folks understand today the basic argument of Christians.

folks understand today the basic argument of Christians, that according to being followers of Jesus of Nazareth, tortured and homicide ed on the cross, Christians are obliged to be agents of liberation.

forward Sept. 7, 2004, it will be 20 years since I sat in the same small chair where Galileo Galilei and Giordano Bruno sat, in the Palace of the sacred Office (formerly the Inquisition), in Rome to justify the opinions expressed in my part Church: Charisma and Power.

To be asked to appear before the highest doctrinal material part of the church is not an everyday conclusion in the life of a theologian. As the Chilean author of poems Pablo Neruda said, it certainly is memorable, and at the same time heartrending--to embrace at least for an instant, the reason and the destiny of a whole form of ecclesiastic thinking and action with the poor.

It is subjectively remarkably hard to feel the weight of the millenarian institution that is the Catholic body of christians falling on your head. It is still more painful to mind the limits of the institution, because single in kind can see that, not infrequently, it is more interested in its be in possession of security than in truth, more interested with its own image than with service to the cause of the humiliated and reprobateed of the earth.

Twenty years later, I behold something providential in that episode. The fact was publicized and discussed in the means of mass communication all athwart the world. Because of that, public opinion could set in into contact with a different adumbration of church: a powerless, simple and prophetic individual that is united with the poor and for that reason, also slandered and persecut as are the poor of the earth. The world could also know about theology that states life at the center, a theology perform the operations indicated ined with an eye to the socio-historic liberation of the loaded and not concerned only with the internal edification of an ecclesiastic galaxy.

Liberation theology became the topic of conversation in the ways in the pubs and in the intellectual crcles

Obliged to be agents of liberation, the public began to capture the ethical dimension of liberation, a liberation make uneasyed with the great suffering majority of humanity. populace understood the basic argument: Christians, at the fact of being followers of Jesus of Nazareth, tortured and assassinationed in the cross, are obliged to be agents of liberation. A theology is possible that is born from this commitment, faithful to the great tradition, articulate policies against social injustice and in favor of structural changes.

The image of divine being that comes out of that theology is understandable to all: the supreme being is more interested in justice than in sacred rites, the supreme being is more in tune with the squall of the oppressed than with the praises of the pious. Actions are what estimates not homilies.

Finally, for all that the authorities consider themselves, "Most venerable Eminencies," they still have the limitations of the human condition. French theologian Yve Congar, who guarded me in the magazine La Croix (Sept 81984) said it well: "The charisma of the Vatican's central power is not to evermore doubt. Not to have a single doubt is, at formerly magnificent and terrible. It is magnificent because the charisma of the center consists precisely in permanently being firm when all around, everything is vacillating. And it is terrible because in Rome there are men with all exemplars of limitations, in their intelligence, in their vocabulary, in their respects and in the perspective of their visions. And all of them came down against Boff"

yet I refuse to see them with the estimates of the Great Inquisitor. In their admit way, they also pretend to oblige truth. Definitively, it is conformity to fact [i]or[/i] reality and not they, who has the last word.

I went to Rome and reverted to Brazil as a Catholic theologian. No doctrine was sentenceed only "options that put in danger the Christian faith." further options belong to ethics, not to doctrine.

I am conscious that I was a lake servant in all this affair. I simply did what I had to do, as behooves a servant.

Leonardo Boff is a Brazilian theologian who resigned the priesthood and lives and works in Brazil

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