Jon Sobrino

Investigated by the Vatican throughout his career as a professor of theology, he has remained an outspoken proponent of peace, joining protests in 2008 of the continued training of Latin American military officers in torture techniques at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning.

Because of the theological positions he took in his works, Sobrino was the subject of a theological notification; a critique statement and an admonishment by the Vatican and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in March 2007.

Retired professor of theology Peter Hünermann (then Tübingen, Germany) declared in April 2007 that the Vatican notification was a "shock" for all theologians, because along with Sobrino "the most distinguished exegetes and systematic theologians – both Catholic and Protestant – stood in the dock". Supported by more than 100 professors of Catholic theology, Hünermann also demanded an "intelligent redevelopment" of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, because, as successor organization of the Holy Office, it still had the structure of an "early modern board of censors".

Sobrino's main works are Jesus the Liberator (1991) and its sequel Christ the Liberator (1999), along with Christology at the Crossroads (1978), The True Church and the Poor (1984), Spirituality of Liberation (1990), The Principle of Mercy: Taking the Crucified People from the Cross (Orbis, 1994), No Salvation Outside the Poor, and Prophetic-Utopian Essays (Orbis, 2008).

On 16 November 1989 he narrowly escaped the murder of the UCA scholars by the Atlacatl Battalion, an elite unit of the Salvadoran Army. By a coincidence, he was away from El Salvador when members of the military broke into the rectory at the UCA and brutally murdered his six fellow Jesuits, Ignacio Ellacuría, Segundo Montes, Juan Ramón Moreno, Ignacio Martín-Baró, Amando López, and Joaquín López y López, and their housekeeper Elba Ramos and her 16-year-old daughter Celina Ramos. The Jesuits were targeted for their outspoken work to bring a resolution to the brutal El Salvador Civil War that left about 75,000 men, women, and children dead, mostly civilians.

Jon Sobrino SJ (born 1938) is a Jesuit Catholic priest and theologian, known mostly for his contributions to Latin American liberation theology. He received worldwide attention in 2007 when the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a notification for what they termed doctrines that are "erroneous or dangerous and may cause harm to the faithful."

Born 27 December 1938 into a Basque family in Barcelona, Sobrino entered the Society of Jesus when he was 18. The following year, in 1958, he was sent to El Salvador. He later studied engineering at Saint Louis University, an American Jesuit university, and then theology at Sankt Georgen Graduate School of Philosophy and Theology in Frankfurt in West Germany for his Doctor of Theology (Dr.theol.) degree. Returning to El Salvador, he taught at the Jesuit-run University of Central America (UCA) in San Salvador, which he helped to found.