Liberation Theology, Cardinal Ratzinger, and Orwell

The greatest ideological disease afflicting us today is the determination to do "anything in the name of" a particular cause, a disease which was weaponized by Communism and injected into the Church by the first wave of liberation theology. Here, Cardinal Ratzinger discusses what it looked like when injected:

...At almost a moment’s notice, there was a change in the ideological ‘paradigm’ by which the students and a part of the teachers thought. While until now Bultmann’s theology and Heidegger’s philosophy had determined the frame of reference for thinking, almost overnight the existential model collapsed and was replaced by the Marxist. Ernst Bloch was now teaching in Tübingen and made Heidegger contemptible for being petty bourgeois…Existentialism fell apart, and the Marxist revolution kindled the whole university with its fervor, shaking it to its very foundations. A few yeas before, one could still have expected the theological faculties to represent a bulwark against the Marxist temptation. Now the opposite was the case: they became its real ideological center....

...the destruction of theology that was now occurring (through its politicization as conceived by Marxist messianism) was incomparably more radical precisely because it took biblical hope as its basis but inverted it by keeping the religious ardor but eliminating God and replacing him with the political activity of man.  Hope remains, but the party takes the place of God, and along with the party, a totalitarianism that practices an atheistic sort of adoration ready to sacrifice all humanness to its false god.  I myself have seen the frightful face of this atheistic piety unveiled, its psychological terror, the abandon with which every moral consideration could be thrown overboard as a bourgeois residue when the ideological goal was at stake.  All of this is alarming enough in itself; but it becomes an unrelenting challenge to the theologian when the ideology is presented in the name of the faith and the Church is used as its instrument.  The blasphemous manner in which the Cross now came to be despised as a sign of sadomasochism, the hypocrisy with which some still passed themselves off as believers when this was useful, in order not to jeopardize the instruments that were to serve their own private ends: all of this could and should not be made to look harmless or regarded as just another academic quarrel....

It was actually a small circle of functionaries who drove developments in the direction of I have described.  But it was this circle who determined the reigning climate...--Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Milestones: Memoirs, 1927-1977 (Ignatius Press, 1998), p.136-138.

The process which then-Cardinal Ratzinger describes above is discussed in greater detail by me here and here. More from the Cardinal and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith here.  Cardinal Stafford describes the eruptions of 1968 here.  The dynamic at work is the normal union of ideology and reason in the pursuit of political aims/power, which is an inversion of the Church's union of faith and reason in pursuit of truth and love.  The end result of the premises which underly liberation theology come out clearly in the dedication of Rules for Radicals:

Make no mistake--the weaponized disease of "anything in the name of" afflicts the right just as badly as the left, as the Global War on Terror continues to prove. But give credit where credit is due--the left managed to modernize it and disseminate it to the world.