The moment
Meeting at Medellín in August and September 1968, the bishops of Latin America issued documents that affirmed the rights of the poor and called the Church away from the privileged few to the side of the impoverished majority. Small base communities, led mostly by laypeople, read the Bible in the light of their neighbourhoods' needs and multiplied across the continent, and the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez gave the movement its name with A Theology of Liberation in 1971. In 1984 the Vatican's doctrinal office under Cardinal Ratzinger warned against its borrowings from Marxism. Archbishop Óscar Romero of San Salvador, shot while saying Mass in 1980, was made a saint in 2018.
People: Gustavo Gutiérrez, Óscar Romero, Joseph Ratzinger