López Trujillo, Alfonso (1935–)

Alfonso López Trujillo, Colombian churchman, as president of the Council of Latin American Bishops (CELAM) led a conservative movement against Liberation Theology and other progressive tendencies in the Latin American Catholic Church. Born on November 8, 1935, in Villahermosa, department of Tolima, he entered the seminary in Bogotá and was ordained a priest in 1960. He received a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Colombia. In 1971 he was appointed auxiliary bishop of Bogotá. He became archbishop of Medellín in 1978 and was raised to the rank of cardinal in 1983. From 1987 to 1990 he was president of the Colombian episcopal conference. He was elected secretary-general of CELAM in 1972 and served as its president from 1979 to 1983. As secretary of CELAM he was in charge of the third meeting of the Latin American bishops, held in Puebla, Mexico, in 1979. In 1990 he was named president of the Pontifical Commission on the Family, in Rome. In 2001 he became a Bishop of Cardinals and has since fought resolutely against government authorization of gay marriage as well as emphasizing abstinence as the only ordained form of birth control.

See alsoCatholic Church: The Modern Period .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alfonso López Trujillo, Liberación marxista y liberación cristiana (1974).

Penny Lernoux, People of God: The Struggle for World Catholicism (1989).

Additional Bibliography

Gómez Orozco, Horacio. El Cardenal Alfonso López Trujillo. Santa Fe de Bogotá: Plaza and Janes Editores, 1997.

Salazar Palacio, Hernando. La Guerra secreta del cardenal López Trujillo. Santa Fe de Bogotá: Temas de Hoy, 1996.

                                           Jeffrey Klaiber