The Latin American movement, born among Catholic theologians, clergy, and poor Christian communities, that read the Gospel as a call to liberate the oppressed from unjust structures, drew on Marxist social analysis, produced martyrs under military regimes, and was disciplined by the Vatican before its core idea entered mainstream Church teaching.
In 1980, a gunman shot Archbishop Óscar Romero through the heart as he raised the chalice at Mass. He had spent years denouncing his government's killing of the poor, and He had made enemies among the forces defending the regime. Romero was the most famous of many priests, nuns, and laypeople murdered for a single idea: that God takes the side of the oppressed, and that to follow Christ is to fight the structures that keep people poor. That idea was liberation theology. It turned a powerful current within Latin American Catholicism toward social liberation, drew the bullets of military regimes who called it communism, and drew the discipline of Rome, which feared it had traded the Gospel for politics. Romero was made a saint in 2018.