Jon Sobrino

Jon Sobrino (born 27 December 1938) is a Spanish Jesuit priest and theologian known mostly for his contributions to Latin American liberation theology. He received worldwide attention in 2007 when the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a notification for what they termed doctrines that are "erroneous or dangerous and may cause harm to the faithful."

Life Born 27 December 1938 into a Basque family in Barcelona, Sobrino entered the Society of Jesus when he was 18. The following year, in 1958, he was sent to El Salvador. He later studied engineering at Saint Louis University, an American Jesuit university, and then theology at Sankt Georgen Graduate School of Philosophy and Theology in Frankfurt in West Germany for his Doctor of Theology (Dr.theol.) degree. Returning to El Salvador, he taught at the Jesuit-run University of Central America (UCA) in San Salvador, which he helped to found.

On 16 November 1989 he narrowly escaped the murder of the UCA scholars by the Atlacatl Battalion, an elite unit of the Salvadoran Army. By a coincidence, he was away from El Salvador when members of the military broke into the rectory at the UCA and brutally murdered his six fellow Jesuits, Ignacio Ellacuría, Segundo Montes, Juan Ramón Moreno, Ignacio Martín-Baró, Amando López, and Joaquín López y López, as well as their housekeeper Elba Ramos and her 16-year-old daughter Celina Ramos. The Jesuits were targeted for their outspoken work to bring a resolution to the brutal El Salvador Civil War that left about 75,000 men, women, and children dead, mostly civilians.

Investigated by the Vatican throughout his career as a professor of theology, he has remained an outspoken proponent of peace, joining protests in 2008 of the continued training of Latin American military officers in torture techniques at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning.

Works Sobrino's main works are Jesus the Liberator (1991) and its sequel Christ the Liberator (1999), along with Christology at the Crossroads (1978), The True Church and the Poor (1984), Spirituality of Liberation (1990), The Principle of Mercy: Taking the Crucified People from the Cross (Orbis, 1994), No Salvation Outside the Poor, and Prophetic-Utopian Essays (Orbis, 2008). Archbishop Fernando Sáenz Lacalle of San Salvador reportedly proceeded to bar Sobrino from teaching at Catholic institutions or publishing.

The congregation emphasized in the notification that it was issued as part of its service "to the people of God, and particularly to the simple and poorest members of the Church." They emphasized the people's "right to know the truth ... about Christ" and therefore their corresponding duty to intervene. The notification was premised on Pope Benedict XVI's teaching that "the first poverty among people is not to know Christ."

According to the notification, Sobrino's erroneous propositions concerned: "1) the methodological presuppositions on which the Author bases his theological reflection, 2) the Divinity of Jesus Christ, 3) the Incarnation of the Son of God, 4) the relationship between Jesus Christ and the Kingdom of God, 5) the Self-consciousness of Jesus, and 6) the salvific value of his Death." Supported by more than 100 professors of Catholic theology, Hünermann also demanded an "intelligent redevelopment" of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, because, as successor organization of the Holy Office, it still had the structure of an "early modern board of censors".

Sobrino's work was reviewed by a number of theologians, including , , Javier Vitoria, Carlo Palacio of Belo Horizonte, and Martin Maier, editor of the German Jesuit periodical Stimmen der Zeit. These theologians found no doctrinal errors in Sobrino's works. It is not apparent that their findings were considered by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.