The KGB invented both the name Liberation Theology and the Latin American movement that promoted it, the former head of communist Romania’s secret police told the Catholic News Agency. Mihai Pacepa, who defected to the United States in 1978, claimed that in 1968, through a KGB-funded front group called the Christian Peace Conference, the KGB

was able to maneuver a group of leftist South American bishops into holding a Conference of Latin American Bishops at Medellin, Colombia. The Conference’s official task was to ameliorate poverty. Its undeclared goal was to recognize a new religious movement encouraging the poor to rebel against the “institutionalized violence of poverty,” and to recommend the new movement to the World Council of Churches for official approval. The Medellin Conference achieved both goals. It also bought the KGB-born name “Liberation Theology.”

Pacepa also suspects that “there was an organic connection between the KGB and some of those leading promoters of Liberation Theology, but I have no evidence to prove it.” He feels that the founding work oF the movement, Gustavo Gutierrez’s A Theology of Liberation, “was written at the Lubyanka” (KGB headquarters in Moscow) but has no proof.

Not quite, argues John L. Allen, the broadly respected observer of world Catholicism. “Most experts on Latin American religion believe the forces underlying both liberation theology and the expansion of Evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity were largely home-grown,” he writes in Crux. “In the case of liberation theology, it emerged at a time of deep tension in Latin America fueled by poverty and social exclusion, the rise of military regimes and police states, and widespread human rights abuses.”

Inspired by the Second Vatican Council’s call to engage the world, Liberation Theology’s founding theologians —Gutiérrez, Leonardo Boff, and Juan Luis Segundo — “wanted to read the ‘signs of the times’ through the lens of the Bible and Catholic social teaching, and likely would have given rise to liberation theology no matter whose geopolitical interests it served.” Liberal bishops, Allen added, “were already on board with liberation theology before anyone in Moscow knew it was stirring.”

Writing in the English weekly The Spectator, conservative Catholic journalist Damian Thompson writes that Pacepa “is now well to the right of the American political spectrum. He’s not into nuance and he exaggerates. I don’t believe that the KGB ‘created’ a movement as complex as liberation theology and I’m far from convinced that its name was dreamt up in the Lubyanka.” However, he continued, it would also be “naive to dismiss claims that the Soviet Union pumped money into the movement.”

The Vatican Critique

In 1984, the Vatican issued a statement on Certain Aspects of the “Theology of Liberation”, written by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, and approved by Pope John Paul II. A long and nuanced document, it criticized “certain forms of liberation theology which use, in an insufficiently critical manner, concepts borrowed from various currents of Marxist thought.” Clear about the poverty and oppression to which the theological school was responding, the document declared that the marxist concepts and a “rationalist” way of reading Scripture created a theology “which is corrupting whatever was authentic in the generous initial commitment on behalf of the poor.”

Two years later, the Vatican issued a follow up document, a statement on Christian Freedom and Liberation, to describe “the main elements of the Christian doctrine on freedom and liberation.” Also written by Cardinal Ratzinger and approved by the pope, it stressed the “appeal to the spiritual and moral capacities of the individual and to the permanent need for inner conversion, if one is to achieve the economic and social changes that will truly be at the service of man.”

The statement mentioned no theologian by name and observers argued that its condemnation of “certain forms” gave approval to other forms that did not fail in the ways the statement described. The movement has been criticized for a failure to understand economics and to promote statist policies that increase poverty rather than alleviate it. Among its major critics has been the Acton Institute, most recently in an article on Michael Novak’s book Will It Liberate?