Gustavo Gutierrez:"... "the poverty of the poor is ... a demand that we go and build a different social order."

“But the poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny. His or her existence is not politically neutral, and it is not ethically innocent. The poor are a by-product of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible. They are marginalized by our social and cultural world. They are the oppressed, exploited proletariat, robbed of the fruit of their labor and despoiled of their humanity. Hence the poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order.” ― Gustavo Gutiérrez


Gustavo Gutiérrez-Merino Díaz OP (8 June 1928 – 22 October 2024) was a Peruvian philosopher, Catholic theologian, and Dominican priest who was one of the founders of liberation theology in Latin America.[1][2] His 1971 book A Theology of Liberation is considered pivotal to the formation of liberation theology.[3][4][5] He held the John Cardinal O'Hara Professorship of Theology at the University of Notre Dame and was a visiting professor at universities in North America and Europe.[6]

Gutiérrez studied medicine and literature at the National University of San Marcos before deciding to become a priest. He began studying theology at the Theology Faculty of Leuven in Belgium and in Lyon, France.

His theological focus connected salvation and liberation through the preferential option for the poor, with an emphasis on improving the material conditions of the impoverished. Gutiérrez proposed that revelation and eschatology have been excessively idealized at the expense of efforts to bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth.[7] His methodology was often critical of the social and economic injustice he believed to be responsible for poverty in Latin America, and of the Catholic clergy. The central pastoral question of his work was: "How do we convey to the poor that God loves them?"...

Largely as a result of his work, Latin American liberation theology thus emerged as a biblical analysis of poverty. Gutiérrez distinguished two forms of poverty: a "scandalous state" and a "spiritual childhood"...
while the former is abhorred by God, the second is valued...Gutiérrez asserted that his understanding of poverty as a "scandalous state" is reflected in Luke's beatitude "Blessed are you poor, for the kingdom of God is yours", whereas his interpretation of it as "spiritual childhood" has precedent in Matthew's verse, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven". He argued that there are forms of poverty beyond economic[8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustavo_Gutiérrez