It remains to be asked whether any of this would assist the Council fathers in our fictitious ‘thought-experiment’. The insistence of CST upon the ‘universal destination of earthly goods’ remains: property rights must give way to the needs of the exigent poor. The very fact of this concession at the heart of Catholic teaching is surely significant, before we try to specify the conditions under which it might be activated. There is here and in recent encyclicals an unequivocal insistence on a caesura between the logic of the market, however benign, and the imperative of the gospel. The liberation theologian must go further, however, insisting that the condition of which Gaudium et Spes 69 speaks has come to pass, as a matter of brute historical fact, in the desperate political and eco- nomic ‘crucifixion’ of the peoples of the South. It will not suffice to rest in the quandry of George Bernanos’ country priest: ‘Insoluble problem: to give back his rights to the Poor Man without invest- ing him with power’. The liberationist instead concurs with Seamus Heaney in The Cure at Troythat ‘once in a lifetime’, exceptionally, the risk of empowerment must be undertaken, for, as Heaney says, while historical reality warns against hoping, once in a lifetime jus- tice demands that history and hope are brought together.