Famous liberation theologian repents. "Enough! I have to speak out" Christ has been displaced by ideology. Sharp attack in Open Letter to Latin American and Caribbean Episcopal Conference.

Clodovis Boff: CELAM bishops hide the Catholic faith

Father Clodovis M. Boff, OSM, a convert to the Catholic faith from the heterodoxy of Marxist liberation theology, has written an open letter to the Bishops of the Latin American and Caribbean Episcopal Council (CELAM) in which he clearly exposes the direction the Church is taking in Ibero-America due to the doctrinal deviation and disastrous pastoral work of its prelates.

Father Clodovis M. Boff, OSM, is a prominent figure in Ibero-American theological thought. Born in 1944 in Brazil, he is the brother of the well-known theologian Leonardo Boff, although over time their paths diverged sharply. A priest of the Order of the Servants of Mary, he studied philosophy and obtained a doctorate in theology in Belgium, becoming a leading voice in liberation theology in its early days.

For years, he was a professor at institutions such as PUC-Río and the Marianum University in Rome, where he reflected on the role of the Church in Latin America. However, unlike many of his colleagues, Clodovis Boff gradually distanced himself from the Marxist line of liberation theology. In 2007, his text "Liberation Theology and Return to the Foundation" marked a turning point: in it, he denounced the dominant approach that had displaced Christ from the center, replacing him with the sociological category of the poor.

Since then, Boff has maintained a critical stance toward what he considers an "internal secularization" of the Church, warning against the risk of reducing it to a mere NGO. This position has radically differentiated him from his brother Leonardo, with whom he publicly broke.

It is therefore not surprising that he wrote a letter to the bishops of CELAM, warning them that they have been in a state of complete drift for 40 years, which has led the Church in the Americas to the greatest crisis in its history.

In his letter, Boff denounces the bishops' exclusive emphasis on social issues, without mentioning grace, salvation, the need for conversion, prayer, worship, and, ultimately, Catholic doctrine. He points out an obvious fact: the bishops' message is not truly religious or spiritual. And he reminds them of Christ's words:

"The words of Christ come to mind: the children ask for bread and you give them a stone (Mt 7:9). Even the secular world is fed up with secularization and seeks spirituality. But no, you continue to offer them the social, and always the social; of the spiritual, barely a few crumbs."

He also points to something that is very evident in broad sectors of the Church in Latin America:

"...while the laity are pleased to display signs of their Catholic identity (crosses, medals, veils, and blouses with religious prints), priests and nuns go against the grain and appear without any distinctive sign."

The Brazilian priest doubts that the bishops hear, as they claim, the "cries of the people," since what they say is the same as what journalists and sociologists say, while they fail to hear the world's cry to God. He states:

"...the great concern of the Church on our continent is not the cause of Christ and his salvation, but social causes, such as justice, peace, and ecology, which you mention in your message as a refrain."

They ignore the Pope

Boff notes that the CELAM bishops did not follow the path forged by Pope Leo XIV, who wrote to them to acknowledge the "urgent need to remember that it is the Risen Lord, present among us, who protects and guides the Church, reviving it in hope." However:

In the letter they wrote to him, they made no echo of these papal warnings. Rather, instead of asking him to help them keep the memory of the Risen Lord alive in the Church and the salvation of their brothers and sisters in Christ, they asked him to support them in their struggle to "encourage justice and peace" and in "denouncing every form of injustice." In short, what they told the Pope was the same old refrain: "social, social...", as if he, who worked among us for decades, had never heard it."

Fr. Clodovis questions the superficial use of religious vocabulary in CELAM's message. Although key terms such as "God," "Christ," and "evangelization" are mentioned, the priest complains that they lack concrete spiritual content and are used in a generic way. He warns that, far from reflecting a living faith, these words seem to serve as decoration in a discourse focused on social issues. In particular, he points out that the name of Christ barely appears, and its potential to revitalize the essence of the faith is wasted. Appealing to the Nicene dogma, he says:

"I wonder why we do not take advantage of this immense dogmatic truth to renew, with all fervor, the primacy of Christ-God, which today has such a limited presence in the preaching and life of our people."

Clodovis Boff denounces that the Church proposed by CELAM, although defined as a "home and school of communion" and "merciful, synodal, and outgoing," lacks an explicit foundation in Christ. He affirms that, without this centrality, the Church runs the risk of becoming a mere "pious NGO," as Pope Francis warned.

The priest laments that while Catholicism is declining in Latin America—with empty churches and countries ceasing to be predominantly Catholic, including Brazil—the bishops express no concern. He criticizes their silence in the face of the decline, recalling the prophetic accusation of Amos and the image of the "dumb dogs" evoked by Saint Gregory the Great and Saint Boniface.

Boff acknowledges that many Latin American bishops live a richer and more diverse pastoral approach than that reflected in CELAM's official message. He emphasizes that, since they do not depend on CELAM, but on the Holy See and their own conscience before God, the bishops are free to adopt different approaches. He warns, however, that there are at least three dissonances within the organization: between the bishops and the institutional CELAM, between the general conferences and the ordinary documents of CELAM, and between the bishops and those who draft their texts. Despite this, he affirms that the message for CELAM's 70th anniversary faithfully reflects the dominant tendency of the Ibero-American Church: prioritizing the social over the religious.

Clodovis Boff warns that the prolonged emphasis on social issues has relegated the religious to a secondary role in the Ibero-American Church, a process that began in Medellín in 1968. He points out that this loss of the centrality of Christ has contributed to the spiritual and numerical deterioration of the Church. He urgently calls on the bishops of CELAM to recover a clear, strong, and transformative Christocentrism, both within the Church and in its public action. According to Boff, only by restoring Christ to his absolute place—as Saint Cyprian and Saint John Paul II already exhorted—can the Church be authentically revitalized.

I Must Speak

The priest explains to the bishops why he wrote his letter:

“If I have dared to address you directly, dear bishops, it is because for some time now I have seen, with dismay, repeated signs that our beloved Church is at grave risk: that of moving away from her spiritual essence, to her own detriment and that of the world. When the house is burning, anyone can cry out.”

And he concludes, before entrusting himself to the Virgin:

“As we are among brothers and sisters, I have one last confidence to share with you. After reading your message, something happened to me that I felt almost 20 years ago, when, unable to bear any longer the repeated errors of liberation theology, such an impulse arose from the depths of my soul that I banged my fist on the table and said: “Enough! I must speak.” It is a similar inner impulse that leads me to write this letter, with the hope that the Holy Spirit may have had something to do with it.

Open Letter to the Bishops of the Latin American and Caribbean Episcopal Council (CELAM)

Dear Brother Bishops:

I have read the message you published at the end of the 40th Assembly held in Rio at the end of May. What good news did I find in the message? Excuse my frankness: None. You, the bishops of CELAM, repeat the same old refrain: social, social, social. You have been doing this for more than fifty years. Dear older brothers, don't you see that this music is getting tiresome? When will you give us the good news about God the Father, Christ, and his Spirit? About grace and salvation? About conversion of heart and meditation on the Word? About prayer and adoration, devotion to the Mother of the Lord, and other similar themes? Finally, when will you announce to us a truly religious and spiritual message?

This is precisely what we need most today and what we have been waiting for for a long time. I am reminded of Christ's words: "The children ask for bread, and you give them a stone" (Mt 7:9). Even the secular world is fed up with secularization and seeks spirituality. But no, you continue to offer them the social, and always the social; of the spiritual, barely a few crumbs. And to think that you are the guardians of the most important treasure, the one the world needs most and the one you, in a certain sense, deny it. Souls ask for the supernatural, and you insist on giving them the natural. This paradox is evident even in parishes: while lay people delight in displaying signs of their Catholic identity (crosses, medals, veils, and blouses with religious prints), priests and nuns go against the grain and appear without any distinctive sign.

Yet you dare to say, with great conviction, that you hear the "cries" of the people and that you are "aware of the challenges" of today. Do you truly listen, or do you simply remain superficial? I read your list of today's "cries" and "challenges" and see that it is nothing more than what ordinary journalists and sociologists say. Do you not hear how, from the depths of the world, a formidable cry to God is rising today? A cry that even many non-Catholic analysts already hear? Isn't the reason for the existence of the Church and its ministers precisely to hear this cry and respond to it, a true and complete response? Governments and NGOs are there to respond to social cries. The Church, undoubtedly, cannot remain on the sidelines, but it is not the protagonist in this field. Its sphere of action is a higher one: to respond precisely to the cry that seeks God.

I know that you, as bishops, suffer day and night the harassment of public opinion to define yourselves as "progressives" or "traditionalists," "right-wing" or "left-wing." But are these the appropriate categories for bishops? Are they not, rather, "men of God" and "ministers of Christ"? On this, Saint Paul is categorical: "Let men consider us as ministers of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God" (1 Cor 4:1). It is not idle to recall here that the Church is, above all, a "sacrament of salvation" and not a mere social institution, progressive or not. She exists to proclaim Christ and his grace. That is her primary purpose, her greatest and permanent commitment. Everything else is secondary. Forgive me, dear bishops, if I remind you of what you already know. But if you know it, why, then, does all this not appear in your message and in the writings of CELAM in general? Reading them, one almost inevitably comes to the conclusion that, today, the great concern of the Church on our continent is not the cause of Christ and his salvation, but rather social causes, such as justice, peace, and ecology, which you mention in your message as a refrain.

The same letter that Pope Leo sent to CELAM, through its President, speaks unequivocally of the "urgent need to remember that it is the Risen One, present among us, who protects and guides the Church, reviving her in hope," etc. The Holy Father also reminds them that the Church's proper mission is, in his own words, "to go out to meet so many brothers and sisters, to proclaim to them the message of salvation of Jesus Christ." However, what was their response to the Pope? In the letter they wrote to him, they made no echo of these papal warnings. Rather, instead of asking him to help them keep the memory of the Risen Lord alive in the Church and their brothers and sisters' salvation in Christ, they asked him to support them in their struggle to "encourage justice and peace" and "denounce every form of injustice." In short, what they told the Pope was the same old refrain: "social, social...", as if he, who worked among us for decades, had never heard it. You might say: "All these truths are taken for granted; there's no need to repeat them all the time." That's not true, dear bishops. We need to repeat them with renewed fervor every day; otherwise, they will be lost. If it weren't necessary to repeat them over and over again, why did Pope Leo recall them? We know what happens when a man takes his wife's love for granted and doesn't care to nurture it. This applies infinitely more to faith and love for Christ.

Certainly, the vocabulary of faith is not lacking in his message. I read in it: "God," "Christ," "evangelization," "resurrection," "Kingdom," "mission," and "hope." However, these are words placed in the document in a generic way. They lack a clear spiritual content. Rather, they evoke the usual refrain of "social, social, and social." Let's take, for example, the first two words, which are fundamental and more than basic to our faith: "God" and "Christ." As for "God," they only mention him in the stereotypical expressions "Son of God" and "People of God." Brothers and sisters, isn't this astonishing? As for "Christ," he appears only twice, and both times in passing. One of them is when, recalling the 1,700 years since Nicaea, they speak of "our faith in Christ the Savior," something extremely important in itself, but which has no relevance to their message. I wonder why we do not take advantage of this immense dogmatic truth to renew, with all fervor, the primacy of Christ-God, who today has such a scarce presence in the preaching and life of our Church.

Your Excellencies declare, and rightly so, that they desire a Church that is "a home and school of communion" and, moreover, "merciful, synodal, and outgoing." And who doesn't desire that? But where is Christ in this ideal image of the Church? A Church that does not have Christ as its reason for being and speaking is, in the words of Pope Francis, nothing more than a "pious NGO." Isn't that precisely what our Church is headed toward? At best, instead of becoming agnostic, the faithful sometimes become evangelical. In any case, our Church is losing its sheep. We see empty churches, seminaries, and convents around us. In our America, seven or eight countries no longer have a Catholic majority. Brazil itself is on the way to becoming "the largest ex-Catholic country in the world," in the words of a well-known Brazilian writer [Nelson Rodrigues]. Yet this continuing decline doesn't seem to concern you much. The prophet Amos's denunciation of the leaders of the people comes to mind: "Do not grieve for the ruin of Joseph" (Amos 6:6). It is strange that, in the face of such an evident decline, you do not say a peep in your message. Even more terrible is that the non-Catholic world speaks more about this phenomenon than the bishops, who prefer to remain silent. How can we fail to recall here the accusation of "dumb dogs" made by Saint Gregory the Great and repeated a few days ago by Saint Boniface [in the Office of Readings]?

Certainly, the Church in our America is not only in a process of decline, but also of ascent. You yourselves affirm in your message that our Church "continues to beat strongly" and that "seeds of resurrection and hope" sprout from it. But where are these "seeds," dear bishops? They do not seem to be in the social sphere, as you might imagine, but in the religious sphere. They are found especially in renewed parishes, as well as in new movements and communities, fertilized by what Pope Francis called the "current of charismatic grace," of which the Catholic Charismatic Renewal is the best-known form. Although these expressions of spirituality and evangelization constitute the ecclesial element that most fills our churches (and the hearts of the faithful), they have not merited a single greeting in the episcopal message. Yet it is there, in this spiritual seedbed, that the future of our Church lies. An eloquent sign of this future is that, while in the social sphere we currently see almost only "gray heads," in the spiritual sphere we can observe a massive influx of today's young people.

Dear bishops, I can already hear your repressed and perhaps indignant reaction: "But then, with this supposedly 'spiritual' discourse, should the Church now neglect the poor, social violence, ecological destruction, and so many other social tragedies?" Wouldn't that be a sign of blindness and even cynicism? Agreed, brothers. That the Church must involve itself in dramas like these is indisputable. The real question, however, is this: When the Church involves itself in these dramas, does it do so in the name of Christ? Is its social intervention and that of its activists truly transformed by faith and, specifically, however redundantly, by the Christian faith? Indeed, if the Church enters into social struggle without being informed and animated by its faith, the Christological faith, it will do no more than any NGO. Therefore, it will do "more of the same" and, over time, it will get worse: its social action will be incoherent, because, without the leaven of a living faith, the social struggle itself ends up being perverted: from liberating it becomes ideological and, finally, oppressive. This is the lucid and serious warning that Saint Paul VI gave (Evangelii Nuntiandi 35) about the then-emerging "liberation theology" (a warning that, as we have seen, this theology completely failed to take advantage of).

Dear elders, let me ask you: where do you want to take our Church? You speak a lot about the "Kingdom," but what is the concrete content of that "Kingdom"? Since you talk so much about building a "just and fraternal society" (another of your cants), one might think that such a society is the central content of the "Kingdom" you evoke. I am not unaware of the element of truth in this. However, you say nothing about the principal content of the "Kingdom," that is, the Kingdom present both in our hearts today and in its consummation tomorrow. There is no eschatology in your discourse. It's true: they speak twice of "hope," but in such a vague way that, given the social bias of their message, no one, hearing that word from their mouths, would raise their eyes to heaven. I do not deny, dear brothers, that heaven is also your "great hope," but then, why this shame in speaking loud and clear, like so many bishops of the past, about the "Kingdom of Heaven," and also about "hell," about the "resurrection of the dead," about "eternal life," and about other eschatological truths that offer so much light and strength for the struggles of the present, in addition to the ultimate meaning of everything? It is not that the earthly ideal of a "just and fraternal society" is not beautiful and grand. But nothing can compare with the Heavenly City (Phil 3:20; Heb 11:10, 16), of which, fortunately, through our faith, we are citizens and workers, and you, through your episcopal ministry, are the great architects. Yes, you will also contribute to the earthly City, but that is not your specialty, but that of politicians and social activists.

I would like to believe that the pastoral experience of many of you, as bishops, is richer and even more diverse than that which emerges from your message. This is because the bishops, not being subject to CELAM (which is simply an organ at your service), but only to the Holy See (and, of course, to God), have the freedom to impose on their respective churches the pastoral line they consider best. This sometimes results in a legitimate dissonance with the line proposed by CELAM. It is worth adding another dissonance: that between the rich documents of CELAM's General Conferences and the more restricted line of CELAM itself. I would add, with your permission, a third dissonance, closer to your heart: that which can occur, and often does occur, between the episcopal magisterium and theological advisory bodies, that is, between bishops and the drafters of their documents. However, even with all these discrepancies, which give us a very different view of the situation of our Church, your Message for the 70th anniversary of CELAM seems to be a faithful reflection of the general situation of our Church: a Church that gives priority to the social over the religious. And you, bishops of CELAM, wished to take advantage of your 40th General Assembly to "renew the commitment" to continue along this path, that is, giving priority to the social. And you decided to resume this option with complete determination and explicitness, as demonstrated by the triple use you made of the words "renew" and "commitment."

I understand, dear bishops, without wishing to justify anything, that by insisting, not without reason, on the social and its painful tragedies, you have ended up relegating the religious to the background, without, of course, denying its primacy. This, in fact, was a process that, almost without realizing it and not without great danger, began in Medellín [at the Second General Conference of the Latin American Episcopate in 1968] and has reached us. However, you know from experience that, without removing the religious question from that shadow as soon as possible and exposing it to the light with speeches and deeds, its primacy ends up being lost. This is what happened with the central figure of Christ: he ended up relegated to the background. If we continue to confess Him as Lord and Head of the Church and the world, it is superficially, or almost so. The proof of this slow deterioration is before our eyes: the decadence of our Church. If we continue on the same path, we will decline further and further. All because, before declining in numbers, the fervor of faith, of faith in Christ, the dynamic center of the Church, sadly declined. As you can see, brothers, it is the numbers that challenge us all, but especially the bishops of CELAM, to rectify the general direction of our Church, so that, by fervently resuming our option for Christ, it may grow once again in quality and quantity.

Therefore, it is time, and more than time, to bring Christ out of the shadows and into the full light. It is time to restore his absolute primacy, both in the Church ad intra (in individual conscience, in spirituality, and in theology), and in the Church ad extra (in evangelization, in ethics, and in politics). The Church of our continent urgently needs to return to its true center, to its "first love" (Rev 2:4). A predecessor of yours, Bishop Saint Cyprian, urged you with these lapidary words: "to put nothing before Christ" (Christo nihil omnino praeponere). In saying this, dear bishops, am I asking you for something new? Not at all. I simply remind you of the most evident demand of faith, of the "ancient and ever new" faith: the absolute option for Christ the Lord, the unconditional love for Him, which is particularly required of you, as He did for Peter (Jn 21:15-17). Therefore, it is urgent to adopt and practice with clarity and determination a strong and systematic Christocentrism; a truly "overwhelming" Christocentrism, as Saint John Paul II put it. This is not at all a question of falling into an alienating Christomonism (note the word "Christomonism").It is a matter of living an open Christocentrism, which ferments and transforms everything: individuals, the Church and society.

If I have dared to address you directly, dear bishops, it is because for some time now I have seen, with dismay, repeated signs that our beloved Church is running a serious risk: that of moving away from its spiritual essence, to its own detriment and to the detriment of the world. When the house is on fire, anyone can cry out. Since we are among brothers, I have one last confidence. After reading your message, something occurred to me that I felt almost 20 years ago, when, unable to bear the repeated errors of liberation theology any longer, an impulse arose from the depths of my soul such that I banged on the table and said: "Enough! I have to speak out. It is a similar inner motion that makes me write this letter, in the hope that the Holy Spirit has had something to do with it.

Asking the Mother of God to invoke the light of the same Spirit upon you, dear bishops, I sign as brother and servant:

Father Clodovis M. Boff, OSM

Rio Branco (Acre), 13 June 2025, feast of St. Anthony, Doctor of the Church.

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