Every year for five decades, Gustavo Gutiérrez scheduled a week or two for study and theological reflection. This was no silent retreat, however. He welcomed hundreds—sometimes thousands—of others to join him. Pastoral ministers, priests and nuns, lay men and women, students, teachers, and leaders of social organizations came together in Lima, Peru, to listen to lectures, do small group Bible study, and reflect on pastoral practices.

Gutiérrez started the gatherings in 1971, the same year his groundbreaking book Teología de la liberación: Perspectivas was published. They continued until 2020. Known until 2000 as Jornadas de Reflexión Teológica (JRT, or Theological Reflection Journeys) and afterward as the Curso de Teología (Theology Course), these gatherings ran parallel with a tumultuous period in Peru’s history and Gutiérrez’s own long career as a priest, scholar, and theologian.

Gutiérrez died in 2024 at the age of 96, after 65 years as a priest, 23 years as a Dominican, and 17 years as the John Cardinal O’Hara Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, a position from which he retired in 2018.

In 2018, Timothy Matovina, then chair of the theology department, organized a reunion of Gutiérrez’s former graduate students. Gutiérrez had returned to Peru full time in his retirement, so they traveled to see him, his parish, and places important to his work. During a visit to his archive in Lima, the group saw a collection of tapes and CDs—audio recordings from the Jornadas and the Curso de Teología. It reminded Matovina of how Gutiérrez’s last teaching assistant at Notre Dame, Leo Guardado, had asked him why they weren’t doing something with Gutiérrez’s archive. Suddenly, Matovina knew what they could do. “I remember thinking, ‘There are many treasures here, but this is the gold mine,’” he said.

Fast-forward to today. Through the painstaking and years-long work of a devoted team, many of those recordings have been digitized, transcribed, and compiled into what is now the Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino, O.P., Collection. This significant contribution to global scholarship was made possible by a years-long collaboration between the University of Notre Dame and the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP), which sponsored the Jornadas between 1971 and 2000, and the Instituto Bartolomé de Las Casas (IBC), which sponsored the Curso de Teología after 2000.
 

Witnessing to hope

The collection and the collaboration behind it were celebrated at a symposium held at Hesburgh Library on November 14, 2025. “Reasons for Our Hope: Honoring the Theological Legacy of Gustavo Gutiérrez, O.P.,” drew graduate students, faculty members, Dominicans, community members, and members of the project team. Some traveled from as far as Lima; others joined from just down the hall.

The first session of the afternoon focused on the new archival collection, and the second delved into Vivir y pensar el Dios de los pobres, Gutiérrez’s new book, published posthumously (Centro de Estudios y Publicaciones, 2025) with Guardado as editor and an English translation forthcoming from Orbis Books. The Hesburgh Libraries, University of Notre Dame Archives, Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, Department of Theology, and Kellogg Institute for International Studies cosponsored the event.

In his opening remarks, David Lantigua, associate professor of theology and the William W. and Anna Jean Cushwa Co-Director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, shared a translated line from Gutiérrez’s new book: “The double eruption of God and the poor in our lives is the source of a spirituality that summons us to give reasons for our hope.” He paused before adding a personal note: “I can speak for myself and for many others—some gathered in this room today—about a third eruption. That is the eruption of Father Gustavo in our lives, whether knowing him personally or through his writings.”

As one of Gutiérrez’s graduate students, Lantigua said that Gutiérrez had opened up for him the role of faith and theology within history. “He did it with tremendous intellectual force as a teacher, yet with the most profound spiritual subtlety.” Lantigua shared how Gutiérrez had given him “hope and courage to see a path in my own intellectual life”—a theme that was echoed by others at the symposium.

In the first session, a panel of project team members introduced themselves and provided context about the collection and its development. The panel included Erika Hosselkus, associate dean of the Hesburgh Libraries and former curator of Latin American and Iberian studies, who co-directed Notre Dame’s part of the project alongside Matovina; longtime Gutiérrez colleague Carmen Lora of IBC who supervised the team in Lima charged with preparing the collection; and Juan Miguel Espinoza Portocarrero, associate professor in the theology department at PUCP, who has studied and written about the first 30 years of these courses.

Espinoza provided an overview of the importance of these gatherings within Peruvian society and how they responded to political, social, and economic realities in the country. He called them an “intellectual laboratory” where Gutiérrez was able to present ideas he was developing and hear from participants about their experiences in the field. Gutiérrez’s objective with these events was to create a space for people without systematic training in theology to study and do theological reflection. About 300 people attended the first Jornada in 1971—so many that they had to move their meetings to Catholic high schools in Lima that had enough space to host them. What started as one week in February expanded in 1983 to include a second week in August. It reached peak attendance in 1986 with 2,500 participants; gatherings after the year 2000 were much smaller due to a change in focus. Taken as a whole, Espinoza said the gatherings “significantly contributed to theological formation in the Church in Peru and to the dissemination of liberation theology.”

Carmen Lora first met Gutiérrez in 1963, when he was teaching the basic required theology course at PUCP. In 1971 she was working with the Centro de Estudios y Publicaciones (CEP), which published his Teología de la liberación. Lora, who went on to become the editorial director at CEP, continued working with him for the next 50 years. She attended almost all of the Jornadas between 1971 and 1999, as well as some of the later Curso meetings, when she was invited to give talks about her own work. Lora remembers especially the Jornada in 1978, a particularly unstable year for Peru—their gathering took place at the same time that the country’s school teachers were on strike—and the Curso of 2004, when they considered the new Truth and Reconciliation Commission report, which documented the atrocities committed by the Shining Path and Peru’s military forces, and reflected on what social gaps and conflict meant to the faith and engagement of Christians.

Labor of love

Because she knew the timeline of Gutiérrez’s work, Lora coordinated with others who knew Gutiérrez’s voice well. They took on the massive task of listening to the recordings, deciphering garbled audio, and producing accurate transcriptions. Lora then sifted through Gutiérrez’s notes, outlines, and schemas from the gatherings, matching them to the corresponding audio files. All told, the collection includes 400 hours of Gutiérrez speaking at these events. (Only his talks have been included in the collection, although programs in the supplementary materials include the names of other presenters and their topics.)

“Carmen was the manager of the project. She bought all the equipment, hired the transcribers, did all the work. It was an absolute labor of love. If there’s one hero in this whole process, it’s Carmen Lora,” Matovina said. “Without her, this would not have happened.”

Speaking at the symposium, Lora acknowledged the transitional space the project had reached. “On the one hand, this ceremony is a final step in a work process. On the other, it’s the beginning of making available an archive that we know will be valuable to many researchers and people interested in the work of Gustavo Gutiérrez.”

“There are leading scholars of Gustavo Gutiérrez’s theology who don’t even know these tapes exist.”

– Timothy Matovina

“There are leading scholars of Gustavo Gutiérrez’s theology who don’t even know these tapes exist,” Matovina said before the symposium, noting the freshness of the material. “Gustavo said—it’s the title of the first session of the symposium—más que la palabra escrita, [my theology is] more than the written word. Theology is a spoken act. It’s done in dialogue with the community. Of course he did write some great books, but this is a chance to hear his theological voice, to hear the crowd interacting with him—even in their laughter or their applause, you’re getting a sense that this is an oral theological event, not a written one.”

The audio recordings provide additional information about how the talks may have been received by the audience, but the project team had researchers in mind when they decided to transcribe them all. “Research with audio files can be challenging,” Hosselkus said. “Audio quality and volume vary significantly and researchers may listen to hours of recordings without encountering relevant content. To facilitate use of this collection, we committed to professional transcription of all files. In addition to listening to the recordings, researchers can read transcripts and perform keyword searches to locate content about specific topics or themes. The transcripts also function as a data set that can be analyzed in many different ways, vastly increasing the usability of these rich materials.”

A post-custodial approach

From the beginning, Hosselkus and Matovina knew they wanted to support IBC and PUCP in maintaining their collections and making the material more accessible to researchers. They were implementing an approach referred to as post-custodial collecting, where archivists support record creators in managing their own materials rather than acquire physical materials and then sever the relationship.

For Hosselkus, the project exemplifies a model she hopes to see adopted more widely. “The model that we’re using here is something that we want and need to be doing more. Other parts of the world have important and potentially endangered collections, and we can partner to preserve them in unique ways—preserve the physical collection in its place of origin, and then take these digital copies and make them accessible to a much broader audience.”

In this case, Notre Dame, PUCP, and IBC developed a memorandum of understanding to guide their collaboration. Notre Dame Research provided the project with two library acquisitions grants, and Hesburgh Libraries, Notre Dame’s Department of Theology, Institute for Latino Studies, and Office of Mission Engagement and Church Affairs also provided support. Funds covered the cost of digitization, description, transcription, archival supplies, and equipment like humidifiers, dehumidifiers, and a copier.

The original recordings and supplemental documents remain in the archives in Lima, which was an intentional decision of the project directors. “We didn’t want to be in a position of removing this really important legacy from Peru, where Gustavo was from, and taking it to a North American archive,” Hosselkus said. Instead, they wanted to increase access to the materials, which was done by making the full collection available in the form of digital surrogates at each of the three cooperating institutions. And the Hesburgh Libraries’ commitment to preserve and secure these materials is an investment in the collection. “This is beyond just access,” Hosselkus said. “The focus on long-term preservation of these materials acknowledges the importance of this collection as well.”

Jason Kauffman, an archives specialist at the University Archives, created the bilingual finding aid for the collection. Once the partners in Lima completed a batch of materials, usually every five or six months, Lora would load everything onto a flash drive and mail it to Hosselkus, who would pass it along to Kauffman. He’d transfer the files to his storage system and start inventorying them. All told, it’s just over 35 gigabytes of material—546 audio files, 723 image files, and 1,355 documents. Kauffman said the Gutiérrez collection complements several other collections at the University of Notre Dame Archives, including the Conferencia General del Episcopado Latinoamericano (also a digital surrogate collection), as well as the Marcos McGrath Papers and the San Miguelito Mission Records.

While the Gutiérrez collection is completely digitized, it’s not available online—researchers must visit Notre Dame, IBC, or PUCP to access the material. This honors the wishes that Gutiérrez shared at one of the project team meetings for how the archives would be accessed. “A lot of these talks are not formal—there’s usually colloquial language and maybe a little joke or something,” Matovina said. “He didn’t want to be quoted out of context.”

In the days and weeks prior to the symposium, the project team was busy making final tweaks to the collection with the aim of all three institutions opening the collection simultaneously. Some researchers are impatient—Hosselkus said they already had graduate students knocking down the door to get access to it. Others are expected to follow soon.

To help expand access to the collection and to foster the study of Gutiérrez more broadly, the Cushwa Center announced in August 2025 the Gutiérrez Research Awards, open to scholars pursuing research projects in theology, history, and the social sciences that engage or take inspiration from the work of Gutiérrez, especially his articulation of the preferential option for the poor. Inaugural award recipients were announced in March 2026. 

Remembering Father Gustavo and friends

The second session of the symposium focused on Gutiérrez’s book Vivir y pensar el Dios de los pobres. David Lantigua interviewed Leo Guardado, now an associate professor of theology at Fordham University, about his experience working as editor of the volume. Since both Lantigua and Guardado studied under Gutiérrez, the conversation veered into Gutiérrez’s teaching methods and his spirituality, as well as the themes of memory, poverty, and the incompleteness of theory without praxis. “I know it’s odd in a classroom, in a doctoral program, to ask students about the contemplative prayer dimension,” Guardado said, but otherwise, “I think we end up with the misunderstandings of liberation theology as a social philosophy or as some other thing, but not actually a theology. Deep theological, mystical, prayerful thinking is very different. It’s embodied and it’s incarnate. So that’s a challenge that I’ve set forth for [my students]. How that happens is through the communities that you accompany.”

The excitement around the new book and collection was punctuated with stories that presenters and attendees shared about personal interactions with Gutiérrez. Guardado detailed how his first encounter with Gutiérrez involved fixing his computer. Father Daniel Groody, C.S.C., now vice president and associate provost for undergraduate education at Notre Dame, remembered meeting Gutiérrez in person for the first time at a symposium in Paris in 2000. Rev. Virgilio Elizondo, who knew both Groody and Gutiérrez, invited the two of them to lunch. It was there that Elizondo, at the request of then-chair of theology John Cavadini, invited Gutiérrez to join the Notre Dame Department of Theology. “When he was asked, he actually started to cry. He said that he had never been asked to formally join any theology department before.” Groody added that Notre Dame held special meaning for Gutiérrez. “Father Hesburgh had invited him to come here in the late 1960s, right after he had given some initial talks in Canada. It was here that he began formulating some of his ideas around the theology of liberation.” That connection continued to deepen after Gutiérrez joined the faculty in 2001.

“We’re really honored to be the North American outlet of the ongoing study of Gustavo through examination of his archives,” Matovina said, “and to be collaborating with our colleagues in Lima.”

But there was a great void felt at the symposium—not only with the loss of Gutiérrez himself, but also with the absence of a number of other collaborators. Both Espinoza and Lora mentioned Father Andrés Gallego, former chair of PUCP’s theology department, who had passed away just weeks earlier. Lora also acknowledged members of the project team in Peru who were unable to attend: Pilar Arroyo, Gutiérrez’s assistant, without whom much of the work would not have been possible; Mari Carmen Vallenas, who scanned the original documents; Blanca Cayo and Gustavo Álvarez, who transcribed the audio; and those who took care to record and save the documents from the Jornada and Curso gatherings. “Without their work,” Lora said, “it would not have been possible to have this valuable material now.”