Jose Comblin: challenging academic intellectuality
16/04/2011
- Opinión
Near Salvador, (Bahia), Brazil, on March 27th, liberation theologian Jose Comblin died at 88 years of age. A Belgian by birth, he chose to work in Latin America, because he understood that European Christianity was in its twilight, and in our subcontinent he saw space for creativity and for a new essay on the Christian faith in the context of popular culture. Jose Comblin embodied the new form of theology, inaugurated by the Theology of Liberation, which has one foot in the world of misery and the other in academia. Or, put another way: it articulates the cry of the oppressed with the liberating faith of the message of Jesus, starting not from doctrine, but from the contradictions of reality, and collectively seeks a liberating solution, from the point of view of the people.
Comblin lived poor and dispossessed in the Brazilian Northeast, which supposedly lacks the conditions for a high level intellectual production. But even there, he wrote tens of books, many of great erudition. Logically, he took advantage of time spent at his alma mater, the university of Louvain, to recycle himself. In this manner he wrote one of the best books on the Ideology of National Security, two volumes on the Theology of Revolution, a detailed study on Neoliberalism: the dominant ideology in the change of century. And, scores of books on theology, exegeses, and spirituality, including Time of Action, Christians bound towards the XXI Century and Vocation for Liberty. Comblin was an advisor of Dom Helder Camara in his struggle for the poor, and Don Leonidas Proaño, bishop of the Native people from Riobamba (Ecuador).
Due to his ideas, in 1972, he was expelled from Brazil by the military. He went to work in Chile, from where the military also expelled him in 1980. Back in Brazil, he dedicated himself to giving form to his profound conviction: the new Christianity in Brazil must be born from the faith of the people. He created several initiatives of popular evangelization known as Theology of the Azada. He was inspired by Padre Ibiapina and Padre Cicero, the great missioners from the Brazilian Northeast, who, more than administrating the sacraments and strengthening the ecclesiastical institution, performed a pastoral of advice and consolation for the oppressed, both of which are greatly sought after by them.
Jose Comblin is one of the best exponents of the new type of intellectual that characterizes the theologians of liberation and pastoral agents who follow this path: to realize the exchange of knowledge, this is, to take seriously popular knowledge, «made of experiences», soaked in blood and sweat, but rich in wisdom, and articulate it with academic knowledge, criticism, and commitment to social transformations. This exchange enriches both. The intellectual gives the people knowledge, that helps them advance, and the people force the intellectual to consider burning problems, and to be rooted in the historic process. The academic intelligencia bears an enormous social debt to the poor and excluded. Universities are in large part macro-apparatuses for reproducing a society characterized by inequality, and factories that form teams to enable the prevailing system to function. But, regardless of their limitations, it must be recognized that they also were, and are, laboratories for questioning and libertarian thought.
But there still has been no profound encounter between university and society, no formation of an alliance between academic intelligence and popular misery. They are parallel worlds, and university extensions will not close the gap that separates them. There has to be a true exchange of knowledge and experiences. Whoever imagines that the people are ignorant, is ignorant. The people know much, and have discovered a thousand ways to live and survive in a society that is adverse to them.
If there is any merit in the liberation theologians, (they exist here and around the world: Roma has not been able to exterminate them), it is that they have grasped that union. That is why one cannot imagine a theologian of liberation who is not immersed in both worlds, and is not attempting to create from that union a more equalitarian society, which, expressed in Christian dialect, has more riches from the Kingdom, namely, justice, dignity, rights, solidarity, compassion and love.
Father Jose Comblin has left us his example and this challenge.
- Leonardo Boff, Theologian, Earthcharter Commission
Free translation from the Spanish sent by Melina Alfaro, done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU.
https://www.alainet.org/en/articulo/149106
