An advocate for the world’s ‘poor and exploited’, Gutierrez promoted ideals that revolutionised the Latin American church. Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutierrez, regarded as the father of Latin American liberation theology, has died aged 96. He passed away on Tuesday night in Lima, said the Dominican Order of Peru, without giving a cause.
Gutierrez was an eminent Catholic theologian and philosopher, whose 1971 book – titled A Theology of Liberation – deeply influenced church doctrine and practice in Latin America. It holds that Christian salvation goes beyond spiritual matters, also demanding that people be freed from material or political oppression. He famously wrote: “The future of history belongs to the poor and exploited”.
Archbishop Carlos Castillo, Lima’s cardinal-designate, remembered Gutierrez, who in his younger years served as a local parish priest in Lima, as a “a faithful theologian priest who never thought about money, or luxuries, or anything that seemed to make him superior”. “Small as he was, he knew how to announce the Gospel to us with strength and courage in his smallness,” said Castillo. Gutierrez’s thinking attracted many who were outraged by the inequality and dictatorships in several Latin American countries in the 1960s and 1970s.
He inspired figures like Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero , who was assassinated in 1980 after taking a stand against rights abuses in his country’s civil conflict. Initially, the Vatican harshly de.