September 28, 2020

 

Thought for Today

 

“But what Vatican II also made possible were the subsequent Bishops’ conferences, such as Medellin, Columbia in 1968,where the theology of liberation was openly articulated and embraced.  I don’t know when I first heard the words ‘preferential option for the poor,’  but it must have been close to that time.  The church in Latin America was flowering in its base communities and imagining a confraternity close to that known by the earliest Christians.  I read Gustavo Gutierrez a few years later, but it wasn’t till 1978 when I first went to El Salvador, that I experienced the other, living church.  In the intervening years, I had drifted away from my Catholic practice.  I was, as they say of us, fallen, ‘a fallen away Catholic.’  The campesino Catholics of El Salvador brought me back.”

 

Carolyn Forche in 

A Conversation with Carolyn Forche, 

in Image, A Journal of the Arts and Religion, 

Summer 2003, Number 39, page 55