...and I think it's good. To a certain extent, it's a dead horse, but apparently not as dead as we might think.
Liberation Theology has been around for decades, now. As Prefect of the CDF, Cardinal Ratzinger addressed a number of the problems with the way Liberation Theology had been carrying on. Due to that and other movements in the Church, it seems that Liberation Theology is finding its proper niche in the Church and a better instantiation which is truer to the Gospel.
But there must yet be lingering elements out there that still threaten to make it Liberation Theology movement a merely humanitarian force. He addressed these issues at length in his first encyclical Deus Caritas Est, God is Love. He has continued to address it in less formal (and less authoritative) ways, and his Angelus of this week he continues it still:
Jesus Christ . . . did not organize campaigns against poverty but proclaimed the Gospel for a complete ransom from moral and material misery to the poor. The Church, with its unceasing labors of evangelization and human promotion, does the same.
I am not all that surprised that he's still treating of these issues. We have been told, afterall, that he is going to be publishing his third encyclical this year. It is to be on social issues, with its title: Caritas in Veritate, Love in Truth. It was supposed to be published in 2008, but the economic crisis caused him to withhold its publication and even (probably) to revise it. I expect his 2009 Message for Peace, with its significant economic focus, is a foreshadowing of what we will see in the forthcoming encyclical.
