When the young Augustinian Fr. Robert Prevost landed in Lima in 1985, sent after advanced studies in Rome to assist his religious order’s mission in northern Peru, the country was convulsing.
At the same time, the Catholic Church in Latin America was living its own revolution. After the Second Vatican Council, Latin American grassroots activists, theologians and bishops were reading the signs of the times and beginning to articulate what became the region’s theological hallmark throughout the late 20th-century: “the preferential option for the poor.”
Less than six months into the pontificate of Pope Leo XIV, a Chicago native who spent more than two decades as a missionary in Peru, that language has already been proven to be a guiding force in the pope’s vision for the church.
“I am convinced that the preferential choice for the poor is a source of extraordinary renewal both for the church and for society,” the pope wrote in his first major document, Dilexi Te, an apostolic exhortation centered on the needs of the poor that draws heavily from the Latin American bishops’ conferences that spurred the development of liberation theology.
Although Prevost has never been explicitly linked to the development of liberation theology in Latin America, his experience as a missionary has painted the first U.S.-born pope’s perception of the poor and pastoral care in a Latin American, and distinctly Peruvian, way.
Prevost had no formal ties to the development of liberation theology, yet his missionary experience in Peru formed what Emilce Cuda, secretary of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, called a distinctly Latin American way of doing theology: one rooted in the concrete realities of suffering communities and animated by a deep theological intuition that faith must begin with lived experience.
“Placing yourself alongside the people condemns you to be a liberation theologian,” Cuda said, reflecting on Leo’s theological trajectory. “He taught the people in his communities that theory cannot determine reality, rather that reality comes first, then it is thought about, reasoned with, and then we can talk about a theory.””That’s where you can see that this pope is Latin American,” she said. “Not because he has a passport that says he was naturalized or because he lived in Peru for 20 years, or because he eats Peruvian food; he is Latin American because of the methodology and the great contribution of Latin America,” namely, “that the starting point is reality — that is the methodology that the Latin American church offers to the whole world.”
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With thanks to the National Catholic Reporter (NCR) and Justin McLellan, where this article originally appeared.
