Liberation theologian says hope takes work
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Published: October 30, 2008
Dominican Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez speaking at DePaul Univeristy Oct. 30 (Photo by David V. Kamba)
Conference marks 40 years of 'preferential option for the poor'
Chicago
Hope isn’t synonymous with just sitting around waiting for something good to happen, the widely acknowledged father of Latin American liberation theology said this morning. Instead, it implies concrete effort in daily life to generate reasons for that hope.
“Hope is a gift, but you don’t receive that gift if you’re not creating resources for it,” Dominican Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez said this morning in Chicago. “Reasons for hope don’t just drop from the sky. They come from below, from what people are doing or not doing.”
Gutiérrez, a Peruvian, spoke this morning at a conference titled “Transformed by Hope: Building a Catholic Social Theology for the Americas,” sponsored by the Catholic Theological Union and DePaul University.
The conference marks the 40th anniversary of the famous meeting of the Latin American bishops in Medellín, Colombia, in 1968, which gave rise to the Catholic church’s “preferential option for the poor” -- a social commitment recently reaffirmed during the 2007 conference of the Latin American bishops in Aparecida, Brazil. Coincidentally, 2008 also marks 35 years since the first translation of Gutiérrez’s famous book, A Theology of Liberation, into English. More
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