SÃO PAULO – An open letter to the bishops of the Episcopal Conference of Latin America (known by the Spanish acronym CELAM) released in June by Father Clodovis Boff spurred controversy among clergy members and theologians in Brazil.

In the document, Clodovis Boff – once a major leader of the Liberation Theology movement in Latin America along with his brother Leonardo Boff and now a frequent critic of such a theological school – accuses the bishops of prioritizing social issues to the detriment of Jesus’s good news.

The leaders of the Latin American and Caribbean church gathered at the end of May in Rio de Janeiro for their general assembly. In their final message, they stressed the need to build a synodal Church, one that can give a testimony of unity amid the politically polarized societies in the region.

CELAM’s letter also mentioned major challenges in Latin America, like violence, poverty, social inequality, corruption, the weakening of democracy and secularization.

Right at the beginning of his letter, released on Jun. 13, Clodovis Boff highlighted his disaccord with the message of CELAM.

“What good news did I read there? Forgive me for being so frank: None. You gentlemen, bishops of CELAM, always repeat the same old story: Social, social and social. And you have been doing so for 50 years. Dear superior brothers, can’t you see that such a song is getting old?” he asked in the document.

Clodovis Boff then asked the bishops when “will they give the good news from God, from Christ and from His Spirit,” the good news of “grace and salvation,” of “the conversion of the heart and of the meditation of the word,” of “prayer and adoration, of piety with the Mother of the Lord” and other similar themes.

“When will you send us a truly religious, spiritual message?” he added.

Clodovis Boff argued that the secular world is tired of secularization and longs for spirituality, but all the Latin American bishops do is to talk about social matters. While lay churchgoers gladly carry the signs of their Catholic identity, wearing shirts with religious prints and crucifixes, priests and nuns “show up without any kind of distinctive sign.”

“Governments and NGOs are there to respond to ‘social outcries.’ The Church, without a doubt, cannot stay out of this game. But it is not the protagonist in this field. Its proper field of action is another and higher: responding precisely to the ‘outcry for God’,” he continued, adding that the Church is “sacrament of salvation,” and not a simple social institution.

Clodovis Boff argued that, by reading CELAM’s letter, one could think that the Church’s main concern today in our region is “not the cause of Christ and of salvation, but the social causes, like justice, peace, and ecology.”

He emphasized that Pope Leo XIV sent a message to CELAM in which he mentions the “urgent need to remember that it’s the Resurrected that protects and guides the Church, reviving it in hope” and that the Church’s mission is to “reach out for so many brothers and sisters in order to announce the message of Jesus Christ’s salvation.”

He mentioned the crisis of the Latin American Church, in which “seven or eight countries no longer have a majority of Catholics” and criticized CELAM for failing to address such a problem. Clodovis Boff said that, at the same time, there are seeds of hope in the Latin American Church and they’re not connected to social activism, but with the new “movements and communities… of which the Charismatic Catholic Renovation is the most notorious form.”

“While those expressions of spirituality and evangelization constitute the ecclesial group that most fills our churches (and the hearts of the faithful), they did not deserve a single ‘hello’ in the Episcopal Message,” the letter read.

He added that one can only see “white-haired heads” dealing with social issues in the Church, but when it comes to the spiritual dimension, there is a “massive participation of the youth.”

Clodovis Boff urged the Latin American episcopate to “resume with fervor the option for Christ,” taking Him out of the shadows and restoring His total primacy in the Church. He defined it as a “Christ-centrism, one that ferments and transforms everything: people, Church and society.”

“After reading your message, something happened to me that was similar to what I felt almost 20 years ago, when, no longer able to bear the repeated mistakes of Liberation Theology, such an impetus rose from the depths of my soul that I banged on the table and said: ‘Enough! I have to speak,” the document read.

Clodovis Boff’s letter was reproduced and discussed by numerous priests and lay Catholics of traditionalist and conservative extractions, being hailed by some as a necessary and obvious warning to the region’s “hegemonically progressive” Church.

The text also resonated among scholars, especially the ones who studied or collaborated with Clodovis Boff in the past.

That was the case with Romero Venâncio, a professor at the philosophy and religion studies department of the Federal University of Sergipe. He was one of the students of a summer course given by Clodovis Boff in São Paulo at the beginning of the 1990s, and has accompanied his work for decades.

“Clodovis has an admirable intelligence and is a tremendous theologian. But he has been clearly leaving Liberation Theology behind over the past decades and becoming a conservative theologian with a much narrower world view,” Venâncio told Crux.

Shortly after Clodovis Boff’s letter began circulating on social media, Venâncio released a short essay with severe criticism of his ideas, which also had a wide distribution on the internet.

In his text, Venâncio mentioned the transformation of Clodovis Boff in the 1990s, when he began to question the use of the category “poor” in Latin American theology, even affirming that Liberation Theology “replaced Jesus with the figure of the poor.”

In a book he published in 2014, Clodovis Boff took “a new metaphysical turn”, according to Venâncio, adopting idealistic notions about humanity and spirituality. Once a reader of the marxist thinker Louis Althusser, now he would never mention Marx and would prefer to deal with themes connected to post-modernism, Venâncio said.

“The letter seems to be addressed to a new flock: a select group of right-wing extremists who act on social media and in dioceses, vociferating against communism, the Second Vatican Council, Pope Francis and any project of synodality,” he argued.

In Venâncio’s opinion, Clodovis Boff seems to have an outdated vision of the Charismatic Catholic Renewal (CCR), which “is not anymore that massive movement of the 1990s concerned with spirituality, but is now a segment divided over theological divergences and even about property management,” an allusion to legal disputes that have impacted a major CCR group in Brazil, Canção Nova.

Clodovis Boff’s view of the current leaders of CELAM is also apparently mistaken, Venâncio said. Archbishop Jaime Spengler of Porto Alegre, who currently heads Brazil’s Bishops’ Conference and CELAM, is widely seen as a moderate man, without any visible connection to Liberation Theology.

In Venâncio’s opinion, Clodovis Boff is “clearly worried about the theme of spirituality and mystical, which he has all right to look for in other schools, and not in Liberation Theology.”

“But in my opinion, it’s not fair to say that such a dimension is out of Liberation Theology,” he argued.

Venâncio emphasized that Clodovis Boff published in the 1980s a book in collaboration with U.S.-born theologian George Pixley, a Baptist thinker who spent decades in Latin America and “had a profound mystical view of the world.”

In the opinion of the sociologist Francisco Borba Ribeiro Neto, who formerly headed São Paulo’s Pontifical Catholic University’s Faith and Culture Center, Clodovis Boff is a “naturally mystic man who wants to restore the mystical vision in the Church.”

“The Church has lost such a vision. Traditionalism lost it due to its formalism and the progressive Church lost it due to its focus on sociopolitical issues,” Ribeiro Neto told Crux.

He argued that Pope Francis was equally misunderstood in his mystical dimension, given that “most people would associate his message with political issues – both inside and outside of the Church.”

“It means that even in the Catholic world people are not used to mystique anymore,” Ribeiro Neto said.

He argued that Clodovis Boff’s criticism of CELAM is due to its “inability to advance beyond social matters.”

“He’s not requiring that the bishops talk less about social issues. What he wants is that they recognize God’s presence in the world. He’s not saying that they’re too sociological, he’s saying that they’re lacking the mystical dimension,” Ribeiro Neto said.

In his opinion, Clodovis Boff is now a “complete outsider and has a distressed perception that Francis tried for ten years to correct such problems and the Church failed to understand it.”