New Worlds

This book by one of the field’s most distinguished historians is the first scholarly English- language history of the Catholic Church in Latin America from the conquest to the present. The language of the book is not heated or passionate — this is not Lynch’s style in any of his work — but it feels personal, almost like a labor of conscience. The central interpretive theme, and the one that lends the book its framework of analysis, is social justice. Neither the author’s disappointment in the church’s many failures to make life better (spiritually and materially) for the faithful nor his approval of its many successes in so doing is ever too far beneath the surface.Lynch’s guiding interest in the church’s struggles to defend the faith and to protect the faithful leads him to feature on the one side of the social justice ledger the sixteenth- century missionary orders, the Jesuits among the Guaraní, the “new evangelists” of the late nineteenth century who worked in the Pampas and the eastern slopes of the Andes (p. 154), Social Catholicism, the Mexican Cristeros, the Second Vatican Council, and (with some misgivings) liberation theology, along with many individuals, mostly church officials, whom Lynch sees as defenders of Catholic faith and justice (for example, Pedro Claver, Miguel Pro, Cardinal Sebastião Leme da Silveira Cintra, Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo). On the other side, Lynch criticizes the eighteenth- century secularization of the doctrinas for diminishing the “cure of souls” (p. 82), the Syllabus of Errors and nineteenth- century intransigents for retarding the church’s movement into the modern age, the Brazilian church for its silence on slavery, the Argentine and other national churches for their silence during the military dictatorships, and other churches and churchmen who failed to carry out the essential work of the church: “to preach the doctrine of salvation in the example of Christ, and to reach out to the poor and oppressed” (p. 323).This framework of analysis, built around the success or failure of the church in its pastoral mission, inevitably privileges a top- down view of religion: the well- being of parishioners depends in part on the goodness of their priests but mostly on the particular stance and guidance of the hierarchy. This interest in the hierarchy and its ideas permits the author to delve deeply and effectively into three areas: intellectual and philosophical debates within the church over time; intrachurch factionalisms, restructurings, and reorientations (for example, the Romanization of the church in the nineteenth century); and the changing relationships between church and state. The handling of all three topics is strong throughout but is especially impressive for the four chapters on the nineteenth century and the five on the twentieth century. The three chapters that deal with the colonial period cover somewhat more familiar scholarly territory, and the challenge of comparison across national histories is, of course, much less than for the national period.Such a framework does not make it easy for Lynch, however, to incorporate much of the recent work on religion and the church in Latin America emphasizing the practice of faith and the actions of the faithful in shaping how religion and the church were experienced on a day- to- day basis. This work does not help answer the kinds of questions that interest him. In fact, Lynch deals with “popular religion” directly in just one chapter, probably the least effective in the book (p. 161). In it, he seems rather uncomfortable with the whole concept of thinking about the history of religion from the point of view of the flock. For him, ordinary Catholics are present as seekers of spiritual solace, as victims of the state, and, at times, as victims of the church’s own indifference and arrogance, but not as actors shaping what Catholicism was or how the church operated. For all their importance as the most faithful of the faithful, for example, women do not come in for any special analysis in this book, and in a way this makes sense on this book’s terms, since laywomen (and even nuns, who have been extensively studied) do not make church policy or guide the pastoral mission. The book’s framework, then, allows some areas of great interest to historians to be dealt with very satisfactorily, while making it difficult to address others.A final note: the “religion” of the title is almost exclusively Catholic. There is a chapter on non- Catholic religions (Judaism, African American religions, Protestantism, and Pentecostalism), and Protestants, along with positivists, make an appearance in the nineteenth- century chapters as challengers to Catholicism. But this does not lead, Andrew Chesnut – style, to anything like religious pluralism: Lynch is clear that, as he puts it in the preface, “the evidence suggests that for five centuries the defining religion of Latin America has been Catholic and this is the assumption on which the book has been written” (p. xv).In sum, while this book is selectively synthetic rather than comprehensively so, Lynch packs a great deal into 360 pages and it becomes, on a number of important topics, the go- to book on the Catholic Church in Latin America

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