Fr Pat pays tribute to Peruvian theologian and priest

Fr Pat Cleary pays tribute to Peruvian philosopher, Catholic theologian, and Dominican priest Fr Gustavo Gutiérrez, who was one of the founders of liberation theology in Latin America.

At the first AGM of the Society of St James after I joined in 1990, we had a talk from Fr Gustavo Gutiérrez, a priest of the diocese of Lima and a renowned theologian.

I had heard of him as one of the principal Liberation Theologians and was expecting a firebrand preacher and confrontationist. When I saw this diminutive, smiling man with a clubbed foot, talk with such gentleness about his love for Our Lord and the church I was a bit bemused.

His main teaching seemed to be to take the Gospel stories and look at them from a different perspective. The perspective of the poor and dispossessed. They take on a different feel when we do that and it can have the effect of rearranging the spiritual furniture in our mind if we allow it to. Easier, of course, to cling on to old ways of thinking.

For me, this is Fr Gutiérrez great contribution to the world he peacefully left as a Dominican priest on October 22 this year.

Some found his teaching a threat to order in politics and the church. It’s up to each of us to decide. Having heard him speak over the years on various occasions I have the deepest admiration for his commitment to the poor and his mission to encourage us to be more Christ like in this way.

Allow me to tell you about an incident in the parish in which I was working, Nuestra Señora de Fatima in Santa Cruz, Bolivia back in the 1990s. There was an epidemic of cholera and in one day, seven different families bought dying or sometimes, dead babies to the parish for ‘emergency Baptisms’ – they didn’t want their babies to die without Baptism (it had become the custom for Baptism to be administered on the child’s first birthday).

I asked one family to take their child to the hospital in the city which the German government sponsored offering free health care in such emergencies, the boy died on the way and so the next day I went to their shack-like home on the edge of the jungle and we carried out a burial having given a local lad a pound to did a grave.

No paperwork as the boy’s birth hadn’t been registered so no death certificate was needed. It occurred to me later that it is likely that the only time that boy’s name was written down was in the Baptism register, if our names were only going to be written once, that’s not a bad place to have it!

The tragedy for that family continued as the mother died sitting alongside me as I drove her to the same hospital.

When we say the Lord’s Prayer we say ‘Our Father’ not ‘My Father’. Our discipleship has to have breadth as well as height and depth. Was that boy’s life less valuable than yours, mine, the king of England or anyone else’s?

The answer to that question may take us to challenging places and to my way  of thinking that’s what Fr Gutiérrez was asking us to do. I realise that with a story such as the one I’ve told may bring up emotions and we need to act with heart and head, it’s  when we exclude either we get into difficulties. 

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