Tag: liberation theology

  • ¿Santidad laical?Kite designed by Francisco Toledo on handmade paper from Vista Hermosa Art Paper

    Lay holiness?

    By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

     

    This weekend two young Roman Catholics will be canonized by Pope Leo XIV (Canonization of Carlo Acutis and Pier Giorgio Frassati). Pier Giorgio Frassatti, an Italian Dominican layman who lived in the first quarter of the 20th century. The other, Carlo Acutis, the so-called “first millennial saint.” Each reveals not only l'air du temps of each century, but rather raise the question of the model of Church that we urgently need to present in our times of global catastrophe.

    Since the end of the 19th century, the Roman Catholic Church, especially in Europe, has sought to listen to the working class and maintain contact with the population produced by the Industrial Revolution. The social teaching of the papal magisterium—since Pope Leo XIII and his Encyclical Letter Rerum Novarum until the current pontiff Leo XIV, who chose his name for that reason, displayed an urban pastoral approach typical of the time to walk with that suffering sector of the people of God.

    Catholic Action would be a lay response, supported by groups of bishops in countries such as Belgium and France, to such challenges. The worker priests (Worker Priests: The Church's Commitment to the Working World) were another praiseworthy page in this history, where it is worth remembering the accompaniment of the Dominican theologian Marie-Dominique Chenu and the subsequent infamous suppression of the movement by Pope Pius XII. The influence of Catholic Action would reach Latin America with its see-judge-act methodology, later inspiring liberation theology in Peru, Brazil and other countries in the region, as Agenor Brighenti has carefully studied in recent years (The ver-julgar-agir method).

    One hundred years ago, a young Dominican layman from Piedmont (Pier Giorgio Frassati OP), close to the miners in his land and a mountaineer by passion, was the fruit of that ecclesial sensitivity of the time that would bear fruit in later decades in pastoral experiences in the rest of Europe and Latin America, with the pastoral movements of insertion in popular environments, especially the working world and indigenous peoples. Son of a famous journalist who was the owner of The StampPier Giorgio Frassati used to combine his political activism in the Italian Popular Party with readings of Thomas Aquinas and Catherine of Siena, accompanied by climbs in the Alps with a club of friends and days of Eucharistic adoration in which he unfolded his interior life. A figure of his time, Pier Giorgio is today claimed by the Roman Catholic Church as a youthful lay saint, whose life ended abruptly at the age of 24 due to fulminant poliomyelitis probably contracted through his apostolate to the poor of Turin, leaving a spiritual imprint on the pastoral youth movements of a century ago.

    The other young lay saint is Carlo Acutis, an Italian born in London, devoted to the Eucharist and very active on social media. He lived as a teenager focused on spreading the word about Eucharistic miracles and Marian apparitions. After his death from leukemia at the age of fifteen, he became a symbol for today's "Catholic influencers," but with a more devotional tone than the social and political one like his fellow canonizer. A few months ago, I received Carlo's relics along with the youth ministry group of the Parish of Santa Rosa de Lima in Mexico City, founded by the Dominican friars almost a hundred years ago. This was an initiative of the Archdiocese of Mexico to commemorate the Jubilee of Youth (A faith that never ages: Rome, 25 years after the Jubilee of Youth with John Paul II) convened by Pope Francis and carried out by Pope Leo XIV. I was struck by the low attendance of young people from this hipster area of the city, with the presence of some devout young people with very pious traits and little social sensitivity. The rosary prayer prepared by the local youth group in the tradition of Dominican spirituality meditated on the sorrowful mysteries of Christ's passion, associating them with the cry of today's youth in this neighborhood of Mexico City: gentrification, insecurity, violence against women, unemployment, and drug abuse as wounds of Christ's body today. It was an attempt to connect the tradition of the rosary with the lives of people today. The small community of older adults gathered there prayed in amazement, following the lead of the young people, and then returned to their traditional devotions, meditating on Christ's life in his passion and death. At the end, a few young people from other parishes gave a brief workshop on the millennial saint, urging the use of social media as a new place to proclaim Christ and promote the adoration of the Eucharist in communities, along with the values of the Gospel.

     

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    I had already encountered this new generation of young traditionalist Catholics in Europe and the United States, among lay people, Dominicans, and Jesuits, among the religious orders and congregations recognized as promoters of the conciliar renewal of Vatican II. Their interests seem retrograde to me at first, although later I try to get closer to those generations and discover in them an inner beauty, mixed with naiveté and fear of getting lost in the labyrinth of pluralism. They seek identities that give them certainty. Religiously, they love the ancient Latin culture of medieval Christianity, above all, less so that of the Greek patristic era. They are enraptured by Gregorian chant and the Summa of Theology of Thomas Aquinas and other medieval masters, but without understanding their method open to conversation with pagan philosophers, nor following scholastic logical thought. They are fascinated by conspicuous signs of belief, such as the religious habit, the liturgical veil, and receiving communion by kneeling with great devotion, but clumsily because they do so as if they were newborn giraffes.

    Despite their intense devotion, they are indifferent to social issues as a spiritual and theological context. Talking about Gaza in a sermon seems like ideology to them. Not to mention inviting unmarried couples to the Eucharistic table, much less welcoming the community of sexual diversity at Mass. They deem such practices a deviation from Church doctrine. These younger generations of Catholic laypeople seek to return to the doctrinal Church, like that of the Council of Trent and Vatican I, without fully understanding the meaning of the conciliar spirit that inspired Pope Benedict XVI to convene Vatican II.

     

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    And I wonder then what models of Church are urgently needed today for a laboratory city like Mexico City and so many others around the world. It's about responding to a range of youth identities where it's a challenge to create spaces to invite them to look at one another, almost impossible to welcome them in a single liturgical celebration. I remember that my generation still dreamed of "taking Paradise by storm" through a commitment to justice and peace, with universal human rights as a sign of the new times. This led us to a university ministry at the CUC in the 1980s focused on a liberating Church.

    Something that seems outdated in this era of deglobalization and the expansion of war ministries, military drone invasions, and the cynicism of capitalism in its expansionist phase of obscene forced colonization. The perverse use of religion, as we see today in Palestine with the Israeli government and its allies around the world justifying their genocidal actions in the Bible, seems to leave young Catholics today indifferent, absent from the protests in the streets and squares of the world against this manipulation of faith.

    What secular saints does humanity need today amidst the ruins of our civilization? Frassati or Acutis. The young mountaineer close to the miners or the saint. millennial of Eucharistic adoration as a “highway to heaven.”

    I think neither one nor the other, because both were children of their time. Today I see a new generation of young people passionate about Christ as Messiah and universal brother, whom they recognize for his exceptional inclusive love of the just and sinners that arises from their intimate experience of communion with his AbbaYoung people who are simultaneously touched by the teachings of the Dalai Lama and Tich Nath Han, or by the Zen meditation masters they have encountered at retreats in diverse spiritual traditions.

    Young lay people who live holiness in their eroticized and loving bodies, unafraid to explore different modes of femininity and masculinity, of biological or adoptive fatherhood and motherhood, wrapped in the love of Christ and passionate about serving his wounded body.

    Millennials who are not tasteless influencers who reproduce on social media the same things they heard in their parish groups, but who invent "blessed blends" of narrative theologies close to the discarded, crossing the peripheries, weaving bonds of life, empathy and political-spiritual solidarity. Lay holiness as the new generation of young people from the Ecclesial Base Communities of Latin America and the Caribbean (Blessed Mixture. Narrative Theology of Our America) that reinvents that old method of see-judge-act with a narrative theology on the peripheries of society, with compassionate imagination, following in the footsteps of Jesus of Nazareth and his messianic community.

    Perhaps today, as daughters and sons of uncertain times, lay holiness is experiencing a collapse of religious institutions and the invention of other ways of worshipping the loving presence of Divinity, not only in the temple, but also in the community that, animated by its faith, seeks to save a polluted river or a dying lake. Youth communities climb the volcanoes of Mesoamerica or the Andean mountain range, with its endangered glaciers, as paths to ecological spirituality.

    Initiatives that seek to worship Christ in his wounded body today.

    Lay holiness which, after all, is the life of the Ruah divine who makes all things new from the rubble of the crumbling world.

     

    Mexico City, September 6, 2025

  • Adiós, “America”.Photo by Elizabeth Scholl for The Huntington News

    Goodbye, “America.”

    By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

     

    Since I was a child, I have had an ambivalent relationship with American culture. On the one hand, enjoying its cartoons like every childhood of the 20th century, then its multicultural music, from the jazz we listened to at family parties and the rhythms of the time like Twist  and Rock & Roll, that moved the elders at home to dance. Baseball, “the king of sports,” was the sport we enjoyed most at home, which my dad and my family passionately followed on the radio and later on television. I experienced the Apollo 13 moon landing as a 9-year-old boy in front of the television, admiring the latest marvel of human civilization.

    But I also remember reading the newspapers and watching TV scenes of Uncle Sam's constant military invasions around the world as a teenager, with the sad stories of the wars promoted by US imperialism during the Vietnam era. As a high school student, I became more aware of US interventions in Latin America, from its support for dictatorships in South America to the CIA's funding of paramilitary groups to dismantle guerrilla movements across the continent and in my own country.

     

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    My education in Mexico laid the foundation for critical thinking, first at the Benemerita Autonomous University of Puebla, where I began studying philosophy, and then at National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM for its acronym in Spanish), where I completed my bachelor's degree, though I didn't graduate, following the advice of my Dominican superiors. Postgraduate studies in Switzerland and France opened my eyes to new perspectives on the traditions of European phenomenological thought and contemporary Hebrew philosophy.

    I never imagined living for a long time in “the heart of the empire” until an invitation arrived from Boston College, (BC) to join its prestigious Theology Department. I arrived in Massachusetts at the height of my academic career after 25 years of teaching and research in Mexico, Switzerland, France, and Chile, to build bridges between the South and the North through classes in liberation theology and Latin American thought. But my background also included, to the surprise of my Boston colleagues, decolonial thought and queer theory. These are three avenues I explored and connected over the years to reflect on the crisis of modernity and its effects on the experience of subjectivity open to the revelation of another world.

    I was received with great professional attention by the BC authorities and with polite respect for my colleagues, recognized as the best in their disciplines in the international academic world, according to the dominant model of knowledge. I began my work in January 2021, in the middle of winter and during the critical phase of the pandemic. The campus seemed like a ghost town, frozen in time by the frigid cold and the mandated lockdown. I offered my first classes in through a hybrid model, with half the students in the classroom wearing masks and the other half online. I survived the first year of isolation thanks to the invaluable support of Sole, a beloved Chilean doctoral student who served as my teaching assistant, and Neto, a kind-hearted Salvadoran colleague.

    Once established as a Senior Scholar, I threw myself into teaching, discovering to my surprise the tremendous workload entailed in an educational model that prioritizes the undivided attention of the "instructor" over students who follow instructions to the letter, with little creative imagination to independently search for sources, problematize topics, and suggest new interpretations. It was also important to adapt the bibliography to English only texts because the students didn't read other languages. To top it all off, I discovered that Spanish wasn't recognized as a "scientific language." Then the warning signs went off, as I began to perceive the power of white academia, still present on the East Coast of the country, so famous for its liberal thinking, but ultimately with an internalized colonialism yet to be defused.

    I set about immersing myself in this experience of a new educational model, abandoning my initial intention upon accepting this invitation, which was to focus on writing two outstanding books to complete my second theological trilogy, this time on the idea of "tradition" that communicates divine revelation according to the Christian narrative. Those manuscripts are still on my desk. I sensed it was important to pursue the research in another way, so I began a project called Beyond Global Violence Initiative (BGVI) as a platform for promoting academic conversations with colleagues from the South and North on pressing issues facing the humanities today. Thanks to the initial support of academic authorities and, above all, the generosity of colleagues from various latitudes who responded to the invitation, I was able to organize five colloquia to weave collective reflections on modern subjectivity in the face of civilizational catastrophe, following the path of phenomenology, mimetic theory, and apophatic thought. A book in progress on political theology, scheduled to appear in 2026, will be the rich harvest of these gatherings.

     

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    The initial academic project of building bridges between South and North was going well until we welcomed Palestine. Then I began to perceive the strangeness, later transformed into suspicion, and finally into distrust, on the part of some colleagues and academic authorities regarding these investigations with their social and political implications, of openly critiquing the theologies of empire, such as in its form of Israeli or Christian Zionism. With some fellow professors, doctoral students, and a few undergraduate students who shared this concern about the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, we organized two academic events to learn about current Palestinian thought. But I began to receive messages of "concern" from academic authorities and outright rejection from some students who, emboldened Trump supporters, openly and at times aggressively expressed themselves against decolonial critique of extractive capitalism, heteronormative patriarchy, and white supremacist racism.

    The fear promoted by the Trump administration since its first term grew massively from the beginning of its second term. It focused on controlling thought in American universities. Its strategy became more aggressive since taking office in January 2025. Through "hate rhetoric"—analyzed through a mimetic lens by the Brazilian colleague João Cezar de Castro Rocha, first in Brazil and then in the United States and other far-right countries in government—the movement Make America Great Again (MAGA) increasingly and viciously controlled minds and universities through social media and censorship policies. The problem wasn't just Trump, but the more than 70 million voters who supported him and who, even amid the US geopolitical military expansionism, continue to subscribe to his imperial dictatorial policies (on immigration, gender, and white supremacist racism), all of which are amalgamated with the "theological" ideology of political messianism.

    American colonialism is closely linked to Israeli Zionism and both are part of the new phase of the coloniality of power, with its replicas in far-right movements around the world, as the Puerto Rican thinker Nelson Maldonado-Torres has put it with the idea of the "principle of coloniality" (The US at 250, Coloniality, and Political Zionism in Perspective).Therefore, theology as critical thought, which emerges from the life and practice of Christian communities in diverse contexts who experience the glimmerings of redemption, is urgently called to dismantle this false political theology. Failure to do so justifies the imperial narrative.

    An event scheduled for last April as part of our BGVI research project sought to reflect, together with Hilari Rantisi (Centering Human Life, Disrupting Injustice Without Replicating It), a Palestinian-American colleague at Harvard, on peacebuilding in times of war, comparing Zionist colonialism in Palestine with British colonialism in Kenya's recent past. We had organized it with a BC colleague, but ultimately decided to cancel it due to institutional pressure and to avoid the real risk of deportation and even criminalization for those of us who are foreign professors and students, since we could have been accused of supporting "terrorist groups" and threatening national security.

    In that tense atmosphere, BC no longer offered me the necessary security to continue my theological work, to the point of offering me private legal assistance in case of emergency, not institutional, but rather a lawyer specializing in immigration matters. So, with the support of my Dominican religious superior in Mexico, I decided to resign from BC at the end of the spring academic semester to return to my homeland and continue my theological work in freedom.

    The climate of self-censorship that spread like a contagion was most evident when I said goodbye in a letter from my colleagues at BC. I received a single, empathetic response that emphasized "the emotional effects" I suffered from this veiled censorship, without commenting on the reasons for my resignation or the call I made in my letter to reconsider what kind of theology we were pursuing at that university.

     

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    Today, as I conclude my institutional collaboration with Boston College,I write these lines to say "Goodbye, America." That name stolen from the entire continent, but which, in Spanish and Portuguese, as Maria Clara Bingemer, my dear Brazilian colleague, says, we write with an accent, "América." I will not use that name again to refer to a country that has based its two-and-a-half-century history on the theft of territories, fueled by a messianic colonialism of the invasions of American and Caribbean lands, planning and financing constant wars of dominion across the planet. I say goodbye to its theology of dominion and prosperity, disguised as democracy and the free world.

    To my US colleagues who remain silent in the face of their government's imperialism, I hope they may soon awaken from the slumber that has lulled them, whether out of fear of censorship or the complicity of white colonial privilege that prevents them from seeing the corruption of the power that shelters and protects them, based on the global war of the Western world system that creates more and more victims crying out to heaven.

    The giant has feet of clay and will one day fall. Meanwhile, those of us who stand in the crevices of power, wherever we are, weave other ways of life, from the inner freedom of thought and solidarity, from the social, political, academic, and religious peripheries.

    Ivan Illich and Gustavo Esteva, walking with Jean Robert, Sylvia Marcos, and peoples in resistance like the Zapatistas in the epistemic South, opened up the path of life for “deprofessionalized intellectuals” as listeners to peoples in resistance.

    On these routes, fruitful dialogues are woven: South-South, South-North, and many other geographical, political, and spiritual directions, sowing the seeds of new worlds.

    Goodbye, “America.” Hello, free world.

     

    eGoli / Jo'Burg, June 29, 2025

  • El fuego de DiosKim en Joong OP, La Pentecôte, Saint Genès, 2012

    The fire of God

    By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

     

    Israeli missiles, drones, and snipers are ravaging Gaza and the West Bank today, aiming to complete the total destruction of the Palestinian people.

    It's been 77 years now Nakba or catastrophe, which began in 1948 with the creation of the State of Israel and the expulsion of the Palestinian people from their territory. The Israeli army gives biblical names to this new artillery of annihilation, conceived by the human mind but executed with precision by artificial intelligence. A recent example was the "Gideon's Chariots" operation announced by President Netanyahu to attack the terrorist group Hamas, implemented in 2025 by the Israeli army. This name recalls the battle of a Hebrew peasant who gathered 300 men to wage war on the Midianites in the name of God to occupy a territory "promised by God" as the ideology of the time. This story from more than three thousand years ago, recounted in the Book of Judges (6-7), is now evoked by Israeli power to justify the ongoing genocide.

    As an expression of this control of the imagination of the Jewish people today, we can see the videos circulating on social networks, showing Israeli soldiers and settlers playing at killing Palestinian children as if it were a video game. millennialsPerhaps those actors of today's horror grew up from childhood in that artificial world of wars where the victor lives in the aseptic space of a digital screen. To top it all off, today's horror takes on a festive, "messianic" appearance, as it is a "holy war," accompanied by Hebrew choirs and traditional Jewish dances of those who mock the filth that represents the enemy. This people must be annihilated to liberate the land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael) from their invaders. The Bible already told this story when a people enslaved in Egypt created the story of the divine promise that would give them “a land flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3:17), interpreting a symbolic message as a mandate to conquer territory.

    A similar version of military colonialism with a religious ideological cloak gave birth to the United States in modern times. English settlers fleeing religious wars and famine arrived in the lands of the Powhatan and Massachusetts people on the East Coast with "messianic" rhetoric, seeking to seize those lands with God's supposed blessing. The speeches of the Founding Fathers are inspired by biblical quotations, as are Trump's current incendiary speeches, especially after the 2024 attack, when the White House resident openly claims to have been sent by God to "save the free world." Bolsonaro expressed this same religious delirium in Brazil a few years ago to justify a racist regime with hate speech.

    And so the supposed divine fire that inspires the Zionist state, the US government, and many of today's populist leaders launches "flames of fire" to annihilate anyone who opposes its divine mission, which, in reality, masks today's colonialism in its most brutal and cynical form.

     

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    But the Bible tells others Stories of God's fire. Over thousands of years, the Hebrew people first and the early Christian community later discerned between the warring fire of false gods and the divine fire of the Eternal One, which prophets and poets, healers and apostles received, addressing the people in the name of God, healing their wounds, and announcing nonviolent messianic hope amidst the horror.

    This divine fire is a flame that does not destroy, but rather builds from within, an experience initiated by the prophets of Israel, from Elijah to Jeremiah. This inner fire is like a spark that shares in the flame of the Eternal, where women and men in trance, illuminated by this divine light, announce new things for an oppressed and hopeless people. This fire is not military, but divine. It enables those who receive it to see and act with boldness, creative imagination, and loving compassion.

    A fire different from that of the drones becomes light, splendor and strength, as in the story of Jesus the Galilean, who "transfigures" himself on the mountain to reveal his deepest being, preparing to go to Jerusalem at a critical moment of his mission, the center of religious power of his time, to bear witness there, in the heart of the empire, to the glory (קבֹד kabod) of your Abba. Glory is not power, but life.

    That divine fire inspired Jesus and his community to weave a liberating and loving closeness with the invisible people of his time: the poor, women, strangers, and the sick. It also enabled them to denounce the corruption taking place, especially the perversion of the religion of the Temple and, later, of the Pharisees who called themselves teachers of the Torah.

    A fire another world that, after the atrocious execution of Jesus on a Roman cross with the complicity of the angry mob and some religious authorities, settled on the head of the community terrified by the fear of suffering the same mockery as his RabbiAfter a time of mourning and fear, that fire opened their minds and hearts to understand what was happening. The crucified One was back, alive. otherwiseHe had awakened and was following his steps, babbling another message with his disciples and apostles, performing signs of new life in the midst of new communities, both within and beyond the borders of the Hebrew people. These communities in the diaspora recognized him as the crucified Messiah by rereading the Hebrew Scriptures and breaking bread in his memory, symbolic acts to continue the work of divine redemption in the hearts of suffering and hopeful peoples.

    This divine fire is not exclusive to any nation, nor is it a monopoly of any sacred institution, whether secular or religious. Nor does it justify wars of conquest and colonization. Much less is it a destructive fire that annihilates other nations.

    That fire is harvest retireThis is the powerful symbolism of the fifty-day cycle of the Hebrew and Christian calendar. The Hebrew Jubilee Year, which every fifty years forgives debts, lets the land rest, and frees the captives to make way for God's glory. Fifty days after Jesus' Passover, the Christian community celebrates God's loving abundance, which does not launch drones or missiles to destroy his enemies, but communicates flames of divine fire to "raise the humble of the earth from the mire," as Hannah and Mary sang in both Testaments (1 Samuel 2:10 and Luke 1:52).

    Divine fire recreates the face of the earth from the survivors of the horror story, who interweave life with memory, dignity, and mutual care, amidst the death that surrounds them.

    Blessed feast of Pentecost.

     

    Mexico City

    June 7, 2025

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