A Christian theological movement that took shape in Latin America in the late 1960s and early 1970s, holding that the Gospel speaks first and most directly to the poor and the oppressed, that the situation of the poor is not incidental but central to theological reflection, and that the church's task is concrete solidarity with their struggle for liberation — not only spiritually understood, but materially and politically. The Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez gave the movement its founding text in A Theology of Liberation (1971); the Brazilian brothers Leonardo and Clodovis Boff, the Salvadoran Jesuit Jon Sobrino, and the Uruguayan Juan Luis Segundo were among its other major figures.
Theologically, liberation theology rests on what Gutiérrez called the "preferential option for the poor" — the claim that God in Scripture is not impartial between oppressor and oppressed but is consistently and actively on the side of the latter, and that any theology that obscures this is to that extent false. Methodologically, it begins with the concrete situation of the poor and reads Scripture and tradition from there, rather than beginning with abstract doctrine and applying it downward. It drew on Marxist social analysis as a tool for understanding structural poverty without (in its mainstream form) accepting Marxist materialism as a metaphysics. The base ecclesial communities — small lay-led congregations meeting for Bible study and political reflection — were its characteristic ecclesial form.
The movement was met with sustained Vatican opposition under John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Benedict XVI) in the 1980s, and several of its theologians were silenced or disciplined. It was also met with violent state opposition: Óscar Romero, the Salvadoran archbishop who became identified with the movement, was assassinated at the altar in 1980; the six Jesuits killed in San Salvador in 1989 were Sobrino's colleagues. The election of Pope Francis in 2013 brought a partial rehabilitation. Parallel currents — Black liberation theology (James H. Cone), feminist and mujerista theology, Asian and African liberation theologies — extended the framework into other contexts.