way, the nation’s great martyr, St. Oscar Romero, was not, contrary to what many believe, in any way an advocate of liberation theology but an orthodox, even conservative, proponent of Catholic social teaching.) Likewise, before the 1979 Sandinista revolution, most of the land in Nicaragua was owned by a few. This does not sound like Dickens’ London, let alone Western countries today; this sounds like medieval Europe.

Similarly, Mexico, a country that has great potential but is bogged down by great socioeconomic inequality, owes its plight not to capitalism, but to seven decades of rule by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, an anti-American, anti-clerical, and anti-capitalist authoritarian party that limited property rights and closed Mexico off from the world.

Karl Marx incorrectly predicted that the communist revolution would take place in industrial England and not feudal Russia; while there was tremendous injustice in the treatment of Britain’s working class during the Industrial Revolution, thanks to the free market the United Kingdom (although not without inequalities and poverty) is one of the world’s wealthiest countries today. To see the failure of communism, one need not look further than the stark contrast between the two Koreas.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Marxist governments ruled Russia, half of Europe, various countries in Latin America (Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela) and Asia (China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia), and even Ethiopia. Despite the enormous cultural differences between these lands, Marxist governments invariably led to mass poverty and gross human rights abuses. The PRC’s current economic boom is due only to China’s eschewing of Marxist economics under Deng Xiaoping.

In The Ratzinger Report, the eponymous cardinal writes that although as a theologian he is concerned primarily about the moral repercussions of liberation theology, he is nonetheless unconvinced that it will improve the material wellbeing of Latin Americans.

He notes that liberation theologians were often themselves Western Europeans or were educated in Western Europe (in El Salvador, for instance, many of the most prominent luminaries of liberation theology, such as Jon Sobrino or Ignacio Ellacuria, the latter a victim of the Salvadoran dictatorship’s violence, were missionaries from Spain). He tells Messori that it is a form of “cultural imperialism” for thinkers from rich countries to try to impose Marxism, a discredited and failed ideology, upon developing nations:

[I]n the West, the Marxist myth has lost its attraction for the young and even for the workers. There is an attempt, therefore, to export it to the Third World on the part of those intellectuals who actually live outside countries dominated by ‘real Socialism.’ Indeed, it is only where Marxism-Leninism is not in control that there are still people who take its illusory “scientific truths” seriously.

The toxic fruits of Marxist regimes validate Ratzinger’s concerns.

Church and State, a toxic combination

As a college student during the Bush Jr. and early Obama years, I often heard American liberals slamming the former for his opposition to embryonic stem cell research or homosexual “marriage.” Their primary argument was that such policies were against the sacred principle of the separation of Church and state.

Modern Western notions of the separation of Church and state actually stem from Jesus’ words about rendering onto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s as well as Pope Gregory VII and the Investiture Controversy. Indeed, it is healthier for both throne and altar when they are separate. However, in a free democracy I see no reason why religious bodies should not speak out on what is good for society and what is not. Interestingly, these same anti-Bush liberals from the aughts did not protest when John Paul II’s Vatican criticized the US-led invasion of Iraq, for instance.

In college, I spent many hours in my residential hall trying to convince the same liberal students who hated Bush that Fidel Castro, the Sandinistas, and Hugo Chavez were not heroes but thugs. And this leads to another problem with liberation theology, presciently diagnosed by Cardinal Ratzinger. In the Instruction, he writes of the theological school:

“Nothing lies outside… political commitment. Everything has a political color.” A theology that is not “practical,” i.e., not essentially political, is regarded as “idealistic” and thus as lacking in reality, or else it is condemned as a vehicle for the oppressors’ maintenance of power.

Many liberation theologians not only were publicly engaged in politics; they publicly supported absolutely evil regimes. In an interview after Fidel Castro’s death, Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff, silenced by the CDF (albeit not for his flirtation with Marxism but for his heterodox view that Jesus did not establish the institutional Church), praised the tyrant and spoke of their “long friendship,” noting that the Cuban dictator thought highly of the works of liberation theologians Gutierrez and Frei Betto.

In fact, Castro, a dictator with the blood of thousands of human lives on his hands who turned Cuba, once Latin America’s richest country, into a chronically suffering living museum of communism, directly supported liberation theology. After the Marxist Salvador Allende became president of Chile, Fidel Castro traveled there to assure 180 priests belonging to the pro-Allende Christians for Socialism organization of his support. Meanwhile, Camilo Torres, joined the Maoist terrorist group the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) in Peru which murdered priests, including the three martyrs of Chimbote (Blessed Fathers Michał Tomaszek, Zbigniew Strzałkowski, and Alessandro Dordi, who were beatified together in 2015).

Tellingly, just a couple classes after my undergraduate history professor had blasted John Paul II, he called Castro “the world’s most respected leader” and gave a panegyric speech about his great “accomplishments.”

Meanwhile, under the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua (currently back in power), which has kidnapped many priests and engaged in the genocide of the Miskito Indians, Ernesto Cardenal, a Trappist, and his brother Fernando, a Jesuit served as Ministers of Culture and Education, respectively (John Paul II excommunicated the former, but Francis lifted the excommunication many years later).

I need not add that many of the progressive students I knew in college who were appalled by George W. Bush’s social conservatism came from culturally Catholic backgrounds and saw the Cardenal brothers as heroes.

While the Industrial Revolution has led to an overall improvement in the world’s material well-being, entire nations continue to live in abject poverty. The social encyclicals of the popes can give us guidelines how to make the world more equal. However, through its affection for Marxism and proximity to oppressive communist regimes, liberation theology has proven to be an idol and ideology that failed, a fact that Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI were absolutely correct in recognizing.