Peruvian Dominican priest, theologian, and the founding figure of Liberation Theology. Born in Lima in 1928 into a family of modest means and of Indigenous Quechua heritage, Gutiérrez trained first in medicine and then, after a turn to philosophy, in theology at Louvain and Lyon and pastoral work in the barrios of Lima — the decisive education, as he always insisted, happening not in the European seminaries but in the parish of Rímac where the poverty was not an object of study but a condition of ministry. He joined the Dominican Order in 1998, taught at Notre Dame for much of the last two decades of his life, and died in Lima in October 2024.
A Theology of Liberation (1971, English 1973) is the foundational text of the movement — indeed, it gave the movement its name. Against a European theology that treated poverty as an unfortunate backdrop to questions of faith and meaning, Gutiérrez argued that the poverty of the Latin American masses was a theological scandal first and a sociological fact second, that God's self-revelation in scripture shows a decisive "preferential option for the poor," and that theology must therefore begin not with abstract doctrine but with solidarity in the actual struggle of the oppressed — "critical reflection on praxis in the light of the Word." The book borrowed analytic vocabulary from Marxist social theory (class, structure, dependency) while keeping its theological and spiritual sources firmly Catholic: Bartolomé de las Casas, the Latin American popular piety, and the biblical prophets.
The Vatican under John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Benedict XVI) investigated Gutiérrez repeatedly through the 1980s. He was never formally disciplined — his orthodoxy was too careful — but many of his colleagues were. The election of Pope Francis in 2013, an Argentine shaped by the same Latin American Catholic milieu, changed the official temperature: Francis invited Gutiérrez to Rome, concelebrated Mass with him, and wrote the preface to one of his later books. His later work — We Drink from Our Own Wells (1983), On Job (1986), Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ (1993) — deepened the spiritual side of the project that his first book had laid out in its polemical political form.