Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez In Memoriam: A Brief Tribute

I had the privilege of recruiting, and then appointing, Fr. Gustavo to the Department of Theology here at the University of Notre Dame in 2001. I had the privilege of recruiting and appointing many great theologians, far surpassing my own stature or ability, but Fr. Gustavo was certainly by any measure among the greatest. His 1971 A Theology of Liberation, still in print in many languages, was the beginning of a worldwide theological movement that has permanently affected Christian theology, Catholic, Protestant and Evangelical. Several of his other books have become theological classics in their own right. We Drink From Our Own Wells: The Spiritual Journey of a People (1983, twentieth-anniversary edition published in 2003) has become a classic of spirituality, irreducibly social and spiritual at the same time. Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ (1992) is the most definitive biography of the Dominican Bartolomé de las Casas, no less theological because it is biographical. On Job (1985) is a classic contribution to the exegetical literature on the Book of Job.

On the basis of these and other works, Fr. Gustavo was the recipient of many academic honors, including 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 seemed not even to have noticed his election to this Academy. He seemed almost bemused when he received even further honors such as the Principe de Asturias award in 2003. His humility was so profound, and his attention so firmly settled in God, that he absorbed these accolades without visible effect, though, I hasten to add, he was always impeccably gracious in expressing his appreciation.

His humility was part of his greatness. From time to time he showed me the mimeographed, later photocopied, sheets of basic catechesis and of the elements of the spiritual life that he used in his pastoral work with small communities of the poor in Lima. He was still using and creating more of these while he was receiving awards from academic groups for whom this basic catechetical work for the poor was completely invisible. These sheets included extracts from the Fathers of the Church and from his famous Dominican confrere Thomas Aquinas, as well as from other theological classics. He told me that these gems of wisdom were the birthright of the poor and there was no reason they should not be given proper access to them and that it was his job as a priest to participate personally in this work. This is what defines, indelibly, his greatness for me.

The caricature of him as primarily a political activist based in irreducibly secular categories could not have been more misplaced. He was an evangelist, first and foremost. His primary impulse was catechetical and biblical. His social vision arose from the fundamental conviction that the dignity of the poor, as human beings, transcended all social and political reductionism and not only transcended materialism but resisted it. The poor he worked with, like everyone else, asked questions about life and death, about suffering, about purpose and meaning in life. In fact, it was often especially these poor who asked such questions, manifesting the desire for God that Catholicism says is intrinsic to human nature and, with Augustine, exhibiting the restlessness with answers that seemed either to cheapen their aspirations as merely material, or to affront their sensibility that things should not be as they are. Gustavo did not romanticize poverty. “Poverty is death” he used to say. One does not address the poor adequately either by telling them their poverty is spiritually good for them, or by telling them there is no hope for human beings beyond death.

As is well known, some of the theologians who followed in the wake of A Theology of Liberation were not as securely founded as Fr. Gustavo in his fundamentally evangelical and ecclesial sensibilities, and seemed to have absorbed Marxist social analysis more constitutively. Famously, under John Paul II, liberation theology that seemed pervasively Marxist in inspiration and reductionist in its approach was criticized. Then Cardinal Ratzinger, while prefect of the CDF, had asked a group of Latin American bishops to look into Fr. Gustavo’s theology. But ultimately Ratzinger cleared his theology of any suspicion of error.

I remember one afternoon when he and Fr. Vergilio Elizondo took me out to dinner at an Italian restaurant in town to thank me for welcoming him into the department. At one point before dinner was served he took an envelope out of his jacket pocket. Turns out, it contained a handwritten letter from Ratzinger, assuring Fr. Gustavo that he had found nothing in his theology to criticize and indeed in this letter he warmly congratulated Fr. Gustavo on his achievements. Fr. Gustavo was very proud of this letter. But also—he knew that I cared about such things. He wanted to communicate to me that he cared, too. I had never mentioned or even hinted at any kind of worry or doubt to him. He simply wanted to show me that he cared about what I cared about and that he cared for me enough to tell me.

Working within 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 categories to think with. Perhaps this is nowhere more evident than in his invocation of a preferential option for the poor, the preferential option for the poor as it is customarily designated. This idea was received into the papal magisterium of John Paul II,[1] the very pope most concerned about certain trends in liberation theology, and from there into the Compendium of Catholic Social Teaching,[2] as well as the theology of Pope Francis.[3]

The idea bears the traces of the greatness of Fr. Gustavo’s mind and spirit. Speaking for myself, it is the idea of his that has had the most profound effect on my own thinking. I was originally uncomfortable with the idea—probably a sure mark of its worth! It seemed to me to teach that God plays favorites. It seemed to valorize the poor as though they were somehow worth more than other people in God’s eyes. I had a hard time explaining to critics why this was not true, because I had a hard time understanding it myself. Also, perhaps subconsciously, I feared being “de-centered” from God’s attention. St. Augustine would have understood this fear. We prideful people do not like being shoved off the center stage we think we deserve and that, in fact, we prefer.

But that is exactly the problem. What do we prefer? As I listened to Fr. Gustavo speak, both in public and in private, and as I studied more of his writing and, in particular, his greatest work (in my opinion), On Job, I began to understand. I began to ask myself, Well, what do you prefer? An uncomfortable question which could also just as well be posed as, To what do you defer? It was hard not to answer, if I were being honest, Wealth, Social Status, Prestige, Political Power. The Academy is especially invested in prestige, the prestige of publishing venues, of rankings, and of honors and awards, of long CV’s. But what does God prefer? How does God value things? God prefers none of these. The preference for such things makes those who do not have any of them, in a way, invisible. Looking for, and deferring to, money, power, and prestige, we do not pay much attention to those who do not have them. We do not “see” them, just as the rich man in the parable did not see, or care enough to notice, the poor man begging at his doorstep covered in disgusting sores. We conveniently forget them.

God, however, does see and does remember. God’s preferences are different from ours. God does not prefer wealth, social status, prestige (academic or otherwise), or political power. God sees through all of this to our bare human nature, as we were created, without any of these things. He sees through to the human dignity inherent in his human creatures as his own image and likeness. The preferential option for the poor is God’s preference for human dignity, which is valid and operative apart from any of the things in which our preferences invest dignity. The preferential option for the poor deconstructs those preferences and re-centers our attention on those from whom such preferences had stripped human dignity and rendered them, and with them human dignity itself, invisible and unlovable. I began to see that I had an investment in the preferential option for the poor if I were to have an investment in human dignity itself.

I began to see that the preferential option for the poor is in the first instance about God, and not about the poor. “The ultimate basis of God’s preference for the poor is to be found in God’s own goodness and not in any analysis of society or in human compassion, however pertinent these reasons may be” (On Job, xiii). Again, “God undertakes self-revelation by acting and overturning values and criteria. The scorned of this world are those whom the God of love prefers. This is a very simple matter, but for a mind that judges everything by merits and demerits, worthiness and unworthiness, it is difficult to grasp” (xii). The poor are not just an economic category. They are the “scorned,” the inconvenient people of all kinds, negligible, unimportant and disposable people, at the mercy of a merciless throw-away culture as Pope Francis has put it. We act and maybe more importantly we feel as though our preferences are objective, are God’s preferences.

Not even Job, in the end, was immune from the “anthropocentrism” (76) which replaces God’s preferences and valuations with our own. Job assumed he knew what justice was. But such self-righteousness will ultimately and always generate scorn, in fact the very scorn from which Job himself was suffering! It can never provide the healing from scorn or the ultimate source of social renewal, and in fact it “leads in the final analysis to the replacement of God with self and to the usurpation of God’s place” (79). But, “This is precisely what the Bible means by idolatry, which is a permanent temptation for believers . . . a certain kind of rational pride—the replacement of God by the human person” (79), a replacement of God by our preferences and judgments. It thus cuts off all access to a love for human dignity in and of itself, with no particular merit attaching to it, as we judge merit according to our own preferences.

The profoundly traditional, indeed Augustinian, provenance of such statements is evident, and stands in the face of those who would find in Fr. Gustavo’s theology a rejection of biblical and traditional theology in deference to materialist or irreducibly political ideologies. Fr. Gustavo shows that the endpoint of the scorn bred by idolatry is the scorning of Jesus himself, the Word made flesh (John 1:14). For he is the One who, though he was rich, became poor (2 Cor 8:9), who, in his Incarnation, preferred not wealth, social status, political power, and least of all prestige, but “flesh,” our flesh, in its very nakedness and utter impoverishment. He became what we scorn in order to show what God prefers, indeed, what God, independent of and before any merit of ours, loves. The world that did not and does not recognize and in fact scorns that love is a world in which it is impossible for true justice to exist because it is impossible for the truth of human dignity to be seen, loved, spoken, and defended as it is, completely shorn of the things that we, the world, in fact prefer.

In perhaps one of the most startlingly Augustinian moments in this profoundly exegetical book, Fr. Gustavo would have us contemplate Jesus as he prays the words of Psalm 22 on the Cross. Jesus did not write the Psalm, Fr. Gustavo notes, but “the important thing is that Jesus made it his own and, while nailed to the cross, offered to the Father the suffering and abandonment of all humankind. This radical communion with the suffering of human beings brought him down to the deepest level of history at the very moment when his life was ending” (On Job, 100). In this communion, the plight of all those whose human dignity is outraged by the “preferences” of prideful idolatry is lifted up in the revelation of God’s preferences. Jesus’ “cry on the cross renders more audible and more penetrating the cries of all the Jobs, individual and collective, of human history” (101), and this excludes no one. The very hinges of history and of God’s Providence are revealed as invested in and ordered to human dignity, especially insofar as it is outraged, insulted, scorned, and mocked, in whatever person and in whatever form. It is these that God prefers. And would we have it otherwise? Would we have the hinges of history be based on our preferences and the things to which we defer? In the end, that would, ironically, exclude us. It would, in fact, exclude all of us.

It is this which I learned from Fr. Gustavo. And I think I could learn it because he did not scorn me, someone whom he knew had qualms about such things as the “preferential option for the poor,” however unstated, someone he knew did not think instinctively according to the sensibilities and reflexes and vocabulary laid out in A Theology of Liberation or his other works. Yet he managed not just to tolerate me but to care enough to communicate that he cared about something he knew I did care about, the ecclesial fidelity of a theologian. And then, over time, he permanently expanded for me what such fidelity might, in fact, ultimately entail. I would like to take this opportunity to publicly acknowledge this gift and so many others. Thank you, Fr. Gustavo, for all that you gave to me, to the Church, to Notre Dame, and to the discipline of theology itself. May your memory be a blessing to us as we chart our course into a future in which we hope to live up to the many gifts you gave us!

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