Ingrid Betancourt is documented at the University for the thesis she is doing in Oxford.
"Pope Francis carries within him the reflection of decades in Latin America on the Church's response to social problems," said the French-Colombian politician during her visit .
PHOTO: Manuel Castells
Ingrid Betancourt visited Pamplona to consult bibliographic material at the University for the Library Services University, for the thesis on Theology that she is carrying out in Oxford. During her stay at campus, the French-Colombian politician, kidnapped by the FARC in 2002, affirmed that "Pope Francis carries within himself a reflection of decades that has taken place in Latin America regarding the response of the Church to social problems. In the case of Argentina, these debates have had great depth due to the context of confrontation with the regime of the military dictatorship".
Ingrid Betancourt is doing research on a peculiar movement of the Argentine Catholic Church in the late 1960s, the Movement of Priests for the Third World (Movimiento de Sacerdotes Para el Tercer Mundo). As she explained, the study intends to establish "if within the statements, press conferences, conference proceedings of the movement... a variation from a fundamentally evangelical budget to a revolutionary one can be seen".
Relationship between Theology and politics
Ingrid Betancourt said that she went to the University of Navarra to consult specific documents on the Movement: "I looked for the material on the Internet. In Europe, the Library Services that gathered them and was closer to Oxford was that of this University. It is very well endowed in the field of Latin American Theology".
Regarding his research, he emphasized that what interests him most is "the reflection on the relationship between Theology and politics, how the Church has been incorporating its reflection to today's world, what are its responses to the problems of modernity and, in particular, to those of Latin America".
"At Oxford, most of the researchers in theology are lay people. It is an academic space not necessarily linked to priests. In fact, there are many women and the environment is young," he explained.