ABSTRACT
During the sixties of the previous century, the Catholic Church and Catholic theology in general experienced an unprecedented turn to ‘the world’. In this regard, we can refer to the encyclicals Pacem in terris (1963) and Populorum progressio (1967), and especially to Gaudium et spes, the ‘Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World’, which was promulgated on 15 December 1965 during the last day of the Second Vatican Council. With these documents, the Church confirmed ‘the world’ as an independent domain in which Christians have to fulfil a worldly task, implying that there is an intrinsic relationship between Christianity and the commitment to bring about a better world. Salvation ought not to be reduced solely to the salvation of one’s soul in the hereafter, but is also and intrinsically connected to justice and liberation from oppressive structures in the here and now. In the wake of this turn to the world, all kinds of theology came into being which were heavily implicated in leftist politics: liberation theologies, political theologies, revolutionary theologies, Marxist theologies, etc. The basic intuition behind the present article is that Christians, in order to be faithful to the core of their own religion, should link up again with this tradition, which has, unfortunately, largely been abandoned, and that they should revitalize their involvement with leftist politics. But as times have changed, we are no longer living in the sixties and seventies of the previous century, and it is not possible, or desirable, to simply return to the political theologies which have been developed by our predecessors. We will need to formulate our own answers, contemporary answers, in the search to reconnect Christianity and politics.
