DBWI: Catholics Reject Liberation Theology

As a non-religious person who is nonetheless interested in the Catholic church from a historical POV, it always struck me how the Church transformed itself more or less overnight in the past 50 years. From Pope John XXIII's Vatican II through Paul VI endorsing liberation theology in a roundabout way through an encyclical and more importantly the promotion of Gustavo Gutierrez to Cardinal. Now with Gutierrez having been elected as Pope John XXIV, it seems the Church stands without peer as a vehicle for social justice and aid to the impoverished. While it may not have been popular in it's infancy I can scarcely imagine how the Catholic Church might look today if there had been some sort of reactionary movement back to the Latin rites and strict hierarchies of the "old church," and especially if some Cardinal had thought to label liberationism as socialist during the Cold War.

So what do you all think? What would a church without liberation theology look like, and how would you get that result?

(OOC: My knowledge of Catholic history is limited to Pope-watching, so if I've taken any extraordinary liberties let me know)
 
Despite the probable infighting the Roman Catholic church would likely have more influence simple due to it's size. Without all the traditional Catholics setting up The Universal Catholic church they would've stayed under the authority of Rome.
Not like they are now in name only, while having the council of bishops in power, but genuinely accepting the holy father as their spiritual leader.
Imagine the good we could do if Peter's rock hadn't split in two.

And just because they suddenly needed to replace the beautiful tridentine mass with that near protestant monstrosity. (You may guess which side I'm arguing from ;))
 
It isn't the first schism the True Church has had and it won't be the last. I think the mood with a lot of the Roman priests is that losing a few hardliners to schism was a fair sacrifice, not one to be celebrated by any means but not as destructive as the Universal doom-prophets would have us believing. The overtures toward the Anglicans certainly made up for the numbers with interest, I think you'd find a lot of Catholics both Roman and Universal who would say that getting back into communion with the Church of England was a milestone in Catholic history. Don't get me wrong, I like the Tridentine Mass as much as any other Catholic, but as Pope Paul VII (OOC: Cardinal Giovanni Benelli in place of Karol Wojtyla with the conclave happening as per IOTL) said, we must not let our grand rituals cloud the essence of our mission on Earth.
 

Deimos

Banned
The OP is very correct in the assumption to name The Second Vatican Coucil as a starting point for the adoption of liberation theology. Many theologians argue that it was inevitable once the modern platform took hold of it. With Vatican II many protestants and other groups were ecstatic about an open-minded and modernised Holy Roman Catholic Church. I guess the reform-minded party in the HRCC wanted to go further and thus introduced liberation theology on a global level.

Theologically speaking, there are a lot of problems with liberation theology. First and foremost, in practice it focuses too much on elevating oppressed and socially disfavoured groups above others, while neglecting other strata of society. Its proponents see Jesus mostly as a social refomer - one to reverse the current miserable situation. In doing so, they forget a lot of the message of Jesus was about leveling the field, i.e. teaching that the downtrodden are also part of the chosen people and mostly critcized prideful pharisees and rich people who were too attached to their worldy possessions and not pharisees and rich people per se.
You can even see that in the way The Roman Catholic Church conducts its proselytisation, seeing as they primarily focus on the lower classes and lower middle classes and their numbers are stagnating where the middle class is growing at the cost of the lower class.

And while maybe no cardinal has spoken out against liberation theology, the second poster maybe did not stress enough that a lot of bishops and ordinary priests and laymen were and are speaking out against it as "Socialist", "Marxist" and "Bolshevist", especially when they anounced the Marxist doctrine of class struggle as an historical truth. If I am not mistaken some German bishop even lamented liberation theology with the words of Oswald Spengler "Christian theology is the grandmother of bolshevism."
 
I think the major turning point was finding St. Paul's long lost epistle to the Laodicians, sure people call it a forgery or gnostic, but I think it is legitimate. Especially since it was found in Qumran.

For those who hadn't read it, the epistle supported many of the points that the reformers had been arguing for centuries.
 
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