Someone - I forget who - said that the Catholic church was active in liberating people, for example in El Salvador. This person specifically mentioned the Jesuits, some of whom where horribly killed there.
That the Jesuits were "freeing" anyone is open to debate. I attended a college that was at least nominally Catholic and belongs to the Jesuits. There, we had to take a mandatory subject, called "Theological Reflection about Reality". One of the priests made us watch a specific movie, "The Mission", as an example of the good role that the Jesuits could play in liberating the opressed.
Somebody here may have watched that movie. It's about how the Portuguese and the Spanish destroyed the "reductions" the Jesuits had built in Paraguay. The Jesuits had created communities of Indians who would all live communally and worked together. During the daytime, the men would go to work the fields following a "saint" in a procession, and singing. They would return in the afternoon in the same fashion. The women stayed in the reduction doing other chores. In this way, the Jesuits were able to accumulate wealth, and that was what attracted the greed of the Portuguese and the Spanish. And the movie ends with some brave Jesuits, one of them being Robert de Niro, dying while they fight for the Indians.
Actually, the reductions were places where the Indians were never allowed to choose what they wanted. They were kept as perpetual children, and the church, of course, was entitled to lead them. The fact that a Jesuit in the 20th century would fail to notice that is in itself depressing, and it was one of the first reasons I had to walk slowly away from the Catholic Church. One has to wonder whether the Jesuits didn't achieve their ideal when they created the "reductions".
It is said that the Jesuits created ETA, the terrorist Basque organization. I know for a fact that they were involved in many a revolt in Latin America. Some of them died, like the ones in El Salvador, but others didn't. They just encouraged the young to fight.
I wonder to what extent a Liberation Theologian like the priest who made us watch that movie could be trusted to be promoting anybody's liberation. I believe they had a very particular definition of freedom.