Asked recently why she continued in good heart with her work despite much official discouragement or apathy, a Roman Catholic feminist theologian replied simply that it was because she loved the Church — “and we are the Church”. But those who love the Church suffer through the Church, and theologians are often lightning rods. The German priest Bernard Häring stood before military courts four times during the Second World War. Later, as a preeminent professor of moral theology, he faced trial by the doctrinal congregation in Rome. Hitler’s courts were preferable any day, he testified.

The track record of the Catholic Church in this respect is not good. Almost every theologian who played a leading part in Pope John XXIII’s reforming Second Vatican Council, which met in Rome from 1962 to 1965, had been censured or silenced beforehand.

The latest theologian to suffer unwelcome attention is the Jesuit Jon Sobrino, a leading liberation theologian. A Basque from Spain, Sobrino has taught for many years in El Salvador. He has been active in developing the themes of Jesus Christ as friend of the poor and liberator from sinful structures, and the school to which he belongs has had great impact, particularly among the bishops, parishes and seminaries of Latin America. Liberation theology emerged after the meeting of Latin American bishops in Medellin, Colombia, in 1968, when they committed themselves to the “option for the poor”.

The poor are at the centre of Jon Sobrino’s concern. His 1999 book, which is cited prominently in the Vatican’s Notification against his work released this week, was called Christ the Liberator: a View from the Victims. The subtitle is significant. This is theology “from below”, where those who must be consulted in matters of doctrine are the many in the world who have been deprived, dispossessed, starved, expelled, locked up, tortured and killed in political and social violence. These victims include six of his own colleagues at the University of Central America in San Salvador, taken out by a military death squad one night in 1989, together with their housekeeper and her daughter, to have their brains blown out and splattered — deliberately, to signify contempt for their intellects — over the garden. Sobrino only survived because he happened to be away.

Theologians who put their life on the line deserve the utmost respect. But liberation theologians, with their left-wing politics and their strategy of inspiring the poor to help themselves through basic communities, made many enemies among the powerful in Latin America and had also fierce critics in Rome. The liberation school used elements of Marxist analysis, and one of them, Leonardo Boff of Brazil, made an unfortunate blunder when he went to Moscow and praised communist society, just before the whole Soviet system crumbled into dust.

Rome gave liberation theology the thumbs down in a highly critical Vatican document published in 1984. Just at that time the Belgian Primate, Cardinal Godfried Danneels, visited Latin America, and declared on his return that if he lived there, he would be on the liberation theologians’ side. Emblematic of his experience, he said, was the sight of a man in Bolivia walking along a track carrying a dead baby in a shoe box. Said Danneels: “What struck me most in Latin America was the struggle between life and death.”

If you do not have that vision, your theology may smell of the library. Jon Sobrino would not say that the only place to do theology is in a Latin American barrio. But he would say that is one privileged stance from which to do it.

Liberation theologians have emphasised that they are concerned not so much with technical detail as with the wider context. In a letter to the Jesuit General, Sobrino has complained that the Notification against his work is selective. The doctrinal congregation, he wrote to Peter Hans Kolvenbach, “appears obsessed with ferreting out any limitation or error”. Rome’s concern is that Sobrino presents Jesus as more human than divine, but Sobrino maintains that he cannot recognise his theology in the Notification.

The Catholic Church has not been very successful, so far, in incorporating into its structures and thinking the Vatican II vision of a collegial model of governance based on shared respect and responsibility at every level. In the period since that council, the close link of trust and mutual support that was forged between bishops and theologians has been greatly damaged. The International Theological Commission, set up to provide an undeniably competent jury across cultures, has been sidelined because the controllers in the doctrinal congregation proved unable to give it any sort of free hand. The world which the liberation theologians seek to address will not be much concerned with whether or not Jesus in the womb of his mother enjoyed the Beatific Vision, but will certainly notice if the papal civil service in Rome appears to use its power crudely

John Wilkins was editor of The Tablet, 1982-2003