I had the privilege of recruiting, after which appointing, Fr. Gustavo to the Division of Theology right here on the College of Notre Dame in 2001. I had the privilege of recruiting and appointing many nice theologians, far surpassing my very own stature or potential, however Fr. Gustavo was definitely by any measure among the many best. His 1971 A Theology of Liberation, nonetheless in print in lots of languages, was the start of a worldwide theological motion that has completely affected Christian theology, Catholic, Protestant and Evangelical. A number of of his different books have develop into theological classics in their very own proper. We Drink From Our Personal Wells: The Non secular Journey of a Folks (1983, twentieth-anniversary version printed in 2003) has develop into a basic of spirituality, irreducibly social and non secular on the similar time. Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ (1992) is essentially the most definitive biography of the Dominican Bartolomé de las Casas, no much less theological as a result of it’s biographical. On Job (1985) is a basic contribution to the exegetical literature on the Guide of Job.
On the idea of those and different works, Fr. Gustavo was the recipient of many educational honors, together with his induction into the French Legion of Honor (1993) and his election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2002). As I recall, he appeared not even to have observed his election to this Academy. He appeared virtually bemused when he acquired even additional honors such because the Principe de Asturias award in 2003. His humility was so profound, and his consideration so firmly settled in God, that he absorbed these accolades with out seen impact, although, I hasten so as to add, he was at all times impeccably gracious in expressing his appreciation.
His humility was a part of his greatness. Now and again he confirmed me the mimeographed, later photocopied, sheets of fundamental catechesis and of the weather of the non secular life that he utilized in his pastoral work with small communities of the poor in Lima. He was nonetheless utilizing and creating extra of those whereas he was receiving awards from educational teams for whom this fundamental catechetical work for the poor was fully invisible. These sheets included extracts from the Fathers of the Church and from his well-known Dominican confrere Thomas Aquinas, in addition to from different theological classics. He instructed me that these gems of knowledge had been the birthright of the poor and there was no cause they shouldn’t be given correct entry to them and that it was his job as a priest to take part personally on this work. That is what defines, indelibly, his greatness for me.
The caricature of him as primarily a political activist based mostly in irreducibly secular classes couldn’t have been extra misplaced. He was an evangelist, at the start. His major impulse was catechetical and biblical. His social imaginative and prescient arose from the basic conviction that the dignity of the poor, as human beings, transcended all social and political reductionism and never solely transcended materialism however resisted it. The poor he labored with, like everybody else, requested questions on life and demise, about struggling, about function and that means in life. In reality, it was usually particularly these poor who requested such questions, manifesting the need for God that Catholicism says is intrinsic to human nature and, with Augustine, exhibiting the restlessness with solutions that appeared both to cheapen their aspirations as merely materials, or to affront their sensibility that issues shouldn’t be as they’re. Gustavo didn’t romanticize poverty. “Poverty is demise” he used to say. One doesn’t handle the poor adequately both by telling them their poverty is spiritually good for them, or by telling them there isn’t any hope for human beings past demise.
As is well-known, among the theologians who adopted within the wake of A Theology of Liberation weren’t as securely based as Fr. Gustavo in his basically evangelical and ecclesial sensibilities, and appeared to have absorbed Marxist social evaluation extra constitutively. Famously, below John Paul II, liberation theology that appeared pervasively Marxist in inspiration and reductionist in its strategy was criticized. Then Cardinal Ratzinger, whereas prefect of the CDF, had requested a gaggle of Latin American bishops to look into Fr. Gustavo’s theology. However finally Ratzinger cleared his theology of any suspicion of error.
I bear in mind one afternoon when he and Fr. Vergilio Elizondo took me out to dinner at an Italian restaurant on the town to thank me for welcoming him into the division. At one level earlier than dinner was served he took an envelope out of his jacket pocket. Seems, it contained a handwritten letter from Ratzinger, assuring Fr. Gustavo that he had discovered nothing in his theology to criticize and certainly on this letter he warmly congratulated Fr. Gustavo on his achievements. Fr. Gustavo was very happy with this letter. But in addition—he knew that I cared about such issues. He wished to speak to me that he cared, too. I had by no means talked about and even hinted at any type of fear or doubt to him. He merely wished to point out me that he cared about what I cared about and that he cared for me sufficient to inform me.
Working inside and from the humility of his ecclesial sensibilities, he expanded our ecclesial sensibilities. He challenged and sensitized our ecclesial conscience and he widened our theological horizons by giving us new classes to suppose with. Maybe that is nowhere extra evident than in his invocation of a preferential possibility for the poor, the preferential possibility for the poor as it’s usually designated. This concept was acquired into the papal magisterium of John Paul II,[1] the very pope most involved about sure tendencies in liberation theology, and from there into the Compendium of Catholic Social Instructing,[2] in addition to the theology of Pope Francis.[3]
The concept bears the traces of the greatness of Fr. Gustavo’s thoughts and spirit. Talking for myself, it’s the concept of his that has had essentially the most profound impact by myself pondering. I used to be initially uncomfortable with the concept—most likely a positive mark of its value! It appeared to me to show that God performs favorites. It appeared to valorize the poor as if they had been by some means value greater than different folks in God’s eyes. I had a tough time explaining to critics why this was not true, as a result of I had a tough time understanding it myself. Additionally, maybe subconsciously, I feared being “de-centered” from God’s consideration. St. Augustine would have understood this worry. We prideful folks don’t like being shoved off the middle stage we expect we deserve and that, in reality, we want.
However that’s precisely the issue. What do we want? As I listened to Fr. Gustavo communicate, each in public and in non-public, and as I studied extra of his writing and, particularly, his best work (in my view), On Job, I started to grasp. I started to ask myself, Properly, what do you favor? An uncomfortable query which might additionally simply as properly be posed as, To what do you defer? It was arduous to not reply, if I had been being trustworthy, Wealth, Social Standing, Status, Political Energy. The Academy is particularly invested in status, the status of publishing venues, of rankings, and of honors and awards, of lengthy CV’s. However what does God want? How does God worth issues? God prefers none of those. The desire for such issues makes those that wouldn’t have any of them, in a means, invisible. In search of, and deferring to, cash, energy, and status, we don’t pay a lot consideration to those that wouldn’t have them. We don’t “see” them, simply because the wealthy man within the parable didn’t see, or care sufficient to note, the poor man begging at his doorstep lined in disgusting sores. We conveniently neglect them.
God, nevertheless, does see and does bear in mind. God’s preferences are totally different from ours. God doesn’t want wealth, social standing, status (educational or in any other case), or political energy. God sees by all of this to our naked human nature, as we had been created, with none of this stuff. He sees by to the human dignity inherent in his human creatures as his personal picture and likeness. The preferential possibility for the poor is God’s desire for human dignity, which is legitimate and operative aside from any of the issues by which our preferences make investments dignity. The preferential possibility for the poor deconstructs these preferences and re-centers our consideration on these from whom such preferences had stripped human dignity and rendered them, and with them human dignity itself, invisible and unlovable. I started to see that I had an funding within the preferential possibility for the poor if I had been to have an funding in human dignity itself.
I started to see that the preferential possibility for the poor is within the first occasion about God, and never in regards to the poor. “The last word foundation of God’s desire for the poor is to be present in God’s personal goodness and never in any evaluation of society or in human compassion, nevertheless pertinent these causes could also be” (On Job, xiii). Once more, “God undertakes self-revelation by performing and overturning values and standards. The scorned of this world are these whom the God of affection prefers. It is a quite simple matter, however for a thoughts that judges every little thing by deserves and demerits, worthiness and unworthiness, it’s troublesome to understand” (xii). The poor aren’t simply an financial class. They’re the “scorned,” the inconvenient folks of every kind, negligible, unimportant and disposable folks, on the mercy of a cruel throw-away tradition as Pope Francis has put it. We act and possibly extra importantly we really feel as if our preferences are goal, are God’s preferences.
Not even Job, in the long run, was immune from the “anthropocentrism” (76) which replaces God’s preferences and valuations with our personal. Job assumed he knew what justice was. However such self-righteousness will finally and at all times generate scorn, in reality the very scorn from which Job himself was struggling! It will probably by no means present the therapeutic from scorn or the final word supply of social renewal, and actually it “leads within the closing evaluation to the substitute of God with self and to the usurpation of God’s place” (79). However, “That is exactly what the Bible means by idolatry, which is a everlasting temptation for believers . . . a sure type of rational satisfaction—the substitute of God by the human particular person” (79), a substitute of God by our preferences and judgments. It thus cuts off all entry to a love for human dignity in and of itself, with no specific advantage attaching to it, as we decide advantage in line with our personal preferences.
The profoundly conventional, certainly Augustinian, provenance of such statements is clear, and stands within the face of those that would discover in Fr. Gustavo’s theology a rejection of biblical and conventional theology in deference to materialist or irreducibly political ideologies. Fr. Gustavo exhibits that the endpoint of the scorn bred by idolatry is the scorning of Jesus himself, the Phrase made flesh (John 1:14). For he’s the One who, although he was wealthy, grew to become poor (2 Cor 8:9), who, in his Incarnation, most well-liked not wealth, social standing, political energy, and least of all status, however “flesh,” our flesh, in its very nakedness and utter impoverishment. He grew to become what we scorn in an effort to present what God prefers, certainly, what God, impartial of and earlier than any advantage of ours, loves. The world that didn’t and doesn’t acknowledge and actually scorns that love is a world by which it’s inconceivable for true justice to exist as a result of it’s inconceivable for the reality of human dignity to be seen, cherished, spoken, and defended as it’s, fully shorn of the issues that we, the world, in reality want.
In maybe one of the vital startlingly Augustinian moments on this profoundly exegetical ebook, Fr. Gustavo would have us ponder Jesus as he prays the phrases of Psalm 22 on the Cross. Jesus didn’t write the Psalm, Fr. Gustavo notes, however “the essential factor is that Jesus made it his personal and, whereas nailed to the cross, provided to the Father the struggling and abandonment of all humankind. This radical communion with the struggling of human beings introduced him all the way down to the deepest degree of historical past on the very second when his life was ending” (On Job, 100). On this communion, the plight of all these whose human dignity is outraged by the “preferences” of prideful idolatry is lifted up within the revelation of God’s preferences. Jesus’ “cry on the cross renders extra audible and extra penetrating the cries of all of the Jobs, particular person and collective, of human historical past” (101), and this excludes nobody. The very hinges of historical past and of God’s Windfall are revealed as invested in and ordered to human dignity, particularly insofar as it’s outraged, insulted, scorned, and mocked, in no matter particular person and in no matter kind. It’s these that God prefers. And would we’ve it in any other case? Would we’ve the hinges of historical past be based mostly on our preferences and the issues to which we defer? Ultimately, that will, sarcastically, exclude us. It will, in reality, exclude all of us.
It’s this which I realized from Fr. Gustavo. And I feel I might study it as a result of he didn’t scorn me, somebody whom he knew had qualms about things like the “preferential possibility for the poor,” nevertheless unspoken, somebody he knew didn’t suppose instinctively in line with the sensibilities and reflexes and vocabulary specified by A Theology of Liberation or his different works. But he managed not simply to tolerate me however to care sufficient to speak that he cared about one thing he knew I did care about, the ecclesial constancy of a theologian. After which, over time, he completely expanded for me what such constancy would possibly, in reality, finally entail. I wish to take this chance to publicly acknowledge this present and so many others. Thanks, Fr. Gustavo, for all that you simply gave to me, to the Church, to Notre Dame, and to the self-discipline of theology itself. Might your reminiscence be a blessing to us as we chart our course right into a future by which we hope to dwell as much as the numerous items you gave us!
[2] For instance, §§ 59 (in reference to Mary), 182, 449.
