B onar L. H ernández S andoval . Guatemala’s Catholic Revolution

A distinctive feature of the armed revolutionary movements that sprang up in 1970s and 1980s Central America was their ties to the Catholic Church. Their organizations often piggybacked on Catholic structures and processes of community-building while their leaders had often been radicalized through Catholic education and, in some cases, were themselves ordained in the church. Bonar L. Hernández Sandoval’s somewhat ambiguously titled Guatemala’s Catholic Revolution, however, refers not to these movements but to the radical transformation of the Guatemalan church itself that preceded and facilitated them. Its shift from a deeply conservative and profoundly weakened institution to a robust and progressive force at the center of Guatemalan political life is all too often, as Hernández argues, ascribed to the influence of Vatican II, the Conference of Latin American Bishops, and liberation theology. The great strength of this book is its tracing of the roots of this transformation instead to...

Bishops · Institution · Latin Americans · Liberation theology · Political science · Politics · Theology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies