Pope Leo, The Liberation Theologian?

Last updated on: October 11, 2025 at 3:00 pm by Andrew Chesnut

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Pope Leo, The Liberation Theologian? 2025-10-11T15:00:36-04:00 Andrew Chesnut

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From the vantage of Latin America’s long tradition of “theology from the below,” Pope Leo XIV has already signaled what many liberation theologians call the “precarious continuity” of prophetic insistence: continuity, yes, but never without the need for creative fidelity. In his first apostolic exhortation, Dilexi te (“I Have Loved You”), Leo explicitly frames poverty not as an incidental pastoral concern but as a structural challenge calling for ecclesial conversion.

My three decades of research on Latin American religious movements emphasizes how theological gestures must be read through the register of lived communities. In that spirit, we might read Leo’s emergence not simply as Francis redux, but as a new node in the longue durée of Latin American Catholic social memory—and as a test of the Church’s capacity to hold tensions between prophetic marginality and hierarchical stability.

Liberation Rooted in Peru

Leo’s biography already carries hints of affinity with liberationist sensibilities. During his time in Peru, Prevost is reported to have known Gustavo Gutiérrez—one of the foundational thinkers of liberation theology—and to have appreciated his thought. That is not a trivial fact, given how Gutiérrez’s writings shaped the mid-20th century shift in Latin American theology toward seeing systems of oppression as theological problems, not merely social ones.

Moreover, Leo worked in dioceses in Peru, including in regions with Indigenous and rural socioecological vulnerability, where the Church’s pastoral work intersects with issues of land, ecology, and colonial legacies. In that sense, his pastoral imagination is already steeped in the real struggles of communities often at the margins of capitalist growth and extractive economy.

In Latin America, the soil bears memory—of revolts, Christian base communities, and of priests martyred for social engagement. In choosing to echo Francis’s language of the “preferential option for the poor,” Leo is drawing on that sedimented memory, even as he seeks to recast it for new contexts.

Dilexi te: Building on Francis’s Foundation

One of the clearest indicators of Leo’s desire for continuity is that Dilexi te is not entirely novel: substantial drafting is said to have been done by Francis before his death, and Leo completed it, adding his own voice. Among its 130 citations, over forty percent reference Francis’s writings. That density of intertextuality is itself a rhetorical strategy: Leo stakes a claim to Francis’s moral and theological inheritance.

But Leo also ventures beyond attachment. He sharpens the critique of structural injustice: denouncing economic systems that marginalize the poor, challenging “overconsumption,” and insisting that migration is not just a demographic challenge but a “knock at the door of the community.” In this way, Leo elevates the language of liberation from charity to structural conversion.

One might say Leo is pushing the boundary of “theology at the margins” toward “theology of structural conversion”. He is not content merely to affirm the poor but wants the Church to re-see its disciplines, finances, liturgy—even its geopolitics—through the lens of oppressed peoples.

Liberation Theologian and Liturgical Traditionalist

Yet Leo is not univocal. The new pope is widely perceived as moderate or conservative on doctrinal matters. Some observers point out that he retains skepticism toward excessive liberationist radicalism, especially its flirtations with Marxism. Indeed, in earlier phases of his career, Prevost voiced concerns about communist infiltration into Christian circles, and his choice of relics and papal name (Leo, evoking Leo XIII and social teaching) suggests a cautious posture.

Here we see the dialectic that Latin America’s theologians always negotiate: how to be sufficiently prophetic without fracturing communion; how to engage political critique without collapsing into partisanship; how to draw on liberation theology’s moral energies while containing its theological excesses.

Leo appears to calibrate this tension by combining structural critique with liturgical respect, doctrinal safeguards, and institutional prudence. His symbolic gestures—reaffirming the preferential option for the poor while not endorsing doctrinal novelties—aim to reassure traditionalists that continuity does not equal revolution.

From Option for the Poor to Structural Conversion

Ultimately, Leo’s experiment will be measured not by rhetoric but by concrete shifts: in Vatican finances, in appointments of bishops, in how the Church positions itself vis-à-vis neoliberalism, extractivism, migration, and ecology.

Already, he has reversed at least one financial reform of Francis’s, loosening centralization of Vatican investment control. That move signals Leo’s willingness to adjust Francis’s institutional legacy, not merely affirm it wholesale.

If Leo is to succeed in truly “gravitating” toward liberation theology, he will need to push beyond symbolic alignment and into ecclesial transformation: that is, to make the poor and their struggles constitutive agents of theology — not merely recipients of charity. He will need to let the borders of doctrine, liturgy, and institutional governance feel the pressure of the oppressed. The Church must become more porous to the sufferings and resistances of those on the underside of history.

If he manages that, Pope Leo XIV could emerge not merely as a Francis 2.0, but as a distinct iteration of a Latin American and U.S. Catholic imagination re-animated for the 21st century—a pope who listens, learns, and moves sacrificially in solidarity with those whom history has marginalized.

About Andrew Chesnut

Dr. R. Andrew Chesnut earned his Ph.D degree in Latin American History from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1995 and joined the History Department faculty at the University of Houston in 1997. He quickly became an internationally recognized expert on Latin American religious history Professor Chesnut was selected as the inaugural recipient of the Bishop Walter Sullivan Chair in Catholic Studies at VCU in 2008. The chair was established as the Most Rev. Walter F. Sullivan was nearing retirement as the 11th bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Richmond to honor his nearly thirty years of service. For Professor Chesnut the chair became a unique opportunity to develop Catholic studies in a global context and at a large public university. Professor Chesnut’s early work, Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and the Pathogens of Poverty (Rutgers University Press, 1997), traces the meteroric rise of Pentecostalism among the popular classes in Brazil following the disestablishment of the Roman Catholic Church. His second book, Competitive Spirits: Latin America’s New Religious Economy (Oxford University Press, 2003) focuses on the three groups that have prospered most in the region’s pluralist landscape, Protestant Pentecostalism, the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, and African disasporic religions (e.g., Brazilian Candomble and Haitian Vodou). Professor Chesnut's most recent book is Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint (Oxford University Press, 2025). It is the first in-depth study of the Mexican folk saint in English and has received widespread media coverage. You can read more about the author here.

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