The Maike Hickson article, Liberation Theologian Boff: “Francis is One of Us” of December 26, 2016 makes disturbing reading. It commences:On 25 December 2016 the Brazilian Leonardo Boff, one of the most prominent theorists and operatives of Latin American Liberation Theology, gave a candidly revealing and manifoldly informative interview to the German regional newspaper Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger. Due to his confident, if not presumptuous, openness, the 78-year-old Boff (b. 14 December 1938) speaks about several matters of moment which we otherwise would not so easily hear about.
See what I mean?
For example, he reveals the following:
In the following, therefore, I shall translate parts of this important interview. The words of Leonardo Boff will speak for themselves.
Important to note in this context, however, is that Boff himself was publicly criticized and silenced in 1985 by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger – then the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) – for his unorthodox writings that boldly go quite far against Church doctrine. Thus, in 1992, he both formally left the Franciscan Order to which he had belonged and he also then publicly left the Catholic priesthood.
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Q: Liberation Theology of Latin America – one of whose most prominent representatives you certainly are – has now received new honors [and encouraging support] from and through Pope Francis. [Is there now to be] A rehabilitation also for you personally, after your years-long struggles with Pope John Paul II himself and with his highest defender of Doctrine, Joseph Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict XVI?
Francis is one of us. He has turned Liberation Theology into a common property of the Church. And he has widened it. Whoever speaks today of the poor, also has to speak of the earth, because it, too, is now being plundered and abused. “To hear the cry of the poor,” that means to hear the cry of the animals, the forests, of the whole tortured creation. The whole earth cries. Also, says the pope – and he thus quotes one of the titles of one of my books – we have to hear simultaneously the cry of the poor and the cry of the earth. And, for sure, both need to be liberated. I myself have dealt in the recent past with this widening of the Liberation Theology. And that [this environmental dimension] is also the fundamentally new aspect in Laudato Si.
Q: ….which is now in the “ecological encyclical” of the pope promulgated in the year 2015. How much Leonardo Boff is in Jorge Mario Bergoglio?
The encyclical belongs to the pope. But he has consulted with many experts.
Q: Has he read your books?
More than that. He asked me for material for the sake of Laudato Si. I have given him my counsel and sent to him some of what I have written. Which he has also used. Some people told me they were thinking while reading: “Wait, that is Boff!” By the way, Pope Francis directly told me: “Boff, don’t send the papers directly to me.”
Q: Why not?
He said: “Otherwise, the Sottosegretari (the employees of the Vatican administration, editors [of the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger]) will intercept them and I will not receive them. Rather, send the things right to the Argentine Ambassador [at the Holy See] with whom I have a good connection, then they will safely land into my hands.” For that, one needs to know that the current Ambassador at the Holy See is an old friend of the pope from his time in Buenos Aires. They have often drunk together mate [a special drink from Argentina, a sort of tea]. Then, one day before the publication of the encyclical, the pope had someone call me in order to thank me for my help.
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