The Night After the Catacombs

On the evening of 17 November 1965, in a parish church on the working-class edge of Rome, an eighty-three-year-old cardinal sat among about twenty bishops who had once served as his chaplains. The church was Saint Michael Archangel in Pietralata, which the cardinal had chosen himself.

His name was Joseph Cardijn. He had worn the red hat for less than nine months and had turned eighty-three just four days earlier. The bishops around him had come to give thanks for forty years of the Young Christian Workers, the movement he founded for young workers in Belgium. Most had served as its chaplains before becoming bishops. Together, they represented roughly sixty of the council fathers who had completed the Second Vatican Council across the city.

The night before, forty bishops went underground. At an altar among the tombs in the Catacombs of Domitilla, they signed a pledge to renounce titles, privileges, and the trappings of rank and to live as the poor did. History recorded that night. It became the Pact of the Catacombs, and up to five hundred bishops later added their names to it.

The second night is almost forgotten.

Archbishop Hélder Câmara of Olinda and Recife, in Brazil, had planned both Masses. On 17 September 1965 he wrote to Cardijn and proposed an oath modeled on the vow the young priest made in 1903 beside his father’s deathbed, to give his life to the working class. Cardijn did not seize the idea. He asked his closest colleagues what they thought. Their advice, kept in his papers, was that he should not initiate the plan or direct its details, and that a vow might be too strong. The pledge the bishops signed in the catacombs came from Câmara’s circle, not from Cardijn.

What the bishops wrote at Pietralata was quieter and, in its way, harder. It was a message to bishops worldwide. It did not ask them to become poorer. Instead, it asked them to find and appoint more chaplains for young workers and for the lay movements around them.

The next day, 18 November, the council promulgated its decree on the lay apostolate. The catacombs pledge went out into the world. The Pietralata message stayed in the Cardijn archives.

Câmara wanted two Masses, one for the poor and another for the workers. History kept the first and dropped the second, and liberation theology cannot be understood without both.

The Scroll in Nazareth

Liberation theology begins with a synagogue scene. In Luke 4:18–19, Jesus reads from Isaiah and applies the words to himself: good news for the poor, release for captives, sight for the blind, and freedom for the oppressed.

Four claims follow from that interpretation.

• God’s reign is good news for the poor. Jesus went to the margins, including lepers, tax collectors, women, Samaritans, the sick, children, debtors, and anyone marked by shame.
• Liberation is more than comfort. Jesus healed bodies, welcomed outcasts back into the community, challenged unjust arrangements, and taught that the last will be first. Liberation theology adds that personal change must go hand in hand with change in unjust systems.
• Solidarity comes before theory. Jesus ate with the people he spoke about, stood up for them, and shared their vulnerability. For liberation theology, friendship with the rejected is a core spiritual practice, not a side project.
• The cross reveals the cost. Jesus’ conflicts with the powerful warn that faithfulness to God can put Christians face-to-face with injustice.

Liberation theology does not portray Jesus as a political rebel. It reads his message of God’s reign as a weave of personal salvation, communal healing, and resistance to the forces of greed, violence, and death that diminish human life.

A Counter-Community Before It Had Power

The first Christians had no army, no tax base, and no seat in the Senate. They had each other. That makes the early church the strongest precedent for liberation theology and the one handled most carefully.

• Shared goods. Acts says believers pooled their resources until “there was no needy person among them” (Acts 4:34–35). Luke paints an idealized portrait, and the sharing was voluntary. It is not modern liberation theology. It still reflects the same instinct: faith had to be visible in how people handled money.
• Organized care across distances. Paul collected funds from Gentile congregations for the poor in the Jerusalem church (1 Corinthians 16:1–4; Romans 15:25–27). Support was intentionally directed from one city to another.
• Baptismal equality. Paul wrote that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, enslaved nor free, male nor female (Galatians 3:28). The early church did not abolish slavery or patriarchy, and it failed to live up to its own words. Those words still gave later Christians a standard to argue from.
• Mercy as worship. Christians were known for caring for widows, orphans, prisoners, and the sick (Acts 6:1–6; James 1:27; Matthew 25:36). Their liturgy and charity were one and the same.
• A loyalty that cost something. Before Christianity held political power, it formed communities whose first loyalty was to Christ. That put them at odds with the imperial cult, the family hierarchy, and rank.

Liberation theology follows this pattern. It begins with the experience of the oppressed, reads Scripture and tradition from that vantage point, and expects faith to take the shape of a real community.

A Vow at a Deathbed

Joseph Cardijn was born in Schaerbeek, Brussels, on 13 November 1882, the son of parents who ran a small apartment building. His father, Henri, died on 24 May 1903. According to the story, at his father’s deathbed, Cardijn vowed to give his life to the working class, especially young workers. He was ordained on 22 September 1906.

In 1912, as a curate in Laeken, he gathered the first groups of young workers who would later form the Young Christian Workers (YCW, from the French JOC). The movement adopted that name in 1924, received Belgian statutes in 1925, and won the approval of Pope Pius XI during an audience that March.

Cardijn gave liberation theology its working method: See–Judge–Act. Workers, especially young ones, examine the conditions of their own lives, weigh them against the Gospel, and organize to change them. The parallels with liberation theology run step by step.

• See. Cardijn: observe social reality, especially the exploitation of workers. Liberation theology: begin with the lived experience of poverty, exclusion, and oppression.
• Judge. Cardijn: read reality through Scripture and Catholic social teaching. Liberation theology: read the Gospel in conversation with the poor’s situation.
• Act. Cardijn: organize for education, solidarity, and social change. Liberation theology: treat faith as “praxis,” reflection that leads to liberating action.

The method was never social activism wearing religious clothing. It taught ordinary people to understand their own lives and to act together as the people responsible for their own history. Its reach into Latin America ran through people. Câmara was a founding chaplain of the YCW in Brazil. Enrique Angelelli, later a bishop in Argentina, served as a YCW chaplain and signed the Catacombs Pact. Leonidas Proaño of Ecuador wrote about discovering Cardijn and the movement as a young priest.

The Council Opens the Doors

The Second Vatican Council met from 11 October 1962 to 8 December 1965. It did not create liberation theology, but it cleared the ground. Its central move was to place the Church among the joys, hopes, griefs, and anxieties of the modern world, not above them.

• Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, promulgated on 7 December 1965, told the Church to read the “signs of the times” and to address human dignity, work, peace, development, and injustice. Liberation theology asked what those signs said about poverty in Latin America.
• Human dignity. The council taught that no circumstance can cancel a person’s dignity. If that is true, poverty and oppression are not misfortune. They offend God’s intention for people.
• The lay apostolate. The decree Apostolicam Actuositatem, promulgated on 18 November 1965, states that formation for the apostolate “cannot consist in merely theoretical instruction” (section 29). It urges lay people to learn from the start to view, judge, and act in the light of faith. The decree never names Cardijn or his method, but it echoes both and gives official standing to Christians who study their world to change it.
• The Church as servant. The council recovered the image of a Church that serves God’s saving work in history. Liberation theology presses the follow-up question: servant to whom, in which situations, and at what cost to the poor?

The Catacombs Pact belongs here. Forty bishops took the council’s language about a servant Church and asked what it would demand of their own houses, titles, and tables.

Medellín: The Council Comes Home

Between the council and liberation theology lie three years and one conference.

In August and September 1968, the Latin American bishops’ conference (CELAM) met in Medellín, Colombia, to apply Vatican II to the continent. Gustavo Gutiérrez, a Peruvian priest, served as a theological adviser and helped draft its documents on peace and justice. Medellín did not adopt liberation theology as such, but the seeds were sown in its pages. The Pact signers had already articulated the point three years earlier: serving the majority of humanity, who live in physical, cultural, and moral misery, was the bishops’ shared work.

Gutiérrez gave the movement its name. His book Teología de la liberación was published in Lima in 1971. Orbis Books published it in English as A Theology of Liberation in 1973. The book argues that the God of the biblical tradition shows a preferential commitment to the poor and that theology begins with the questions the poor ask, not with those asked on their behalf. Gutiérrez died in October 2024 at age 96.

That sequence matters. Liberation theology is not a Latin American invention that Rome reluctantly tolerated. It is a specific answer to a question the council itself posed.

The Objection That Deserves a Hearing

A fair account has to give the critics their best case. On 6 August 1984, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and approved by Pope John Paul II, issued Libertatis Nuntius. It targeted forms of liberation theology that borrow concepts from Marxist thought without sufficient scrutiny. Its argument runs like this. When class struggle becomes the key to all of history, the Gospel shrinks into a political program, salvation turns into a social outcome, and the poor can be betrayed by the cure offered in their name.

The instruction also stated what it was not saying. It called the term theology of liberation valid in itself and warned that its criticism must not excuse indifference to injustice. A second instruction, Libertatis Conscientia, followed on March 22, 1986, and set out the Church’s positive teaching on freedom and liberation.

The objection has force, and the Cardijn line addresses part of it. Any method that begins with lived experience needs a way to analyze structures, and the choice of tool matters. See–Judge–Act embeds the discipline in the middle step: workers weigh what they see against the Gospel before acting. When that step is skipped, the critics are right. When it holds, the analysis serves the faith, and the faith keeps the analysis honest.

What Fits on an Index Card

The line from Nazareth to Medellín reduces to five habits.

1. Start with people, not theory. Jesus ate with the people he spoke for, and Cardijn began with the workers’ own lives.
2. Test what you see against the Gospel. Observation without judgment is sociology. Judgment without observation is sermon.
3. Act together. Solidarity that stays private is sympathy. The early church took up collections, and Cardijn organized.
4. Pair the pledge with the power. A promise to live simply, as the catacombs bishops made, is half the work. The other half is asking who decides, and who is trained to decide.
5. Name the structures, and keep the analysis under the Gospel’s judgment. Economic, racial, political, and gender-based causes of suffering deserve their names. No theory of them is allowed to become the faith.

The Church at Pietralata

Return to the working-class parish on the night of 17 November 1965. The bishops of the catacombs promised to live like the poor. At Pietralata, the bishops gathered around a cardinal who deferred to others and asked for something less dramatic and more lasting. They asked for chaplains who would stand beside young workers as they learned to see, judge, and act for themselves.

That is the half of the story the Church forgot. It is also the half that makes the other half work. A pledge of simplicity changes a bishop. A movement of organized workers changes a neighborhood, a factory, and sometimes a country.

The second night still waits.

And that is Wisdom Speaking.

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Sources

• Stefan Gigacz, The Pact of the Catacombs: For a Church of the Poor and a Workers’ Church
• Joseph Cardijn Digital Library, Pietralata Appeal, 17 November 1965
• Hélder Câmara to Joseph Cardijn, 17 September 1965, in Cardijn Reflections
• Australian Cardijn Institute, Cardinal Czerny to deliver the Cardijn Lecture and The Pact of the Catacombs, Catholic Outlook
• Joseph Cardijn Digital Library, Cardijn timeline, and International Young Christian Workers, Cardijn’s Life
• Joseph Cardijn, Wikipedia, for the date he became a cardinal
• Second Vatican Council, Apostolicam Actuositatem, section 29
• Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction on Certain Aspects of the “Theology of Liberation”, 6 August 1984
• WLRN, Gustavo Gutiérrez, father of liberation theology, dies at 96

The advice Cardijn’s colleagues gave on Câmara’s proposal is summarized at Reactions to Camara’s proposal, which draws on the Cardijn archives. Accessed 12 October 2026. Scripture references follow the New American Bible, Revised Edition. The opening and closing dates of the council (11 October 1962 and 8 December 1965) are confirmed, as is the promulgation of Gaudium et Spes on 7 December 1965. The 1973 Orbis Books edition of Gutiérrez is confirmed. The date of Libertatis Conscientia has been confirmed as 22 March 1986.