Liberation theology, libertarian theology, and the question neither side is allowed to stop asking.
By thirty-two, he was known as a poet, an artist, and a writer in two countries, and he traveled to Kentucky planning to stop writing altogether.
In 1957 he joined the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani as a novice. The man who received him had walked up that same avenue on 10 December 1941, an American whose autobiography had since sold hundreds of thousands of copies, master of novices since 1955 and already weary of fame. The two of them talked about Latin America constantly. About people in Nicaragua with low incomes. About what a monastery might be if it were built on an island instead of behind walls.
In 1959 the doctors sent him away. He left because he was told to, and by August he was writing home from Mexico.
People forget what his novice master was quietly doing in those same months.
That September, Thomas Merton asked Rome for an indult of exclaustration, formal permission to live outside his monastery. He hoped to go south, first to Dom Gregorio Lemercier’s Benedictine priory in Cuernavaca, then perhaps to Nicaragua, to Corn Island, to Ometepe, anywhere he could live and poorly, untethered from the institution that fed and printed him. He was asking permission to be poor among people with low incomes.
In December 1959, the answer came back. No. It came directly from the Vatican, not his own superiors, leaving him nothing to appeal to.
Merton did as he was told. “I must stay here until the Church herself places me somewhere else,” he wrote. He remained nine more years and died near Bangkok on 10 December 1968, twenty-seven years to the day after he entered Gethsemani. He reached Latin America once, as a young man in Cuba in 1940, and never lived there.
The novice did go. Ernesto Cardenal was ordained in 1965, founded a contemplative community on the Solentiname islands, watched the Nicaraguan army destroy it, and on 19 July 1979 became Minister of Culture in the Sandinista government. In March 1983, on the runway at Managua, John Paul II pointed a finger at him in front of the cameras and told him to settle his affairs with the Church. He was suspended from priestly ministry on 4 February 1984. Francis lifted the suspension on 18 February 2019, thirty-five years later.
Most people remember the finger.
Few remember that the man who formed Cardenal had asked the Church for the same permission, was refused, and stayed.
Two men, one novitiate, one question: what does the Gospel ask of someone who can see the poor? That is the argument between liberation theology and what critics and occasionally friends call ‘libertarian’ theology. Both answers are still in the room, and popes have handled both.
Through the eyes of the poor
Liberation theology is a method before it is a politics. Gutiérrez published Teología de la liberación in Lima in 1971; Orbis Books published the English edition in 1973. The central move is procedural: theology is not the first act but the second. Commitment comes first; reflection follows. You do not reason your way to solidarity from a desk. You stand somewhere, and then you think.
The Latin American bishops laid the groundwork at Medellín in 1968 and named it plainly at Puebla in 1979: a preferential option for the poor. Underneath sits Joseph Cardijn’s See–Judge–Act, carried from Belgian factory floors to Peruvian parishes, a method that insists on the actual conditions of actual people before anyone opens a catechism.
The tradition’s hardest claim is that sin has structure. A wage, a land title, a debt schedule, and a trade rule can each be arranged so that no one in the chain does anything identifiably wrong while the whole arrangement crushes people. If that holds, personal conversion alone cannot be the remedy, because the machine does not need anyone’s malice to keep running.
Rome objected hard. On 6 August 1984, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under the signature of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, issued Libertatis Nuntius. The criticism was surgical: borrowed Marxist analysis carries its origins. The term class struggle, the instruction argued, “remains pregnant with the interpretation that Marx gave it,” so a theologian who imports the tool imports the view of the human person attached to it. A second instruction, Libertatis Conscientia, followed on 22 March 1986 and affirmed liberation as an authentic Christian theme. Rome did not reject the question. It rejected one set of borrowed answers.
The other half of the same tradition
Now the opposing case, stated the way its defenders state it, beginning with the honest asymmetry. There is no libertarian theology the way there is a liberation theology. No founding text, no continental bishops’ conference. What exists is a body of work, largely American and written since 1980, arguing that the free economy is not merely tolerable to Christianity but congenial to it.
Michael Novak’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (Simon & Schuster, 1982) is the anchor, and the argument is structural rather than economic. A free society runs on three separate systems: political, economic, and moral-cultural. Each checks the other two. Collapse them into one, and you get tyranny, whatever flag flies over it. Novak’s charge against the liberation theologians was that their critique was vivid. Their alternative was vague, and vagueness about institutions is no small failing when millions of people have to live inside the result.
The theological materials are real. Human beings are made in the image of a Creator, so enterprise is participation, not concession. Original sin argues for dispersing power, which is an argument against the central planner before it is ever an argument for the entrepreneur. And subsidiarity, which Pius XI set down in Quadragesimo Anno on 15 May 1931, holds that a higher body must not absorb what a lower one can do for itself. That principle sits inside Catholic social teaching, not outside it.
Robert Sirico and Kris Mauren founded the Acton Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1990, naming it for the historian whose letter of 5 April 1887 to Bishop Mandell Creighton gave the world the line about power tending to corrupt. Two moves carry their case: people with low incomes are lifted by the same forces that create wealth, and a state large enough to redistribute everything is large enough to take everything.
Then came the sentence they have quoted ever since. In Centesimus Annus, on 1 May 1991, John Paul II asked whether capitalism should be proposed to the nations coming out of communism, and answered in two halves. If capitalism means an economy that recognizes business, the market, private property, and free human creativity, yes, though he preferred the names business economy, market economy, or simply free economy. Suppose it means an economy unbounded by law that puts freedom at the service of the whole person, no. Both halves sit in one paragraph. Which half gets quoted depends on who is quoting.
Where they actually differ
Liberation Theology Libertarian Theology
| Where theology starts | In commitment, then reflection | In the nature of the person, then application |
| What sin looks like | Structures that crush without malice | Coercion, and the concentration of power |
| What the poor most need | A change in the arrangement | An open door and a functioning market |
| What it fears most | Charity used as an alibi for injustice | Compassion used as a warrant for control |
| Its strongest evidence | The people still on the bottom after every boom | The more than one billion who left extreme poverty after 1990 |
| Its characteristic failure | Mistaking a political program for the Gospel | Mistaking an economic outcome for a moral one |
Read the middle two rows slowly. Each tradition is most alert to the failure the other is least equipped to see. That is not a balance to celebrate. It warns that neither can correct itself.
Francis names the fallacy.
People routinely file Francis as a liberation theologian, which is imprecise. He was formed in teología del pueblo, the Argentine variant that took the preferential option seriously while declining the Marxist apparatus, finding the wisdom of people with low incomes in popular piety rather than class analysis.
He still said the harder thing out loud. On 24 April 2017, in a message to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, he named libertarianism and called it a fallacious paradigm. The charge was philosophical: its radical individualism rests on a fiction of self-causation, so that “everyone has the ‘right’ to expand as far as his power allows, even at the expense of the exclusion and marginalization of the most vulnerable majority.”
Defenders answered, fairly, that Francis was describing Ayn Rand rather than Friedrich Hayek, and that no serious libertarian claims to be self-caused. Hold both replies. The critique lands on a real strain of it, but not on all of it.
Leo comes from Chiclayo.
Robert Prevost arrived in Peru in 1985 and stayed, with interruptions, for more than two decades. Chulucanas first, then nearly ten years at the Augustinian formation house in Trujillo, then bishop of Chiclayo in 2014. That is the same northern coast, within a long afternoon’s drive of Chimbote, where the phrase had been spoken seventeen years earlier. He was there through the Shining Path years and walked in human rights marches. The formation is not theoretical.
Asked about liberation theology, he gave a definition worth keeping: “Liberation theology, from the perspective of Gustavo Gutiérrez, for example, is to begin to see through the eyes of the poor and with the poor in order to understand how God is in and among us.”
The method, without the apparatus.
His first major document, the apostolic exhortation Dilexi te, appeared on 4 October 2025 and grounds the preferential option in God before it grounds it in policy. Paragraph 92 takes the swing: “There is no shortage of theories attempting to justify the present state of affairs or to explain that economic thinking requires us to wait for invisible market forces to resolve everything.” Paragraph 91 refuses the other side’s alibi, insisting charity is “a genuine force for change in history” aimed at the structural causes of poverty.
Then, on 15 May 2026, exactly 135 years after Leo XIII signed Rerum Novarum, Leo XIV signed Magnifica humanitas. It runs to 245 sections on the human person under artificial intelligence. Read for economics; three paragraphs matter.
Paragraph 31 holds the tension on purpose: the Church “criticizes both unlimited competition and collectivist projects that undermine the freedom and responsibility of the individual.” Paragraph 66 states the limit the free-market case rarely quotes: “The Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute or inviolable,” always subordinate to the universal destination of goods. Paragraph 67 does something new. It extends that destination to “patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data.”
That is the move to watch. For 135 years this argument ran over land, factories, wages, and capital. Leo has just said the contested commons now includes the model weights. Whoever owns the algorithm owns the leverage, and the old question arrives in new clothes before either side has finished the previous round.
What would Merton not concede?
Merton never read a word of liberation theology. Gutiérrez named it in July 1968, in a lecture called “Hacia una teología de la liberación” given to a national gathering of priests and laypeople at Chimbote, on the northern coast of Peru. Merton had five months left. He died on 10 December 1968, three months after the bishops closed at Medellín and three years before the book reached Lima. Whatever he was refusing, it was not Gutiérrez.
He knew silencing from the inside. On 20 January 1962, the Cistercian Abbot General, Dom Gabriel Sortais, wrote to order him to stop writing about nuclear war. The letter reached Gethsemani on 27 April. He finished his book Peace in the Post-Christian Era. It was stopped. On 26 May Merton answered: “I accept your decision joyfully.”
Then he went down to the monastery mimeograph.
Through June 1962, he ran off copies of the forbidden book on the abbey’s own equipment and mailed them to Dorothy Day, Daniel Berrigan, and Jim Forest. He did the same with 111 letters written between October 1961 and October 1962, which passed hand to hand for years as the Cold War Letters. About forty-five percent of the suppressed manuscript surfaced inside Seeds of Destruction (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964) after he negotiated permission to recast it. Orbis Books published the book itself in 2004, forty-two years late.
He obeyed the order. He did not obey the silence.
He did not pick a side between the two economic systems. In September 1961, he sent “A Letter to Pablo Antonio Cuadra Concerning Giants” to a Nicaraguan poet who was Cardenal’s friend and editor. Blackfriars ran it in 1962; it appeared the next year in Emblems of a Season of Fury (New Directions, 1963). He cast the two superpowers as Gog and Magog and declined to choose. The West was totalitarian too, he argued, only more subtly, assembled out of business, armament, and political fever, and the fact that its citizens felt free was part of the mechanism rather than evidence against it.
He was no apologist for the other giant. He called Marx a great diagnostician of what capitalism does to people, a man who saw correctly that human beings had come to be ruled by things, by money, and by machines. Diagnosis is not a cure. Merton never confused the two.
His objection to both systems was the same, and it was not economic. Both manufacture what he called, in New Seeds of Contemplation (New Directions, 1961), the false self: the constructed, performing self that seeks confirmation from outside, and takes it from a commissar or a commercial with equal appetite. A person with no self that is not for sale cannot be liberated by transferring a title deed, or freed by widening the range of purchase.
His reading of Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society, which he took up in October 1964 and called prophetic while judging Ellul too pessimistic, meets the economic argument here. The question underneath both ideologies is not who owns the machinery. It is what the machinery is doing to the person operating it.
Five distinctions worth carrying
- Keep the method apart from the apparatus. Seeing through the eyes of people with low incomes is a discipline. Class struggle is a theory. Rome rejected the second in 1984 and has affirmed the first in every pontificate since.
- Keep the market apart from the metaphysic. Prices coordinate knowledge no committee can assemble. That is a finding about information, not a doctrine about the human good, and it does not expand into one.
- Ask what each position needs you not to notice. One hides what central power does to people—the other hides who is still on the bottom after the boom.
- Follow the leverage. The argument has moved from land to capital to data. An economic theology that stops at factories is arguing about the last century.
- Test every answer against the person, not the aggregate. What is happening to the human being inside this arrangement?
In December 1959, a letter reached Kentucky, and a monk did not get what he wanted. He had asked to go south and be poor among people with low incomes. They told him to stay behind the wall, and he stayed; from behind that wall, he wrote the letters that formed a man who did go, who did act, and who paid for it on a runway in front of the world.
Then in 1962 they told him to stop writing. He said yes, and printed the book anyway on their own machine.
Cardenal was told to choose, and chose, and lost his ministry for thirty-five years. Merton was told to stay, and stayed, and found the third thing: a way to obey the Church and refuse the silence in the same breath.
Neither man was wrong about people with low incomes. They were answering different halves of one question, and the Church has never dropped either half, which may be its most useful thing.
The letter said no.
It did not say the question was closed.
Questions to ponder
- If the machine crushes people without anyone in it intending harm, who exactly is called to repent?
- Liberation theology asks you to stand somewhere before you think. Liberation theology asks you to think clearly before you stand. Which failure costs more: standing in the wrong place, or thinking from nowhere?
- Subsidiarity says a larger body should not do what a smaller one can. Who decides what the smaller body can do, and what happens when that judgment is made by whoever benefits from the answer?
- If patents, algorithms, and data now fall under the universal destination of goods, what would it actually cost you, this year, to act as though that were true?
- Merton accepted the order and ran the mimeograph. Cardenal took the office and lost the altar. Is Merton’s third way faithfulness, or is it the most literate evasion in twentieth-century Catholicism, and are you sure?
- Does your economic position require you to believe anything about human beings that you would not say out loud to one?
- What is happening to the human person inside the arrangement you are currently defending?
Sources
- Thomas Merton and Ernesto Cardenal, From the Monastery to the World: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Ernesto Cardenal, trans. Jessie Sandoval (Counterpoint, 2017); International Thomas Merton Society, The Merton Annual 8, correspondence documenting the 1959 petition and its refusal; Thomas Merton, A Search for Solitude: The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume 3, 1952–1960 (HarperSanFrancisco, 1996).
- Patricia A. Burton, “Forbidden Book: Thomas Merton’s Peace in the Post-Christian Era,” The Merton Annual 17, for the 1962 prohibition and the mimeograph campaign; Thomas Merton, Peace in the Post-Christian Era (Orbis Books, 2004) and Cold War Letters (Orbis Books); Seeds of Destruction (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964).
- Thomas Merton, “A Letter to Pablo Antonio Cuadra Concerning Giants,” Blackfriars (1962), collected in Emblems of a Season of Fury (New Directions, 1963); New Seeds of Contemplation (New Directions, 1961); Ross Labrie, “Thomas Merton on Marx and Marxism,” The Merton Seasonal 35:4.
- Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation (Orbis Books, 1973).
- Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Libertatis Nuntius (6 August 1984) and Libertatis Conscientia (22 March 1986).
- Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno (15 May 1931); John Paul II, Centesimus Annus (1 May 1991).
- Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (Simon & Schuster, 1982); Acton Institute, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
- Francis, Message to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (24 April 2017).
- Leo XIV, Dilexi te (4 October 2025) and Magnifica humanitas (15 May 2026).
- National Catholic Reporter, “From Peru to Peter’s chair: How Latin America formed a US pope.”
Discover more from Innovate ~ Educate ~ Collaborate
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Leave a Reply