Some quotes about solidarity:
- From Robert McAfee Brown, Liberation Theology: An Introductory Guide, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), 99.
- “A group of American college students has gone to Recife, Brazil, for the summer, to work with the poor. The dynamic archbishop of Recife, Dom Helder Camara, greets them with surprising honesty, saying in effect: We are glad to have you here and hope it is a good experience. I have two requests. First, don’t try to start a revolution for us, as some of your enthusiastic friends frequently wish to do. If real bullets begin to fly, your embassy will have you safely on the next plane home, and it will be our young people who get killed. Second, if you really want to help us, observe and learn what you can, and then go home and find ways to make your government get its boots off the necks of our people, because those boots are the main source of our misery. The problem isn’t only in Recife, it’s in Washington as well.”
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From Rebecca S. Chopp, The Praxis of Suffering: An Interpretation of Liberation and Political Theologies, (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1986), 44, 129-130, 132, 152.
“God is not merely an inescapable mystery beyond the horizons of thought. God is the liberator of history, choosing to be on the side of the oppressed, on the side of those who suffer history. The solidarity of human history and of Christian witness finds its ultimate referent in God’s solidarity with the despised of the earth. This solidarity with those who suffer is the gift of grace and, correlatively, the nature and role of Christian witness. Far beyond any easy religious consiousness reflective of historical process or any radical encounter with a totally other God, Christian experience is now a praxis of solidarity with those who suffer.” –44
“…for liberation theology, Christ is fundamentally the revelation of God’s grace in solidarity with those who suffer. The narrative of Christ discloses the identification of hope and suffering, of cross and resurrection, of God and those who suffer as always together. As the ultimate revelation of God, Jesus mediates the kingdom of God: as for much of the Christian tradition, Jesus comes not to announce himself, but to announce the kingdom. Through Christ as the revelation of God, Christianity becomes a way of the kingdom in its praxis of solidarity with those who suffer. It is a graced way, for Jesus Christ reveals the gratuitous gift of God’s salvation through love of neighbor. It is the nature and purpose of the church to continue the incarnation as the full embodiment of God’s love in the world through the announcement of the kingdom in the midst of suffering, death, and hope. The church continues the wintess of the kingdom of God through the power of the Spirit as the sacrament of God’s activity.” 129-130
“Christianity relates to the world through the liberating activity of solidarity. This includes the denunciation of oppressive structures and the conscientization of the oppressed. Christianity must criticize that which oppresses the human subject, from cultural values to global exchange, from nuclear arms to the writing of history, from language to economic systems. Christianity works for liberation by participating in new systems and structures, by suggesting alternative ways of being in the world, and by enabling persons to be and to do in history. But Christianity carries forth this praxis not as an implcation of its faith, not as a time-filling device, and not as liberal charity, but as the very constitution of faith, the mysterious experiencing of God, and the following of Jesus Christ.” –132
“In liberation theology, Christianity is located within the practical activity of human existence and as a specific form of praxis. Christians, as Gutierrez repeatedly emphasizes, experience God in a praxis of solidarity with the poor that anticipates new ways of becoming human. Christianity is expressed as a praxis of solidarity, a way of following Christ by the representation of the freedom and the preciousness of created existence. The nature of Christianity as an activity is not, as is sometimes claimed, the reduction of Christian faith to social action, for in the relocation of liberation theology the activity of Christianity is both mystical and political, a way of imitating Christ in the identification of suffering and hope.”–152
