
Zapatista Church: a very small monument to liberation theology. Credit: Flickr/David Sasaki. CC BY-NC 2.0.
This June saw the passing of two of our generation’s most fascinating and controversial Catholic priests: François Houtart and Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann. Houtart was a Jesuit priest and prolific scholar on the faculty of sociology at the University of Louvain in Belgium. His leadership in the dialogue between Marxism and Christianity, his research on religion in society from Sri Lanka to Nicaragua, and his desire to connect social movements in the global South through the Tricontinental Centre (CETRI) which he founded in 1976, matched his academic output of some 50 books.