Three events jostled in our week: the publication of the fourth encyclical of Pope Francis, He loved us (“He loved us”), the death of Gustavo Gutiérrez, the most French of Latin American liberation theologians, and finally the closing of the synod on synodality, also called the synod “on the future of the Church” . Three events which have the common point, or rather the vanishing point, of showing a God who discovers himself in the encounter with others, in the place where we are.
Pope Francis in his encyclical insists on the human as well as divine love manifested by Jesus Christ to open us to a life worthy of our vocation as children of God. Gustavo Gutiérrez never stopped putting his thoughts into action and bathing his theology and the concepts of doctrine in the water of the tears and sweat of those who suffer and work, becoming a close friend and a friend. simple faithful. Finally, the synod in Rome matures its work which opens the Church to a more fraternal institutional functioning. It will take time and there will be resistance, of course, but the movement that has started is irrepressible.
A word emerges in the midst of these considerations: context. Liberation theology is built on the idea that the concrete human context imposes itself on theological reflection and that basically we do not produce the same thought in the favelas or in the Sorbonne. The first step is therefore the one which allows us to become close to those to whom we speak, of whom we speak and ultimately with whom we speak. The encyclical on the Sacred Heart of Jesus says similar things: if love is at the center of our lives and our faith, for it to be realistic, it must be inhabited by real faces of brothers and sisters towards whom this love carries us. Francis warns that the spirituality of the Sacred Heart is not a flight path to flee the world in a false mysticism, but rather an interior strength to create society. Finally, the future of the Church which is opening up in these times of great upheaval appears all the more solid as it is anchored on the vivid memory of the experience of the apostles and the first Christian communities, which addressed specific territories and languages.
Becoming sensitive to the lives of others, becoming close to each other, this is the favorable context for the growth of our capacity to love, to act and to be Church.
