Vatican Warning

Liberationists are assailed

How can Christianity best serve as an effective advocate for the world's poor and oppressed? One answer is a movement known as "liberation theology." Its proponents, who view history in Marxist terms, work to raise the consciousness of the downtrodden in what they see as a class struggle. A fringe element has even flirted with revolutionary violence. Developed in the late 1960s among Latin American Roman Catholics, liberation theology has spread with increasing force throughout the Third World, as well as among leftist Catholic and Protestant circles in Europe and North America.

Pope John Paul came up against the movement directly during his tour of Central America a year ago. He was especially alarmed by the campaign in Nicaragua to drive a wedge between the Catholic hierarchy and a "people's church" inspired by liberationist thinking. Upon his return to Rome, John Paul commissioned a special study of the problem by the Vatican's top theologian, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger.

Ratzinger's response is a ringing denunciation. Originally delivered in private last September at a weekly meeting of the Pope and his cabinet, Ratzinger's report appeared last week in 30 Giorni (30 Days), an Italian Catholic monthly. Though not a formal Vatican decree, the document is known to reflect the Pope's thinking and is the toughest theological attack yet mounted from the top level of the church.

John Paul's speeches have warned against the advocacy of violence for social change, and against trying to build social action on a Marxist foundation. Cardinal Ratzinger goes further, identifying liberation theology as a serious doctrinal error. Ratzinger concedes that the movement might never have arisen if the church had been more aggressive in attacking oppression. However, he firmly rejects the approach of liberation theologians who, he says, use Marxism to interpret the Bible in their own way and who believe they can adopt Marxism's techniques without its atheism. He accuses such writer-priests as Gustavo Gutierrez of Peru and Jon Sobrino of El Salvador of transforming spiritual concepts into political ones.

A liberal-minded Jesuit in Rome doubts that "Ratzinger can pull the rug out from under priests like Gutierrez and Sobrino. They probably will only say 'That's his opinion.' " But the Vatican is highly unlikely to leave it at that. Ratzinger, noting that liberation theology "steadily attracts more and more" priests and nuns, declares it to be a "fundamental danger for the faith." A strategy to confront the movement is now, he warns, "urgent."