Fr Blake has this post and video about real, solid Catholic missionary work in South America.
None of this flaky liberation theology junk.
While I’m at it, when I was training in England for Catholic ordination we had a sixties type Domincan come to lecture us about sacramental theology. He was getting all excited about liberation theology sacramental theology…”So you see, whenever we give a poor person a bath it is a baptism..whenever we feed the hungry it is Eucharist.”
Us former Anglicans were aghast and didn’t buy it. One of them said, “Excuse me Father, this might be revolutionary for you and something totally new, but this is nothing more than the sacramental theology of the Salvation Army. It’s been around since General Booth in London in the nineteenth century, and furthermore, that’s why the Salvation Army no longer practice the sacraments of any kind.”
Fr. L,As a Brazilian who suffered seeing the Church go from above 90% of the population as Catholics dwindle to 70% in three decades, one paragraph jumped at me:”Things have changed, partly because social revolution did nothing but create war and class hatred, partly because Catholics began to realise if they did not offer the poor Christ then North American Protestant Evangelicals would.”I can’t help but nod. Homilies and parish ministries loaded with class warfare did nothing but turn people away from the Church, often to the hands of the Assemblies of God and to mega churches preaching the health-and-wealth gospel.I believe that one reason was that listening to someone trying to convince you that you should remain poor and not seek to better your standard of living was cynical and more oppressive than the difficulties in seeking and finding that.But, at the end of the day, the first victim of Liberation Theology was Jesus, Who was sacrificed yet again at the fire of vanities, Marxist vanities. For catechesis and practice were forgotten by the clergy and bishops, all too busy with the illusion of engineering society beyond original sin without Christ.Now, with “friar” Betto, a major proponent of Liberation Theology in Brazil, now laicized, as a “counselor” to the Socialist president who’s pushing for decriminalizing abortion and allowing gay “marriage”, he’s showing on whose side of the spiritual battle for souls he’s been on all along.May Our Lady of Victory pray for us.
Augustine, what a sad turn of events. Not being familiar with the history of how things eventually went in South America, it was dismaying to read that embattled faith was just another avenue leading to abortion and gay marriage. I live in California where we are currently in a spiritual life/death struggle regarding gay marriage, not to mention allowing minor girls to get abortions without telling parents. Of course, these same girls won’t be able to have an aspirin dispensed to them at school without parental consent first so go figure.
I agree with your sentiment. Yes there is the passage from St James exhorting us to help the poor with good works, but that is only one dimension of the faith. Those drawn into socialism seem to lose the faith in a hurry because it draws them into materialism of this world. And materialism is completely opposed to the faith.The real battle is not simply faith vs. atheism. It is faith vs materialism.