| When Christians, in their struggle to create a just society, turn to the historical Jesus and make a preferential option to support the poor, a spirituality of liberation emerges. |
Father Risley, O.P., serves in the Social Pastoral Office of the archdiocese of Cochabamba, Bolivia, is a member of the Permanent Assembly of Human Rights of Cochabamba, and works with a team for rural evangelization in the Cochabamba Valley. |
WHAT do many people think of when they hear the expression "liberation theology"? Often it is the image of a political theology, the concept of a theology of revolution, even the picture of a Marxist "theology." But what most miss is the fact that at the roots of liberation theology is a profound Christian spirituality. Indeed, without this foundation it would not be truly a theology. And though the spirituality is articulated and illuminated by the theology, the spirituality itself comes out of a new Christian experience, an experience of faith which is also a "praxis" of faith. In turn, liberation spirituality motivates and accompanies Christian experience, so that it becomes more and more imbued with the Spirit of God, its source. Latin American Christianity, in the post-Vatican II age, has not only given birth to a new model of church, new pastoral approaches, even a new theology; it has engendered a new spirituality.
What does this spirituality, rooted in the Latin American experience, have to say to North Americans? Latin Americans, by sharing their faith experience and spirituality with their Christian brothers and sisters in the North, can lead them to reflect upon their own experience of God and his coming kingdom. A truly North American spirituality, rooted in its particular social, historical reality, could be a great source for renewal and liberation for the North American church. North Americans can experience what has happened already in Latin America. Christians there are brought into touch, first, with the historical spiritual experience of Jesus, to which liberation theology and spirituality look for basic light and instruction. Secondly, they are brought into contact with their own history, in its global context, as it conditions and shapes their lives and the life of their nations. Spirituality, Jon Sobrino has said, has to do with the "correct relation of the subject with history, of the spirit of the subject with the proper, objective weight of history, with its proper spirit."
In this brief exposition of the spirituality of liberation, I shall be especially inspired by, and indebted to, the Chilean theologian, Segundo Galilea. But I will enhance and complement his reflections by thoughts from some other prominent Latin American theologians of liberation.(1) Their reflections will be filtered through my own thirteen years of life, ministry, and theological reflection in Bolivia.
A Christian spirituality of liberation can be summed up in two concepts which are keys to understanding the new theology which has emerged in Latin America in the last fifteen to twenty years: Jesus and the poor. I will treat each one of these themes as the basis for a spirituality of liberation. But first let me clarify what I mean here by "spirituality." The Latin American experience has caused a reinterpretation of the very concept of spirituality, a new interpretation which, at the same time, is radically traditional.
THE MEANING OF SPIRITUALITY
Liberation theology seeks to overcome all vestiges of the false dualisms that have crept into Western Christian spirituality over the centuries. Spirituality is in no way synonymous with interiority, nor with subjectivity, nor with religiosity. This is not to deny that the deepest roots of one's spirituality are in the interior depths of the personal subject where that person directly encounters the living God. But spirituality speaks of the Spirit of God who reveals and manifests himself as source of life, freedom, and love within the totality which is the human person and his or her world and history. That which generates in Christians what we call a spirituality is the Spirit present in all truly human activities, personal and social, as a liberating force which is manifested concretely and palpably within the historical context of Christianity. Spirituality is a way of being, a life-style-what the gospel calls "discipleship." This following of Jesus involves one's relationship with self, others, nature (cosmos), history, and God. It has interior sources but also corporal (and structural) exteriorization and verification that point to personal and social (and political) conversion and sanctity.
Segundo Galilea always emphasizes that Christian spirituality is, in its deepest core, a mística ("mystique"). This mystique is the "why" and "whereby" of what we do and how we live, that which gives our life and activity its motivation, its force and dynamism, its deepest meaning. It is those values and basic personal attitudes that generate our life's options. Our spirituality provides the evangelical "why" of our Christian personal, social, and political options.
For Galilea, the spirituality-mystique with which Christians live the demands and tasks of their faith is always lived within a certain historico-social context. It is therefore not independent of the historical, social, and cultural dynamic of the "place" in which that spirituality is shaped. Thus the "signs of the times" of Latin America deeply affect the spirituality of the Latin American church. The Spirit acts in Latin American society and history, in its values, in its aspirations, in its ideals and historical tasks, insofar as they are convergent with the values of the kingdom of God.
What is unique about Latin American spirituality of liberation is that the secular sociopolitical context of a poor and oppressed society in the process of transformation and liberation is linked to the religious context of peoples who have a deeply rooted Christian (Catholic) heritage. As the Latin American bishops in the Puebla conference said: "The faith of the Church has sealed the soul of Latin America, marking its essential historical identity."(2) This encounter of the Spirit with Christian peoples living in societies "under the sign of transformation and development" has renewed Christian life and ecclesial practice profoundly, incarnating the church's mission in the signs of the times. It has generated a mystique and is producing a spirituality which is properly Latin American.
This Latin American spirituality has its preferred "places," as the Spirit is manifested preferentially in particular "historical places." It emerges in those places or "presences" of the Latin American church where the encounter with the Spirit of Christ is more clearly verified. This is, as the bishops acknowledged at both Medellín and Puebla, in the world of the poor and oppressed, and in those groups, apostolic movements, and Christian base communities where the Spirit manifests itself in the cultural values and religiosity of the people and in the aspirations and dynamisms of their liberation. This spirituality, as we will see later, expresses itself and lives out its dynamic in "the preferential option for the poor," the clarion call of Puebla. It calls us both to interior conversion and to social transformation of structures (438, 1221).
The new Latin American spirituality comes out of the new ecclesial praxis of liberation and grows with that praxis which in a special and preferential way reaches out to the poor and downtrodden. But it is also true that this spirituality, which is decidedly apostolic, is nourished by the same poor (1147), by their spirituality, by their experience of life supported by a deep religious faith which knows how to suffer and knows how to hope. This growing link between a developed, very articulate, and often sophisticated theology of liberation, and the unschooled, inarticulate, and symbolic espiritualidad popular ("spirituality of the people") is unique to Latin American liberation spirituality. Galilea calls it an "exodus spirituality," an "exile spirituality," a "frontier spirituality."(3) It Motivates and accompanies the "exodus" of the church from the center of society (the "haves") to the periphery (the "have-nots"). It is "to live the gospel in a strange land," the spirituality of a Peter who is lead by the Spirit to "where you would rather not go" (John 21:18).
As we will see in the next sections, liberation 'spirituality, like all true aggiornamentos in the church, is both a return to the source of our faith, the gospel in its originality, and also a social, historical, and ecclesial experience of the Christian people, for that is what gives life to the same gospel. In order to indicate what is happening in the consciousness and lives of countless Christians in Latin America, it is aptly called a "spirituality of liberation." But since it is a liberation in process, in suffering conflict with the forces of domination and captivity, and signed by the cross of Jesus, it can also be called "a spirituality from out of captivity."(4)
RETURN TO THE HISTORICAL JESUS
The first focal point ("place") of the spiritual renewal of Latin American Christianity under the sign of liberation is the reevaluation of the historical Jesus. Liberation theology believes that both theology and spirituality have suffered from an overly abstract and idealistic conception of Jesus Christ, one that has separated us from the real historical and incarnate spirituality that Jesus experienced. Thus theologians, like Jon Sobrino, attack spiritualities which are really "spiritual isms," because they are guilty of invoking "the Spirit of Christ but do not look to the concrete Jesus for their real-life verification . . . . They keep appealing to some vague spirit that is not the Spirit that served as the driving force behind the concrete history of Jesus."(5)
Behind the spirituality of liberation, then, are the new Latin American Christologies (6) and the reflections on the Gospels by Christian groups or basic ecclesial communities.(7) Both start from the historical Jesus, and they see Jesus Christ, not as an abstract theological problem, but, rather, as a concrete truth who throws light and inspiration on the concrete truth of our own lived experience. As Walter Kasper has said in another context: "It is now a matter of talking about Jesus Christ in such a way that human beings feel they themselves and their problems are being discussed."(8)
What Latin Americans have discovered from this approach to Jesus Christ is the noticeable resemblance between the historical and social situation in which Jesus lived and acted and the situation in Latin America today. The vital themes that surround the historical Jesus and the life-and-death themes that surround Latin America coincide: the dawning reality of God's kingdom which is justice for the poor; the call to radical conversion as an option for the poor; the crisis situation of a society characterized by social sin; the relation between orthodoxy and orthopraxis. But this becomes clear only when we view the history of Jesus, not in idealistic terms which come to us from catechism or dogma, but in terms of the historical categories that describe the human life of Jesus: denunciation and gospel proclamation, conflict and confrontation, failure of one's cause and unconditional trust in that cause, power and vulnerability, death and concrete, historical signs of new life. "In Latin America Christology is in fact being worked out by comparing the present day situation with the historical Jesus. Latin American faithful see that as the best way to give expression to their Christian faith."(9)
Thus liberation theology and spirituality take seriously the humanity of Jesus. This, of course, always happens in the great moments of renewal of Catholic spirituality. But today we are more aware of the necessity of taking Jesus' humanity seriously not only in its personal but also in its historical implications. This better allows us to recapture the essential dimension of Christian life and discipleship: the following of the historical Jesus by the impulse of the Spirit. The Puebla conference reiterated this (180-81, 1929-93), proclaiming that what Latin America precisely needs is the church "to educate people capable of shaping history according to the 'praxis' of Jesus" (279). What is needed is more than a "formal" following of Jesus, that is, simply being guided by his teachings, as one would follow the teachings of any great sage. No, this spirituality calls for a real following of Jesus in the sense that his own history and praxis become the model and basis of our discipleship and gospel style of life.
Interestingly enough for Catholic spirituality (but with increasing ecumenical implications), the rediscovery of the historical Jesus is being accompanied by a rediscovery of Mary of Nazareth, the faithful woman of the gospel, the model of the "poor of Yahweh" of yesterday and today. She who is always found among the poor (like our Lady of Guadalupe, for example) becomes a model of a spirituality of liberation for the poor and for those who live in real solidarity with the poor. Her Magnificat becomes a song of historical liberation. In the Puebla documents she becomes a model "for those who do not accept passively the adverse circumstances of personal and social life . . . but who proclaim with her that God 'exalts the lowly' and, if it is the case, 'pulls down the princes from their thrones"' (297; cf. also 292-93, 296, 302, 1144).
Before I terminate this section I would add just one other element in liberation spirituality that comes, to be sure, from a professed ideological option, but even more fundamentally from Jesus of Nazareth: radicalness. Jesus goes to the "root" of things, does not accept worldly "equilibrium," is not guided by the "sensibleness" of the wise and learned, is "daring' in his denunciation of the old and in his proclamation of the new.(10) The gospel shows us that Jesus was, in Christian terms, a radical. The good news is radical; the response to it must be a radical metanoia. This gospel is the only absolute; its demands are radical, and any value which is not compatible with the radical option for Christ has to be sacrificed (Matt. 8:18; also 6:24; 10:37-39; 13:44-46). Jesus demands a following which is carried to its ultimate consequences (Luke 9:57-62). We are called to practice the radical love of Jesus (John 13:34), and to imitate his radical trust in the Father (Matt. 7:7-11; Mark 9:23; John 15:16). Jesus' radicalism makes him a sign of contradiction (Luke 2:34), and neither he nor his disciples will be tolerated by an unconverted world (Matt. 10:22-25; John 15:18-20). The radicalism of the gospel finds its best incarnation in the attitude of giving our life for others (John 10:15-18; 13:1).
Jesus lived a radical spirituality and undertook a radical mission because he knew that the crisis of his time needed a radical answer; he answered a radical call from the Father (Luke 4:18ff.). Latin Americans today also see the crisis of their time as demanding a radical response, a response of radical change that gets down to the roots of social sin and institutionalized violence (28-30). Liberation theology seeks to articulate and inspire such a response. Perhaps most Christians in the North think of it simply as a radical political option -- and I will not deny its political dimension -- but it is much more revolutionary than that. It is a radical spirituality. It wants to live the radicalism of the gospel in our own times -- a radicalism that is characteristic of the consecrated life of religious, in its proper way, but which must also be, in another way, characteristic of the whole Christian community as a sign in the world. This, liberation spirituality insists, is to follow the historical Jesus.
THE POOR
The second accent of liberation spirituality is the "sense," or meaning, of the poor. It is a theme inseparable from the historical Jesus. To discover the Jesus of the Gospels is to discover an evangelical perspective on the poor which can be understood only on the basis of Jesus' teaching and practice. Liberation theology, coming out of an experience of the poor which is also an experience of the Christian God, starts from the premise that there is no true Christianity without this sense of the poor.
First of all, let me be clear about whom I mean by the "poor." It is, in the first place, not a spiritual concept but a socioeconomic one. The former (that is, the "poor in spirit" of Matt. 5:3), true enough in itself, expresses a special awareness of, and response to, the latter. In the experience of Latin American Christians, the poor are seen, first of all, as a social historical fact that profoundly marks the reality of the continent. They are real and visible persons, groups or social classes, countries; their inhuman and anti-evangelical poverty is the place of injustice, oppression, exploitation, violence, and social sin which challenge the conscience of Christians and the mission of the church. Poverty is the human condition of the needy and dispossessed, those who are unable to develop themselves humanly, those who are without hope and defense. For the Puebla conference, they are very human faces that confront us in the streets, neighborhoods, and fields of Latin America: poor hungry children, unschooled youth, underpaid and unemployed workers, peasant farmers, slum dwellers, old people without aid (31-39).
But for Christians the poor also become a religious and even a "sacramental" category. This is because faith discovers in the poor, beyond their socioeconomic, historical reality, a truly biblical "place." The gospel, through Jesus, reveals to us a sense of the poor that not only makes us aware of their God-given dignity and their privileged place in God's plan of salvation, but also challenges and calls us to a commitment to the poor that becomes the test point of our Christian lives. On this will depend whether we truly know the God of the Bible who is the God of the poor and whose kingdom makes common cause with their cry for liberation (Exod. 3:7-9; Luke 6:20-21). On this will depend our experience of Jesus Christ who identifies himself with the poor (Matt. 25:40).
Perhaps one might object that the primordial sense of the gospel is that of God and neighbor (Mark 12:28ff.). That is true. What I am saying here is that the gospel sense of neighbor (brother or sister) is concretized and verified in the "sense" of the poor. The brother or sister we are preferentially concerned about, as Jesus explains in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, is the person who appears on the road of our lives as a call to a commitment of love, revealing himself or herself to us particularly as the "poor" brother or sister. The "poor" or "needy" as a social concept is a relative and pluriform category; it varies with different cultures, societies, and times. The prophets gave special attention to the day laborer, the orphan, the widow, and foreigner; Jesus, to the hungry, thirsty, strangers, naked, sick, and imprisoned. Each society has to identify the real poor according to the "signs of the times" of poverty and oppression in that society. In Latin America today, the "poor" are the victims of structural injustice, economic margination, and political persecution: the indigenous, the campesinos, the exploited workers, the exiled.
Liberation spirituality is trying to reverse an historical fact long ago noted by St. Paul and given theological expression by him: "The anger of God is being revealed from heaven against all the wickedness of men who keep truth imprisoned by their injustices" (Rom. 1:18). To keep truth historically imprisoned in injustice is what Jon Sobrino has called a failure of "honesty and fidelity toward the real," not recognizing God's creation as it is. It is the gift of life and liberty to all human beings. That gift is vitiated by the denial of life and liberty to the immense majority of men and women in the world today. Not to denounce this "sin" and not to enter into active solidarity with the poor and oppressed in order to bring them justice and liberation is to invite God's anger. A right relationship with reality in honesty and fidelity toward history is to know the truth of God and to have an experience of that God who reveals and communicates himself precisely in that history of conflict. It is to shape a spirituality in which the spirit of the subject enters into harmony with the spirit of creation "groaning' for liberty and seeking its fullness, its glory (Rom. 8:18-25).
What Gustavo Gutierrez said of liberation theology, that it "arose in solidarity with the poor," is also true of liberation spirituality. Seeing the poor, oppressed, and needy in their subhuman condition of life which "cries to heaven," and recognizing that the preferred "place" of Jesus is among them, Latin American Christians, led by the Spirit of Jesus into that world of the poor, and there preaching the good news of liberation and "doing the kingdom" (Acts 10:38) in justice and love -- these Christians are truly having more than an ideological, political, or humanitarian experience; it is a spiritual experience. That spiritual experience, Leonardo Boff says, "signifies an encounter with the new and challenging face of God that emerges from the great challenges of historical reality."
This spiritual experience leads one to know and follow more closely the historical Jesus who is rediscovered in the face of the poor. It is therefore a liberating experience. And this "sense of the poor," transmitted by Jesus, has decided significance for the church's mission of evangelization. Jesus, by word and deed, has taught us that the authenticity and credibility of the gospel is essentially tied to the fact that the evangelizing church does or does not privilege the poor in its preaching and in its tasks of human liberation. This credibility is the kind that Jesus gave to his own mission (Luke 4: 13f .).
The gospel sense of the poor, moreover, is also the authentic verification of the contemplative and interior values of Christian spirituality. Segundo Galilea reminds us that orthodox Catholic spiritual theology, when trying to discern the criteria for the authenticity of prayer and mystical experience, has always responded that the verification does not come with the contemplative prayer in itself, that is, with the subjective mystical experience. That can easily be deceiving. No, its verification is in the practice of fraternal love, in fidelity to the sense of the brother or sister in need. The gospel declares that authentic spirituality is one love which embraces both God and neighbor, the neighbor who is precisely the poor and needy (Luke 10:29ff.; Matt. 25:31ff.). The experience of God and the experience of the poor are mutually verifying and mutually reinforcing: the sense of the poor brings with it and reinforces the sense of God, and vice versa.
PRAYER AND LIBERATION
We all know there is no spirituality without prayer and the contemplative dimension. In the spirituality of liberation, prayer takes on a particular shade or coloring by reason of its insertion in the world of the poor, as a following of Jesus, within the Latin American context. Those who are actively involved, as Christians, in the continental-wide struggle for liberation know that the experience that comes from solidarity with the poor and from a commitment to liberating praxis on their behalf is not alone sufficient to nourish and maintain a spirituality. Moreover, the capacity to encounter Jesus in the poor and needy does not come from a sociological or political effort but from a grace that is the fruit of a living faith nourished by the Spirit.
The world of social and political involvement on behalf of the poor and defenseless is not only a privileged "place" of the Spirit but also a "place" of sin, a place of ambiguity. As Segundo Galilea explains so well, the spirituality of exodus is not only a "kingdom" experience of liberation but also a "desert" experience. Therefore a Christian mystique of liberation must constantly nourish itself with a more direct experience of God in prayer. This mystique is not only a driving force that makes us struggle to make others free; it is also a search for, and progressive road to, our own interior freedom without which we can never minister freedom to others. This interior liberation is found in that eloquent solitude where we encounter an Absolute Love which frees us. It is found in that experience of radical poverty that allows us to be poor with the poor. Thus it is contemplation which permits us to make the experience of the poor a spiritual experience, an experience of liberating faith. It is the twofold experience of Christ of which the gospel speaks and which verifies authentic Christian contemplation: the encounter with the person of Jesus himself, and the encounter with the presence of Christ in the other, especially in the "least' (poorest) brother or sister (Matt. 25:40).
Liberation spirituality is attempting to create a synthesis or symbiosis of prophetic commitment to the work of justice and active transforming love on the one hand, and, on the other, of the prophetic call for prayful "space" in which to listen to the Lord of history. For the contemplative encounter with the "absolute God" leads one to the "absolute of neighbor." In this way liberation theology, working from the Latin American perspective, is reformulating the traditional value of contemplation. The Puebla documents capture this when they speak of a new experience of God through "prayer that leads to a commitment in real life," and through a "living of reality that demands strong moments of prayer" (727).
The prayer of liberation attempts to be the prayer of the historical Jesus who keeps invading this spirituality as he is reinterpreted in the light of present experience. The gospel is "reread" in light of the encounter with the present God of history. We are talking about him whose essential prayer was: "Father, your kingdom come," and who, at the same time, went about "doing the kingdom." Jesus experienced liberation in calling God "Abba, Father," but also in treating others as his brothers and sisters. With the same force that he structured his life for and with others, Jesus shaped his life for and with God. He never failed to affirm the good news and gave the poor the right to an unshakable hope in liberation, because it was built upon rock, that is, an absolute, personal love that calls each person by his or her name and promises victory over sin and death. He fought for the justice of the kingdom but always knew it to be the gift of the Father.
Leonardo Boff argues that, in the new experience of faith in Latin America, the classical monastic motto ora et labora ("pray and work") has been inverted to labora et ora. We are discovering the divine and Christic character of creation and work, especially the work of justice and commitment to the poor. Such work in itself, under the action of the Spirit, gives direct mediated access to God, and not just insofar as it is offered to God in prayer. And prayer itself as access to God is authenticated by its unity with the work of liberating and life-giving love. The real synthesis is not in prayer and action, or action and prayer, but prayer in action, prayer in the struggle for liberation. What is especially new in liberation spirituality is not simply that prayer and mysticism become involved in the active and secular sphere of life; that was long ago promoted by Ignatius of Loyola. The new element is that prayer and mysticism enter into the political arena of life. The task of creating a synthesis of the mystical and political, of producing Christian militants with a truly political sanctity, that is, sanctity in the work of changing structures in the world of social, economic, and political power, is still an unfinished task of liberation theology and spirituality.
In this article I have tried to explain why Latin American Christians, who are in the process of creating a liberation theology and praxis which is truly their own and yet with universal significance for the whole church, should also be known and appreciated for the spirituality which is resulting from, accompanying, and growing with, that same experience of faith. I have pointed out the preferential "places" of this spirituality, without wanting to exclude or depreciate other "places" or permanent values of Catholic spirituality, such as penance, abnegation, liturgy, devotion to the cross, spiritual exercises, and other practices. But all these are now set within a new context and given a new focus.
I should point out that liberation spirituality, as liberation theology itself, is in the process of formation. It has not answered all the questions that it has given rise to. It has not yet achieved a new synthesis of all the various elements that go to make up the Christian life. It is one thing to legitimately question and criticize certain traditional "truths" of Christian theology and practice that have lost their meaning and efficacy in the lives of contemporary Christians. It is another to know how to fit them into a new spiritual and pastoral vision and to give them their rightful place and importance.
Latin America is living through times of crisis, and the church shares that crisis. We are always in crisis when we pass from one stage of our lives, personal or collective, to another. In this process of formation and reformation, at each stage we must create a new synthesis of values. It is the transition between two syntheses that causes the crisis. It can be fraught with confusion, doubt, instability, wrong turns, retracing of steps, new advances, painful challenges, but also with new experiences of life, light, strength, hope, and renewal.
Latin American spirituality is passing through a transition at the present time; in the midst of crisis, it is working toward a new synthesis of Christian spiritual values. The present struggle, however, is not just a passing stage in liberation spirituality, for liberation spirituality will never allow itself to settle down into an achieved system of spiritual values and practices. In one sense, liberation spirituality is a "spirituality of crisis." It underlines the point that Christians, as Christians, will always live in crisis, in pilgrimage, and in the call to transforming action, as they eagerly await and "groan" for the new creation.
This is the strength and the weakness of a spirituality of liberation. This recognition of crisis gives it newness, vitality, dynamism, radicalness, and transforming, liberating power. But times of crisis, of exciting newness and intense involvement, also make it difficult to have the tranquility and psychological distance to put things nicely in order, to achieve a coherent synthesis that has precision and clarity, to bring about stability in one's life. Perhaps it also makes it more difficult, humanly speaking, to interiorize sufficiently the values that are being newly discovered and dynamically incarnated in real-life situations that are full of change; it is certainly more difficult to integrate those values and experiences into a systematic vision of the Christian life. But without crises -- the "times" that Scripture calls kairos: grace-filled opportunities -- we would never have that process of growth by which we become freer and more mature Christians.
If North American Christians desire to be enriched by Latin American spirituality, then they must try to understand and participate in the crises of their own country and their own church, and to strive in the Spirit to make their own new spiritual synthesis, turning to the historical Jesus and committing themselves to justice for their poor.
- For those who read Spanish (or Portuguese) and have access to Latin American theological journals, a joint project of articles on Latin American spirituality of liberation was published in seven journals toward the end of 1979. The journals are: Mensaje of Chile, Revista eclesiastica brasilena of Brazil, Paginas of Peru, SIC of Venezuela, ECA of El Salvador, Dialogo of Guatemala, and Christus of Mexico.
- Concluding Document, no. 445, of the Third General Conference of the Latin American Episcopacy in Puebla, Mexico, February, 1979. Henceforth this conference's documents will be referred to in the text by citation of the appropriate number.
- See the following books in Spanish by Segundo Galilea (and check Orbis Books for new translations of Galilea and other Latin American liberation theologians): Vivir el Evangelio en tierra extraña, Contemplación y apostolado, Aspectos críticos en la espiritualidad actual, El sentido del pobre, Espiritualidad de la liberación.
- See Leonardo Boff's extremely enlightening book Teologia desde el cautiverio.
- Jon Sobrino, Christology at the Crossroads (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1978), p. xvi.
- For example, Jon Sobrino, Christology at the Crossroads; Leonardo Boff, Jesus Christ Liberator; Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation; Ignacio Ellacuria, Freedom Made Flesh. All the preceding are published by Orbis Books.
- See Ernesto Cardenal, The Gospel in Solentiname (Maryknoll, N.Y.- Orbis Books, 1976).
- Cited in Sobrino, Christology, p. 10.
- Sobrino, Christology, p. 13.
- Karl Rahner, not known for political or theological radicalism, said, "The only admissable 'tutiorism' [i.e., playing safe] in the life of the Church today is the tutiorism which consists in taking risks." (Theological Investigations, vol. 7 [New York: Herder and Herder, 1971 ], p. 81).
So the two disciples went on ahead into the city and found everything just as Jesus had said, and they prepared the Passover supper there.
A man named Simon, who was from Cyrene, was coming in from the country just then, and they forced him to carry Jesus' cross. And they brought Jesus to a place called Golgotha (which means Skull Hill). They offered Him wine drugged with myrrh, but He refused it. Then they nailed Him to the cross. They gambled for His clothes, throwing dice to decide who would get them.
It was early on Sunday morning when Jesus rose from the dead, and the first person who saw Him was Mary Magdalene, the woman from whom He had cast out seven demons. She went and found the disciples, who were grieving and weeping. But when she told them that Jesus was alive and she had seen Him, they didn't believe her.
