About Gustavo Gutiérrez
Gustavo Gutiérrez-Merino Díaz (8 June 1928 – 22 October 2024) was a Peruvian Catholic philosopher, theologian, and Dominican priest who was one of the founders of Latin American liberation theology. His 1971 book A Theology of Liberation is considered pivotal to the formation of liberation theology at large. He held the John Cardinal O'Hara Professorship of Theology at the University of Notre Dame and was a visiting professor at universities in North America and Europe. Born in Lima, Gutiérrez studied medicine and literature at the National University of San Marcos before deciding to become a priest. He began studying theology at the Theology Faculty of Leuven in Belgium and in Lyon, France. His theological focus connected salvation and liberation through the preferential option for the poor, with an emphasis on improving the material conditions of the impoverished. Gutiérrez proposed that revelation and eschatology have been excessively idealized at the expense of efforts to bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth. His methodology was often critical of the social and economic injustice he believed to be responsible for poverty in Latin America, and of the Catholic clergy. The central pastoral question of his work was: "How do we convey to the poor that God loves them?" He acknowledged that while dependency theory itself had many Marxist elements, it "cannot simply be reduced to the Marxist version." In 1974, Gutiérrez founded the Lima branch of the Bartolomé de Las Casas Institute. In 2000, Brown University awarded Gutiérrez an honorary Doctor of Divinity. In this, he wrote that "only by overcoming a society divided into classes... by eliminating the private appropriation of wealth created by human toil, can we build the foundation of a more just society". In 1993, he was awarded the Legion of Honor by the French government for his tireless work.
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