In 2007, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking Soviet bloc official ever to defect to the West, told the world that Soviet bloc intelligence agencies had cultivated and developed the pro-Communist union of Marxism and Christianity that the world came to know as liberation theology. Pacepa documented that disinformation operation six years later, in the book “Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism,” which I was privileged to co-author with him.
The KGB liked the term “liberation.” In 1964, it formed the National Liberation Army of Bolivia (with help from the Communist icon Che Guevara). That same year, the first Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Council, consisting of representatives handpicked by the KGB, approved the Palestinian National Charter. In 1965, the KGB created the National Liberation Army of Colombia (with help from Fidel Castro). Later, the KGB would create the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which carried out numerous bombing attacks, and the Secret Army for Liberation of Armenia, which organized numerous bombing attacks against U.S. airline offices in Western Europe.
Liberation theology was introduced to the world in 1965 by the Christian Peace Conference (CPC), a religious organization headquartered in the Soviet bloc (Prague), secretly financed by the KGB and staffed by the KGB community (including the Romanian intelligence organization headed by Pacepa). The CPC was eventually subordinated into to the World Peace Council, which in 1989 admitted that 90 percent of its money had come from the KGB.
Peruvian priest Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez, who wrote the book “A Theology of Liberation” (English edition, 1973), is generally considered the founder of liberation theology. Gutiérrez, who quoted Che Guevara for support, wrote that liberation theology “is a theological reflection born of the experience of shared efforts to abolish the current unjust situation and to build a different society, freer and more human … to give reason for our hope from within a commitment that seeks to become more radical, total, and efficacious.”
Followers of liberation theology read the Gospels from the perspective of the poor and the oppressed and desire a church that is politically and culturally decentralized. They seek to fight poverty and social injustice through political activism, especially in relation to human rights. In the same way Marxists deify the proletariat, liberation theologians put the poor at the center of their theology. Adherents take inspiration from fallen martyrs like Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador and Dorothy Mae Stang, an American-born nun who was murdered in Brazil.
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