Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino, O.P.
(born 8 June 1928 in Lima) is a Peruvian theologian and Dominican
priest regarded as the founder of Liberation Theology. He holds the
John Cardinal O'Hara Professorship of Theology at the University of
Notre Dame. He has been professor at the Pontifical Catholic University
of Peru and a visiting professor at many major universities in North
America and Europe. He is a member of the Peruvian Academy of Language,
and in 1993 he was awarded the Legion of Honor by the French government
for his tireless work. He has also published in and been a member of
the board of directors of the international journal, Concilium.
Gutiérrez is a Mestizo, being of mixed Spanish and Quechua
descent. As a youth he was bedridden and suffered from osteomyelitis.[1]
He has studied medicine and literature (Peru), psychology and
philosophy (Leuven), and obtained a doctorate at the Institut Pastoral
d'Etudes Religieuses (IPER), Université Catholique in Lyon.
The founder of liberation theology, he was born in Peru, and spent much
of his life living and working among the poor of Lima.
In September 1984, a special assembly of Peruvian bishops were summoned
to Rome for the express purpose of condemning Gutiérrez, but
the bishops held firm.
Gutiérrez's groundbreaking work, A Theology of Liberation:
History, Politics, Salvation (1971), explains his notion of Christian
poverty as an act of loving solidarity with the poor as well as a
liberatory protest against poverty.