dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

Faith, Faith in Focus

Once I discovered liberation theology, I couldn’t be Catholic without it

by David Inczauskis June 4, 2021

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Priests celebrate Mass for protesters in the middle of a rural street in Honduras in 2017 in an effort to block the passage of equipment for a construction project that would be harmful to the environment. (Photo courtesy of author)

As a college student in 2011, I was searching for a faith as radical as the Gospel I was reading. I found it in the rural town of Chiantla in Huehuetenango, Guatemala, where I had gone to research human rights abuses against women and children. In Chiantla, a group of committed campesinos were organizing youth, women and indigenous communities on the weekdays. They were canvassing for the leftist National Revolutionary Unity party on Saturdays. And they were going to Mass on Sundays.

I had never before witnessed this seamless integration of faith and revolutionary political struggle that these people knew as “liberation theology.” But having seen it, I knew that I could no longer be a Catholic without it.

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Growing up, I knew that Jesus preached good news to the poor and woe to the wealthy. I knew that Jesus said that it was harder for a rich person to enter heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle. I knew that Jesus’ disciples shunned private property. I even knew that Jesus’ mother Mary called on God to feed the hungry and send the rich away empty, to lift up the weak and dethrone the powerful. But folks at my home parish in the United States would always explain away these lines by spiritualizing them.

The Guatemalan campesinos did nothing of the sort. They took Jesus at his word. They consciously carried out the revolution of society—and hearts—that Mary, Jesus and his disciples had started. They organized structural changes in their community to eliminate the wealth gap and to redistribute private property. They taught peasants how to read so that they could study the causes of their oppression and change it through political action.

I will never forget one Saturday I spent campaigning with the National Revolutionary Unity party for Rigoberta Menchú, a Mayan indigenous woman running for president under the banner of a coalition of leftist parties. We interviewed members of a rural community whom the rival campaign of Otto Pérez Molina had visited a few days before. His campaign had told them that it would plant microphones and cameras in the voting booths. If the peasants did not support Mr. Pérez Molina, then the campaign would know and would return to kill them.

I was shocked, but my …

https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2021/06/04/liberation-theology-catholic-faith-240599/