Leonardo Boff's Church: Charism and Power (Igreja, Carisma e Poder), published in Portuguese in 1977 and in English in 1985, is the most ecclesiologically consequential work of Latin American liberation theology. Written by a Brazilian Franciscan theologian who was subsequently silenced by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1985, it develops an ecclesiology - a theology of what the Church is and ought to be - grounded in the base Christian communities (comunidades eclesiais de base) of Brazil's poor and in the biblical account of the early Jerusalem community of Acts 4:32-35. Boff argues that the Church as currently structured inverts the New Testament model: instead of power flowing from the Spirit-filled community to ordained leadership, it flows from institutional hierarchy downward, in a pattern that mirrors the feudal and colonial societies in which that hierarchy was formed.
The Thinker and His Work
Leonardo Boff (born 1938), a Franciscan friar from the Brazilian state of Parana, was one of the leading theologians of the Latin American liberation theology movement alongside Gustavo Gutierrez, Jon Sobrino, and Juan Luis Segundo. His doctoral dissertation at Munich, completed under Karl Rahner's supervision in 1970, concerned the theology of grace and the experience of God in the secular world. His subsequent work shifted toward the intersection of theology and social analysis, with the Church: Charism and Power representing his most direct challenge to the institutional Catholic Church's ecclesiology.
The Vatican's action against Boff - a mandated year of silence from speaking, writing, and teaching, followed by further restrictions - made him the most visible martyr of liberation theology's confrontation with Rome. He eventually left the Franciscan order in 1992 and became a lay theologian, continuing to write prolifically on liberation theology, ecology, and the spirituality of the earth.
Biblical Texts Engaged
Acts 4:32-35 - 'Now the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common... There was not a needy person among them' - is Boff's primary ecclesiological text. The Jerusalem community is presented in Acts as a community of radical economic sharing, mutual care, and Spirit-filled charismatic life that preceded the development of formal ecclesiastical structures. Boff argues that this community is not merely a historical curiosity but the normative model of what the Church should be - and that the base communities of Latin America's poor are its contemporary instantiation.
1 Corinthians 12:4-7 - 'Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord... To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good' - grounds Boff's theology of charism. The New Testament Church, he argues, was organized not by hierarchical office but by charism: each member contributed their Spirit-given gift to the common good, and leadership emerged from the exercise of charism rather than from institutional appointment. The base communities of Brazil, where unordained lay leaders (often women) lead liturgy, biblical reflection, and social action, recapitulate this charismatic model.
Luke 4:18 - Jesus's programmatic proclamation in Nazareth - 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor' - grounds the preferential option for the poor as ecclesiological principle. The Church that follows Jesus must be constituted in solidarity with the poor, not merely by concern for them from a position of social distance.
Core Argument
Boff distinguishes between the Church as 'institution' and the Church as 'event.' The institutional Church - with its hierarchical offices, canonical law, and sacramental system - is a legitimate but historically contingent structure that has taken different forms in different eras. The Church as event - the gathering of believers around the proclaimed word, the enacted sacrament, and the shared life of charity - is the ecclesiological constant, the reality that institutions serve but cannot replace. When institutions come to serve themselves rather than the event they exist to facilitate, they must be reformed.
The base communities are, in Boff's ecclesiology, authentic Churches (ecclesiolae in Ecclesia - little churches in the Church) that manifest the essential marks of the Church (one, holy, catholic, apostolic) and that generate from below the ministry, sacrament, and leadership that the hierarchical Church claims to dispense from above. This is ecclesiogenesis - the birth of the Church from the people, from their experience of God in the struggle for justice and human dignity.
Intellectual Context
Boff was working within the framework established by Vatican II's Lumen Gentium (1964), which had introduced the concept of the Church as 'the People of God' - a formulation that gave theological legitimacy to Boff's bottom-up ecclesiology. He was also drawing on Karl Rahner's theology of grace (which argued that God's self-communication is available to all human experience, not only within formal Church structures) and on the sociological analysis of dependency theory (which analyzed Latin American poverty as the structural product of global capitalism rather than individual failure).
Reception and Critique
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, oversaw the investigation and silencing of Boff. The CDF's Notification on the book (1985) argued that Boff's relativizing of hierarchical structures undermined the Church's divinely instituted form. From the conservative Catholic perspective, the base communities, however admirable in their pastoral energy, cannot replace the sacramental and apostolic structures that ensure the Church's continuity with its apostolic origins.
From within liberation theology, some critics argued that Boff's analysis remained too focused on the Church's internal reform and insufficiently attentive to the political and economic structures outside the Church that generate the poverty the base communities were responding to. Jon Sobrino's ecclesiology emphasized the Church's external mission of prophetic witness to the Kingdom of God more than its internal democratic reform.
Legacy
Boff's ecclesiology has influenced Catholic pastoral practice far beyond liberation theology circles. The base community model spread from Latin America to Africa and Asia; it influenced the World Council of Churches' reflections on base ecclesial communities; and it shaped the pastoral strategies of local churches in contexts of poverty and social marginalization worldwide. His later work on eco-theology - applying the liberation theology methodology to the ecological crisis - extended the base community model to communities of earth-care.
Key Passages
'The Church was not founded to be an end in itself but to serve the Kingdom of God. The Church is the sacrament of the Kingdom, the sign and instrument of a reality that transcends it: the full liberation of all men and women and of the entire cosmos.' (Church: Charism and Power, trans. Dierkesmeier)
Contemporary Relevance
Pope Francis's apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (2013), with its emphasis on a Church that 'goes forth' to the peripheries, its celebration of popular piety, and its language of the Church as missionary community rather than institutional fortress, represents a partial vindication of Boff's ecclesiology. Francis's frequently invoked image of the Church as 'a field hospital after battle' - treating the wounded rather than managing institutional procedures - echoes the pastoral priorities Boff articulated from the base communities of Brazil. Boff himself publicly celebrated the election of Francis, noting the convergence between the pope's vision and the theology for which he had been silenced.