“The Crisis of Liberation Theology in the Catholic Church makes the thought of Fr. Clodovis Maria Boff, one of the most penetrating contemporary minds in the Church of South America, available in English for the first time. Though Boff was an early proponent of Liberation Theology in Brazil alongside his brother Leonardo, his reading of the ‘signs of the times’ eventually led him to correct course. The relationship between the rise of Liberation Theology in South America and the decline in Catholic practice (usually in favor of Pentecostalism), he concludes, is a matter not only of correlation but of causation as well. The root cause is deceptively simple: At the level of theological focus and pastoral investment, the Church has replaced Jesus Christ with the poor as her existen¬tial center and raison d’être. Only Christ, however, can ultimately bring eternal salvation and a meaningful life. Despite drawing on considerable philosophical and theological learning, The Crisis of LiberationTheology manages to speak with prophetic candor. It deserves a wide readership.”

“According to Fr. Clodovis Boff, the root crisis within the Church is a grave deficit of faith stemming from the predominance of the social over the spiritual dimension—that is, the natural over the supernatural. In this work he shows how this deficit has played itself out in Liberation Theology, making Christian social activists easy prey for secularist seduction. Boff also argues that Liberation Theology has never been very clear about how it understands the building blocks of fundamental theology, such as the relationships between nature and grace, faith and reason, history and ontology, and Scripture and Tradition. He uses the word ‘ambi¬guity’ to describe the engagement of liberation theologians with these building blocks. Of all the books published on Liberation Theology, this will come to be regarded as one of the most significant since it is written by someone who has been at the center of the movement from its inception—and who has also become one of its staunchest critics. While Clodovis Boff affirms the Church’s social teaching and interest in the poor, he is critical of any approach to these issues that occludes Christ and indeed the entire Trinity, prioritizing the political over the spiritual.”

“Most priests who studied theology in the early 1980s will recall entire courses devoted to Liberation Theology—and its claimed implications for nearly every doctrinal locus: eschatology, the Trinity, the sacraments, and moral theology. It presented itself not simply as a perspective within theology but as ‘an entirely new way of doing theology,’ one rooted ‘from below,’ in the experience of the poor too often neglected by the Church. Among the formative texts of that period was Introducing Liberation Theology by Leonardo Boff and his brother, Clodovis Boff. Yet, in the decades since its rise, Catholicism declined precipitously in parts of Latin America, where the movement first flourished. To understand why this attempt to baptize Karl Marx and substitute politics for proclamation weakened rather than renewed the Church, one needs only read The Crisis of Liberation Theology in the Catholic Church. This book is a clear, necessary, and sobering account of both the promise and the cost of that experiment from one who was there at the founding.”

“Liberation theology emerged in the wake of the Second Vatican Council from a genuine and urgent concern: to take seriously the cries of the poor and to discern the meaning of the Gospel within their concrete historical circumstances. Yet, in some of its forms, this project risked losing its theological center, allowing history to eclipse revelation rather than be illumined by it. In this important work, Fr. Clodovis Boff offers a penetrating and deeply personal critique from within the movement itself, having been one of its pioneers. Writing with both intellectual rigor and ecclesial fidelity, he recalls theology to its proper foundation in the primacy of God’s self-revelation in Christ. This book is not only a critique but a necessary act of retrieval. It invites us to recover the authentic vision of the Second Vatican Council, in which attention to the ‘signs of the times’ is integrated within the Church’s living tradition rather than set alongside or above it. For people of faith seeking to engage contemporary questions without losing sight of the Gospel’s enduring truth, this work is an invaluable guide.”

“Liberation Theology’s European progenitors challenged traditional Catholic social doctrine as an expression of bourgeois ideology and asserted the primacy of praxis over theoria. Fr. Clodovis Boff meets his interlocutors on their own ground. Inductively demonstrating the failures of mainstream Liberation Theology at the level of praxis, Fr. Boff returns to the first principle of all theologizing: the revelation of the God who is Love through the mediation of Christ’s sacred humanity. This work is no mere polemic. Fr. Boff provides a theologically substantive response to mainstream Liberation Theology while modeling the prophetic fortitude to which Liberation Theology calls its own disciples. He incisively warns Catholics in the West against the tendency, not limited to Liberation Theology, to grant the pseudo-religion of Man-become-God priority over the mystery of God-become-Man. Arising out of the Latin American context, the significance of this work, both profound and approachable, will reverberate throughout an ecclesial and political culture ideologically afflicted by the religion of humanity.”