I don’t know about if he had a connection to liberation theology. I do know, however, that many have alleged he played a nasty role during the years of Argentina’s military dictatorship between roughly 1976-1980. During those years thousands of people were kidnapped and killed, including a group of priests. I don’t know the details of the allegations against him. I do know that when Bergoglio was sued over his involvement, he refused to testify.
CDF head: Pope Francis has close ties with liberation theology
The Tablet ^ | 5/2/14 | Christa Pongratz-Lippitt
According to Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Pope Francis has close ties with liberation theology, the same discaterio that once condemned the movement. In the 1980s the CDF under then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger attacked liberation theology as borrowing “from various currents of Marxist thought.”
Few know that Müller is also a pupil of Gustavo Gutierrez, the “father” of Latin-American liberation theology. It certainly, when Müller, the prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith affirms that “Pope Francis has close ties with liberation theology” it makes clear the reason for the exaltation of Leonardo Boff and the most radical leaders of the Marxist Liberation theology with the election of Pope Francisco .
Pope Francis’ opening to liberation theology is in stark contrast with the persecution to a very orthodox order for its adherence to Tridentine mass and the traditional tenets and liturgy that were the standard of the Catholic Church for hundreds of years.
We pray to God that the followers of the Marxist Liberation Theology are wrong and that Pope Francis is going to prove to be as loyal to the True Faith as was Pope Wojtyla and Pope Ratzinger.
Pope John Paul II was strongly influenced by his first hand experience of living under Communism. Is unquestionable that Bergoglio has been influenced by the Argentinean peronism; a supposedly third way between socialism and capitalism, although in reality is another form of fascism. What is more worrisome is the close relationship of Pope Francis with the most radical leaders of the Marxist Liberation Theology. The liberationists rejoiced with the election of Cardinal Bergoglio, it seems that they take for granted that he is one of them.
One of Pope Francis’ most vocal supporters since his election has been Leonardo Boff, one of the founders of liberation theology, and the most radical at it, a man silenced by the Vatican in 1985, and later by his Franciscan Order, because of attacks to the Church. An exulted Leonardo Boff expressed his feelings: ‘This pope will change the church’, basically according to Boff we shouldn’t need a pope. The church could build a network of religious communities which communicate with each other.
In the 1980s the CDF under then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger attacked liberation theology as borrowing “from various currents of Marxist thought“.