The University of Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism has launched a new research award to honor Rev. Gustavo Gutiérrez, O.P. (1928–2024), the Peruvian priest and theologian widely recognized as the father of Latin American liberation theology. Gustavo Gutiérrez Research Awards will support projects in theology, history, and the social sciences that engage or broadly take inspiration from Gutiérrez’s work on the preferential option for the poor.
“Gustavo left a lasting legacy at Notre Dame,” said Timothy Matovina, professor of theology at Notre Dame and director of the Cushwa Center from 2002 to 2012. “One of his most memorable contributions was his insistence that any reflection worthy of the name theology needs to give marginalized and suffering people, in the words of I Peter 3:15, a concrete ‘reason for the hope that is in you.’ I applaud the Cushwa Center for inaugurating this research award to continue the groundbreaking work begun with Gustavo.”
About Father Gutiérrez
Born in Lima, Peru, to parents of mestizo descent, Gustavo Gutiérrez first pursued medicine before deciding to enter formation for the Catholic priesthood. As a young seminarian, he pursued studies in Louvain, Lyon, and Rome. In 1960, he began teaching theology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. In 1965, he participated in the fourth session of the Second Vatican Council. A few years later, he was enlisted to help draft major portions of the documents generated by the historically groundbreaking Second Episcopal Conference of Latin America, held in 1968 in Medellín, Colombia. In 1971, he published the first edition of his landmark text, Teología de la liberación: Perspectivas. Orbis Books published it in English in 1973 as A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation.
From 1980 until 2000, Gutiérrez served as pastor of Cristo Redentor, a Catholic parish in an impoverished sector of the Lima metro. He maintained this pastoral commitment even after becoming a world-renowned theologian, returning to the parish between teaching engagements throughout North America and Europe. He credited the insights of his highly regarded exegetical text, On Job, to the poor of his parish. “My parishioners in Lima,” he once said in an interview, would “teach me volumes about hope in the midst of suffering.”
In 1974, Gutiérrez founded the Instituto Bartolomé de las Casas, an interdisciplinary research, teaching, and publishing institute in Lima committed to liberation and human development in Peruvian society. Today it is one of three sites where Gutiérrez’s archival collections are preserved, the others being the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and the University of Notre Dame.
In 2001, Gutiérrez joined the Dominican Order and began teaching at the University of Notre Dame as the John Cardinal O’Hara Professor of Theology. He remained on the faculty until his retirement in 2018.
The preferential option for the poor
At the heart of Gutiérrez’s theology is the preferential option for the poor. Although the phrase is often credited to him, Gutiérrez was quick to point out that the concept was as old as the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. “The God of the Bible,” Gutiérrez said, “always takes sides with the lowly, the outcast, the poor . . . We don’t need to read liberation theology to learn this. It is in the core of the Christian message.”
While the perspective was not new, Gutiérrez’s application of it was. Inspired by the Second Vatican Council’s injunction that Christians should read and respond to the “signs of the times,” Gutiérrez took the biblical perspective of God’s special concern for the poor and marginalized and related it directly to the reality of poverty on his continent. In so doing, he pioneered a new way of doing theology, which he described as “critical reflection on praxis in light of the Word of God.” As reflection on praxis, he taught, theology is a second step, flowing out of and informed by a lived commitment to the poor and to the transformation of society. As a critical task incorporating analysis of the root causes of poverty, theology must open itself to the discoveries and tools of a wide range of academic disciplines.
Interdisciplinary research support
Gutiérrez Awards include a cash award of $3,000 to recognize and support outstanding works in progress by faculty, independent scholars, postdoctoral scholars, and graduate students. The program is open to scholars at Notre Dame as well as those outside the University. The first application deadline is December 31, 2025.
Along with projects that deal directly with the development and reception of Father Gutiérrez’s own theology, Gutiérrez Awards will support research and writing projects in a range of disciplines that broadly engage the multifaceted theme of poverty in North and South American theology, history, and contemporary society.
As Gutiérrez called on the academy to attend to voices from “the underside of history,” the Cushwa Center invites projects that explore the history of Christianity in the Americas from the perspective of poor and excluded communities.
Gutiérrez also encouraged an interdisciplinary approach to theological reflection. Poverty, he often pointed out, is a complex global reality with political, economic, social, spiritual, and cultural dimensions. To effectively analyze and confront it, theology requires the insights of the social sciences. The Cushwa Center therefore welcomes applications involving either qualitative or quantitative research that engage the multifaceted reality of poverty in the Americas.
“So much apostolic fruit and such rich theology”
During his career, Gutiérrez received numerous awards and distinctions in recognition of both his scholarship and his service to humanity. He was named to the Peruvian Academy of Language and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he received more than 30 honorary degrees. His many published books and articles, now translated into over a dozen languages, have made an indelible mark on Christian theology around the globe.
Colleagues, parishioners, students, and friends of Gutiérrez will mark the first anniversary of his death on October 22. At the time of his passing, David Lantigua, William W. and Anna Jean Cushwa Co-Director of the Cushwa Center, said that the “concrete encounter of the God of history through the poor, and being evangelized by the poor” grounded Gutiérrez’s theology. “The real and lasting contributions of Gutiérrez’s work,” Lantigua said, are found in his articulation of “the option for the poor and the perspective of the poor in history. It has universal, global implications.”
In a video message aired at Gutiérrez’s funeral in Lima in October 2024, Pope Francis called the Peruvian priest “a great man, a man of the Church,” who “managed to carry forward so much apostolic fruit and such rich theology.”
The Cushwa Center will pilot the Gutiérrez Research Awards—one of six research funding programs it currently administers—for an initial five years, during which it will seek dedicated support to sustain the program for years to come. Given Gutiérrez’s profound impact on students and colleagues at Notre Dame, the center’s directors, staff, and fellows are pleased to honor the legacy of one of the most important theologians of the last century and a tireless defender and friend of the most vulnerable members of the human family.
Kelly Rich Klee is a doctoral candidate in systematic theology at the University of Notre Dame. She earned a B.A. in theology from the University of Notre Dame and a master of arts in religion from Yale Divinity School. Her research explores the intellectual roots of Gustavo Gutiérrez’s liberation theology.
Learn more about the Cushwa Center’s grants and awards, open to Notre Dame and non-Notre Dame scholars. The next application deadline is December 31, 2025.
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