Over the weekend, Pope Francis praised Father Julian Zini, a songwriter, and advocate of Liberation Theology in Argentina, reported CRUX, citing L’osservatore Romano. Father Zini died August 16 of cancer.
“I consider him one of the great ‘Poets of the People,’ a creator of song, of life, of beauty,” Francis said in the handwritten note sent to the northern province of Corrientes, where Zini ministered most of his life. The letter was read Saturday during a TV special honoring the life of this priest, defined as a man who “embraced” the Second Vatican Council, according to CRUX.
The songs Zini wrote, Francis argues in his letter, now belong to “that people to which he gave his priestly life, they are of that humble people whom he served with generosity as a father who only knows how to give life. To Fr. Julian, ‘a thank you as big as your heart deserves’”.
CRUX noted that “Zini was a member of the ‘Movement of Priests for the Third World,’ founded after the Second Vatican Council by a group of priests who had a strong political and social participation. Between 1967 and 1976 the movement worked as an Argentine version of Liberation Theology, with ties to leftwing Peronism but with less affinity for Marxism.”
