The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America

Perhaps an apropos place to begin this brief review is with the author’s concluding sentence: “In the end, the history of the Church in Latin America is in reality all of this — the large interplay of great ideas and theologies, and the daily faith of the millions of people working out the story of salvation in their own lives and in their own time and place” (p. 275). While other themes have their place in John F. Schwaller’s The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America, it is the author’s consistent attention to two major competing visions of the church as defined by either ecclesiastical hierarchy or the “body of the faithful” (p. 268) that makes this book a remarkable work of scholarly synthesis.Schwaller organizes his work chronologically, with chapters that mirror the peri-odization of any general history of Latin America. By adhering to the aforementioned interplay, however, Schwaller offers readers a nuanced picture of such familiar themes as the Iberian Reconquista or the Bourbon reforms. His attention to the structure of Andean religions, for example, illustrates the link between centralized and local religiosity in pre- Columbian practice. His juxtaposition of the Franciscan and Dominican orders and their very different views on preaching and conversion prepares readers for his later discussion of lay activism in the twentieth century.Schwaller is probably at his best in his treatment of the colonial church, for here he builds on his earlier work on the colonial Mexican clergy and church wealth. His explanation of the offices and roles of the cabildo eclesiástico is superb (pp. 78 – 80), while his treatment of religious confraternities reveals the complexity of sodalities, with their devotional, mutual aid, and professional functions (pp. 82 – 85). Turning to the late nineteenth century, Schwaller explores what happened when “popular religious expressions emerged to fill the void” left by a decreased clerical presence in rural areas (p. 179). In both Canudos, Brazil, and Tomochic, Mexico, “a local religious cult . . . took on political and social messages and became a threat to the existing power structures” (p. 178).The emergence of Catholic Action in the twentieth century, along with the related Catholic Unions, Catholic Circles, and Catholic trade unions, represents for Schwaller how support for the church and its goals was passing into the hands of laypeople from the middle and lower classes, even though these movements were often sponsored by and answered to the local bishop. In this sense, Catholic Action may have been a forerunner to the ecclesial base communities that were developing by the 1950s. By midcen-tury, there appeared “the first major shifts in [the church’s] political and social orientation” (p. 214). In Brazil, Catholic Action became more socially progressive, lobbying in the political sphere for workplace- related issues. Base communities filled the void left by the decline in clerical vocations. And bishops began to organize themselves in ways that gave them a collective voice, first in Brazil with the formation of the Conferência Nacio-nal de Bispos Brasileiros (CNBB) in 1952 and then at a regional level with the creation of the Latin American Episcopal Conference (CELAM).Yet in the 1950s, the church’s leadership was still in either close partnership or tacit support of governments that were moving to the right in reaction to Marxist ideologies and the threat of social revolution. By the 1960s, however, government brutality and repression of civil rights led some in positions of ecclesial leadership to speak out in opposition. In Brazil, for example, Bishops Lorscheider and Arns transformed the CNBB into “the most vocal opponents to the military regime and its repression” (p. 235). What emerges in Schwaller’s treatment of the period from the 1950s to the 1980s is a complex picture: while the church attempted to navigate a tense sociopolitical context, opinion within the church became more heterogeneous in relation to theology, ecclesiology, and politics. In addition to pressures from the Right and the Left, the church faced increased competition from non- Catholic religious groups, as Latin America became a “religious marketplace” (p. 264).In his conclusion, Schwaller suggests that one should understand the history of the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America as the playing out of a dialectical struggle between two competing ecclesiologies or models of the church, one from the ground up, the other from the top down. His monograph successfully highlights those tensions, whether he is contrasting Franciscan and Dominican models of evangelization in the sixteenth century or examining tensions between traditionalists and liberationists in the period following the Second Vatican Council. Historians of Latin American Catholicism will benefit from another fine work of synthesis that brings together more than a generation of rich scholarship in the field

Archaeology · Church History · Colonialism · Faith · Historiography · Latin Americans · Political science · Sociology · Theology · Vision · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Anthropology · Classics · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious and Theological Studies