SÃO PAULO – Pope Francis’s death heavily impacted old-timer Liberation theologians, people who on several occasions had to struggle with the Church structure to make their voices be heard and suddenly, many decades later, saw a pontiff embody most of their school’s principles and practices.

Despite the deceased pope’s particularities when it comes to his identification with Liberation Theology, the once strong intellectual movement in the Latin American Church that developed in the 1960s and 1970s and combined theological reflection and social criticism in the pursuit of a “preferential option for the poor,” they considered him one of them – and think that the new pontiff will not change the Church’s direction.

Liberation Theology gradually gained strength in several Latin American countries in the years that followed the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965).

Thinkers like Peruvian-born Gustavo Gutiérrez (1928-2024) and Brazilian-born Leonardo Boff would resort to secular sociologists, political scientists, and philosophers in order to reflect on the ways the Church should follow in order to definitively side with the poor, something that for them was a requirement presented by the Gospel, and enable them to struggle for total liberation – from their countries, from dominant nations, from oppressors of all kinds, from the obstacles between them and God.

Liberation Theology quickly spread all over Latin America and inspired many people to pursue a missionary life. Its massive influence on the Church of countries like Brazil, Colombia, and El Salvador ended up creating shocks with the hierarchy.

In the 1980s, Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger – then prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith – began to take measures to control the movement and restrict what they saw as its excesses. Several liberation theologians, including Boff, would be admonished and sanctioned. The movement gradually lost importance, especially after the 1990s.

Maybe to avoid such controversies, some theologians in Argentina insisted for years on the point that Pope Francis’s maître à penser, Jesuit Father Juan Carlos Scannone, and his Theology of the People, had not the same focus Liberation Theology has, especially when it comes to the latter’s discussion of class struggle and its assimilation of Marxian categories.

But veterans like Boff don’t consider there are real distinctions.

“Pope Francis has always seen himself inside Liberation Theology in its Argentinian branch. He took to the Vatican the preferential option for the poor, the theme of liberation, and the criticism of the system that kills and produces a double injustice – social injustice, making the majority of humanity being poor, and ecological injustice, devastating ecosystems,” Boff told Crux.

He also recalled that Francis invited liberation theologians who had been ostracized in the past, like himself, Gutiérrez, Spanish-born Jon Sobrino, and Spanish-born José Maria Castillo.

Frei (Friar) Betto, a Brazilian-born writer and social activist, equally doesn’t have any doubt concerning Pope Francis’s ties with Liberation Theology. He argued that “all encyclicals written by him and all the messages he sent to popular movements during meetings are consistent with Liberation Theology.”

“Once, in Bolivia, he characterized money as the devil’s dung. In the encyclical Laudato si’, he denounced nature’s degradation as a result of predatory exploitation,” Betto told Crux.

Austrian-born Bishop emeritus Erwin Kräutler of Xingu, Brazil, one of the masterminds of the 2019 Amazon Synod, emphasized that Francis was not a theologian in an academic way, but was somebody who chose to know the concrete reality of poverty, marginalization, oppression, and suffering.

“He struggled for the right of every human being to the so-called ‘sumak kawsay’ of the Andean peoples – good living, in English – harmony with oneself, with nature, with human beings and the Supreme being,” he told Crux.

In different documents written by Pope Francis, the sources of some of the ideas he expressed were not identified, but those who know such specific debates can identify them, explained Korean-born theologian Jung Mo Sung. That was the case with a special contribution of some Liberation theologians with the pontiff’s work.

“In Evangelii Gaudium, the pope criticizes capitalism and discusses the idolatry of money, for instance, without identifying the source. He also mentions the divinization of the market. Those ideas come from Brazilian-born theologian Hugo Assmann [1933-2008] and German-born theologian and economist Franz Hinkelammert [1931-2023],” Sung told Crux.

In his opinion, that was a strategy of the pontiff to avoid problems with right-wingers and Traditionalists.

“The theological criticism of capitalism, developed by such authors, has been published mainly in Spanish and Portuguese. When Jorge Mario Bergoglio still lived in Argentina, he had friends in common with Assmann and Hinkelammert,” he added.

For those thinkers, Pope Francis’s death doesn’t necessarily mean that the ideas brought from Liberation Theology by him to the Vatican will suddenly cease to circulate there with a new pontiff, even if he is conservative.

“I’m convinced that the next pope or the future popes will not desire to take the Church back to the time before the Second Vatican Council and distance themselves from Francis, thus giving up to build a synodal Church, one that was so desired by him,” Kräutler said.

Frei Betto agrees. In his opinion, the next pontiff will probably keep following Francis’s paths.

“I have a feeling that we will have a new moderate-to-conservative pope who will not reverse what Francis has achieved. I bet that the papacy will return to the hands of the Italians,” he said. Betto recalled that Francis has appointed five Italian cardinals who identify with his pastoral line.

For Leonardo Boff, Francis opened a new world in the Church, one in which popes will mostly come from the peripheries of the world – and not from Europe anymore, where only 26 percent of the world’s Catholics live.

“My candidate, the one who would be in line with Pope Francis, is Cardinal Leonardo Steiner, the Archbishop of Manaus. He’s the only Amazonian cardinal who, as I see it, will have a great space in the debates of the cardinals, due to the ecological erosion and the importance of the Amazon for the planet,” Boff said.

In his opinion, if Steiner is elected, he will probably choose the name Francis II.

“He is a Franciscan with excellent education, he speaks several languages,” Boff said.