A well-known Catholic apologist has warned Filipino activists against preaching the Gospel using "Marxist rhetoric."

Raymond de Souza, director of Australia’s Saint Gabriel Communications, and program director of Human Life International (HLI), said the track of activism that Filipinos should follow must be based on Catholic teachings that promote cooperation and not class struggle.

He told ucanews.com that Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum supported the rights of the working class to form labor unions and affirmed the right to private property, but rejected communism and unrestricted capitalism.

De Souza was in the Philippines early this month to attend an HLI conference. He said Filipinos defending the rights of workers and peasants need to find clear voices from Catholic teachings "to dispel the confusion" in their work.

He said liberation theology didn’t do much to alleviate poverty in Brazil because the doctrine was "misused and abused."

De Souza describes himself as "Brazilian by birth, Catholic by grace, Australian by choice."

He said liberation theology failed because it was used to strengthen state control in Brazil’s vast land resources and not to empower poor peasants.

Liberation theology links salvation to the social and political liberation of the poor and the oppressed. It emerged in South America in the 1950s when Marxist ideology was used to advance the peasants’ struggle against the region’s landed and wealthy elite.

"Liberation theology in Brazil has created slums. The state is now the greatest landowner in Brazil, not the poor people. The government doesn’t want to hand over the land for free to the people because it wants to do away with the principle of private ownership of land," De Souza told ucanews.com.

"As long as the employer’s heart is full of greed and the employee’s heart is full of envy, we will always have class struggles," he said.

Some sectors of the Catholic Church in the Philippines have been in the forefront of the struggle of peasants and workers for justice and human rights.

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