Guest blog piece by Revd Paul Nicolson of Taxpayers Against Poverty
LETTER IN THE GUARDIAN 27 AUGUST 2014
Written in response to a Guardian Leader on 24th August
Christianity needs bishops who speak up for the poor and against oppression
• Liberation theology cannot be picked up from South America and planted
in the UK. But its method of doing theology – from the perspective of
the poor, studying the facts and being shocked by their circumstances –
can be. Leonardo Boff, silenced by the Vatican in 1992, wrote: “The
central question is how to exercise faith in the midst of social
oppression. How should the ecclesiastical community interact with the
political community?”
The
short answer to Boff’s question (posed in an essay, The Originality of
Liberation Theology, in The Future Of Liberation Theology: Essays In
Honour of Gustavo Gutiérrez, published in 1989) is with and for poor
people who suffer innocently. That is done out of the love inspired by
the innocent suffering of our founder, who joined them on a cross.
Our
first-world churches are complicit with extreme free-market politics
and do not reflect, in the light of our faith, on the oppression done in
the name of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Our ineffectiveness can be
measured by the increasing oppression of the poorest citizens in the UK.
We
desperately need bishops and archbishops who will interact with the
political community and the public in the manner of Oscar Romero. He
famously said: “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask
why they are poor, they call me a communist. When the church hears the
cry of the oppressed it cannot but denounce the social structures that
give rise to and perpetuate the misery from which the cry arises.”
Romero was assassinated on 24 March 1980, the eve of the enthronement of
Robert Runcie as archbishop of Canterbury.
Rev Paul Nicolson
Taxpayers Against Poverty
Rev Paul Nicolson
Taxpayers Against Poverty
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