Liberation theology formed in Latin America in the 1960s. It reads scripture from the standpoint of the poor and treats structural injustice as a theological problem and not a merely political one. Its organizing claim is the preferential option for the poor: God is not neutral between the oppressed and their oppressors, and a theology that counsels patience to the hungry has misread its own texts.
Gustavo Gutiérrez's A Theology of Liberation (1971) gave the movement its name and its method, arguing that theology should begin from praxis, from committed action alongside the poor, and not from doctrine applied afterward. The Latin American bishops' conferences at Medellín in 1968 and Puebla in 1979 brought the language into official church teaching. Its characteristic institution was the base ecclesial community, small lay groups reading the Gospel against their own conditions, which worked as catechesis and political organization at once. Paulo Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed developed in the same milieu on the same premise, that the oppressed are subjects of their own liberation and not objects of someone else's program.
Rome's response was severe. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under Cardinal Ratzinger, issued instructions in 1984 and 1986 warning that the movement had borrowed Marxist class analysis in ways incompatible with Christian anthropology, and that reducing salvation to political emancipation emptied it. Leonardo Boff was silenced. The Vatican appointed conservative bishops across the region. Óscar Romero, who had moved from cautious conservatism to open denunciation of state killing, was assassinated at the altar in 1980.
The movement is smaller than it was, weakened by Rome, by the fall of the regimes it opposed, and by Pentecostalism's growth among the poor it addressed. Francis, the first Latin American pope, partially rehabilitated it, canonizing Romero and adopting much of its vocabulary while keeping its Marxist apparatus at arm's length. Its method has traveled, producing Black, feminist, Palestinian and Dalit liberation theologies.