Camilo Torres Restrepo

The Priest Who Read Sociology

Camilo Torres arrived at the University of Louvain in Belgium in 1954 — the year of his ordination as a priest — and spent the following four years in the specific intellectual milieu that was producing the social Catholicism that would eventually become Liberation Theology. Louvain in the 1950s was one of the centres of Catholic engagement with Marxist sociology, with development economics, and with the pastoral experience of working-class communities in industrial Europe. The priests who taught and studied there were taking seriously the question of what Christian faith required in the face of poverty and exploitation, and they were doing so in conversation with the social sciences rather than in opposition to them. The encounter with this tradition was decisive for Torres's formation: he acquired the analytical framework that allowed him to understand poverty as a systemic rather than individual phenomenon, and he carried that framework back to Colombia where the systemic poverty was more severe, more visible, and more thoroughly produced by identifiable political and economic structures than anything he had encountered in Belgium.

The sociology he brought back was not a neutral academic discipline in his hands — it was a moral instrument. His students at the National University remembered his classes as events in which the empirical description of Colombian social reality was simultaneously an implicit moral indictment of the structures that produced it. He taught his students to see poverty as something that required explanation — something whose causes could be identified, whose reproduction could be analysed, whose continuation was the product of specific choices made by specific people and classes in defence of specific interests. The effect was to make passive acceptance of that reality intellectually untenable for anyone who took the analysis seriously, and Torres's students did take it seriously. Many of them would become central figures in the Colombian left in the decades after his death.

The Option for the Poor — Literally

The phrase "preferential option for the poor" entered the official language of Latin American Catholicism at Medellín in 1968. Camilo Torres had been acting on the concept for a decade before it had a name, and his particular interpretation of it was more radical than anything the Medellín documents explicitly endorsed. For Torres, the option for the poor was not primarily a charitable or pastoral commitment — it was a political commitment, requiring not merely service to the poor but solidarity with them in their struggle against the structures that produced their poverty. And solidarity, in the Colombian context of the 1960s, eventually required what solidarity in any situation of violent conflict eventually requires: the willingness to be present and to resist, not merely to witness and to serve.

He worked this argument out publicly and at length in the articles, speeches, and interviews he gave in the months before joining the ELN, and it was an intellectually serious argument rather than an emotional outburst. He distinguished between the structural violence of the existing social order — which he calculated killed more Colombians annually through malnutrition, preventable illness, and the grinding attrition of poverty than any guerrilla campaign — and the revolutionary violence required to challenge that order. In his calculus, the moral weight of the second was less than the moral weight of the first, and the Christian who chose purity over effectiveness was making a choice that benefited themselves at the expense of the poor they claimed to serve. This argument was controversial within the Church, contested within the left, and compelling to enough people that the United Front he had built before going to the mountains drew genuinely large crowds. It was also, whether right or wrong in its ultimate conclusions, a serious moral argument rather than a rationalisation for violence.

Thirty-Six: Everything and Nothing Done

Camilo Torres died at thirty-six, in his first combat engagement, having been a guerrilla fighter for less than four months. In one sense this makes his revolutionary career the briefest of all the figures in this project — he did not lead campaigns, did not build organisations that lasted, did not leave behind the kind of institutional legacy that a longer guerrilla career might have produced. What he left behind was a single act and its interpretation: the decision to take up arms, the reasoning that produced that decision, and the death that resulted from acting on it. Whether that act was strategically wise — whether the armed route he chose was more likely to achieve the social transformation he sought than the legal political route he abandoned — cannot be answered, because he died before either could be adequately tested.

What can be said is that the death itself, and the specific manner of the life that led to it, had consequences that outlasted anything a more conventional guerrilla career might have produced. Torres's example — the priest who chose the mountain, who gave up everything that the Colombian elite had given him and died for the people that elite had defined as beneath concern — became the most powerful single image of the radical Catholic tradition in Latin America, more powerful for being grounded in a specific person's specific choices than any theological argument could be. The bishops of Medellín were thinking about him when they wrote their documents. The thousands of students across Latin America who were radicalized in the 1960s and 1970s carried his image alongside Guevara's. The Liberation Theology that transformed Catholic politics across the continent for the following generation was built partly on the foundation of his example, even by those who drew different tactical conclusions from it. He was in the mountains for less than four months. He has been in the conversation for sixty years.

Also Profiled — Colombia, Venezuela & Bolivia