the 90’s, but still the local activities of the base-com-
munities remains strong in Latin America, even
without the call for full scale revolution.
This touches on a crucial concern: how to avoid the
new appearance of small micro-cathedrals in liber-
ated base communities? This is a tricky question,
which is also why many have turned against the guer-
rillas who many times turned out to be as undemo-
cratic as their corrupt opponents. Here the main tool
is critical consciousness and transparent organiza-
tion, but in the coming chapters we will also explore
other forms of control aiming to minimize this prob-
lem by using distributed protocols rather than cen-
tralized command.
However, it should be noted that what is radical in
Liberation Theology is not the exegetic writings of
Marxist theologists, but their anchoring in action, in
orthopraxis, of righteous acting in the world. This
highlights Christian activism, modelled on the New
Testament, as a refusal to remain neutral or passive to
surrounding injustice. It is also the practical reor-
ganization of the church into base communities, or
basic ecclesial communities that is the answer to
meet these needs. In these communities the hierar-
chical order of the Catholic Church is reversed and
the right of biblical interpretation and liturgy comes
from the practice of the local communities, read from
their practical standpoints. It amplifies the social
ethics of the Bible as an argument to change the or-
ganizational constitution of the Church in favour of
the poor and transforming a massive Vatican-can-
tered cathedral to a buzzing, base community ba-
zaar.
In 1984, Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI,
declared that “the theology of liberation is a singular
heresy” (Rohter 2007) and although the relationship
between the Vatican and the adherents of Liberation
theology has improved, it is still decidedly chilly. The
reason Liberation theology was rejected by the Vati-
can in the first place is because of its social agenda
and Marxist concepts and exaltation of class struggle
and historical materialism. Even if most of the Lib-
eration theology followers have acted peacefully,
some religious activists have also supported armed
communist revolution in the name of faith, and sid-
ed with the numerous guerrilla-movements that
raged Latin America in the late 20th century. The pre-
vious pope, John Paul II, known for his strict anti-
communism also stated early in his papacy that Lib-
eration Theology’s “conception of Christ as a political
figure, a revolutionary, as the subversive of Nazareth,
does not tally with the church’s catechism.” (Rohter
2007)
Nevertheless, the resistance to Liberation Theology
comes not only from the Vatican, but especially from
the socio-economical and military regimes in Latin
America, where numerous practitioners and priests
have been murdered. The most infamous incident
was when gunmen assassinated the San Salvadorian
Archbishop Oscar Romeo, who embraced a nonvio-
lent form of liberation theology openly during a
church service in 1980.
What primarily interests me in relation to Liberation
Theology, is not the means or morals of social strug-
gle itself, but rather the use of religion’s “mythical
energy”, or its intensity for liberation within this be-
lief-system, how it relates to praxis and how it trig-
gers self-organized catalytic processes of empower-
ment through the engagement of locally formed
base-communities. It is from here a line of practice
grows, of low-level organization for community self-
enhancement, that we can follow and apply to de-
sign.liberation theology
In Brazil, the world’s most populous Roman Catho-
lic nation, there are still over 80,000 base communi-
ties, the grass-roots building blocks of liberation
theology. Also nearly one million “Bible circles” meet
regularly to read and discuss scripture from the
viewpoint of the theology of liberation (Rohter
2007). The base communities are small groups of be-
lievers, not only meeting to discuss the Scripture
from their own perspective for overcoming oppres-
sion, but also to hold Communion service on their
own, in the absence of a priest. They also collabora-
tively form the base organization of the movement
as self-reliant worshipping communities or “base
communities”, which affect the participatory format
of the political discussions and solidarity as well as
religious practice.
The participatory perspective of Liberation Theolo-
gy is something that can be traced from the original
churches of the first centuries after Christ, when the
Christian religious community was still distributed
throughout the Roman Empire in local and self-or-
ganized parishes. Likewise, but five centuries before