The Oxford Handbook Of Latin American Christianity [1 ed.] 0199860351, 9780199860357, 0190058854, 9780190058852, 0199984034, 9780199984039, 019986036X, 9780199860364

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t h e ox f o r d h a n d b o o k o f

L AT I N A M E R IC A N C H R IST I A N I T Y

The Oxford Handbook of

LATIN AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY Edited by

DAVID THOMAS ORIQUE, O.P., SUSAN FITZPATRICK-BEHRENS, and

VIRGINIA GARRARD

1

1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Control Number: 2019954827 ISBN 978-0-19-986035-7 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Hardback printed by Marquis, Canada

Contents

List of Contributorsix Introduction1 David Thomas Orique, Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, and Virginia Garrard

PA RT   I   C H R I ST IA N I T Y C OM E S TO T H E   N E W   WOR L D 1. The Making of Colonial Christianity in Hispanic America John F. Schwaller

9

2. Time and Christianity in Early Latin America Matthew O’Hara

23

3. Scholastic Theology, Justice, and the Conquest of the Americas David M. Lantigua

39

4. The Sacred Art of Counter-Conquest: Material Christianity in Latin America57 Jennifer Scheper Hughes 5. Indigenous Christianities: Commensuration, (De)Colonization, and Cultural Production in Latin America Andrew Orta 6. (Un)Making Christianity: The African Diaspora in Slavery and Freedom Rachel Sarah O’Toole

83

101

7. Millenarian Movements Carole A. Myscofski

121

8. The Course of Catholic History in Latin America Fernando Cervantes

139

vi   contents

PA RT I I   T H E C H U RC H M I L I TA N T: C AT HOL IC P OL I T IC A L AC T I V I SM 9. Liberation Theology: History and Trends Phillip Berryman 10. Catholicism, Revolution, and Counter-Revolution in Twentieth-Century Latin America Stephen J. C. Andes 11. Bishops, Priests, and CELAM Erika Helgen

157

175 195

12. Activist Christians, the Human Rights Movement, and Democratization in Latin America Nick Rowell

217

13. Prophetic Martyrdom in Modern Latin America: Two Definitions of Christian Martyrdom Edward T. Brett

237

14. The Ambivalence of Catholic Politics in Latin America: Ideology, Interests, and Institutions Amy Edmonds

257

15. Rights, Religion, and Violence at Mexico’s Borders Christine Kovic

273

PA RT I I I   A T R A N SNAT IONA L SP I R I T: M I S SIONA R I E S A N D C HA R I SM 16. Pentecostalism and Neo-Pentecostalism in Latin America: Two Case Studies291 Virginia Garrard and Justin M. Doran 17. Conversion Processes and Social Networks in Latin America Henri Gooren

309

18. A New Pentecost: Conversion in the Caribbean Luis N. Rivera-Pagán

329

19. Protestant Innovative Evangelizing to Oral Cultures in Guatemala Rachel M. McCleary

347

contents   vii

20. Liberation Theology’s Spiritual Legacy for the Latin American Church Harold Segura

377

21. Preferential Option for the Spirit: The Catholic Charismatic Renewal Brenda Carranza

393

22. Alternative Christianities: Mormons, Seventh-day Adventists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses Ronald Lawson, Kenneth Xydias, and Ryan T. Cragun

411

23. Mainline Protestantism in Latin America Joel Morales Cruz

435

PA RT I V   C ON T E M P OR A RY C H R I S T IA N I T Y I N   L AT I N A M E R IC A 24. Christianity and Ecology in Latin America Lois Ann Lorentzen

459

25. Mary, Mother of Jesus: Consolatrice of the Americas Jeanette Rodriguez

473

26. Marshaling the Faithful: Popular Religiosity and Institutional Life in Modernizing Mexico Edward Wright-Ríos

489

27. Catholic Laity in the Latin American Church Robert S. Pelton, C.S.C.

507

Complete Bibliography Index

523 581

List of Contributors

Stephen J. C. Andes is an Associate Professor of History at Louisiana State University. Andes is the author of The Vatican and Catholic Activism in Mexico and Chile: The ­Politics of Transnational Catholicism, 1920–1940 (Oxford University Press, 2014), and of The Mysteria Sofia: One Woman’s Mission to Save Catholicism in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Nebraska, 2019). He is also the co-editor (with Julia G. Young) of an anthology entitled Local Church, Global Church: Catholic Activism in Latin America from Rerum Novarum to Vatican II (The Catholic University of America Press, 2016). Phillip Berryman is a writer and translator in Philadelphia, who worked in a Panama City barrio (1965–1973) as a Catholic priest and in Guatemala as Central America ­representative for the American Friends Service Committee (1976–1980). He has translated approximately thirty books, primarily works of Latin American theologians. Recent work includes Latin America at 200: A New Introduction (2016), and a memoir, Mementos of the Living and the Dead (Wipf and Stock, 2019). Edward T. Brett, who received his PhD in History from Rutgers University, is Professor Emeritus at La Roche University. He is the author of The U.S. Catholic Press on Central America: From Cold War Anti-Communism to Social Justice (University of Notre Dame, 2003) and The New Orleans Sisters of the Holy Family: African American Missionaries to the Garifuna of Belize (University of Notre Dame, 2012) and coauthor of Murdered in Central America: The Stories of Eleven U.S. Missionaries (Orbis Books, 1988) and Martyrs of Hope: Seven U.S. Missioners in Central America (Orbis Books, 2018). Brenda Carranza studied Theology at the Pontifical Athenaeum S. Anselmo in Rome and earned her Master’s and PhD in Social Sciences at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in Brazil. She has a postdoctoral degree from the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) in Brazil and has conducted research at the Institutfür Katholische Theologie/Universität Osnabrück, Deutschland. She is a Professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Campinas (PUC-Campinas, Brazil). Catholicism, Pentecostalism, gender, politics, media, youth, and popular religiosity are among Carranza’s areas of research and interest. Her recent publications include: “Conservative religious activism in the Brazilian Congress: Sexual agendas in focus” (Belgium-France, 2018), Francisco in the World Youth Day” (Argentina, 2017); “Export Catholicism” (Brazil, 2016); “Challenges to the Urban Imagination” (Colombia, 2016); “Pentecostal Christianity: The New Face of the Catholic Church” (Brazil-Italy, 2015).

x   list of contributors Fernando Cervantes is Reader in History at the University of Bristol, specializing in the intellectual and religious history of early modern Europe with a particular interest in Spain and Spanish America. He is the author of The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain (Yale, 1994), coeditor of Spiritual Encounters: Interactions between Christianity and Native Religions in Colonial America (Birmingham, 1999) and Angels, Demons and the New World (Cambridge, 2013). His latest book, Conquistadores, is due to be published in 2020 by Allen Lane/Penquin. Ryan  T.  Cragun is a sociologist of religion. Originally from Utah, he now lives in ­Florida and works at The University of Tampa. His research and writing focuses on religion, with an emphasis on Mormonism and the nonreligious. His research has been published in a variety of academic journals and he is the author of several books. For more about his work and copies of his peer-reviewed articles, see his website: www. ryantcragun.com. Joel Morales Cruz (ThM, PhD; Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago) is an Adjunct Professor of Theology at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago and McCormick Theological Seminary where he teaches courses on history and theology. He is the author of The Mexican Reformation: Catholic Pluralism, Enlightenment Religion, and the Iglesia de Jesús Movement in Benito Juárez’s Mexico (1859–72) (Wipf and Stock, 2011) and Histories of the Latin American Church: A Handbook (Fortress Press, 2014). Recently he has contributed to The Protestant Reformation and World Christianity: Global ­Perspectives (Eerdmans, 2017). Currently, Cruz is researching the theology of the seventeenth-century nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. He resides in Chicago. Justin M. Doran is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Middlebury College. His research explores the religious experiences of capitalism, particularly as they reshaped Christianity in the Americas throughout the twentieth-century. His international archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in Houston and São Paulo formed the basis of his forthcoming book, which retells the history of prosperity religion in Brazil. He received his PhD in religious studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Amy Edmonds (BA, Oklahoma Baptist University; MA, Baylor University; PhD, Baylor University) is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Milligan College, Tennessee. Special interests include religion and politics in Latin America, democratization, and nonviolence. She is author of “Moral Authority and Authoritarianism: The Catholic Church and the Military Regime in Uruguay” in the Journal of Church and State. Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens is Professor and Chair of History at California State University, Northridge. She studies U.S. Catholic missionaries, indigenous communities, women religious and transnational social movements in Guatemala and Peru during the Cold War. She is also interested in the unintended consequences of intersections between Catholic social movements and U.S. foreign policy, which together contributed at times to social and political revolution. Her publications include:The Maryknoll Catholic Mission in Peru, 1943–1989: Transnational Faith and Transformation (­University

list of contributors   xi of Notre Dame Press, 2012), scholarly and popular articles and book chapters which have appeared in publications including, Latin American Research Review, the U.S. Catholic Historian, and NACLA. Virginia Garrard is Professor of History and Director of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. She is author of the forthcoming monograph, New Faces of God in Latin America, (Oxford, 2020); Her other monographs include Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala Under General Efraín Ríos Montt, 1982–1983 (Oxford, 2010); Terror en la tierra del Espiritu Santo (AVANCSO, 2012); Viviendo en La Nueva Jerusalem (Editorial Piedra Santa, 2009); and Protestantism in Guatemala: Living in the New Jerusalem (University of Texas Press, 1998). She is also coauthor, with Peter Henderson and Bryan McCann, of Latin America in the Modern World (Oxford ­University Press, 2018). In addition, she has coedited a number of publications, including The Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America (Cambridge, 2016) with Stephen Dove and Paul Freston; Beyond the Eagle’s Shadow: New Histories of Latin America’s Cold War (University of New Mexico Press, 2013, with Mark Atwood Lawrence and Julio Moreno; and Rethinking Protestantism in Latin America (Temple, 1993), with David Stoll. She has also edited the collected volume, On Earth as It Is in Heaven: Religion and Society in Latin America (Scholarly Resources, 2000). Henri Gooren a Dutch cultural anthropologist who has published especially on conversion and on Pentecostalism, Protestantism, Mormonism, and Roman Catholicism in Latin America. After working at the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), he joined the Center IIMO for Intercultural Theology at Utrecht University in  the research program Conversions Careers and Culture Politics in Pentecostalism: A  Comparative Study in Four Continents (2003–2007). In August 2007, he became ­Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan; he received tenure in 2011. Palgrave-Macmillan published his book Religious Disaffiliation and Conversion: Tracing Patterns of Change in Faith Practices in 2010. Gooren conducted fieldwork research on the Pentecostalization of religion and society in Paraguay and Chile in 2010–12, sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation. He is currently working on a monograph to report his main findings. Erika Helgen is Assistant Professor of Latinx Christianity at Yale Divinity School. Her book, Holy Wars: Protestants, Catholics, and Religious Conflict in Brazil, 1916–1962, is forthcoming from Yale University Press. Christine Kovic, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, has conducted research in the areas of human rights for the past twenty-five years. She is author of Mayan Voices for Human Rights: Displaced Catholics in Highland Chiapas (University of Texas Press, 2005), Women of Chiapas: Making History in Times of Struggle and Hope (co-editor with Christine Eber, Routledge, 2003), and a series of articles and book chapters. Her current research addresses the intersection of human rights, health, and immigration, with emphasis on Central American migrants crossing Mexico in the journey north and on the organizing efforts of Latina/os in the United States.

xii   list of contributors David  M.  Lantigua is Assistant Professor of Moral Theology and Ethics at the ­University of Notre Dame. He has taught at The Catholic University of America and was previously a graduate fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. He is coauthor of Comparative Religious Ethics: A Narrative Approach to Global Ethics, 2nd edition, with Darrell Fasching and Dell deChant (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). He is also coeditor and cotranslator, with Lawrence Clayton, of Bartolomé de las Casas and the Defence of Amerindian Rights (University of Alabama Press, 2020). His forthcoming monograph, Church, Empire, and Infidels in a New World Order (Cambridge University Press), identifies early modern Spanish theological and legal contributions to international thought in colonial context. Ronald Lawson was born and educated in Australia. He earned a BA with Honours in History and a PhD in Sociology and History from the University of Queensland. He traveled to Columbia University in New York City in 1971 for postdoctoral studies on a Fulbright Travel Grant. He taught at the City University of New York from 1971 through 2009, with six years at Hunter College and thirty-three years at Queens College. He became a tenured Full Professor in 1983. His books include Brisbane in the 1890s: An Australian Urban Society (University of Queensland Press, 1973) and The Tenant Movement in New York, 1904–1984 (Rutgers University Press, 1986). Since 1984, his research has focused on globalizing American-born religious groups, especially Seventh-day Adventism, and he is currently preparing a series of four book manuscripts based on research in sixty countries. He has published a slew of articles on protest movements, tenant-landlord conflict, Adventists, and American-born religious groups in academic journals and edited books. He now lives in Loma Linda, CA. Lois Ann Lorentzen is a Professor in the Theology and Religious Studies Department at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of Etica Ambiental (Environmental Ethics); editor of Hidden Lives in the United States: Understanding the Controversies and Tragedies of Undocumented Migration; coeditor of Ecofeminism and Globalization: Exploring Culture, Context and Religion; The Gendered New World Order: Militarism, the Environment and Development; and Associate Editor for the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature. She has written numerous essays on grassroots environmental movements. Her research is based in El Salvador and Mexico. Rachel  M.  McCleary holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Chicago, a Master’s in Theological Studies from Emory University, and a BA from Indiana University. She is lecturer, Economics Department, Harvard University, and visiting Professor, Universidad Marroquin, Guatemala. Her research focuses on how religion interacts with economic performance and the political and social behavior of individuals and institutions across societies. She studies how religious beliefs and practices influence productivity, economic growth, and the maintenance of political institutions such as democracy. Her books include: Seeking Justice: Ethics and International Affairs (Westview Press, 1992); Dictating Democracy: Guatemala and the of End Violent Revolution (University Press of Florida, 1999, English; Artemis-Edinter, 1999, Spanish); Global

list of contributors   xiii Compassion: Private Voluntary Organizations and U.S. Foreign Policy since 1939 (Oxford University Press, 2009 and winner of the 2010 AFP Skystone Ryan Research Prize), Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Religion (Oxford University Press, 2011) and The Wealth of Religions: The Political Economy of Believing and Belonging,(with Rosert J. Barro) (Princeton University Press, 2019). McCleary is currently writing two books: Protestantism and Human Capital in Guatemala, and The Abuses and Misuses of Conscience Explained. Carole  A.  Myscofski is McFee Professor of Religion at Illinois Wesleyan University and directs the Women’s and Gender Studies Program there. As a historian of religions, she includes among her research interests a wide range of topics in heterodox religious activities in Brazil from the colonial period through the twentieth century. She has written on rituals in Umbanda, messianic movements, the impact of the Portuguese Inquisition in early colonial Brazil, new religions, marriage and sexuality, and magic during the colonial era. She recently completed Amazons, Wives, Nuns and Witches: Women and Roman Catholicism in Colonial Brazil, 1500–1822 (University of Texas Press, 2013), and continues her work on the historical origins and meanings of magical practices among women and enslaved men in the late 1500s and early 1600s in Brazil. Rachel Sarah O’Toole is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Irvine. Her monograph, Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru received the 2013 Latin American Studies Association Peru Section Flora Tristán book prize. With Sherwin Bryant and Ben Vinson III, she coedited Africans to Spanish America: Expanding the Diaspora (University of Illinois Press, 2012). She has published articles on the construction of whiteness, masculinity within slavery, African Diaspora identities, indigenous politics, and gender influences on racial constructions in Radical History Review (2015), Secuencia: Revista de historia y ciencias sociales (2011), Social Text (2007), The Americas (2006), and The Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History (2006), as well as in edited volumes in the United States, Germany, and Peru. Matthew O’Hara is a Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Spain’s Ministry of Culture, American Philosophical Society, and the American Council of Learned Societies. His publications include The History of the Future in Colonial Mexico (Yale University Press, 2018); A Flock Divided: Race, Religion and Politics in Mexico (1749–1857) (Duke University Press, 2010); Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America (Duke University Press, 2009) (coedited with Andrew Fisher). David Thomas Orique, O.P., is Associate Professor of Colonial and Modern Latin American as well as Iberian Atlantic World History, and the Director of Latin American and Latina/o Studies at Providence College. Besides a doctorate in History, he holds a Masters in Theology, History, and Spanish Literature. His writings and publications include,

xiv   list of contributors among others: “To Heaven or Hell: An Introduction to the Soteriology of Bartolomé de Las Casas” (2016); “Justice and the Church in Latin America in the Era of a Jesuit Pope” (2015); “A Comparison of Bartolomé de Las Casas and Fernão Oliveira: Just War and Slavery,” (2014); “Journey to the Headwaters: Bartolomé de Las Casas in a Comparative Context” (2009). His book titled To Heaven or to Hell: Bartolomé de Las Casas’s Confesionario was published in 2018 by Penn State. The manuscript for another book titled “The Unheard Voice of Law from the Often-heard Text: A New Rendition of Bartolomé de Las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destruición de las Indias” has been completed. He is also an editor for Bartolomé de Las Casas, O.P.: History, Philosophy, and Theology in the Age of European Expansion (Brill, 2019). Andrew Orta is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, where he has served as Head of the Department of Anthropology, and Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. He has conducted research with Aymana communities of the Bolivian highlands since 1989. Earlier work in the region focused on contemporary Catholic missionization; more recent work examines the impact of neoliberal processes of political decentralization and on the reproduction of local modes of authority and regional integrity. Another line of research is based on ethnographic study of MBA training in the United States, with a focus on the internationalization of MBA curricula intended to prepare MBAs to work in a global and cross-cultural business environment. Robert  S.  Pelton, CSC is Director Emeritus of (LANACC) Latin American North American Church Concerns for the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame. He gives special attention to the social teachings of the Latin American Church. This includes liberation theology and small Christian communities. However, his sharpest focus is upon Saint Oscar Romero as a pastoral example of future leadership in the new and evolving church. This is demonstrated in his book, Monsignor Romero: A Bishop for the New Millenia (Notre Dame Press-2004). Pelton also wrote on the preferential option for the poor in the Orbis publication (2009) relating to the Aparecida Conference in Brazil. Also, his award winning documentary, “Monsignor: The Last Journey of Oscar Romero,” has been shown throughout the world. Finally, for the Oxford Handbook for the Christian Church, he produced “CELAM: Emerging Reception of the ‘Bridge Theology’ of Pope Francis from Marcos Gregorio Mcgrath to the Latin American Church Today” (Belo Horizonte, 2018). Luis N. Rivera-Pagán is the Henry Winters Luce Professor of Ecumenics and Mission Emeritus at Princeton Theological Seminary. He received his Doctorate in Philosophy (PhD) at Yale University in 1970, and is the author of several books, among them: A la sombra del armagedón: reflexiones críticas sobre el desafío nuclear (1988), Senderos teológicos: el pensamiento evangélico puertorriqueño (1989), Evangelización y violencia: La conquista de América (1990), A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas (1992), Los sueños del ciervo: Perspectivas teológicas desde el Caribe (1995), Entre el oro y la fe: El dilema de América (1995), Mito exilio y demonios: literatura

list of contributors   xv y teología en América Latina (1996), La evangelización de los pueblos americanos: algunas reflexiones históricas (1997), Diálogos y polifonías: perspectivas y reseñas (1999), Fe y cultura en Puerto Rico (2002), Essays From the Diaspora (2002), God, in your Grace . . . Official Report of the Ninth Assembly of the World Council of Churches (2007) [Editor], Teología y cultura en América Latina (2009), Ensayos teológicos desde el Caribe (2013), Peregrinajes teológicos y literarios (2013), and Essays from the Margins (2014). Jeanette Rodriguez is a Professor at Seattle University and teaches in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, the graduate Program of Couples and Marriage and Family Therapy, as well as cross-lists her classes with Women and Gender Studies, and Latin American Studies. Rodriguez is the author of several books and articles concentrated in the areas of US Hispanic theology, theologies of liberation, peacebuilding, and Women’s Voice in Religion and Spirituality. Her works include Our Lady of Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment among Mexican American Women (1994); Stories We Live (1996); coeditor with Dr. Maria Pilar Aquino and Dr. Daisy Machado of A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology (2002), coauthor with Dr. Ted Fortier of Cultural Memory: Resistance, Faith and Identity (2007); A Clan Mother’s Call: The Reconstruction of Cultural Memory Among the Haudenosaunee. She has served as a board member for the Academy of Hispanic Theologians in the United States, and as vice-Chair for Pax Christi USA. Rodriguez holds a PhD in Religion and the Personality Sciences (1990) from the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California. Nick Rowell is an Instructor of Political Science at Cabrillo College in Aptos, California. He completed his PhD in Political Science at the University of New Mexico in 2012. His doctoral dissertation is entitled “Roman Catholic Episcopacies, Church–State Ties and Human Rights Movements in Latin America.” He is the co-author of “The Church, the State, and Human Rights in Latin America” in the journal Politics, Religion and Ideology. His teaching and research interests focus on the comparative analysis of Latin American politics, with emphasis on the interaction between civil society and the state, including religious organizations, social movements, and political parties. Jennifer Scheper Hughes is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Riverside. Her teaching and research focus on the history of religion in Latin America, with special consideration for the spiritual lives of Mexican and Mexican-American Catholics. Drawing on both archival and ethnographic materials, her work explores themes of popular practice, material religion (theory of the object), affective approaches to the study of religion, the history of liberation theology, ghosts, spirits, and rituals honoring the dead, and religion, catastrophe, and disease. Her book, Biography of a Mexican Crucifix: Lived Religion and Local Faith from the Conquest to the Present (Oxford 2010) is a history of popular devotion to images of the suffering Christ in Mexico. Hughes’s second book, Contagion and the Sacred in Mexico, will examine the impact of demographic collapse by epidemic disease on the birth of New World Christianity. She is completing an ethnographic film on Day of the Dead celebrations in California.

xvi   list of contributors John F. Schwaller is a Professor of History at the University at Albany. He is a wellknown scholar of the history and culture of Mexico in the sixteenth century. His most recent books include A History of the Catholic Church in Latin America (New York University Press, 2011) and The First Letter from New Spain (University of Texas Press, 2014). Schwaller has two projects: one on the ceremonies and rituals of the Aztec month of Panquetzaliztli; the other a biography of Don Luis de Velasco, the younger, Viceroy of Mexico and Peru. He sits on the editorial boards of The Americas and Estudios de Cultura Nahuatl. Harold Segura is the Regional Director of Church Relationships and Christian Identity, for Latin America and the Caribbean Regional Office. World Vision Colombian, Baptist Pastor, Business Manager—Santiago de Cali, University, Bachelor of Theology, Master of Theology, International Baptist Theological Seminary of Cali. University Baptist theologian, Cali Colombia Foundation. Master Religious Studies, Evangelical University of the Americas, Costa Rica. PhD student in Theology at Pontificia Javeriana University, Bogotá, Colombia, Member of the Latin American Theological Fraternity, and the International Board of Motion Together with Children and Youth. Former rector of the International Baptist Theological Seminary, Baptist University Foundation today. Collaborate as a writer of several international journals. He is author of eight books, all published between 2000–2013. Edward Wright-Ríos (PhD, UCSD, 2004) is Mellon Foundation Chair of the ­Humanities, Professor of Latin American History at Vanderbilt University. He has published articles and essays on religion, Indian-centered nationalism, ecclesiastical reform and popular religiosity, and notions of gender and the fanatical in satirical expression. In 2009 he published Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revelation, 1887–1934 (Duke University Press). More recently (2014), he published a second monograph, Searching for Madre Matiana: Prophecy and Popular Culture in Modern Mexico (University of New Mexico Press). It examines the cultural legacy of the apocryphal prophetess, Madre Matiana, from the 1850s to the 1960s, in particular her emblematic stature for those seeking to fit devout femininity into the Mexican national imaginary. Kenneth Xydias received his BS and MS degrees from the New York State College of Forestry (now College of Environmental Science and Forestry). He has been involved in forestry and forest research for his entire career, and has skills in sampling, statistics, forest biometrics, economics, computer programming, and data analysis. His interest in the Jehovah’s Witnesses began when his wife started a Bible study with them more than four decades ago. Since then, he has spent considerable time studying the religion and has utilized his skills in statistics to analyze their growth.

I n troduction Oxford Handbook of Latin American Christianity David Thomas Orique, Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, and Virginia Garrard

This volume was conceived as an effort to integrate Latin America into the growing field of studies of global Christianity. With an estimated 480 million Christians, Latin America’s population represents nearly a quarter of the 2 billion Christians in the world. By 2025, Latin America will surpass Europe and the United States to become the global region with the highest number of observant Christians. The region’s Christian dominance is representative of a broader transformation through which Christianity is becoming less Europeanized and more global with each passing year. In The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, Philip Jenkins predicts that by 2025— assuming a stable Christian population little influenced by conversion—Latin America, Africa, and Asia (known as the “Global South”) will form the overwhelming majority of the world’s Christian population. In just over a quarter of a century, nearly half—1.733 billion of an estimated total of 2.6 billion Christians—are projected to live in the Global South.1 Jenkins’s numbers point to important—and for many, unanticipated—changes in Christianity: the number of Christians in what was once described as the “developing world” has grown exponentially and continues to do so. Arguably Christianity should no longer be considered a “Western” religion, if indeed it ever was, since its founder, a first-century Jew, lived in the Middle East. Unlike the other regions of the Global South, Latin America has, uniquely, been Christian for more than five centuries. Its history, culture, holidays, worldviews, and spiritual ecology are all built on Catholic Christian foundations, and the majority of Latin Americans today are Roman Catholics. But the vast majority of Christian growth across the Global South has been among evangelicals (a term we use here in the Spanish and Portuguese sense, to mean any Protestant), most of whom are Pentecostal—those who subscribe to a variation of Christianity that emphasizes the Holy Spirit and that requires undergoing a somatic “baptism in the Holy Spirit,” as evinced in miraculous utterances, faith healing, or other embodied

2   Orique, Fitzpatrick-Behrens, and Garrard experiences. Harvey Cox observes that Pentecostals have grown from a small handful in 1900 to several hundred million today.2 In fact, of the 2 billion global Christians, over  500 million are Pentecostals or Charismatics.3 As relatively recent studies have noted, nearly all religions in Latin America have become, to a greater or lesser extent, “Pentecostalized.”4 In 2006, an extensive study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life estimated that at least one-fourth of the 680 million people in Latin America were “renewalists”—Protestant Pentecostals or Charismatic Catholics—who professed belief in such bodily experiences of faith as speaking in tongues, prophesying, and divine healing and who, most centrally, believe in the literal power of the Spirit.5 The growth of global Christianity not only has been the subject of a breadth of recent studies, but also has become a growing field of research and study at colleges and universities. Yet most recent research has focused on Africa, where the highest rate of growth is projected, and Asia. Renowned religious historian Mark Noll, for example, focuses almost entirely on these regions in The New Shape of World Christianity, a “comprehensive” analysis of the global faith, which barely mentions Latin America.6 Likely this oversight is due to Latin America’s deep Catholic roots, while recent studies of global Christianity tend to focus on the exponential growth of Protestant, particularly Pentecostal, Christianity. But, Latin America is also a dominant force in this conversion. In his Introduction to Pentecostalism, Allan Anderson observes that “[t]he growth of Pentecostalism in Latin America has been one of the most remarkable stories in the history of Christianity.” And he concludes that “it is quite possible that half of the classical Pentecostals in the world are found in Latin America.”7 As Protestant Pentecostalism has expanded, so has what some have called “Catholic Pentecostalism”; today, Catholic Charismatic Renewal is the most dynamic and fastest-growing current in the Latin American Church.8 As the essays in this volume demonstrate, Latin America should be a core reference point in studies of global Christianity for the following reasons. First, Latin America is arguably the site of the earliest and largest-scale global “conversion” to Christianity. The Europeans who, more than 500 years ago, invaded what would come to be known as Latin America did so with legal sanction provided by the Catholic Pope, and their “right” to the territories of the region was predicated on their conversion of native populations to Christianity. More remarkable than the mandate and its perceived legality was its success. Catholic Christianity became the core religious and cultural identity of the region, transcending geographic, ethnic, class, and later national boundaries of Latin America. By 1550, just over half a century after Christopher Columbus embarked on his journey, proclaiming a desire to convert and to liberate Jerusalem,9 in the Spanish New World, in the famous words of Robert Ricard, the so-called “Spiritual Conquest” was complete.10 Nearly all indigenous people had, in one way or another, embraced the Catholic faith. Even as the spiritual landscape of indigenous people often remained populated by the spirits, daykeepers, holy mountains, sacred caves, and magic energy of the pre-Hispanic world, the images and epistemologies of Christianity came to dominate over time, with time and space marked off by the Catholic liturgical calendar and new Christian ideas of sin and grace becoming part of the indigenous religious idiom.

Introduction   3 Enslaved Africans brought forcibly to the region subsequently also became subject to European efforts to convert them to Catholicism, although slave traders and owners were often much more eager to use religion as a method to control their slaves rather than to save their souls.11 Christianity transformed in the hearts and minds of Africans and their descendants, who overtly and covertly merged the saints and virgins of Catholicism with the spirits and exus of West Africa. While their native religion was one of the only things that enslaved Africans could bring with them to the New World, these religious ideas and expression also, over time, became thoroughly infused with a Catholic religious imaginary. The second reason for placing Latin America at the center of global Christianity derives from the first. Latin American Catholicism has been the subject of some of the most innovative studies about the processes of conversion and the ways that religious structures become foundational to social, political, and cultural continuity and change. Studies of  indigenous and African-descendant “conversion” to Catholicism offer innovative methodological models for understanding how Christianities are changed by those who embrace, practice, and engage them. The wealth of archival materials from Spanish colonial Church and state sources, a breadth of indigenous languages, artistic, and archaeological sources for Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru, and extensive library holdings at the Beinecke library at Yale, the Library of Congress, and the Vatican Archives among others provide the foundation for highly innovative studies about how European Catholicism was transformed by native peoples. Older work by historians including Lewis Hanke, Robert Ricard, John Lloyd Mecham, and, more recently, John Lynch provided comprehensive views of the role of Catholicism in Latin America.12 A new wave of scholarship on Latin American Christianity ensued with prominent figures like Anthony Pagden, Sabine MacCormack, Rolena Adorno, Stewart Schwartz, William Taylor, Eric Van Young, Virginia Garrard, Todd Hartch, R. Andrew Chesnut, Edward Cleary, and others.13 Research also examined the role of Catholic structures—cofradías and cargos—for providing indigenous and African descendants the means of negotiating with the forces of colonialism. In the heyday of mid-twentieth-century anthropology, “religious syncretism”—sometimes called “folk Catholicism”—became a key scholarly preoccupation, with an emphasis on “authentic” versus heterodox religious forms, which now reads as unnecessarily binary in its approach. Later work examining “hybrid” cultures of Latin America was inspired, in part, by the efforts of Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz to understand the complexities of African descendants’ “transculturation” of Catholicism and other European practices and structures.14 The development of liberation theology as a distinctly Latin American response to the Second Vatican Council drew new scholarly attention, especially as Catholics inspired by this reformed vision became associated with revolutionary movements and became the targets of military dictatorships. Scholars who accepted implicitly the theory that secularization was a necessary corollary of modernization were forced by the surprising role of Catholicism in contemporary revolution to question their theories.15 Theologians, political scientists, and historians turned their attention to the surprising transformation of Catholicism and its role in promoting human rights.16

4   Orique, Fitzpatrick-Behrens, and Garrard The final reason for placing Latin America at the center of studies of global Christianity is precisely the fact that the region not only has deep roots in Catholicism and conversion, but also has become one of the most important sites for the exponential growth of Pentecostalism. Given its long-standing identity as a profoundly Catholic region and the limited success of mainline Protestants in facilitating large-scale ­popular conversion, researchers were initially stunned by the phenomenal embrace of Pentecostalism. Pentecostals have grown to some 35 million followers in Latin America and have drawn extensive journalistic and scholarly attention through numerous reports, which often highlighted what was perceived as Pentecostalism’s growing challenge to Catholicism. Pioneering work by David Martin and David Stoll played a key role in drawing scholarly attention to this religious transformation. Is Latin America Turning Protestant? (the title of Stoll’s book) became a refrain for scholars, Catholic clergy and laity, and even casual observers of the region.17 While Pentecostal growth has been extraordinary, Catholic Charismatics outnumber Pentecostals almost two to one in Latin America. Of the world’s 200 million Catholic Charismatics, 73 million are Latin American. Studies about the embrace of Evangelical Christianity abound to such a degree that when historian John Lynch published New Worlds: A Religious History of Latin America in 2012 and argued that “the evidence suggests that for five centuries the defining religion of Latin America has been Catholic . . . ” to explain his overwhelming focus on Catholicism, the claim seemed insufficient to justify the title.18 By the advent of the twenty-first century, the religious history of Latin America appeared to be a history of Christian pluralism. Yet, in practice Lynch’s argument was valid. The Pew Survey on Religion observed, “Historical data suggest that for most of the 20th century, from 1900 through the 1960s, at least 90% of Latin America’s population was Catholic.” Large-scale conversion to Protestantism did not start until the 1970s and, according to Pew, 69 percent of adults in Latin America still identify as Catholic.19 This volume draws together established and up-and-coming scholars in the field of Christianity in Latin America. Individually, each chapter provides a well-referenced overview of the issue or topic addressed to allow both advanced researchers and novice scholars to gain a foundation of knowledge and access to sources to deepen it. The essays are chronologically and thematically focused and have been written by an interdisciplinary group of scholars from the United States and Latin America. Together they cover the period from the European introduction of Catholicism through the advent of the new religious marketplace and conversion to Pentecostalism and Charismatic Catholicism. In addition to providing a depth of knowledge about Christianity in Latin America, the volume may also provide researchers studying global Christianity with a framework for considering issues and approaches to analyze how religious change takes place when faiths are embraced and transformed by new believers in new social, political, and cultural contexts. The depth of scholarship on this process makes Latin America a core area for understanding Christianity’s growth and transformation.

Introduction   5

The History of the Volume Edward J. Cleary, OP, a pioneer in the field of Christianity in Latin America, conceived this volume as a contribution to global Christianity and a reference work for students and scholars seeking knowledge and resources to understand Christianity in Latin America. Cleary was a vital presence in the field of Christian studies in Latin America. In addition to spending more than half a century as an observer and participant in Latin American Christianity, Cleary published more than a dozen books, over fifty articles, and was a cofounder of the Latin American Studies Association Section on Religion. He published the first work on Charismatic Catholics and focused extensively on Catholic lay activism, while also studying deeply the field of Pentecostalism and main-line Protestantism. In addition to being an extraordinarily productive scholar, Cleary, over the years, played a defining role in the lives of many young scholars whose dissertations he scoured before seeking them out for conversation and incorporation into the growing field of studies on Christianity in Latin America, not least the three editors of this volume. Cleary developed the organizational scaffolding of this volume, contracted many of the contributing authors, and secured a contract with Oxford University Press. Regrettably, he passed away in 2011 before he could oversee the development and completion of the project. Religious scholar Manuel A, Vasquez became the volume’s editor after Cleary passed. We thank Vasquez for all the work and insights he brought to this work in the early phases of this project. We gratefully dedicate this work to Edward J. Cleary.

Notes 1. Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002), 2–3. 2. Harvey Gallagher Cox, Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2007), 8. 3. Allan Anderson, An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 11. 4. See, for example, R.  Andrew Chesnut, “Pentecostalization and Pluralization: The New Latino Religious Landscape,” Huffington Post, May 9, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost. com/r-andrew-chesnut/pentecostalization-and-pl_b_5294863.html, and Luis Lugo, “Pope to Visit ‘Pentecostalized’ Brazil,” Pew Research Center on Religion and Public Life, April 19, 2007, http://www.pewforum.org/2007/04/19/pope-to-visit-pentecostalized-brazil/. 5. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, “Spirit and Power: A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostals,” October 5, 2006, http://www.pewforum.org/2006/10/05/spirit-and-power/. 6. Mark  A.  Noll, The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2013).

6   Orique, Fitzpatrick-Behrens, and Garrard 7. Anderson, An Introduction to Pentecostalism, 63. 8. Edward L. Cleary, The Rise of Charismatic Catholicism in Latin America (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2011). 9. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1984), 10–11. 10. Robert Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An Essay on the Apostolate and the Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain, 1532–1572, trans. Lesley B. Simpson (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966). 11. Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986). 12. Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, 1949); Ricard, Spiritual Conquest; J. Lloyd Mecham, Church and State in Latin America: A History of Politico-Ecclesiastical Relations (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1934); John Lynch, “The Catholic Church in Latin America, 1830–1930,” in The Cambridge History of Latin America, 12 vols., ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–2008), 527–595. 13. Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Rolena Adorno, The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014); William B. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); Eric Van Young, The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Mexican Struggle for Independence, 1810–1821 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Protestantism in Guatemala: Living in the New Jerusalem (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1998); Todd Hartch, The Rebirth of Latin American Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Andrew Chesnut, Competitive Spirits: Latin America’s New Religious Economy (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2003). 14. Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunto cubano del tabaco y el azucar: (advertencia de sus contrastes agrarios, económicos, históricos y sociales, su etnografía y transculturación) (La Habana: Universidad Central de las Villas, Dirección de Publicaciones, 1963). 15. José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 16. Phillip Berryman, The Religious Roots of Rebellion: Christians in Central American Revolutions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984); Edward  L.  Cleary, The Struggle for Human Rights in Latin America (Westport, CT: Praeger Press, 1997); Christine Kovic, Mayan Voices for Human Rights: Displaced Catholics in Highland Chiapas (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2005); Scott Mainwaring, The Catholic Church and Politics in Brazil, 1916–1985 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986); Anna  L.  Peterson, Martyrdom and the Politics of Religion: Progressive Catholicism in El Salvador’s Civil War (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997). 17. David Martin, Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); David Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant? The Politics of Evangelical Growth (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990). 18. John Lynch, New Worlds: A Religious History of Latin America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), xv. 19. Pew Research Center, Religion and Public Life: Widespread Change in a Historically Catholic Region (November 13, 2014). http://www.pewforum.org/2014/11/13/religion-inlatin-america/.

pa rt I

C H R IST I A N I T Y C OM E S TO T H E N E W WOR L D

chapter 1

The M a k i ng of Col on i a l Chr isti a n it y i n Hispa n ic A m er ica John F. Schwaller

The conversion of the native peoples of the Americas was an essential component of the Spanish agenda in the conquest and settlement of the New World. As a result of papal grants, the Spanish monarchs were obliged to assure that the indigenous peoples of these new continents would become Christians. Failure to do so would cast doubt on the legitimacy of Spanish claims to the Indies. Additionally, on the Iberian Peninsula the Spanish monarchs had used Christianity as one of three initiatives to galvanize support in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, along with the monarchy and the Spanish language. Thus, the conversion of the natives to Christianity was important for two separate purposes: one international, in that Spanish claims to the New World rested on the spread of Christianity; the other more domestic, in the creation of a homogeneous body politic. While the Catholic Church appears monolithic, there are actually many different institutions that are subsumed within the Church. Although the Church consists of all believers, in reality most people think about the priests and others who represent the Church and who minister in its name. Priests in the Church fall into one of two main categories. Members of established religious orders, such as the Franciscans, Dominicans, or Jesuits, are considered regular clergy. In this context, “regular” does not have the meaning of ordinary or normal, but rather derives from the Latin word regula, meaning a set of rules. Members of the regular clergy live according to a special set of rules for their particular order. Thus, the Franciscans live according to rules handed down by their founder, Saint Francis of Assisi. The Jesuits live according to rules developed by their founder, Saint Ignatius Loyola. The Franciscan, Dominican, and Augustinian orders all took specific vows of poverty and thus were known as the “begging,” or mendicant orders, since they supported themselves through alms. Members of these orders addressed one another as “brother,” and many members

10   John F. Schwaller never became priests. As a result, the members are generally known as friars, from the Latin word frater, meaning brother. Only members of orders who lived their lives separated from the world and who followed the Benedictine Rule were known as monks. Thus, there were very few monks in colonial Hispanic America. For reasons that will be explored later, most of the early efforts to Christianize the native peoples of the New World came from the members of the regular clergy. The regular clergy are largely self-governing, organizing their members into convents or priories that are linked into provinces, and eventually to officials who generally reside in Rome, and ultimately to the pope. Until the mid-sixteenth century the religious orders operated without much local supervision from bishops or archbishops.1 In Europe, and eventually in the New World, most parish priests were members of the secular clergy, also known as the diocesan clergy, and not members of organized religious orders. The word “secular” derives from a Latin word (saeculum) which means the world, implying that these priests lived out in the world, not closeted away in convents or monasteries or priories. The term “diocesan” refers to the fact that these priests were supervised by local bishops and functioned within the district governed by the bishop, called a diocese or bishopric. Bishops and archbishops are equal in the eyes of the Church, except that archbishops have some administrative supervision over neighboring bishops in their region, also called an ecclesiastical province.2 The spreading of Christianity is called evangelization. This term derives from the Latin word for the Gospels (evangelium, also known as the “Good News” from the original Greek)—the accounts of Jesus’s ministry in the New Testament. As such, this would mean something akin to “spreading the Gospel.” In general, early evangelization fell frequently to members of the regular clergy. Because they were largely self-governing, a small group of regular priests could operate outside of the normal ecclesiastical hierarchy of bishops and archbishops. Moreover, in 1522 the Franciscan Order had received a special permission from the pope allowing them to exercise the full range of church ministries, without the need for bishops, as long as they were in regions more than three days’ travel to a bishop. This permission was called Omnimoda (“total”), since it essentially gave the missionary friars full papal authority for their ministry. Eventually this privilege was extended to all of the missionary orders. By and large, four religious orders participated in the early missionary efforts in the New World: the Franciscans (OFM), Dominicans (OP), Augustinians (OSA), and Mercedarians (OM). In general, the colonial world consisted of two great cultural regions: Mesoamerica, what is now Central Mexico reaching down into Central America, and the Andes, the mountainous regions stretching from modern-day Colombia to Chile. Different orders held primacy in different regions. For instance, the Franciscans were the first order to evangelize Mexico, but the Mercedarians had ­primacy in Peru. Each of the orders had a different approach to the work of conversion, largely in keeping with their historical traditions. The Franciscans had, as an essential element of their calling, the desire to emulate Christ. Thus, they approached conversion through the pursuit of apostolic poverty and charity (living in a manner like Christ and his apostles),

The Making of Colonial Christianity in Hispanic America   11 believing that the natives would be attracted to Christianity by their lifestyle. The Dominicans were established as an order of preachers, believing that through their preaching, people would be attracted to the message of Christ and would gain a deeper understanding of Christianity. Thus, in the New World, they put great emphasis on preaching and education in general. The Mercedarians were founded with the goal of ransoming captives held by Muslims and other non-Christians. Thus, their order was accustomed to operating under difficult conditions in non-Christian areas. The Franciscans arrived in New Spain, the region that eventually became Mexico, in 1524, followed by the Dominicans in 1528, and Augustinians in 1533. In Peru, the Mercedarians began their mission in 1541, followed by the Franciscans and the Dominicans. Upon their arrival, each order pursued the conversion of the natives to Christianity. One clear obstacle was that of language. The friars spoke Spanish, the Bible was written in Latin, and the services were also conducted in Latin. Although the missionaries considered teaching Spanish to all the natives, clearly it was more efficient for the missionaries to learn the native languages. Nonetheless, a few children of the native elite were trained in both Spanish and Latin in order to serve as intermediaries in conversion efforts. In both New Spain and Peru, the natives spoke hundreds of different languages, many of them mutually unintelligible because they were from completely different language families. Yet in both regions, as a result of influence of the Aztec and Inca empires, there were common languages spoken by many people over wide swaths of the land. In New Spain the Aztec language, Nahuatl, was the lingua franca (the language of trade and government) from the deserts of northwestern Mexico all the way into Central America. Similarly, in the Andes the Inca language, Quechua, was the lingua franca from Ecuador all the way to modern-day Chile and northern Argentina. Thus, the missionaries could draw on this tradition of native languages to assist them in the conversion of the native. Christian prayers and catechisms could be translated into one of these common languages, or even composed originally in those languages, for use in the conversion. In both the case of Nahuatl and Quechua, the missionaries had to choose one of the regional dialects to serve as the standard. In both instances they selected the version spoken by the elites of each native empire. Thus Cuzco Quechua and Nahuatl of the Valley of Mexico became the normative for the missionaries, as those dialects had been under the Inca and Aztecs. In both regions the missionaries tapped into preexisting patterns of control and domination. Because both languages had been used as imperial languages, regional variants continued to exist. In the case of the Andes, the language spoken in the northern reaches of the Inca Empire was known as Quichua, because of local pronunciation variants. In Mesoamerica several forms of Nahuatl coexisted. In the region of Oaxaca, for example, the local Nahuatl depended on what the underlying native language had been, since Zapotec speakers spoke a different variant from Mixtec speakers, because of their first language. Consequently, there were several “Nahuatls as a second language,” depending on the underlying native language. The translation of Christian concepts into the native languages posed tremendous difficulty. Christian notions of sin simply did not exist in native philosophies and religions.

12   John F. Schwaller At the same time, the missionaries agonized over whether to use native words for “god” to describe the Christian deity, or to simply leave the word Dios untranslated. At this point a process called “double mistaken identity” by one scholar began to take hold.3 Although many missionaries gained fluency in the native languages, they continued to think like Europeans. Similarly, many natives attained fluency in Spanish, but continued to think like their ancestors had. Although each side thought they understood what the other meant by some word or practice, in actual fact they were quite wrong, and tragically wrong in some instances. For example, in Mexico missionaries used two epithets from pre-conquest times to describe the Christian deity: Ipalnemoani, “the one through whom all live,” and Tloque Nahuaque, “possessor of the nearby, possessor of the far.” Yet these two epithets were associated in pre-conquest thought with the important trickster and war god Tezcatlipoca.4 Consequently, native peoples associated some aspects of Tezcatlipoca with the new Christian God, while the friars thought that these descriptions merely enhanced and deepened the natives’ understanding of the Christian God. The process of adopting the foreign belief system while adapting it to the native thought and belief process is also called “transculturation.” On the surface it might seem as if the natives have embraced Christianity, but in reality they have embraced a set of beliefs that they incorporated into and modified because of their preexisting vision of the world. The different missionary techniques of the different religious orders also had an impact on how quickly and how thoroughly the natives under their supervision embraced the new religion. Medieval theologians inspired the Franciscans to believe that once Christianity had been spread among all nations, the end times would begin and Christ’s kingdom on earth would start, known as the millennium or thousand-year reign. As a result, Franciscans were very eager to convert as many natives as quickly as possible because they genuinely believed that Christ’s second coming was near. For them, baptism, the sacrament through which a person formally became a Christian, was crucial. The early chronicles of the order have tales of hundreds of thousands of natives being baptized by specific missionaries. In contrast, the Dominicans believed that people had to fully understand the religion before they could make an informed choice to embrace it. Thus, they established a long process whereby the natives would slowly be taught about Christian doctrine (indoctrination) before actually receiving the sacrament of baptism. These two approaches created significantly different responses among native peoples. As a result of grants from the pope to the kings of Spain, the Spanish monarchs had the right to nominate bishops and request the creation of dioceses, the territories governed by bishops. The first dioceses in the New World were created in 1512, to supervise the Church on the islands of Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. In 1525, the King created the first diocese in North America, that of Puebla-Tlaxcala, and appointed Fr. Julián Garcés, OFM, as first bishop. The diocese of Lima was created in 1541 with Fr. Jerónimo de Loayza, OP, as first bishop. The monarchs also had the responsibility to appoint other Church officials, create parishes, appoint parish priests, and collect and distribute the ecclesiastical tax—the tithe, a 10 percent tax on agricultural production and commodities.

The Making of Colonial Christianity in Hispanic America   13 The Spanish kings donated the tithe back to the Church, but held back a small portion, one-ninth, to further missionary activity. Because the religious orders operated under their own rules, established centuries before and endorsed by a series of popes, they fell largely outside of the supervision of royal authority. The evangelization of the New World coincided with the Protestant Reformation. Some theologians of the era believed that the missionary activity in the New World was a divine response to the Reformation, allowing the Catholic Church to gain adherents in the new lands as it lost faithful in Europe. The most important Catholic response to the Reformation was the convening of an ecumenical council in Trent (located in northwestern Italy), in order to bring about needed reform within the Church. The bishops and other prelates met on and off for nearly two decades as they debated reforms and the agenda for the future of the Church. Finally, in 1563, the final decrees were published. One of the important concepts elaborated by the reforms was that the local bishop should have greater control over the clergy in his diocese, both the secular and the regular clergy. In the reforms of Trent, the Spanish Crown saw an opportunity to bring the religious orders in the New World more completely under royal jurisdiction, by bringing them under the control of local bishops. In addition, the royal courts had the power to interpret Church law in certain contexts, and thus resolve disputes between the branches of the clergy. As the Spanish population of the colonies increased to a critical mass, local officials and the Crown all began to recognize the need for opportunities for women in the Church. In the early modern period, the role of women in the Church was largely confined to religious orders for women. Every major city of Latin America saw the establishment of convents for women within a few years after conquest and settlement. Religious orders for women are part of the regular orders, by definition. Each house or convent followed a particular set of rules and ordinances, frequently versions of the rules for male religious orders. Thus each major religious order had both male and female components. For example, the Franciscan Rule was adapted for use by female religious in an order named after its founder, one of Saint Francis’s early followers: Saint Clare of Assisi. Female Franciscans came to be known as the Poor Clares, since they pursued the same goal of apostolic poverty, as did Francis. Because historically the order for men was established first, it was known as the First Order of Saint Francis. The Order of Saint Clare, established later, is known as the Second Order. Thus in general, male orders are known as the First Order, female as the Second Order. Eventually orders were developed for lay people, which did not require members to take vows of celibacy. These lay orders are known as Third Orders. Early foundations for women were created when nuns traveled from Spain to help establish their orders in the New World. With this critical mass, they then began to recruit new members from among the daughters of the local elite. Just as male orders had a specific vocation or calling (Dominicans were a preaching order, for example, and Mercedarians sought the ransom of captives), so female religious houses also had specific vocations, such as caring for the ill or continual prayer. Several early convents for women were established to assist in what were seen as two pressing needs of society

14   John F. Schwaller of the time. One was to provide an honorable calling to young women from “good” families who for one reason or another probably would not marry. Another was to offer a secure and safe place for women and children to live while the male head of household was abroad in trade or conquest. Lastly, convents could offer a place where women who had been abandoned by their male protector might seek a new life.5 As dioceses were created and bishops were appointed, native peoples came into contact with the secular clergy and witnessed some of the tension between the secular and the regular clergy, and especially efforts by local bishops, even those who were members of religious orders themselves, to reign in the orders. Issues emerged over the degree to which the natives, as neophytes, or newcomers to the faith, should be subject to the rules and regulations that applied to all the faithful. Two areas quickly emerged in which the role of natives was at issue. The tithe was historically the basis for the financial support of the Church. While in Europe the tithe was collected on a wide range of items, in the New World it was limited to agricultural products and commodities elaborated from them. For instance, the tithe on wheat consisted of one-tenth of the grain harvested from a given farm. But for sugar, the tax was not imposed on the sugar cane, but on the refined sugar and molasses made from the cane. The native peoples paid a variety of taxes to the Spanish state, the most important of which was tribute, a head tax imposed on heads of household. As a result of the papal grants giving the Spanish monarchs control over the New World Church, the king also was ultimately responsible for paying local priests, bishops, and other ecclesiastical officials. At the same time, the king collected tribute from the natives, some of which was distributed to local Spanish elites in recognition of their participation in the conquest and settlement of the region. The king resolved to use the tribute as the source of funding for parish priests who administered the sacraments among the natives. Similarly, local colonists who received tribute from the natives were also responsible for paying the priests who ministered to those natives. Thus, if the natives were required to pay the tithe, they would, in essence, be paying twice for the support of the Church: once through tribute, a second time through the tithe. As a result, the natives were generally exempted from having to pay the tithe, except on three items of European origin: wheat, silk, and wine. In the newly established dioceses of the New World, the Crown did not establish the Holy Office of the Inquisition—the government office dedicated to maintaining the purity of the Christian faith—until the 1570s. In the absence of a formally established Inquisition, the power of inquisitor rested with the local bishop. In the 1530s the bishop of Mexico, Fr. Juan de Zumárraga, OFM, pursued inquisitions against some native leaders, one of whom was a traditional lord of the important town of Texcoco. In the wake of the inquisitorial trial, the native lord and others were executed as apostates and idolaters, that is, ones who had rejected Christianity and had returned to the worship of idols. This had a profound impact on public opinion both in Mexico and in Spain. In general, most felt that the natives, as recent converts to Christianity, could not be held to the same standard as Spaniards. As a result, the natives were exempted from the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. Nonetheless, their religious practices and

The Making of Colonial Christianity in Hispanic America   15 beliefs were still subject to the scrutiny of the local bishop through the normal Church courts, but not the Inquisition. The sixteenth century saw the rapid growth of both the regular and secular clergy. Missionaries from Spain continued to travel to the New World at the same time that the local Spanish population grew and began to contribute young men to both branches of the clergy. The number of dioceses continued to increase rapidly into the seventeenth century, when the growth slowed. As a result of internal political considerations and mandates of the Council of Trent, the Spanish Crown continued to seek to limit the power of the religious orders. One of the outcomes of Trent was to place more pastoral supervision in the hands of the local bishop: that is, local bishops were to take an active role in the administration of Church sacraments within their territory. As a result, members of the regular clergy needed to be licensed to perform religious services by the bishop of the diocese within which they operated. For the Spanish Crown, the regulations established at Trent provided a method with bringing the regular clergy under greater control. By and large, the Crown had little direct control over the regular orders, since they had their own internal administration that bypassed the Crown. But since the regulars administered the sacraments, they needed to be licensed by the local bishop, who was ultimately appointed by the king. In addition, the Crown began a program in the late sixteenth century that moved regular clerics from serving parishes in rural areas into convents and monasteries in towns and cities. This program sought to place all parishes in the hands of the secular clergy, and under more direct royal supervision. The process, however, took until the mid-eighteenth century to accomplish. Perhaps the most successful order was the Society of Jesus, known as the Jesuits. A Basque Spaniard, Saint Ignatius Loyola, founded the order. The Jesuits used a strong military-style organization to allow them to confront the threat of the Protestant Reformation and to engage in missionary activity overseas. Because the order was founded at about the same time as the discovery and conquest of the Americas, it arrived later to the region than the other missionary groups, generally around 1570. The Jesuits tended to focus on two types of activity. On the one hand, the Jesuits established colleges for the education of the European residents, frequently affiliated with one of the universities that had been established in the Americas, and also ministered to urban populations in general. On the other hand, the Jesuits also had missions in the frontier regions of the empire: in the northwest of Mexico and in what is now Paraguay, to name but two regions. In order to support these activities, the Jesuits embraced commercial agriculture. Using land either donated to the order or purchased by it, the Jesuits developed farms and ranches, the products of which would fund their extensive activities. In some places these estates produced cattle and wheat for the local market. In other places the Jesuits owned and operated sugar plantations; in still others they cultivated vineyards and produced wine. The common denominator was large-scale, almost industrial-scale, production for the commercial market. Profits were reinvested into operations and in

16   John F. Schwaller the purchase of additional estates, as well as for the support of the colleges and missions. In this way, the Society of Jesus became the largest and wealthiest order in colonial Hispanic America. Once the missionaries had mastered the native languages, they also set about learning about the native cultures. While much of the information they gathered helps modern scholars understand the pre-conquest civilizations better, even eliciting the comparison of the early missionaries with modern ethnographers—the comparison is badly made. The missionaries had a single goal that drove their interest in the native societies: they wished to eradicate the last vestiges of the old culture and replace it with Christianity. In the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Christianity acquired many local variations across the length and breadth of Hispanic America as local practices became established. As part of the conversion process, the missionaries and parish priests implemented many features of popular Christianity and also sought to involve the natives in the life of the Church. In order to facilitate the daunting task of teaching the rudiments of Christian doctrine to thousands of natives in any given parish, the priests trained natives to assist them. Native labor built churches in native villages. Natives cleaned and cared for the churches. Native musicians participated in the liturgy. Some natives served as acolytes and took minor roles in the celebration of Church rituals. In short, all of the essential elements of church life involved the natives. By the last quarter of the sixteenth century, and even earlier in central Mexico, religious sodalities began to emerge in native communities. Sodalities, also known as confraternities (cofradías), provided small group experience for the newly converted natives. In general, sodalities were church organizations that provide mutual support for parishioners. Importantly, their membership included both men and women. They might take the form of burial societies or prayer groups. In the Hispanic world, many societies dedicated themselves to the veneration of the consecrated host, the Blessed Sacrament. In a cofradía, members would pay annual dues, participate in regular worship activities with other members, and provide financial support for the Christian burial of members. Clergy favored the creation of cofradías as a means of increasing religious devotion, providing additional revenue for the priest and also for the upkeep of the church building. The cofradía operated under the supervision of the local parish priest, but had a rather large degree of freedom from scrutiny. From the late sixteenth century, records of various native cofradía were kept in native languages, such as Nahuatl. One friar, Alonso de Molina, is credited with having developed a Nahuatl language constitution for the sodality of the Blessed Sacrament (Santísimo Sacramento). With the passage of time, some of these societies came to acquire fairly large sums of money that would be managed by the leadership of the organization, not by the parish priest. This money could be invested in mortgages on property or in livestock or other productive enterprises. The cofradías also sponsored local religious festivals during which funds were spent, either coming out of the communal coffers or the pockets of the chosen leaders. The natives of Mesoamerica in particular, and the Andean region to a lesser degree, capitalized on the Spanish having transcribed their languages into European characters.

The Making of Colonial Christianity in Hispanic America   17 In particular, in the colonial period hundreds of thousands of documents were written in Nahuatl using the system developed by the missionary friars. The Maya, too, embraced the Spanish system of writing their languages, but to a lesser degree than the Nahua. Literacy allowed the natives to develop their own artistic expression in support of their faith. The production of religiously oriented dramas proved quite popular. Initially these theatrical productions followed strict Spanish conventions and focused on biblical stories. But creativity brought about a flowering of expression, running the gamut from passion plays to morality plays, to farces, all composed by natives for natives, sometimes with a minimum of Spanish supervision. Music played a very important role in religious celebrations in most native communities prior to the arrival of the Spanish. Logically, music was enlisted to serve in the celebration of Christian rituals. The missionaries attempted to train native musicians in European musical traditions with European instruments, particularly stringed instruments that were largely unknown, since native instrumentation included drums and other rhythm instruments, flutes, and horns of various types. The natives, especially in the Nahuatl-speaking regions, had a tradition of choral music, songs composed to honor the pre-conquest deities. The use of these songs by the natives during Christian rituals was of great concern for the missionaries. Yet, faced with this problem, they had three choices: to eliminate native music completely, to modify the lyrics of native songs to make them more appropriate to a Christian setting, or to train native musicians in a completely new style, namely European music. Time pressures dictated that while the missionaries hoped to train the natives in the new style, as a stop-gap measure, they would adopt native songs and adapt them to the new reality.6 In the Andean region, the use of natives as assistants within the parish proved to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, clearly missionaries could not have served their native parishioners without local assistants. Not only did the Quechua language pose its own problems, at the same time Andean spirituality was quite alien to the missionaries. Without native assistants, the missionaries would have been quite unable to express notions about the Christian deity in any intelligible way. While the missionaries focused much energy on the creation of an educated native elite, to serve as cultural intermediaries, they did not copy the system developed in Mexico where children of native leaders were taken off to a school in Mexico City for indoctrination. Rather, they attempted to teach the native leaders in their own home areas. Yet, as in Mesoamerica, they did accord a special status to the native leaders. Thus many villages had a cadre of young Quechua speakers from elite families who were seen as cultural intermediaries. In the cities, the seventeenth century saw the flowering of life in the convents. Female religious of the era came to occupy a critically important role in society. The impact of these women can be seen in the lives of two female religious: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in Mexico and Saint Rose of Lima in Peru. They manifest nearly diametrically opposite responses to the role of women in the larger society. Sor Juana was born into a largely creole family in the Valley of Mexico. She learned to read at home, and hoped to pursue a life of letters. As a young woman she moved to live with family members in Mexico City. Wishing to continue her education, she tried

18   John F. Schwaller to dress like a boy to attend the university. Nonetheless, she became a member of the viceregal court and served as a lady in waiting to the vicereine, the Marquesa de Mancera. Thwarted in her desire to pursue her education at the university and unwilling to marry the men of the court who had proposed to her, she opted to join the convent. She first entered a very austere order, later opting to join a more relaxed one, the Hieronymite nuns. In the convent she continued her education and established a circle of admirers. Behind the screen of the convent, she entertained a wide range of notables and became a famous poet in her own right. Her poetry was widely respected in the Spanish-speaking world, gaining her the epithet of the “Tenth Muse.” She can even be considered an early feminist, as seen in her poem “Foolish Men” (Hombres necios). Later in her life, she experienced several crises of conscience and eventually embraced an austere and penitent life style, dying at the age of forty-four.7 Saint Rose of Lima had a far different life from Sor Juana. Rose was the daughter of an early settler and conqueror of Peru. Born and raised in Lima, she adopted the lifestyle of Dominican nuns at an early age, living as a Third Order, or lay nun. As she matured, she rejected the advances of boys and became even more dedicated to prayer and self-mortification. Her father, however, refused to allow her to join the convent. As a result, she formally professed to be a lay member of the Dominican Order for women before the archbishop of Lima, taking the name of Rose. Thereafter she voluntarily followed the Dominican rule. Her lifestyle attracted the attention of the Lima elite and during her life she gained a reputation for saintliness, living in a solitary cell that her father had built for her within the family home. She died at the age of thirty-one, universally acclaimed a saint. The process of sainthood was completed fifty years after her death.8 Rose and Sor Juana manifest nearly opposite reactions of women to religious life. Sor Juana found conventual life liberating, allowing her to pursue her own intellectual pursuits somewhat protected from the outside world. Saint Rose fully embraced the ascetic lifestyle that was common in seventeenth-century Latin America, cutting herself off completely from the outside world. Andean religions placed great importance on the landscape, in a manner that was completely inscrutable to the European conquerors. Ritual objects had a spiritual power that the Europeans similarly did not understand. Moreover, the Inca, in particular, engaged in a type of ancestor worship in which the mummified remains of previous rulers were considered part of the ruling elite and were consulted on a regular basis. In Mesoamerica, natives continued to practice private quotidian rituals, table blessings, incantations for good crops, and curing ceremonies, in spite of prohibitions on them. As part of the evangelization throughout the Hispanic Americas, the missionaries attempted to root out many of these practices, but were not completely successful. In Mesoamerica from the late sixteenth century and in the Andean region by the early seventeenth century, local parish priests began to become aware of the remaining vestiges of native religion and spirituality that continued to play an active role in the native communities. Since the natives were exempted from the jurisdiction of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, it fell to the local bishop, and by extension the local parish priest, to root out and eliminate the surviving native practices. The movement has been called the “extirpation.”

The Making of Colonial Christianity in Hispanic America   19 During extirpation efforts, both in the Andean region and in Mesoamerica, local parish priests, generally not friars or members of religious orders, would investigate charges of idolatry, the veneration of idols, and apostasy—Christians who had abandoned the new faith and practiced the old religions. While a few individuals were found to have rejected Christianity or to have continued pre-conquest native religious practices in giving offerings and prayers to idols, the vast majority of native peoples practiced a religion that was essentially Christianity, with numerous additions and borrowing from pre-conquest religion. Religion, like so many other areas of culture, witnessed not just the mixture of two traditions, but a thorough mixing as well. In the extirpation campaigns, natives were punished, idols were seized and destroyed, public punishments meted out, but no one was executed, as Church courts lacked the authority to enforce capital punishment. Just as an earlier period had seen the creation of many texts describing the pre-conquest cultures, understanding the native culture in order to better evangelize, so the ­period of the extirpation also saw the writing of handbooks describing local customs and religious practices with an eye to eradicating them. Scholars in the modern period have drawn on these texts to understand both the pre-conquest native cultures and the mid-colonial culture and religious practices. What is clear is that within the first century following the conquest, many different varieties of Christianity developed, each influenced by the nature and character of the local culture and pre-conquest religion. This process has been called “syncretism.” While previous generations of scholars view syncretism as an unfortunate byproduct of evangelization, and something to ultimately be avoided, modern thought sees it as a process whereby a religion changes in response to local conditions. From its very origins, Christianity drew upon the religious environment of the Mediterranean world. Clearly the placement of the birth of Jesus, in late December, reflects a merging of celebrations with the preexisting holidays associated with the winter solstice. Thus, throughout the Hispanic colonial world, and Christian world in general, there were celebrations at other important solar moments. Easter by rule falls near the spring equinox. Saint John the Baptist was celebrated on June 24, near the summer solstice, and exactly six months from Christmas, while Saint Michael was venerated with all the angels on September 29, near the autumnal equinox. Each of these celebrations could, then, take on the character of the pre-conquest religious tradition associated with these solar events. European concerns that native religions were possible manifestations of the diabolic began to wane in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Increasingly, parish priests and government officials realized that while popular manifestations of religion might vary from region to region, they needed to focus on the native people’s embrace of the basic principles of Christianity, the foundational prayers, and essential rituals, and not fret about seemingly idolatrous behavior. Consequently, the number of extirpation campaigns and trials for idolatry begin to decline in the eighteenth century.9 During the period of the extirpation, the tensions between the regular clergy and the seculars increased. In the mid-seventeenth century, one bishop in Mexico, Juan de Palafox

20   John F. Schwaller y Mendoza, attempted to bring the regular orders more directly under his supervision. In attempting to regulate the activities of the Jesuit Order, Palafox demanded that local priests who administered the sacraments be licensed by him, as mandated in the Council of Trent. The Jesuits refused, noting that the order was under the direct supervision of the pope. Palafox responded by ordering the Jesuits to pay the tithe on their extensive agricultural holdings, reasoning that if the order were not part of the local Church (i.e., subject to the authority of the bishop), they should have to pay the tithe like everyone else. The confrontation ended in a stalemate as both sides filed suits against one another that dragged on for nearly a century. Not until the eighteenth century did the Spanish Crown begin to actively seek greater control over the religious orders as it took a series of actions limiting the number of regular clerics, restricting the number of convents and monasteries, refusing to allow persons to enter the orders, and limiting the amount of money that the orders could inherit from individuals. At the same time, the Crown began to appoint bishops and archbishops who shared the more expansive vision of the Church. When local bishops and archbishops met in council, they passed local Church rules that also created greater scrutiny over the regular orders while generally favoring the seculars. The epitome of the Crown’s program of limiting the regular clergy can be seen in actions taken against the Jesuits. In the mid-eighteenth century a vocal opposition began to grow in the Catholic Church in Europe over what was perceived as abuses by the Society of Jesus. In the Hispanic world, these complaints found a sympathetic hearing from the king, who was concerned over the power of the religious orders in general, but who had specific concerns about the Jesuits. While the Jesuits were probably the wealthiest of the religious orders because of their extensive participation in commercial agriculture, the order also disregarded national origins when it came to assigning personnel. Thus in Hispanic America, Jesuits came from a wide range of nationalities, not just from the kingdoms of Spain. For instance, a famous Jesuit of the early seventeenth century who served in Mexico was originally from Florence. Another famous missionary of the northern frontier was German speaking: Ignaz Pfefferkorn.10 The Spanish Crown resolved to expel all Jesuits from its American holdings, effective April 2, 1767. The expulsion command was kept secret until the morning of the announcement. Jesuits were offered a choice of either permanent exile from the Indies or to leave the order to become secular priests. Very few Jesuits chose the second option. The Crown took over the lands and estates of the order and eventually offered them at auction. The Crown kept the proceeds to benefit various missionary efforts, such as the Franciscans who had taken over the planned Jesuit missions in California. The expulsion of the Jesuits also marked a severe blow to higher education in the Spanish colonies, since the Jesuits ran colleges in most of the major Spanish towns and were an important component in the handful of universities that had been created. In the parishes in the eighteenth century, the faithful continued to participate actively in the life of the church. Over the two centuries since the conquest and evangelization, native peoples had developed their own popular responses to church teachings. They found expression in the festivals and ceremonies that unfolded as the Church year

The Making of Colonial Christianity in Hispanic America   21 progressed. Natives also had forums in which they could manifest their spirituality, especially in small group activities associated with cofradías. Some members of the native communities took the expression of faith even further and composed various spiritual works, which sometimes purported to be canonical; others were fanciful reworkings of known spiritual guides, others still simple flights of fancy. Importantly, though, many of these were written in native languages such as Maya and Nahuatl. The religious authorities had reached an uneasy accommodation with native interpretations of Christian practices. From time to time there were efforts to correct what was seen as heterodox propositions and practices. But denunciations of idolaters might also be interpreted as plots for revenge against others based on a variety of other reasons. Because the ultimate authority to police native religious practices was one of the powers of the local bishop, the prosecution varied widely from diocese to diocese. Thus in most regions of Hispanic America there was a variety of rich and complex practices and beliefs, based in Christianity with native overlay.11 On the eve of independence, while the institutional Church faced a crisis because of continuing attempts by the Crown to control its activities, the Church as it was manifested in thousands of communities continued to be robust. The church building was a focal point of community pride and a locus of community celebrations. The Church— edifice and community—provided structure to native communities, offering some leadership roles to natives in the maintenance and celebration of the Christian cult, from majordomos to sacristans and musicians. The cofradías organized in the parish provided opportunities for social interaction, support in difficult times, and a small cushion of financial stability. Plays, processions, and pageants offered entertainment while celebrating collective identity and local culture, through the prism of Christianity. In short, over three centuries Christianity had gone from a cult imposed by the conquerors on the native peoples to a vehicle for self-expression among those same native communities.

Notes 1. Scholars and others have paid considerably more attention to the religious orders than to the secular clergy. The first significant modern attempt to look at the evangelization following the conquest focused on the mendicant orders in New Spain: Robert Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An Essay on the Apostolate and the Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain, 1532–1572, translated by Lesley B. Simpson (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966). This work was first published in French in 1933 as Ricard’s doctoral thesis. 2. Less emphasis has been placed on the role of the secular clergy. Among the works that do focus on it are: John Frederick Schwaller, The Church and Clergy in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1987) and William B. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). 3. James Lockhart, Nahuas after the Conquest (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 445. 4. Louise Burkhart, The Slippery Earth (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1989), 70.

22   John F. Schwaller 5. Asunción Lavrin has produced many excellent works describing the importance of female religious in colonial Latin America. A major overview of convent life can be found in: Asunción Lavrin, Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). For the importance of convent life in early Peru see: Luis Martin, Daughters of the Conquistadores: Women of the Viceroyalty of Peru (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1983). 6. An example of this is Bernardino de Sahagún, Psalmodia christiana, translated by Arthur J. O. Anderson (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1993). 7. Octavio Paz, Sor Juana: Or, The Traps of Faith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1990). 8. Two works to explore aspects of St. Rose’s life include: Ronald J. Morgan, Spanish American Saints and the Rhetoric of Identity, 1600–1810 (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2002), 67–97; Kathleen Ann Myers, “ ‘Redeemer of America’: Rosa de Lima (1589–1617), the Dynamics of Identity, and Canonization,” in Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas, eds. Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff (New York, NY: Routledge, 2003), 251–275. 9. Fernando Cervantes, The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 125–147. 10. Albrecht Classen, Early History of German Speaking Jesuit Missionaries: A Transcultural Experience in the Eighteenth Century (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 85–129. 11. For a good view of native religious practices in eighteenth-century Mexico, see: Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred, 48–73.

chapter 2

Ti m e a n d Chr isti a n it y i n Ea r ly L ati n A m er ica Matthew O’Hara

In 1524, just a few years after the fall of the Aztec capital, a remarkable intellectual confrontation took place in Mexico City. In the hybrid European-indigenous city that was slowly emerging from the ruins of the former Tenochtitlán, recently arrived Christian missionaries and Mexica-Nahua spiritual leaders discussed religious questions, including conversion to Christianity. The event was a coloquio, or a series of formal speeches, presentations, and responses, where both sides offered their views on the religious transformation sought by the Europeans. Although the record of the coloquio was from decades after the actual event, the Franciscan friars who led the initial evangelization of central Mexico discussed their God as the “true” God, rejected the Nahuas’ deities as false, and expressed their desire for immediate native conversion to Christianity. These “Twelve” Franciscans, whose number intentionally evoked the number of Christ’s apostles, were from a branch of the order whose understanding of time strongly shaped their religious work. Their writings and actions were suffused with a great sense of urgency, as they expected the imminent second coming of Christ and the arrival of the end days. They believed that their evangelical labor would accelerate this process, since medieval prophecies had foretold the return of the Messiah would occur only when the Word of God had been spread among all the peoples of the earth.1 These mendicant friars’ understanding of earthly time, with its implications for their work among the indigenous peoples they encountered, was bound up with their particular interpretation of spiritual and biblical time. As the marching orders given to them by their Franciscan Minister General, Francisco de los Ángeles, explained, “But now that the dawn is far spent and passing away, which is the eleventh hour of which the Gospel speaks, you are called by the head of the family to go forth into his vineyard.”2

24   Matthew O’Hara The indigenous elders gathered at the coloquio responded deferentially, yet voiced grave concerns about the project of the Franciscans. These “lords and holy men” of Tenochtitlán questioned the wholesale replacement of the old gods with the new, Christian one. To do so, one of the Mexica lords described, would be unimaginable, literally wrenching his people out of time. “There has never been a time remembered when they were not worshipped, honored, and esteemed,” he explained. “Perhaps it is a century or two since this [worship] began; [in any case] it is a time beyond counting.” As for the proposed extirpation of the old gods, he found it “very scandalous,” since it endangered the Nahuas’ spiritual and material well-being, and exposed the Spaniards themselves to ruin. Appealing to the Europeans’ obvious desire for dominion over native peoples, and based on his understanding that such control rested on the ­continued power and authority of the native elite, the lord warned, “Watch out that we do not incur the wrath of our gods. Watch out that the common people do not rise up against us if we were to tell them that the gods they have always understood to be such are not gods at all.” He therefore urged his European interlocutors to proceed gradually and with caution. He concluded, “It is best, our lords, to act on this matter very slowly, with great deliberation.”3 As in many other encounters in early Latin America, the coloquio in Mexico City was wrapped in nuance and layered in significance. In this case, the discussion of religion and conversion was also a debate over time. Indeed, the arrival of Christianity in the Americas and its long-term development throughout the colonial era were closely connected to questions of time, such as the understanding of human experience and manipulation of time, the crafting of historical memory, or the imagining of potential futures. In all these factors, religion and time should be thought of as reciprocal, even mutually constitutive, where time shaped the practice and experience of religion, but religious thought and practice also defined time itself. In this usage, “time” refers to the lived experience of time, and all of its human dimensions, sometimes referred to in shorthand as “temporality,” rather than simply “clock” time or “objective” time.4 Exploring classic and recent historical scholarship on the colonial era, this chapter considers some of the ways that the history of Christianity in early Latin America is also a history of time. It focuses on the viceroyalty of New Spain, and central Mexico in particular, but also makes references to scholarship from other parts of Spanish America. The chapter does not exhaustively survey the historiography, but concentrates on some indigenous and European understandings, uses, and manipulations of time and its relationship to the process of evangelization. This historiographical tactic is a reflection of the great diversity of case studies produced in recent years, but also scholars’ current discomfort with arguments that attempt to determine the success or failure of Christian evangelization in the region as a whole, whether the European domination of a “spiritual conquest” or the “idols behind altars” of indigenous resistance. Centering our attention on time starts a productive dialogue within the historiography on early Christianity, without rehashing earlier conversations about the effectiveness of religious conversion. In this spirit, the chapter moves beyond what seems to be a tired debate about the relative “Europeanness” or “indigeneity” of post-conquest cultures, focusing,

Time and Christianity in Early Latin America   25 instead, on unique ways of being that emerged out of the remarkable convergence of intellectual traditions and cultural practices in the colonial world. * * * Perhaps the most widely known and well-studied aspect of religious time in early Latin America is the millenarian impulse among some of the first Christian missionaries, and more generally evident in the encounter between European Christianity and indigenous religion and spirituality. As John Leddy Phelan pointed out in his study of the writings of Gerónimo de Mendieta (1525–1604)—another Franciscan who arrived in New Spain slightly later in the sixteenth century than the Twelve, and who reflected on the missionary experience up to his day—the Franciscans of the first wave came from the so-called Observant branch of their order, and many held an apocalyptic view of contemporary events. They were influenced in spirit, if not directly, by the ideas and writings of a twelfth-century abbot, Joachim de Fiore (ca. 1135–1202) from Calabria, who prophesied a coming stage of human history that would correspond to the biblically announced kingdom of the Apocalypse. This epoch would be characterized by a renewed Church that would revolve around the spiritual lives of the friars.5 Mendieta and Fiore’s vision of time relied on a method of scriptural and biblical interpretation later referred to as “typology,” which held that biblical events and knowledge were prefigurations of later occurrences.6 In theological readings confined to the Bible, Christians had long used typology to demonstrate how the life of Christ and, in general, the events in the New Testament fulfilled the prophecies of the Old Testament. In this framework, the Old Testament comprised a vast store of “types,” or foreshadowings, that were eventually fulfilled in the events of the New Testament, the “antitypes” of what came before.7 However, beginning at least with Saint Augustine (354–430 ce), scholars employed biblical typology to explain and give meaning to the broader sweep of human history.8 In the writings of Fiore, typological reasoning took on an important new direction. As practiced by Fiore, typology did not simply provide a general outline of human history, but could be used to interpret the meaning of contemporary events and even to peer into the future.9 Few later writers matched Fiore’s elaborate chronologies and frameworks, but the less extreme applications of his method became commonplace and accepted, practical tools that interpreters of scripture could use to make sense of the present and future. Throughout the colonial era, whether through analogy, example, or a promised future, biblical content provided a skeleton key for interpreting time and worldly events. Indeed, many colonial subjects found past, present, and future unthinkable outside the heuristic framework of the Bible—not only its moral and theological teachings but also its typological content. For Mendieta the parable of the “Slighted Feast” in Luke 14:15–24 helped explain the historical context and spiritual significance of Spain’s missionary project in the Americas. The parable told of an invitation to a “great banquet” by a wealthy man. When the first round of invitees gave excuses for why they would not be able to attend, the man ordered his servant to fill the table by other, less conventional means. “Go out quickly to

26   Matthew O’Hara the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in the poor and maimed and blind and lame,” he ordered. “Go out into the highways and the hedgerows, and compel people to come in, that my house may be filled.”10 In Mendieta’s interpretation, the guests were in fact being called to Christ’s table, the unconverted now exposed to the Word of God and offered salvation. The supper signaled the end times, the Apocalypse, and the eventual conversion of the “guests” would hasten the Last Judgment.11 But not all subscribed to the typological readings offered by Mendieta or the vision of history and the future that they assumed. For starters, many questioned whether the Apocalypse was imminent, and indeed, whether such knowledge was attainable. The Jesuit José de Acosta (1540–1600), who spent a long career working in the sixteenthcentury Andes, devoted a learned treatise (De temporibus novissimis) to precisely this point, arguing that the world’s end could not be discerned. Though Acosta remained skeptical as to the precise beginning of the end, as Anthony Pagden has noted, the tract “reflects its author’s concern with the logic of the historical process, and with the relations between the human and the divine time scales.”12 Thus, while most European missionaries agreed that the present and future could not be understood outside of the framework of biblical teachings and considered scriptural analogies a valid form of argumentation, many disagreed about how to interpret the typological information available in the Bible and its relationship to the evangelization of native peoples in the sixteenth-century present. Mendieta himself defended the controversial position that the origins of the American Indians could be traced back to the ten lost tribes of Israel, in part because, if true, it would confirm his belief in the impending apocalypse, since medieval European lore held that all Jews would be converted prior to the end times.13 The messianic and apocalyptic view of world history found in the writings of Mendieta, and in the minds of some of his fellow friars, held practical consequences for the activities of the missionary Church. The fundamental disagreements among Catholic missionaries and other authorities in New Spain and elsewhere in sixteenthcentury Spanish America had to do with the tempo of conversion, its methods, and its ultimate goals. The relative speed of native indoctrination and conversion was at issue. Missionaries held very different positions, for example, on whether or not the initial mass baptisms favored by some of the Franciscans were either effective or advisable. Motivated by the vision that the friars were hastening the end of days, and, in a sense, the end of worldly time, some Franciscans argued for a speedier approach to conversion, and also defended some limited use of force and coercion to bring the final “guests” to the table. In contrast, prominent Dominican and Augustinian theologians and missionaries questioned the Franciscan approach; although they found mass baptisms expedient, they were reluctant to defend even mildly coercive evangelization. Instead, these other mendicants argued for a slower, more thorough period of indoctrination in the tenets of the new faith before baptism.14 They relied on different explanatory frameworks to understand contemporary events and their implications. Some members of the Dominican order, including the theologians Francisco de Vitoria and Domingo de Soto, and the famed Bishop of Chiapa, Bartolomé de Las Casas, interpreted the ongoing

Time and Christianity in Early Latin America   27 ­ roject of conversion not so much by apocalyptic typology, but through legal analysis p regarding the sovereignty of the Spanish monarchs over the territories and peoples of the New World, as well as through theological discourse emphasizing adequate preparation for rational acceptance of Christianity. This led a number of intellectual leaders of the Dominicans, for example, to support the Aztec-Mexica as the lawful rulers and lords of the territories of central Mexico, a position that was in turn repudiated by many Franciscans.15 What of indigenous leadership within the church, including the prospect of native men being ordained as priests or indigenous women becoming nuns? Some argued that native church leaders, including both informal, lay assistants and ordained priests or professed nuns, were essential to the successful Christianization of native people. Did not the missionaries themselves rely on indigenous collaborators to help translate Christianity into the many vernaculars found in the Americas? Who would be more adept at communicating the subtleties of Catholic doctrine and theology to local communities than the sons and daughters of those populations? They would deliver sermons with sensitivity to the nuances of local dialects and cultural contexts; they would hear confessions with great skill, and they would avoid the ambiguities of cross-cultural communication lamented by so many missionaries; they would teach Church doctrine as trusted community members. For those influenced by millennial interpretations of history, including the potential of a rapidly approaching apocalypse, speedy evangelization seemed to be of the essence. “With the last end of the world at hand . . . ,” wrote de los Ángeles to the Twelve Franciscans sent to New Spain in the early 1520s, “. . . hurry down now to the active life”; “hurry down,” that is, from a life of spiritual contemplation into one of rapid evangelization and conversion, using the best tools at hand. The prospect of a highly educated group of indigenous nobility, and perhaps an indigenous priesthood, elicited strong reactions from some Spaniards, including within the Franciscan order itself. This was true throughout the colonial period, but especially in the first few decades following the conquest of central Mexico. Some early leaders in the Mexican Church, especially a number of Franciscans influenced by the millennial and apocalyptic view of time referred to earlier, proposed to train a cohort of native youth with the eventual goal of priestly ordination.16 While intellectual and political opposition to the plan limited the creation of a robust Indian priesthood, Franciscans did create a colegio or school of liberal arts for children of the indigenous (mostly Nahua) nobility. Based on a traditional European curriculum that included training in Spanish and Latin, Franciscans opened the Colegio de Santa Cruz at Tlatelolco, a district then on the northern flank of Mexico City. The project derived from a humanist line of thought that considered education central to true conversion and saw little difference between the intellectual potential of native peoples and Europeans. A good example of such thinking is found in the writings of Alonso de Castro (1495–1558), a Spanish Franciscan theologian and Inquisitorial theorist, who argued that select Indians of the New World should receive the benefits of higher education,

28   Matthew O’Hara including instruction in Latin. “Castro had argued that Indians were just like Europeans,” writes Martin Nesvig, “—some were inherently stupid and others had the facility and drive to become learned theologians and priests.”17 The material taught at the colegio came largely from European curricula, though the project paralleled in some ways the Nahua tradition of the calmecac, the Nahuatl term for a school that trained the children of the native nobility in the generations prior to the arrival of Europeans. The Jesuit Acosta echoed these sentiments. In the Historia natural y moral de las Indias, he referred to this institutional legacy as he denounced the meager educational opportunities available to sixteenth-century indigenous children. “The [pre-Conquest] Mexicans used great order and method in bringing up their sons,” the missionary wrote, “and, if the same order existed nowadays in building houses and seminaries where these boys could be instructed, no doubt Christianity would flourish mightily among the Indians.”18 The earlier studies of Phelan and others did an exceptional job of presenting key European perspectives on the relationship between time and the enterprise of ­conversion, and demonstrated how deeply intertwined the two were in the minds of many sixteenth-century missionaries.19 These scholars also captured the way that most sixteenth-century Spanish intellectuals viewed history through a providentialist lens, where secular time revealed the unfolding of a divine plan, and thus collapsed sacred and secular time onto one another. These conclusions are points of departure in a more recent generation of scholarship that has provided different perspectives on the issues at hand. Some of this work relies on indigenous-language sources to examine the translation of European ideas into indigenous dialects and concepts and, conversely, how indigenous thought and traditions shaped European ideas.20 Others have advanced the understanding of these issues through innovative readings of Spanish and Latin sources. Collectively this scholarship reinforces the importance of the millenarian tradition of Mendieta and some of the other missionaries, but provides additional, and sometimes overlooked, views on time and Christianity in early New Spain. Such a shift can naturally follow from the methodological turn toward native-language sources, but is also a part of a broader rereading of New Spain’s history that amplifies voices muffled in earlier accounts, whether those of non-elites, native peoples, or even Europeans who might have been less well known at the time or whose perspectives have been marginalized in the subsequent historiography. These studies also reflect a historiographical tendency to revisit previous scholarship, exploring different facets of earlier histories and testing old hypotheses. To consider this historiographical issue, let us return for a moment to the question of indigenous education and evangelization. For some historians, the colegio at Tlatelolco, along with similar projects, clearly formed part of the “spiritual conquest,” the term used by the French historian Robert Ricard to capture a broad view of subjugation, one that went beyond military or political control to include the cultural transformation that accompanied European evangelization.21 In this line of thinking, which resonates with the assessment of Acosta, training children from prominent indigenous families in the concepts, languages, and logics of the European and Christian tradition amounted to a

Time and Christianity in Early Latin America   29 subjugation of native minds. This approach served as an ideal complement to the more overt assertion of Spanish power over native peoples. The project of education and indoctrination was those things, of course, but not only. Louise Burkhart has noted that one should not overlook how such programs—possibly intended by their Spanish architects to contribute to the long-term conversion of native peoples and, indeed, to achieve a more muscular social control over surviving indigenous communities and political units—could have also fostered an entirely unexpected way of interpreting the arrival of the new and its relationship to the old. These interpretations could include a critique of the colonial project itself. Burkhart’s take on the Nahua youths who were educated under the tutelage of the Franciscans at Tlatelolco is worth quoting at length: . . . knowledge empowers, and so does language. The Nahuas who knew the most about the conquering culture were not thereby obliged slavishly to honor its tenets. Graduates left the Colegio conversant in two cultural traditions. . . . Who could be better equipped to compare and evaluate both cultures, to challenge Spanish authority on its own grounds, to subvert its paradigms through subtle manipulations and restatements? Who could be better equipped to construct new ways of being Nahua, new models of the past and present, suited to their people’s current situation?22

In such cases, the outcome of the evangelical project could take the form of an ­interesting melding of European and indigenous concepts, including those related to time and religion. A fine example can be found in “Holy Wednesday,” a Passion Play, or a dramatic re-enactment related to Christ’s trial, sentencing, and punishment under Pontius Pilate, which was translated from Spanish into Nahuatl in the late sixteenth century, quite possibly at Tlatelolco.23 Passion Plays were a staple of early modern European pastoral labor and were brought to the Americas by missionaries eager to bridge the cultural and linguistic divides between them and their would-be converts. Friars and native peoples referred to the plays with the Spanish ejemplo, Latin exemplum, or Nahuatl neixcuitilli, all of which signaled their didactic use as an “example” of right conduct.24 From the friars’ perspective, these were tools to communicate Christian concepts and narratives, and, in turn, aid in the process of eradicating native religious beliefs and practices. Indeed, the plays communicated and assumed a Christian understanding of time, where worldly events of the past and present acted as a prologue to the eventual return of Christ in preparation for the end times and judgment.25 Yet, as Burkhart and others have shown, the substantial collaboration of Nahuas with the friars, from the Nahua translation of the Spanish texts to the performance of the ­dramas, meant that European and Christian messages could be modified and refashioned according to Nahua concepts.26 In the case of the “Holy Wednesday” play, the Nahua scribe who translated and adapted the text altered the understanding of time from that found in the Spanish original. In the Nahuatl version, Christ shows less agency and individual initiative than in the Spanish text. He is more deferential to Mary, and his actions are guided less by free will than by the influence of his parents and ancestors. These

30   Matthew O’Hara changes were consistent with Nahua notions of a son’s proper position in relation to his family and community, but also with Nahua ideas about the unfolding of time, which gave great weight to prophecies and the idea that worldly events were in large part preordained. The result was a text (and performance) that softened some of the linearity and teleology of Christian temporality, situating the story of Christ in a more Mesoamerican variant of time, where past, present, and future are closely related. In some ways, this relationship to time evokes the typological readings of the Christian past, where biblical events prefigured subsequent history. Yet the Nahua scribe gave substantially more weight to the past and its role in the present. The Old Testament prophets play the decisive role in the “Holy Wednesday” drama, not unlike the role of ancient prophecies in Nahua culture and the place of elders as keepers of historical memory. Their prophecies initiate a pattern and framework, through which Christ acts. “It is they who give meaning and form to present actions;” Burkhart notes, “he [Christ] does not confer retroactive significance upon their ancient deeds.”27 Even Christ’s ultimate sacrifice is driven by “forces he does not control.”28 The creative synthesis of time elements found in the Nahuatl version of the “Holy Wednesday” drama resonates with the way that many indigenous communities responded to other encounters with European time. Consider, for example, the massive survey by the Spanish Crown in the late sixteenth century, collectively known as the relaciones geográficas, which, among other items, requested information about local history. Serge Gruzinski and Barbara Mundy have shown how indigenous leaders who responded to the survey combined and resolved two different ways of reckoning time: one (European) that demanded chronologies, dating, and quantification, and another (Mesoamerican) that emphasized past cycles and relegated specific dates to their location in larger chunks of time and established frames of temporal meaning. Though the relaciones geográficas responded to a survey undertaken by the Crown, rather than the Church, the temporal schema that they contain draw heavily on religious elements, given the ways that both sixteenth-century Nahuas and Europeans fused worldly and sacred notions of time, and the prominent place of religious events in the history of early New Spain.29 Scholars have found similar combinations and mixings of temporal frameworks and historical reference points in the genre of “primordial titles,” hybrid alphabetic and pictorial documents created by indigenous communities primarily in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, usually in relation to land claims. In many of the primordial titles of Mesoamerica, the arrival of Christianity figures prominently. Such references are especially intriguing given that recent research into the genre has suggested that the indigenous authors of the títulos directed them primarily to their fellow community members. While many of the titles reference histories of land tenure and community boundaries, Stephanie Wood, along with other scholars, has suggested that the documents went far beyond instrumentalist land claims. Instead, she writes, “[t]hey concentrated on shoring up community autonomy while also cementing certain families’ places of authority in those independent realms.”30

Time and Christianity in Early Latin America   31 The títulos frequently contain stock references in Nahuatl to the arrival of Christianity (“the faith arrived,” “the faith was installed”) and to local people who graciously and eagerly accepted the new faith.31 The “arrival of the faith,” one could say, was remembered as a moment of inflection and reorientation, a marker of time, but not a radical rupture with previous eras. Produced generations after the arrival of Europeans and their faith, such references served as “anchoring statements,” to use David Tavárez’s term, which helped indigenous audiences situate these documents as a particular reading of the past with implications for the community in the present.32 Far from suggesting a spiritual conquest, indigenous readings of the past claim ownership over the arrival of Christianity and give a great deal of agency to community ancestors who lived during that time of transition. Writing about the primordial titles from Cuauhnahuac (Cuernavaca), in what is now the Mexican state of Morelos, Robert Haskett notes that “there cannot be said to have been a conquest at all, but merely the arrival of new actors on the scene who augmented and influenced in a generally positive way the life and legitimacy of the altepetl and its indigenous rulers.” The great changes and indigenous sufferings of the sixteenth century are glossed in a few short phrases, “collapsed into a single moment, combined in a unified creative act charged with sacred, political, and social significance.”33 Toward the other end of the spectrum—that is, demonstrating persistent forms of pre-conquest time reckoning—is the remarkable corpus of clandestine Zapotec calendars that has been expertly studied by David Tavárez. Church authorities collected most of these documents in a long-term campaign against “idolatry” in the Villa Alta district of Oaxaca. Most of the calendrical sources studied by Tavárez date from the end of the seventeenth century, and while they contain evidence that local ritual specialists resolved key dates on the Christian and Zapotec calendars, they also demonstrate uniquely indigenous forms of timekeeping and the ritual practices associated with them. They document, for example, the widespread use of a 260-day count referred to in Zapotec as the biyé/piyé (“time interval”), which ritual specialists used in a variety of ways, including to orient communities in the cosmos and to track the celebratory calendar.34 At the same time, a number of the calendrical texts refer to the arrival of Christianity and the first Spaniards in the region, using the Zapotec phrase bida titza que Dios (“the word of God came”). Yet, Tavárez notes, none of the documents refers to Christian dates; they instead situate this pivotal event within a Zapotec system of dating.35 In the end, Tavárez characterizes these calendrical and historical documents as attempts to “suture and merge the seams of the past.” “The merging of Christian time with Zapotec time,” he concludes, “may have been regarded as a necessary move for colonial Zapotec day keepers and their apprentices as they sought to understand the cosmological order as a whole.”36 This sampling of remarkable adaptations and interpretations of the past should not discount the traumatic events of the early conquest, which were perceived as such by some native peoples at the time, nor to forget the radical transformation of most indigenous societies throughout the colonial period. Ample documentation and a deep body

32   Matthew O’Hara of scholarship demonstrate both points. For the former, look no further than the classic accounts of Nahua lamentation in the wake of the conquest, the Cantares mexicanos, collected by Miguel León-Portilla in The Broken Spears, or the Nahua perspective on the conquest found in Book 12 of the Florentine Codex.37 While such sources speak ­primarily from the perspective of an indigenous nobility, they capture the wrenching change that many must have experienced. One of the poems from the Cantares mexicanos mourned the ruins left in the wake of the conquest, and found in them a spiritual crisis: We are crushed to the ground; we lie in ruins. There is nothing but grief and suffering in Mexico and Tlatelolco, where once we saw beauty and valor. Have you grown weary of your servants? Are you angry with your servants, O Giver of Life?38

Despite such famous examples of social and spiritual trauma, and countless others with a more modest historical profile, a profound religious transformation took place over subsequent generations. Later in the colonial era, notwithstanding many cases of local adaptation or even outright resistance to Catholicism, the overwhelming picture that emerges of New Spain is that of a “mature Catholic society,” where memories of Catholicism stretched back generations and indeed centuries; a place where a network of religious institutions and personnel had introduced and now supported a common grammar of Catholic practices and thought.39 The spread of Catholicism, of course, brought enormous changes to conceptions of time, from the imposition of the yearly liturgical calendar, to local celebrations built around the feast days of patron saints, to the development of a sacramental culture that marked key moments in the yearly ­calendar and the individual life cycle. At a most basic level, the regular tolling on church bells in village or neighborhood churches were prominent markers of daily and weekly time.40 These diverse outcomes of evangelization are something that scholars have long understood. The development of Christianity in New Spain is a history of local variations, a spectrum of responses ranging from outright rejection to fundamental ­acceptance.41 Viewing the topic of Christianity and evangelization through the lens of time suggests a way to review this historical diversity and to bring seemingly incommensurate case studies into dialogue with one another. A theme emerges at the nexus of time and colonial Christianity: the remarkable “usability” of the past, the way that so many in colonial society rebuilt their present and futures through the materials available to them, often drawing on previous times as a font of tradition legitimated by some general notion of its historicity, but in the process remaking that past. This can be seen in the artful historical memory found in numerous

Time and Christianity in Early Latin America   33 primordial titles, where later indigenous communities downplayed the conquest and made a past that emphasized their ancestors’ role in the process of conversion. The usable past is also evident in the ways Zapotec ritual specialists “sutured” time, mending what might be perceived as tears in the temporal/historical fabric of the early colonial period. Some scholars have posited a notion of “cumulative” time to describe the temporal framework of Mesoamerican cultures, where the linear sequences of past events become part of longer-term cycles, establishing patterns and leading to historical accretions that forever inform the present.42 In a similar vein, Enrique Florescano describes a Mesoamerican “living past,” for the ways that it maintained its relevance and force in the present.43 These arguments are extremely helpful as ways of explaining the great importance of the past in colonial New Spain, not just in terms of its commemoration, but also as a tool for navigating a complex present, including the evolving religious environment after the arrival of Christianity. These studies tend to emphasize differences in indigenous and European temporal structures, the former more cyclical, the latter more linear. Without overlooking such important distinctions, attention might also turn to some of the points of convergence in these traditions. Many subjects in New Spain drew on the past in creative ways via a European tradition of typological readings of the Bible, references to post-biblical prophecy, and the guidance of classical authors.44 In both traditions, the past was active in the present, available as a resource for legitimation, serving as a guide to the present, and even a prologue to the future. * * * In a pathbreaking article some thirty years ago, Nancy Farriss rejected the standard position that Western (European) time, with its strong inclination toward a linear and sequential unfolding of events, was somehow incompatible with traditional modes of timekeeping and temporal experience in Mesoamerica that tended to be more cyclical and recurring. Focusing on the transitions in time consciousness among the Maya, Farriss demonstrated how, on the one hand, the pre-conquest Maya combined cyclical and linear models of time, what she referred to as their “dual conception of time and the past.” On the other, she describes how some post-conquest Maya artfully drew upon both European and indigenous understandings of time and its flow in the centuries following the arrival of Europeans. In both the European and Mesoamerican traditions, she noted, time contained cyclical and linear elements, though in either system one of these guiding principles would be dominant.45 Early modern Europeans, for instance, included what can only be described as cyclical elements of time experience, most notably the ongoing celebration of the Mass as a re-enactment of Christ’s sacrifice, within a larger system of linear time that would conclude with the second coming.46 The post-conquest Maya, in similar ways, merged the two models of time, by integrating past prophecies and calendrical cycles within a more linear historical reckoning of events than had been found in previous generations. Farriss, for example, points to the Books of Chilam Balam, a series of

34   Matthew O’Hara clandestine documents in which the post-conquest Maya recorded their cosmology and history. She notes how the books included references to specific events from more linear accounts of sixteenth-century history, including the arrival of Christianity, periodic visits by Church officials, episodes of idolatry, and so on, but did so by situating them within traditional twenty-year periods, what the Maya referred to as a katun. As a result, Maya intellectuals memorialized these incidents alongside pre-conquest events that shared similar qualities. This process inscribed each collection of events with meaning, corresponding to the “nature,” essence, or “burden” of the different katun-rounds.47 In the examples described by Farriss, and in many other cases from the colonial period, including those discussed in this chapter, Spanish and indigenous understandings of religion and time interacted in unpredictable ways, producing outcomes that could not be reduced easily to their European or indigenous antecedents. Along with our detailed knowledge of European missionaries and their understanding of time, the ethnohistory of previous decades makes it difficult to sustain either the traditional notion of European/Christian time as simply linear or Mesoamerican time as utterly cyclical, or the incompatibility of the two frameworks. Colonial indigenous communities related to time, like Christianity itself, in myriad ways, ranging from clandestine maintenance of traditional ritual cycles and calendrical systems to the wholesale adoption of European time practices and their meanings. Many cases fell somewhere in between, where creative appropriation, juxtaposition, or blending of temporal concepts and practices prevailed.48 In New Spain, colonial subjects tapped time as a resource for creative forms of “past-making” and “future-making.” Time itself developed out of these diverse practices in the historical present.

Notes 1. For the best introduction to the topic, see John Leddy Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1970). 2. Francisco de los Ángeles, “Orders Given to ‘the Twelve’ (1523),” in Colonial Spanish America: A Documentary History, eds. Kenneth Mills, William  B.  Taylor, and Sandra Lauderdale Graham (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2002), 59–64, 62. 3. “The Lords and Holy Men of Tenochtitlan Reply to the Franciscan, 1524,” in Colonial Spanish America: A Documentary History, 19–22, 22. 4. David Couzens Hoy, The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), xiii. 5. Phelan, Millennial Kingdom, 14–15; Jacques Lafaye, Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness, 1531–1813 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 30–36; Enrique Florescano, Memoria mexicana: Ensayo sobre la reconstrucción del pasado: época prehispánica–1821 (Mexico City: Editorial Joaquín Mortiz, 1987), 107–109. At the time, apocalyptic thinking was widespread in Europe, and, among many others, famously stirred the imagination of Columbus. For a recent treatment of the topic, see Carol Delaney, Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem (New York, NY: Free Press, 2011). 6. Scholars of British North America, and especially of Puritanism, have long recognized the importance of typological reading. More recent work on Spanish America also demonstrates the widespread use of typology as a way of interpreting the colonial experience.

Time and Christianity in Early Latin America   35 See David A. Brading, Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe, Image and Tradition across Five Centuries (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Carlos Herrejón Peredo, Del sermón al discurso cívico: México, 1760–1834 (Zamora, Mexico, and Mexico City: El Colegio de Michoacán and El Colegio de México, 2003); Brian Connaughton,“¿Politización de la religión o nueva sacralización de la política? El sermón en las mutaciones públicas de 1808–24,” in Religión, política e identidad en la independencia de México, ed. Brian Connaughton (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana and Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 2010), 160–200. 7. Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 79. 8. See Augustine’s treatise, On Catechizing the Uninstructed, and his monumental City of God, both discussed in Brading, Mexican Phoenix, 22. 9. See Brading, Mexican Phoenix, 20–24. 10. Luke 14:21–23 (Revised Standard Version). 11. Phelan, Millennial Kingdom, 7–8. 12. Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 168. Such concerns can be found throughout the documentary record, as in an almanac published in Mexico City in 1733, which, among other dates, situated itself relative to the creation of the world (5,682 years), the flood (4,036 years), “the foundation of the most noble city of Mexico” [by the Aztecs] (406 years), the conquest of the same [by the Spaniards] (212 years), and the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe (202 years). Archivo General de la Nación (Mexico), Inquisición, vol. 1332, exp. 27, fs. 140, 143–158, 1732, “D. José Bernardo de Hogal, vecino de esta ciudad, impresor y mercader de libros en ella, a nombre del Dr. D. José de Escobar, catedrático de matemáticas, presenta el pronóstico de temporales, para el año de 1733.” 13. Phelan, Millennial Kingdom, 25–27; José de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, ed. Jane E. Mangan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), Book I, Chapter 23, 69–71. Franciscans themselves held differing views on the proximity of the end times and their relationship to the present. To get a good sense of diversity within the order on these and other matters, see David A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), Chapter 5; Martin A. Nesvig, Forgotten Franciscans: Works from an Inquisitorial Theorist, a Heretic, and an Inquisitional Deputy (Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), and Ideology and Inquisition: The World of the Censors in Early Mexico (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); for a comparison of different orders’ institutes and activities, see Karen Melvin, Building Colonial Cities of God: Mendicant Orders and Urban Culture in New Spain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). 14. For many years the standard account, generally celebratory of the mendicants’ efforts, was Robert Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An Essay on the Apostolate and the Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain, 1523–1572 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966 [1933]), Chapter 4. On the question of coercion, see Phelan, 10, 16. 15. For this style of reasoning, see Vitoria’s Relectio de indis and Las Casas’s De unico vocationes modo omnium gentium ad veram religionem, translated as Bartolomé de las Casas: The Only Way, trans. Francis Patrick Sullivan, SJ, and ed. Helen Rand Parish (Paulist Press,

36   Matthew O’Hara 1992). Las Casas also held that Spain should return the territory of the former Inca Empire to Guayna Capac, a descendant of the pre-Conquest rulers. Sabine MacCormack, On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain and Peru (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 54–55; Phelan, Millennial Kingdom, 5–10, 131 nn. 17, 19. 16. Members of the indigenous elite and Spanish authorities in New Spain revived this debate in the middle of the eighteenth century, some two centuries after the first proposals for a native priesthood. Though the context had changed substantially from the sixteenth century, the proposal again failed, this time withering for a lack of resources in the context of political battles between Crown and Church officials. See Matthew D. O’Hara, A Flock Divided: Race, Religion, and Politics in Mexico, 1749–1857 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), Chapter 2. 17. Nesvig, Ideology and Inquisition, 155. For a translation of the relevant treatise by Castro, “Utrum indigenae novi orbis instruendi sint in mysteriis theologicis et artibus liberalibus” (On Whether the Indians of the New World Should be Instructed in Liberal Arts and Sacred Theology), see Nesvig, Forgotten Franciscans, 26–50. 18. Acosta, Natural and Moral History, 374. On the colegio at Tlatelolco, see among others, José María Kobayashi, La educación como conquista (empresa franciscana en México) (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1974); Martin  A.  Nesvig, “The ‘Indian Question’ and  the Case of Tlatelolco,” Local Religion in Colonial Mexico, ed. Martin  A.  Nesvig (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 63–89. 19. Phelan, Millennial Kingdom; Brading, First America, especially Chapter  4; Florescano, Memoria mexicana, Chapter 3 focuses on Spanish attitudes toward time, religion, and history in the early colonial period, while much of the rest of the book addresses the transformation of indigenous historical memory during the colonial period. 20. There is now a large and impressive literature on such themes. For fine examples, see Louis M. Burkhart, The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1989); Mark Z. Christensen, Nahua and Maya Catholicisms: Texts and Religion in Colonial Central Mexico and Yucatan (Stanford, CA; Berkeley, CA: Stanford University Press and The Academy of American Franciscan History, 2013); Osvaldo F. Pardo, The Origins of Mexican Catholicism: Nahua Rituals and Christian Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004); David Tavárez, The Invisible War: Indigenous Devotions, Discipline, and Dissent in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). In other areas of Spanish presence, see, among others, Vicente  L.  Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), and Regina Harrison, Sin and Confession in Colonial Peru: SpanishQuechua Penitential Texts, 1565–1650 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2014). 21. Ricard, Spiritual Conquest. 22. Louise  M.  Burkhart, Holy Wednesday: A Nahua Drama from Early Colonial Mexico (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 59. 23. Ibid., 52. 24. Exempla were a staple of medieval and early modern European sermons. Preachers used them to craft short, dramatic narratives that were meant to capture the attention of their audiences and convince them of some moral or theological message. Jacques Le Goff, Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages (New York, NY: Zone Books, 1990), 13. 25. Burkhart, Holy Wednesday, 46–47.

Time and Christianity in Early Latin America   37 26. Burkhart, Holy Wednesday; Burkhart, The Slippery Earth; Louise  M.  Burkhart, “The Destruction of Jerusalem as Colonial Nahuatl Historical Drama,” The Conquest All Over Again: Nahuas and Zapotecs Thinking, Writing, and Painting Spanish Colonialism, ed. Susan Schroeder (Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 2010), 74–100; Christensen, Nahua and Maya Catholicisms; Barry D. Sell and Louise M. Burkhart, eds., Death and Life in Colonial Nahua Mexico, vol. 1 of Nahuatl Theater (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004); Sell and Burkhart, eds., Nahua Christianity in Performance, vol. 4 of Nahuatl Theater (Norman OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009). 27. Burkhart, Holy Wednesday, 90–92, quote 92. 28. Ibid., 91. 29. Serge Gruzinski, The Conquest of Mexico: The Incorporation of Indian Societies into the Western World, 16th–18th Centuries (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 1993), 70–97, and Painting the Conquest: The Mexican Indians and the European Renaissance, trans. Deke Dusinberre (Paris: Flammarion, 1992), 90–95; Barbara  E.  Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), passim, but especially, 68–76. 30. Stephanie Wood, Transcending Conquest: Nahua Views of Spanish Colonial Mexico (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 107. 31. Ibid., 124, 128. 32. David Tavárez, “Representations of Spanish Authority in Zapotec Calendrical and Historical Genres,” The Conquest All Over Again: Nahuas and Zapotecs Thinking, Writing, and Painting Spanish Colonialism, ed. Susan Schroeder (Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 2010), 206–225, 211. 33. Robert  S.  Haskett, Visions of Paradise: Primordial Titles and Mesoamerican History in Cuernavaca (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005), 16, 304–305; See also the historiographical comments of Tavárez, who notes that the diverse corpus of indigenous narratives of conquest have a “tendency to treat preconquest and colonial history as continuous expanses of time.” “Representations of Spanish Authority,” 206. 34. Tavárez, “Representations of Spanish Authority,” 209–210; Invisible War, 144–151. 35. Tavárez, “Representations of Spanish Authority,” 213–214. 36. Ibid., 221. A more extensive treatment of these topics can be found in Tavárez, Invisible War. On the “binding” of time/space as a recurrent metaphor in Mesoamerica, see Miguel León-Portilla, Tiempo y realidad en el pensamiento Maya (Mexico City: Universidad Autnónoma de México, 1968); Amos Megged, Social Memory in Ancient and Colonial Mesoamerica (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Burkhart, Slippery Earth, 72–86. 37. Miguel León-Portilla, The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992); James Lockhart, We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1993. See also the discussion in Florescano, Memoria mexicana, Chapter 4. 3 8. León-Portilla, Broken Spears, 81. 3 9. O’Hara, A Flock Divided, 2–3, 228–229. 4 0. O’Hara, A Flock Divided; William  B.  Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996; Katy Solórzano, Se hizo seña: medición y percepción del tiempo en el siglo XVIII caraqueño (Caracas: Planeta, 1998); Ross Hassig, Time, History and Belief in Aztec and Colonial Mexico (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001).

38   Matthew O’Hara 41. For the many possibilities, see J. Jorge Klor de Alva, “Spiritual Conflict and Accommodation in New Spain: Toward a Typology of Aztec Responses to Christianity,” The Inca and Aztec States, 1400–1800: Anthropology and History, eds. George Collier, Renato Rosaldo, and John Wirth (New York, NY: Academic Press, 1982), 345–366. 42. Barbara Tedlock, Time and the Highland Maya (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1982); Popul Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings, ed. and trans. Dennis Tedlock (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), discussed in Burkhart, Slippery Earth, 72. 43. Florescano, Memoria mexicana, 83. 44. On the use of classical texts as a framework for analyzing the present and future in Spanish America, see MacCormack, On the Wings of Time. 45. Nancy M. Farriss, “Remembering the Future, Anticipating the Past: History, Time, and Cosmology among the Maya of Yucatan,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 29, no. 3 (July 1, 1987), 566–593, 569. 46. Ibid., 572–573. 47. Ibid., 577–581. 48. For works that emphasize the persistence and survival (sometimes clandestine) of indigenous practices related to time and its keeping, see Tavárez, Invisible War, and Megged, Social Memory. Gruzinski and Florescano argue for a more thorough transformation of indigenous thought. Among Gruzinski’s many works, see Conquest of Mexico and The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization (London: Routledge, 2002); Florescano treats the Mesoamerican conceptions of time and their transformation under colonialism in Memoria mexicana. For a recent study that rejects the argument that Aztec time was inherently cyclical, see Hassig, Time, History, and Belief.

chapter 3

Schol astic Th eol ogy, J ustice , a n d th e Conqu est of th e A m er icas David M. Lantigua

The European Renaissance was the age of the “Second” or “Silver” scholasticism, ­indicating its successor status to medieval scholastic theology. Early modern scholasticism had to  face new theological, social, and political challenges inside and outside Europe scarcely imaginable to its predecessor in Latin Christendom. This chapter considers the Amerindian question (or la duda indiana) as chief among the topics debated by scholastic theologians in the royal councils, ecclesiastical courts, and universities of Castile during the first half of the sixteenth century and coincident with the Crown of  Ferdinand and Isabel and the reign of Emperor Charles  V.  Scholastic theology’s “encounter” with the New World in this period meant confronting the reality, and the brutality, of Spanish conquests across the Atlantic. This unprecedented historical event made a significant contribution to the scholastic tradition’s renewal in theological method and development of its idea of justice. Although the legacy of Spanish scholastic theology owing to this period of encounter is mixed, its importance to Latin American religious, legal, and cultural history is considerable and lasting. This chapter focuses on key Spanish theologians—Francisco de Vitoria, Domingo de Soto, and Bartolomé de las Casas—who inhabited what may be called “the Dominican moment” of political thought during the early modern period.1 Their innovative scholastic views were greatly indebted to the medieval Dominican friar and theologian St. Thomas Aquinas, from whom they inherited “the idea of natural law as a way to gain a critical understanding of contemporary political reality.”2 The Spanishscholastic theological reflection on political life in a transatlantic context yielded new ideas about justice applicable to all human beings, which anticipated modern developments of international law and human rights.

40   David M. Lantigua

Scholastic Theology and the Natural Law “Scholastic theology” was to a certain extent an invented category of early modern Europe. The term served a pejorative purpose of demarcating new intellectual and religious reforms like humanism and Protestantism, inspired by Erasmus of Rotterdam and Martin Luther, respectively. These epochal figures set their reformatory interpretations of Christian faith in opposition to the unsophisticated, formulaic, and sterile presentation of religious doctrine encapsulated and exhausted by the academic schools (Lt. scholae). The practical and pastoral turn reflected in Erasmus’s philosophia Christi and Luther’s sola Scriptura were distinct attempts to resist scholastic theology’s overtly academic context, constrained methodology, abstract theorizing, and apparent overdependence on human authorities, especially Aristotle, at the expense of the Bible.3 In the ensuing age of inter-confessional conflict and European expansion, the vilification of scholastic thinkers under Aristotelian captivity stemmed from a new wave of political thought established on rationalist and empiricist foundations, as seen in Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes. However ossified scholastic theology might have become in the early modern period following its fragmentation into different schools of thought among Thomists, Scotists, and the via moderna of the nominalists, it was a vibrant theological tradition that had already spanned nearly five centuries. Scholasticism was a tradition grounded in the authority of texts, the most sacred of which was the Bible. The tradition developed as an organized reflection on the truths of the Christian faith, attested by Scripture, as well as Church Fathers, councils, ecclesiastical law, and ancient philosophy. Its primary medieval textbook was Peter Lombard’s Sentences (ca. 1155). Lombard’s method of inquiry was fundamentally dialectical, which attempted to identify the deeper meaning (sententia) of biblical texts by gathering seemingly contradictory teachings from various authorities and synthesizing them to demonstrate the harmony between human reason and revealed faith. The twofold order of reason and faith simultaneously affirmed the integrity of nature and the need for grace, thus expressing a form of humanism in the Middle Ages that was scholastic in character and distinct from Renaissance and modern secular versions.4 The scholastic method of seeking comprehensive unity in knowledge was situated specifically within an academic environment (or school) with faith in God serving as the basis for the pursuit of truth. The most prestigious of these academic schools of theological learning during the Middle Ages from Oxford to Padua was the university of Paris. At the height of thirteenth-century scholastic theology in Paris, there emerged two notable mendicant masters or teachers: the Franciscan Saint Bonaventure (1221–1274) and his Dominican contemporary Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). Aquinas and Bonaventure composed major commentaries on the Sentences as part of their basic theological curriculum. But they also imparted to students a comprehensive theological vision of faith

Scholastic Theology, Justice, and the Conquest   41 as an answer to the human longing for perfection and happiness. Bonaventure’s Itinerarium mentis in Deum and Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, for example, both identified the image of God in every rational soul as the internal compass directing an individual’s return to his or her Creator.5 Created in God’s image, human beings resemble God by imitating the Son, Jesus Christ, the perfect image of the Father. This congruence between reason and faith, and nature and grace, evident in their imago Dei teaching, highlighted the distinctively scholastic-humanist dimension of their thought. With scholastic theology’s strong commitment to the powers of human reason, the tradition could also affirm what was good and true in non-Christian cultures. Aquinas’s use of Aristotle (called “the Philosopher”) for his own theological and philosophical reflection was profound. But pagan wisdom was not limited to Greek philosophy. The Church of the Latin West had also inherited the classical Roman tradition of philosophy, law, and rhetoric that was rediscovered in the academic schools of the twelfth century, especially in Bologna. Concurrently, the thought of Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 bc) had an increased influence on the moral and political philosophy of medieval thinkers.6 Cicero’s public philosophy, though eclectic, relied on a Stoic cosmopolitan vision of the world, affirming the oneness of humanity based on reason, which he considered the divine marker of human worth. Cicero believed that human nature was inscribed with a law impelling reason to do what it ought and forbidding the opposite.7 Among theologians and canon lawyers, Cicero’s Stoic view of reason as a central feature of moral agency was a major contribution to the scholastic concept of natural law. Notably, the scholastic view expanded the Roman legal-philosophical tradition, because it anchored the natural law in the moral and spiritual freedom of rational creatures made in God’s image.8 Medieval scholastic thinkers eagerly looked for biblical support of natural law. The most important biblical support of it came from St. Paul’s teaching in Romans 2:14 that the Gentiles, who do not have the Jewish Law, do by nature what the Law requires. Relatedly, Aquinas defined the natural law as “the light of natural reason” whereby human beings discerned what was good and what was evil.9 For Aquinas, the natural law was a creaturely way of participating in God’s eternal law (or divine providence) through the inborn powers of self-movement and free choice by which human beings cared for themselves and for others. But he also referred to the divine law, which came by grace and by faith, as enabling one to participate more deeply in the eternal law because it provided a new orientation toward everlasting union with God.10 Though Aquinas believed that grace was necessary for salvation, and that the effects of sin were crippling, his scholastic view accounted for the integrity of reason and the natural law in all human beings. The beginning of the Summa presented his oft-cited maxim that “grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it.”11 In the early modern debates concerning the wars against Amerindian peoples, this scholastic maxim was politically decisive for the Spanish Dominican theologians. The firm scholastic commitment to the dignity of natural reason and the order of grace that respected it provided an intellectual and ecclesiastical safeguard against theocratic-royalist and imperial-humanist claims to the contrary. The legacy of scholastic theology in the context of the Indies was evident in

42   David M. Lantigua the development of natural law into a universal vision of natural rights, protecting the political autonomy and human freedom of all rational creatures made in God’s image.

Disputes over the Justice of the European Conquest The Spanish claim over the newly discovered Indies was thoroughly religious in character. It stemmed from an expansionary prerogative to evangelize and baptize all nations according to Jesus’s apostolic commission.12 Ferdinand and Isabel, los Reyes Católicos, sought to remake a visibly Christian culture across the Iberian Peninsula by expelling Jews and conquering Muslim territories. When the Catholic Monarchs received full papal endorsement of their religious project of reform and expansion through Pope Innocent VIII’s Reconquista bull of Granada in 1486 (Orthodoxe fidei propagationem), they obtained the ecclesiastical wherewithal to make rapid changes effectively and authoritatively.13 Amidst a tumultuous century marked by internal conciliar debates and external fear of the Ottoman Turks after the fall of Constantinople, the papacy granted the Castilian Crown the perpetual right to administer ecclesiastical matters in their territories through a system of royal patronage (Patronato Real). During the watershed year of 1492, Castile added to its dominion the last Muslim stronghold of Granada, along with the Canaries off the African coast. In both the Reconquista of Granada and the conquest of the Canaries, the Crown explicitly identified its plan to spread a uniform faith by converting or expelling subjugated non-Christian peoples. When the Admiral Christopher Columbus made contact with the native Taíno population in the Caribbean that same year, the Iberian kingdom evolved into a fullfledged Atlantic imperial power. Not long after the initial contact, the colonial practices of forced labor and war developed, becoming the twin engines of a European mission to convert and civilize peoples across the Atlantic. The injustices against the newly encountered peoples did not go unnoticed to all Spaniards. In 1510, three Dominican priests and a lay brother were sent as missionaries by the head of the Order of Preachers, Tommaso de Vío Cajetan (d. 1534), to the island of Española. Among these Dominicans was Antón Montesino, the preacher who first spoke out against the Spanish abuses of the natives on the Fourth Sunday of Advent in 1511. Montesino’s memorable sermon denounced the colonial practices of war and forced labor: “Tell me, by what right and with what justice do you so violently enslave these Indians? By what authority do you wage such hideous wars against these people who peacefully inhabit their lands, killing infinite numbers of them by unimaginable and unspeakable means?” Montesino then proclaimed the rational nature of the Indians with unflinching moral conviction, “Are they not human beings? Do they not have ­rational souls? Are you not obligated to love them as you love yourselves?”14 The following week, the Dominicans threatened to deny absolution to any Spaniards who continued

Scholastic Theology, Justice, and the Conquest   43 to  hold the natives in cruel bondage. Their uncompromising message produced more enemies than sympathizers, though they did eventually reach the conscience of Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566), a priest-encomendero who would later enter the Dominican Order and emerge as an irrepressible advocate for Amerindians. The “new doctrine” of the Spanish Dominicans, as its vehement critics called it, was not a new teaching at all, but rather an application of faith and scholastic theology to a radically new situation of European colonization. The reflexive insight of the friars grew out of a context marked by spiritual and intellectual reforms back in Europe. At the university of Salamanca, there was a renewal of Aquinas’s thought through the efforts of Diego de Deza, OP (d. 1523), Prima chair of theology and head of the San Esteban Dominican priory. Deza revived the traditional spiritual observances of his friars and required them to read and study Aquinas.15 The first Dominicans who came to Española in 1510 had received Deza’s training at San Esteban. They brought this spiritual reform and intellectual training to bear on the forced-labor problem and the machinery of war replenishing it. Indeed, they were the catalyst of what historian Lewis Hanke classically referred to as the “first great struggle for justice” in the New World.16 Their teachings on the injustices of slavery and war would be deeply opposed by other Spaniards on different theoretical and legal grounds. The political ideas justifying the European right of conquering infidel populations to spread the faith came from two discernible camps in the early sixteenth century. In Spain, the theocratic-royalist view of Juan López de Palacios Rubios, “El Doctor,” supplied the common legal opinion among the partisans of missionary conquest. Palacios Rubios was a trained lawyer who employed Scripture and canon law to assert worldwide papal sovereignty as the basis for the Spanish right of conquest against infidels.17 The lawyer specifically had Pope Alexander VI’s 1493 bull of donation Inter caetera in mind as the ecclesiastical justification legitimating European expansion in the New World.18 Following the medieval canon legal views of Pope Innocent IV and Cardinal Hostiensis, Palacios Rubios and the Spanish theocrats believed that under royal patronage, the Crown of Castile possessed the rightful claim, given by Christ to the Church, to punish infidels who hinder Christian preachers and commit sins contrary to natural law.19 This medieval linkage between war and evangelization provided the classic legal rationale for the Spanish conquests, which was encoded in the Requerimiento penned by Palacios Rubios in 1513.20 According to that legal document, all the peoples of the New World were “required” to submit to the temporal and spiritual authority of the Crown or would be forced to do so through war and enslavement.21 As “the divine trustee of the Church,” the Crown possessed the perpetual right to conquer and enslave infidels in order to abolish idolatry and spread the faith.22 At the university of Paris, the nominalist theologian John Mair articulated another justification for conquest. He was the first European scholastic to address the Amerindian question in his commentary on the Lombard’s Sentences.23 The scholastic commentary was published in 1510—the same year the first Dominicans arrived to the New World. Unlike the Spanish theocratic-royalists, Mair offered a modern-sounding argument for a European right of conquest that did not appeal to papal authority.24

44   David M. Lantigua Mair made special use of the classical philosophical category of the “natural slave” notoriously presented in Aristotle’s Politics to advance his Christian imperial interests. Aristotle had claimed that some barbarians were unfit to govern themselves since they lacked certain natural perfections of reason such as deliberation and authority. The Aristotelian doctrine was quite adaptable to a nominalist denial of universal natures (e.g., humanity as such) whereby particular peoples could be classified as inferior and uncivilized on the basis of experience and testimony. Relying on popular Spanish reports designating the newly discovered natives as beastlike, violent, and non-industrious, Mair deemed them naturally incapable of self-rule, and therefore dependent on a superior civilization for proper development. Accordingly, Europeans possessed the “innate” right to rule over these allegedly uncouth barbarians. The legal, philosophical, and theological arguments for European expansion across the Atlantic coalesced in the writings of the Renaissance classicist and translator of Aristotle, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1490–1573). Educated in Bologna, Sepúlveda was formed in a brand of humanism that attempted to retrieve a classical warrior ethic like that of Niccolò Machiavelli. For Machiavelli, effective politics utilized force to impose fear and motivate respect toward civil institutions and rulers, as the “armed prophets” Moses, Romulus, and Theseus had victoriously done in founding their societies.25 Sepúlveda embraced this coercive model of politics, yet remained firmly planted in his Iberian Catholic cultural heritage. Alternatively, he did not promote pagan republicanism within an Italian city-state, but rather European colonialism within a transatlantic empire. Sepúlveda’s first dialogue (Democrates primus), published in 1535, responded to Lutheran and Erasmian critiques of the compatibility between war and Christian virtue. In that work Sepúlveda widened the traditional criteria for just war beyond defensive purposes (e.g., repelling violence and recovery of stolen goods) to include two aggressive causes directly related to European expansion: punishment of sinful offenses in foreign communities and the subjugation of pagan enemies of the faith.26 Although Sepúlveda capitalized on the tradition of the Crusades in proposing these aggressive causes and the use of armed pilgrims, his justification for the European right to conquer the Amerindians was shaped by his deeper commitment to retrieving classical humanism in a Christian imperial context. Similar to Mair, but unlike Palacios Rubios, Sepúlveda’s argument did not invoke the papal donation for justification. Instead, Sepúlveda’s Eurocentric humanism turned to modern, even secular, arguments for conquest.27 His second dialogue Democrates secundus (Sp. Demócrates segundo), composed about a decade later, further illustrated this secular turn. Although he applied Aristotle’s idea of the natural slave to categorize Amerindians as barbarians, he appealed especially to natural law and human reason to justify war against unbelievers. Following the canon lawyers, when unbelievers violate the natural law, evident in cases of human sacrifice and idolatry, they may be punished by a superior religious culture whose project was to civilize them. Sepúlveda’s argument here represented a move toward the secularization of natural law that could account for Spain’s universal authority to enforce moral norms in foreign lands independently of papal power. This imperialistic view of natural law, used to judge exotic cultures and impose norms on them, contrasted with a scholastic

Scholastic Theology, Justice, and the Conquest   45 theological approach to natural law, focused on the image of God present in all peoples and exhibited through the powers of moral agency and freedom. Combining arguments from Aristotle’s Politics and medieval canon law, Sepúlveda claimed that the Castilian Crown possessed a natural right to rule over barbarians “as children are subject to adults, women are to men, or the cruel and inhuman are to the continent and temperate.”28 Nature purportedly required uncivilized peoples to come under the benevolent dominion of wiser and more virtuous ones. The eyewitness testimony of gross Indian mistreatment influenced the speculative thought of notable Dominican thinkers, as seen in Cajetan’s genre of commenting on the questions of Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. The slaveholder turned Dominican friar, Las Casas, tells us in his History of the Indies that Master General of the Order Cajetan was personally informed in Rome about the widespread injustices across the Atlantic.29 Cajetan was composing his commentary on Aquinas’s Summa during this time. The scholastic principles and maxims in Cajetan’s commentary provided the benchmark for the standard Dominican theological response to the Spanish conquests, and it strongly opposed the views of Palacios Rubios, Mair, and Sepúlveda. Specifically, his commentary on Question 66, Article 8, of the Secunda secundae of the Summa became the locus classicus for addressing the Amerindian question. Cajetan supplied the common opinion for thinking about Christian relations with non-Christian others, both inside and outside Europe. He identified three categories of unbelievers, outlining the legitimacy of Christian political authority over non-Christians and the limits of European rule. Two categories pertained to traditional medieval relations between Christians and non-Christians such as Jews and Muslims. However, Cajetan introduced a third category of unbelievers applicable to the New World context. This category referred to non-Christians who were never under Christian political rule either in fact or by right. Accordingly, they legitimately hold political authority over themselves and cannot be deprived of it under any false pretense such as their unbelief or their refusal to become Christian. Cajetan’s position was nothing less than a direct critique of the Spanish titles to conquer the Amerindian peoples evident in Palacios Rubios and the Requerimiento protocol. In irrevocable terms, Cajetan’s commentary on Aquinas stated: “No king, no emperor, not even the Roman Church can wage war to occupy their lands or subjugate them under temporal authority. That is because they lack a legitimate cause for war.”30 The Spanish Dominican view would subsequently turn on the issue of just war, which the Indians could equally claim on their behalf, rather than an alleged imperial right based on Iberian cultural superiority or universal temporal power. Cajetan appealed to the teaching of Aquinas to defend the political autonomy and freedom of non-Christian regimes. The relevant teaching first came from Question 10 on unbelief (Article 10), where Aquinas proposed in scholastic-humanist fashion: “dominion and authority are institutions of human law, while the distinction between faithful and unbelievers arises from Divine law. Now the Divine law which is the law of grace, does not do away with human law which is the law of natural reason.”31 With explicit reliance on this teaching, Dominicans categorically rejected the belief that the

46   David M. Lantigua pope or emperor had legitimate spiritual or political power over the Amerindians.32 The teaching was an extrapolation of the Thomistic dictum that “grace does not destroy nature.” Its New World application mobilized a Dominican defense of Amerindian legal and political status, in opposition to unjustly asserted titles to war.

The Image of God, Natural Rights, and Just War Following Deza’s reforms, there emerged an academic community in Spain that came to be known as the school of Salamanca. The Burgos-born Francisco de Vitoria (1492–1546) was the singular force behind this intellectual renewal. Studying at the Dominican Collège de Saint-Jacques in Paris, Vitoria earned a strong reputation early on for his theological acumen. He learned theology from the defector of nominalism, Pierre de Crockaert, who had replaced the Lombard’s Sentences with Aquinas’s Summa theologiae as the principal textbook for theological formation. When Vitoria came to the university of Salamanca to hold the Prima Chair of Theology in 1526, he instituted the practice of reading and commenting on the Summa in the classroom halls through the lectura.33 The first generation of the Salamanca school beginning with Vitoria also included his pupil from Paris, Domingo de Soto (1495–1560), along with Melchor Cano (1509–1560). For these Dominican friars, scholastic theology was grounded in the speculative thought of Aquinas, yet was attentive to the historical-critical concerns of Renaissance humanism.34 One important contribution of their innovative method was the introduction of a new theological genre: the relectio. The relectiones (Sp. relecciones) were wellprepared faculty dissertations, lasting about two hours, often on a topic of sociopolitical or ecclesiastical concern related to their classroom lectures. These topics included but were not limited to current debates concerning poverty, sacraments, civil authority, empire, and war. The relectiones at Salamanca were typically delivered during holidays and the spring months before other faculty and students. For the theological critics of European conquest and colonial practices, the scholastic relectio relied on the teachings of Aquinas and Cajetan, and conveyed the fundamental principles for addressing the Indies during the reign of Charles V. In the aftermath of Hernán Cortés’s conquest of Mexico in 1521 and Francisco Pizarro’s looting of the Inca capital of Cuzco in 1533, the relectiones of Soto and Vitoria were exemplary scholastic theological responses to the mistreatment of Amerindian peoples. Soto’s Relectio de dominio (1535) and Vitoria’s Relectio de Indis (1539) began with “re-reading” a relevant passage from the Bible—a hermeneutical starting point—and proceeded to engage the Bible’s theological meaning in a transatlantic context. Vitoria’s De Indis began with Jesus’s Great Commission in Matthew 28:19 to teach the Gospel to all nations. Additionally, Soto’s De dominio began with re-reading Genesis 1:27–28 to affirm humanity’s divine

Scholastic Theology, Justice, and the Conquest   47 image and rule over creation. Both relectiones momentously identified the imago Dei doctrine as the basis for universal rights in the West. Often overlooked, Soto’s De dominio was the first relectio to substantively address the affair of the Indies at Salamanca with respect to Amerindian ownership of possessions (dominium rerum) and political authority (dominium iurisdictionis). Soto rejected the frequently rehearsed claim propounding the Crown’s right to conquer the peoples across the Atlantic on the title that the pope or emperor was lord of the world (dominus orbis). On the contrary, as Aquinas and Cajetan had made clear, political authority rested on human law and natural reason, not divine law and grace.35 Soto generated a powerful critique of imperial power, beginning with the classical Romans, who ruled by might of arms instead of lawful right.36 In direct contrast to theocratic-royalists and imperial-humanists, Soto claimed that natural right belongs equally to individuals and polities irrespective of creed, since everyone shares the same human nature.37 The Spanish Dominicans, and later Jesuits like Luis de Molina and Francisco Suárez, understood the political expression of dominium as an outgrowth of the most fundamental aspect of human existence: free ownership of one’s acts. This concept of natural dominium, indebted to Aquinas, pertained to rational creatures themselves who exercised a freedom of choice to do or not do an act, or in using or not using something.38 Free choice and self-movement—the traditional scholastic markers of the image of God—indicated the personal and interpersonal nature of dominium potentially present in every human being.39 Belief in the image of God, and the natural dominium it protects, opened a horizon for these Spanish theologians to speak of subjective natural rights for Christians and non-Christians alike.40 These relectiones denied medieval theocratic and papalist arguments for European expansion, alleging that sinners and nonbelievers had no political sovereignty and land possession unless approved by ecclesiastical power. For example, Vitoria’s Relectio de Indis began with an account of natural dominium founded on human reason. He relied on the theological doctrine of the image of God to argue that natural rights flowed from this exalted status of humanity. These fundamental rights pertained to sinners as much as saints, believers and unbelievers, adults and children, and the wise as well as the mentally impaired.41 Since every human being existed for his or her own sake as creatures made in God’s image, no one existed for another’s use. This ontological condition of intrinsic (or non-instrumental) worth before God meant that every human being was capable of being injured by undue actions. Some scholars have criticized Vitoria’s De Indis for its seeming acquiescence to, even strong endorsement of, imperial sovereignty.42 Critics have rightly observed that Vitoria not only addressed the unjust titles to war, but also proposed eight possible titles for Castilian rule in the Americas. There were important concerns raised about these latter titles, especially his first and second titles, which rested on an absolute duty to hospitality. These appeared to grant wide latitude for enforcing the rights of traveling (ius peregrinandi) and preaching (ius praedicandi). But among strong critics of Vitoria there has been a myopic tendency to ignore the corpus of his thought, and to draw conclusions from what Vitoria did not in fact say. To avoid misreading a careful thinker like Vitoria,

48   David M. Lantigua it is essential to note that he considered war something awful, especially in the Americas. He expressed his opinion in a letter to the Dominican provincial of Spain in 1534.43 After Vitoria learned about Pizarro’s conquest of Peru, he condemned the war as unjust and tyrannical, and recognized the Amerindians as innocent. In Vitoria’s follow-up lecture to De Indis on just war in 1539 (Relectio de iure belli), he clearly rejected “difference of religion” and “enlargement of empire” as valid causes for war. These two reasons covered the entire range of unjust titles to Spain’s avowed right to subjugate the Amerindians, which Vitoria had dismissed as illegitimate in De Indis. Vitoria’s twofold rationale undermined the various imperial justifications, which included the belief that the emperor or pope was lord of the world (unjust titles one and two); or that Spain possessed a right of discovery as supported by classical Roman law (unjust title three); or that unbelievers might not refuse to accept the Christian faith (unjust title four); or that unbelievers outside of Christian lands could be punished for mortal sins (e.g., idolatry) as taught by the medieval canonists (unjust title five); or that they have willingly accepted the Requerimiento (unjust title six); or that God has granted Spain a special gift to conquer (unjust title seven). For Vitoria, war belonged contingently to the law of nations and must only follow from an injury committed against innocent persons.44 Vitoria was careful to place constraints even here so that only specific, certainly not all, grave injuries constituted a valid reason for use of force. The effects of war—slaughter, fire, and devastation—were simply cruel and horrible. Contrary to what some critics have claimed, Vitoria’s scheme did not finally support and defend Spanish incursions into Indian society in toto.45 Rather, Vitoria’s relectiones categorically rejected all the “causes” proposed to justify the wars against Amerindians at that point in colonial history. Vitoria’s principled rejection of the commonly asserted titles of conquest helps explain why he was undoubtedly targeted by Charles V’s imperial censure, which restricted him or anyone else at Salamanca from preaching or publishing anything about the Indies without royal oversight. His honest assessment of the injustice of conquest in the Americas, combined with his scholastic precision, moved Christian discussion of just war beyond the parochialism of the medieval crusades and toward a universal, more egalitarian framework. Vitoria’s appeal to the universal authority of the law of nations (ius gentium) meant that his justification of war was, in principle, generally applicable to all peoples. To a greater and lesser degree, scholars have noted Vitoria’s cosmopolitan sensibilities favoring the equality of peoples supported by an international order.46 His account of just war holds relevant in a global society where human rights and the international criminal court are mechanisms for establishing norms cross-culturally. Humanitarian intervention due to the responsibility to protect the innocent from tyranny, especially those experiencing widespread violent religious persecution, and the just defense of allies, are of considerable importance to contemporary political thought and international relations (possible just titles three, four, five, and seven). Though Vitoria’s possible titles stemming from an absolute duty of hospitality whereby Amerindians should welcome Spaniards (if they cause no harm) may have been shortsighted and in need of further qualifications, his students attempted to rectify

Scholastic Theology, Justice, and the Conquest   49 limits of his thought after his death in 1546. Melchor Cano, who later occupied the same Chair in Theology at Salamanca, contextualized the first possible title based on a right of travel by critically pointing out that the Spaniards were not needy foreign travelers, but invaders more akin to Alexander the Great.47 Nevertheless, Vitoria’s full approval of the freedom to travel for those who posed no threat to others has remained an important resource for contemporary immigration debates turning on the conflict between the right of state sovereignty and the right of migrants. Vitoria’s second possible title endorsed the preaching of the Gospel in unwelcoming places. Since Vitoria supported instances of preaching against the will of those hearing the message, it meant then that armed conflict and war could follow when providing safety to missionaries.48 Cano addressed this issue by pointing out that not every obstacle to evangelization meant resorting to coercion and violence. Furthermore, since the Gospel must not be forced upon anyone, a community could freely decide to refuse missionaries.49 The teaching of Jesus in the synoptic Gospels affirmed this when he told his disciples to enter into towns where they were welcomed, but to depart and shake the dust from their feet where they were not.50 Soto’s Relectio de dominio cited this biblical passage to promote an apostolic method of evangelization and the freedom to receive faith without coercion, in contrast to the missionary warfare method of the crusading tradition. Las Casas also referred to it frequently in his works beginning with his 1534 treatise on peaceful evangelization known as The Only Way (De unico vocationis modo).51 Vitoria never supported the conquests, but neither did he present a viable solution for the Indies as his scholastic confreres had done.

Scholastic Theology and the Latin American Tradition of Human Rights The Spanish-scholastic account of dominium founded on the image of God, and the freedom of individual persons and their respective commonwealths, supplied the intellectual armature for a distinctively Latin American tradition of human rights.52 No religious and political thinker has figured more prominently in this tradition than Bartolomé de las Casas.53 After Las Casas was appointed bishop of Chiapa in 1543, he went to Salamanca to recruit the best Dominican friars from San Esteban to return with him to preach peacefully in the New World as he had already done in the southernMexican and northern-Guatemalan region of Verapaz. Las Casas’s thought was the flowering result of over forty years of firsthand experience, sharpened and refined by his training as a canon lawyer. He combined juridical insight with the scholastic concept of natural law to defend Amerindian rights. His opposition to unjust war during the reign of Charles V proved even more forceful and reformatory than Vitoria’s argument. Las Casas’s message was so resounding, in fact, that the emperor promulgated the “New Laws” of 1542, temporarily abolishing the encomienda and prohibiting wars of conquest,

50   David M. Lantigua due to his advocacy. The legacy of Las Casas strongly persisted in Latin America’s modern history of political independence and continues in the ongoing struggle for the rights of indigenous peoples and the poor. Freedom and the natural right of self-defense provided the locus for Las Casas’s articulation of Amerindian rights. Among his 1552 Seville treatises, which included his very brief account of the destruction of the Indies (Sp. Brevísima relación) and his controversial “Twelve Rules for Confessors,” the bishop appended a scholastic-juristic reflection in Principia quaedam to his preceding treatises. This speculative legal primer concerning “certain principles” presented a scholastic natural law theory of political authority, applied to the Amerindian case. It supplied a principled defense of Amerindians by synthesizing scholastic-juristic teachings about the image of God, natural justice, consent of the people, and human liberty as a bulwark against contrived claims to conquer because of cultural superiority.54 Las Casas provided an indefatigable argument for Amerindian freedom and their right of self-defense against Spanish invaders. Following from his historical analysis of relevant events surrounding the early encounters, Las Casas resolutely held that the only legitimate right of defense came from the Amerindian side of the conflict, evident, for example, in the brutal attack of Jalisco by Spaniards.55 He was also intimately familiar with the just rebellion waged by the cacique Enriquillo on the island of Española, whom Las Casas had peacefully assuaged. Enriquillo had fled to the mountains with other natives following a skirmish that resulted from the violence and sexually abusive activities of a Spanish encomendero.56 Strikingly, the scholastic appeal to “natural law and the common reason of humans” worked reflexively on the conscience of Las Casas, who earlier had supported the transplantation of African slaves to the Indies in order to alleviate Amerindians.57 When Las Casas learned later in life from Portuguese chronicles that the Africans were tyrannically conquered and unjustly enslaved, just like the Amerindians, he soulfully condemned his earlier requests.58 The scope of self-defense belonging to the peoples of the Indies, as well as Africa, extended out from the fundamental good of life to include their political freedom, their property, and even their religion. At the Valladolid meeting in Spain (1550–1551), where Sepúlveda supported the lawfulness of war as a means of evangelization, Bishop Las Casas cited Cicero to articulate the Amerindian natural right (derecho natural) to defend their religion from extermination by Spaniards.59 His use of Cicero to support the universal bond of humanity and the naturalness of religion was a prominent aspect of his philosophical and his protoanthropological thinking.60 Aquinas echoed this classical Roman teaching by describing sacrifice—a ubiquitous religious practice—as part of the natural law.61 This combination of Cicero’s thought with scholastic humanism yielded a more positive comparative assessment of Amerindian cultural and religious practices, such as idolatry and self-­ immolation.62 Instead of dismissing these indigenous customs as demonic aberrations, as many of his contemporaries did, Las Casas tried to understand them from a posture of deep respect, admiration, but also unreserved faith. Though gravely misguided, Amerindian self-immolation, as seen among the Incas, exhibited something quite

Scholastic Theology, Justice, and the Conquest   51 profound: the universal desire to offer God what was supremely valuable and most precious—human life.63 Indeed, for Las Casas, the greatest idolaters were those Spanish colonizers who betrayed the Christian faith by vanquishing the lives of innocent Amerindians in the pursuit of wealth and the glories of war. Las Casas’s final treatises applied the language of natural rights to address the political and religious elements of Amerindian cultures: the restoration of Inca sacred sovereignty and their sacred possessions, as well as that of any other society attacked by colonial aggressors. His posthumous De regia potestate (On Royal Power), published in 1571, along with what he called his last will and codicil—De thesauris (On the Treasures of Peru) and Doce dudas (Twelve Doubts)—were the crowning achievement of his lifelong commitment to protect the Amerindians and to purify faith from its violent and worldly colonial expressions, seen in both the encomienda and the conquests. His clear identification of the native right of consent to, or dissent from, European political rule, along with his ongoing insistence that the Spaniards had no legitimate claim for self-defense against the Amerindians, obviate attempts to portray him as an imperialist, ecclesiastical or otherwise.64 Moreover, Las Casas’s constant reminder that Christ taught the apostles to depart from unwelcoming towns further strengthened his belief that Spaniards should flee possible conflicts with native peoples, rather than fight back. De thesauris and Doce dudas made the radical case for full restoration of Inca political rule in Peru and the abolishment of the encomienda system. Employing Cajetan’s category of unbelievers who have never been under Christian jurisdiction, Las Casas classified the Spanish incursions singularly as unjust wars.65 Once again, the Amerindians could exercise their natural right of self-defense and resistance against the Spaniards who had first injured them and violated their natural freedom.66 In this historical instance, the sacred Inca Atahualpa was unjustly executed in 1533 and the conquistador Pizarro wrongfully seized the Inca capital city. Las Casas did not hesitate to identify Pizarro as a tyrant, thus discrediting not only his title to rule, but all subsequent Spanish governance.67 Las Casas also condemned Cortés’s subjugation of the Aztecs. In accordance with Aquinas’s scholastic-humanist dictum that “grace does not destroy nature,” Las Casas supported a twofold origin of political authority in both God and the people, as seen in the election of ancient Israelite monarchs Saul and David: God neither destroyed nor abrogated natural right, which from the beginning providence had established in a wise and immutable manner.68 Las Casas also turned to Cajetan’s relevant commentary and Aquinas’s classic teaching from the Summa: “Divine law, which is from grace, does not take away human law, which is from natural reason.” Therefore, neither the pope nor the Spanish monarchs had the authority to rule over the Amerindians against their will, according to nature and the order of grace. Amerindian political self-determination, or the right of consent, resides in a people’s natural power to accept or refuse foreign powers.69 Consequently, Christians cannot assert political rule over non-Europeans at the expense of the latter’s natural freedom and human laws. Las Casas’s scholastic view of political life contained strong democratic inclinations that went beyond the mindset of medieval Christendom. His De regia potestate, which did not have a Spanish edition until 1969, distilled his political thought in the speculative

52   David M. Lantigua fashion already begun in Principia quaedam. The treatise made little mention of the Indies. What it lacked in historical specificity was made up in a broad theoretical application, beginning with its significant claim that the people (populus) hold the efficient cause of all royal power. The people were originally free and anterior to any form of political authority, the latter’s purpose of which was not to create the law, but to administer it justly by respecting the freedom and natural rights of its subjects. The ruler was entrusted with the duty of establishing the well-being of the people by supplying for their deficiencies, correcting their customs to promote virtue, and defending them from anyone who threatened the common welfare.70 Las Casas’s scholastic political theory of right evaded the standard opposition between ancient and modern, or classical and liberal. The prominent legacy of Las Casas in Latin American cultures has served various political interests tied together by the common discourse of resistance to colonial powers or oppressive regimes—most notably Spanish governance, military dictatorships, and multinational corporations. The ideas of Francisco Suárez and Jean-Jacques Rousseau have generally been associated with theories of popular sovereignty and political independence in modern Latin American history.71 Yet Las Casas has remained an emblematic figure on the side of those struggling on behalf of the poor and oppressed, especially among indigenous and creole peoples. His searing accounts of Spanish injustice recorded in his Brevísima relación may have supplied potent ammunition for the Black Legend used by British and Dutch imperial competitors, but it also mobilized nineteenth-century resistance to colonialism in Latin America. For example, Fray Servando Teresa de Mier wrote an introduction to an edition of the Brevísima relación in 1812 during his exile in London to promote insurgent efforts back in Mexico. Mier saw Las Casas as both the father of creole rebels and the protector of the Indians.72 In a notable letter from Jamaica in 1815, the republican revolutionary Simón Bolívar appealed to the example of the “philanthropic bishop of Chiapa,” who was considered the “apostle of America” and a “friend of humanity.” Having learned about the bishop from his tutor, Bolívar could not think of a more appropriate name than “Las Casas” for the capital of a new state that would link Venezuela and New Granada.73 Las Casas also became an icon of freedom and resistance in the Cuban struggle for independence from Spain. The poet, essayist, and social activist José Martí penned El Padre Las Casas as a tribute to the bishop’s compassion and justice. Martí commented that Las Casas’s theological, humanistic, and legal training were “skillfully employed to defend the human right to liberty, and the duty of rulers to respect it.”74 Across the Latin American landscape, the modern elements of Las Casas’s political thought were repeatedly employed in political resistance efforts. During the twentieth century, Las Casas inspired theologies and philosophies of liberation in the face of military dictators and neocolonialism. Whether interpreted as a prophet of liberating evangelization or a philosopher of maximal critical consciousness, Las Casas has been crucial for contemporary Latin American thinkers who articulate an alternative narrative of freedom and human rights in the West from the perspective of the suffering poor.75 His solidarity with the voiceless other represents a historical option for the poor, a theme which has become a staple feature of the modern Catholic social

Scholastic Theology, Justice, and the Conquest   53 teaching inaugurated by the renewed scholasticism of Pope Leo XIII when the Roman Church turned its pastoral care directly toward exploited workers of European industry. The tireless, lifelong efforts of Las Casas to defend Amerindians demonstrate that true justice requires a preference for the rights of the poor and oppressed. This theological preference remains especially relevant in hyper-individualistic cultures where the freedoms of the privileged are often promoted over and above the basic needs of many who are beyond the solicitude of governments, special interests, and the consumer industry of affluent populations.

Notes 1. Annabel Brett, “Scholastic Political Thought and the Modern Concept of the State,” in  Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought, eds. Annabel Brett and James Tully with Holly Hamilton Bleakley (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 141. 2. Ibid., 144. 3. Ulrich G. Leinsle, Introduction to Scholastic Theology, trans. Michael J. Miller (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 247–260. 4. R. W. Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, vol. 1 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 44. 5. Bonaventure, The Journey of the Mind to God, trans. Philotheus Boehner, ed. Stephen Brown (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993), chap. 3; Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica (hereafter cited ST), trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York, NY: Benziger, 1948), I, q. 93. 6. Janet Coleman, A History of Political Thought: From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), chap. 1. 7. Marcus Tullius Cicero, The Laws (De legibus), in The Republic and The Laws, trans. Niall Rudd (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997), I.18, 103. 8. Jean Porter, Nature as Reason: A Thomistic Theory of the Natural Law (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), 348–358. 9. ST I–II, q. 91, a. 2. 10. ST I–II, q. 91, a. 4 ad 1. 11. ST I, q. 1. a. 8 ad 2. 12. Mt 28:19; Mk 16:15. 13. For a complete English translation of the Bull, see W. Eugene Shiels, King and Church: The Rise and Fall of the Patronato Real (Chicago, IL: Loyola University, 1961), 66–70. 14. Bartolomé de las Casas, Historia de las Indias, III, ed. Agustín Millares Carlo (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1965), c. 4. All Spanish and Latin translations are author’s own, unless otherwise indicated by use of alternate translation. 15. Juan Belda Plans, La Escuela de Salamanca y la renovación de la teología en el siglo XVI (Madrid: Biblioteca Autores Cristianos, 2000), 67–68. 16. Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 2002), 18. 17. Juan López de Palacios Rubios, De las Islas del Mar Océano (Libellus de insulis oceanis), trans. Paulino Castañeda Delgado et al. (Navarra: EUNSA, 2013), cap. 5, §1, 332–335. 18. See Shiels, King and Church, chaps. 5 and 6. 19. Palacios Rubios, De las Islas, cap. 3, §4, 160–163; cap. 4, §7, 276–279.

54   David M. Lantigua 20. James Muldoon, Popes, Lawyers, and Infidels: The Church and the Non-Christian World, 1250–1550 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979); Paulino Castañeda Delgado, La teocracía pontifical en las controversias sobre el Nuevo Mundo (Ciudad de México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1996). 21. Hanke, Spanish Struggle for Justice, chap. 3; Luis Rivera, A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), 32–41; for a comparative historical treatment of the Spanish legal ritual of Requerimiento and its medieval Islamic roots, see Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chap. 3. 22. Palacios Rubios, De las islas, cap. 2, §1, 116–117. 23. For a complete transcription of the relevant passage in Latin, see Pedro Leturia, “Maior y Vitoria ante la conquista de América,” Anuario de la Asociación Francisco de Vitoria 3 (1930–1931), 79–82. 24. Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 39. 25. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Peter Bondanella (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005), 22. 26. Tratados Politicos de Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, trans. Angel Losada (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Politicos, 1963), 176. 27. José Fernández-Santamaria, The State, War and Peace: Spanish Political Thought in the Renaissance, 1516–1559 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), Chaps. 6 and 7; David Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots and the Liberal State, 1492–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 86–88. 28. Sepúlveda, Demócrates segundo, o, De las justas causas de la guerra contra los indios, trans. Angel Losada (Madrid: CSIC, 1984), 33. 29. Las Casas, Historia, III, c. 38. 30. Tommaso deVío Cajetan, Commentary on Summa theologiae, in Sancti Thomae Aquinatis Opera Omnia, Leonine edition (Rome: Ex Typographia Polyglotta, 1882–1918), II–II 66.8, §I, 94. 31. ST II–II, q. 10, a. 10; cf. II–II q. 12, a. 2, and q. 66, a. 8. 32. Venancio D. Carro, “The Spanish Theological-Juridical Renaissance and the Ideology of Bartolomé de Las Casas,” in Bartolomé de las Casas in History: Toward an Understanding of the Man and His Work, eds. Juan Friede and Benjamin Keen (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971), 251–252. 33. Belda Plans, La Escuela de Salamanca, cap. 4. 3 4. Ibid., 157. 35. Domingo de Soto, De dominio, in Relecciones y opusculos, trans. Jaime Brufau Prats (Salamanca: Editorial San Esteban, 1995), §32. 36. Manuel Martinez, “Las Casas on the Conquest of America,” in Bartolomé de las Casas in History, 321–328; David A. Lupher, Romans in a New World: Classical Models in SixteenthCentury Spanish America (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003), Chap. 2. 37. Soto, De dominio, §29. 38. Jaime Brufau Prats, La escuela de Salamanca ante el descubrimiento del Nuevo Mundo (Salamanca: Editorial San Esteban, 1989), Chap.  1; Annabel  S.  Brett, Liberty, Right and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1997), Chap. 6.

Scholastic Theology, Justice, and the Conquest   55 39. Soto, De dominio, §11; Vitoria, On the American Indians (De Indis), in Vitoria: Political Writings, eds. Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 248–249. 40. Tierney, Idea of Natural Rights; Brett, Liberty, Right and Nature; Roger Ruston, Human Rights and the Image of God (London: SCM Press, 2004). 41. Vitoria, On the American Indians, 239–251. 42. Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York, NY: Telos Press, 2003), 113–125; Robert Williams, The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1990); Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Chap. 1. 43. See Vitoria, Appendix A, in Political Writings, 331–333. 44. Cf. Vitoria, On Self-Restraint (De temperantia), 225, and On the Law of War (De iure belli), 303–304. Both relectiones can be found in Political Writings. 45. Anghie, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, 21; Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 113. 46. James Brown Scott, The Spanish Origin of International Law: Francisco de Vitoria and His Law of Nations (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934); Georg Cavallar, The Rights of Strangers: Theories of International Hospitality, the Global Community and Political Justice since Vitoria (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002). 47. Lupher, Romans in a New World, 85–93. 48. Vitoria, On the American Indians, 285. 49. Lupher, Romans in a New World, 86. 50. Mt 10:14; Mk 6:11; Lk 9:5. 51. Soto, De dominio, §34; Las Casas, De unico vocationis modo 5, §17, 178–180, in Obras completas, vol. 2, eds. Paulino Castañeda Delgado and Antonio García de Moral (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1988–1990). 52. Edward  L.  Cleary, Mobilizing for Human Rights in Latin America (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2007), 4. 53. Paolo  G.  Carozza, “From Conquest to Constitutions: Retrieving a Latin American Tradition of the Idea of Human Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly 25, no.2 (2003), 281–313. 5 4. Las Casas, Principia quaedam, in Tratados de Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, II (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1965). 55. Las Casas, Brevísima relación, in Tratados, I, 101. 56. Francis Patrick Sullivan, Indian Freedom: The Cause of Bartolomé de las Casas, 1484–1566 (Kansas City, KS: Sheed and Ward, 1995), 188–199. 57. Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, I, cap. 24, 133. 58. Clayton, Lawrence A. Las Casas and the Conquest of the Americas (Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2011), 135–144; Adorno, The Polemics of Possession, 64–69. 5 9. Las Casas, Aquí se contiene una disputa o controversia, in Tratados, I, 408–409. 6 0. Cary Nederman, Worlds of Difference: European Discourses of Toleration, c. 1100–1550 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 99–115. 61. ST II–II q. 85, a. 1, cited in In Defense of the Indians, trans. Stafford Poole (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992), 230. 6 2. Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), Chap. 5. 6 3. In Defense of the Indians, Chaps. 35 and 36.

56   David M. Lantigua 64. Daniel Castro, Another Face of Empire: Bartolomé de Las Casas, Indigenous Rights, and Ecclesiastical Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 65. Doce dudas, in Obras completas, vol. 11.2, c. V. 66. De thesauris, in Obras completas, vol. 11.1, caps. XXXV–XXXVI. 67. Doce dudas, caps. XXIII and XXVI. 6 8. De thesauris, c. XVIII. 6 9. Ibid., c. XXXVII. 7 0. De regia potestate, in Obras completas, vol. 12, VIII.2. 7 1. Howard  J.  Wiarda, The Soul of Latin America: The Cultural and Political Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), Chaps. 4 and 5. 72. Adorno, Polemics of Possession, 80–81. 73. Benjamin Keen, Essays in the Intellectual History of Colonial Latin America (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 23. 74. José Martí, “El Padre Las Casas,” in La edad de oro (Barcelona: Linkgua, 2008), 145. 75. Gustavo Gutiérrez, En busca de los pobres de Jesucristo: El pensamiento de Bartolomé de las Casas (Lima: Instituto Bartolomé de Las Casas, 1992); Enrique Dussel, The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity, trans. Michael D. Barber (New York, NY: Continuum, 1995).

chapter 4

Th e Sacr ed A rt of Cou n ter- Conqu e st Material Christianity in Latin America Jennifer Scheper Hughes

. . . we may now claim any artistic style as our own, without anxiety or trepidation or fear of error, as long as we inscribe there the symbols of our destiny and the language through which our very soul inhabits these objects. —José Lezama Lima, “Baroque Curiosity,” in La expresión Americana1

Material Christianity in Latin America encompasses those physical expressions of Christianity that anchor the sacred in public, domestic, and natural space: imposing baroque cathedrals and humble household oratories, sumptuous gilded altarpieces and worn wooden tables crowded with saints’ images, painted colonial crucifixes preserved and cared for over centuries, and inexpensive statues of saints sold by the thousands in street markets across the continent. From works of monumental architecture to vernacular expressions of “folk” religion, objects of material religion secure and orient lived faith. These material manifestations of the sacred give Latin American Christianity its depth and dimension. This chapter explores the invention and persistence of Latin American sacred art in relation to lived belief and practice, specifically in those cultural traditions understood as Catholic, in the most inclusive sense.2 Latin American Christianity is often oriented toward visible, tangible manifestations of the holy. Through ritual action, human beings imbue these artworks with religious significance and power. In her home chapel in the Guatemalan highlands, an indigenous Maya woman celebrates her pueblo’s patron saint. Religious images, rich adornments, warm candlelight, and thick clouds redolent of incense incarnate the sacred. Through her ritual actions, she tends to the materium tremendum, the sacred encountered first through its penetration and animation of the material world, and reconciles the paradoxes of Latin American Christianity (Figure 4.1).3 In spite of its painful origins in violent conquest

58   Jennifer Scheper Hughes

Figure 4.1  A woman in her home chapel tends to the materium tremendum. Momostenango, Guatemala. Photo by Rhonda Taube, with permission.

and imperial domination, in many Latin American communities the Christian sacred is not remote but proximate, not intangible but materially manifest, and the corresponding lived faith of many Latin American Christians is familiar and tender, intimate and affectionate. This study of Latin American religion is not only material but also necessarily materialist.4 Contemporary religious practice in Latin America reflects the pain and paradox of its colonial origins and thus must be contextualized and historicized in relation to the structures of colonial domination that define the context of its creation. The “infinite image” defines Latin American material Christianity, but this sacred superabundance is always “realized within a finite history.”5 Latin American Christianity was born from the fraught and freighted colonial “encounter” of diverse indigenous, African, and European populations. European Catholic missionaries labored to coax and compel a new faith for a New World, drawing on the rich visual-religious idiom of early modern Iberia—theirs was also an abundant material religious world.6 Yet many colonized peoples perceived that the forced introduction of Christianity during colonial rule did not so much deliver the sacred as threaten to annihilate it. The arduous process of forging Latin American Christianity was therefore one of concentrated artistic, cultural, and spiritual production as indigenous, African, and mestizo peoples in Latin America worked on the imposed European Christianity to make it a usable, potent, and sacred religion.7 This chapter

The Sacred Art of Counter-Conquest   59 explores this sacred labor and the resulting religious forms that manifest the complexities of Christianity’s ambivalent history in Latin America. The relative coherence of Latin American Christian practice today across the continent is evidence of a widespread consensus among indigenous and indigenous-descended communities that Christianity could be reworked to defend and protect the sacred from European cultural destruction. Objects of material religion occupied the very center of this effort. The novel cultural and religious expressions, deemed syncretic or hybrid, characteristic of Latin American Christianity are the product of human agency, artistry, and effort, produced within and against the structures of colonial society.8 A tremendous ritual, spiritual, and cultural labor imbued adopted artistic forms and the imposed Christian religion itself with sacred meaning and power. This act of redemption was, by necessity, a labor of contraconquista, the sacred art of counter-conquest.

Tabula Rasa: The Blank Slate, the Empty Canvas The history of Christian material religion in Latin America begins with a violent act of imagined erasure. One of the first ritual acts of Christian evangelization in the Americas was the destruction of indigenous sacred material objects, as friars, priests, and bishops worked to create a tabula rasa, a fictional blank slate, upon which the Christian story could be written. The sixteenth-century Dominican friar Diego Durán explained, “Fields of grain and fruit trees do not prosper on uncultivated rocky soil, covered with brambles and brush, unless all roots and stumps are eradicated.”9 The slave ships that crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the Middle Passage may have been similarly imagined as a place where past histories, religious cultures, and spiritual attachments could be erased and replaced by European cultural norms.10 The tabula rasa offered a potent theological and philosophical imaginary—a theoretical point of origin, an epistemological starting place—definitive for comprehending the material origins of Christianity in the New World. Most of the major native religious traditions in Latin America at the time of conquest were fundamentally materialist and image-based, oriented around a complex visual pantheon of materially manifest deities.11 Christian missionaries disparaged these as “idols,” even as Iberian Christianity was also fundamentally oriented around the centrality of religious images. From the late Middle Ages, western European Catholics engaged in dynamic relationship with religious images in ways contradicted by subsequent Protestant and modern epistemological distinctions between being and matter.12 The Council of Trent (1563) reaffirmed the centrality of art to Christian practice, even while attempting to define more narrowly the parameters of religious devotion. Nevertheless, the spiritual conquest of Latin America was waged as a “war of images,” pitting one culturally specific version of religious materiality against another.13 In this

60   Jennifer Scheper Hughes war, this “spiritual conquest,” missionaries to the New World frequently destroyed indigenous sacred buildings, divine images, and holy texts in an effort to purge the landscape of its indigenous sacred content. They replaced these with images of Jesus, Mary, and the saints. Some friars, such as the ethnographer-theologian Bernardino de Sahagún, labored to preserve aspects of indigenous culture and language for posterity. The Dominican Bartolomé de las Casas also defended the integrity of certain specific elements of indigenous culture, especially in his Apologia and Apologética historia sumaria. But material Christianity in Latin America begins with violent acts of iconoclasm such as these. In extirpation campaigns, through the ceremony of the auto de fe, and in less formalized but no less brutal acts of iconoclasm, missionaries consigned divine effigies, texts, and other works of indigenous material religion to flame.14 Their guardians stood powerless to redeem them (Figure 4.2). In the Andes among the Inca, the targets of seventeenthcentury extirpation campaigns included objects of en-souled and vital matter: sculpted stones, domestic gods of lineage, and vital malquis, ancestral mummies preserved, dressed, and adorned so they maintained much the same appearance in death as in life. Extirpating priests and friars took materially manifest deities from homes and deposited them in flames, while explaining to the offending worshippers the nature of their sins. They removed the mummies from their places of honor and buried them as dead, in the cold, dark earth. Sacred buildings, temples, pyramids, and sanctuaries were similarly destroyed or repurposed. The spirited and animate massive stone monuments, too large to destroy, were marked with Christian symbols and claimed for the new tradition.15 In  Mexico, the Franciscan missionary Diego de Landa’s renegade inquisition in the Yucatan in 1562 is a particularly brutal example. De Landa consigned dozens of Maya sacred books and perhaps as many as ten thousand “idols” to flames. He simultaneously oversaw the interrogation and torture of some 5,000 Maya Indian converts to Catholicism, resulting in the deaths of almost 200 people.16 De Landa’s terrible ritual linked the annihilation of objects of indigenous material religion with the physical punishment and even destruction of indigenous bodies. Yet, irrespective of Spanish iconoclastic fantasies, the destruction of indigenous religious cultures was never more than partial. Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn consider that colonial acts of iconoclasm resulted in the fragmentation, diffusion, and reconstruction of the indigenous sacred, but never in its final destruction.17 Missionaries consistently confronted the reality of indigenous and African cultural survival. Decades, even centuries later, church leadership worried over the persistence of indigenous religious practices, even in communities where Christianity was well rooted. Especially in the Andes, efforts at extirpation accelerated in the seventeenth century, precisely in response to evidence that indigenous religious cultures persevered.18 Nonetheless, from the perspective of the Spanish evangelizing body, a mythological moment of erasure marks the birth of Christianity in the New World: a moment when the earth was supposedly emptied of divine figures and sacred forms and material deities were reduced to burnt remains, left as ash upon a fallow ground. Upon this imagined, evacuated religious landscape, religious orders, missionary friars—Franciscans,

The Sacred Art of Counter-Conquest   61

Figure 4.2  Tabula rasa. Friars burning native sacred images and books. Diego Muñoz. With permission. University of Glasgow, Special Collections. Camargo, Historia de Tlaxcala, Mexico 1585. Folio 242r.

Dominicans, Augustinians, and Jesuits—began to construct the scaffolding of their religious enterprise: the mission compounds and the reducción churches where evangelization of the “natives” would take place. These religious orders populated with the Catholic saints, crucifixes and other representations of Jesus, and the Virgin Mary: painted on murals, frescoes, and retablos, and sculpted in the round. In colonial Latin America, material religious culture was the primary medium for Christian conversion and indoctrination.

62   Jennifer Scheper Hughes

Into the Void: The Latin American Baroque and the Sacred Art of Counter-Conquest The so-called spiritual conquest of Latin America and its violent efforts at erasure of indigenous material religion left a figurative void, an empty altar, a blank canvas.19 Indigenous communities struggled to maintain, honor, and tend to the sacred, even in the midst of iconoclastic destruction and social upheaval. They sought continuity of practice, and persisted especially in their care for the materium tremendum, even in its new and problematic Christian guise, where, against all odds, they also often perceived the presence of sacred power. Many Latin American indigenous cultures are epistemologically inclusive—in the long colonial period their expansive understanding of the sacred allowed for the incorporation of new deities and divine personages or spirits, like the novel Christian saints, into a flexible religious pantheon.20 These communities frequently recognized the potency of the Christian holy, particularly in its material manifestations. Conflict, resistance, and tragedy resulted, however, when European clergy forcefully asserted radical Christian exclusivism and challenged the power of indigenous Christian structures of authority (caciques, cofrades, and mayordomias) to govern and control local Christian practice. Into the imagined void created by iconoclastic destruction, indigenous and ­mestizo Christians labored to construct a new religious, visual, and material universe. In some cases, non-European artists and craftsmen were so effective in the production and distribution of Christian religious images that colonial authorities felt compelled to limit their right to produce works of Christian sacred art. A late sixteenth-century regulation allowed indigenous artists in New Spain to produce Catholic images for their own devotional use, but prohibited them from creating works for formal installation in churches or for the general use of Spanish Christians. Nevertheless, non-European artists persisted in the creation of Christian art from early in the colonial period (Figure 4.3). Thus, the religious landscape was revitalized through the toil of New World artisans: churches and chapels rose up against the horizon, and altars swelled anew with images and effigies and other forms of material sacra. From the sixteenth century, indigenous, mestizo, and African craft workers, artists, and other skilled laborers participated in the construction of Christian art and architecture in a variety of capacities: as sculptors, santeros (image makers), architects, masons, engineers, painters, and illustrators. They not only worked as compulsory laborers in the construction of religious edifices, but also collaborated actively with Spanish craftsmen and apprenticed in workshops as they strove for the skill and authority to create their own works of Christian art. Through their exceptional labors, material Christianity proliferated in Latin America: no corner remained unconsecrated or devoid of divine presence. The dynamic of destruction and proliferation marks Latin America’s emergence as a Christian territory. Thus, the material proliferation of Christian image and form was cast against the abstract emptiness of

The Sacred Art of Counter-Conquest   63

Figure 4.3  An Indian santero, creator of sacred artworks, labors over an image of the crucified Christ. Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica y buen govierno, Peru, 1615. With permission. Royal Dutch Library, Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Royal Library, GKS 2234 quarto, drawing 267.

zero, of the tabula rasa. For indigenous and African survivors of the conquest and colonial rule, Christian images especially came to occupy the limen, the space between something and nothing. This sacred proliferation has an art historical appellation: the baroque. Latin American Christianity began to achieve its full breadth in the mid-colonial period, especially in the long seventeenth century, when the baroque became the dominant

64   Jennifer Scheper Hughes artistic style. Flourishing in the period of European global, imperial expansion, the baroque arrived to Latin America as a European import.21 The visual mode of the Catholic Reformation, the baroque was born out of the Tridentine church’s reassertion of the sensory dimension of the Catholic faith. In the face of Reformation era challenges, the baroque functioned as the aesthetic reassertion of Catholic dogma.22 Critics observe the manipulative potency of baroque art in the context of colonial rule in the subjugation of native, colonized, and enslaved populations. In the Latin American context, the baroque sometimes functioned in the “mythologization of the conquest . . . eviscerating local histories.”23 The vast resources necessary for the construction of ostentatious baroque ecclesial structures with gold and silver interiors, whether cathedrals or large urban churches, were the direct product of European colonial domination: made possible by the extraction of wealth through a system of compulsory labor, slavery, and the subjugation of the native population. Nevertheless, in spite of its ties to European imperialism, the baroque aesthetic resonated with indigenous and African conceptions of religious materiality in ways that transcended the politics of domination. Against the Protestant Reformation’s emphasis on interior belief, individual piety, and denial of the material dimensions of Christianity, the baroque validated emotion, affect, and a more corporeal experience of the sacred. The baroque made sacred power available to a subject population denied access to most other forms of cultural, religious, and social capital. Further, the proliferation of sacred forms, ornamentation, and complexity, as in the assembly of saints on the baroque altarpiece, resonated with indigenous conceptions of the abundant presence of the sacred, especially as manifest in manifold material forms. Indigenous notions of religious materiality, in particular vital materialism or the sense of living matter, found purchase in the baroque and its unresolved complexity: never static, baroque architectural design teemed with life: floriated motifs, winged spirits, and a dizzying range of local beasts animated church ceilings, walls, and columns. Inasmuch as the baroque facilitated accommodation to the colonial order, in the Latin American context it was transformed into a vital mode of cultural and spiritual resistance and survival. In the mid-twentieth century, the Cuban poet and cultural theorist José Lezama Lima explained that in Latin America the baroque is not so much a ­decadent style, or an aesthetics of counter-reformation, but rather the very art of counterconquest: the contraconquista.24 Against the full potency of the colonial apparatus, against the structure, regulation, and regimentation of a strictly ordered colonial society, the Latin American baroque impulse strained and prevailed: unruly and uncontained, it defied boundaries and rebelled against order itself. Through the efforts of indigenous, mestizo, and black artists and devotional communities, the European form was indigenized in the Americas. In Latin America the baroque style was compelled to yield to diverse colonial artistic interventions. Art historian Gauvin Bailey writes that the baroque was an open-ended artistic mode, permeable and porous: “the baroque was a more forgiving style . . . more accepting of indigenous contributions.”25 The resulting style has many names: the Latin American baroque, the folk baroque, the indigenous baroque, and, most recently, the

The Sacred Art of Counter-Conquest   65 hybrid baroque.26 In Latin America the baroque became an aesthetic articulation of the cultural and racial complexity of mid-colonial society, increasingly urban and increasingly “mixed,” expressing the particularity of the Latin American cosmopolitan: mestizaje. As the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier explains, in fact “all symbiosis, all mestizaje, engenders the baroque.”27 Latin America thus became the “chosen territory of the baroque.”28 The religious labors of colonized people brought about an intercultural miracle of sorts, through which “the products of an alien system” came to be perceived as original.29 This process was so utterly complete that Lezama declared repeatedly that, far from a European imposition, the baroque is “our thing,” cosa nuestra. In very much the same way, through overlapping mechanisms, Christianity itself became the chosen religion of Latin America. Baroque art dreads the void, it is said, just as surely as colonized communities throughout the continent recoiled at the desolation of the tabula rasa: an American horror vacui.30 In the course of the colonial period in Latin America, the canvas was filled, the altar occupied, and the void negated. Through the lens of baroque counter-conquest, we come to understand something of the unique spirituality of Latin American Christians as they labored to render an authentic faith from an imposed religion: in itself a powerful and generative act of artistic creation.

Making Space Sacred: Latin American Church Architecture from Monasteries to Oratories In the first two centuries after the conquest, the mission-monastery compounds and the remote Indian reductions (reducciones) marked Latin America as Christian territory. By the mid-colonial period, vast cathedrals, shrines, basilicas, and churches defined the sacred as urban and cosmopolitan. Liturgical life across the continent continues to be anchored around these imposing examples of colonial ecclesial architecture.31 At the same time, a seemingly haphazard network of smaller and more informal neighborhood chapels (capillas) and household oratories dedicated to locally significant saints has come to anchor the sacred in domestic space and daily practice. For believers, these structures are continuous with, rather than autonomous from, more formal expressions of Christian architecture: woven together in a powerful spiritual network through collective ritual practice. Many architectural articulations of material religion in Latin American Christianity demarcate Christian space in ways that are consonant with preexisting indigenous cultural mores in which the community is spatially bounded and defined by linked sites of worship.32 Over time, the religious architecture and art of Latin America acquiesced in sometimes surprising ways to indigenous preferences, desires, and engagements with the holy.33 Across the continent, Latin American mission architecture symbolized the renewal of Christendom as signaled by the mass conversion of the “Indians.” An insistent sort of optimism characterized the original missionary architecture in Latin America, present

66   Jennifer Scheper Hughes even in the ascetic simplicity, the “austere severity,” of the Mexican convento.34 Yet this missionary fantasy often obscured and denied the profound struggle of native peoples who languished under colonial rule, including under the forced imposition of European religion. As the principal location for the indoctrination of newly converted indigenous Christians, the conventos functioned as centers of evangelism, education, and art. With walled atrial courtyards that encompassed church and priory, anchored at the center by a monumental stone cross, the New World convento compounds appeared as great stone fortresses against the horizon. Nevertheless, historian Fernando Cervantes describes how indigenous communities (pueblos de indios) throughout Mexico came to see the parish churches, the conventos, and the missions (and eventually the baroque cathedrals) as their own. Overwhelmingly, church structures in the sixteenth century were built by indigenous laborers and then were maintained by the traditional structures that organized care for the sacred. Eleanor Wake notes that while indigenous communities refused other key manifestations of Christianity (eschewing attendance at Mass and at the indoctrination schools), they embraced the construction of churches.35 Observing the “enthusiasm” of indigenous communities for building churches, the friars record that they could complete an entire church building from the ground within six or seven months, a stunning expression of dedication and effort. Under the steady, careful hand of indigenous craftspeople and artisans, a preponderance, almost saturation, of indigenous symbols imbued and infused the sacred into the churches erected in this generation. Indigenous painting, masonry, and stonework defined the architecture of the “Indian churches” of New Spain. Indigenous communities usually took entire credit for building the main church.36 Given indigenous authority over a large part of their construction and maintenance, it is not surprising that in many of the mapas churches appear as traditional indigenous portals or gateways to the sacred, as cave or mountain-like. An indigenous Mexican map of Suchitepec, Oaxaca, from 1579 contains several church glyphs that appear as irregular and rounded caves. The central church of Suchitepec appears as a “mountain-church with jaguar skin threshold.”37 In the Mesoamerican setting, the material matrix of Christian church and Christian saint’s image rearticulated the territorial jurisdiction of the Nahua ethnic state, or altepetl, after the conquest. Historian James Lockhart charts how the original Catholic parishes were coextensive with the indigenous altepetl, the parish church replacing the community’s territorial temple. The Nahua therefore regarded the construction of the Catholic parish church or convento-missionary compound as similarly “magnifying the central tangible symbol of the altepetl’s sovereignty and identity.”38 In essence, the convento or parish church “belonged to the altepetl” even before it belonged to friars, priests, or to Christendom itself.39 Even as these churches materially marked the presence of Christianity in the New World, they were even more immediately symbols of the unshakable persistence of local indigenous identity. Great stone atrial crosses anchored the liturgical and spiritual space of the monastery courtyard and incorporated indigenous Nahua motifs and iconography, revealing the presence of an indigenous artistic hand.40 These sixteenth-century crosses sometimes included flint mirrors, traditional portals to the sacred in Nahua art, and other indigenous

The Sacred Art of Counter-Conquest   67 symbolic elements. One such stone cross from the Mexican state of Hidalgo depicts a stalk of maize where the body of Jesus would typically appear: articulating the association between Christ and corn, the multivalent Mesoamerican religious symbol for the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. The murals painted on the interior walls of New Spanish colonial-era conventos narrated key stories of Christian mythology for a newly converted indigenous audience, but many of these frescoes also evidence the presence of an indigenous artistic hand.41 In the Ecce Homo image of Jesus’s arrest at the Augustinian convento in Epazoyucan, Hidalgo, Jesus clasps a green scepter of maize in his bound hands. Thus, in the midst of his passion, Jesus wields the indigenous symbol of life-giving sacred power (Figure 4.4). In the seventeenth century, the Jesuit reduction (reducción) churches were characteristic of South American ecclesial architectural. The reducciónes were forced settlements of “Indians” intended to facilitate both Christian conversion and the colonial administration of labor. On the one hand, the reducciones were places of compulsion, cultural loss, fragmentation, and even death for indigenous peoples. At the same time, indigenous communities leveraged the process of consolidation in the reducción for the preservation

Figure 4.4  Indigenized Ecce Homo. Christ with a scepter of maize, symbol of the New World sacred. Church mural detail. Augustinian convento. Epazoyucan, Hidalgo, Mexico. Photograph by Richard Perry, with permission.

68   Jennifer Scheper Hughes of some aspects of indigenous communal life and culture. Within the structure of the reducción, indigenous artisans claimed some latitude to incorporate local styles into Jesuit church architecture. José Lezama Lima writes, In the willful stone mass of the Jesuit complex, in the flow of Baroque accumulation, and in the great tradition of the late Baroque, the Indian Kondori [the Andean church architect of San Lorenzo Potosí] succeeds in inserting the Inca symbols of the sun and the moon, abstractly rendered, and Inca mermaids, oversized angels whose Indian faces reflect the desolation of their exploitation in the mines.42

Andean church architecture increasingly reflected indigenous design elements as the colonial period progressed (Figure  4.5). The Compañía de Jesús church in Quito, Ecuador, is one such example. Rather than a decline over time, art historians note a revival of indigenous forms as the seventeenth century drew to a close. Itinerant teams of indigenous architects, masons, and sculptors influenced the spread of a regionally specific style of Andean hybrid baroque architecture from the mid-colonial period. Characterized by an explosion of indigenous motifs and designs, the style is associated with a prolonged period of indigenous resistance to colonial rule, culminating in Túpac

Figure 4.5  Andean baroque. Mermaids adorn the church façade in San Lorenzo Potosí by the Inca craftsman and artist, Kondori. Wikimedia commons.

The Sacred Art of Counter-Conquest   69

Figure 4.6  Indigenous baroque church interior. Santa Maria Tonantzintla. Wikimedia commons): By Marioli925—Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21683472

Amaru II’s uprising in the 1780s. Art historian Teresa Gisbert uses the phrase “a liberation of form” to describe the resurgence of indigenous imagery and aesthetics in the Andes in this period, underscoring the rebellious potency of the baroque in the colonial setting.43

70   Jennifer Scheper Hughes In seventeenth-century New Spain, the mission convento and reducción gave way to the urban baroque cathedral as the architectural anchor of the New World church. Even as the baroque was an urban style, it greatly influenced secondary centers and smaller cities, where the largely indigenous population also pursued the construction of baroque, cathedral-like churches. Jaime Lara refers to the “bicultural splendor” of the baroque church interior in Spanish America, that “bridge[d] the linguistic and cultural divide” and characterized the contradiction and complexity of mid-colonial society.44 Among the most famous examples of an indigenized baroque church may be Santa Maria Tonantzintla in Puebla, Mexico (Figure  4.6). In Brazil, an analogous African hybrid form of church architecture flourished under the inspiration of the architect sculptor, Antonio Francisco Lisboa (1738–1814). The son of a Portuguese man and an enslaved African woman, more commonly known by his nickname, Aleijadinho, he is attributed with articulating Black Atlantic baroque ecclesial architecture.

Housing the Sacred: Domestic Oratories The institutional power of formal ecclesial architecture, with its evocative, hybrid, Latin American elements, defines one pole of materially bounded Christian space. A vast ­network of smaller neighborhood chapels, rural village shrines, and household prayer rooms defines another. Here I do not refer mainly to the private chapels of the wealthy, found on plantations and estates as markers of economic and religious power, but rather to those maintained by poor and ordinary Christians across the continent. As early as 1539, the Junta Eclesiástica in Mexico expressed concern about “a survival of polytheism in the multitude of little chapels erected by the Indians, just like those they had once had for their particular gods.”45 Domestic oratories were common in the homes of indigenous Christians even within a generation of the spiritual conquest, as were informal barrio chapels. Based on her study of Nahua wills spanning over two centuries, historian Stephanie Wood describes how these were understood to be special houses built for family saints: as “his or her [saint’s] home.”46 Today, small chapels similarly dedicated to care for locally significant saints can be found in almost every neighborhood and on almost every street. In this way the holy comes to reside alongside, and preside over, the mundane routines of everyday life. While official church architecture typically strives to regulate sacred space as the preserve of an exclusive ordained male priesthood, domestic prayer rooms democratize access to sacred power and authority. Vastly understudied and poorly understood, the household oratory is a room inside a family home, or even an independent structure within a family compound. Often these domestic chapels are the territory of laywomen, a vehicle for their spiritual leadership in the community, denied to them by official church channels. This is evident in the photograph (Figure 4.1) from Momostenango, Guatemala, that appears at the beginning of this chapter. In her home chapel, relatively

The Sacred Art of Counter-Conquest   71 unencumbered by the structures of male religious authority, this devout woman believer assumes a sacerdotal and liturgical role as she presides over Catholic rites. I have observed this elsewhere, in the indigenous pueblo of Tepoztlán, Mexico, where a local woman maintained a large, domestic chapel with a packed dirt floor, dedicated to the crucifix known as the Señor de Chalma. An impressive, elaborately adorned altar in the saint’s honor occupied the front of the chapel, and several rows of rough-hewn wooden pews crowded the rest of the space. Each week, she presided over a liturgical rite in honor of the famous Cristo, attended by several dozen members of the community as they prepared to make the rigorous pilgrimage by foot to the Chalma shrine. On her knees before the impressive altar, positioned with her congregation seated behind her, she led a solemn ceremony of song, chanted prayer, and communion. In the Caribbean and Brazil, domestic oratories are frequently dedicated to the practice of African-descended articulations of Catholicism, oriented around rituals of spirit possession, most prominently Santeria and Afro-Cuban religions, as well as Umbanda and Candomblé. Occupying the largest room in the house, these home chapels are typically obscured by a curtained entrance, protected from the prying eyes of unannounced visitors. In poorer, rural areas the simple floor may be packed dirt and the walls wattle and daub. Small stools and drums are positioned around the perimeter of the room, leaving an open central space suitable for dancing, ritual, and movement. Inside, the altar abounds with images of Catholic saints, candles, alcohol, cigars, and the favorite food items of the saints. Great care is taken to provide hospitality for the saints and spirits when they arrive at the ceremony. These house churches, or domestic terreiros, afford a certain degree of privacy to practitioners of African Christianity, all too frequently stigmatized. Domestic oratories like these are not primarily for private use, but are typically accessible to the local neighborhood and community. Whether domestic chapels or neighborhood shrines, these humble houses of the holy maintained by lay believers are physical landmarks that anchor the Catholic sensorium in Latin American local cartographies. It may seem strange to treat mission churches, grand baroque cathedrals, household oratories, and domestic terreiros in one breath. Yet these domestic constructions do not stand in defiant opposition to more formal articulations of church architecture, but rather they work in concert with it: lay Catholic devotional labor functions precisely to create continuity between monumental and vernacular works of Christian art and architecture, lending coherence to seemingly disparate forms.

The Rebellious Altar: A Theory of the Sacred Plane The altar in its many forms anchors material Christianity in Latin America. The preeminent space of counter-conquest, the altar is a place of disruptive potency, of infinite possibility and complexity. The altar is a supreme point of access, a zone of contact and actuation: the place for serving and engaging the saints and spirits in their manifold

72   Jennifer Scheper Hughes forms. The altar is a holy plane that collapses the distinction between celestial and ­terrestrial realms. The most potent Christian space in Latin America, the altar is a “sacred precinct,” the privileged place of ritual encounter between human beings and celestial forces.47 The altar possesses the capacity to encompass all of the paradox, potency, and pain of Latin American Christianity itself. Consider, then, the rebellious altar as the preeminent site of counter-conquest. Just as sacred power flows back and forth between Latin America’s great ecclesial architectural structures and the elaborate network of modest chapels demarcating the spiritual cartography of small towns and villages, the one activating and enlivening the other, the same can be said about the web of connection adjoining the sacred power of the high altar of a baroque cathedral and the simple altar in the most humble believer’s home. The baroque altarpiece (reredos or retablo) dominates the reflections of art historians. In its early European origin, the altarpiece was an ordered panel of painted saints’ images hung or standing behind the Eucharistic altar in the church sanctuary. After the Council of Trent, the retablo gained an unprecedented dimensionality and intensity: sculpted saints’ images multiplied beyond imagining; freed from their two-dimensional frame, celestial forms swirled and spun outward and upward with dizzying result. The baroque altarpiece is unruly, easily defying boundaries and order itself. The lavish decadence of the baroque retablo overwhelmed the church interior, dwarfing even the Eucharistic table. In Latin America, working in concert with the rest of the church interior, the baroque retablo drew the beholder’s eyes to heavenly heights—just as the indigenous population of Latin America plummeted to its lowest nadir.48 In the context of lived religious practice, the official church altar is the location of Eucharistic ritual, while the domestic altar is more immediately accessible and anchors daily life. Found in almost every religious home in Latin America in some form, these are discovered especially in the homes of the poor. Physically, the home altar is a plank, a shelf, a table holding an assembly of material sacra. Household altars may be permanent or temporary: assembled on a window ledge, within a glass curio cabinet, under a Christmas tree, on a chest of drawers—a place without contradiction. Here the faithful gather images of various sizes and media, some printed, others cast in plaster or resin, some old, some recently purchased, some long sanctioned by ecclesial authorities, some newly innovated. Here also one can find family relics and photographs, flowers in various stages of vitality and demise, and also drink and food for the spirits, and sometimes urns, caldrons, and other vessels.49 As is evident in the photograph of the domestic ­chapel in Momostenango (Figure 4.1), the potency of the altar is activated by the burning of incense, the lighting of candles, and the aroma of fragrant flowers: here one inhales the scent of the sacred. Ephemeral candles also figure centrally on the altar, their yellow light dancing against hallowed forms, bringing shadows to light and to life. Together, these objects anchor cosmic power in domestic space. The particular arrangement of objects on altars is never static, often in flux: there is often great significance to the positioning of the images and objects in relation to each other. Consider again the elaborate altar that Doña Paula, of Nahua ancestry, ­constructed in her oratory in Tepoztlán. (fig. 4.7) In its seemingly disordered, m ­ ulticentered ­complexity,

The Sacred Art of Counter-Conquest   73

Figure 4.7  Doña Paula in front of her domestic altar with its abundance of saints’ images. Tepotzlán, Mexico.

its exceptional ornamentation, silver and gold garlands, proliferation of saints’ images in diverse media (printed, cast, and sculpted), and abundance of flowers, Doña Paula’s altar is the quintessence of an indigenous baroque aesthetic.50 Some would qualify it as an example of the folk baroque, but I prefer to emphasize a continuity of style between ecclesial and lay forms, without privileging one as original and the other as derivative. In constructing and adorning her altar in this fashion, Doña Paula links her domestic space to the considerable sacred and artistic power of the baroque altarpiece in more formal and monumental ecclesial structures. At the same time, her altar subverts the hierarchical and patriarchal structure of the Church, domesticates it in the sense of bringing it into her home, but without limiting its impressive, even unwieldy, power. The domestic altar is rebellion in material and aesthetic form: the religious space hardest to police, most difficult to legislate, most easily shielded from scrutiny, and the last of all religious spaces to be secularized.51 As Laura Pérez has observed in her studies of Chicana art, the altar lends itself to hybridity of form and content.52 Inside the domestic Brazilian terreiro, the Umbanda altar abounds with images in typical baroque fashion. These include traditional Catholic saints (Saint George, the Virgin Mary, Jesus) along with Afro-Brazilian spirits or entities: Pretos Velhos (slave spirit), Caboclos (Native Brazilian spirits), and regionally potent unofficial saints (Padre Cicero and Frei Damião in the Northeast, for example). More recently adopted Hindu and Buddhist images are sometimes also to be encountered: Ganesh and Shiva Nataraja,

74   Jennifer Scheper Hughes the cosmic dancer, are favorites. The gathering together of seemingly disparate and irreconcilable images and effigies into sacred agglomeration may be where the home altar derives its greatest potency. Anthropologist Hugo Nutini’s detailed study of the Todos Santos (All Saints) celebration in rural Tlaxcala, Mexico, in the 1980s describes the domestic altars he encountered. On these altars printed images of Catholic saints, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus share space with pre-conquest stone deities.53 These figurines, mostly of the Mesoamerican god Tlaloc, had not been carefully preserved for centuries, but rather were more recently unearthed by the mundane activities of agricultural labor in the rural community. The irrepressible persistence of the indigenous sacred refutes the myth of tabula rasa: after centuries of exile, Tlaloc the rain god rises from the earth and reoccupies his place of honor. Highly esteemed by late twentieth-century Tlaxcalan families, these recovered figurines, archaeological treasures, are given pride of place on altars with Christian saints. The association with more traditional Catholic sacred persons and beings augments, rather than diminishes, Tlaloc’s power (and vice versa). Again, the altar is a sacred space that comfortably holds, and even wields, contradiction, complexity, and paradox.

The Living Image: Iconography and Icons Sacred power in Latin America emanates from a particular religio-cultural nexus of image, altar, and chapel/sanctuary. Religious images, material representations of holy personages dedicated for devotional use, especially three-dimensional images in the round, flourish in baroque proliferation in Latin American belief and ritual practice. We have already encountered here the image in its many forms and potencies, venues and vernaculars: destroyed by friars, painted on murals, unearthed by farmers, sculpted on altarpieces, arranged on home altars. One of the key functions of religious images in Latin America has been marking multiple spheres of concentric belonging: my altar, my home, our neighborhood, our pueblo, and (eventually) our nation. In the colonial period, titular saints marked territorial identities and domains, as I have shown. In New Spain, each village or pueblo adopted a particular Christian saint (including ­particular manifestations of the Virgin or Jesus) as its patron. The image of a pueblo’s titular saint was celebrated and honored in the local church and lent its name to the town. Within a given pueblo, each individual barrio similarly boasted a chapel in honor of its particular saint. In some instances, regionally significant images have eventually become symbols of national independence. This is certainly true of the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe, who, ever since the hero of Mexican independence, Fr. Miguel Hidalgo, emblazoned her image on his banner as a symbol of resistance, has been thoroughly conflated with Mexican nationhood. In the colonial period, through the process of counter-conquest, Christian images became markers and preservers of local indigenous identity and African community

The Sacred Art of Counter-Conquest   75 integrity, imbued with sacred power. This is evident, for example, in the seventeenthcentury cristos de caña. Among the most famous New World artistic innovations, these crucifixes were crafted employing a pre-Hispanic technique of molding images from corn pith paste and recycled paper and textiles, reiterating the association of Christ with corn. In Cuba, the Virgin of Copacabana is celebrated as “La Morena,” the brown Virgin, and has protected African slaves and their descendants for centuries.54 In the Andes, the Virgin Mary was honored as the indigenous Pachamama, the sacred mountain mother goddess (Figure 4.8). The Cuzco school of religious painting, illustrated here by the Virgin Mary as Pachamama, was a stylistic rupture that represented a resurgence of indigenous artistic autonomy in the last third of the seventeenth century. These images are material testaments to the veracity, power, and persistence of indigenous Christian faith. The inclusive Spanish term santo pertains to any religious image imbued with sacred power and animus (life) with whom believers engage in ritual relationship. This includes images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, as well as a variety of official and unofficial saints (unsanctioned by the institutional church) from Saint Joseph to Santa Muerte. One of the central identities of a santo, especially at the domestic and local level, is as a vital, dynamic, and even agentive member of the communities to which it pertains.55 Stephanie Wood observed for the colonial period that people understood their domestic images not as objects, but rather as “people who shared the house with them.” In their wills, they often named the particular saints “with whom they lived” and made provisions for their care and maintenance.56 Weeping virgins, moving crucifixes, and self-regenerating statues of Mary are among the vital images populating the religious landscape of Latin America. Inasmuch as the potency of these images arises from miraculous, wonder-working prowess, as in miracles of healing or other divine interventions in human affairs, it also results from the signs of life, vitality, even vulnerability that they display. The latter is, perhaps, what most distinguishes Mesoamerican practice from European cognates: in contrast to European images, Catholic devotion in Mexico has “focused on images that show signs of life.”57 Even crucifixion images that show Christ at the moment of death, limbs limp, head bowed, are imbued with vitality: these are commonly regarded as cristos dormidos, or sleeping Christs. Baroque artistic styles intensified this sense of liveliness as they strove for realism. Images were enhanced through the use of human hair, glass eyes, and even human teeth, and were made in such a way that they needed to be dressed in real clothing. Ritual actions further serve to imbue santos with power and life: dressing and processing them, lighting candles, burning incense, singing songs, holding, stroking, and feeding them are acts that reflect and honor this sensibility. These images are not just vital, they are also often understood to be agentic, as sources of action—agency defined here as the “causal consequences of objects . . . on the course of human activity.”58 The agency of saints’ images does not diminish human autonomy and agency, nor is the human meant to surrender to the saint’s will, but rather agency is “congregational”—distributed horizontally and shared between humans and other materially manifest persons.59 When multiple and diverse santos are gathered together on an altar, their animacy and power are further heightened: they now become “throbbing confederations”60 working in concert with human actors. The power of the religious image in Latin

76   Jennifer Scheper Hughes

Figure 4.8  The Virgin Mary figured as the Inka goddess Pachamama. La Virgen del Cerro, Casa Nacional de Moneda, Potosí, Bolivia. Wikimedia commons.

The Sacred Art of Counter-Conquest   77

Figure 4.9  Repetition, abundance, multiplicity. Crucifixes for sale near the Catholic cathedral in Bogotá, Colombia. Photograph by Noah Evans, with permission.

America is manifest in repetition, abundance, and multiplicity more so than in singularity and distinction, as is evident in the many crucifixes for sale in a shop near the Bogotá Cathedral in Colombia (Figure  4.9). Indeed, a complex economy of regional (and

78   Jennifer Scheper Hughes international) factories, neighborhood shops, and botánicas facilitates the distribution of material sacra, allowing for the material penetration of the sacred into even the most rural and remote areas.61

Conclusions: De profundis: Rupture and Continuity, Profusion and Proliferation The materium tremendum speaks volumes where sacred scripture, text, and word fall silent. In the profound religious disruption of European colonial rule, new kinds of Christian communities formed—and, for the most part, these sought to forge continuity and cohesion out of rupture. Here I have worked to chart the historical emergence of Latin American material Christianity—in physical space, altars, and images—in the context of struggle and survival as colonized peoples labored to reconcile Christianity with their lives, cultures, and spirits. In some sense, Latin American Christianity is a salvage religion, a salvage spirituality, rescued, retrieved, and reclaimed from structures of power, domination, and suffering. Through the counter-conquest of Christianity, indigenous peoples worked an American redemption and ransomed a compromised religion. The cultural complexity of material Christianity in Latin America has proven capable of speaking to and encompassing the paradoxes and contradictions of the colonial and postcolonial experience. Most importantly, these include the paradox of European compulsion and indigenous investment in the Christian project. The fundamental paradox of Latin American Christianity is that it was simultaneously a religion imposed by foreign invaders and has somehow become, through processes only hinted at here in  material terms, an authentic expression of faith practiced by the indigenous and African-descended peoples of the Americas. Placing material Christianity at the center of analysis reveals that Latin American Christianity is itself a creation of the sacred art of counter-conquest.

Notes 1. José Lezama Lima, La expresión americana (Mexico: Fonda de Cultura Económica, 1993), 104 (author’s translation mine). In particular, see chapter entitled, “La curiosidad barroca”, or “Baroque curiosity”. 2. I am grateful to Thia Cooper for her careful reading and response to a manuscript version of this chapter. Pentecostalism represents another powerful form of material Christianity, with its focus on the embodied experience of the Holy Spirit, and, in the case, of Neo-Pentecostalism, its gospel of health and wealth.

The Sacred Art of Counter-Conquest   79 3. Here I engage with Rudolf Otto’s foundational observation of the “mysterium tremendum et fascinans.” 4. See Manuel Vasquez, More than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010). 5. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup, editors’ note to Chapter  11, Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 210. 6. Insightful scholarly engagements with European Christian practice in the early modern period include the work of Caroline Walker Bynum, William Christian, Peter Brown, and others. 7. Although I have emphasized indigenous expressions of Latin American materiality here, there is a significant and substantive literature that treats material religion within the context of African Latin American cultures and communities, with greater or lesser relation to Christian practice. See, for example: Jalane Schmidt, Cachita’s Streets: The Virgin of Charity, Race, and Revolution in Cuba (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Todd Ramón Ochoa, Society of the Dead: Quita Manaquita and Palo Praise in Cuba (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010) and “Prendas-Ngangas-Esquisos: Turbulence and the Influence of the Dead in Cuban-Kongo Material Culture,” Cultural Anthropology 25 (2010): 387–420; David  H.  Brown, Santeria Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an AfroCuban Religion (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Stephan Palmié, Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002) and “Thinking with Ngangas: Reflections of Embodiment and the Limits of ‘Objectively Necessary Appearances,’” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, no.4 (2006), 852–886. Important considerations of materiality that are not the primary focus of the work can also be found in: F. Gómez, “The Circulation of Bodily Knowledge in the Seventeenth Century Black Spanish Caribbean,” Social History of Medicine (August 2013) and Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 8. A large scholarly literature by art historians and anthropologists considers syncretism and hybridity. See, for example, Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn, “Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America,” Colonial Latin American Review 12, no.1 (2003), 16–19. 9. Diego Durán, The History of the Indies of New Spain (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), 51. 10. On the perseverance of African culture in the Americas, see Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) in which the African drum functions as an anchor of material memory. 11. For recent works on pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican material culture from within the field of religious studies, see Jennifer Scheper Hughes, “Cradling the Sacred: Image, Icon, and Affect in Mesoamerican Material Religion,” History of Religions 56, no.01 (2016) 55–107; and Molly Bassett, The Fate of Earthly Things: Aztec Gods and God-Bodies (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2015). See also Miguel Astor-Aguilera, The Maya World of Communicating Objects: Quadripartite Crosses, Trees, and Stones (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2011). For the Maya, see also the many works of archeologist Karl Taube. 12. Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2011).

80   Jennifer Scheper Hughes 13. Serge Gruzinski, Images at War: Mexico from Columbus to Blade Runner (1492–2019) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 14. The auto de fe was both a formal and informal ritual in Latin America. For works on  “idolatry” and extirpation campaigns in the Andes, see Kenneth Mills, Idolatry and Its Enemies: Colonial Andean Religion and Extirpation, 1640–1750 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); and Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 15. Carolyn Dean, A Culture of Stone: Inka Perspectives on Rock (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 16. Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 17. Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn, “Scorned Subjects in Colonial Objects,” Material Religion 13, no.4 (October 2, 2017), 414–436, https://doi.org/10.1080/17432200.2017.1379377. 18. Kristen Norget similarly observes for Oaxaca that constraints on indigenous Christianity increased after Trent. Kristen Norget, “Hard Habits to Baroque: Catholic Church and Popular-Indigenous Religious Dialogue in Oaxaca, Mexico,” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 33, no.1 (2008), 131–158, 140. 19. Celorio writes of a religious void (a “vacío religioso”): “Pero el vacío no solo es religioso. También es político . . . .” Gonzalo Celorio, Ensayo de contraconquista (Mexico City: Tusquets, 2012), 83. 20. See, for example, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Os pronomes cosmológicos e o perspectivismo ameríndio,” Mana 2, no.2 (1996) (http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S010493131996000200005&script=sci_arttext). See also Fernando Santo Granero and Philippe Descola, particularly the latter’s Beyond Nature and Culture. A current ontological debate in anthropology considers a post-humanist view of agency. 21. José Antonio Maravall’s 1975 groundbreaking study explores the emergence of European baroque culture in the context of “imperial mass civilizations.” La cultura del barroco (1975), 104; Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Culture (English translation 1986). 22. Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, 263. 23. Leonardo Acosta, “El barroco de Indias y la ideología colonista,” in El barroco de Indias y otros ensayos (Havana: Casa de Américas, 1985), 24. 24. José Lezama Lima, “La curiosidad barroca,” in La expresión Americana (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993). See also English excerpt and translation: “Baroque Curiosity” in Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 212–240, 213. Celoria subsequently picks up the theme of counter-conquest in his Ensayo de contraconquista (2001). 25. Gauvin Alexander Bailey, The Andean Hybrid Baroque: Convergent Cultures in the Churches of Peru (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2010), 19. 26. Angel Guido invents terms “indo-barroco” and “indígena-barroco.” See his Redescubrimiento de América en el arte (Rosario, Argentina: Imprenta de la Universidad Litoral), 194. 27. Alejo Carpentier, “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real” [1975], translated in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 89–108, 100. 28. Carpentier, “Baroque and the Marvelous Real,” 100.

The Sacred Art of Counter-Conquest   81 29. Celorio, “From the Baroque to the Neobaroque,” in Baroque New Worlds, 501. 30. Celorio writes, “¿Habrá, acaso, una definición mas certera, sobre todo por su fundamento científico, que la exime de exageración, del horror vacui, que suele presentarse como argumento causal del arte barroco?” “Del Barroco al neobaroco,” in Ensayo de contraconquista (82). 31. See, for example, Elaine Peña, Performing Piety: Making Space Sacred with the Virgin of Guadalupe (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011). 32. R. T. Zuidema’s account of the ceque system through which the entire Inca Empire was bound together by a system of roads marked by shrines dedicated to particular huacas. John Watanabe’s account of the spatial organization of community defined by sites of worship is also relevant here. John Watanabe Maya Saints and Souls in a Changing World (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1992). 33. The resulting hybrid works have been labeled tequitqui, the Nahua word for “tributary.” Jose Moreno Villa coined the term in 1942. Manuel Aguilar Moreno develops the concept. Cf. Tequitqui Art of Sixteenth-Century Mexico: An Expression of Transculturation, PhD diss., University of Texas, Austin (1999). Elsewhere, Aguilar has referred to tequitqui as “the  art that the conquered made for their conquerors.” Manuel Aguilar Moreno, Handbook to Life in the Aztec World (Oxford University Press, 2007), 263. 34. Clara Bargellini describes them as “rudely massive . . . with a look of austere severity, frowningly somber . . . primitive,” but her description belies the optimism of the architectural form. “Representations of Conversion: Sixteenth-Century Architecture in New Spain,” in The Word Made Image: Religion, Art and Architecture in Spain and Spanish America, 1500–1600, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston, MA: Trustees of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1998), 91–102. 35. Eleanor Wake, Framing the Sacred: The Indian Churches of Early Colonial Mexico (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), 84–87. 36. James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries, 1st ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 257. 37. Wake, Framing the Sacred, 116. 38. Lockhart, Nahuas after the Conquest, 206. 39. Ibid., 209–210. 40. William B. Taylor writes about the spatial dimension of the Christian cross, “Placing the Cross in Colonial Mexico,” The Americas 69, no.2 (2012), 145–178, 152. 41. Baragellini, “Representations of Conversion,” 100. See also Pablo Escalante’s essay, “El patrocinio del arte indocristiano,” Patrocinio, colección y circulación de las artes (Mexico City: 1997), 215–235, on this topic. 42. Lezama Lima, “Baroque Curiosity,” 236. 43. Cited by G. Bailey, Andean Hybrid Baroque, 38. 44. Jaime Lara, “Church: Interior” Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque: Transatlantic Exchange and Transformation, eds. Evonne Levy and Kenneth Mills (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2013), 49. 45. Robert Ricard, Spiritual Conquest, 269. 46. Stephanie Wood, “Adopted Saints: Christian Images in Nahua Testaments of Late Colonial Toluca,” The Americas 47, no.3 (January 1991), 259–193, 281–282. Private collections of saints on altars were also common in European Catholicism.

82   Jennifer Scheper Hughes 47. Hugo Nutini writes of the altar as sacred precinct. Todos Santos in Rural Tlaxcala: A  Syncretic, Expressive, and Symbolic Analysis of the Cult of the Dead (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 188. 48. I owe this observation, and my curiosity regarding the “curious baroque” in Latin America, to a lecture given by William B. Taylor in his introduction to Colonial Latin America at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2005. 49. In some expressions of Cuban religion, packed urns and cauldrons are animate spirits for communing with the agentic dead. Ochoa, “Prendas-Ngangas-Esquisos.” 50. Nutini observes the inherently baroque aesthetic of the domestic altar, Todos Santos, 188. 51. The last secularized, says Nutini, Todos Santos, 196. 52. Laura Pérez, Chicano Art: The Politics and Poetics of Chicana Spiritual Altarities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 93. 53. Nutini, Todos Santos, 182. 54. Schmidt, Cachita’s Streets. 55. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 2010). 56. Wood, “Adopted Saints,” 280. 57. William  B.  Taylor, Shrines and Miraculous Images: Religious Life in Mexico Before the Reforma (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico, 2011), Introduction. 58. Journal of Archeological Method and Theory (special issue on Agency) (2008), 297. See also Matthew Day’s piece on Method and Theory in the Study of Religion (“Keeping it Real”). 59. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 34. 6 0. Ibid., 23. 61. Patrick Polk, Botánica Los Angeles: Latino Popular Religious Art in the City of Angels (Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 2004).

chapter 5

I n digenous Chr isti a n itie s Commensuration, (De)Colonization, and Cultural Production in Latin America Andrew Orta

From the earliest moments of the colonial encounter, indigenous Christianity has been an object of scrutiny. Insofar as missionary efforts of evangelization and conversion were woven throughout the colonial process, assessing the condition and the potential of indigenous Christianity was a technique of colonial rule. Amerindians’ status as either apostates, or idolaters, or ignorant children unready to consent to conversion, shaped the form and legitimacy of colonial violence. Colonial missionaries were among the earliest Spaniards to develop a profound knowledge of indigenous societies and languages; their work included efforts to locate elements of Christianity in indigenous cultures, those that cast echoes of earlier evangelization, or represented “seeds of the divine word” sown in another cultural fields. Insofar as Christianity was a hegemonic backdrop of moral assessment, of administrative legibility, and of all forms of colonial commensuration, anything indigenous was, inescapably, more or (usually) less Christian. Any examination of indigenous Christianity is, therefore, focused on a founding problem of Latin American studies; the asymmetrical encounter of indigenous communities with external powers and the resulting complex of social, political, and economic entanglements is the origin story of the project. Christianity was there at the beginning. This chapter does not tell the story of that encounter. Nor does it survey the varieties of indigenous Christian experiences in Latin America today. Rather, this essay is framed around two correlated arguments. The first is the plainly visible, but easily overlooked point that Christianity, like many other “Spanish” forms, was quickly insinuated as a self-evident and potent component of indigenous experience. This had cosmological as well as more prosaic implications. Within this context, indigenous locality—the ground of indigenous Christianities—is best examined not as an insular embattled survival

84   Andrew Orta (the “closed corporate community” of classical social science),1 but as an ever-emergent project of cultural production undertaken always with respect to a more inclusive sacred and social universe. This introduces the second argument, which concerns the ways this founding entanglement has become constitutive of indigenous locality, and advocates approaching Christianity less as an index of degrees of assimilation or change, and more as a dynamic cultural resource and frame of continuing encounter that remains a generative component of an emerging indigenous modernity. Taken together, these discussions seek to move beyond the convert/resistor binary that has hobbled inquiry into indigenous religion in Latin America, as it has research on many other facets of local indigenous cultural forms.

Conversion and Coercion: Reciprocal Understanding on Unequal Terms Christianity was constitutive of the earliest moments of the Iberian invasion of the New World, coming on the heels of the Reconquista and the re-establishment of centralized Christian orthodoxy on the peninsula.2 This is clear from the founding moments of encounter, perhaps most potently in the Requerimiento. Spaniards read this text aloud to inform Amerindians that they were there with authority delegated by the Crown, derived in turn from the Catholic Church, itself founded in the authority delegated to Saint Peter by Jesus Christ. Amerindians were invited to acknowledge the universal legitimacy stemming from this line of descent through their willed subordination as part of a God-given feudal regime. As Todorov notes, “the Indians can choose only between two positions of inferiority: either they submit of their own accord and become serfs; or else they will be subjugated by force and reduced to slavery.” Pagden similarly points out the double bind of the Christian ontology that undergirded Spanish understandings of themselves, of their Amerindian others, and of the unprecedented colonial project on which they were embarking.3 Although the Requerimiento appears cartoonish for its assertion of (at best!) oneway communication, the evangelizing impetus of the conquest was a frame for a more dyadic, if still asymmetric, project of understanding. Missionaries were among the most schooled of the earliest generations of colonial officials; many brought an evangelical zeal modulated by a comparative sense of society shaped by knowledge of classical antiquity. Missionaries in contact with Amerindian societies that—in their view, most approximated the achievements and complexities of classical antiquity—entered into fraught scholarly relationships vexed by ambivalences of admiration of another society and profound frustration over its failures to follow the evangelical script.4 In her study of Andean missionary encounters, MacCormack tells a story of missed opportunities of intercultural understanding, as an Old World vocabulary for making

Indigenous Christianities   85 sense of difference met its margins and lost its flexibility in the New World encounter. An impressive cohort of learned missionaries and jurists followed the conquistadores in the Andes. Although these men made important strides in documenting the languages, histories, and practices of indigenous societies, their efforts toward mutual understanding and recognition of the richness of Andean spiritual traditions nonetheless end in a turn to a hard line extirpative position.5 Consider the advice to priests in the 1583 Confessionario prepared by the Third Council of Lima and attributed to the Jesuit Jose de Acosta. The Confessionario begins with a gesture of commensurability, locating the rich Andean religious tradition within a shared human desire for meaning in the world and knowledge of God: . . . [T]here are not people so barbaric that they do not have some form of superstition, and their own opinions about the things of god and human souls and the afterlife. And in these provinces of Peru it is a thing of admiration to see the number and variety of superstitions and ceremonies and rites and divinations and sacrifices and fiestas that all of these Indians have, and how convinced and accustomed the Devil has them in their follies and errors.

Father Acosta’s ambivalence in the face of the abundance of indigenous ritual life is clear. And the extirpative sting is in the tail of his advice: And while they will not be disabused of their errors by those who preach to them, it is too much to think that these Indians will receive the faith, however much they repeat and make them repeat the Christian doctrine, as it would be as hopeless and fruitless as sowing seeds in land dense with brushwood without cutting it down and breaking it up.6

Consider a similar arc elsewhere in the hemisphere: the Franciscan Diego de Landa’s careful study of Maya codices and socio-ritual life, developed in close collaboration with native consultants during the early 1550s. Landa’s work came to a violent halt after the discovery of a network of Maya ritual specialists practicing Maya rites in Catholic chapels. In a dramatic auto-da-fé punishing native idolatry, Landa oversaw the exhumation of one his closest Maya consultants who had died some years earlier, as well as the burning of the codices they had together labored to understand.7 Acosta’s advice to doctrineros that, without extirpative force, their evangelizing would be in vain came on the heels of the Andean religious movement known as Taqi Onqoy, or dancing sickness. Andeans in the central highlands in the 1560s found themselves possessed by wak’as: place deities that were powerful interactants in local Andean political and ritual world. Denied traditional offerings, the wak’as possessed Andeans to express their concerns. While the movement expressly instructed Andeans to shed Christianity and other attributes of association with the Spanish (clothing, food, etc.), among the leaders of the movement were Indian women who “called themselves Santa Maria and Santa Maria Magdalena and other names of saints . . . in order to be revered as saints.”8

86   Andrew Orta In these cases, a reciprocal process of commensuration was underway. Spaniards were assimilating indigenous worlds within the categories of Iberian experience. Chief among those categories was the organizing and universalizing rubric of religion, asserting a hierarchizing framework of comparison across the cultural boundaries. At the same time, the actions of Andeans (and Mayans) suggest that even in the earliest post-conquest generations, Christian symbols, places, and practices were recognized as sources of power and incorporated in local indigenous action. This was, of course, a valenced potency. Missionary readings of indigenous practices ascribed to them a position framed as an alternative “pagan” other to Christianity. And this generated a commensurability of indigenous practices and power with respect to those of the Christian world. This was nowhere more significant than in Spanish recognition of the work of the Devil in indigenous religion. As Abercrombie notes, the intensifying Spanish demonization of indigenous practices in the wake of Taqi Onqoy generated new semantic and pragmatic entanglements between indigenous religions and Christianity: The result of this concerted repression and increased surveillance was double. On the one hand, Andeans were taught a new difference between public and private activities; their heterodox practices were channeled into clandestinity, where they could be carried out only by small groups of people behind closed doors or on faraway mountaintops. On the other hand, these private and clandestine practices were simultaneously ever more closely tied to the rituals that could still be carried out in public as large-scale collective performances. Those, of course, were Christian festivities, directed towards the Virgin and the Holy Trinity and towards a host of images that for Spaniards were not idols: the saints and advocations of Christ and the Virgin.9

This field of difference constituted a coherent system, generative of the complexly entangled indigenous present. Dillon and Abercrombie detail the point more cosmologically in their treatment of the “Myth of the Destroying Christ.” Here, a prehistoric population of rude savages once inhabited the Andes. Traces of them are evident in burial chambers and mummified remains called chullpas by Aymara today. To say that the chullpas lived without any vestige of civilization and that they inhabited an unformed world without the spatial differentiations of mountains and valleys, or diurnal differentiations of day and night, would be to say the same thing. The arrival of the destroying Christ is the dawn of the sun, whose fiery advent burns the chullpas (thus their desiccated mummies) and introduces a set of distinctions constitutive of the Andean world: the oscillation of night and day, and the variegated Andean landscape of highlands and lowlands. These differences condense a broader cosmological order spanning an inner/lower realm connected with chthonic place deities (and the Devil), and outer/upper realm of sky deities linked to Jesus Christ (and the solar cult of the Inca). The middle realm, the space of human experience, draws from and depends upon this scheme of difference and symbolic potential energy, the mediation of which is the stuff of human life and history.10

Indigenous Christianities   87

Christianity and the Production of Indigenous Locality Not only was Christianity imbricated in the very constitution of the post-conquest indigenous cosmos, under colonial administration Christianity became integral to the constitution of indigenous selfhood. Baptism, marriages, deaths—indigenous life was marked by a sequence of Christian rites indispensable to the legitimate expression of sociopolitical agency. Similarly, Christianity provided the setting for some of the most palpable experiences of indigeneity: waiting for names to be inscribed, for tribute payments to be made, for blessings to be conferred. Guevara-Gil and Salomon have written about visitas de indios—tours of inspection by representatives of the Spanish crown: For millions of colonial people, periodically standing in lines in the sun, wondering when they might get back to their workshops or herds while waiting for a lawyer and a translator to set their names into the paper simulacrum of society, was the drudge which invested “Indian”-ness with death-and taxes inevitability. . . . Inspection deserves to be seen not only as an instrument of finance but as a performative action, constitutive rather than representative of “native” social structure and “Indianness” itself.11

And just as such techniques of statecraft were themselves components of indigenous experiences of the repertoires of Christianity—in parish record books, for instance—so Christianity was an integral component of the context of the administrative visitas, as Indians were summoned by the sounds of church bells, lined up in the shadow of the church, answered questions about their faith, and likely heard a Mass as part of the visita. The visitas were testing the colonial reformation of indigenous society, and, particularly for the case of the Andes, the implementation of a systematic reorganization (reducción) of local indigenous polities carried out by Francisco de Toledo, the fifth viceroy of Peru. In the areas I know best (Aymara areas of the Bolivian altiplano, and particularly the region of Jesús de Machaqa), elements of local indigenous structure, involving social groups known as ayllus, moiety relations, and modes of political authority ranging from rotating leadership positions to forms of inherited authority, were reinvented through the reducciones to create a transformed space-time of indigenous experience. Christianity was integral to the warp and weft of this space-time. In a pattern familiar across the Americas, Jesús de Machaqa is anchored by a central town with a peripheral network of rural hamlets. The town is the site of a central parish church. The construction of the massive church over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries involved financing mobilized by successive generations of indigenous Andean nobility. Called cacique by the Spanish, they were renowned for their abilities to coordinate the actions of component social groups, circulating products across distant ecological zones of the Andean mountain system. Also known for their gluttonous splendor, caciques embodied Andean

88   Andrew Orta political ideals concerning the mediation of local and distant values and the potential plenitude implicit in the valenced social order.12 Caciques endured by translating traditional modes of indigenous authority into the terms and values of the colonial system. Thus, it was that a powerful family of caciques took it upon themselves to localize a key foreign value: financing the construction of the enormous church.13 The location of the church bears additional comment. The town, surrounded by smaller communities (ayllus), is a symbolic center: a microcosm of the region. The regional (Toledan-established) cabildo, comprising leaders from the surrounding ayllus, meets here. The central plaza contains a grid of inlaid stones, with each square belonging to a component ayllu. The plaza is most evidently a microcosm of the region during the Catholic feast of Rosario, when ayllu groups come to dance on their respective squares. In these data, the complex position of Catholicism is evident: on the one hand, Catholicism appears as an external value harnessed and localized in a pattern familiar from other Aymara practices; on the other, Catholicism has become constitutive of many dimensions of Aymara sociopolitical life. The church anchored a parish that interlaced regional communities and families in new ways. Ayllu leaders participated in town festivals; a network of dispersed chapels in the communities and a calendar of saint’s day celebrations provided the framework for a sensuous catechism suffusing Aymara time and space.14 The institutional routines of the church echoed and reinforced elements of the multi-scalar structure of Aymara sociopolitical organization, and helped shape its reproduction over time, even as Aymara engagement with the church drew on local practices and sensibilities. For instance, the church comprised a network of twelve altars. Through the mid-twentieth century, indigenous mayordomos cared for the altars, with different communities responsible for sending mayordomos to attend to specific altars. The altars were ranked and sorted into a moiety-like system of “left” and “right,” designations also applied to Aymara social groups. Mayordomo obligations for each community rotated annually, with mayordomos from a given community moving through the ranked set of altars in a pattern that matched the service of ayllu leaders in the regional cabildo. Aymara refer to the mayordomo/altar/ saint complex as a jisk’a kawiltu, or little/junior cabildo. The analogy is apt, evoking both the structural parallels and the broader pattern of burdensome “cargo” service that functioned as a channel for extracting indigenous labor and wealth. Mayordomo service is also compared to pongueaje, a despised institution of indentured domestic service obligating indigenous Andeans to powerful rural elite. In Bolivia, pongueaje was abolished in the 1950s as part of a land reform breaking up rural estates (haciendas). The mayordomo complex ground to a halt soon after, reflecting the position of the Church in a system of extractive and violent exploitation. At the same time, the rotative system of mayordomos echoes a similarly complex pattern linking the biographies of cargo service that mark every adult Aymara life to the production of regional indigenous society. As this extended example makes clear, Christianity is an integral component of indigenous experience. Fiestas, cabildos, myths, and clandestine rituals—all components of the machinery for the reproduction of indigenous locality and indigenous

Indigenous Christianities   89 subjects—rely as foundation or counterpoint on Christianity. Notwithstanding the tendency to see Christianity and indigeneity at odds, they have been enmeshed from the get-go. There is no conceiving one without the other. Indeed, it is instructive to recall Mill’s observation that by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries much of the evangelizing labor had shifted from efforts to introduce Christianity toward efforts to control and limit the ways in which Indians were taking it up.15

Idols behind Altars: “Folk Catholicism” Facing the New Evangelizations So far, this chapter has argued that indigeneity and Christianity in Latin America are inconceivable apart from one another. Indigeneity comes into being in a context suffused with Christianity. The Christian project in Latin America depends upon its indigenous alter (and altar) for its contours. They are reciprocally required components of a more complexly entangled situation: a more inclusive map of the sacred universe, and a more comprehensive map of the sociopolitical universe. An irony of Latin American indigenous studies is that this complex amalgamation of indigeneity and Christianity, reflecting their mutually implicated histories, has routinely been viewed by contemporary observers as “shackled to the past.”16 There are two paradoxes tangled together here. The first is that such a historically dynamic cultural formation would be seen as frozen in time. The second involves the “Christian” elements of this formation—saints, fiestas, the necessity of priests, and so on. On the one hand, these are taken as evidence of a superficial evangelization, a veneer covering an enduring and resistant indigenous identity.17 At the same time, these very practices appear as metonyms of contemporary indigeneity, defining attributes of a closed corporate refusal of modernity. As Platt has noted, analyses of indigenous religion have “emphasized a distinction between new Christian forms and an underlying concrete logic of pre-Colombian origin, suggesting that pagan mythic thought, accompanied by many practical concepts and ideas, has been able to survive unobtrusively till today, beneath the deceptive appearances of a dominantly European public aesthetic.” He describes his encounter with an “eccentric ex-priest” in the 1970s who exclaimed, “these Indians don’t believe in God at all. They’re not really Christians. It’s the sun they worship—the sun! the sun!”18 Twenty years later, priests who had come to Bolivia in the 1960s and 1970s spoke with me in similar terms of the “shallow roots” of Christian evangelization among the Indians, resulting in a “patina” of Christianity overlaying indigenous forms.19 The priests I spoke with were in Bolivia as part of a twentieth-century pastoral ­re-engagement with Latin America, with important implications for indigenous Christianity. During the Second World War, as missionary orders like Maryknoll moved personnel from mission fields turned battlefields in East Asia and the Pacific, there was a

90   Andrew Orta marked intensification of Catholic pastoral presence in Latin America. Alongside the pragmatic reasons of moving missionaries out of harm’s way, this re-engagement was shaped by other concerns, including a Cold War preoccupation with communism, an emerging focus on the role of Catholicism in a modernizing world, and intensifying missionary efforts by Protestant churches in Latin America. The Catholic Church was not the only one that focused on Latin America. Over the twentieth century, Latin American Protestantism moved away from the European immigrant communities that brought it to the region.20 The growing influence of Protestant missionization in the region indexed an intensifying hemispheric connection between the United States and Latin America, reflecting similar geopolitics and preoccupations with modernization that shaped the Catholic effort. These various missionary efforts of the mid-twentieth century (dubbed a “Second” or “New” Evangelization in the Catholic Church) shared important features in their readings of indigenous Christianities.21 Of course, they found them wanting. They saw an index of the failures of colonial evangelization, which yielded a set of superficial and poorly understood rote practices. Protestants condemned the focus on Catholic iconography and, with many Catholic pastoral agents, condemned the sensuality and excess of indigenous Catholic ritual: the dancing, the drunkenness, the sex, the gluttony, and the sheer duration of the events. An irony of the period is that for many Catholic priests, their sense that the original evangelization failed was coupled with a profound frustration over the apparent necessity of their presence to the reproduction of daily indigenous life. Missionaries found themselves in demand: for fiesta Masses, baptisms, and so on. However, many chafed at the fact that they could not control, or fully understand, the terms of their local significance. They decried their experience as mere functionaries of the sacraments, and dismissed what they saw as meaningless memorization and recitation of Catholic prayer and doctrine, all confirming their sense that indigenous Christianity was incomplete. As the Canadian missionary Jacques Monast phrased it: the Indians had been “baptized but not evangelized.”22 Watanabe tells a similar story from Guatemala. The Chimalteco Maya of the early twentieth century considered themselves muy bien católicos. They were served by itinerant priests who struggled to visit the many communities under their care, and considered the Indians to be “barbarians and brutes” with no chance of becoming good Catholics. Despite the lack of priestly attention (and no lack of priestly contempt), Indians in the region were apparently good enough Catholics to reject the earliest evangelizing of Protestant missionaries in the region in the 1920s.23 Maryknoll missionaries arriving in the 1940s were soon frustrated by the demands of circuit riding to attend to a large pastoral zone. The new missionaries adopted new pastoral tactics. At their core was the training of indigenous catechists: local religious specialists who would multiply the presence of priests by delivering doctrinal instruction in their communities. Priests looked to catechists to certify the preparation of candidates for sacraments such as marriage or baptism, to attest that sponsors of fiestas were undertaking their cargo with appropriate religious devotion, and to broker a host of other interactions between indigenous community members and periodically visiting

Indigenous Christianities   91 clergy. The strategy was employed throughout indigenous Latin America, with catechists appointed to lead local faith groups and some serving as ministers of sacraments. Networks of pastoral courses and pastoral institutes designed to promote lay religious leadership sprang up across the region, some affiliated with institutional movements such as Catholic Action. However, all participated in a re-engagement of the Church with indigenous Latin American communities and with the syncretic legacy of the colonial evangelization.24 This had profound results for indigenous Christianities in Latin America, with impacts that resonate through the present. One upshot was a neo-orthodoxy. Priests seeking to curb the excesses of syncretic ritual practices often insisted on a return to the gospel and foundational catechetical knowledge. This fit with the pastoral possibilities presented by the native catechists, who were tasked with enforcing new styles of Catholic worship. This neo-orthodoxy valued a facility with catechetical knowledge, biblical texts, and a growing corpus of hymns (in native languages), and condemned a swath of other ritual practices ranging from “indigenous” rites, such as offerings to place deities, to saint-focused worship and related folk Catholic practices. The result was a twentieth-century extirpation campaign, with priests and catechists in some regions aggressively denouncing local indigenous Christianity, and catechist-led faith groups appearing as a schismatic branch of Catholicism. When I asked Bolivian Aymara about “kinds” of Christians in their communities, respondents often listed catequistas as part of a list also including Protestant churches, Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, all distinguished from the more typical of the folk Catholic variety. Warren reports a similar separation of catechist-led Catholic Action followers from Catholic costumbristas among the Trixano of Guatemala.25 The native categorization stems from a shared condemnation of Catholic ritual excess. But there are other commonalities connecting these critiques. Like many “neoCatholics,” Protestants saw the amalgamation of indigenous and Catholic religiosity as indexing the subordination of Indians in Latin American societies. In his study of indigenous Protestantism in Guatemala, Annis characterizes folk Catholicism (“milpa logic”) as a system enabling the reproduction of an Indianness marked by economic and social inequality vis-à-vis Guatemalan society. He describes “the replication from one generation to the next of colonial relations. What is replicated is Indianness, a permanent state of unequal separation.”26 Protestantism, he argues, offers an alternative system for the production of indigenous Christians, and particularly those at the margins of a traditional corporate community. Where that community is thought to be inward looking and status quo driven, the Protestant Indian is committed to change: economic advancement, engagement beyond the rural community, and modernization in skills and lifeways. Other discussions cast the contrast in even more dramatic terms: Catholicism keeps Indians in chains, blind, like slaves, and so forth. Protestantism entailed a sharp break from the Catholic past, seen as “a time of ignorance, idolatry, drunkenness and degradation.”27 In Ecuador, where Catholicism was closely connected with the hacienda mode of production, one of the most momentous mass conversions to Protestantism in Latin America (in the Colta Lake region) occurred in the wake of land reforms abolishing haciendas and the servitude of Kichwa peasants.28

92   Andrew Orta Protestant missionaries to the Kichwa communities of the Colta Lake region described the Indians they encountered as miserable and downtrodden. This oppressed condition became a fulcrum for Protestant conversion, cast as offering a new path and new opportunities.29 A similar promise can be found in Catholic pastoral activities. Warren discusses the ways that efforts to instill a modern Catholic orthodoxy in Guatemala provoked profound rethinking of indigenous ethnic identity and relations between indigenous Trixano and their ladino neighbors, as well as relations between Trixano converts to Catholic Action and those continuing to follow costumbre.30

Commensurating the Vernacular: Indigenous Christianities and Modernity This moment is marked by two important developments for indigenous Christianities in Latin America. The first involves a focus on a self-consciously modernizing break in indigenous religiosity. This was not unprecedented; independence brought its own promises of modernity and a push to participate in a postcolonial future. (There, too, Catholicism was often invoked as a metonym of the colonial conditions being put in the past; there, too, the entanglement of costumbre with the production of indigenous life made it difficult to sever these connections.) However, here, newly missionized Christianities offered new ontologies of self and new moral frameworks that enabled and authorized new aspirations and actions in the world. Counter to the pat narrative that conversion to Protestantism and neo-Orthodoxy entailed the fragmentation and breaking up of indigenous communities, they provoked new ways of making indigenous community.31 Although it would be anachronistic to describe these modernizing efforts with the rhetoric of de-colonialization that marks the leading edges of contemporary indigenous thought, there are seeds here of current efforts to shed the hobbling inheritances of colonialism and to articulate an alternative indigenous modernity. A second development stemming from this moment is that local indigenous Christianity became networked in new ways to global religious institutions. Again, this is not a strictly new development. The Catholic Church was, arguably, the earliest global institution, and colonial Catholicism connected indigenous Christians within an institutional network of translocal reach, stretching from parish and doctrina to Madrid and Rome. At the same time, the folk Catholicism of the post-independence period involved a relatively inward-focused set of practices, keyed on the reproduction of indigenous community through the production of competent and morally authoritative social persons. Notwithstanding the fact that the communities of classical community ethnographies were never as “closed” as the literature implied, in many areas of Latin America, intensified by the weakening of the Church in the face of postindependence anticlericalism, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century indigenous

Indigenous Christianities   93 Christianity was relatively local or regional and was not well connected to the broader institution of the Catholic Church. This intersection of decolonializing and modernizing aspirations and the thickening of translocal institutional linkages was a rich growth medium for indigenous Christianities. Liberation theology, which stemmed from the second evangelization and the critique of the subordinate status quo, reflects a systematic effort to anchor a revitalized religious identity with respect to local circumstances.32 A good deal of liberationist pastoral work continued in the reformist neo-orthodoxy vein: heavily text-based, critical of colonially derived forms of piety, and suspicious of indigenous, syncretic, or folk religious practices.33 Unsurprisingly, these movements were controversial and made considerably less headway in community-based indigenous areas of Latin America than they did in urban or proletarianized rural areas.34 A successor movement to liberation theology, dubbed the theology of inculturation, represents a more explicit attempt to inspire and codify indigenous Christianities. The concept of inculturation has a long pedigree, dating back to sixteenth-century efforts to identify seeds of the divine word in indigenous practices, and correlated missionary strategies focused on finding local functional equivalents for Christian practices. The term appears with growing frequency in church documents from the 1970s on, at once reflecting the growing attention to local practices and a concern with mediating cultural differences, and embodying the thickening institutional apparatus within which these efforts were unfolding. Indigenous pastoral agents play a key role in this process of mediation. Inculturationists point to the life of Jesus as the exemplar of inculturation: giving the universal Christian message life in the cultural and historical time and place of the gospel accounts. They challenge indigenous Christians to do the same in their lives. Missionaries I observed in Bolivia suggested that just as Jesus built upon the existing religious traditions of his day, Aymara catechists must view the practices of their own communities through the eyes of Jesus, “writing” through their actions an Aymara New Testament. Maya catechists are characterized as “indigenous apostles,” engaged in a similar task through worship practices focused on a newly empowered Maya exegesis of the Bible.35 In such exhortations, the figure of Jesus plays a double role. On the one hand, Jesus is a man of his place and time: embodying the message of Christianity in his lived context. On the other, as the bridge between context and the assumed universal message, Jesus is a point of access to an essential Christianity, distilled from any particular cultural or historical setting. Garrard-Burnett describes inculturationist practices among Guatemalan Maya as an effort to “decontextualize” Christian narratives from their Western referents and recontextualize them in local Maya circumstances.36 The inculturationist message is realized in contingent ways in different local communities. For some catechists, an increased use of the native language in the liturgy, or a greater willingness to participate in communal events once regarded with suspicion, may be the limit of their inculturationist practices. Others, more closely realizing the aims of the missionaries, may embrace selected indigenous practices and seek out new ways to collaborate with traditional ritual authorities in public rites. Elsewhere, inculturationist

94   Andrew Orta catechists seem to reject more completely elements of the costumbre complex linked to saint festivals. In the Tzoltzil Maya case, missionaries have criticized the financing of these expensive rituals as compelling Maya participation in a local political economy that maintains the dominance of non-indigenous landholders. Inculturated Tzoltzil worship focuses more on acts of exegesis by catechists. In a rite of baptism, for instance, catechists evoke analogies between Maya conceptualization of three creations and the Christian trinity, and also gloss the baptism as bestowing a vocational “gift” linked to a capacity to work, on the initiate. This is resonant with a focus in inculturationist Mayan communities on an entrepreneurial work ethic linked to coffee production and indigenous control of lands.37 This range of outcomes, beyond missionary control, is certainly not new. However, in the context of inculturation this capillary part of the process is considered integral to an inculturated indigenous Christianity. An emphasis on key traits and practices as at once representative of indigenous tradition and potential vehicles for inculturated Christian meaning is evident in other cases. In her discussion of an emergent “teología Maya,” Garrard-Burnett describes the systematization of key elements of Maya spirituality. Cultural values such as “peace”—with the natural world, with people, and with place deities—along with concepts like soul shifting, centeredness, or complementary opposition, become the Maya framework within and through which inculturationists seek to identify and express Christian meanings.38 Lyons describes the ways an inculturationist turn in Ecuadorian Kichwa communities focuses on the social value of “respect” toward elders. This rhetoric of respect conflates contemporary elders with idealized distant ancestors, while uncomfortably echoing a different language of respect deriving from the hacienda social hierarchy dominant in the region through the mid-twentieth century.39 Doing theology in these ways involves complex metacultural interpretations— assertions of what it means essentially to be “Maya” or “Kichwa—that are themselves historically conditioned. Contemporary expressions of indigeneity are inseparable from their fraught history of entanglement with Christianity. Noting the “hermeneutic puzzle” entailed by inculturationists’ renderings of Mayanness, Garrard-Burnett discusses the key role of the Popul Vuh: a historic text that at once provides some basis for commensurability between Maya tradition and the textually encoded core of Christianity and, as it was produced as a text during the earliest moments of Maya-Spanish engagement, seems to offer a glimpse of a pre-Columbian Maya spirituality.40 A related challenge of systematizing any sort of “teología_” involves the standardization of what are inevitably diverse and ever-changing identities within any one cultural group. Inculturationists are not alone here, as the broader turn toward “official multiculturalisms” has had a paradoxically homogenizing effect, marking cultural differences in increasingly similar and comparable ways.41 The inculturationist elaboration of a serial set of indigenous theologies, each with key features highlighting putatively core values, runs precisely these risks. Yet these limitations do not contain localizing efforts such as inculturation, which establishes spaces for improvisation and channels for reciprocal changes. Conversionlike accounts of spiritual and political transformation are staples of contemporary

Indigenous Christianities   95 missionary autobiographies in Latin America.42 The increasing use of indigenous languages similarly opens up new arenas of challenge, recalibrating received categories routinely expressed in dominant languages. Writing of inculturationist-influenced work by Nasa Uwe speakers in Colombia, Rappaport describes intercultural processes whereby documents in Spanish are translated into Nasa Uwe and then “back translated” into Spanish. The reversal of the translational arrows creates new semantic fields for key terms and meanings in the “original” documents.43 The Nasa activists were focusing on the Colombian constitution; the biblical exegesis of the “indigenous apostles” among the Tzoltzil or elsewhere does potentially similar work. Comparable developments are evident for non-Catholic indigenous Christianities. Recent research reports high growth in Protestantism among indigenous populations.44 In some regards, this is continuous with earlier scholarship detailing the tensions between Protestantism and folk Catholicism and the ways the unraveling of the corporate Indian community is a growth opportunity for Protestant evangelists. However, as this recent work makes clear, Protestantism has also been an important context for a reimagined indigeneity. As with the case of neo-Catholicism, Protestantism has served as “a vehicle for indigenous renewal” and forms of indigenous social mobilization that connect with a broader ethos of multicultural valorization across Latin America.45 The Ecuadorian Indigenous Evangelical Federation (FEINE) has attracted attention in this regard. In addition to upending conventional understandings about evangelical Christianity as being antithetical to political mobilization, studies point out the ways FEINE and similar organizations came to represent indigenous peoples’ regional and national claims, as Protestant practices became local sites for indigenous cultural reproduction.46 To judge from recent work with second- and third-generation converts in Chimborazo, Ecuador, younger generations draw from a rich cultural repertoire, including elements of a revalorized indigenous identity, to assert locally compelling modes of indigenous Protestantism.47

Christianities in Process Like all local communities, indigenous faith communities have been adapting received orthodoxies for generations, producing vernacular religious forms. Yet there is something new in the insights to be drawn from current research on indigenous Christianity. This returns me to my opening comment: indigenous Christianity has long served as an index of the transformation of the region, classically figured as the forces of change introducing the contemporary and the future from without, while the local stands as the recalcitrant vernacular, lagging always behind the curve of contemporary modernity. The story, of course, is quite different. Indigenous Christianity is much more than a litmus test of the impact of external change. It is an index of the dynamic production of indigeneity deeply engaged with contemporary local and translocal circumstances. Indigenous Christianities offer a powerful illustration of the production of indigenous

96   Andrew Orta modernities: as a setting for the commensuration of identities within universal frames of reference, as an engine for the production of individual and collective moral subjects authorized to act with respect to those frameworks, and as a vector connecting highly local and individualized practices with more inclusive scales of action. Similarly, indigenous Christianities exemplify the potent political engagement of local indigenous cosmologies with matters of contemporary local, regional, national, and global concern. In an essay on “indigenous cosmopolitics,” de la Cadena discusses “an insurgence of indigenous forces and practices with the capacity to significantly disrupt prevalent political formations, and reshuffle hegemonic antagonisms, first and foremost by rendering illegitimate (and, thus, denaturalizing) the exclusion of indigenous practices from nation-state institutions.”48 She is commenting on the political salience of “earth practices,” as offerings to place deities and invocations of a cosmological and ecological balance between human communities and the earth become part of a grammar of indigenous political action: staking out an indigenous footing for political participation and evoking a qualitatively different politics unsettling a separation of the natural and social world characteristic of Western modernity. De la Cadena begins her essay quoting a letter from Humberto Cholango, president of the indigenous organization Ecuaruni, to Pope Benedict XVI in 2007: It’s inconceivable that in the 21st century, God still has to be defined according to the European standards. . . . We think the life of Jesus is the Great Light coming from Inti Yaya (Paternal and Maternal Light that supports it all), whose aim is to deter anything that doesn’t let us live in justice and brotherhood among human beings and in harmony with Mother Nature. . . . The Pope should note that our religions NEVER DIED, we learned how to merge our beliefs and symbols with the ones of the invaders and oppressors.

Cholango’s letter was provoked by a statement by Benedict asserting that “at the time of the Conquest Indians had already been longing for their conversion, which had been nonviolent.”49 Conventional models of conversion and assessments of indigenous Christianities have figured the process as encompassing indigeneity within a universal framework. Even the culture-friendly categories of inculturation aim to celebrate local tokens of universally meaningful types. Anything confounding such encompassment is taken as evidence of an incomplete or incoherent process. But a growing body of work on contemporary indigeneity—not all of it engaging explicitly with “religious” themes—provokes new analytic approaches to this chestnut of Latin American studies. What if Christianity (or modernity) is itself encompassed as an integral (and not alien) component of other ways of being in the world—transforming them in the ­process, but not defining or determining them? Such questions call attention to differently positioned processes of meaning making and the ways, as in the Nasa strategy of back translation, Christianity can never fully set the terms. Such a view need not discount the asymmetry, compulsion, and violence of Christian missionization. Complete refusal or

Indigenous Christianities   97 ignorance of these projects is not an option; the Nasa, after all, were wrestling with the Colombian Constitution. The indigenization of Christianity remains framed by a process of incorporation rooted in acts of imposition. Nonetheless, the long arc of Christianity traces a process of syncretic entanglement of which the formal institutions never had full control. Thus, inculturation can be figured by theologians as the latest in a series of cultural encounters. Other work draws attention to the limits of modernizing projects, which inevitably meet their match in the messy vernacular practices of middle- and localrange scales of social life.50 Shaped and constrained by unequal conditions of entanglement, these are the spaces of world-making action. In this light, the classical framing of indigenous Christianities are all the more limiting, as they mask what such processes may tell us about the alternative modernities and agencies of indigenous peoples. Vernacular indigenous Christianities necessarily exceed the orthodoxies with which they are linked. The inevitable incompletion of conversion is not an index of failure; it is integral to a broader human condition that is forever an unfinished project, pushed forward by the creative and varied processes of human cultural production. Indigenous Christianities exemplify this, challenging us all to grapple, as they inevitably must, with the complex legacies of a long history of unequal evangelical entanglements.

Notes 1. In this view, indigenous communities exhibited an “active denial of outside alternatives” preserving internal homogeneity and cultural continuity. Eric Wolf, “Types of Latin American Peasantries: A Preliminary Discussion,” American Anthropologist 57 (1955), 452–471, 459. 2. William A. Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth Century Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981). 3. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1984), 148; Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). The absurdity of the Requerimiento was pointed out at the time by the Dominican Friar Bartolomé de las Casas; see Lewis Hanke, All Mankind Is One (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974), 93. 4. E.g., Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniards in Yucatan, 1517–1570, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 5. MacCormack, Religion. 6. Catholic Church, Province of Lima, Concilio Provincial, Confessionario para los curas de indios: Con la instrucción contra sus ritos y exhortación para ayudar a bien morir…1583, Proemio A2, https://archive.org/details/confessionariopa00cath. 7. Clendinnen, Ambivalent. 8. Luis Millones, ed., El retorno de las huacas: Estudios y documentos sobre el Taki Onqoy, siglo XVI (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1990), 89, 99; Jeremy Mumford, “The Taqi Onqoy and the Andean Nations: Sources and Interpretations,” Latin American Research Review 33, no.1 (1998), 154.

98   Andrew Orta 9. Thomas  A.  Abercrombie, Pathways of Memory and Power: Ethnography and History among an Andean People (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 262. 10. Mary Dillon and Thomas A. Abercrombie, “The Destroying Christ: An Aymara Myth of Conquest,” in Rethinking History and Myth: Indigenous South American Perspectives on the Past, ed. Jonathan D. Hill, 50–77 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988). 11. Armando Guevera-Gil and Frank Salomon, “A Personal Visit: Colonial Political Ritual and the Making of Indians in the Andes,” Colonial Latin American Review 3, nos.1–2 (1994), 6, 24. 12. Thierry Saignes, “The Quechua-Aymara Heartland 1570–1780,” in Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the America (vol. 3, pt. 2), eds. Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz, 59–137 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Abercrombie, Pathways. 13. Roberto Choque Canqui, “Las haciendas de los caciques Guarachi en el alto Perú (­ 1673–1734),” América Indígena 39, no. 4 (1979), 733–748; Andrew Orta, Catechizing Culture: Missionaries, Aymara and the “New Evangelization” (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2004), 40–46. 14. George Kubler, “The Quechua in the Colonial World,” Handbook of South American Indians, vol. 2: The Andean Civilizations, ed. Julian H. Steward, 331–410 (Washington, DC: Bureau of American Ethnology, 1946). 15. Kenneth Mills, Idolatry and Its Enemies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 16. Jeremy Adelman, ed., Colonial Legacies: The Problem of Persistence in Latin American Histories (London: Routledge, 1999). 17. See Jacques Monast, Los Indios Aimaraes: ¿Evangelizado o solamente bautizados? (Buenos Aires: Carlos Lehle, 1972). 18. Tristan Platt, “The Andean Soldiers of Christ: Confraternity Organization, the Mass of the Sun, and Regenerative Warfare in Rural Potosí,” Journal des socíeté des américanistes 73, no. 140f. 19. Orta, Catechizing, 155. 20. See Garrard and Doran, Chapter 16 in this volume. 21. E.g., Victor Codina, “Evangelizar 500 Años Después,” Cuarto Intermedio 5, nos. 34–51; Edward Fedders, “How the Aymara See Our Priesthood,” LADOC 53, nos. 30–35; Monast, Los Indios; Paulo Suess, La nueva evangelización: desafíos históricos y pautas culturales (Quito: ABYA-YALA, 1991). 22. Monast, Los Indios, 313. 23. John M. Watanabe, Maya Saints and Souls in a Changing World (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1992), 194. 24. E.g., Ruth J. Chojnacki, Indigenous Apostles: Maya Catholic Catechists Working the Word in Highland Chiapas (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2010); Edward Cleary, “New Voice in Religion and Politics in Bolivia and Peru,” in Resurgent Voices in Latin America: Indigenous Peoples, Political Mobilization, and Religious Change, eds. Edward Cleary and Timothy J. Steigenga, 43–64 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004); Orta, Catechizing; Warren, Symbolism; Watanabe, Maya Saints. 25. Warren, Symbolism, 109. 26. Cf. Sheldon Annis, God and Production in a Guatemalan Town (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1987), 28. 27. Barry Lyons, Remembering the Hacienda: Religion, Authority, and Social Change in Highland Ecuador (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2006), 287. 28. Kathleen  C.  O’Brien, “After Conversion: Gender, Indigenous Modernity, and the Re-Generation of Evangelical Christianity Across Three Generations in Chimborazo, Ecuador” (PhD diss., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2016); Blanca

Indigenous Christianities   99 Muratorio, “Protestantism, Ethnicity, and Class in Chimborazo,” in Cultural Transformation and Ethnicity in Modern Ecuador, ed. Norman E. Whitten, Jr., 506–534 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1981). 29. O’Brien, “After Conversion.” 30. Warren, Symbolism. 31. Cf. Ricardo Falla, Quiché Rebelde: Religious Conversion, Politics and Ethnic Identity in Guatemala (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001); Orta, Catechizing. 32. See Berryman, Chapter 9 in this volume. 33. Bruce Calder, “Interwoven Histories: the Catholic Church and the Maya, 1940 to the Present,” in Resurgent Voices in Latin America: Indigenous Peoples, Political Mobilization, and Religious Change, eds. E. Cleary and T. Steigenga, 104 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 2004); see also José Miguez Bonino, ed., Faces of Jesus: Latin American Christologies (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984); Lyons, Remembering; Orta, Catechizing. 34. Exceptions here include regions under the pastoral leadership of Bishops Samuel Ruiz in Chiapas, Mexico, or Leonidas Proaño in Chimborazo, Ecuador. 35. Chojnacki, Indigenous. 36. Virginia Garrard-Burnett, “ ‘God Was Already Here When Columbus Arrived’: Inculturation Theology and the Maya Movement in Guatemala,” in Resurgent Voices in Latin America: Indigenous Peoples, Political Mobilization, and Religious Change, eds. E.  Cleary and T. Steigenga, 125 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 2004). 37. Chojnacki, Indigenous. 38. Garrard-Burnett, “God Was Already Here.” 3 9. Lyons, Remembering. 40. Garrard-Burnett “God Was Already Here,” 114. 41. Charles R. Hale, Más que un Indio/More than an Indian: Racial Ambivalence and Neoliberal Multiculturalism in Guatemala (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2004); Richard Wilk, “Learning to Be Local in Belize: Global Systems of Common Difference,” Modernity through the Prism of the Local, ed. D.  Miller, 110–133 (London: Routledge, 1995). 42. E.g., Andrew Orta, “Living the Past Another Way: Reinstrumentalized Missionary Selves in Aymara Mission Fields,” Anthropological Quarterly 75, no.4 (2002), 707–743. 4 3. Joanne Rappaport, Intercultural Utopias: Public Intellectuals, Cultural Experimentation, and Ethnic Pluralism in Colombia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 94ff. 44. Carolyn Gallaher, “The Role of Protestant Missionaries in Mexico’s Indigenous Awakening,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 26, no.1 (2007), 88–111; James W. Dow, “The Expansion of Protestantism in Mexico: An Anthropological View,” Anthropological Quarterly 78, no.4 (2005), 827–850. 45. Gallaher, “Role of Protestant Missionaries,” 109; see also O’Brien, “After Conversion”; Jose Antonio Lucero, “Representing ‘Real Indians’: The Challenges of Indigenous Authenticity and Strategic Constructivism in Ecuador and Bolivia,” Latin American Research Review 41, no.2 (2006), 31–56. 46. Lucero, “Representing”; Muratorio, “Protestantism”; Jill  M.  Wightman, “Healing the Nation: Pentecostal Identity and Social Change in Bolivia,” Conversion of a Continent: Contemporary Religious Change in Latin America, eds. Timothy J. Steigenga and Edward L. Cleary, 239–255 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008). 47. O’Brien, “After Conversion.” 48. Marisol de la Cadena, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond ‘Politics,’ ” Cultural Anthropology 25, no.2 (2010), 336.

100   Andrew Orta 49. De la Cadena, “Indigenous,” 334f.; Benedict XVI, “Inaugural Address to the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean,” May 13, 2007. http:// w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2007/may/documents/hf_ben-xvi_ spe_20070513_conference-aparecida.html. 50. E.g., James  C.  Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Anna L. Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

chapter 6

( U n ) M a k i ng Chr isti a n it y The African Diaspora in Slavery and Freedom Rachel Sarah O’Toole

Promoted as a candidate for canonization soon after his death, Fray Martín de Porres inhabited a celebrated, yet marginal, position within the colonial Catholic Church. As a man of African descent, he could not be ordained as a priest or even make vows as a lay brother, and so he donated himself to Lima’s Dominican convent in 1594.1 Like many other Afro-Latin American donados and donadas, Fray Martín (though literate) worked in a menial capacity, ringing bells for prayer, washing clothes, and serving in the infirmary.2 His divine gifts of levitation, prophesy, and healing were celebrated by ecclesiastical authorities.3 In addition to his self-mortifications—denials of food and comfort—he greeted racial insults with a smile, asking all to “treat this mulato dog as he deserved.”4 In many ways, the qualities of an exalted, humble servant of God mirrored what slaveholders, Crown authorities, Catholic clerics, and others of the colonial Iberian world expected from a man of African descent. At the same time, he, like other Afro-Latin Americans, called on the Church, a critical force in the early modern state, in their devotions as Catholics. The Catholic Church was a tepid ally for enslaved and free people in colonial Latin America. Most Church authorities in Spanish and Portuguese America remained silent regarding the violent exploitation of the transatlantic slave trade and did not object to the enslavement of Africans.5 Moreover, members of its religious orders, as well as secular ecclesiastic individuals, profited from enslaved African and African-descent labor in the Americas and in Spanish America. Until the later eighteenth century, African descendants were prohibited from making religious vows due to a perception of their illegitimate descent and non-Christian ancestry, with a few exceptions in Brazil.6 Nonetheless, the Church provided an entry point for Africans and their descendants, since canon law allowed Africans, as Crown subjects, to be baptized as Catholics.7 To secure their place in Catholicism, men and women of the African Diaspora remade

102   Rachel Sarah O’Toole aspects of Christianity into their own religious beliefs, while constructing a way to protect their persons and families. Understanding the contrast between what the Church ordered and how people responded is critical to the aims of this chapter. For example, Africans and their descendants appear to have run the everyday affairs of black and mulato confraternities, organizations that were critical to the coherence and identity articulation of African Diaspora communities. However, supervising clerics easily undermined Afro-Latin American leadership in the name of paternalistic concern.8 “Protection” was a means of control. In the case of colonial Latin America, the Catholic Church could simultaneously act as a protectorate of its enslaved Catholic subjects while exploiting their labor contribution, or their value as propertied objects. Welfare, in other words, was conjoined to exploitation, but one conceived under metaphors of care.9 More explicitly, Catholic inclusion of enslaved Africans and their descendants coexisted with the economy of slaveholding. Slaveholders inflicted punishments that exceeded the restraints ordered by the Church and Crown, suggesting an approach to colonial Catholicism that included an understanding of its actual economy, as well as its economy of governance. As a result, Catholicism, like many other aspects of colonialism, simultaneously invited and denied, and admitted and rejected, enslaved and freed people. Regardless, enslaved and free people of African descent worshipped as Catholics throughout the colonial period, shaping practices and beliefs, while at the same time destabilizing the institution’s exclusionary mandates.

Church and State: Defense of Slavery The question, for Catholic clerics and to some extent the Spanish Crown, was the legality and morality of purchasing Africans who had been captured unjustly. As the slave trade increased to the Americas throughout the sixteenth century, clergy and other observers reported that slave traders sold captives who were not Muslim (but Catholic) and had been sold by their rulers for petty or nonexistent crimes, rather than resisting conversion. While the Portuguese Crown appeared not to have questioned the legality of the transatlantic slave trade, Dominican Tomás de Mercado (d. 1575), warned that the commerce, including the illegal capture of Africans (some newly baptized) by Portuguese traders, was unjust and a mortal sin.10 Ultimately, Jesuit Luis de Molina (1536–1600) argued that the responsibility to ascertain who was justly or unjustly captured lay with the kings, bishops, and merchants who oversaw the trade.11 In this way, the paternalistic protection of the state, which included secular, religious, and commercial authorities, allowed the slave trade to continue within a Catholic sphere. In the Americas, clerics explained how enslavement was a way to save indigenous populations and provide Africans with the opportunity to convert to Christianity.12 The few clerics who condemned slavery of Africans and their descendants in the Americas met with reprisals. Jesuit Miguel Garcia (1550–1614) refused to hear anyone’s confessions,

(Un)Making Christianity   103 or basically perform his duties as a cleric, because he believed that none of the indigenous or African slaves had been justly captured, meaning that everyone in Brazil was living in sin.13 As a result, he and his compatriot were returned to Europe.14 Articulating further criticism of slavery in the Americas, Capuchin friars Francisco José de Jaca (1645–1690) and Epifano de Moirans (1644–1684) declared that the pope had condemned slavery, and argued that if all people were naturally free, then no one could be enslaved. In a radical move, Jaca and Moiran declared that the Christian monarchs, who oversaw the transatlantic slave trade as well as the profits of the colonial economy, were at fault. Threatening the basis of the colonial economy, Jaca suggested that a slave who had become a Christian should be freed and their enslaved labor repaid. As a result, Jaca and Morian were detained by Crown authorities and excommunicated by Church authorities, processed by the recently established Office of Propaganda Fide. They also were jailed, removed from Cuba to Europe, and forbidden to return to the Americas.15 Throughout the later seventeenth and into the eighteenth centuries, Church and Spanish Crown authorities, and provoked by concerned clerics, continued to debate the limitations of slavery. In 1685, the king of Spain, Carlos II (1661–1700) called a council to decide if the slave trade and slavery were legitimate within the Spanish realm. The Consejo de Indias responded, assuring the Crown that captives were justly enslaved and black people were born to serve.16 Merchants, slaveholders, other colonizers, and both Iberian Crowns benefited too much from the sale of captive Africans and their labor to tolerate this level of dissent. As the slave trade to the Americas grew, along with the enslavement of Africans and their descendants in the sixteenth century, Spanish colonial authorities further racialized Afro-Latin Americans. Beginning with mid-fifteenth-century texts that invoked the biblical account regarding Noah’s curse of his son and descendants of Ham, Iberians equated blackness with slavery.17 Catholic authorities suggested that because of their supposed innate infidelity to Christianity and association with slavery, blacks could not fully participate in the Church as Christians. Simultaneously, Spanish writers began to identify blackness with divine punishment—and one that could not be removed.18 According to historian María Elena Martínez, the Spanish transformed the Iberian religious anxiety about Jews and Muslims into a racial fear rooted in a perception of genealogical impurity. People of African descent, therefore, would also be excluded from economic, political, and cultural institutions—such as the corporate governance unit of a republic or leadership roles such as the priesthood—because their blood was perceived to be “impure.”19 Colonial officials and ecclesiastical authorities, then, created discourses that separated Africans and their descendants from Indians and Spaniards, who could claim legitimate membership in the Spanish kingdoms that included the Americas. In many ways, the Crown was interested in fulfilling its Catholic duties. Faced with the increasing numbers of captive Africans traded into the Viceroyalty of Peru, in 1603, the king ordered that slaveholders should pay a priest to teach, confess, and administer communion to their slaves on Sundays.20 Parishes would facilitate the claims of Africans and their descendants for inclusion within a society organized by corporate or collective locations. However, the Crown and the Church were unable to marshal the necessary

104   Rachel Sarah O’Toole clerics to oversee the evangelization of enslaved people and so attempted to force individual slaveholders to Christianize slaves.21 Repeatedly, the Crown ordered slaveholders to treat slaves well and to provide adequate food and clothing.22 The Crown also ordered slaveholders to ensure that slaves prayed regularly and were taught Christian doctrine and baptized.23 As mandates were issued from distant Spain and transmitted through colonial authorities—who also owned slaves—the likelihood of enforcement was questionable. In an effort that signaled desire for protection as well as control, the Spanish Crown, however, took a particularly strong position against the excessive punishment of enslaved people. While slaveholders were allowed to discipline slaves, cruel physical acts were prohibited.24 By the eighteenth century, the Crown mandated that slaveholders honor daily wage agreements with slaves who worked outside of the household and refrain from branding captives on the face or back.25 These mandates could have been (and have been read) as an indication of Spanish America’s protection of enslaved populations. These same orders, however, also indicate that the Crown was more interested in representing itself as the defender of Catholic rites, but not necessarily the bodies and persons of Afro-Latin Americans. For example, the repetition of mandates to protect slaves in the 1785 Codigo Negro Carolino for Santo Domingo, and again in 1789 and 1794, suggests that slaveholders were reluctant to provide enslaved people with access to Catholic doctrine or to refrain from abusive treatment.26 The Crown, at the same time, was ineffective and reluctant in its enforcement due to its need to control a large population of Africans and their descendants in the Americas. Rather than destabilize slavery—and thus introduce a host of questions regarding the legal location of black people beyond the Republic of the Spaniards and the Republic of the Indians—the Spanish Crown revealed its reluctance to interfere in the practice of slaveholding, just as the Catholic Church offered a theology that, while sympathetic with the slave, justified slaveholding.27 Spanish royal orders concerning black people appeared to be more concerned with controlling, rather than protecting, the African-descent population. For example, when the Crown mandated that slaveholders Christianize and provide basic necessities to their slaves in 1545, the same order also prohibited enslaved men from riding horses, thereby asserting control over the enslaved. In this act of governance, the Crown exercised both a form of control as well as protection.28 Theorist Michel Foucault would call this aspect of Spanish governance an economy, or the “correct manner of managing individuals, goods and wealth within the family,” including the enslaved under the purview of their owners.29 According to the Spanish Crown’s order, enslaved men were also not supposed to carry weapons, move around without written permission from an owner or overseer, or shelter fugitive slaves.30 “Protection,” thus, was also a form of surveillance. Still, the Crown warned in the eighteenth-century Codigo Negro Carolino that excessive punishment would induce enslaved people to flee and to rebel.31 In these ways and others, the Crown sought methods to rein in the slaveholders. The Crown’s repeated orders indicate that slaveholders had different priorities than Christianizing their slaves.

(Un)Making Christianity   105 Simultaneously, the Spanish monarch targeted enslaved and free people of African descent (and other people of indigenous and mixed descent) within the Christian kingdoms of Latin America who were perceived as unruly. A 1638 mandate demanded that people of color attend Mass and confession, as well as baptize their children. By imposing “a political and religious life” on these communities, the Spanish Crown hoped to eliminate robberies and other lawlessness in Panama.32 According to the Catholic monarchs, governance through religious practice would create an orderly society. To produce this Catholic world in the Americas, the Christian monarchs also worked to govern the external representations of its subjects. In 1672, the Crown mandated that enslaved and free men and women, especially those belonging to ecclesiastics, dress appropriately in Cartagena and other provinces. This order was not due to the lack of clothing but was a matter of discipline, because colonial authorities reported they were violating standards of Christian decency by drinking at night or having relationships outside of marriage.33 Following up, in 1710 the Crown ordered slaveholders to cease (supposedly) prostituting enslaved women who went out to earn their daily wage.34 While certainly referencing the sinful nature of these activities, the main concern pertained to maintaining public order. In 1725, the Crown was more explicit. The mandate claimed that the supposedly luxurious dress of women of color in Peru was supported by money gained from thefts, causing extreme lawlessness.35 In the later eighteenth century, sumptuary laws to outlaw black women from wearing pearls, emeralds, and silver underlined elite anxieties about maintaining the increasingly strict regulations of race and class.36 As Tamara Walker has argued, by wearing elegant clothing, an enslaved or freed woman “could literally dress like a white woman.”37 The Crown’s orders against dress choices therefore illuminate a need to rein in supposedly errant Africans and their descendants, whose actions threatened not only public order, but also the basis of Catholic society in the Americas. If women of African descent could present themselves as white women, then the racial hierarchy of the Americas that included the justification for slavery of Africans could be questioned.

Jesuits: Slaveholding Justifications Just as the Crown defended the transatlantic slave trade and promoted slaveholding, Catholic religious orders profited from their extensive use of enslaved labor. Secular clergy and religious clerical orders, such as Augustinians, Dominicans, and Benedictines, as well as female religious orders, owned slaves who worked in their convents or monasteries and also on large sugar operations, farms, textile mills, vineyards, and ranches.38 In particular, the Jesuit missions in the Americas depended on slaveholding. In northeastern Brazil during the seventeenth century, the Jesuits owned six sugar mills, each housing between forty and eighty slaves. By the late colonial period, the Jesuits became Brazil’s largest slaveholder.39 In the early eighteenth century, the Jesuits in Mexico owned

106   Rachel Sarah O’Toole a significant number of slaves. Each Jesuit estate on the Peruvian coast included, on average, 240 slaves.40 By the later eighteenth century, the Jesuits throughout Río de la Plata relied almost exclusively on enslaved labor, and their Paraguayan estates included 25 percent of all the region’s slaves.41 Profit coexisted with Jesuit ministry. On estates, administrators scheduled regular prayer, Christian teaching, and either had a resident priest or one who visited take confession and administer the sacraments on Sundays.42 Jesuits also encouraged other slaveholders to allow their slaves to marry, so that all could fulfill their duties as Catholics. They also distributed rosaries to slaves who lived on other estates, and exhorted secular administrators to allow slaves to rest on holidays.43 Jesuit slaveholders were intent on protecting their investments. Corporal punishment was still essential to Jesuit enterprises. As the number of enslaved laborers grew, slave quarters were divided by sex and locked in at night.44 The Society allowed members to use hot tallow to burn a slave’s body. Jesuit estates paid the rural guard to capture fugitive slaves, and kept stocks, shackles, collars, as well as other tools designed to punish errant or resistant slaves.45 In addition to enduring epidemics that affected the general population, slaves on Peruvian Jesuit estates suffered from protein and Vitamin A deficiencies due to their poor diet.46 The Jesuit estates generally included a low number of childbearing-age women, and Jesuit records indicate a low birth rate.47 The Jesuits, therefore, replaced their slave populations through purchase rather than encouraging reproduction.48 Jesuit practices indicate that the Society identified Africans and their descendants primarily as sources of labor, even as they targeted Afro-Latin Americans to convert and practice Catholicism. With other Jesuits from Cartagena, Father Alonso de Sandoval and Father Pedro Claver met slave-trading ships with water, interpreters, and an intention to administer basic Christian doctrine.49 Repeatedly, the regular missives from the Cartagena house— whose members witnessed the forced arrival of thousands of captives—reported that newly arrived Africans were capable of receiving Christian teaching and living as Catholics.50 According to these clerics, Africans and their descendants were thwarted from living as Catholics due to logistical barriers. There were not enough Jesuits to administer to a growing number of slaves, and the Spanish Crown made only weak attempts to provide slaves with access to clergy.51 In the Spanish Americas, the monarch repeatedly ordered slaveholders to pay a priest who made a regular circuit to rural estates.52 Once face to face, Jesuits struggled to learn the languages of enslaved Africans, as this was necessary to understand enslaved confessions.53 The tortured exchanges, though, often passing through a chain of interpreters, could not be trusted to communicate the nuances of Christian faith. The process of baptism, as a result, could be quite rudimentary. Missionaries engaged potential converts by offering them water, sweets, biscuits, tobacco, or another token.54 The gifts provided Jesuits with an entry into a mediated exchange that even they doubted resulted in true conversion. Jesuits reported that Africans and their descendants appeared unable to maintain Catholic practice and faith.55 Enslaved men and women, Jesuits and other clerics observed, employed Sundays for their own celebrations, failed to attend religious instruction, and

(Un)Making Christianity   107 did not marry or have their children baptized. Sandoval, who dedicated his life to the conversion of newly arrived captives in Cartagena, did not question the humanity of Africans and their descendants. He understood that even though their bodies were enslaved, their souls could be saved.56 Still, like many early modern theologians, Sandoval followed Aristotle, and believed that some people were born to be slaves and that the conditions of slavery had made Africans and their descendants intellectually inferior.57 Jesuits, supposedly the defenders of slaves, thus divided Christianity by constructing Africans and their descendants as lesser Catholics. The purpose of the Jesuit missionizing project was to create good slaves as well as good Catholics—what could be understood as mutually constitutive goals. For example, Sandoval was confused by the rich diversity of the African Diaspora. As a result, he reduced distinctions among Africans into ethnic categories or castas that made taxonomical sense to his project of baptism.58 In the process, Sandoval erased differences among Africans to recreate captives and slaves as cyphers to be filled with new, and correct, identities and religious practices.59 As Sandoval worked to evangelize Africans, he created slaves from newly arrived Africans.60 At the same time, Jesuits assumed that converted Africans were to adopt the role of an obedient slave. A Jesuit hagiographer of Pedro Claver described the ideal transformation of Africans into slaves as similar to domesticating African lions.61 In 1675, the author of the Jesuit annual letter recounted how a blind and barbarous slave resisted his owner, was wounded, and then was cured by Jesuits. The miracle, though, was not the survival of the African-descent man. Instead, the Jesuits celebrated the enslaved man’s metamorphosis from a fierce black to a good and docile slave who served his master.62 The spiritual protection offered by the Jesuits harnessed enslaved Africans and their descendants to the slaveholding economy. Jesuit missionizing, therefore, created a space for African Catholics in the Americas, but one that demanded conformity with the expectations of slavery.

Authority and Agency through Catholicism Iberian Crown mandates, much like Jesuit evangelization, worked to incorporate Africans and their descendants into a colonial society as obedient slaves, servants, or laborers. For example, royal orders suggested that marriage could deter enslaved men from becoming fugitives or otherwise resisting.63 Working against a customary assumption that marriage facilitated freedom, the Crown urged enslaved people to marry, while ensuring that once they had children, the parents and their offspring would remain enslaved.64 The Portuguese Crown, in general, paid less attention to its colonial population, and a weak institutional Church with a chronic shortage of clergy characterized Brazilian Catholicism.65 Afro-Latin American Catholic participation, however, tied enslaved and

108   Rachel Sarah O’Toole free people to the state. In 1602, the Spanish Crown insisted that the confraternities of Indians and blacks maintain decency and restrain themselves from excessive festivities. The purpose of the Christian institutions, the mandate underlined, was to instruct and to maintain “good customs.”66 In a similar manner, the colonial authorities sanctioned Afro-Brazilian religious conduct by issuing licenses to confraternities to carry their own coffins, or by granting them permission to solicit donations in the streets.67 Despite these limitations, enslaved men and women seized upon Catholic practices to create their families and communities. When Afro-Latin Americans got married in the Catholic Church, they participated in a Christian sacrament of all those baptized, consenting, single people who were not related.68 By doing so, enslaved men and women created new kinship bonds. West Central Africans married others from the same region, while brides and grooms legitimized family relations, including those of “shipmates” or people who had survived the Middle Passage together.69 Likewise, enslaved and free people employed baptism and confirmation to build their kinship networks. Slaveholders were supposed to oversee baptism, but enslaved parents could choose free or enslaved people as godparents for their children, thus creating or sustaining wider social network.70 With these elections, parents and sponsors solidified current, reciprocal relationships or formalized economic ties among the participating parties.71 Matrimony, though officially protected and encouraged, was not automatically awarded to enslaved men and women. The Catholic bond impeded slaveholders’ control of their property since the Church and the Spanish Crown prohibited owners from selling married slaves away from their spouses. Moreover, matrimony meant that spouses had the right to a married life that included regular conjugal visits.72 As a result, slaveholders in the Spanish Americas regularly refused to give their slaves permission to marry and discouraged matrimony with threats, punishment, and selling children away from a family.73 When denied either the ability to get married or maintain a marriage, enslaved men and women could petition the ecclesiastical courts for the ability to live together or to be sold to an owner in the same city where their spouse had been relocated.74 As Herman Bennett has shown, enslaved men and women called on clergy and other legal representatives to astutely argue their cases. They presented themselves as respectful wives and honorable husbands. In doing so, enslaved men and women challenged core assumptions of slavery by calling on the Catholic Church (backed by colonial authority) to supersede an owner’s control.75 In addition to the goal of reuniting with their spouses, Africans and their descendants petitioned Church courts for recognition of their freedom. They called on the promises made in owners’ testaments, and they inserted themselves in disputes over the agreed price of manumission.76 Enslaved people also employed one of the most dreaded ecclesiastical courts, the Inquisition, for their own ends. In some cases, enslaved men and women renounced God when they were being punished, causing the beating to stop and the Inquisition to intervene.77 Enslaved men and women claimed to the ecclesiastical tribunal that by whipping their slaves so severely, the slaveholders had provoked slaves to blaspheme.78 In effect, the slaves pointed to their colonial masters as the real sinners.

(Un)Making Christianity   109 Christianity, therefore, was part of the structure of slavery and racial hierarchies that disciplined Afro-Latin Americans, while it also provided the means for individual and collective inclusion.79 Fray Martín de Porres, who would become a Catholic saint, served with humility and obedience, identifying with the dog, the lowliest of devoted creatures.80 After his death, his image—a black man dressed in a Dominican lay-brother’s habit, holding a broom and often overseeing his first miracle of a mouse joining a cat and a dog to eat from the same bowl—signified a black man who accepted, yet transcended, his place in colonial society.81 At the same time, Fray Martín was a known ally to people of color throughout the city of Lima. He attended to the sick, poor, enslaved and freed. People of all castas and classes attended his funeral.82 He called young black men “son” and older black men the respectful term of “uncle,” signifying his acknowledged kinship within communities of color.83 Hardly contradictory, Fray Martín attended to the illnesses of and gave advice to powerful limeños and was buried in a clerics’ tomb.84 In this way, Fray Martín, in his person and resulting image, could reflect a position as both a lowly slave and an African-descent man who deserved divine praise. The donada who took vows to obey the rule of the Sisters of the Franciscan Order, the Rule of Saint Clare (also known as the Order of the Poor Clares), former slave Ursula de Jesús also presented the characteristics of an obedient slave while critiquing the racial hierarchies of colonial Lima. In the Convent of Santa Clara, she was known for her exceptional humility; she supported the hierarchy of her religious community, and like Fray Martín, she understood that slaves were property.85 At the same time, Ursula de Jesús critiqued the system from her position as a laboring woman of color. After securing her freedom, she hesitated to take vows as a donada because she would then become the servant of the convent.86 She expressed frustration that she could not devote time to her spiritual exercises because she was called upon to work.87 From her position as a practiced healer and a powerful mystic, who reportedly communicated with the souls in purgatory, Ursula de Jesús called attention to the daily inequities of her position.88 She had visions of Christ admonishing the nuns of her convent for their inattention to ­spiritual devotions, and she declared that her mystical experiences revealed how heaven would be a just place for all, regardless of color or status.89 The authority of Ursula de Jesús’s religious devotion was not unique. Other lay religious women who were not members of official orders, or beatas, such as Rosa Maria Egipcíaca da Vera Cruz, developed significant communities and followings. Born on the Gold Coast of West Africa and enslaved in Rio de Janeiro in the first part of the e­ ighteenth century, she served as a spiritual adviser to Brazilian elites and clergy, as well as to colonial bureaucrats.90 Images and hagiographies of Rosa Maria Egipcíaca da Vera Cruz, Ursula de Jesús, and other mystic women of color provided a model for obedient slaves, while also demonstrating the power that Africans and their descendants could gain through the Catholic Church. Africans and their descendants employed institutions such as confraternities to develop religious communities as well as express an alternative religiosity. These lay religious brotherhoods annually celebrated their chosen saint(s), raised funds to build chapels

110   Rachel Sarah O’Toole and churches, led prayers, and organized burials for their members.91 In addition to performing acts of charity and devotion, confraternities could be meticulously o ­ rganized, with members electing a board, treasurers, judges, and other positions, as well as composing statutes to govern themselves. For example, in Minas Gerais, Brazil, the confraternity of Our Lady of the Rosary (one chosen by Africans and their descendants throughout the Americas since its popularity among Lisbon’s black population in the late fifteenth century) elected a king and a queen who paid the highest membership fees and thus supported the group’s activities.92 Similar to other confraternity royalty throughout the Americas, they dressed in robes, grasped scepters, held court during their coronations, and received foreign ambassadors.93 In contrast to the executive administration of the brotherhoods, the court, led by the king and queen, organized the revelry, securing permission to solicit charitable contributions during parades through city streets dressed in regal splendor and accompanied by dance and song.94 Some confraternities collected funds to free their members and empowered their leaders to force reticent slave owners to allow manumission for a just price.95 In some cases, the saint of a confraternity corresponded to deities such as the Yoruba Ogún (who manifested as Saint George), the patron of blacksmiths, or Yemanjá, with iconography melding with that of Our Lady of the Rosary, just as rosary beads were repurposed as protective amulets.96 Signifying collective representation, the confraternity royalty and leadership also presented colonial officials and slaveholders a defiant display of their autonomy. State and Church officials certainly monitored confraternities. Their statutes had to be approved, and account books were to be reviewed annually.97 Lima’s municipal authorities declared that the public celebrations were too boisterous, and attempted to prohibit gatherings of more than three Afro-Peruvians. Africans and their descendants, though, continued to congregate in the Peruvian viceregal capital and elsewhere. Moreover, their annual processions allowed members of confraternities to participate in what were often significant municipal displays of belonging. In Minas Gerais during the early eighteenth century—the height of the gold boom—the Our Lady of the Rosary confraternity processed with personages representing the sun, moon, and planets, as well as members in long, white silk robes carrying statues of their saints adorned with gold and diamonds.98 In addition to displaying their wealth, the confraternity took its place alongside other lay religious organizations, as well as clerical authorities and municipal officials. Confraternities built themselves into the urban colonial landscape by constructing their own churches that they opened to lesser confraternities in exchange for promised obligations. But even so, differences among confraternities mattered. Festive or funeral processions organized by the brotherhoods also included articulations of hierarchies of the religious associations emphasizing the higher status of free or militia men, as opposed to enslaved and recently arrived Africans.99 The primary function of confraternities, to organize the funeral and burial of their members, also allowed Africans and their descendants to claim a public space and to present themselves as a cohesive group. Confraternities assured their members a proper burial in a cemetery or in and around their church, as opposed to being abandoned

(Un)Making Christianity   111 or thrown in collective pits by slaveholders.100 Brotherhoods assembled for a burial procession, and with music and dance accompanied, mourned, and collected funds to pay for the funeral.101 Assembling allowed a community to articulate its allegiances, as demonstrated in the common phrase repeated at early nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro funerals: “We are weeping for our kin.”102 Leadership and identity could also be articulated at funerals. Rulers and their offspring who died in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro were afforded elaborate funerals by the people of their nation, which included delegations from other communities. Followers lined the procession route, clapping their hands, singing, dancing, and playing drums.103 Through these practices, and others, enslaved and free men and women adapted institutions such as the lay religious brotherhoods to develop community leadership. By joining and creating Catholic institutions, enslaved and free Africans and their descendants (especially in urban areas) inserted themselves into positions of Catholic vassalage. Through their usage, Afro-Latin Americans remade Christianity in their own image.

A Hostile Church Regardless of how Africans and their descendants worked to include themselves, Church authorities, overall, discouraged black religious practices while insisting on conversion. In particular, the Inquisition targeted Afro-Latin Americans (especially women) for witchcraft, but also for the crime of bigamy, a common offense of enslaved men and women who were often sold away from their spouses. Beginning in the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth century, the Holy Office prosecuted Muslims in the Americas who had originated from northern Africa, Iberia, or the Senegambian coast.104 Ecclesiastical authorities feared that, like other non-Christians, these practitioners would contaminate the Americas with their heresies. Likewise, the Holy Office targeted Afro-Latin Americans who engaged in “superstitions” that mixed Iberian, African, and indigenous beliefs that also can be understood as alternative spiritual practices. Cases from Lima’s Inquisition reveal that Afro-Peruvians developed strong spiritual ties with Andeans, as well as with other colonial inhabitants, and even joined forces against slaveholders and colonizers. Enslaved men and women contracted with Andean ritual specialists to inflict revenge on their abusive owners, or employed indigenous religious materials such as coca.105 The Church, therefore, discouraged any forms of heterodoxy that were also acts against elite control. Inquisitorial prosecution often revealed Afro-Latin American attempts to resist or at least survive their current conditions of enslavement. Accusations against Afro-Latin Americans were often tied with a generalized Iberian fear of blackness, or of associated darkness with the Devil.106 Owners reported that their slaves and servants stole, but also attempted to poison them or commit other acts of witchcraft.107 Though accused by the Inquisition for the crime of witchcraft, enslaved men and women were often attempting to protect themselves from slaveholders. For example, in the 1640s, the Inquisition in

112   Rachel Sarah O’Toole Brazil accused a freed Angolan man of witchcraft for having two women bathe “in a tub of water that contained crushed leaves, a rattle, and a jaguar tooth.”108 The ritual, however, was an attempt to shield the enslaved women from their abusive mistresses. In this case and many others, Africans and their descendants understood that the mistreatment and violence of slavery was proof that slaveholders and other colonial authorities were witches themselves.109 The only thing that could counter witchcraft, they astutely hypothesized, was better witchcraft. Though officially prohibited, non-Catholic practices were not categorically discouraged. In 1685, a slaveholder in Bahia hired an enslaved Central African diviner, Gracia, to locate the person who murdered his slaves through witchcraft. She employed a Congo divination ritual to ascertain who, among the white and black inhabitants, was a “witch.”110 While historian James Sweet explains that the African divination practice operated to mediate conflicts within the enslaved Brazilian community, apparently slaveholders were also interested in harnessing these powers. Even some Catholic clergy were not immune to the potency of African Diaspora religious practices. In the early eighteenth century, a parish priest in northern Brazil sent for a black “sorcerer” to divine the reasons why his lover, a black woman, had taken ill.111 In the meantime, the Inquisition as an institution targeted Afro-Latin Americans for practicing sorcery, witchcraft, and other forms of heterodox religiosity.112 Nonetheless, in daily life, African Diaspora religiosity in some cases flourished, in part due to the participation of those charged with overseeing enslaved and freed people’s Catholic orthodox practices. Catholic institutions were often locations where Afro-Latin Americans could practice their own religions and belief systems. As a result, colonial and church authorities often suspected that confraternities, especially those with exclusive black memberships, engaged in unorthodox practices.113 Historian Joan Bristol has discussed the case of an illicit confraternity that erected a chapel with an altar in a private home, where they processed Saint Nicholas and said Mass in Latin without clerical supervision. While witnesses reported that the religious organization was Afro-Mexican, only 50 percent of the accused were identified as black, mulato, or of color. Bristol’s analysis of the Inquisition case—which includes the valuable objects confiscated from the improvised chapel—reveals that Afro-Mexicans and lower-status Spaniards developed an alternative “devotional environment.”114 Rather than renegade, the worshippers of Saint Nicholas appear to have wanted to engage in orthodox practices, with their makeshift pulpit, worn altar covering, and cheap tallow candles. Still, as they included themselves within Catholicism, the Inquisition (with the assistance of testifying neighbors) policed the participation of Afro-Latin Americans as well as others who would join their worship. In the later eighteenth century, the Catholic Church faced new threats. In the Spanish sphere, the Real Pragmática (extended to the Americas in 1778), and subsequent marriage legislation, required that parents provide permission for whites to marry. Disputes over marriage, as a result, came before civil courts as the Bourbon state worked to remove ecclesiastical authority and to strengthen private inheritance law.115 One consequence was a more public and official stance against interracial marriage that encouraged

(Un)Making Christianity   113 church authorities to underline what had been customary racial distinctions in their parishes.116 Under Joseph I of Portugal (1750–1777), the reformer Marquis of Pombal encouraged indigenous and Portuguese intermarriage in Brazil, but there were similar moves by the clergy to separate potential marriage partners because they were perceived to be of different races.117 Even as Afro-Latin Americans continued to participate in the Church, Enlightenment ideals took hold in colonial Latin America, including increased racial classifications that resulted in more explicit forms of racial discrimination. Accompanying eighteenthcentury ideals of individual liberty, Protestantism also proved increasingly tempting in the Iberian Americas. Since the sixteenth century, there had been enslaved and freed people who had entered the Iberian colonies as practicing Jews or Protestants due to their previous enslavement or origins.118 By the mid-nineteenth century in the city of Recife in northern Brazil, free black Agostinho José Pereira preached that the word of God superseded the importance of the images of saints.119 Known as the “Divine Teacher,” Pereira explained that his Protestant inspirations had come from a divine vision. When the British offered refuge to the beleaguered Portuguese Crown, the resulting treaty between the two nations allowed Anglican merchants to establish a church in Recife.120 However influenced by Anglican teachings and the abolitionism favored by the British Crown or the rebellions that rocked the Brazilian Northeast during the period, Pereira taught other Afro-Brazilians to write using models of popular verses that threatened the end of slavery from a revolution similar to the one that had occurred in Haiti.121 Catholicism, therefore, was no longer the only way for Afro-Latin Americans to engage in collective activities, and some turned to new secular forms of organization. The coming century would see Afro-Latin Americans increasing their membership in artisanal guilds and expanding their leadership positions in militias and militaries. Outside of the Catholic Church, into the nineteenth century, men and women of color would advocate publicly for their freedom and right to citizenship.

Conclusions Ecclesiastical officials proclaimed that Africans and their descendants, as Catholic subjects of the Crown, had the obligation to participate in Christian religious practices such as getting married and attending Mass. Nonetheless, black participation was limited by the early modern clerical assessments of enslaved and freed abilities to comprehend religious principles. Catholic ritual, ideology, and doctrine, in many ways, was part and parcel of Iberian colonial control, and provided what Michel Foucault has suggested was the thinking involved in practices of government.122 As a result, Catholic ideas and actions served the Crowns’ interests in justifying the transatlantic slave trade and the enslavement of Africans in the Americas. As a major financial and political institution of the early modern world, the Catholic Church participated in and developed the nefarious fiction that black people could be sold and purchased because of their racial

114   Rachel Sarah O’Toole identity. As part of the Iberian empires, and the colonial state, bishops and priests, as well as dioceses and monasteries, profited from the transatlantic and domestic slave trade as well as enslaved labor. Nevertheless, enslaved and free people included themselves within the Catholic Church, participated enthusiastically in Catholic worship, and employed ecclesiastical structures to organize their communities. The Church that enslaved, denied, and excluded them also provided refuge and infrastructure for African-descent communities and individuals who were faithful. With these limited openings, Afro-Latin Americans remade colonial Latin American Catholicism in their own image and in order to establish social bonds in the Americas. At the same time, Africans and their descendants placed the worship of black saints and confraternities at the center of colonial municipal celebrations and called on Iberian ecclesiastical courts to defend their families against the definitions of property by slaveholders. In this way, Afro-Latin Americans claimed the Catholic Church as a location to develop kinship and collectivity in the Americas. As a result, Afro-Latin Americans played a central role in the formation and development of Latin American Catholicism.

Notes 1. J. A. del Busto Duthurburu, San Martín de Porras: (Martín de Porras Velásquez) (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1992), 56. 2. Ibid., 64, 84, 88. 3. Busto Duthurburu, San Martín, 119; J.  P.  Tardieu, “Genio y semblanza del santo varón limeño de origen africano (fray Martín de Porras),” Hispania Sacra 45 (1993), 563. 4. Tardieu, “Genio,” 561–562; Busto Duthurburu, San Martín, 141. 5. Laënnec Hurbon, “The Church and Afro-American Slavery,” in The Church in Latin America 1492–1992, ed. Enrique Dussel (Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates, 1992), 368; Frederick P. Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru 1524–1650 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974), 27. 6. Eduardo Hoornaert, “The Church in Brazil,” in The Church in Latin America 1492-1992, ed. Enrique Dussel (Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates, 1992), 204; María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 220–224; Patricia A. Mulvey, “Black Brothers and Sisters: Membership in the Black Lay Brotherhoods of Colonial Brazil,” Luso-Brazilian Review 17, no.2 (1980), 266; Mary  C.  Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro 1808–1850 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 87. 7. Herman L. Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003), 33. 8. Nicole von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for AfroMexicans (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2006), 112. 9. C. Gordon, “Governmental Rationality: An Introduction,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. G. Burchell et al. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 12. 10. J.  Andrés-Gallego, La esclavitud en la América española (España: Ediciones Encuentro, 2005), 36; David  G.  Sweet, “Black Robes and ‘Black Destiny’: Jesuit Views of African Slavery in 17th-Century Latin America,” Revista de historia de América 86 (1978), 92; A.  J.  R Russell-Wood, “Iberian Expansion and the Issue of Black Slavery: Changing

(Un)Making Christianity   115 Portuguese Attitudes, 1440–1770,” American Historical Review 83, no.1 (1978), 35; Alida A. Metcalf, Go-betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500–1600 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2005), 159, 310. 11. Andrés-Gallego, La esclavitud, 39–40. 12. Hans-Jürgen Prien, Christianity in Latin America (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 135. 13. Ibid., 93. 14. Ibid., 137. 15. Andrés-Gallego, La esclavitud, 42–49. 16. Ibid., 50. 17. Metcalf, Go-betweens, 167. 18. Martínez, Genealogical, 158. 19. Ibid., 221. 20. “R.C. que los negros sean bien doctrinados” (1603), in Richard Konetzke, ed., Colección de documentos para la historia de la formación social de Hispanoamérica 1493–1810 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1953–1962) II, no.1, 99. 21. “R.C. al Gobernador de Cartagena que informe” (1611), in Konetzke, Colección II, no.1, 179–180. 22. “Ordenanzas acerca de la orden” (1545), in Konetzke, Colección I, 237; “R.C. a la Audiencia de Guadalajara” (1685), in Konetzke, Colección II, no.2, 762; “R.C. al gobernador de la Habana diciéndole” (1693), in Konetzke, Colección III, no.1, 40. 23. “Ordenanzas acerca de la orden” (1545), in Konetzke, Colección I, 238. 24. “R. C. al virrey del Perú que al esclavo” (1681), in Konetzke, Colección II, no.2, 722. 25. “R.C.  para el remedio de los daños” (1752), in Konetzke, Colección III, no.1, 260; “R.O. aboliendo la práctica de marcar a los negros” (1784), in Konetzke, Colección III, no.2, 543. 26. “Extracto del Codigo Negro Carolino” (1785), in Konetzke, Colección III, no.2, 554; “R. Instrucción sobre la educación” (1789), in Konetzke, Colección III, no.2, 644–645, 648–649; “Consulta del consejo de las Indias” (1794), in Konetzke, Colección III, no.2, 726–727. 27. Hurbon, “Church,” 366, 368. 28. Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. G. Burchell el al. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 92. 29. Ibid., 92. 30. “Ordenanzas acerca de la orden” (1545), in Konetzke, Colección I, 238–40. 31. “Extracto del Codigo Negro Carolino” (1785), in Konetzke, Colección III, no.2, 555. 32. “R.C. que los negros, mulatos, zambos y mestizos” (1638), in Konetzke, Colección II, no.2, 365. 33. “R.C. que los negros y negras anden vestidos” (1672), in Konetzke, Colección II, no.2, 587–588. 34. “R.C. que los gobernadores y justicias” (1710), in Konetzke, Colección III, no.1, 113. 35. “R. C. aprobando un bando del virrey” (1725), in Konetzke, Colección III, no.1, 187. 36. “Extracto del Codigo Negro Carolino” (1785), in Konetzke, Colección III, no.2, 562. 37. Tamara J. Walker, “ ‘He outfitted his family in notable decency’: Slavery, Honour and Dress in Eighteenth-Century Lima, Peru.” Slavery and Abolition 30, no.3 (2009), 392. 38. J.P. Tardieu, Los Negros y la iglesia en el Perú: Siglos XVI–XVII (Quito: Centro Cultural Afroecuatoriano, 1997), I: 116, 119; Paul Lokken, “Angolans in Amatitlán: Sugar, African Migrants, and Gente Ladina in Colonial Guatemala,” in Blacks & Blackness in Central America: Between Race and Place, ed. Lowell Gudmundson et al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 31, 36; John Frederick Schwaller, The History of the Catholic Church

116   Rachel Sarah O’Toole in Latin America: From Conquest to Revolution and Beyond (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2011), 106; Kathryn Burns, Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 115. 39. Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society, Bahia, 1550– 1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 96, 149; Dauril Alden, “Late Colonial Brazil, 1750–1808,” in The Cambridge History of Latin America. Volume II. Colonial Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 613. 40. H. Konrad, A Jesuit Hacienda in Colonial Mexico: Santa Lucía, 1576–1767 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1980), 244; N.  Cushner, Lords of the Land: Sugar, Wine, and Jesuit Estates of Coastal Peru, 1600–1767 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1980), 91. 41. Sandra Olivero Guidobono,“Producción y mano de obra en las haciendas jesuíticas del Buenos Aires colonial: La Chacarita y Las Conchas en el siglo XVIII,” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 69, no.2 (2012): 643; Ignacio Telesca, “Esclavos y jesuitas: El Colegio de Asunción del Paraguay,” Archivum historicum Societatis Iesu 77, no.153 (2008), 202. 4 2. Tardieu, Los negros, I:215, 216, 251, 255; C.A.  Palmer, Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570–1650 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 54; Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (ARSI). Peruano Litterae Annuae, vol. 16 “Letras annuas de la Prova del Perú del año de 1655,” 29v. 4 3. Schwartz, Sugar, 385; ARSI, Peruano Litterae Annuae, vol. 16, “Letras annuas de la Prova del Perú de los años de 1660 y 1661 y parte de 1662,” 91–91v. 4 4. Cushner, Lords, 93. 4 5. Tardieu, Los negros, I:243, 247, 248. 4 6. Cushner, Lords, 95; P. Macera, “Instrucciones para el manejo de las haciendas jesuitas del Perú (ss. XVII–XVIII),” in Nueva corónica 2, no.2 (1966), 39–49, 48. 47. Cushner, Lords, 102, 103. 48. Rosa María Martínez de Codes, “De la reducción a la plantación. La utilización del esclavo negro en las haciendas jesuitas de la América española y portuguesa,” Revista Complutense de Historia de América 21 (1995): 92, 105; J.P. Tardieu, “Compra de esclavos por el colegio jesuita de San Pablo Lima (1691–1729),” Hispania Sacra 56 (2004): 279. 49. Ronald J, Morgan, “Postscript to His Brothers: Reading Alonso de Sandoval’s De Instauranda Aethiopum Salute (1627) as a Jesuit Spiritual Text,” Atlantic Studies 5, no.1 (2008), 80. 50. María Cristina Navarrete Pelaéz, “Las cartas annuas jesuitas y la representación de los Etíopes en el siglo XVII,” in Genealogías de la diferencia: Tecnologías de la salvación y representación de los africanos esclavizados en Iberoamérica colonial, ed. María Eugenia Chaves Maldonado (Bogotá: Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2009), 37. 51. Bowser, African, 238. 52. Ibid., 242. 53. Tardieu, “Los negros,” I:431, 484, 487–488; Bowser, African, 245. 54. ARSI, Peruano Litterae Annuae, vol. 16, “Letras Annuas de la Provincia de el Perú de los años de 1664, 1665, 1666,” 112v. 55. María Cristina Navarrete, “La Representación jesuítica de los etíopes del siglo XVII desde las Cartas Annuas,” Memoria & Sociedad 10, no.21 (2006), 98. 56. V.P. Franklin, “Alonso de Sandoval and the Jesuit Conception of the Negro,” Journal of the Negro History 58, no.3 (1973), 356.

(Un)Making Christianity   117 57. Franklin, “Alonso,” 356, 357, 359; E.  Vila Villar, “Introducción,” in Un tratado sobre la esclavitud, (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, [1647] 1987), 22; Catalina Ariza Montañez, “El viaje dantesco de los etíopes: la construcción del ser esclavo en el periodo colonial,” in Genealogías de la diferencia: Tecnologías de la salvación y representación de los africanos esclavizados en Iberoamérica colonial, ed. María Eugenia Chaves Maldonado (Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2009), 151, 154. 58. Margaret M. Olsen, Slavery and Salvation in Colonial Cartagena de Indias (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2004), 139. 59. Ibid., 63. 60. Rachel Sarah O’Toole, “From the Rivers of Guinea to the Valleys of Peru: Becoming a Bran Diaspora within Spanish Slavery,” Social Text 92 (2007), 24–25. 61. J. Fernández, J, Apostólica y Penitente Vida de el V. P. Pedro Claver de la Compañía de Jesús sacada principalmente de informaciones jurídicas hechas antes el Ordinario de la Ciudad de Cartagena de Indias (Zaragoza: Diego Dormer, 1666), 143. 62. ARSI, Peruano Litterae Annuae, vol. 16, “Letras Annuas de la Provincia de la Compañía de JHS,” 225. 63. “R. Provisión para que se casen los negros” (1527), in Konetzke, Colección I, 99. 64. “R. Provisión que no sean libres” (1526), in Konetzke, Colección I, 81; “R.C. que los esclavos negros a quienes” (1538), in Konetzke, Colección I, 185; “R.C. que los negros se casen con negras” (1541), in Konetzke, Colección I, 210; “R.C. para que los negros se casen” (1553), in Konetzke, Colección I, 318–319. 65. Mulvey, “Black,” 270. 66. “R.C. que en las cofradías,” in Konetzke, Colección II, no.1, 88. 67. Mariza de Carvalho Soares, People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in EighteenthCentury Rio de Janeiro (Durham: Duke University Press [2000] 2011), 125, 154. 68. Bennett, Africans, 97, 101. 69. Ibid., 100, 111. 70. Stuart  B.  Schwartz, “Opening the Family Circle: Godparentage in Brazilian Slavery,” in Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery, ed. Stuart Schwartz (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 140, 152, 154. 7 1. Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 121. 72. Bennett, Africans, 127. 73. Bowser, African, 255; Kathy Waldron, “The Sinners and the Bishop in Colonial Venezuela: The Visita of Bishop Mariano Martí, 1771–1784,” in Sexuality & Marriage in Colonial Latin America, ed. Asunción Lavrin (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 163. 74. Maribel Arrelucea Barrantes, Replanteando la esclavitud: estudios de etnicidad y género en Lima borbónica (Lima: CEDET: Centro de Desarrollo Étnico, 2009), 65–66. 75. Bennett, Africans, 150. 76. Michelle McKinley, “Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Legal Activism, and Ecclesiastical Courts in Colonial Lima, 1593–1689,” Law and History Review 28, no.3 (2010), 768. 77. Kathryn Joy McKnight, “Blasphemy as Resistance: An African Slave Woman before the Mexican Inquisition,” in Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World, ed. Mary E. Giles (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 234. 78. Javier Villa-Flores, “ ‘To Lose One’s Soul’: Blasphemy and Slavery in New Spain, 1596–1669,” Hispanic American Historical Review 82, no.3 (2002), 438, 458.

118   Rachel Sarah O’Toole 79. Herman  L.  Bennett, Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), 32. 80. Busto Duthurburu, San Martín, 68. 81. Celia Cussen, Black Saint of the Americas: The Life and Afterlife of Martín de Porres (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Alex García-Rivera, St. Martín de Porres: The ‘Little Stories’ and the Semiotics of Culture (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995), 6. 82. Busto Duthurburu, San Martín, 93, 274. 83. Ibid., 248. 84. Ibid., 201, 276. 85. Nancy E. van Deusen, “The World of Ursula de Jesús,” in The Souls of Purgatory: The Spiritual Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Afro-Peruvian Mystic, Ursula de Jesús, ed. Nancy E. van Deusen (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2004) 1, 4, 53, 54; Alice  L.  Wood, “Religious Women of Color in Seventeenth-Century Lima: Estefania de San Ioseph and Ursula de Jesu Christo,” in Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas, ed. David Barry Gaspar et al. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 307. 86. van Deusen, “The World,” 4. 87. Ibid., 53–54. 88. Nancy E. van Deusen, “ ‘The Lord Walks among the Pots and Pans’: Religious Servants of Colonial Lima,” in Africans to Spanish America: Expanding the Diaspora, ed. Sherwin Bryant et al. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 142, 151. 89. van Deusen, “The World,” 55–56. 90. João José Reis and Herbert S. Klein, “Slavery in Brazil,” in The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History, ed. José  C.  Moya (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 191; Herbert S. Klein and Ben Vinson III, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean. 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 162. 91. Karasch, Slave, 82–83. 92. Linda  M.  Heywood, “The Angolan-Afro-Brazilian Cultural Connections,” Slavery & Abolition 20, no.1 (1999): 10; Elizabeth  W.  Kiddy, “Ethnic and Racial Identity in the Brotherhoods of the Rosary of Minas Gerais, 1700–1830,” The Americas 56, no.2 (1999): 240. 93. Elizabeth W. Kiddy, Blacks of the Rosary: Memory and History in Minas Gerais, Brazil (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 130, 133. 94. Soares, People, 138. 95. Mariana  L.  R.  Dantas, “Humble Slaves and Loyal Vassals: Free Africans and Their Descendants in Eighteenth-Century Minas Gerais, Brazil,” in Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America, ed. Andrew B. Fisher et al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 134. 96. Karasch, Slave, 85; Kiddy, Blacks, 60; Mulvey, “Black,” 256. 97. Kiddy, Blacks, 86. 98. Ibid., 88. 99. Soares, People, 116. 100. Ibid., 129. 101. Ibid., 128. 102. As reported by Jean-Baptiste Debret; Soares, 128. 103. Karasch, Slave, 251–252. 104. Bowser, African, 251. 105. Ibid., 252.

(Un)Making Christianity   119 106. Laura  A.  Lewis, Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 147–149. 107. Ibid., 157. 108. James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 164. 109. Ibid., 164–165. 110. Ibid., 120–121. 111. Ibid., 222. 112. James  E.  Wadsworth, “Jurema and Batuque: Indians, Africans, and the Inquisition in Colonial Northeastern Brazil,” History of Religions 46, no.2 (2006), 159; Martha Few, Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion, & the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002) 29. 113. Joan Meznar, “Our Lady of the Rosary, African Slaves, and the Struggle against Heretics in Brazil, 1550–1660,” Journal of Early Modern History 9, no.3–4 (2005), 380. 114. Joan Cameron Bristol, “Afro-Mexican Saintly Devotion in a Mexico City Alley,” in Africans to Spanish America: Expanding the Diaspora, ed. Sherwin  K.  Bryant et al. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 128. 115. Susan Socolow, “Acceptable Partners: Marriage Choice in Colonial Argentina, 1778–1810,” in Sexuality & Marriage in Colonial Latin America, ed. Asunción Lavrin (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 210–211. 116. Patrick J. Carroll, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity, and Regional Development (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, [1991] 2001), 149. 117. Peter Wade, Race and Sex in Latin America (London: Pluto Press, 2009), 93. 118. Sweet, Recreating, 97. 119. Marcus J.M. de Carvalho, “Agostinho José Pereira: The Divine Teacher,” in The Human Tradition in Modern Brazil, ed. Peter M. Beattie (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2004), 24. 120. Ibid., 25–26. 121. Reis and Klein, “Slavery,” 193; Carvalho, “Agostinho,” 29. 122. M.  Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage, [1999] 2010), 25.

chapter 7

Millena r i a n Mov em en ts Carole A. Myscofski

Millenarian movements, rooted in the Christian expectation of the thousand-year ­kingdom ruled by Jesus at the end of time, developed in the Spanish and Portuguese New World colonies alongside the more conventional practices of the Roman Catholic Church. Hopes for spiritual revitalization in indigenous communities, religious renewal among peasant groups, and ecclesiastical autonomy among dissident parties similarly inspired rebellion as the imperial conquests of Latin America disrupted native religions, and colonial and postcolonial governments created intolerable social and religious conditions for disenfranchised peoples. Because of the power of religious institutions in the creation and maintenance of political systems in Latin America, millenarian movements—whether among indigenous peoples, slaves, peasant workers, or urban poor—manifested the inescapable links between religious worldviews and political ideology and found their social expression through resistance and revolution.

The Apocalyptic Heritage Expectations for the Second Coming of Jesus diminished not long after his death and by the second century had been replaced with more elaborate prophecies. The last book in the New Testament, Revelation to John, or The Apocalypse, dramatized the conviction that divine intervention would end the known world in a series of spiritual and physical battles directed by Jesus and his saints against Satan and his minions. That imagery combined with popular stories and ecclesiastical interpretations to support predictions that physical catastrophes and social chaos would precede the imminent Last Days. Millenarian groups also anticipated a prophetic leader, like Jesus himself, to end earthly oppression and lead a small number of true believers with secret prophecies into an

122   Carole A. Myscofski earth-bound peaceful utopia enjoyed by God’s faithful alone. While a few early theologians elaborated these apocalyptic teachings, Christian authors in the fourth century, such as Jerome and Augustine of Hippo, opposed this disruptive interpretation of Scripture. Later medieval commenters and popular traditions contributed as much to the millennial movements of Latin America as did the scriptural canonical tradition.1 In the Christian tradition, few radical religious movements espoused all of the details of the apocalyptic message from Revelation, particularly the expectation of a thousand-year kingdom while the Devil lay enchained (Rev 20:2–3), but groups may still be designated “millenarian” if most of the elements characteristic of that symbolic discourse centered their worldviews. Thus, millenarian movements are those that featured the dualism of good and evil, imminent transformation, cosmic upheaval, messianic intervention, and the divine kingdom as “key symbols,” in Sherry Ortner’s terms, to summarize their religious perspectives. Some symbols in particular—signs of the end, heavenly visions, and promises of a renewed monarchy—acted as “root metaphors” to both elaborate and organize cultural understanding of cosmic events as they unfolded in Europe and South America.2 This description corresponds with Norman Cohn’s proposal to define as “ ‘millenarian’ any religious movement inspired by” a vision of salvation that would be “collective,” “terrestrial,” “imminent,” “accomplished” by spiritual powers, and accompanied by “total” destruction throughout the known world.3 It is worth noting, however, that most Latin American movements suggest a narrower definition—one drawn from the Christian symbolic worldview and centered on the restoration of the believing community under a messianic leader. The emergence of such religious defiance in Latin America suggests that the colonial encounter itself inspired sufficient motivation for the new millenarian movements. Some ­ illenarian scholars, including Eric Hobsbawm and Ralph Linton, have theorized that m movements were nascent political movements utilizing repressed or fragmented ­religious imagery.4 Brazilian anthropologist Roberto da Matta placed religious movements within a “dual social system” in which marginalized communities challenge colonial or m ­ odern political ideologies.5 Other theorists emphasized the “relative deprivation” of the socially or economically repressed groups, who then attempt to improve their conditions under the guidance of a millenarian prophet. By contrast, Patricia Pessar has argued that these approaches diminish the importance of dynamic religious beliefs in individual and communal life. Millenarian groups comprehend their lives “in cosmological and moral terms,” and their beliefs provide both a richer understanding of their problems and viable solutions in both the mundane and spiritual realms.6 Rather than reduce religious movements to other types of social behavior, this chapter argues that millenarian movements in Latin America arose during historical moments of radical decline in the social and political autonomy of marginalized communities and dramatic deterioration in the support expected from religious leaders and rituals. These conditions reminded the participants or incipient leaders of their traditional apocalyptic beliefs, whether rooted in indigenous cosmologies or unfolding within the teachings of the Catholic Church. Interpreting cataclysmic events, including the disintegration of their social networks, primarily as religious events, millennialists recognized

Millenarian Movements   123 patterns derived from their religious traditions, a network of symbols that made up the long-cherished millenarian beliefs. This chapter reserves the term “millenarian” for those movements that were either Christian in origin or that demonstrated influence or heritage from Christian eschatological traditions. This will allow the inclusion of indigenous movements and religious rebellions that exhibit many of the characteristics of millenarian movements, but nonetheless stop short of the prophecy of the thousandyear reign of Jesus in a utopian kingdom on earth.

The Iberian Traditions The concepts of apocalyptic struggle from the Book of Revelation persisted in European Christianity through the Middle Ages and merged with messianic legends surrounding the Holy Roman Emperors, Charlemagne, and King Arthur, and with mystical numerology calculating the eras of European history. Persistent prophecies of a “future eschatological ruler” corresponded with the Iberian beliefs in a hidden king who would inaugurate a universal Christian kingdom—a king later identified as Ferdinand II of Aragon (1452–1516) and Sebastião I of Portugal (1554–1578).7 Eschatological concepts of divine intervention, along with papal support initiated during the military crusades against Islamic powers, brought the first Christian millennialist ideas from the “most Catholic” King Ferdinand across the Atlantic. Franciscan authors had constructed their own visions of the ­conquest of the Americas from biblical passages and affirmed that the papal concession of the rights of patronage mandated a messianic destiny for Spain and its rulers. Anticipating the conversion of all inhabitants of the newly encountered lands, Fray Gerónimo de Mendieta considered the Spanish king “to be the Promised One, the Messiah-World Ruler” whose missionary empire would overthrow the forces of evil and establish a millennial peace “on the eve of the Last Judgment.”8 In Portugal, national identity since the eleventh century had included legends of visionary rulers and messianic destiny for the people as a whole. These heightened ­during the reign of Sebastião I, called o desejado, or “desired one,” and immediately afterward. Sebastião acceded to the Portuguese throne at age three, but died during a misguided venture into northern Africa to avenge the destruction of Portuguese territory. His tragic death resulted in the temporary rule by his childless great-uncle Cardinal Henrique and the eventual loss of Portuguese autonomy to Spanish rule (1580 to 1640). That period of the “Portuguese captivity” furthered enthusiasm for lost kings and millenarian dreams in Portugal and its colonies, so that centuries later, Sebastião was still evoked as the hidden messiah who might restore Portuguese or Brazilian greatness in an apocalyptic empire. These religious and political traditions inspired Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries in early colonial Brazil and the Spanish colonies to perceive their missions in accord with messianic eschatology and to propel a handful of immigrant or creolized religious communities to defy ecclesiastical authorities so that they might realize the utopian dream of a Christ-led kingdom on earth.9

124   Carole A. Myscofski

Indigenous Revitalization and Millennial Movements Transformative religious movements occurred among indigenous and enslaved communities in South America from the earliest colonial moments through the twentieth century, comprising not only religious revitalizations but also political insurrections against monolithic power and oppressive neo-colonial regimes. Tupí-Guaraní Indian prophets in Paraguay and Brazil led followers on pilgrimage toward the “Land-withoutEvil” and enacted both a characteristically utopian worldview and, later, resistance to European domination. Rebellions among the Maya people in the Yucatán peninsula and among Andean peoples articulated similar millennial themes of cosmic battles centered on the restoration of earthly kingdoms and messianic promises for autonomy, especially in reaction to the colonial hegemony of the Spanish Roman Catholic Church and imperial state. And, as Alida C. Metcalf has argued, African and mixed-race participants in the Santidade movement in Jaguaripe, Brazil, incorporated millennial beliefs into their new religious movement in the 1580s.10 Inspired by their own interpretations of cosmic events and local tragedies, indigenous communities in Paraguay, Brazil, and Mexico followed messiah-like leaders to establish utopian societies in pre-colonial Latin America. The earliest recorded movements among these were the Tupí-Guaraní in Brazil and Paraguay, who undertook lengthy religious pilgrimages in search of the land of the immortals in the sixteenth century. For the Tupí communities in the Amazon basin, the world had already passed through one cycle of creation and destruction at the hands of the Creator. The few survivors were the immortal spirits in the Land-without-Evil, whose power could still be felt in the second world inhabited by their descendants. Led by their great shamans, Tupí families abandoned their villages, agriculture, and social customs so that they might purify themselves through an arduous life and find the Land-without-Evil. Hélène Clastres argued that the demands of those shamans articulated the tension between religious and sociopolitical powers among the Tupí-Guaraní, and their followers broke that tension by abandoning all non-religious activity so that they might attain the earthly paradise of plenty and ease, the Land-without-Evil.11 Recovered evidence has suggested that the Tupí on the northeast coast of Brazil showed little familiarity with seaside living, and since they were “relatively recent arrivals to the area,” their resettlements might have been inspired by their search for a perfected land not unlike the millennial kingdom expected by medieval Christians.12 In the 1500s, Europeans reported on at least two migrations taking the Tupí-Guaraní toward their Land-without-Evil. The first brought 300 Tupí from Brazil to Peru, where they claimed that their ten-year trek through the Amazon rainforest had taken them through regions rich with gold and jewels. Between 1562 and 1609, several other migrations took the Tupí-Guaraní from their ancestral lands toward the Land-without-Evil, each group led by great shamans. In that era, the very presence of Europeans may have been taken as a

Millenarian Movements   125 sign of the expected cataclysm that was to destroy the world, so that the shamans ­hastened their plans. In 1605, for example, the French Franciscan Claude d’Abbeville reported that a Portuguese or mestiço shaman leading his community toward the Landwithout-Evil had stopped so that they might cultivate crops and hunt for food. Having met and battled with the French near the Amazon delta, the disappointed migrants turned again toward home and abandoned their religious dreams.13 The Tupí-Guaraní pilgrimages were powerful revitalization movements that shared many elements with millenarian movements elsewhere in Latin America. Reliant on powerful shamans, rather than messiahs, the pilgrims undertook the difficult personal and social journey to reach the divine realm here on earth. They expected to transform themselves through their sacrifices, so that one small group of survivors in the ­Land-without-Evil might live through the fires that would destroy the rest of the world.14 The more powerful aspects of this prophetic religion persisted through the twentieth century, so that the Guaraní shamans invoked the Land-without-Evil to mount resistance to the dominant colonial powers. In the 1970s, motifs from Tupí-Guaraní “cosmological beliefs” formed part of Roman Catholic services, and the Tupí migrations were likened to the ancient Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt as another quest for spiritual freedom.15

Colonial Movements While some of the Tupí-Guaraní pilgrimages were completed as Portuguese explorers arrived, the first millenarian movement in colonial Brazil might have begun in the 1580s in the Santidade, or Holiness, movement at Jaguaripe in northeastern Brazil that attracted Indians, enslaved Africans, mixed-race residents, and Portuguese colonists after years of disease, war, and famine. The visiting Portuguese Inquisition recorded claims that prophets, or pajés, enacted rituals for personal and cosmic transformation and united Tupí-Guaraní symbols and actions with Catholic titles and sacred powers. The small group revered indigenous divine beings merged with God, Mary, and incarnate saints, and expected supernatural intervention in their lives. The two leaders called themselves “Pope” and the “Mother of God,” led the community in “baptisms, prayers, speaking in tongues, ‘drinking’ the sacred smoke of tobacco, and falling into trances,” and promised that God would eliminate the white oppressors and restore freedom and fertility to the devotees.16 While the short-lived movement clearly included social and political resistance and efforts to restore Tupí-Guaraní religious traditions alongside new religious powers and concepts, the participants did not proclaim the Second Coming of Jesus to inaugurate a millennial kingdom. Rather, their hopes for natural cataclysms and inverted social roles centered on emancipation from colonial oppression and, more importantly, built on the religious foundation of indigenous cosmologies such as the expectations for the Land-without-Evil among the coastal Tupí.17 In the Spanish colonies, the peoples of present-day Mexico and Peru struggled not only to preserve their own ancient religious traditions, but also to develop an ­independent

126   Carole A. Myscofski understanding of the Roman Catholic doctrines that they were forced to accept. The Aztec, Maya, and Inca cultures held traditional worldviews that mirrored some of the fundamental characteristics of Christian millenarian movements, for they understood the world to undergo periodic renewals, with creative and destructive spiritual forces arrayed on each side to complete the cycle. Accordingly, proper rituals and proper p ­ ersonal behavior guided by religious leaders would enable the dutiful to withstand the waves of devastation and emerge triumphant in a new and ideal world. The most important aspect of these movements, as Alicia Barabas has argued, was their “religious worldview,” held as a “relatively coherent and integrated symbol system” and providing “one of the principal spheres of expression of resistance for oppressed groups.”18 The earliest religious revolts began in central and southern Mexico, where the most severe repression of native beliefs and practices engaged the Spaniards in the enslavement of the inhabitants and destruction of sacred objects and places. Surviving indigenous people from the 1500s through the 1600s followed charismatic leaders who promised the restoration of an ideal world for the devoted few after cosmic retribution against the oppressors. Insurrections in Mexico near Zacatecas and in the Yucatán in the 1540s were “inspired by a profound religious sentiment” to eradicate the Spaniards and their new doctrines from the region.19 These violent religious rebellions and others later in the 1500s and 1600s in Chiapas and the Yucatán might be categorized as nativistic movements, for their participants fought to retain Maya religious traditions and revitalize them on their own terms. While Maya resistance to Catholicism accompanied their opposition to colonization, some religious leaders concealed sacred objects and practices supporting their hopes for restoration of their validity, while others organized to weave “Christian symbols, rituals, and organizational practices into the complex fabric” of ­traditional Maya life.20 After decades of indoctrination, most native religious cultures were fragmented beyond recognition, but some persisted while interwoven with Catholic teachings. Local rebellions against Spanish domination did not cease, but in the early 1700s these coalesced with independent devotional groups focused on the Virgin Mary, just as Dominican preachers introduced Marian brotherhoods into indigenous villages. In central Mexico, Native Americans had already witnessed the incorporation of the cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe and its indigenous perceptions of spirituality and practice into the Catholic tradition. Among the most marginalized mestizo and indigenous communities, visionaries transformed the introduced religion into a vital spiritual practice. In Zincantán, Chiapas, for example, an aged hermit drew crowds for worship and repeated arrests by the Spanish governors with his claims of visions of the Virgin Mary in 1709. And in Santa Marta and Chenalhó, wooden statues of the Virgin demanded new shrines and new devotions, while the leaders prophesied that Mary would reciprocate food and incense offerings with “maize, beans, and many children” for her devotees.21 These and similar devotional cults expressed only a few millenarian elements, but certainly represented indigenous interpretations of Catholic symbols and rituals; all met with severe repression at the hands of the colonial religious and political authorities.

Millenarian Movements   127 Later in the eighteenth century, millenarian movements after the Zincantán revolt in Mexico battled the disruption of locally inspired religious activities and the elimination of personal and property rights. With material and spiritual disintegration imminent, Maya people in the Yucatán and in Chiapas expected the complete inversion of the social order under a new priest-king and his salvific reign. Native peoples sought to seize control of religious and governmental institutions in order to revitalize their own ancient traditions in light of their new understandings of cosmic time and renewals developed from Christian teachings. These religious revolts incorporated both indigenous and imported concepts of power and time, and their visions and prophecies drew on the ancient Maya symbolism of the great cycles of the cosmos, re-enacted by religious heroes—creating “a synthesis of Maya destiny and the Christian millennium.”22 The leaders, indigenous men who were conversant with both Maya and Spanish perspectives on cosmic cycles and morality, linked the immorality of the colonial institutions with the disintegrating social order to predict the end of time and the subsequent redemption of the indigenous culture by the Virgin Mary.23 In 1712, “a young Indian woman called María de la Candelaria” experienced a vision of Mary, near the town of Cancuc, Chiapas, and demanded a new shrine and devotional community for the Mother of God.24 This movement and later similar examples incorporated not only warnings about approaching cataclysms that resounded from ancient Maya cosmology, but also a distinctive role for Mary as the savior of her followers, t­ aking Jesus’s place as the eschatological victor. While other indigenous people also claimed miraculous interventions and cures by Mary and other saints, a new prophetic priesthood whose activities and hierarchy replaced both Maya and Catholic functionaries performed baptisms and other recurring ceremonies resembling Roman Catholic ­sacraments. Calls to neighboring villages drew thousands to a new Marian religion, “forging a heterodox popular faith that, once repressed by the clergy, became the basis for millennial insurrection.”25 Although the Spanish militia ultimately defeated the armed devotees, this ideology survived and provided a more powerful platform for the creation of a new violent millennialism in Mexico. By the 1750s, increasing violence across Chiapas and the Yucatán destroyed indigenous religious communities and social solidarity, and heightened the sense that the world order had been irrevocably disrupted. The end of foreign dominance was imagined not just in the religious but also in political realms, while utopian prophecies encouraged violent rebellions against Spanish rule in the name of a new king or priest chosen by the Virgin Mary. Here the ancient concepts of cycles of renewal were informed by the eschatological calendar from Christian apocalyptics, while indigenous structures and concepts of ritual, divinity, and priesthood were thoroughly “permeated” by the symbols and hierarchies of the Catholic Church.26 The ensuing rebellions reasserted religious autonomy through their focus on local religious concerns such as family health and agricultural success, the emphasis on female divine power, and unmediated access to divinity and sacred power through dreams and visions.27 Thus in the late 1750s in Yautepec, visionary Antonio Pérez led the opposition to the reported abuse and greed of the local clergy. Pérez drew hundreds of followers who

128   Carole A. Myscofski sought refuge with Virgin Mary of the volcano Popocatépetl, salvation in visions of Jesus, and cures from Pérez. Pérez prophesied “earthquake and epidemic, events which would announce the destruction of Spanish rule, especially of its three agents—tribute, viceroy and archbishop.”28 Pérez began as teacher and curandero, promised that he would be priest and king, and finally proclaimed his own divinity. His miracles would sustain the community under his reign until the rebirth of “the Holy Christ” who had been buried for one thousand years.29 Calling indigenous followers to retake sole possession of their lands, Pérez created a new religious landscape in which Catholic millenarian teachings enhanced traditional Indian beliefs in earthly power and cyclic renewals. The millennial vision of Marian salvation continued on the feast day of Our Lady of Conception in Quisteil, Yucatán, when “another indigenous movement exploded that combined the presence of traditional religious beliefs with a radical rejection of Spanish domination.”30 In November 1761, Jacinto Canek represented resistance to Spanish religious and governmental functionaries with threatening prophecies of the coming End Times. Canek’s supporters barely survived a disorganized revolt before proclaiming him “king of the Yucatan” and his consort “the Blue Virgin of the Conception.”31 The Spanish defeated the resistance decidedly that same month, brutally tortured and killed the leaders, and razed the town of Quisteil itself to eradicate its influence. A brief resurgence of similar millenarian fervor brought a small group of devotees in Tulancingo to proclaim a local prayer leader as God and his companion the Virgin of Guadalupe in 1769. Supporters rallied to his prophecies of “the death of the Spaniards, the creation of an Indian government, abolition of the Catholic hierarchy, its replacement by an Indian priesthood, and the end of tributes,” but swift reprisals ended their cause that same year.32 The followers of Canek, like those of Pérez and other visionaries, envisioned the ­re-emergence of long-repressed Indian traditions in a new world unhindered by Spanish Catholic dominion. But their millennial communities actually merged Catholic and Mexican religious ideas as they articulated their support for the messianic leadership of newly educated but marginalized men, and hoped for liberation among the suffering underclass following the demise of imperial evil. In the 1750s and 1760s, central-southern Mexico witnessed an essential shift in religion, two centuries after the first encounters between indigenous cultures and Catholic evangelism. Summoning messianic intervention against their foes, Indian communities there generated a radical reassessment of the cosmos and reasserted their own religious autonomy by fusing Christian and indigenous concepts.33 Millenarian movements in Peru similarly reassessed their world with a syncretic vision of a messianic Inca ruler promising liberation. In the 1560s, Andeans openly resisted Spanish Christianity and reaffirmed the power of traditional rituals to drive out evil, disease, and the Spanish themselves. Two concepts of time and transformation— the Andean concept of pachacuti, which entailed the “termination and reveal of an established order” and “the Christian concept of the Last Judgment”—merged to support hopes for the renewal of the Inca Empire from pre-colonial times.34 With the promise of  regeneration from the Inca ruler Túpac Amaru, slain by the Spanish in 1572, and the indigenous worldview of repeated cycles of destruction and renewal, millenarian

Millenarian Movements   129 movements predicted the restoration of Andean autonomy in a kingdom that still ­incorporated elements of the colonial world. Political rebellions formed in the 1600s, and revolts led by descendants of the last rulers of the Inca Empire followed in the 1700s, but the most widespread movement was the “Great Rebellion” led by Túpac Amaru II in the 1780s. The groundwork for the rebellion had been laid by the coalescent religious worldviews and the “progressive deprivation” of indigenous peoples at the hands of the Spanish.35 A “matrilineal descendent of the last Inca, Felipe Tupac Amaru,” the mestizo leader and cacique José Gabriel Condorconqui y Thupa Amaro called for the overthrow of the ­religious and political realms of Spanish Peru to mirror the devastation visited upon the Inca empire. Using eschatological mythology of Inkarrí and the Andean divinity of ­“cataclysmic change,” Túpac Amaru II offered himself as the savior to end colonial injustices but preserve the locally run councils, schools, and churches. Catholic priests opposing the abuse of the Andeans supplied biblical quotations for the millennial kingdom and nominal support for the first attacks near Cuzco in 1780. Thousands of Andean rebels massacred their Spanish and Creole opposition, despite previous promises of accommodation, and carried their battles to the surrounding regions, but even the addition of his brother Diego Túpac Amaru could not prevent the  disastrous end of this rebellion in 1781. Túpac Amaru II was captured, tortured, and killed in May 1781, and successive leaders who laid siege to La Paz, Bolivia, were ­executed within the year.36

Millenarian Movements in the Post-Colonial Era At the end of the colonial era, local uprisings against political and religious reorganization drew on popular millenarian ideology to challenge the modernism and centralization resulting from independence movements across Latin America. The first wave of millenarian movements during the 1800s in Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico unified regional conflicts with devotional passions that echoed colonial and early-modern concepts of religious organization and salvific intervention. In Brazil, the nonviolent transition from colony to independent empire had failed to unify the disparate population, and the increased assertion of papal control over the local Church, along with political, social, and environmental problems, seemed to represent the end of the recognizable world. In the sertão, or backlands, marginalized rural poor and working classes interpreted their losses as signs of the apocalypse and welcomed messianic leaders to guide them to the millennial kingdom. Participants in the movements at Serra do Rodeador, Pedra Bonita, and Canudos, devastated by the economic struggles and secularism of the Brazilian Empire and their own abandonment by the Catholic Church, fought against federal troops with swords, guns, and apocalyptic visions of the lost king Sebastião.37

130   Carole A. Myscofski The millenarian movement at Serra do Rodeador lasted only three years, but left an indelible mark in the history of messianism in northeastern Brazil. In 1817, the former soldier Silvestre José dos Santos began preaching the End Times in Pernambuco and joined his followers to establish a village by a shrine in the Serra do Rodeador near the town of Bonita. As the community grew, the Santa Milagrosa, or “miraculous Saint” of the Rock, spoke to Santos and his assistant Manoel Gomes das Virgens about their endeavors and altered their future. Most importantly, she revealed to them that “King Sebastião and his army would emerge” from a nearby ridge to make the two men “princes of his new Realm and their followers wealthy nobles.”38 Santos organized his village as a sort of religious brotherhood and led the backlanders in litanies, rosaries, austerities, and “self-flagellation in order to perfect their own religious devotion to the sect and the saint.”39 The combination of revived Sebastianism and devotional Catholicism proved persuasive, especially when enacted daily by Santos himself, and the growing community of laborers, soldiers, and peasants eventually abandoned their families and religious ties to await the end. As the population of the millenarian village exceeded two hundred, Santos resisted the advice of visiting clergy to adapt his enthusiastic new religiosity to the institutional structures of the local Roman Catholic Churches. The promises from the Santa Milagrosa, perhaps from the Virgin Mary herself, accelerated so that witnesses later recalled that they expected to “ransom the holy places of Jerusalem” itself as they inaugurated the “City of Earthly Paradise.” In 1820, however, the militaristic governor of Pernambuco, Luiz do Rego Barreto, destroyed the city and killed over ninety devotees and most of the leaders. Santos and Virgens evaded capture, and popular outrage forced the release of the women and children who had been imprisoned after the attack. The millenarian movement, subsequently eulogized as a miraculous connection between the messianic past of Portugal and the future of the Brazilian Republic, marked the beginning of a series of religious revolts in the sertão.40 The millenarian vision of the transcendent Portuguese monarchy continued at Pedra Bonita, and the millenarian movement there formed twice, under João Antonio dos Santos and João Ferreira, before coming to a violent end amid group suicides and repression by the local militia. Santos revived the interest of backlanders in the return of Sebastião in 1836, announcing that he had discovered the enchanted army of the lost king immured in mysterious rock formations. Showing “two brilliant little stones” recovered from an “enchanted pond,” Santos claimed that the rock spires nearby were a nearly buried cathedral and royal buildings that would re-emerge when Sebastião was drawn out by communal prayers and religious devotions.41 His family responded to his call, but Santos himself was dissuaded from his own messianic role by local Catholic priests; at his abrupt departure, João Ferreira claimed his own kingship in the community and organized housing, sanctuaries, and a ritual centered on an intoxicating “enchanted wine.”42 Ferreira promised nobility, rule, and riches to those among the two hundred families who gave their goods and livestock to support the growing movement, but he finally demanded that they give their lives as well. On May 14, 1838, Ferreira preached that the hidden king despaired of his people, and that only one last sacrifice was needed to break

Millenarian Movements   131 the enchantment: the sacred rocks around the center spires must be bathed with the blood of voluntary human sacrifices. After sharing enchanted wine with participants, Ferreira sacrificed his own father and proceeded with the help of his companions to kill dozens of Sebastianists on the “Stone of the Sacrifice.” His assistant, brother to the original leader, slayed Ferreira himself as the ultimate offering, but when Brazilian militia men and national guards under Major Pereira da Silva entered the scene, few survivors were willing to engage the final battle. Reports from observers put the death total at fifty-three—and most sources add that fourteen dogs were also carefully sacrificed for the apocalyptic prophecy.43 The final millenarian movement of the nineteenth century emerged under the inspired leadership of Antônio Mendes Maciel, who denounced both the emergent Brazilian republic for its creation of a newly secular state and the Catholic hierarchy for its failure to support popular devotions. Antônio Conselheiro—called “counselor” by his supporters—was recognized as a learned and ascetic holy man, prophet, and perhaps messiah, but most of his early efforts in the 1870s took him across the northeastern sertão to rebuild decrepit chapels and lead residents and fellow beggars in traditional prayers and processions. At first, he was invited by Church officials to take the pulpit for his dramatic sermons, since his themes echoed acceptable teachings on sin and salvation, but by the 1880s he faced expulsions and arrests for his subversive prophecies about imminent upheavals that would end the oppressive authority of state and Church alike. His followers echoed his themes in their calls for the re-establishment of the monarchy in Brazil with the return of Sebastião as their sacred king.44 Gathering landless peasants to establish a holy refuge in 1893 at a remote ranch in Bahia, Conselheiro offered an apocalyptic wisdom embodied in scriptures and popular religious pamphlets. The village of Canudos was organized as a self-sufficient community dedicated to strict religious devotions and drew not only religious pilgrims, but also roaming bandits from the backlands as well. With thousands of displaced supporters, Conselheiro warned of the impending doom faced by the poor and working classes in Brazil and impelled committed disciples to fast and pray alongside him. Local press reports, however, characterized the members of the growing settlement as dangerous fanatics, and the Church abandoned its support for the popular religious enthusiasm that Conselheiro represented. When the bloody defeat of three expeditions by regional and national troops “scandalized” the readers of melodramatic journalists, a full military attack was launched against Canudos in 1897.45 The troops razed the town and slaughtered remaining residents, but their messianic leader—weakened by his own penitential fasts—had died before the last onslaught, probably of dysentery.46 As Brazilians rallied to the promise of a renewed spiritual monarchy, other late ­nineteenth-century rebellions similarly bore traces of millenarian threats and messianic guidance. While the belief system in Argentina drew most heavily on Catholic doctrines in a series of political rebellions, Mexican millenarian movements included ancient Maya or Aztec cosmologies, folk Catholic practices, messianic ideals, special devotions to the Virgin Mary, and a determination to reinstate political and religious autonomy in the face of brutal neo-colonial repression of indigenous and mestizo villagers. In 1872,

132   Carole A. Myscofski in Tandil, Argentina, for example, rebels attacked immigrant workers who were seen as displacing local gauchos. Local preacher Jacinto Pérez rallied the gauchos to a millenarian fight and promised that the healer Gerónimo de Solané, or “Tata Dios,” would bring an end to evils and salvation in a transformed world for those who fought.47 Mexican movements in the late 1800s and early 1900s responded to the Mexican ­revolution, demanding the reinstatement of Roman Catholic lands and privileges and the end to political and social abuses suffered since the 1600s. When local communities saw little political or social improvement, religious leaders again welcomed visions of the Virgin Mary to announce the apocalypse. In Chihuahua in the 1890s, the village of Tomochic became the center for religious resistance following years of ecological disasters and social deprivation. Two religious healers, the holy man Carmen María López and visionary Teresa Urrea, challenged the absent Catholic Church to help the communities and intercede on their behalf. They offered anticlerical diatribes intermixed with miracles inspired by the Virgin Mary in the new religious community at Tomochic, but their messianic leader, Cruz Chávez, led them into a losing battle with federal forces and their ultimate defeat in 1892.48 Different factors supported millenarian movements in the early 1900s, with movements across Latin America utilizing nationalistic rhetoric as part of their cosmological understanding of religious renewal. The call for millenarian renewal galvanized ­dissidents in the Cristero Rebellion to fight for their religious, economic, and political demands in the 1920s in the Mexican states of Jalisco, Michoacán, and Zacatecas. Catholic officials and lay leaders first favored passive resistance to the strict anticlerical provisions of the Constitutions of 1857 and 1917, upheld by state and municipal governments. As villagers challenged civil law with the cry of Viva Cristo Rey! and called for “deliverance” from the evils of the secularizing state, armed rebels in other western states formed Christ’s Army to fight in “defence [sic] of an identity rooted in orthodox religious practice.”49 While some cristeros were certain of “the fundamental righteousness” of their battles to restore the sacred world order, most continued to demand religious freedom, land reform, and political autonomy without mention of an apocalyptic kingdom.50 Political movements in Argentina and Peru around the same time similarly evinced messianic or millenarian motifs as part of their rhetoric, without directly invoking divine intervention in battles against the evils of modernism and militarism there. In Brazil, dreams of messianic liberation brought a series of leaders to national prominence as heirs to the powers of Sebastião and the late Conselheiro. Notable among these was the religious movement at Juazeiro, revering Padre Cícero Romão Baptista as a miracle-worker and living saint. Padre Cícero defied the local elites on behalf of the impoverished nordestinos in his parish in Ceará and taught a distinctly millenarian faith, based on his own visions of Jesus and the imminent end of the world. Enthusiasm for his status as messiah exploded after he gave communion to a devout woman in March 1889, and the consecrated host turned to blood in her mouth. Repetition of the miracle led to prophecies of the Second Coming, even while the Roman Catholic hierarchy denied the transformative events and curtailed his religious practices. Nonetheless, the chapel at Juazeiro became a center for pilgrimage in the Northeast, and Padre Cícero

Millenarian Movements   133 wielded both religious and political power and remained the center of personal devotion even after his death in 1934. The millenarian fervor of the early movement has since changed, however, into a devotional cult focused on the priest and his dedication to the rural poor.51 In the Contestado movement, rural Brazil witnessed another monarchist prophet ­initiating a millenarian rebellion to resist political and religious corruption. In 1912, the charismatic preacher Miguel Lucena Boaventura, then called José Maria, collected a small following at his traditional religious and healing services and attempted to found communitarian agricultural oases in a contested region between Paraná and Santa Catarina. The rural laborers who joined him had lost both traditional workerlandowner relationships and the underlying spiritual values of cooperation during a wave of European immigration and labor disputes in the area. Facing further violence and land seizures, workers and a few patrões (bosses) prayed together for divine intervention.52 Although José Maria died during fighting with state militia, visions of his imminent resurrection alongside King Sebastião and an enchanted army inspired the millenarianists under José Eusébio Ferreira dos Santos to create a new holy city. Once established, the Contestado communities grew to over ten thousand residents, but struggled through a series of battles to retain their autonomous lands.53 By 1916, military excursions had crushed their hopes of replacing the “evil republican form of government” with a new sacred kingdom.54 In perhaps the final moment of the millenarian tradition of northeastern Brazil, Pedro Batista, like Antônio Conselheiro and Padre Cícero before him, was called to ­religious leadership for the End Times. His reliance on charity and “miraculous cures” suggested a saintly identity to his followers, who founded their “new Jerusalem” at Santa Brígida, Bahia.55 Batista neither claimed a messianic role nor preached of imminent cosmic upheavals, but his community expressed traditional millenarian values even as they accommodated modernism. Following his death in 1967 and disappointment at his failure to return, Batista’s pilgrims commemorated his life with a small museum and festival. Like those who flock to the annual cavalcade to Pedra Bonita and to the eightyfoot statue of Padre Cícero in Juazeiro do Norte, they contribute to the next epoch for  millenarian movements in Brazil, with the pilgrims and curious alike joining in ­“religious tourism.”56 The religious movements of the late twentieth century have sought what Michael F. Brown identified as “utopian renewal” with a conscious return to centuries-old motifs for their inspirations.57 In Mexico, religious movements centered on local folk saints and visions from the Virgin Mary to realize their apocalyptic dreams once more. Among the rebels in Andean countries, two powerful Andean religious symbols recurred in local millenarian movements; the first is the concept of pachacuti, depicting “the ­termination and reversal of an established order,” merged with Roman Catholic eschatology, and the second the reappearance of the divine king Túpac Amaru in various forms through the late 1970s.58 In Brazil, two traditions have run parallel through the ­millenarianism: the Sebastianist ideology perpetuating violent messianic uprisings in the rural Northeast, and native concepts of religious renewal blended with Catholic

134   Carole A. Myscofski apocalyptics among the descendants of Brazilian indigenous peoples. In these ­communities, we see the most recent enactments of the drama of cataclysmic upheaval followed by ­salvation for the chosen few, as the would-be survivors share their religious problems and create new solutions from ancient traditions. The histories of two movements in particular indicate that apocalyptic expectations may decline as participants accommodate broader social demands. The Mexican ­community of Nueva Jerusalén began under the guidance of visionary Gabina Romero, when revelations from the Virgin Mary in the mid-1970s identified local pastor Nabor Cárdenas as the religious guide to “lead the Catholic world out of corruption and apostasy, and back to the true doctrine of the Church” so as to avoid the imminent destruction of the world.59 But the millenarian views among the peasant residents have receded as new members expressed other personal and spiritual motives for their presence there. In the 1963 religious movement begun among in the Canela communities in the Amazon, leaders first reinterpreted an older myth of the culture hero Aukhé and claimed that the imminent birth of a new female hero would reverse the balance of powers to restore religious and social autonomy to her native village. The movement revived ­communal dances and inspired attacks on outsiders to the Amazonian culture. The movement ended under the harsh repression of Brazilian authorities, but it had already abandoned many of its central religious claims when prophecies based on the intertwined indigenous and Christian cosmologies failed.60 By the twenty-first century, alternative religions and evangelical Protestantism ­introduced new directions for millenarianism in Latin America, leaving little room for the monarchic dreams of Brazilian movements or the Marian salvation envisioned by Mexican movements in the Yucatán. Missions undertaken by the Church of Latter-Day Saints and Jehovah’s Witnesses have also appealed more directly to those hoping for cosmic changes at the turn of the millennium. While few communities still predict Jesus’s Second Coming, recent religious movements have incorporated apocalyptic symbols and eschatological visions in their perception of world history. Two important cases confirm these new directions. Contemporary Santo Daime groups in Brazil, for example, have developed an eclectic worldview in support of their use of ayahuasca, a hallucinogen enabling participants, or daimistas, to experience divine union. Some daimistas ­perceived ecological disasters as harbingers of the End Times and created rural outposts so that they might shelter themselves under the neo-messianic leadership of founders Irineu Serra and Mota de Mello during the battles between good and evil. With the increasing presence of messianic rhetoric from national leaders such as General José Efraín Ríos Montt, Pentecostal Christians in Guatemala have also brought millenarian claims to the foreground.61 While some anticipate building the Kingdom of God, many Guatemalan millenarianists have more recently read their own political disasters as signs of the End Times as well. These newer examples and innovations suggest that millenarian motifs and related cosmological interpretations of history are deeply embedded in the worldview of Latin American Christianity and will continue to inform the development of religious ideologies.

Millenarian Movements   135

Notes 1. Bernard McGinn, Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1979), 14–27. 2. Sherry  B.  Ortner, “On Key Symbols,” American Anthropologist, New Series, 75, no. 5 (October 1973), 138, 139–140. 3. Norman Cohn, “Medieval Millenarism: Its Bearing on the Comparative Study of Millenarian Movements,” in Millennial Dreams in Action, ed. Sylvia L. Thrupp (New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1970), 31. 4. E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York, NY: Praeger, 1963), 1, 4–6; Ralph Linton, “Nativistic Movements,” American Anthropologist, New Series, 45, no. 2 (1943), 232. 5. Roberto da Matta, Carnavais, malandros e heróis: para uma sociologia do dilema brasileiro (Rio de Janeiro: Zahar Editores, 1979), 20–21. 6. Patricia Pessar, “Millenarian Movements in Rural Brazil: Prophecy and Protest,” Religion 12, no. 3 (1982), 187, 189, 193. 7. Bryan Givens, Judging Maria de Macedo: A Female Visionary and the Inquisition in Early Modern Portugal (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2011), 16. 8. John Leddy Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1970), 7, 12. 9. John Lynch, “The Quest for the Millennium in Latin America: Popular Religion and Beyond,” in Latin America between Colony and Nation: Selected Essays (London: Palgrave 2001), 210–211. 10. Alida C. Metcalf, “Millenarian Slaves? The Santidade de Jaguaripe and Slave Resistance in the Americas,” American Historical Review 104, no. 5 (December 1999), 1531–1559. 11. Hélène Clastres, The Land-without-Evil: Tupí-Guaraní Prophetism (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 22–45, 49. 12. Judith Shapiro, “From Tupã to the Land without Evil: The Christianization of TupiGuarani Cosmology,” American Ethnologist 14, no. 1 (February 1987), 130. 13. Clastres, Land-without-Evil, 49–51. 14. Ibid., 36–45, 55–57. 15. Shapiro, “From Tupã to the Land without Evil,” 133–135. 16. Metcalf, “Millenarian Slaves,” 1531. 17. René Ribeiro, “Brazilian Messianic Movements,” in Millennial Dreams in Action: Studies in Revolutionary Religious Movements, ed. Sylvia L. Thrupp (New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1970), 57–58; and Metcalf, “Millenarian Slaves,” 1531–1533. 18. Alicia M. Barabas, Utopías indias: Movimientos sociorreligiosos en México (Mexico City: Plaza y Valdés, 2002), 99. 19. Enrique Florescano, Memory, Myth, and Time in Mexico: From the Aztecs to Independence, trans. Albert G. Bork and Kathryn R. Bork (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1994), 108. 20. Barabas, Utopías indias, 104–114; Matthew Restall, The Maya World: Yucatec Culture and Society, 1550–1850 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 165. 21. Florescano, Memory, Myth, and Time in Mexico, 145–148, 151. 22. Lynch, “The Quest for the Millennium,” 211. 23. Ibid., 210–211; cf. Barabas, Utopías indias, 168–169. 2 4. Florescano, Memory, Myth, and Time in Mexico, 154.

136   Carole A. Myscofski 25. Frank Graziano, The Millennial New World (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999), 120. 26. Barabas, Utopías indias, 159. 27. Ibid., 159–160. 28. Lynch, “The Quest for the Millennium,” 212. 29. Florescano, Memory, Myth, and Time in Mexico, 165. 30. Ibid., 157. 31. Lynch, “The Quest for the Millennium,” 211. 32. Florescano, Memory, Myth, and Time in Mexico, 166. 33. Lynch, “The Quest for the Millennium,” 213; Florescano, Memory, Myth, and Time in Mexico, 157–161. 34. Sabine MacCormack, “Pachacuti: Miracles, Punishments, and Last Judgment: Visionary Past and Prophetic Future in Early Colonial Peru,” American Historical Review 93, no. 4 (October 1988), 961. 35. Nicholas  A.  Robins, Genocide and Millennialism in Upper Peru: The Great Rebellion of 1780–1782 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 51. 36. Ibid., 59, 40, 63–70. 37. Patricia  R.  Pessar, “Millenarian Movements in Rural Brazil: Prophecy and Protest,” Religion 12, no. 3 (1982), 190. 3 8. Carole A. Myscofski, When Men Walk Dry: Portuguese Messianism in Brazil (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1988), 166. 39. René Ribeiro, “O episódio da Serra do Rodeador (1817–20): um movimento milenar e sebastianista,” Revista de Antropologia 8, no. 2 (dezembro 1960), 142; Myscofski, When Men Walk Dry, 167. 40. Ibid., 136, 138, 140–142. 41. F.  A.  Pereira da Costa, “Folk-lore pernambucano,” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, LXX, Pte. II (1907), 35, 36. 42. Antônio Attico de Souza Leite, “Memória sobre a Pedra Bonita ou reino encantado na comarca de Villa Bella, província de Pernambuco,” Revista do Instituto Archeológico e Geográphico Pernambucano XI (1904), 228. 43. Costa, “Folk-lore pernambucano,” 40, 41. 4 4. Myscofski, When Men Walk Dry, 175–182. 4 5. Robert M. Levine, Vale of Tears: Revisiting the Canudos Massacre in Northeastern Brazil, 1893–1897 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), 194, 178. 46. Ibid., 184–185; Myscofski, When Men Walk Dry, 179–181. 47. Lynch, “The Quest for the Millennium,” 215, 213–215. 48. Ibid., 219–220. 49. Matthew Butler, Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico’s Cristero Rebellion: Michoacán, 1927–29 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004), 208. 50. Ibid., 212. 51. Candace Slater, Trail of Miracles: Stories from a Pilgrimage in Northeast Brazil (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), 32–39. 52. Todd  A.  Diacon, Millenarian Vision, Capitalist Reality: Brazil’s Contestado Rebellion, 1912–1916 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 24–43, 135–140. 53. Levine, Vale of Tears, 222–223. 54. Diacon, Millenarian Vision, 116. 55. Patricia Pessar, From Fanatics to Folk: Brazilian Millenarianism and Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 43, 98.

Millenarian Movements   137 56. Ibid., 215–221. 57. Michael  F.  Brown, “Beyond Resistance: A Comparative Study of Utopian Renewal in Amazonia,” Ethnohistory 38, no. 4 (Autumn 1991), 388, 389. 58. MacCormack, “Pachacuti,” 961; Rosalind C. Gow, “Inkarri and Revolutionary Leadership in the South Andes,” Journal of Latin American Lore 8, no. 2 (1982), 201–209. 59. Miguel C. Leatham, “Rethinking Religious Decision-Making in Peasant Millenarianism: The Case of Nueva Jerusalén,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 12, no. 3 (1997), 297. 60. René Ribeiro, “Messianic Movements in Brazil,” Luso-Brazilian Review 29, no. 1 (Summer 1992), 73–74. 61. Andrew Dawson, “Religious Identity and Millenarian Belief in Santo Daime,” in Religion and the Individual: Belief, Practice, Identity, ed. Abby Day (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 183–186; Pierre Beaucage and Gerardo Ducos, “Après le Règne de Jésus: Aperçus d’imaginaire des autochtones pentecôtistes de l’Ouest du Guatemala,” Anthopologica 19, no. 1 (2007), 95–111.

chapter 8

The Cou rse of Catholic History i n L ati n A m er ica Fernando Cervantes

On the eve of the discovery of America, the Church seemed woefully unprepared for the task that awaited her. Ferdinand and Isabel deplored the situation in Spain in the 1480s, lamenting that the Church had “never been in such ruin.” As in much of Europe, a worrying number of clerics often preferred to squander “all the income that they should devote to the poor . . . on their worldly greed.”1 For their part, despite their genuine reforming efforts, Ferdinand and Isabel can hardly be praised for their enthusiastic ­support for the Spanish Borgia pope, Alexander VI, who became a firm ally of Spanish colonial interests, going as far as granting the “Catholic monarchs” their famous title as well as the right of royal patronage over the Church in all the newly discovered lands, while happily turning a blind eye to Ferdinand’s endless searches for ecclesiastical sinecures to bestow on his numerous illegitimate children. However, to dwell on such abuses can be misleading. There can be little doubt that Catholic reform in Spain long predated the Protestant Reformation and was animated by a deep spiritual and intellectual revival that was no mere reaction to perceived shortcomings. Despite the limited success of Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros in his efforts to reform the secular clergy, his commitment to the reform of his own order, the Franciscans, was paralleled by similar reforms undertaken by the Dominicans, Hieronymites, and Augustinians. The standards of the Mendicant orders, which became the main engines of the early decades of evangelization in the New World, were noticeably higher in Spain than elsewhere in Europe.2 Moreover, the Cardinal was committed to the strengthening of theological studies, most notably in his foundation of the University of Alcalá, soon to become a leading center of learning in Europe. Together with the University of Salamanca, it would contribute significantly to the debates about empire and indigenous rights, leading to the creation of a moral climate that made the Spanish crown acutely aware of its obligations toward the indigenous peoples and

140   Fernando Cervantes brought about a commitment to ensuring justice throughout the Hispanic world. A legal system thus developed that thought in terms of incorporating all the subjects of the monarchy into an organic and hierarchically constituted society, one that would give the indigenous peoples the chance of defending their rights by appealing, if necessary, to the summit of the judicial system.3 These two important developments suffice to call the bluff of any too-ready dismissal of the late-medieval Spanish Church as ill equipped for mission. “Mission,” however, is not a word that would have made much sense to the early Mendicants. It is easy to forget that, well into the mid-sixteenth century, Europeans had no notion of the novelty of the “New World.” The early friars never called themselves “missionaries” in the sense in which we have become accustomed to understand the term—a specialized sector of the Church’s personnel entrusted with the instruction and conversion of non-Christians through the careful exposition of a clear set of doctrines and beliefs. In fact, they worked under assumptions much closer to those expressed as far back as the fourth century by the official panegyrist of Emperor Constantine, Eusebius of Caesarea. “One God,” he had written, “was proclaimed to all mankind; and at the same time one universal power . . . arose and flourished.” Thus “by the express appointment of the same God, two roots of blessing, the Roman Empire and the doctrine of Christian piety, sprang up together for the benefit of mankind.”4 This association of the Church with the Roman state was actually perceived as a providential development, for it implied that the Apostles had indeed preached the message of Christ “to the ends of the world.” Therefore, conversion was not so much a matter of going out into the ­wilderness to persuade those outside to accept the Christian truth; rather, it was a matter of incorporating those already inside the universal society of Christendom into the full sacramental life of the Church. This widespread universalist perspective made it practically axiomatic that the gospel must have reached the indigenous peoples of the “New World” at some stage in the past. The Andean chronicler Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (1534–1616), for instance, found little difficulty in fixing the beginning of New World history at the time of the arrival of a descendant of Noah sometime after the great Flood. “Idolatry,” he argued, had been introduced by Manco Capac, leading to the evil rule of “the serpent demons”; but its effects were mitigated by the mission of Saint Bartholomew, whom he believed to have arrived during the reign of the second Inca, bequeathing to posterity the famous cross of Carabuco.5 Some years later, the Augustinian friar Antonio de la Calancha (1584–1654) pointed to evidence in indigenous sources that spoke of a great bearded white sage called Tumupa who had set up the famous stone cross. Rather than Saint Bartholomew, Calancha pointed to Saint Thomas as the more likely Apostle. But the evidence seemed incontestable. If Christ had commanded the disciples to preach the gospel to all nations, it would be contrary to divine mercy and natural justice to have left them to languish in darkness and sin.6 There was no lack of precedent for such speculations. In one of Hernán Cortés’s letters to Charles V, for instance, the conqueror of Mexico explained how he had made it clear to Moctezuma that man-made idols were false. The reply he put in the mouth of the

The Course of Catholic History in Latin America   141 Aztec emperor is startling: he had said that “owing to the very long time that had passed since the arrival of their ancestors to these lands, it was perfectly possible that they could be mistaken in their beliefs . . . and that I, as a recent arrival, should know better the things that they should hold and believe.”7 This attitude harks back unmistakably to Eusebius. How else could we make sense of Cortés’s recurrent practice of replacing indigenous idols, whose destruction he himself had ordered, with Christian images whose care he entrusted to the very same indigenous ministers who had been responsible for the care of the defeated idols? The practice stemmed from the certainty that as soon as the gospel was preached, the natives would remember their true origin. Since there was no question about their humanity, there could be no question about their innate susceptibility to divine grace. As humans, they already belonged to the universal society of Christendom; they were merely in need of being fully incorporated into the sacramental life of the Church. The frequent neglect of this tradition largely explains the widespread but grossly ­misleading assumption that the spread of Christianity in Latin America was characterized almost exclusively by violence. In fact, the early modern Spanish monarchy did not even remotely have the resources to impose its authority by force. Just as the conquests of Mexico and Peru would have been impossible without the collaboration of tens of thousands of Indians, so the spread of Christianity was the result of a gradual process of adaptation and accommodation. The genuine enthusiasm with which the natives flocked to receive baptism was evidence enough, from the perspective of the first evangelizers, that they already belonged to Christ. These clerics accordingly opted to instruct their neophytes not so much by the imposition of a given set of doctrines as by the enactment of a new spiritual power that the natives quickly came to claim as their own. In tune with the bulk of European and African immigrants, the majority of Franciscan, Dominican, and Augustinian friars, just like the Jesuits who arrived some decades later, had no qualms about deferring to what they perceived as the superior knowledge of native leaders, not only about the physical environment but also about the local spiritual forces. As they embraced and gradually reduced to order a large number of conflicting systems of explanation, the Mendicants and Jesuits soon came to take over the roles previously played by indigenous religious leaders and began to instill in the minds of their neophytes an image of Christianity as filled with a power that seemed stronger than the local spiritual traditions but was not in the least incompatible with them. This was essentially a liturgical culture, one where enacted worship had a much more profound and lasting impact than any use of force. The process was not, of course, without serious shortcomings. The bitter disappointment of many friars upon discovering that their neophytes had not entirely abandoned their “idolatrous” practices produced some violent reactions. Already in the early 1530s, the frequent discovery of clandestine native rites among the allegedly Christianized natives led the Franciscan Archbishop of Mexico, Fray Juan de Zumárraga, to implement the first inquisitorial practices against indigenous “idolaters.”8 A few years later, the Junta Eclesiástica of 1539 advised caution with the use of native-style dances and songs and

142   Fernando Cervantes specifically forbade their performance in churches.9 By 1555, the First Provincial Council was laying down detailed rules to restrict the free use of native songs and dances to avoid confusion between Christian and pagan rites.10 The trend reached a dramatic climax in Yucatán in 1562 after the discovery of widespread “idolatry” in the region of Mani, when the Franciscan Diego de Landa authorized a succession of cruel interrogations that are reminiscent of the campaigns of extirpation of idolatry that had begun to spread throughout Peru at this time.11 Thereafter, the bulk of the documentation reveals a paternalistic attitude toward the natives as simple-minded souls to be pitied and protected, belying a more fundamental preoccupation with the demonic inspiration of indigenous rites, which would become the norm in the various movements of “extirpation of idolatry.” Naturally, general histories tend to pay keen attention to these confrontations of evangelizers and their neophytes, for by their very nature they are apt to produce ­abundant documentation. But the tendency has also encouraged a skewed picture of what were, after all, essentially sporadic and circumstantial movements that did little to undermine the extraordinary resilience of the religious cultures that emerged in the early years of evangelization. There are, moreover, clear dangers in taking the process of disillusionment among the evangelizers too much at face value. Not the least of them is to assume that Spanish legislation was effective or easy to implement. Much recent research shows that the majority of the Crown’s legislative initiatives were circumstantial, generally ineffective, and, more often than not, subject to the widespread Hispanic practice of interpreting and adapting the law in the context of local needs, a trend aptly captured in the frequent use of the phrase obedezco pero no cumplo—“I obey but I do not implement.”12 The same could be said of the various legalistic prohibitions concerning the dangers of mixing indigenous and Christian practices. To assume that they were effectively implemented is to ignore the essentially reciprocal nature of the interaction. Even after the narrowing strictures of the Tridentine decrees gave way to a more cautious approach, for instance, the Dominican Diego Durán (1537–1588) could still write enthusiastically about the idea of turning the sacrificial receptacles known as cuauhxicalli—literally “eagle basins”—into baptismal fonts: for “it is good that . . . what used to be a container of human blood, sacrificed to the devil, may now be the container of the Holy Spirit.” His Jesuit contemporary, José de Acosta, heartily agreed: “on those points in which their customs do not go against religion and justice, I do not think it is a good idea to change them; rather . . . we should preserve anything that is ancestral and ethnic.”13 In such a climate, the performative qualities of indigenous public worship were ­readily made to converge with a vibrant and surprisingly adaptable European liturgical tradition that sank roots in the allegorical exegesis of Scripture as developed by Origen, Eusebius, Augustine, and Gregory. It had found a particularly forceful expression in the thought of the thirteenth-century liturgist William Durandus, whose Rationale divinorum officiorum circulated widely in sixteenth-century Spanish America. The indigenous Christian cultures that emerged from this interaction were neither a covert survival of preHispanic paganism nor a pessimistic surrender to conquest, but genuinely spontaneous

The Course of Catholic History in Latin America   143 developments. Fed by the vibrant liturgical imagination of Mendicants and Jesuits, they made possible the development of a corporate identity and a social continuity by which practically every community and every town came to find its liturgical representative and patron. These developments are more in evidence in Mexico than elsewhere in Latin America. The reasons for this are not far to seek: the decade that separates the conquests of Mexico and Peru also marked the establishment of Protestantism in Europe, so by the time the bitter disputes that followed the conquest of Peru had been resolved, the best Mendicant minds in Europe had become more concerned with the threat of Protestantism. Consequently, the Andean region never experienced the degree of Mendicant dedication that was the case in Mexico. Moreover, the rugged structure of the Andean terrain rendered the local structures comparatively more resilient, and the growing financial needs of the metropolis—which gave rise to a much more insistent demand for gold and silver, forced native labor, and the endorsement of slavery in large areas—led to many more instances of active resistance. In the 1560s, for example, a movement called Taki Onqoy (“dancing sickness”) spread throughout the southern-central Andes with indigenous prophets announcing the imminent doom of Christianity. The few inroads achieved by the Mendicants seemed increasingly precarious, and the task of incorporating the indigenous communities into the emerging parish structure fell in large measure to the diocesan clergy, centered now around the various reducciones de indios set up to resettle the natives during the draconian administration of Viceroy Francisco de Toledo. By the early seventeenth century, a change from parish-centered religious instruction to a growing interest in heterodoxy had become much more conspicuous, leading to the growth of a perception in official circles that “idolatry” constituted a concerted attempt on the part of the natives not only to preserve their pre-Hispanic religious beliefs, but also to oppose Christianity. However, a more careful analysis of the documentation reveals that such reactions were largely the result of the sporadic efforts to “extirpate” idolatry, and that such efforts were not characteristic of the Christian experience in the Andes. The Taki Onqoy itself already featured Christian elements; even its most determined adherents had been affected and informed by the new religion. Indeed, the bulk of native celebrations that many extirpators found particularly objectionable managed to survive largely undisturbed and under the benign supervision of clerics inclined to view them as perhaps crude but essentially harmless features of an emerging native Christianity. Even the s­ o-called “dogmatizers,” who did their best to dissuade the natives from listening to the extirpators, had as a rule developed a feeling for the claims and demands of the local Christian ­ministers in a way that suggests a conscious incorporation of the Christian message. This was all perfectly in tune with a process of adaptation and incorporation that closely resembles developments in Mexico. The dances and songs used to commemorate the ancestors and their deeds during the festival of Vecosina, for instance, although unmistakably Andean in origin, were gradually made to coincide with Christian feasts such as Corpus Christi. Intriguingly, many Andeans would make a point of visiting their ancestral towns to make offerings to the mummified bodies of their ancestors and to persuade

144   Fernando Cervantes them to give them permission to attend the Catholic celebrations. Although such ­practices gave much cause for concern in official circles, there is nothing in them that an early medieval Christian would not have readily recognized as a perfectly acceptable expression of genuine pietas.14 This same attitude was quite widespread across Latin America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Indeed, invariably the very same people who made a point of observing the indigenous festivals of renewal were those whom the local clerics regarded as dedicated and devout Christians. The voluminous Mendicant and Jesuit hagiographical literature of the period reveals very similar patterns. Through it, we enter a world remarkably similar to that depicted by Saint Gregory of Tours in sixth-century Gaul.15 This was a world in which the spread of Christianity impressed the natives with the ­presentation of a way of life and a scale of values that contrasted sharply with everything they had hitherto known. The Christian message was primarily one of divine judgment and salvation, seeking expression in the distinction between the present world and the world to come. But this “otherworldliness” differed sharply from what we are likely to associate with the term with its modern individualist and subjective connotations. Nothing could be further from the otherworldliness that emerges from these writings, which was collective, objective, and realist. It expressed itself in the corporate experience and c­ ommunion with the eternal world that the Church claimed to possess in the liturgy and the sacraments, and thus came to provide a new principle of unity. From this new perspective, the passing of the pre-Hispanic ritual order was raised onto a plane where the material world seemed to have been brought back into contact with the one spiritual source that kept it in being. Just as Eusebius of Caesarea would have hoped, the natives of America had been successfully incorporated into the sacramental life of the Church. In the process, they had also become part of a system of government that cannot be understood in isolation from the religious culture that animated it. Without taking this aspect into account, it is impossible to explain the remarkable survival of a worldwide empire for a period of nearly three centuries and in the absence of a standing army or police force. In a political culture that drew no sharp dividing line between the secular and the sacred—in which, indeed, it would have made no more sense to run one’s life without reference to the divine order than to cultivate the soil without reference to the course of the seasons—the Church, with the multifaceted yet unified religious culture that it encouraged, was a key element of the local practice of legitimacy and authority. Often historians depict the diocesan hierarchy and the parish clergy as distant and aloof from their congregations, and too ready to condemn practices deemed suspicious or heretical to the ever-vigilant officers of the Inquisition. This picture has been progressively eroded by recent investigations. The Inquisition, which had no jurisdiction over native peoples, seems to have been a rather ineffective and generally benign body in charge of overseeing the moral behavior of a broad range of people whom it encouraged to reform their lifestyles through the imposition of surprisingly lenient “salutary penances.” Nor is the picture of an indolent and corrupt clergy supported by the evidence.

The Course of Catholic History in Latin America   145 As William Taylor has demonstrated, “for every notoriously unpriestly cura, four or five apparently satisfied their parishioners and superiors.” Even the various elements that might seem to separate parish priests from their parishioners also served as a powerful point of union through which the various strata of the population could share in a ­common religious culture that incorporated and gave legitimacy to a broad range of local identities and corporate expressions.16 This common religious culture has not been given the attention it deserves, but it was an integral part of the world of the Baroque, which embraced the entirety of Catholic Western Europe and possessed a wide zone of diffusion in Central and Eastern Europe, expanding overseas from Goa and the Philippines to the Americas, finding expression in vigorous local religious symbols that at the same time could be transported intact to remote corners of the Baroque world without losing a jot of their universal significance. Perhaps the best known of these is the devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe, the dark Virgin alleged to have appeared to the indigenous neophyte Juan Diego in the hill of Tepeyac, north of Mexico City, in December 1531. As the story has come down to us, it dates from the mid-seventeenth century and is a supreme example of Spanish American Baroque spirituality. Written by the criollo priest Miguel Sánchez, the story seems to be based upon an oral tradition that suggests the existence of a predominantly indigenous cult to the Virgin Mary in Tepeyac, the site of the native goddess Tonantzin, dating back to the mid-sixteenth century. The cult had been the object of some suspicion in the early years, since it seemed to pose a danger to the Mendicant evangelizing efforts by associating the mother of God with a native deity. By the time Sánchez composed his treatise, however, the devotion seemed firmly established; it was vigorous enough to transcend racial and social boundaries, having indeed become an incomparably powerful symbol of corporate religious unity for indigenous communities, criollo patriots, and everyone in between.17 And this is but one in a myriad of instances that mark the spiritual topography of Latin America. The scattered movements of extirpation across the continent in the sixteenth and ­seventeenth centuries often show a marked discomfort with what appeared to some as “sacrilegious” mixtures of Christianity and paganism. As we have seen, however, too much can and has been made of these reactions, and the result has been a skewed picture of the remarkably variegated yet unified Christian culture that emerged across the continent during the Baroque era. Still, this religious culture came under a much more concerted and determined attack in the eighteenth century. The decisive event that would give rise to this development was the extinction of the Spanish Hapsburg dynasty with the death of Charles II in 1700 and the subsequent establishment of a new Bourbon dynasty after the war of the Spanish Succession (1701–1713). After this, the Hispanic world would be decisively divorced from the culture of the Baroque and incorporated into the new international society of a Gallicized Europe. The Hispanic world suddenly found itself in the unenviable position of having to begin afresh, as a backward pupil of French philosophes who had nothing but contempt for the culture of the Baroque and no qualms about attacking and proscribing vibrant cultural expressions, notably the religious drama that had been one of the great organs of popular culture throughout the Baroque period.

146   Fernando Cervantes In Latin America, the attack began to be felt in earnest from the middle of the century. The Bourbon ministers of King Charles III (1759–1788) made no secret of their dislike of the Baroque, finding mysticism distasteful and corporate piety wasteful in its encouragement of a sumptuous and elaborate liturgy. This formed part of a strategy to impose a view of the state that aimed to render the Church humbly subservient to royal authority. Yet, at the same time, Bourbon reformism sought to reaffirm the Council of Trent’s insistence on the importance of episcopal authority. Using the prerogative given to them  by the right of royal patronage, the Bourbons invariably appointed bishops with the Crown’s interests at heart. Drawing their inspiration from a tradition labeled “Jansenist”—more because of its marked opposition to the Jesuits than because of any clear affinity with the spirituality of Port-Royal—18the bishops soon began to adhere more faithfully to the centralizing policies of the Bourbon state. Thus, the stage was set for an inevitable conflict with the corporate popular devotions that had been as central to the Mendicant and Jesuit evangelizing enterprise as they now were to the local ­communal identities throughout Latin America. This resulted in a number of violent rebellions across the continent.19 Up until relatively recently, it was not uncommon to class these movements as antiEuropean and therefore anti-Christian in inspiration. Most recent studies, by contrast, have shown that they were in fact all inspired by religion and that even their frequently irreverent flavor can be explained as directed against intrusions that threatened local religious identities. Far from a clash between European Christianity and native recidivism, the phenomenon was the expression of the confrontation between two different kinds of Christian culture: the liturgical and corporate legacy of the early evangelization on the one hand, and the centralizing and secularizing Bourbon reforms on the other. The confrontation reached a dramatic climax with the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767. With a single stroke, this initiative removed the most dynamic group of missionaries and deprived all of Latin America of the one religious order that had shown itself capable of meeting the challenge of the Enlightenment upon grounds still capable of preserving a traditional vision of the world. The glaring gap left in education and the missions was justified with the argument that the Society had posed a dangerous threat to the absolute sovereignty of the Bourbon state because its members would not disown their potentially subversive loyalty to the pope. Although the other religious orders were not quite so pointedly affected, the trend was one of widespread secularization. Nor was any effort made to introduce any coherent program that could take the place of the old order. Having succeeded in dividing and weakening the forces of tradition, Bourbon “Jansenism” itself became a lost cause, soon finding itself the victim of the forces it had helped to unleash.20 Thus, when the Bourbon state collapsed after the Napoleonic invasion of Spain in 1808, the Catholic hierarchy was left in the lurch. It continued to look to the state for protection, and it regarded insurgent movements as posing comparable dangers to those that the French Revolution had posed to the ancien régime. Not surprisingly, the Church hierarchy tended to identify the cause of religion with royalism. At the same time, it soon had to face the uncomfortable paradox that a large number of parish priests—not least, as was the case in Mexico, the leaders of the movement—were firmly behind the

The Course of Catholic History in Latin America   147 insurgency. The Napoleonic invasion had, in fact, triggered a dilution of power away from the center to the periphery, a movement that sought its natural expression in the traditional, contractual understanding of the monarchy as an organic community. Hints of such a response were already discernible in the various anti-Bourbon revolts mentioned earlier. But the 1808 crisis was brought about by the absence, not the ­perceived abuse, of royal authority. Consequently, the initial course of events was ­dictated by the search for legitimacy. The absence of a monarch made it seem natural to resort to a doctrine of popular sovereignty rooted in the age-old Hispanic tradition of medieval contractualism.21 This, in turn, encouraged those who had assimilated revolutionary notions of popular sovereignty to view the crisis as an opportunity to reconstruct the old order upon liberal foundations. Yet, the common language remained rooted in tradition, and the fact that now the monarch was perceived by the insurgents not as the oppressor, but as the oppressed, imbued the insurgency not with the antiSpanish ethos of nationalist historiography, but with a subtle and deeply monarchical anti-absolutism.22 This explains why the organs of government that filled the vacuum of power from 1808 to 1812 were precisely the old regional municipal corporations. Moreover, the local elites chose to support the Liberal Constitution of Cádiz not because they saw it as a modern, forward-looking document, but because it allowed for the preservation of traditional liberties.23 The Constitution thus filtered down through the vivid ritual re­presentations characteristic of traditional official and religious functions, marked by a profusion of feasts, processions, symbols, allegories, and images of saints.24 Indeed, old expressions of monarchical and Catholic identity were revived and reinforced during this period, as belated reactions to the Bourbon attacks against the Baroque. After the Spanish revolution of 1820, the insurgents began to sway the Catholic ­hierarchy. A bizarre combination of radical liberalism and imperialism effectively turned the Spanish monarchy into an enemy of the Latin American Church, thus giving its leaders ample reasons to side with the patriotic sentiments of the local elites. But these sentiments were not understood in Europe, least of all by popes Pius VII (1800–1823) and Leo XII (1823–1829), who had no understanding of the religious patriotism of the Latin American criollos. Deeply affected by the effects of the French Revolution on the fortunes of the Church, these two popes always equated insurgency with revolution and had no doubts about their duty to give their full-hearted support to the Spanish Crown. The mission sent to Latin America in 1823, led by Monsignor Giovanni Muzi, included the young priest Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti—none other than the future Pius IX, for whom liberalism was an execrable disease. The result was the widely derided encyclical Etsi iam diu (1824) in which Leo XII supported the claims of Ferdinand VII and deplored the evil of rebellion. Not surprisingly, in the proportion that the hierarchical Church became increasingly focused on Rome, so the emerging national states across Latin America began to find the liberal ideology more congenial. The Catholic faithful, in other words, had been left with no middle ground between a proscribed liberalism and an endorsed ­ultramontanism. The impasse gradually led to a liberal backlash in which the Church

148   Fernando Cervantes acquired enemies who “hated it with an intensity born of frustrated conviction,” as John Lynch has wryly remarked.25 The inevitable clash differed from place to place. It was bitterest where the Church was large and wealthy—hence the bitter civil war in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico and the violent confrontations in late nineteenth-century Brazil, developments that contrast sharply with the relative acquiescence of the Andean region. For instance, take the case of Gabriel García Moreno, twice president of Ecuador in the second half of the nineteenth century; he was a keen admirer of Joseph de Maistre and Donoso Cortés, and his Constitution of 1861 took Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors carefully into account. As is well known, the Syllabus had condemned liberalism, secularism, freedom of thought, and religious toleration. Catholic moderates seeking a middle way in Latin America were often embarrassed by its intransigence. To be fair, the papacy was beleaguered at this time: the Piedmontese government had annexed the Papal States and proceeded to imprison priests and bishops who opposed its secularist agenda. The Syllabus was therefore an understandable defense mechanism, and the perception that it introduced a new “Romanized” faith in Latin America is misleading. It was the reiterative tone of the papal definitions, not the unquestioned acceptance of papal authority, that was new. Yet, hand in hand with this reiterative tone went the undeniable papal conviction that the much-needed modernization of the Latin American church had to be undertaken by European prelates. The need to increase the number of good-quality seminaries was undertaken by the Colegio Pío Latinoamericano, founded in 1856 by Pius IX and subsidized by Latin American diocesan contributions. The initiative led to a marked renewal in the quality of bishops and seminary professors, which in turn prepared the ground for the widespread acceptance of the “social Catholicism” that was initiated during the pontificate of Leo XIII (1878–1903), especially after the publication of his famous Encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891. The reception of this document was also accompanied by a new impetus given to missionary activity throughout the region. All these initiatives were now very much centered around a European model that took little notice of the strength and resilience of the legacy of the early Mendicant and Jesuit evangelization. This neglected aspect of Latin American Christianity emerges with surprising vigor in the least expected popular movements. For example, when carefully analyzed, the popular anticlericalism that marked the mid-nineteenth century emerged as a mere dislike of clerical interference in corporate and communal affairs.26 In this, the reforming efforts sponsored by Rome sometimes played into the hands of their opponents. What the new missionaries failed to see was that, as a rule, the popular classes embraced liberalism for reasons diametrically opposed to those of liberal ideologues, often depending on the ease with which liberal solutions could be adapted to address existing local problems—typically, the defense of communal holdings or local religious traditions. This suggests that the reasons why nineteenth-century European Catholic piety found such strong echoes in Latin America had much less to do with the effectiveness of the missionary enterprise than with the vitality of what already existed there.

The Course of Catholic History in Latin America   149 Peasants as a rule resisted the secular impositions of the emerging national states in areas where the villages retained effective control over their landed base and politicoreligious institutions. In areas where villagers failed to do this, by contrast, the population was often willing to embrace secularism. But the motives in both cases were fundamentally similar: in the first case, secularism was seen as an unwelcome encroachment on traditional agrarian and politico-religious organizations; in the second, as a welcome opportunity to contest the dominance of local elites by using the state’s power to their own advantage. In both cases, the primary motive was fundamentally the same: the defense of local, traditional forms of land tenure and politico-religious organization against external threats. The most illustrative example of this trend was the rebellion of the Cristeros in ­post-revolutionary Mexico. This uprising was a predominantly peasant revolt against the anti-clerical policies of the government of Plutarco Elías Calles between 1926 and 1929. Interlocking religious and agrarian grievances proved crucial in filling cristero ranks with peasant fighters. Even amidst the state’s anticlerical educational reforms, it is possible to detect, among those implementing them in the localities, the persistence of traditional forms of religious culture. In order to maximize their efficiency, revolutionary reformers sought to replace Catholicism through conscious imitation of its ritual forms. They did this, as Matthew Butler has demonstrated, on four levels: ideologically, through the “sacralization” of revolutionary doctrines with quasi-religious programs; institutionally, through efforts to replace churches with schools; socially and ethically, through an attempt to replace Catholic devotions, pilgrimages, and catechesis with ­revolutionary marches and morality codes; and physically, through efforts to replace the blood sports held on holy days with team sports, and to demystify natural phenomena through the promotion of agronomy and pediatrics.27 Religion’s presence as a massive, objective, unquestionable power was implicit, even in the minds of revolutionaries who opposed it and sought to replace it. This awareness was not so much in evidence among Catholic reformers. Their approach was in fact more reminiscent of the extirpators of idolatry and the Bourbon reformers than of the liturgical and corporate approach that had given the early Mendicant and Jesuit evangelization its vigor and resilience. In any case, there is not much evidence of any concerted effort to implement thoroughgoing reforms in traditional rural areas, whose care was left to parish priests only too willing to comply with local customs rather than risk unnecessary upheavals. The renewed, modern brand of Catholicism was, therefore, a primarily urban affair. In the cities, the growing middle classes best became attuned to the voices of European Catholic renewal that had ushered in the wake of the social encyclicals of Leo XIII. By the 1930s, the works of renowned European Catholic intellectuals such as Jacques Maritain and Christopher Dawson were read as enthusiastically in Latin American cities as anywhere in Europe, and the growing social conscience of middle-class Catholics led to an increased awareness of matters of social justice, which were reflected in various legislative initiatives that have a clear basis in Catholic social doctrine and which drew their inspiration from parallel movements in Europe.28

150   Fernando Cervantes Unfortunately, the rise of totalitarian dictatorships in the interwar years and the Church’s determined opposition to atheistic Communism encouraged more cautious attitudes, which, in turn, allowed for the persistence of exploitative forms of capitalism that had long disappeared in Europe. This is at the root of what are often seen as examples of shameful complicity between the hierarchy and repressive regimes. It is also the ­origin of what is undoubtedly the most influential theological movement to emerge from Latin America in the twentieth century: a concerted effort to shake the Christian conscience out of its apparent complacency in the face of glaring social injustices. The movement emerged in the wake of the Second Vatican Council where, ironically, the influence of Latin American theologians was minimal. Yet, a succession of theological meetings in Latin America between 1964 and 1965 began to insist upon the need for what they called a “historic theology”; that is, a theology that showed more engagement with contemporary culture in order to provide a convincing critique of it. At the Latin American Episcopal Congress (CELAM) that met in Medellín, Colombia, in 1968, the bishops put a marked emphasis on the need to address glaring economic, political, and educational shortcomings. These efforts ushered in two important publications. The first, which appeared in 1971, was the work that actually gave the movement its name: A Theology of Liberation by the Peruvian Gustavo Gutiérrez. This seminal work argues that theology should give priority to the poor and the oppressed over the Church’s magisterium. Although Scripture was to remain the ultimate source of reference, it would never yield “right action” unless those who read it were aware of their own political, social, and economic situation. As Saint Augustine had amply shown in his great classic, The City of God, ­theology was “critical reflection on historical praxis.”29 Evangelization should therefore not so much be centered on the proclamation of a doctrinal message about the divine as on the revitalization of the world through criticism and prophecy. The second publication, which appeared a year later, was Leonardo Boff ’s Jesus Christ Liberator. In it, the Brazilian Franciscan proposed what he called a “new hermeneutic” that would give ­primacy to anthropology over ecclesiology, to the utopian over the factual, to criticism over dogma, and to the social over the personal. Both books agreed that the new theology was to be done by the people. The prime authority would no longer be the tradition of the church, but the historical process itself. In many ways, liberation theology was a response to the gap that the new urban Catholicism had left in the rural areas of Latin America, a gap that can be traced back to the movements of secularization introduced as far back as the late eighteenth century. But liberation theology was by no means the first movement to try to address these concerns. Indeed, the base communities so closely associated with it long predate liberation ­theology. First set up in the early 1950s, their aim was to relieve the hard-pressed parish priests by taking over activities such as teaching the catechism or running schools and hospitals. However, under the influence of liberation theology, the majority of base communities developed into organs of exegesis and political mobilization. In the process, they began to lose much of their ecclesial character, raising understandable concerns among some sectors of the hierarchy. These were summarized in the

The Course of Catholic History in Latin America   151 early 1970s by the then secretary of CELAM, Alfonso López Trujillo, who argued, from what increasingly emerged as a somewhat unsympathetic and partisan perspective, that it was intellectually dishonest to use Marxist methods of analysis while claiming that this entailed no indebtedness to the broader claims of the Marxist ideology. In fact, he argued, many base communities were claiming that there was no possibility of reconciliation between classes, and they often presented revolutionary movements as genuine carriers of the history of salvation.30 These concerns were echoed by Pope Paul VI in his Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii nuntiandi (1975), where he specifically criticized liberation theology for its tendency to jeopardize the very raison d’être of evangelization. With these reservations in mind, the newly elected Pope John Paul II, on his first trip  abroad, addressed the CELAM conference that met in Puebla, Mexico, in 1979. The starting point of the Congress, the pope admitted, would have to be the conclusions reached at Medellín, but without forgetting “incorrect interpretations” that called for “calm discernment.” This set the tone for the critique penned by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in his early years as Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. In a document issued in 1984, Ratzinger pointed out that it was a mistake to single out the biblical theme of liberation merely by juxtaposing it to particular human situations so as to generate a theology that could ignore tradition. Although it did not dispute that theology needed the help of other disciplines, the 1984 document argued forcefully that these disciplines could in no way dictate the content of theology. To drive the point home, Leonardo Boff, whose theology had shown more concern with presenting a ­critique of the power structures within the Church than with any explicit subordination of theology to the social sciences, was summoned to Rome and instructed to observe an “obedient silence” for an unspecified period. Despite its generally negative tone, the 1984 document nevertheless singled out the value of the notion of liberation for Christian reflection and practice and even pointed to a forthcoming second document to address these issues. When this second document was issued in 1986, the tone was much more conciliatory. The text had been undoubtedly influenced by the bitter critiques of the negative tone of the 1984 document, notably Juan Luis Segundo’s Theology and the Church ominously subtitled A Response to Cardinal Ratzinger and a Warning to the Whole Church (1985). In sharp contrast to the first document, the 1986 sequel was an unconditional endorsement of liberation theology, provided its task was limited to relating Catholic social doctrine to the doctrine of salvation. This amounted to an implicit acknowledgment that liberation theology had been misread in the context of the polarized atmosphere of the 1970s and early 1980s, and an explicit call to move away from attempts to implement Catholic social doctrine through an overwhelming reliance upon natural law thinking, opting instead to bring together political economy and the economy of salvation. The document acknowledged that liberation theology could claim much of the credit for this development. Even Boff took an optimistic view of it, and his “obedient silence” was temporarily brought to an end. Unfortunately, Boff ’s 1986 study E a Igreja se fez povo (And the Church Became People) led to the reopening of the doctrinal process against him. Boff ’s claim that the poor must assert “hegemony” and his attempt to

152   Fernando Cervantes r­ edefine the four attributes of the Church contained in the Creed (one, holy, catholic, and apostolic) with a specific view to serving this hegemony, did not endear him to the Congregation.31 There can be little doubt that the central message of liberation theology—what has become known as the “preferential option for the poor”—has been enthusiastically endorsed by the official Church. Nevertheless, until quite recently, liberation theology itself took rather a defensive backstage since the late 1980s. To some extent, this was due to the intellectual rigor with which Cardinal Ratzinger dealt with some of the more questionable aspects of liberation theology’s exegesis, which in turn gave powerful ammunition to opponents of the movement in Latin America, who began to call for a replacement of liberation theology with what they called a “theology of reconciliation.” The new movement was partly inspired by the pastoral constitution Reconciliatio et ­paenitentia, promulgated after the 1983 Roman Synod on the sacrament of confession. Yet, it is pointedly significant that Cardinal Ratzinger himself turned down an invitation to attend a Congress that met in Caracas in 1988, organized by this new movement of opposition to liberation theology. Clearly, the future Benedict XVI did not think it prudent to be associated with a group that made no secret of its opposition to a theological movement whose central message the official magisterium had only recently offered tepid support. In the meantime, events moved on dramatically from the late 1980s. The general ­disorder into which Marxist-Leninist—or, indeed, any political system associated with socialism—fell after the collapse of the Soviet Union led to the widespread abandonment of revolutionary programs. Governments found themselves forced to commit themselves to the acceptance of democratic accountability, and this often went hand in hand with the endorsement of the free market. Additionally, the period witnessed a steady advance of evangelical Protestantism in the region, a phenomenon undoubtedly fueled by a quick succession of shallow transitions to democracy marked by widespread violence and corruption, as well as the transformation of gender roles and the elective affinity between gospels of health and wealth and neoliberal capitalism. But the ­phenomenon also suggests that the certainty about salvation associated with the appeal of evangelical Protestantism was more fundamental to the religious instincts of large sectors of Latin American Christianity than any commitment to ensuring social justice through political engagement. All the same, the glaring social injustices that gave liberation theology its persuasive sense of urgency have, if anything, grown deeper and more intractable, and the Church’s commitment to the poor, personified in the endearing image of the first Latin American pope, elected in 2013 as Francis, has become more entrenched than ever before. There can be no doubt that the Church’s “preferential option for the poor” will be at the center of the agenda for the foreseeable future. If it is to have any chance of success, however, it must eschew any simplistic historical generalizations about the legacy of Christianity and its depiction as a faithful ally of exploitative forms of capitalism. Above all, there is a need to reassess the enormous vitality and enduring resilience of the Christian cultures

The Course of Catholic History in Latin America   153 that emerged as a result the early Mendicant and Jesuit evangelizing enterprises, for they are at the center of modern Latin American religious identities, and any approach that ignores their dynamic legacy will be doomed.

Notes 1. Quoted in Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, La España de los reyes católicos (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1999), 245. 2. Ladero Quesada, La España de los reyes católicos. More generally, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided (London: Allen Lane, 2003), and Euan Cameron, The Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 3. See J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492–1830 (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2006), 77. 4. Oration in Praise of Constantine, XVI.3–4, trans. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/2504. htm. 5. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno, ed. J. V. Murra, R. Adorno and J. L. Urioste, 3 vols. (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1980 [1615]), i, 39–53, 63, 70–72, 89–97. 6. Antonio de la Calancha, Corónica moralizada del orden de San Agustín en el Perú, ed. Ignacio Prado Pastor, 6 vols. (Lima: Universidad de San Marcos, 1974), ii, 701–769. 7. Hernán Cortés, Cartas de relación, ed. M. Alcalá, 10th ed. (Mexico City, Porrúa, 1978), 65. 8. See Richard  E.  Greenleaf, Zumárraga and the Mexican Inquisition (Washington, DC: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1961), 68–74. I have dealt with this process of disillusionment in more detail in Fernando Cervantes, The Devil in the New World: the Impact of Diabolism in New Spain (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 1994), 13–17. 9. José A. Llaguno, La personalidad jurídica del indio y el III Concilio Provincial Mexicano (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1963), 17–18. 10. Ibid., 34, 134, 140, 176, 286. 11. Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 76–77. See also, by the same author, “Disciplining the Indians: Franciscan Ideology and Missionary Violence in Sixteenth-Century Yucatán,” Past and Present 94 (Feb. 1982): 27–48. On Peru, see Nicholas Griffiths, The Cross and the Serpent: Religious Repression and Resurgence in Colonial Peru (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966); Kenneth Mills, Idolatry and Its Enemies: Colonial Andean Religion and Extirpation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); and Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 12. A good discussion is Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, Politics and Reform in Spain and Viceregal Mexico: The Life and Thought of Juan de Palafox 1600–1659 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004), 36–45. 13. Diego Durán, Historia de las indias de Nueva España e islas de Tierra Firme, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Porrúa, 1967), ii, 3; José de Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las Indias, ed. E.  O’Gorman (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1962), 281. See also José de Acosta, De procuranda indorum salute (Cologne: Officina Brickmania 1596), 150, 483, 517. 14. See Kenneth Mills, An Evil Lost to View? An Investigation of Post-Evangelisation Andean Religion in Mid-Colonial Peru (Liverpool: University of Liverpool, 1994).

154   Fernando Cervantes 15. See Franciscan Jerónimo de Mendieta, Historia eclesiástica indiana, the Dominican Francisco de Burgoa, Palestra historial de virtudes y ejemplares apostólicos, the Augustinian Matías de Escobar, Americana thebaida, vistas patrum de los religiosos ermitaños de N.  P.  De San Agustín, and the Jesuit Andrés Pérez de Ribas, Historia de los triunfos de ­nuestra Santa Fé entre gentes de las más bárbaras y fieras del nuevo orbe. 16. William B. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 191, 222. 17. The best study is David. A. Brading, Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across five centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 18. Port-Royal was the Parisian convent that became the center of a movement of theological reform in seventeenth-century France. It drew inspiration from the study of the early Fathers of the Church, particularly Saint Augustine, laying special emphasis on original sin, human depravity, the necessity of grace, and the doctrine of predestination, thus i­ nevitably coming into conflict with the Jesuits. The movement derived its name, “Jansenism,” from its earliest advocate, the Dutch theologian Cornelius Jansen. For Latin America, see the first chapter of D. A. Brading, Church and State in Bourbon Mexico (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 19. See Anthony McFarlane, “Rebellions in Late-Colonial Spanish America: A Comparative Perspective,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 14, no.3 (1995), 313–338. 20. See Owen Chadwick, The Popes and European Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981). 21. Mario Góngora, Studies in the Colonial History of Spanish America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 68–79. 22. Tamar Herzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2003), 144–145. 23. Elliott, Empires, 378; Demetrio Ramos, “Las Cortes de Cádiz y América,” Revista de Estudios Políticos 126 (1962), 488. 24. Annick Lempérière, “¿Nación moderna o República Barroca? México, 1823–1857,” in Imaginar la Nación, eds. François-Xavier Guerra and Mónica Quijada (Münster: Lit, 1994), 135–177. François-Xavier Guerra, “La Independencia de México y las Revoluciones Hispánicas,” in El Liberalismo Mexicano, eds. Antonio Anino and Raymond Buve (Münster: Lit, 1993), 15–48. 25. John Lynch, New Worlds: A Religious History of Latin America (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2012), 130. 26. Matthew Butler, Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico’s Cristero Rebellion: Michoacán, 1927–29 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 34. 27. Butler, Popular Piety, 84. 28. See Manuel Ceballos, El catolicismo social: Un tercero en discordia. Rerum Novarum, la  cuestión social y la movilización de los católicos mexicanos (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 1991). 29. Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, trans. C. Inda and J. Eagleson (London: SMC Press, 2001), 50. 30. See, especially, Alfonso López Trujillo, Liberación marxista y liberación cristiana (Madrid: Editorial católica, 1974). 31. I draw on Harvey Cox, The Silencing of Leonardo Boff: The Vatican and the Future of World Christianity (London: Collins, 1989), 146–188. According to Cox, Boff presented apostolicity as a “praxis,” holiness as “service to the poor,” catholicity as a “de-centering,” and unity as “venturesome love.”

pa rt I I

T H E C H U RC H M I L I TA N T C AT HO L IC P O L I T IC A L AC T I V I SM

chapter 9

Liber ation Th eol ogy History and Trends Phillip Berryman

Do the particular circumstances of Latin America—that it is Catholic and a majority of its people live in dehumanizing poverty—raise issues that require their own theology? That was the novel question raised by young Latin American theologians in meetings and writings in the 1960s. These explorations were soon baptized “liberation theology.” What attracted attention was not only the novelty of the ideas, but also the fact that they were being worked out in conjunction with grassroots church activity, and thus had implications for society and politics. In contrast to an older pastoral work and theology focused on saving one’s soul from the snares of the world, these theologians insisted that salvation included remedying conditions of hunger and deprivation through people’s own actions in solidarity, all as an integral part of a single journey toward ultimate union with God. They found the term “liberation” more apt than “development,” because it entailed a notion of a break with present systems, through revolution if necessary, and had biblical overtones (Exodus from slavery in Egypt). Liberation theology has unfolded primarily within the Catholic Church because of its majority weight in society, although some Protestant theologians have played important roles. It has never been a mass phenomenon—only a fraction of priests and sisters drew pastoral inspiration from it—but it has been qualitatively important and arguably has entered into the bloodstream of contemporary Christianity. This chapter surveys the movement by considering its changing contexts, its relationship to pastoral activity, some of its major theological themes and their political implications, its relationship to official Church authority, and its continuing relevance in the twentyfirst century.

158   Phillip Berryman

Changing Contexts Liberation theology has unfolded within changing political and church contexts over a half century, as indicated in Table 9.1. The first sketches were made in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as intellectuals and others became impatient with existing models of development. One key moment was the election of a socialist candidate for president, Salvador Allende, in Chile (1970). The next period was characterized by brutal military dictatorships in Chile and elsewhere in South America, and a cycle of conflict in Central America. The end of the Cold War, a return to democracy, and the peace processes in Central America signaled the advent of a third period. It should be noted, however, that various countries (Peru, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela) did not follow that pattern. Less dramatic movements were at least as significant as political changes, especially the massive movement of people from the countryside into cities and towns, advances in schooling and health care, and generally sluggish economic growth, especially during the “lost decade” of the 1980s, triggered by the foreign debt crisis. The Church context can be examined around the various CELAM (Latin American Bishops Conference) meetings starting with Medellín (1968), which was charged with providing guidelines for implementing Vatican II in Latin America.1 The Medellín documents provided the lexicon for a new pastoral approach. In a key passage, the bishops described economic and social development as the “transition from less human to more human conditions for each and every person,” and compared it to the biblical Exodus from slavery. Efforts to overcome poverty were situated within a continuum that moves from meeting basic needs and overcoming injustice, to promoting human unity and peace, culminating in union with God. The Medellín documents denounced violence, including the structural violence of extreme inequality, and called for “sweeping, bold, urgent, and profound renovating changes.” They freely used the term “liberation,” and called for a kind of education in which people become “agents of their own development”; as a pastoral methodology, they encouraged the formation of Christian base communities, small lay-led discussions of the gospel and people’s lives. An entire document was devoted to poverty from three angles: the evil of dehumanizing poverty; the special place of the poor in God’s eyes; and a call for solidarity with the poor. Each of the documents had a similar structure: examine the situation, reflect on it theologically and pastorally, and propose guidelines for commitments of actions. This “see-judge-act” procedure was called the “Medellín method,” and was applied locally to the particular circumstances in countries, dioceses, and parishes. Medellín was a magna carta for an entire generation of pastoral agents (priests, sisters, and active laypeople).2 By the time of the Puebla conference (1979), some Latin American bishops were uneasy with post-Medellín trends, and CELAM itself, under the leadership of Colombian bishop Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, was combating liberation theology. In preparing for the

Liberation Theology   159

Table 9.1   

1960s–1975

1975–1992

1992 –present

Political and economic developments

Cuban revolution

Two-thirds of Latin America under military dictatorship in mid-1970s Sandinistas overthrow Somoza dictatorship (1979) Decade of war in Central America (1980s) Dictatorships give way to civilian governments (1980s) Sandinistas voted out of office (1990) End of communism in Eastern Europe and Soviet Union (1989–1991) 500-year anniversary of discovery/conquest of the Americas (1992)

Democracy becomes normal in most of Latin America Globalization and neoliberal economic policies Resistance in popular movements and World Social Forum Financial crises: Mexico (1995), Brazil (1998), Argentina (2000–2002) Elected left-wing governments in most countries in 2000s

CELAM III: Puebla, Mexico (1979)   Priests-in-government controversy in Nicaragua (early 1980s)

Progressive bishops replaced by Vatican loyalists   CELAM V: Aparecida, Brazil (2007)

Pope John Paul visits Central America (1983) Ratzinger Letter criticizes liberation theology Leonardo Boff is silenced

Argentine cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, head of Aparecida drafting committee, elected pope (2013)  

Military coup in Brazil (1964)

Military coup in Chile (1973)

Church

Vatican II (1962–1965) National priests groups formed in Argentina, Peru, and elsewhere CELAM II: Medellín (1968)   Christians for Socialism in Chile (1972) Backlash among Latin American bishops (early 1970s)

Theology

Sustained growth in most countries 2000–2015; modest reduction in poverty, expanding middle classes. Crucial issues are crime and corruption

CELAM IV: Santo Domingo (1992)

Meetings of young Latin American theologians

Christologies by Jon Sobrino and Leonardo Boff

Gutiérrez talk to priests in Chimbote (1968)

Boff, Church, Charism and Power (1981)

Theologians (Gutiérrez, Sobrino, Boffs, Dussel, Richard, Comblin) continue to publish but far fewer titles Gutiérrez, Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ (1992)

(continued )

160   Phillip Berryman

Table 9.1  Continued  

Manifestos, conferences, articles Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation published in Peru (1971) Similar works by Assmann, Ellacuría, Dussel, and others Meeting of theologians in Mexico City (1975)

Liberation and Theology: collaborative project involving dozens of theologians (1980s)  

Leonardo Boff, Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor (1995)

Work of Ivone Gebara and other Latin American ecofeminists   Gutiérrez coauthors volumes with Vatican doctrinal authority Gerhard Müller Mysterium Liberationis: (2004) and physician two-volume compendium Paul Farmer (2015) of major areas of theology from liberation perspective (1990)    

Note: Publication dates are those of Spanish and Portuguese originals.

Puebla meeting, Lopez Trujillo sought to control the agenda and expressly excluded the well-known liberation theologians from the meeting. They nevertheless gathered in the city, and communicated with sympathetic bishops inside the meeting, especially the Brazilians. The final document reflected the tug-of-war that had taken place there. Some new elements were added, notably a condemnation of the “national security ideology” that was used as justification by the repressive dictatorships then in place. The expression “preferential option for the poor” came into use at Puebla. By the time of the meeting in Santo Domingo (1992), the Cold War was over, civilian governments had replaced military dictatorships, and the conflicts in Central America were coming to an end. John Paul II had been pope for over a dozen years, and thus the deliberations were under thorough Vatican control. When the bishops met at Aparecida, Brazil (2007), the climate had changed further. The theme of Aparecida was “missionary discipleship,” implying that the Church had to leave the comfort of the sacristy and go out to the highways and byways. The head of the drafting commission at Aparecida was Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, who would be elected pope in 2013. The liberation theologians welcomed the thrust of Aparecida and the advent of Pope Francis even more. These developments were the context in which liberation theology emerged and unfolded. In a talk to a nationwide meeting of priests at Chimbote, Peru in 1968, Gustavo Gutiérrez proposed that conditions in Latin America required a “theology of liberation” and offered some initial sketches of what it might entail.3 Over the next several years, similar proposals were aired in conferences and journal articles. In late 1971, Gutiérrez published A Theology of Liberation. Hugo Assmann (1976), Ignacio Ellacuría (1976), Enrique Dussel (1974), José Miguez Bonino (1976), and others published similar

Liberation Theology   161 book-length theological explorations.4 These early works devoted considerable attention to analyzing what was happening in society and the Church, and to the methodology entailed in this new approach to theology. Some theologians wrote book-length treatments of traditional areas of theology, such as Christology and ecclesiology, from a liberation standpoint. In the early 1970s, the Latin American theologians consciously separated themselves from the European matrix in which they had been trained, including in its post-council developments. European theologians were concerned with how to make Christian faith persuasive in a secular environment where atheism and agnosticism were commonplace. In Latin America, the issue was not whether God existed, but how God was envisioned, and whether religion bolstered the unjust status quo (“God’s will”). The theologians likewise agreed to avoid controversies then coming to the fore in Europe and North America, such as contraception, papal infallibility, ordination of women, homosexuality, or abortion, because such “bourgeois” issues were not relevant to the situation of the poor in Latin America, and taking positions on them might unnecessarily aggravate tensions with the bishops and the Vatican and thus undermine their efforts to bring the Church on to the side of the poor. In the 1980s, under the coordination of the Chilean exile Sergio Torres, the major theologians embarked on an ambitious project to cover all areas of theology from a liberation standpoint. The initial volumes began to appear in the mid-1980s, but by the end of the decade the project was foundering from poor sales. Ignacio Ellacuría and Jon Sobrino (1990, 1993) rescued something of the project by having authors write shorter pieces, which they compiled into a two-volume collection of forty-eight chapters titled Mysterium Liberationis.5 As conflictive as the 1980s were in both society and church, they were in some ways the high-water mark of liberation theology. Impelling this theology was a sense—more assumed than expressly articulated—that the direction of history was toward “a new Church in a new society.” The 1990s brought a rude awakening: capitalism seemed triumphant, and under John Paul II, Vatican loyalists often replaced the “Medellín generation” bishops and dismantled their work. The most important thematic new development was perhaps that of the Brazilian Leonardo Boff (1997), who linked ecology and justice—“the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.” The status of liberation theology today is taken up later in this chapter.

Pastoral Impetus The Medellín generation of theologians were not primarily classroom teachers: Gutiérrez was a chaplain to university groups, a pastor in a Lima barrio, and a counselor to many active lay people and pastoral agents; José Comblin worked alongside progressive bishops; Juan Luis Segundo was part of an interdisciplinary team of Jesuits in Montevideo. For a time, Clodovis Boff spent half of each year with a pastoral team

162   Phillip Berryman among rubber tappers in the Brazilian state of Acre.6 Even those who taught in universities, such as Enrique Dussel, Jon Sobrino, and Ignacio Ellacuría, were in close contact with pastoral activity. Starting in the 1960s, priests and sisters attempted to come closer to the poor, sometimes leaving more comfortable quarters in a religious community to live in a shantytown. Many of them were missionaries from Europe and North America who had come in response to appeals from the Vatican to assist the Church in Latin America. Liberation theology was an attempt to grapple with questions arising out of the questions of pastoral agents seeking to move beyond the traditional model of pastoral activity largely centered on ritual actions (mass, confessions, baptisms, marriages, funerals). Gutiérrez insisted that action comes first; theology is reflection based on that action (in contrast to a theology learned in classes and books and then “applied”). Much of A Theology of Liberation examined published reports and statements by lay groups, priests and sisters, and bishops. Priests in various countries had formed national organizations and had issued manifestos expressing their impatience with matters in society and church and raising questions about their own identity as priests and religious. Individual bishops, especially in poor areas, and entire bishops conferences, were denouncing injustices. Gutiérrez traced common threads of concern in this regionwide ferment. His primary interlocutors were not other theologians, but those engaged in pastoral activity. At Medellín, the bishops had urged evangelización concientizadora—consciousnessraising evangelization. The term concientización was from the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, whose influence is visible throughout the Medellín documents. Although concientización was associated with literacy work, it had a wider application, particularly in efforts to help poor people come to a sense of their own dignity and worth and capacity for action. In Freirean terms, poor people, who have been conditioned to defer to the powerful and accept things as they are, have a “submerged consciousness.” Concientización was aimed at encouraging them to emerge from their oppression, to unite among themselves, become organized, and press for their rights. Pastoral work—evangelization— was integral to this process. People’s passivity was often reinforced by a sense of God’s will. Thus popular religiosity could be understood as an obstacle to liberation, an “opiate.” Early on, however, the liberation theologians determined that the religion of the people should not be regarded as a deficient form of Catholicism, as it had been by outsiders, but rather should be understood and appreciated as part of the popular culture. Thus considerable attention has been placed on studying popular religion, and on the need for the faith to be “inculturated” into the people’s culture. In Argentina, theologians—notably, Lucio Gera and Juan Carlos Scannone proposed a “theology of the people,” rooted in popular culture.7 The theologians worked with sympathetic bishops.8 In El Salvador, the Jesuit theologians Jon Sobrino and Ignacio Ellacuría were advisors to Archbishop Oscar Romero and helped him prepare the sermons he delivered in the cathedral every Sunday. After he was assassinated in 1980, they wrote extensively on the theological significance of his witness and martyrdom. Bishops conferences made hundreds of formal statements on

Liberation Theology   163 situations in their countries, sometimes with input from theologians. Theologians were involved in the preparation and implantation of the CELAM conferences, but bishops were generally reluctant to explicitly endorse liberation theology, especially after the advent of Pope John Paul II (1978).

Major Theological Themes Theology—literally “God-talk” (Greek theos and logos)—is about God’s ways with humankind, as understood in revelation and faith. Liberation theologians are believers, and their usual interlocutors are fellow believers.9 The essays in Mysterium Liberationis cover traditional theological topics (God/Trinity, Christ, Holy Spirit, Church, sacraments, eschatology), but the angle is that of pastoral work from a perspective of liberation. This section illustrates a few such themes and notes some characteristic features of this approach to theology. Consider how Leonardo Boff (1993) treats the doctrine of the Trinity, seemingly quite remote from this world. He begins by noting that although the Trinity is central to Christianity, it has often been eclipsed in history by a kind of monotheism that reinforces monarchical unequal relationships in the family, society, and Church. If the Trinity is to mean anything to the poor in Latin America, it should be that the egalitarian communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is a prototype of all reality; society ought to be transformed along trinitarian lines. Examining how the doctrine of the Trinity arose in disputes in the ancient Church, Boff retrieves the concept of perichoresis, a Greek term for the reciprocal interpenetration of the divine persons, sometimes translated as “circumincession.” This “trinitarian dynamic” serves as a basis for a critique of conditions in both society and the Church. “Undeniably, human beings share a basic aspiration for participation, equality, respect for differences, and communion with God,” he writes, but these values are by and large denied. “Hence the longing for liberation . . . and the age-old struggles of the oppressed for their life and freedom.” These values, he says, are denied under capitalism, socialism, and in the Roman Catholic Church. He closes his article with brief references to the trinitarian aspect of the human person, the human family, and human society, before concluding that human concepts are inadequate and that ultimately we must honor the Trinity with our silence.10 In The God of Christians (1990), the Chilean theologian Ronaldo Muñoz devotes considerable attention to the situation of people in urban shantytowns, especially youth. Because they can no longer find God in terms of the natural processes of sun, rain, crops, the beauty of nature, and the feeling of dependence, they experience a crisis of inherited images of God. That in turn opens the possibility of “new perspectives” found in the Bible, first the God of the Old Testament and then the God of Jesus Christ. Muñoz’s procedure is in striking contrast to European theology, which devotes a great deal of attention to the difficulty educated people in the West have of making sense of God, surrounded as they are by untroubled atheists and agnostics. Likewise, Muñoz pays very

164   Phillip Berryman little attention to the history of theology—virtually no mention of Augustine or Aquinas, for example—but moves back and forth between the contemporary culture of the urban poor and the world of the Bible. Like other liberation theologians, Muñoz presents scriptural texts seemingly at face value, not belaboring disputes or contested meanings. A reader can sense that what he says has been influenced by years of Bible discussions in shantytown chapels. Everyday experience is brought to bear in interpreting the scripture; and those scriptures shed light on one’s life. In this “hermeneutical circle,” being close to the poor offers a privileged insight. Jesus Christ has been utterly central to liberation theology, from the Christologies of Boff and Sobrino in the 1970s to the posthumous work found in the computer of José Comblin when he died in 2011.11 Contemporary theology has sought to probe the significance of the humanity of Jesus, which historically had often been eclipsed by his divinity in theology and preaching. Latin American theologians have highlighted the conflictive side of Jesus’s ministry and the connections between his ministry and his fate: he was executed by the religious authorities and the empire because he was perceived as subversive; the resurrection represents God’s vindication of his person and message. That aspect has been heightened by the contemporary experience of persecution and martyrdom. Latin American theologians developed further the ecclesiology (theology of the Church) that came to prominence in Vatican II. The council had proposed that the Church is a “sign” of God’s saving grace, which is at work in all people. Latin American theologians emphasized that as a Church of the poor, it should be a “historical sacrament of liberation.”12 For centuries, the “Kingdom of God” had often been identified with the Church, over against the “world.” Now the Reign of God, a central theme in the scriptures, is understood to be broader than the Church; the Church is to serve the realization of God’s reign in history. Building a more just society can be seen as a partial but real advance toward the wish expressed in the Lord’s prayer: “Thy Kingdom come!” In the 1980s, “grassroots Christian communities,” small lay-led groups meeting as church in private homes, attracted considerable attention. They seemed to hearken back to the “house churches” of early Christianity; some theologians went so far as to call them a “new way of being church,” and to assume that they would become the predominant model of the Church as parishes were reconceived as networks of such communities. The phrase iglesia popular (people’s church) was used to denote this new phenomenon: the Church being born among the people.13 Base communities never became a mass phenomenon. Only a small fraction of parishes used the base-community model, and they required a great deal of pastoral input. However, they were qualitatively important; many grassroots leaders and activists got their start in base communities or similar pastoral initiatives. By the 1990s, however, the movement was stalled, if not waning. In this instance, the enthusiasm of some theologians got ahead of the reality on the ground.14 For these theologians there is no sharp line between spirituality and theology; although they sometimes treat it separately, they regard spirituality as prior to theology.15 They insist first on the lived spirituality of many pastoral agents and lay people, often

Liberation Theology   165 under difficult circumstances in which the threat of violent death is real. Writings about spirituality are a systematization of that lived experience. They note that all human beings have a spirituality, an interiority, which is not to be identified with an immaterial “soul,” as was held for centuries. Spirituality in this sense has to do with being rooted in reality, being willing to take it on, to bear it, an ethical indignation at the injustice of the world, solidarity with others, a spirit of joy as seen in the celebrations of the people. Specifically Christian spirituality is rooted in following the historical Jesus, of being incarnate in ongoing history as he was. Some theologians, notably Boff, Comblin, and Gutiérrez, have written short meditational works accessible to ordinary literate Christians, typically exploring themes in the Bible or the life of Jesus. Moral theology and ethics occupy a somewhat ambiguous space within the overall liberation theology enterprise. Historically, moral theology was developed primarily for priests hearing confessions, and it emphasized sin and prohibitions. In the midtwentieth century, it was reconceived primarily as a theology of Christian living using scriptural categories. Building on that work in Europe, Latin American theologians critiqued its narrow focus on the (middle-class European) individual, and sought to give it a more social dimension, pointing, for example, to idolatries of wealth and power, and critiquing the ethos of capitalism. The author of the article on sexuality in Mysterium Liberationis, for example, a male religious, vaguely admitted the need to re-examine sexuality, but showed no sign of even being aware of a feminist critique, and he dismissed the promotion of birth control as foreign assault.16 The Medellín generation of theologians viewed their individual work as part of a larger collective endeavor. With rare exceptions, they did not break ranks or criticize one another in public. Individual theologians nevertheless had their own distinctive features. Leonardo Boff was perhaps the most prolific writer, and turned out dozens of works on classic Christian themes of theology (Christ, Trinity, the Church, grace). After leaving the priesthood in the early 1990s, he continued to publish primarily in the field of spirituality, with an emphasis on ecology. The Argentine layman Enrique Dussel, who has spent most of his career in self-exile in Mexico, has worked in three fields: he is primarily a philosopher who developed an ethics of liberation; he wrote and edited histories of the Church in Latin America; and he was part of the inner circle of liberation theologians. The Belgian-born José Comblin wrote dozens of volumes in Portuguese, Spanish, and French, in many theological genres, often on non-traditional topics (theologies of nationalism, peace, the city, revolution), scripture commentaries, observations on pastoral work, and various studies of the Church, drawing on two thousand years of history. Perhaps the most idiosyncratic was the Uruguayan Jesuit, Juan Luis Segundo, who typically raised his own questions, and then pursued them drawing on an eclectic mix of sources, often non-theologians. For many years, he met regularly with a group of educated middle-class laypeople who were his interlocutors. All of the forty-eight articles in Mysterium Liberationis were written by Catholics, mostly Catholic priests or religious; even the article on Pentecostals (“Sects”) was by a Catholic cleric. Protestants such as the Argentine Methodist José Miguez Bonino and the Mexican Elsa Támez, who taught at a seminary in Costa Rica, made significant

166   Phillip Berryman contributions to liberation theology, but when most liberation theologians spoke of “the Church” they meant Roman Catholicism. Only four of the contributors were women. The male theologians might mention women when listing the “oppressed,” but they showed little awareness of the deeper critique of patriarchy in society and the Church, let alone its presence in religious symbols and language, which was then being demonstrated by feminist theologians elsewhere.17 Starting in the mid-1970s, Latin American theologians were in dialogue with theologians in Asia and Africa, and Black theologians in North America. That dialogue became institutionalized in EATWOT (Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians), which periodically held conferences and published essay collections.

Political Implications Liberation theology attracted attention beyond the churches because of its apparent political—even revolutionary—implications. Yet aside from occasional mentions of “socialism,” the theologians did not sketch out what a new society would look like.18 The “passage from less human to more human conditions” was assumed to mean a qualitatively different kind of society, one that the theologians, along with many intellectuals and social scientists, assumed would be socialist.19 The theologians largely avoided discussing existing socialism and apparently assumed that a “Latin American socialism” would be different from existing models.20 They likewise devoted surprisingly little attention to how this new society was to come about. Insofar as they did so, it was to make distinctions between the existing violence of the present order, revolutionary violence, and counter revolutionary violence. From the social sciences they borrowed “dependency theory,” which provided an account of how Latin America came to be underdeveloped, particularly how it was brought into the international division of labor as a supplier of raw materials for the industrialized nations. Third World nations must break free from their peripheral role in the world economy and develop in terms of their own needs. The theologians largely accepted this quasi-consensus among Latin American intellectuals. Marxism was part of the atmosphere in universities and intellectual life in general in the 1960s and 1970s. The theologians borrowed concepts such as class structure. When accused of fomenting class struggle, they replied that it already exists; their task was to consider how Christians should deal with it. The relationship between the theologians and Marxism varied. Jon Sobrino, for example, paid virtually no attention to the secular ideology. Enrique Dussel devoted considerable attention and even did scholarship on Marx. Juan Luis Segundo included some unorthodox Marxists among the eclectic mix of thinkers with whom he engaged in his writings. Marxism was peripheral to the work of most of the theologians; none embraced Marxism as a comprehensive philosophy, nor were they members of Marxist political organizations (with the exception of some Chileans in the Allende years).

Liberation Theology   167 Throughout Latin America, priests and sisters understood the “preferential option for the poor” to mean more than simply serving their religious needs or assisting them. The aim was to help them to become organized to address their own problems and defend their rights, to become “agents of their own destiny” (Medellín). After the initial awakening of consciousness and organizing, pastoral agents “accompanied” people, not leading as caudillos, but supporting their efforts to press for their rights. For this they often faced threats or violence. Dozens or even hundreds of instances of modern “martyrdom” have been documented.21 They believed they were simply carrying out the mandate of their pastoral work; their murderers believed that they had poisoned the minds of previously docile people and were agents of communism.22 Modern martyrdom for defending the cause of the poor became a theme of theology.

Internal Church Controversies Opposition to liberation theology among bishops and the Vatican, dating from the early 1970s, came to a head in the mid-1980s, triggered by events in Central America. Unlike what had happened in Cuba twenty years earlier, priests, sisters, pastors, and laypeople had supported the resistance to Nicaragua’s long-time dictator, Anastasio Somoza, and when the leftist Sandinista revolution took power—a victory made possible in part by the participation of liberation-theology-inspired Catholics—they began to participate in efforts to transform Nicaragua, for example, in the 1980 literacy campaign. Three priests were appointed to cabinet-level positions. Especially in the heady early days, the revolution seemed to embody what liberation theology sought—a new model of society—although liberation theologians were generally circumspect in speaking about Nicaragua. Similar revolutionary struggles were underway in El Salvador and Guatemala, and hence what happened in Nicaragua had wider implications. In less than a year, however, the Nicaraguan bishops, with Vatican support, turned publicly against the government and ordered the priests to leave their posts. The priests managed to temporize, and agreed not to act publicly as priests. Shaped by a lifetime of resistance to communism, Pope John Paul II on a 1983 tour through Central America reprimanded the Minister of Culture, Fr. Ernesto Cardenal, on the airport tarmac. Proand anti- Sandinista factions turned an evening outdoor Mass into a shouting match between them. Cardenal was soon stripped of his priestly duties and his ministry was not reinstated until Pope Francis did so in 2019.23 These events were no doubt on the mind of Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, the head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office, in 1984 when he issued a document criticizing liberation theology, cataloging its errors: use of Marxism, politicizing the Church, turning theological concepts into sociology, and so forth.24 Most of the major theologians ignored or tried to sidestep the critique, or said that it had caricatured their theology.25 At around the same time, Ratzinger’s office silenced the Brazilian Franciscan Leonardo Boff, primarily for his book Charism, Church and Power (1983), which besides proposing

168   Phillip Berryman changes in ministry, including ordination for women, included a fierce critique of the way the Vatican wields power. Throughout his ordeal, Boff enjoyed the support of important Brazilian cardinals and bishops, and his disciplining was understood as a rebuke to the hierarchy as well.26 The pope took a somewhat more conciliatory stand in a 1986 document, and recognized the legitimacy of liberation theology. By the 1990s, the tone was softened, mainly because the collapse of communism had changed the context. Nevertheless, individual theologians were disciplined: the Brazilian Ivone Gebara was ordered to take two years of study in Europe, apparently for offthe-record statements about poor women having abortions, and the Vatican Office on Doctrine issued a critique claiming that the Christology of Jon Sobrino was not orthodox.27 Over time, the Medellín-era progressive bishops were systematically replaced by Vatican loyalists. As already noted, by the time of the CELAM meeting at Aparecida (2007), the liberation theologians felt that they had been welcomed back into the fold.28 This became even clearer with the election of Pope Francis, who personally met with Gustavo Gutierrez, and conferred with Leonardo Boff in preparing his encyclical on the environment. He also reinstated the priesthood of those priests who had been suspended for serving in the Sandinista government in the 1980s.

Twenty-first Century: What’s Left, What’s New? Into the 1980s the theologians had expressed a hope that the crucifixion of the present was leading to a resurrection: a new Church in a qualitatively different society. With those hopes apparently dashed in the apparent triumph of capitalism in the early 1990s, some theologians admitted the need for rethinking, but for years they largely adhered to the slogan of the World Social Forum: “another world is possible.” This survey samples the more recent work of four individual theologians (Gutiérrez, Boff, Gebara, Comblin), then considers some aspects of the Aparecida document, and concludes with some observations about where matters stand in the second decade of the twenty-first century. In surveying a half-century of work by Gustavo Gutiérrez, one is struck by the continuity. His characteristic work is the essay, prompted by a particular occasion, and his books are typically collections of essays. Many of his works, such as We Drink from Our Own Wells and On Job, are in the genre of spirituality. Gutiérrez’s most ambitious and scholarly work (1992) is a study of Bartolomé de las Casas, the sixteenth-century Dominican missionary in Mexico and Guatemala, who later spent decades in Spain defending native American peoples and exposing the cruelty of the colonial enterprise. The work is not intended to augment the extensive work on Las Casas by historians, but is a distillation of his themes and regards him as a theologian. The reader is struck by the resonances between that distant time and the

Liberation Theology   169 present: the violation of the rights and dignity of the Indians, the use of power, lust for gold, imposition of the state. Both scholarly and beautifully written, the work is perhaps underappreciated because it defies easy categorization. In 2004, Gutiérrez co-authored a book with German Bishop Gerhard Müller, who had done pastoral work in Peru, and was later named the head of the Vatican office overseeing doctrine, to the chagrin of Peruvian conservatives who had questioned Gutierrez’s orthodoxy. He also co-authored a book with the American physician Paul Farmer, of Partners for Health, who was inspired by liberation theology and later spent time dealing with cholera in Peru. Farmer makes the intriguing observation that disease has a “preferential option for the poor,” that is, their poverty makes them vulnerable, and hence the medical profession should likewise privilege the poor. The affinity between Farmer and Gutierrez, despite the generational, disciplinary, and cultural differences, suggests that liberation theology should not be lightly dismissed as passé.29 In what he calls a “swan song,” Leonardo Boff attempts to summarize the core of Christian faith and set it within a contemporary understanding of the unfolding of the universe.30 Christianity in a Nutshell (2013) has reflections on the mystery of God and the cosmos, the Trinity, Jesus, and Christianity in history. The topic of liberation appears at various points, and Boff notes the pathologies of power to which the churches have been prone. At various points, he portrays popular Christianity not as a defective version of official Christianity, but as an authentic embodiment of Christian faith. Pope Francis’s 2013 visit to Brazil prompted Boff to write short essays, which led to a book organized around Francis of Assisi and the pope, expressing his hopes and laying out an ambitious reform agenda. At one point, he raises the question of whether the pope supports liberation theology and dismisses it as “irrelevant. The important thing is not to be for liberation theology, but for the liberation of the oppressed, the poor, and victims of injustice, and that he is without question”.31 Sr. Ivone Gebara has lived and worked among poor women in Camaragibe in northeastern Brazil for decades. She was among the few women who contributed to the large collective projects in what she calls the “golden age” of liberation theology. Although she sees parallels between that theology and the feminist theology she now pursues, she emphasizes the distance. Her closeness to the everyday reality of poor women makes her wary of grand ideas, including those from theology. She critiques traditional assumptions and symbols from a gender standpoint, for example, how the notion of “sacrifice” and bearing one’s “cross” reinforces domination over women. This critique extends to the liberation theologians: she cites examples from the work of Ronaldo Muñoz and Leonardo Boff that betray an unconscious patriarchal vision.32 Gebara achieved some notoriety in the 1990s when an off-the-record remark she made to a journalist, refusing to judge poor women who have abortions, ended up in the press. Although she had not intended to question official Catholic teaching on abortion, she refused to retract her remark and later she was silenced, and under Vatican pressure was sent to France to study for two years. The Gebara case illustrates several aspects of liberation theology from a feminist standpoint. The vast majority of liberation theologians are male, mainly clerics. While

170   Phillip Berryman the male theologians will list women among the “oppressed,” they continue to use biblical terms and theological concepts, with no awareness of the feminist critique. Some women theologians have formed networks among themselves, but to the degree that they raise reproductive issues, they find themselves marginalized from Church circles. The most thorough attempt to rethink liberation theology is that of José Comblin (1998). The book itself is a reading of the “signs of the times.” Each chapter has many observations about trends in Latin America and the world, and particularly the Catholic Church. At the core of the book are five chapters of observations, under the headings of social, economic, political, cultural, and personal liberation. For example, he makes sober observations on the gap between the illusions of political activists in the 1960s and 1970s, who dreamed of revolution, and the poor themselves, who were moving from the countryside to the city seeking a better life: they would participate in community organizations seeking concrete benefits, but did not share the grand visions of activists and Church pastoral agents. Liberation theologians enthusiastically welcomed the 2007 CELAM meeting at Aparecida as a return to the Medellín method, and also as a kind of return from exile for them. Three key themes in Aparecida are “disciples,” “missionary,” and “life”: the Church is called to “missionary discipleship” in order to serve the life of the peoples of Latin America. The examination of Latin American society appears at several points, and the situation of parishes, dioceses, ecumenism, and various church ministries are discussed with some frankness. Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires headed the drafting committee, and hence the voice is not only that of Latin American bishops collectively, but that of a man who would become Pope Francis.33 Amerindia, a continent-wide network of pastoral agents and theologians, published a book of twenty-five essays, including those by several well-known theologians as well as some of a younger generation.34 In an early section, noting that “reality has become ever more opaque and complex for human beings,” the bishops say, “this has taught us to look at reality more humbly, knowing that it is greater and more complex than the simplistic ways in which we used to look at it in the not very distant past, which often introduced conflicts into society, leaving many wounds that have still not been able to heal.”35 Contrary to Medellín, which  implies a task of transforming society, Aparecida shifted the focus from economics and politics to culture: how is the Church to relate to people in today’s varied cultures? The “missionary” thrust of the document is not understood in the narrow sense of proselytism: it expresses the sense repeated by Francis as pope that the Church must go beyond itself, out to the “perimeters,” particularly to serve the poor. The Aparecida document has dozens of proposals for what should be done, in the Church’s internal structures and training and in its service to society. Fifty years ago, young Latin American theologians proposed that the peculiar features of Latin America—that it is Catholic and overwhelmingly poor—called for its own theology. That theology has in fact developed and has been influential, even if it remained a minority current within Catholicism. However, the premises of the original question may call for revisiting.

Liberation Theology   171 The percentage of people identifying as Catholics has been dropping in the region. Even two decades ago, the number of Protestants, mainly Pentecostals, attending church services was on a par with Catholics in Brazil, Guatemala, and other countries. Perhaps just as important, surveys show growing numbers of people who are not affiliated with any church, and some who identify as agnostic or atheist, especially among the growing numbers of university graduates. Although the Aparecida document makes some references to pluralism and diversity, the bishops still generally speak as though they are addressing Catholic societies. That is especially the case when they speak as presumed moral arbiters, not to simply present their position, but to declare some topics (particularly those related to reproductive matters and sexuality) as illegitimate and as foreign impositions.36 Perhaps surprisingly, progress has been made in reducing poverty. The middle classes have been expanding to the point where they are over half the population in Brazil, Mexico, and elsewhere. Poverty rates declined in most countries since the first decade of  the 2000s. Thirty million Brazilians rose out of poverty in the first decade of the twenty-first century; Chile is within striking distance of achieving a standard of living like that of some European countries, such as Portugal. In the first years of the 2000s, most countries began steady growth, impelled partly by high world prices for commodity exports. Latin America, with the exception of Mexico, suffered little from the post-2008 depression, partly because of sound economic policies instituted earlier.37 Governments of both right and left turned more pragmatic, and interesting innovations were made at municipal levels. Drug gangs ruled in some neighborhoods and corruption was endemic, but these problems were being addressed. The title of a special report in The Economist in September 2010 summarized the new situation: “Nobody’s Backyard: The Rise of Latin America.” This progress notwithstanding, around a third of Latin Americans, 200 million, remained in poverty. They were subsistence farmers or people in urban slums, disproportionately indigenous or Afro descendant, often in single-parent families, in neighborhoods controlled by gangs and served by poor schools. That last item was significant because education is increasingly required for employment, and hence the danger remains of some people being trapped in generational poverty. Liberation theology and its ideals had entered into Church life, arguably to the papacy itself.38 The now classic works of the Medellín generation are part of Catholic theology. Whether there is a post-Medellín generation of theologians not simply repeating but engaged in a similar endeavor in the twenty-first century39 remains unclear. 

Notes 1. See Erika Helgen, Chapter 11 in this volume. 2. For a selection of texts from Medellín, see Alfred  T.  Hennelly, Liberation Theology: A Documentary History (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990), 89–120. 3. Text in Hennelly, Liberation Theology, 62–76. 4. Dates of the Spanish originals are two or more years earlier than the English translations.

172   Phillip Berryman 5. The title was an implicit reference to Mysterium Salutis, a multi-volume systematic theology suitable for seminary use, prepared by a team of German-speaking theologians, translations of which were being used in Latin American seminaries. Ellacuría did not live to see the publication since he was murdered, along with five fellow Jesuits, their housekeeper, and her daughter, in November 1989, by US-trained Salvadoran troops in their home in San Salvador. 6. Gutierrez invoked Antonio Gramsci’s term “organic intellectual” for this type of theologian: Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988). 7. Juan Carlos Scannone, “Theology, Popular Culture, and Discernment,” in Rosino Gibellini, Frontiers of Theology in Latin America (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1979). 8. During this period, bishops could be classified into conservatives, progressives, and a large moderate group in the middle concerned particularly about the unity of the church. 9. This sets theology apart from the academic discipline of “religious studies,” in which religion is studied as a human phenomenon, and in which scholars and students bracket their own faith convictions. 10. Ellacuría and Sobrino (eds.), Mysterium Liberationis, 389–404, citation on 400. These ideas are developed more fully in Leonardo Boff, Trinity and Society (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988), 10. 11. José Comblin, O Espírito Santo e a tradição de Jesus (São Bernardo do Campo: Nhanduti Editora, 2012). 12. Ignacio Ellacuría, “The Church of the Poor, Historical Sacrament of Liberation”, in Ignacio Ellacuría, S.J.  and Jon Sobrino, S.J., Mysterium Liberationis: Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 543–564. 13. Leonardo Boff, Ecclesiogensis: The Base Communities Reinvent the Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986). 14. For a rare critical view by a theologian, see José Comblin, “Algumas questões a partir da prática das comunidades eclesias de base no nordeste,” in REB (Revista eclesiástica Brasileira) vol. 50, fasc. 198 (1990), 335–381. 15. Pedro Casaldáliga and José Maria Vigil, Political Holiness: Toward a Spirituality of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994); Jon Sobrino, “Spirituality and the Following of Jesus,” in Ellacuría and Sobrino (eds.), Mysterium Liberationis (1993), 677–701. 16. Antônio Moser and Bernardino Leers, Teologia Moral: Impasses e Alternativas (São Paulo: Vozes, 1988); and Antônio Moser, “Sexualidad,” in Ignacio Ellacuría, S.J., and Jon Sobrino, S.J., eds., Mysterium liberationis: Conceptos fundamentales de la teología de liberación, 2 vols. (San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1990). 17. Elsa Tamez, ed., Against Machismo (Oak Park, IL: Meyer-Stone, 1987), consists of interviews with the major male theologians on women and machismo. 18. In the thirty-five essays and 750 pages of Mysterium Liberationis (1993) there is no discussion of what a just world order would entail, aside from assertions that it would be ­organized around meeting the needs of all and that people would be the agents of their own destiny in solidarity. 19. Socialism was more plausible in the 1970s, when half the world lived under some form of it. 20. A curious exception is the “theological letters” Clodovis Boff wrote after visits to Cuba, the  Soviet Union, and China—shortly before the collapse of communism: Boff, Cartas teológicas sobre o socialismo (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1989). 21. See Brett, Chapter 13 in this volume.

Liberation Theology   173 22. In El Salvador, bombs were set off in the Jesuit University in the mid-1970s and death threats were issued, blaming the Jesuits for creating unrest, long before they were murdered in 1989. For a masterful account, which weaves together events in El Salvador and the work of the Jesuits, especially Ellacuría, see Theresa Whitfield, Paying the Price: Ignacio Ellacuría and the Murdered Jesuits of El Salvador (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1994). 23. Far less noticed was the fact that the pope urged “dialogue” in El Salvador’s civil war at a time when right-wing death squads regarded that as treasonous, and embraced Guatemalan indigenous people when the army was engaged in systematic massacres in their communities. 24. Text in Hennelly, Liberation Theology, 393–414. 25. Juan Luis Segundo broke ranks and wrote a book-length reply, disputing Ratzinger on individual points and charging that the document as a whole represents a reversal of a major thrust of Vatican II. Segundo, Theology and the Church: A Response to Cardinal Ratzinger and a Warning to the Whole Church (Minneapolis, MN: Seabury, 1985). 2 6. Harvey Cox, The Silencing of Leonardo Boff: The Vatican and the Future of World Christianity (Oak Park, IL: Meyer-Stone, 1988). 27. For essays on Sobrino’s Christology and the controversy, see Stephen Pope, ed., Hope and Solidarity: Jon Sobrino’s Challenge to Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008). 28. Robert Pelton, Aparecida: Quo Vadis? (Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 2008). 29. Gustavo Gutiérrez and Gerhard Müller, On the Side of the Poor: The Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013); Gustavo Gutiérrez and Paul Farmer, In the Company of the Poor (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2015). 30. Almost two decades earlier he had linked the “cry of the earth” and the “cry of the poor” Leonardo Boff, Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997). 31. Leonardo Boff, Francis of Rome & Francis of Assisi: A New Spring in the Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2014), 76. 32. Ivone Gebara, Out of the Depths: Women’s Experience of Evil and Salvation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002), 161–164. 33. In many places, Aparecida sounds like Francis: “We cannot passively and calmly wait in our church buildings, but we must move out in all directions to proclaim that evil and death do not have the last word” (548). “We are asked to devote time to the poor, provide them kind attention, listen to them with interest, stand by them in the most difficult moments, choosing to spend hours, weeks, or years of our life with them, and striving to transform their situation from within their midst” (397). [The parish] “must follow the path of Jesus and become Good Samaritan like Him. . . . It cannot stand apart from the great suffering endured by most of our people often in the form of hidden poverties…” (176). The church must take up a “prophetic critique” on behalf of migrants and work with civil society “to achieve a migration policy that takes into account the rights of people on the move” (414). 34. Collected in Aparecida, renacer de una esperanza (Montevideo: Indo-American Press Service, 2007). 35. Aparecida, 35. The “we” is perhaps ambiguous: do they mean themselves as bishops, or are they perhaps implying that activists decades ago were partly responsible for the repression that followed? 36. In some countries, many of their fellow citizens do not accept their positions and have voted in favor of gay marriage and legalization of abortion.

174   Phillip Berryman 37. For data on economic and social changes in Latin America, see Phillip Berryman, Latin America at 200: A New Introduction (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2016). 38. In early 2017 around forty Latin American, Spanish, and Latino/a theologians met at Boston College to explore common themes in the light of the papacy of Francis, including that of migration. For the proceedings, Luis Aranguren Gonzalo and Félix Palazzi, Desafíos de una teología Iberoamericana inculturada en tiempos de globalización, interculturalidad y exclusion social: Actas del primer encuentro Iberoamericano de teología (Miami, FL: Convivium Press, 2017). 39. See Phillip Berryman, “La generación Medellín y sus sucesores,” in A esperança dos pobres vive: Coletânea em homenagem aos 80 anos de José Comblin (São Paulo: Paulus, 2003).

chapter 10

Catholicism, R evolu tion, a n d Cou n ter-R evolu tion i n T w en tieth- Cen t u ry L ati n A m er ica Stephen J. C. Andes

Violence and bloodshed scarred the human and moral landscape of Latin America’s twentieth century. The 1910 Mexican Revolution resulted in at least one million deaths. Colombia’s urban and rural civil war, La Violencia (1946–1958), produced another 300,000 casualties. In Bolivia, the Nationalist Revolution of 1952, remarkably benign by these standards, managed relatively few casualties. Cuba’s insurrectionary period (1952–1958) claimed another 2,000–3,000. Authoritarian military regimes, backed by US money, materiel, and Cold War anti-communism, deployed increasingly sophisticated and repressive state apparatuses. In Brazil, twenty years of military rule (1964–1985) brought at least 475 state-sponsored murders. In Argentina, 30,000 were “disappeared” or killed in the so-called Dirty War, from 1976 to 1983. The dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990) in Chile led to 2,920 documented cases of human rights violations. In Central America, Guatemala and Nicaragua underwent civil war at mid-century and again in the 1970s and 1980s. In all, perhaps as many as 200,000 people died or were “disappeared” in Guatemala’s conflict from 1960 to 1996. Nicaragua’s successful 1979 Sandinista Insurrection resulted in 50,000 deaths, and the counter-insurgency waged against it in the 1980s produced another 30,000 killed and 180,000 displaced peoples. El Salvador’s twelve years of civil war (1980–1992) added 75,000 to the list.1 The terror of the Maoist Shining Path in Peru was perhaps matched only by government repression to stop it: 69,000 were killed and 6,000 “disappeared” during the presidency of Alberto Fujimori (1990–2000). In short, Latin Americans suffered a century of civil war, ­violence, and death.2

176   Stephen J. C. Andes Catholics were integral participants in the bloodbath. The Catholic Church shaped, and was shaped by, the cycles of insurgency, counter-insurgency, and state terror, which defined Latin America’s twentieth-century violence. Religious commitments, rituals, and cultures forged political identities, melded with gendered, ethnic, and class distinctions, and colored social relations, marking boundaries within and between groups, communities, institutions, and Churches. This situation was not peculiar to Latin America. As James K. Wellman reminds us, “religion creates symbolic and social boundaries that include and exclude.”3 Catholicism provided the rationale for various theories of “just war,” while religious discourses strengthened, even sanctioned, the use of torture and terror in the interests of both Church and state. Catholics took up all sides in twentieth-century conflict, from revolutionary priests, accommodationist bishops, and lay counter-revolutionaries, to Catholic generals who massacred their own citizens with state-sponsored death squads. Yet, Catholicism also became a dynamic force in the emerging quest for human liberation in the region. Catholics established networks of protest against economic and social inequality, opposed poverty and exclusion, and decried injustice and disenfranchisement. Latin America’s revolutionary century splintered Catholic political identities on an unprecedented scale. Conservative and progressive, revolutionary and counter-revolutionary, belligerent and peaceful, the Catholic Church’s Janus face was unmasked in the twentieth century. Despite all the social upheaval, only three insurgencies resulted in revolutionary “success” in Latin America: in Mexico (1910), Cuba (1959), and Nicaragua (1979). All three of these insurgencies dismantled the old regime, established a new and durable political status quo, and implemented a profound reorganization of social classes and economic relations. Thus, unlike anywhere else in Latin America, the Catholic Churches of Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua were confronted with the reality of a revolutionary society in which they too had to vie for space and adapt. Three interlocking factors, associated with revolutionary state-formation, were crucial determinants in pushing Catholic hierarchies, many lay Catholics, and some Protestant Churches toward a counter-revolutionary position: anticlericalism, agrarian reform, and public (especially non-religious) education. Despite the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), its progressive interpretation at the meeting of the Latin American Episcopal Conference (CELAM) at Medellín (1968), and the emergence of liberation theology, bishops in Cuba, and even more so in Nicaragua, reacted in the much the same way to the nascent revolutionary governments as the Mexican episcopate had responded to similar challenges more than half a century earlier. In all three cases, Catholics viewed the fall of corrupt and long-standing dictatorships as positive. But after initial enthusiasm wore off, the Church viewed revolutionary governments as inimical to institutional survival, theological identity, and a challenge to their role as moral legitimators of society. Differences between Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua centered on the unity of counterrevolutionary forces. In Mexico, a strong institutional Church base before the revolution allowed a more sustained and long-lasting challenge to the state. In Cuba, a weak Catholic Church, although united in counter-revolutionary sentiment, forced the Church to adapt and cooperate to regain a foothold in the revolutionary process. In

Catholicism, Revolution, and Counter-Revolution   177 Nicaragua, a strong organizational base did not allow a concerted counter-revolutionary threat to the state. The internalization of conciliar reforms in Nicaragua produced a more decentralized, and ultimately divided front, where a growing “popular church” aligned more closely with the aims of the revolutionary forces associated with the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). The Latin American Catholic Church, as institution, was therefore predisposed toward counter-revolutionary opposition. Revolutionary social reorganization presented a very real threat to the institutional interest of Christian churches, both before and after the Cold War, as well as before and after the Second Vatican Council. Despite marked continuity in Catholicism’s counter-revolutionary position over the course of the twentieth century, the Church’s relationship with revolution revealed a shift toward moderation. Scholars have argued that the shift occurred after the 1960s. In a recent survey of the Catholic Church in Latin America, John Schwaller contends that three main positions characterized the attitude of Catholics toward revolutionary social change after Vatican II and the 1968 CELAM meeting at Medellín.4 First, lay Catholics, priests, nuns, and religious brothers were counted among various rebel and left-wing political movements throughout the region. They embraced revolution, and justified the use of force for obtaining liberation as a defensive violence used against the “institutional violence” of social inequality. Second, conservatives, especially among the episcopate, worked to impede the pace of change, to fight against secularization, Protestant evangelization, and institutional decline. Third, the majority—moderates—caught in the middle, became more conscious of deficiencies in pastoral action, awakened to the plight of the poor in their midst, but were suspicious of the temptation to tie the Church to a ­particular political movement.

Catholics and the Mexican Revolution (ca. 1910–1940) Catholicism’s first encounter with revolution came in Mexico in 1910. Between 1876 and 1911, President Porfirio Díaz established relative peace and stability, albeit through authoritarian and undemocratic rule. Francisco I. Madero, a member of the landed elite, galvanized the popular opposition in late 1910 and successfully brought an end to Díaz’s dictatorship in the spring of 1911. National elections were held in October, which selected Madero as president. He served fifteen months in office until a successful palace coup d’état by General Victoriano Huerta brought about Madero’s downfall and the expansion of large-scale revolutionary upheaval. The Catholic Church’s position toward national upheaval falls into three phases: loyal opposition during the waning years of the Porfiriato; participation, although critical, during Madero’s democratic aperture; and contingent counter-revolutionary collaboration with the regime of Victoriano Huerta. During the long rule of Porfirio Díaz, the

178   Stephen J. C. Andes Catholic Church in Mexico experienced an institutional restoration, facilitating the hierarchy’s moderation toward the regime. However, by the 1890s, Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) focused the social vision of lay Catholics and clergy alike in Mexico. A younger generation of bishops, trained at Rome’s Pontificio Colegio Pío Latinoamericano (Pontifical Pius Latin American College), returned to Mexico from European studies and organized mutualist societies, Catholic labor associations, and lay confraternities with a social bent.5 Lay Catholics and priests developed an alternative to the liberal state-building project.6 As Madero’s 1910 Revolution removed Díaz from power, Mexican Catholics had already begun to work for change within the boundaries of the old regime. The organizing of a Catholic social movement at the end of the Porfiriato positioned Catholics to benefit from the democratic opening supplied by Madero’s Revolution, but popular revolutionaries did not come from Church ranks. Madero’s democratic experiment allowed Catholics to organize a political party, the National Catholic Party (PCN, Partido Católico Nacional), in 1911. The PCN backed interim president Francisco León de la Barra for the vice presidency over the candidacy of Pino Suárez, Madero’s chosen running mate. Although unsuccessful in electing de la Barra, the PCN had enormous success in the elections of 1911, especially on the state and local levels. Deputies were elected in states such as Jalisco, Michoacán, and México. Social Catholic reform legislation was enacted that sought to provide safety insurance benefits for workers and the ability for wages to be negotiated between labor and management. Catholic lay associations were organized, and gained force and momentum, especially the Knights of Columbus, the Association of Catholic Ladies, and the Young Men’s Catholic Association (ACJM).7 The Jesuit Alfredo Méndez Medina, recently returned from European training in the social doctrine of the Catholic Church, established the first modern trade unions.8 Catholics continued their alternative project to liberalism, but remained skeptical, and even hostile, to Madero’s administration. Thus, as Madero’s regime unraveled in February 1913, the majority of the hierarchy, and many within the PCN, rejoiced. General Huerta appeared to be a return to order.9 The Church was contingently aligned with the counter-revolution.10 From these circumstances arose a fierce anticlerical reaction from revolutionaries who mobilized against Huerta’s dictatorship. Anticlericalism became a major characteristic of the Mexican Revolution after 1914. Northern revolutionaries under Pancho Villa mounted sporadic violence against foreign clergy, especially Spanish priests, displaying a good deal of xenophobic fury in the process.11 Southern peasant soldiers led by Emiliano Zapata were more benevolent, often carrying banners dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe. The Constitutionalists, so called for their stated purpose in drafting a new National Charter, contained factions of Jacobin anticlericals, others of a more pragmatic stamp, and old-styled liberals such as Venustiano Carranza, who emerged as the First Chief of the Revolution.12 This last group emerged as the Revolutionary “winners” and wrote a new Constitution in 1917. New, more forceful, restrictions on the Church were written into the document: prohibiting primary religious instruction, prohibiting political speech by priests, and empowering states to regulate the practice of the Catholic cult. By 1925, the Church was an

Catholicism, Revolution, and Counter-Revolution   179 amalgam of contradictory positions: progressive in the efforts of many lay Catholics and priests to unionize workers, but counter-revolutionary in its opposition and rejection of the 1917 Constitution. The Church’s Obregonian renaissance came to end when the new president, Plutarco Elías Calles (1924–1928), directed his energies at implementing the anticlerical restrictions of the Constitution. The Mexican hierarchy declared a Church strike, a moratorium on the sacramental functions of clergy within Church buildings, until the anticlerical laws were modified. The beginning of the Church boycott was set to go into effect the same day that enabling legislation ordered by Calles had been scheduled: August 1, 1926. A Catholic defense league, the National League for the Defense of Religious Liberty (LNDLR), seconded the clerical strike with its own economic boycott. In August, the first reports of Catholic insurrection were received. Small bands of Catholics reacted violently to the local implementation of the anticlerical laws. The Catholic insurgency would be known as the Cristero Rebellion. Between August 1926 and June 1929, perhaps as many as 50,000 Catholics in thirteen states of the Republic took up arms against federal troops and their local government-allied militias, called agraristas. Approximately 90,000 combatants died in the fighting, mainly in the rural center-west region of the nation.13 The Mexican hierarchy, virtually unanimous in its decision to declare the sacramental interdict, was more divided in its attitude toward Catholic rebellion. The thirty-eight archbishops and bishops that comprised the episcopate at the time split between a small number of bellicose prelates who encouraged armed defense (four), a slightly larger contingent who wrote and spoke against it (ten), and the majority who remained indecisive.14 Theological rationale for armed defense drew from Aquinas’s theories of just war: Catholics were within rights to oppose a tyrant to protect religious ritual and practice. Bishops Leopoldo Ruiz y Flores and Pascual Díaz, who had been exiled in the United States, increasingly viewed the Cristero insurgency from a realist perspective. They believed that without help from the Americans the rebellion had no real chance of success.15 When it became clear by late 1927 that the Cristero forces would not gain the aid of money or materiel from the United States, and that Cristero victories on the ground had not materialized, Rome actively sought a settled diplomatic solution to the conflict. A modus vivendi was reached in June 1929 through the aegis of US Ambassador Dwight Morrow, the two Mexican prelates Ruiz y Flores and Díaz, and the new Mexican President, Emilio Portes Gil. The laws had not changed, however—only an agreement by both sides to end hostilities.16 Mexican priests endured persecution in a number of ways. Relatively few became rebel leaders during the uprising; some of the most famous included José Reyes Vega and Aristeo Pedroza from Jalisco, José María Martínez of Coalcomán, and Federico González Cárdenas from northwestern Michoacán.17 These were the exceptions, however, and the clergy did not lead the rebellion. Many priests under threat of summary execution deserted their parishes for the relatively safe environment of cities. Nevertheless, a large number of priests remained in the countryside, ministering to their parishioners. Well-known accounts that state that 3,500 clergymen fled for the safety of the cities are overblown. Approximately ninety priests were executed during three years of civil war.18

180   Stephen J. C. Andes These numbers suggest that martyrdom, although a potential danger, was not as ­common or usual as in other comparable conflicts, such as the Spanish Civil War, where some estimates set the number at 6,832 clergy killed in the wake of Red Terror.19 More common was what Butler describes as “a litany of minor vexations in a long, anxious human martyrdom.”20 Catholic organizations played an important role in Church-state conflict throughout the era. Since the waning years of the Porfiriato, lay Catholic associations gained in strength, numbers, and notoriety. In 1925, President Calles helped encourage a schismatic Catholic movement, which caused Catholic lay leaders to combine efforts and create a Catholic defense league. The LNDLR sought to provide for the civic defense of the Church, coordinate public opinion, organize protests, and disseminate pro-Catholic propaganda. An official memorandum was presented to the episcopate asking the bishops to support a strategy of armed defense, to appoint chaplains to minister to Catholic rebels, and to urge wealthy Catholics to donate funds. The bishops rejected the latter two requests, but could not deny Catholics the right to defend the faith with recourse to arms. The League, although it had built a nationwide network of affiliated centers, was unable to coordinate the largely autonomous bands of Catholic rebels. But rural lay Catholics took up the onus of the rebellion, many without formal membership or connection to the more urban lay Catholic associations such as the League. When the Mexican hierarchy negotiated the ceasefire agreement in 1929, members of the League would be its most vocal critics.21 Most Catholic rebels came from rural parishes and provincial towns, hamlets, and villages. Rebel makeup was cross-class and ethnically diverse. Only the wealthiest hacienda owners were largely absent from the ranks, belying the argument of the government, and some subsequent scholars, that priests led the rebels, supported by conservative landowners.22 Historian Jean Meyer argued that, economic considerations aside, partisanship in the rebellion was defined by religious commitments.23 The rebellion was strongest and most sustained in the country’s clericalized center-west. However, recent research by Jennie Purnell questioned this thesis, revealing that anti-Cristero militias (agraristas), who were recruited from the same region, often declared themselves to be Catholic as well.24 For Purnell, the answer lies in the extent of capitalist modernization, the strength of Catholic lay associations, and the continuity of local politico-religious authority. Partisanship in the Cristero Rebellion was therefore not predicated on religious commitments, but by political and economic cultures and traditions, historically embedded within the experiences and memories of communities.25 The “religious question,” what Ben Fallaw defines as “the place of the Church in a Catholic country after an anticlerical revolution,” was not settled at the end of the Cristero Rebellion, and despite general Catholic acceptance of the regime that would become the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), it continued to be a problem without an immediate solution.26 Catholic opposition to local anticlerical policies, socialist and sexual education promoted under President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940), and agrarian reform frustrated the revolutionary regime’s program of state- and nation formation. Sporadic violence continued during the 1930s, and a second rebellion, known as La Segunda,

Catholicism, Revolution, and Counter-Revolution   181 recruited some 7,500 Catholics to again take up arms against federal troops and their allies. Vatican calls for pacification and incorporation into Catholic Action met with foot dragging, resistance, and outright disobedience. And yet, both projects, forwarded by the state and Church, splintered the trajectory of Catholic activism. Many ex-Cristeros and lay militants joined the conservative Unión Nacional Sinarquista (National Synarchist Union), which continued to mobilize ­resistance to state projects. Because Catholic Action barely got off the ground until late in the 1930s, Catholics called for civic associations, which would boycott state schools, and provide confrontational, though in the main peaceful, modes of resistance. Finally, politicized Catholics, especially university students, helped form a political party called the National Action Party, founded with members of the conservative business, educational, and intellectual elite as a secular opposition party. The Catholic alternative to revolution therefore took a decidedly conservative, counter-revolutionary turn during the Cristero Rebellion and throughout the remainder of the 1930s.

The Catholic Church and the Cold War in Latin America: Cuba The development of superpower rivalries between the United States and the Soviet Union after 1947 exacerbated long-standing struggles over social and political arrangements in Latin America, and added a new dimension to the scope and reach of American interventionism in the region. The Catholic Church faced new challenges that superseded previous conflicts between Church and state. In the 1940s and early 1950s, Catholic leaders recognized the threat of socialist and communist movements, but the successful Cuban Revolution in 1959 made the threat palpable. The rapid radicalization of the Cuban movement, from anti-imperialist insurgency to communist state by the early 1960s, reverberated around the region. The pre-revolutionary Cuban Church of the 1950s was institutionally weak, predominantly established in Havana, and lacking personnel. A 1957 survey of 400 rural heads of households found that over 80 percent never attended services, only a little over 4 percent went to Mass three or more times per year, and only 3 percent believed the Church would help improve social and economic conditions. The Cuban Church was an urban institution, with 85 percent of priests, nuns, and brothers ministering in Havana, often in elite religious schools. Catholic Action and the Young Catholic Workers (JOC, Juventud Obrero Católico) had made some modest gains in forming associations, with the latter claiming approximately 20,000 members. On the eve of revolution, therefore, the Cuban Church was ill equipped to direct the course of the insurgent movement, and would remain marginal to the revolutionary process in subsequent decades.27 Nevertheless, many Cuban Catholics opposed the corruption and dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista (1940–1944; 1952–1959), and welcomed the fall of the regime in

182   Stephen J. C. Andes January 1959. Members of the lay organization Agrupación Católica Universitaria even joined the Twenty-Sixth of July Movement in the mountains, as did eight priests.28 However, the hierarchy was more cautious, and decided not to issue a pastoral statement about the insurrection in late 1958. After Fidel Castro’s victory, the hierarchy published a communiqué cautioning the government against “utopian egalitarianism,” which was code for Marxism/Leninism.29 During the course of 1959, Catholics felt threatened by two projects set in motion by the Castro administration: agrarian reform and education. Both programs inspired opposition from the Church. The bishops at first were cautiously optimistic about the agrarian reform legislation, and Bishop Enrique Pérez Serantes even approved of it generally. In June 1959, Jesuits organized a meeting of sixty-two members of the clergy to discuss the legislation. The majority emerged from the conference critical of the government, and afterward political denunciations of the Castro regime came increasingly from pulpits throughout the country. Moreover, Agrupación Católica steered toward a more conservative stance and opposed agrarian legislation. In education, the hierarchy and lay Catholics were more unified. Castro offered a reform proposal that mandated a unified public and private school curricula. Catholics wanted guarantees that religious education would be protected, and feared that Marxist ideology would indoctrinate the young. As Margaret Crahan argues, the issue of Catholic education, especially parents’ right to choose how to educate their children, became a major rallying point for government opposition, and an important cause of massive emigration to the United States by the mid-1960s.30 Catholic reactions to agrarian reform and education legislation galvanized opposition to the revolution even before the government officially declared itself communist in 1961. The largest public manifestation of Catholic opposition took place in Havana in November 1959. Approximately one million Cubans participated in the National Catholic Congress. Fidel Castro attended the opening ceremony, revealing that the government saw the Catholic constituency as an important force in Cuban society, especially as many political parties disintegrated. Many of the speakers steered away from overtly political statements. But a clear statement of opposition was announced by Agrupación Católica leader José Ignacio Lasaga who, in finishing his talk, declared: “Social justice yes; redemption of the workers and the farmers yes; Communism no!” The crowd responded enthusiastically, “Cuba yes, Communism no!”31 The confrontational stance deepened over the next months. A lay Catholic leader of Agrupación Católica, Manuel Artimé had organized the Movimiento de Recuperación Revolucionaria in the final months of 1958. He then left Cuba and made contact via a Jesuit priest with a CIA contact. Artimé, along with several lay Catholics, three Spanish priests, and a number of other dissidents, helped lead the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961. The failed coup solidified the counter-revolutionary credentials of the Cuban Church. Although the Church unified in opposition to Castro, its weakness and lack of popular support in rural Cuba prevented significant Catholic influence on the regime during the 1960s and 1970s.32 The Cuban government’s enclosure of the Cuban Church in the 1960s prompted some Catholics to rethink their strategy. Younger Catholics and members of Catholic Action

Catholicism, Revolution, and Counter-Revolution   183 argued that the Church needed to reinvigorate education and work with the government toward the common good. Vatican diplomats and the hierarchy supported a slow process of détente with the Castro administration, even as the government sought to build alliances with organizations across the political spectrum.33 In 1969, the bishops published two pastoral letters that criticized the US trade embargo and encouraged Catholics to support government projects. By the mid-1970s, the government published an explicit statement, incorporated into the new Constitution, which declared that Cubans could profess any religious belief as long as they did not align themselves with the counter-revolutionary opposition.34 By 1986, the Catholic Church hosted its first large public gathering in nearly three decades, the Cuban National Ecclesial Encounter (ENEC, Encuentro Nacional Eclesial Cubano), which hosted 181 church leaders—bishops, priests, nuns, and brothers, and numerous lay activists. In contrast to 1959, ENEC declared itself open to dialogue, still opposed to Marxism, but willing to cooperate with the government for the good of Cuban development. In the 1990s, the Cuban Church continued to work toward rapprochement, welcomed the 1992 constitutional changes, which removed statements declaring Cuba an atheistic state, and in 1998 hosted an iconic meeting between Pope John Paul II and Fidel Castro.35 The revolutionary environment forced the Cuban Catholic Church slowly to come to terms with the status quo.36 Yet, rapprochement also represented a clear victory for the Cuban Catholic Church. Despite its institutional weakness at the time of the 1959 revolution, Church leaders and Catholic activists succeeded in pressing the Castro government not only to accept its existence, but also to allow a greater measure of religious freedom.

The Progressive Church in Latin America’s Cold War Several developments within the Church in the 1950s, many preceding the Cuban Revolution, led some Catholic sectors toward a more progressive direction. The first was a shift within the Catholic Action movement.37 The Roman model of Catholic Action was based on a corporatist structure (i.e., branches composed of Men, Women, Young Men, Women, Workers, and Students). Its most successful national establishment took place in Spain during and after the Civil War, and promoted a conservative orientation in the churches of Latin America. This came particularly through the avowedly non-party political nature of the movement, which had been especially welcomed by the episcopates in the region. An alternative model of Catholic Action came to the fore by the 1950s in Latin America, based on the Belgian conception of the movement, developed by Cardinal Joseph Cardijn.38 This promoted a specialized form of Catholic Action, focused on training students and workers. Cardijn forwarded a pedagogical strategy known as “see, judge, act.” Through small study groups, Catholic students and workers, often guided by

184   Stephen J. C. Andes socially committed secular and Jesuit priests, educated themselves in the actual social problems of the country, considered what steps could be taken within the actual contexts where students and workers were active, and then acted to produce change. What differentiated groups such as the Young Catholic Students (JEC) and Young Catholic Workers (JOC) from other older, established branches of Catholic Action was their focus on confronting social and economic issues within national contexts. In other words, JEC and JOC promoted a deeper knowledge of Latin American society, its problems, and potential solutions. Whereas the Roman model of Catholic Action placed a priori boundaries around certain kinds of action—often excluding political activism or labor unionization—from the movement, JOC and JEC allowed for social analyses to guide action, without preconceived notions of a separation between religious, political, or social activism.39 The second factor in positioning sectors within the Catholic Church toward a more progressive stance was the development of the Christian Democratic movement. In the 1930s and 1940s, especially in Chile, Catholic social activists in Catholic Action began to seek an alternative to the Conservative Party, one that more robustly promoted the social doctrine of the Church and was distanced from the Church hierarchy. Influenced by Jacques Maritain’s ideas on rapprochement with liberal democracy, Catholic Action youths such as the Chileans Eduardo Frei and Manuel Garretón, and from Venezuela Rafael Caldera, helped establish Christian Democratic movements in the region. In the course of the 1950s, these became more secular in character, detached from Church direction, but with the stated desire to implement Christian social policies as an alternative to laissez-faire capitalism and socialist economies.40 Third, in Brazil and Chile, socially progressive bishops came to leadership positions. In Brazil, Dom Hélder Câmara established the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops (CNBB) in 1952, which in essence bolstered his position as a leading figure among his more moderate colleagues in the episcopate. In Chile, Manuel Larraín supported the Christian Democrats, and increased ministries to the working class. These successes enabled both in their promotion of a region-wide Latin American Episcopal Conference (CELAM). CELAM held its first plenary meeting in Rio de Janeiro in 1955. This organizational framework provided a forum for new cooperation among Latin American bishops toward policies of development. Top Latin American bishops got behind an emerging mission to address social inequality, exclusion, and poverty in the region, often sidelining the older battle against secularization. Added to the endogenous changes within Latin America, including JEC, JOC, Christian Democratic Parties, and progressive leadership of CELAM, was a new pope. Pope John XXIII’s (1958–1963) call for a fresh wind to update the Church to the modern world encouraged developments in Latin America. John XXIII published Mater et magistra (1961) calling for social justice and integration of the poor, and he seconded this call in his opening of the Second Vatican Council in 1962. Then, in 1963, his encyclical Pacem in terris called for international cooperation instead of Cold War hostility. Vatican II endeavored to rework the definition of the Church, moving it from identification with the hierarchy toward unity of all the faithful, the pilgrim people of God, whose

Catholicism, Revolution, and Counter-Revolution   185 mission was to journey alongside the world. The 1968 plenary session of CELAM in Medellín, Colombia, applied these findings to a Latin American situation. This was a major victory for the progressive sector of the Latin American leadership. The official documents produced by the bishops at Medellín ensconced the position of the Church as the people of God. It helped forge a new pastoral strategy focused on critiquing the prevailing system of social exclusion and poverty, and exposed the corporate nature of sin as reflected in social inequities.41 These institutional and leadership changes gave life to grassroots change. In Brazil, under Dom Hélder Câmara, so-called Base Ecclesial Communities (CEBs, Comunidades Eclesiales de Base) grew during the late 1950s and 1960s. These were essentially parishbased local meetings of Catholics to study scripture, support one another, and contextualize the gospel within their local communities. The base communities expanded after Medellín with official support from clergy and many bishops. By 1978, there were some 150,000–200,000 CEBs in Latin America.42 Moreover, an intellectual critique of Catholic Action also emerged. Former Catholic Action leaders such as Gustavo Gutiérrez in Peru provided a framework for a movement away from developmentalism as a strategy to address Latin American poverty. After the council, their theological positions radicalized, especially in response to increasingly repressive military regimes. Dissatisfaction with state-directed economic development grew from the grassroots, as lay Catholics participated in programs of consciousness-raising (concientización), developed by Paulo Freire in the context of literacy campaigns in Brazil, but later adapted to the CEBs to help “discern the signs of the times.”43 CEBs became forums where gospel-oriented critiques of Latin American societies emerged. Using Marxist social analysis as a basis for understanding dependency and the failure of development, many priests called for liberation as a guiding theme to the pastoral strategy of the Church. The movement represented a shift, detaching the Church from relations with the state, and taking the side of poor, the dispossessed, and those who were oppressed by political systems that excluded them from participation in society. The emerging liberationist perspective developed in dialogue with Protestant intellectuals and theologians in the region. In the mid-1950s, main-line Protestant missionaries in Latin America echoed much of the dissatisfaction with developmentalist strategies, embodied in American-led projects like John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress. Led by Presbyterian missionary Richard Shaull in Brazil, an organization called Church and Society in Latin America (ISAL) developed a “theology of revolution,” which sought to articulate a Christian strategy of rapid and radical social transformation.44 Although the theology did not necessarily endorse the use of violence, Shaull, with the support of the World Council of Churches based in Geneva, provided an institutional forum in which many young theologians were able to develop their ideas. Between 1965 and 1968, ISAL became a location were Catholic and Protestants theologians such as Gutiérrez, Juan Luis Segundo, and Luis Alberto Gómez de Souza met, exchanged ideas, and pushed their critiques of dependency theory in new, more progressive directions. After the Medellín conference, Gutiérrez and Rubem Alves, a Brazilian Protestant and seminary student at Princeton, were invited to a meeting in Switzerland.45

186   Stephen J. C. Andes Gutiérrez had been given the title of his paper by the organizing committee: “The Meaning of Development.” However, on the plane to Europe, Gutiérrez changed the title of the presentation to “Notes on a Theology of Liberation.” At the conference, Alves and Gutiérrez recognized that they were thinking similarly, that “the question is not development, but how to break dependency and create conditions for radical social transformation.”46 They presented jointly at the conference, and thereafter, participated in numerous subsequent meetings that brought together the leading theologians from the region. These included Hugo Assman, Juan Luis Segundo, José Míguez Bonino, and Julio de Santa Ana. Within this context emerged a multitude of publications, articulating an emerging “theology of liberation.”47 The development of a liberationist perspective encompassed a growing set of concerns about the place of the Church in the world, the nature of salvation, history, and a new pastoral strategy. Essentially, Gutiérrez and others reversed the traditional way of doing theology, arguing that praxis, living out the gospel in society, should be the true starting point of theology, instead of a traditional approach that privileged intellectual principles.48 For them, the mission of the believer and, by implication, the Church was to emulate Christ’s identification with the poor, and to participate in the liberation of the human person. This “praxis” of liberation, then, led to a need to understand the social impediments to freedom, the structural sins, institutional violence, and social inequality, which stunted the social and spiritual growth of individuals and communities. Thus, liberation theology provided a context in which dialogue with Marxism could be fruitful for both Christians and the political left.49

The Catholic Church and the Cold War in Latin America: Nicaragua In the 1970s and 1980s, liberation theology came under fire from both an ascendant CELAM leadership and from the Vatican during the pontificate of John Paul II (1978–2005). Meanwhile, insurgent movements spread in Central America, testing both the Church hierarchies in the region and the emerging Catholic progressive and radical sectors. Bishops would be challenged by the profound tensions caused by the implications of revolutionary change. On the one hand, Central American bishops became increasingly critical of long-­ standing and corrupt regimes. On the other hand, prelates remained fearful of the threat of Marxist-Leninist ideology promoted by revolutionary movements. Progressive and radicals risked censure from bishops if they collaborated too closely with leftists, but were also in danger from counter-revolutionary repression and right-wing paramilitaries. Thus, Central America became an important region in which reforms initiated at Vatican II and at the CELAM conferences of 1968 and 1979 were severely tested. At Puebla in 1979, the bishops had officially endorsed the “preferential option for poor”

Catholicism, Revolution, and Counter-Revolution   187 as the mission for the Latin American Church. But what exactly did that mean? On all sides, Catholics interpreted the mission of the Church in the last quarter of the twentieth century according to conscience and institutional necessity. In the summer of 1979, a second wave of insurgency in Latin America, initiated after the Cuban Revolution, culminated in the victory of the Frente Sandinista Liberación Nacional (FSLN, or Sandinistas) in Nicaragua.50 The revolutionary success of the Sandinistas came after a long process of social and political conflict in the country. The victory was not an inevitable outcome. Four important factors enabled the Sandinistas to do what numerous other insurgent movements in the region had failed to accomplish: topple a dictator and establish a revolutionary government.51 First, the ruling Somoza family (established by Anastasio Somoza García, followed by his two sons, Luis Somoza Debayle and Anastasio Somoza Debayle) suffered a crisis of legitimacy in the 1960s and 1970s. When a massive earthquake shook Nicaragua in 1972, the government’s ineffective and plutocratic response prompted widespread dissatisfaction with the regime. Corrupt officials stole foreign aid earmarked for disaster relief, which damaged support among the middle class. Moreover, repression and human rights violations increased under the junior Anastasio Somoza. In 1978, A leading voice for the opposition, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, editor of the Managua daily La Prensa and scion one of Nicaragua’s most lionized families, was assassinated in retaliation for articles he had published critical of the government; this precipitated increased support for the opposition against the Somoza regime Second, the FSLN, organized in the early 1960s, changed strategies, abandoned the tactic of mounting a vanguard insurgency, and developed support among the urban lower and middle classes as well as among rural peasants, building a broad-based coalition of opposition forces. These included progressive elements in the Church, such as CEBs, Catholic youth and university students, so-called Ministers of the Word (lay preachers), and numerous members of the religious clergy, sisters, and lay coworkers (Dominicans, Salesians, Jesuits, Maryknollers, and Capuchins). Reforms initiated at Vatican II and Medellín were metabolized by foreign-born clergy, missionaries, and were disseminated in social action programs and parish study groups. Thus, the process of organizational renewal within the Nicaraguan Church was accompanied by a politicization of a strengthening “popular Church,” developed in dialogue with FSLN leftists and radicals, who viewed the Somoza regime as illegitimate and anti-Christian. By January 1977, the Nicaraguan hierarchy, led by Archbishop of Managua, Miguel Obando y Bravo, published a document decrying government abuses against its citizens, including Church people, pronouncing that a “state of terror” existed in the nation. The following year, the bishops supported the moral legitimacy of armed insurrection to oust Somoza. Third, the backing of Cuba and other Latin American nations aided the FSLN in garnering broad-based support both nationally and internationally. Finally, the administration of US President Jimmy Carter proved crucial. When the Sandinistas took Managua in July 1979, Anastasio Somoza Debayle fled the country, and Carter recognized the legitimacy of the new Government of National Reconstruction.52

188   Stephen J. C. Andes The initial unity of the Catholic Church in opposition to the Somoza regime splintered relatively quickly after the Sandinistas took power. Two extremes buffeted the attitudes of Catholics toward the revolutionary state. First, priests, sisters, and lay activists participated in the Government of National Reconstruction. Miguel D’Escoto, a Maryknoll priest, was named Foreign Minister. A diocesan priest, Ernesto Cardenal (originally trained as a Trappist), took up a position as Minister of Culture. The Jesuit Xabier Gorostiaga worked in national planning, while another Jesuit, and brother of Ernesto, Fernando Cardenal, became director of the national literacy campaign, and later Minister of Education. Edgard Parrales first served as Minister of Social Welfare, and then was appointed Nicaraguan Ambassador to the Organization of American States. Other priests and lay Catholics took up positions as well, supporting the Sandinistas’ reformist project.53 Second, the Nicaraguan hierarchy gave qualified support for the Sandinistas, but in November 1979 cautioned against the risks and dangers of the revolutionary process, criticized the national literacy campaign as a potential source for the spread of Marxist ideology, and urged the FSLN to build a multi-party and pluralistic political system. Qualified support moved quickly to open opposition. Although priests helped direct many of the Sandinista reform projects, Archbishop Obando y Bravo feared the development of a one-party state, and the implementation of public education, aspects of agrarian reform, and compulsory military service. Many of the native-born diocesan clergy, Protestant evangelical and Pentecostal churches, and communities of Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Seventh-Day Adventists seconded the hard line of the episcopate, while more liberal Protestant groups, such most of them affiliated with CEPAD, the Council of Protestant Churches of Nicaragua), strongly supported the Sandinistas. Conservative Protestants opposed the Sandinistas on issues of anti-communism, military service, and public education.54 The Maryknoll Sisters decried human rights violations against Nicaraguan people, an activist stance initiated during the Somoza regime, and continued under the Sandinistas.55 By the early 1980s, Catholic participation in counter-revolutionary activities increased, as the Vatican under Pope John Paul II encouraged the Nicaraguan bishops’ opposition to the Sandinistas. Political identities split between those in favor of the Sandinistas, many of whom viewed Christian principles within the reformist projects of the government, and those who opposed the government. Moreover, Archbishop (and later, Cardinal) Obando sought to reign in the radical elements of the Church, placing one parish community under interdict (i.e., a ban on ritual worship, including Holy Communion) for allegedly roughing up a bishop who had gone to remove the Eucharist from a Church occupied by lay Catholic protesters.56 In 1982, John Paul II sent a letter to the Nicaraguan hierarchy supporting their critical posture, and exhorting the faithful against divisiveness and class hatred. A year later, the pope made a brief visit to Nicaragua, where he gave two public homilies, supporting parents’ right to choose how to educate their children, and excoriated the progressive sector of the Church for being too ideological, radical, and out of step with the national bishops. He also publicly chided liberationist priest Ernesto Cardenal to that he “must fix his affairs with the Church;” at a large outdoor Mass later in the visit, Sandinista cadres attempted to drown out the pope with political slogans.

Catholicism, Revolution, and Counter-Revolution   189 After Pope John Paul’s visit to Central America, the Vatican ordered that clergy must suspend their priestly duties while served in political offices. Priests who served in the government were allowed to retain their holy orders as long as they did not exercise sacramental duties while in civil service. As the administration of US President Ronald Reagan threw its support behind the coalition of armed counter-revolutionaries, the socalled Contras, Nicaraguan bishops developed contacts with right-wing political groups in the United States. As external enemies to the government grew in strength, the Sandinistas began deporting priests and nuns associated with the opposition in Nicaragua. Yet by the late 1980s, North American and European bishops critical of the Reagan policy of arming the Contras began to exert their influence on the Vatican, resulting in a new effort at detente facilitated by the papal nuncio in Managua. As other Central American leaders called for broad-based talks between all parties, Cardinal Obando was positioned to act as a mediator. In 1990, elections were held favoring the National Opposition Union, and the Sandinistas were voted out of power.57

The Catholic Church between Revolution and Counter-Revolution The typology set out at the beginning of this chapter—conservative, moderate, progressive, radical—enable an appreciation of change and continuity over time. Seemingly, the radical position of some Catholics appeared new: the use of violence in the cause of revolution for the extension of the Christian cause. However, on closer examination, Catholics had used violence for political and religious ends throughout the history of the Latin American Church. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Cristeros in Mexico— conservatives and counter-revolutionaries—used violence waged in a “just war” against an anticlerical revolution. The pendulum swung from conservative radicalism at the beginning of the century, to revolutionary and progressive radicalism at the end of it. What truly appears significant in the relationship between Catholics and revolution after Vatican II was that the vast majority of clergy—bishops included—shifted into more moderate and progressive views toward social change. The conservatism of the post-conciliar Church certainly referenced the same institutional concerns as before, but even for them, the liberationist challenge had forced a reconceptualization of the Church’s mission in the world. The Catholic Church in Latin America in the waning years of the century, and into the next millennium, continued to debate the meaning of the “preferential option for the poor,” often appropriating and diffusing the radical edge of its original intent, yet still moving the Church in a more socially conscious trajectory. A final comment helps bring this last point into focus. When Jorge Mario Bergoglio, elected Pope Francis in March 2013, served as Jesuit provincial in Argentina during the years of the military dictatorship, he was viewed as a theological conservative.58 Unlike many of his Jesuit subordinates, he did not embrace a liberationist perspective. Bergoglio distanced himself from radical activism, and has even been accused of complicity, or at

190   Stephen J. C. Andes least silence, as the military imprisoned and tortured priests under his control.59 Bergoglio flatly denied these accusations in the Argentine press, arguing that he had provided protection for seminarians and priests in the Jesuit residence in Buenos Aires, and worked with the resources and influence at his disposal to calm tensions with government authorities. As Francis conceded, his vision of the Church’s mission during the period was not as radical as many other Jesuits. However, his subsequent biography sheds light on the evolving position of the institutional Church in Latin America.60 First as archbishop of Buenos Aires, then as cardinal, Bergoglio evidenced a concern for social inequality in Argentina, especially as the economy crashed and rampant unemployment racked society after 2001. He reflects the synthesis of Cold War Catholicism: conservative on hot button issues such as gay marriage, abortion, contraception, and a married priesthood, but cognizant of the continuing need for a pastoral renewal focused on bettering the lot of the poor, the unemployed, and the victims of economic globalization. The coming of Latin America’s pope was forged in the region’s violent and bloody twentieth century.

Notes 1. Gerald Segal’s, The World Affairs Companion: The Essential One-Volume Guide to Global Issues (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 233. 2. Residual violence in Colombia continued until 1964; see Marco Palacios, Between Legitimacy and Violence: A History of Colombia, 1875–2002, trans. Richard Stoller (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 136; Michelle Chase, “The Trials: Violence and Justice in the Aftermath of the Cuban Revolution,” in A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America’s Long Cold War, eds. Greg Grandin and Gilbert M. Joseph (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 167; Robert Sierakowski, “Nicaraguan Revolution, 1970s–1980s,” in The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, ed. Immanuel Ness (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell, 2009); Iain S. Maclean, ed., Reconciliation, Nations and Churches in Latin America (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 7, 11, 14, 17, 23. 3. James  K.  Wellman, Jr., “Religion and Violence: Past, Present, and Future,” in Belief and Bloodshed: Religion and Violence across Time and Tradition, ed. J. K. Wellman Jr. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 5. 4. John Schwaller, The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America: From Conquest to Revolution and Beyond (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2011), 243–244. 5. María Gabriela Aguirre Cristiani, ¿Una historia compartida? Revolución mexicana y catolicismo social, 1913–1924 (Mexico City: IMDOSOC, 2008), 64–67; Lisa Marie Edwards, “Latin American Seminary Reform: Modernization and the Preservation of the Catholic Church.” The Catholic Historical Review 95, no.2 (April 2009), 261–282. 6. Manuel Ceballos Ramírez, Historia de Rerum Novarum en México (1867–1931), Tomo I: Estudios (Mexico City: IMDOSOC, 2004), 41–61. 7. Randall S. Hanson, “The Day of Ideals:’ Catholic Social Action in the Age of the Mexican Revolution, 1867–1929” (PhD diss., Indiana University-Bloomington, 1994), 133–134, 290–293. 8. Stephen  J.  C.  Andes, “A Catholic Alternative to Revolution: The Survival of Social Catholicism in Postrevolutionary Mexico,” The Americas 68, no.4 (April 2012), 529–562.

Catholicism, Revolution, and Counter-Revolution   191 9. Alicia Olivera Sedano, Aspectos del conflicto religioso de 1926 a 1929: sus antecedentes y sus consecuencias (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1966), 48–50. 10. Robert Curley, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Catholics and the Political Sphere in Revolutionary Mexico” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2001), 198–200. 11. Robert E. Quirk, The Mexican Revolution and the Catholic Church, 1910–1929 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1973), 50–55. 12. Alan Knight, “The Mentality and Modus Operandi of Revolutionary Anticlericalism,” in Faith and Impiety in Revolutionary Mexico, ed. Matthew Butler (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 26–29. 13. The best survey in English is still Jean Meyer, The Cristero Rebellion: The Mexican People between Church and State, 1926–1929, trans. Richard Southern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 14. Jennie Purnell, Popular Movements and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico: The Agraristas and Cristeros of Michoacán (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 96. 15. Stephen J. C. Andes, The Vatican and Catholic Activism in Mexico and Chile: The Politics of Transnational Catholicism, 1920–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 87–99. 16. David C. Bailey, ¡Viva Cristo Rey! The Cristero Rebellion and the Church-State Conflict in Mexico (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1974), Chapter 9. 17. Purnell, Popular Movements, 96. 18. Matthew Butler, “Keeping the Faith in Revolutionary Mexico: Clerical and Lay Resistance to Religious Persecution, East Michoacán, 1926–1929,” The Americas 59, no.1 (July 2002), 10. 19. Julio de la Cueva, “Religious Persecution, Anticlerical Tradition and Revolution: On Atrocities against the Clergy during the Spanish Civil War,” Journal of Contemporary History 33, no.3 (1998), 355. 20. Butler, “Keeping the Faith,” 31. 21. Ben Fallaw, Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 15–19. 22. Ramón Jrade, “Inquiries into the Cristero Insurrection against the Mexican Revolution,” Latin American Research Review 20, no.2 (1985), 53–69. 23. Jean Meyer, La Cristiada, 3 vols. (Mexico City: Siglo XXI Editores, 1973–1974; Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 24. Purnell, Popular Movements, 73–110. 25. Matthew Butler, Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico’s Cristero Rebellion: Michoacán, 1927–29 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 2–13, 214. 26. Fallaw, Religion and State Formation, 2, 10–12. 27. Margaret Crahan, “Religion and Revolution: Cuba and Nicaragua,” Wilson Center, Latin American Program Working Papers, no. 174 (1987), 4–5. 28. Margaret Crahan, “Fidel Castro, the Catholic Church and Revolution in Cuba,” in Church and Politics in Latin America, ed. Dermot Keogh (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 256. 29. Ibid., 257. 30. Crahan, “Religion and Revolution,” 9. The education issue was tied to an increasingly racialized discourse of anti-communism among exiles to the United States, as the Cuban government began mandating the forced desegregation of social and educational institutions and clubs; see Devyn Spence Benson, “Owning the Revolution: Race, Revolution, and Politics from Havana to Miami, 1959–1963,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 4, no.2 (2012), 1–30. 31. Crahan, “Fidel Castro,” 253; Crahan, “Religion and Revolution,” 12.

192   Stephen J. C. Andes 32. Crahan, “Fidel Castro,” 258. 33. John  M.  Kirk, “From Counterrevolution to Modus Vivendi: The Church in Cuba, ­1959–1984,” in Cuba: Twenty-Five Years of Revolution, 1959–1984, eds. Sandor Halebsky and John M. Kirk (New York, NY: Praeger, 1985), 93–113. 34. Crahan, “Fidel Castro,” 261–262. 35. Aviva Chomsky, A History of the Cuban Revolution (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 184. 36. Crahan, “Fidel Castro,” 253–257. 37. Ana María Bidegain, “From Catholic Action to Liberation Theology: The Historical Process of the Laity in Latin America in the Twentieth Century,” The Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame, Working Paper 48 (November 1985), 1–26. 38. John F. Pollard, “Pius XI’s Promotion of the Italian Model of Catholic Action in the WorldWide Church,” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 63, no.4 (October 2012), 776. 39. Madeleine Adriance, “Opting for the Poor: A Social-Historical Analysis of the Changing Brazilian Catholic Church.” Sociological Analysis 46, no.2 (Summer 1985), 131–146. 4 0. Andes, The Vatican and Catholic Activism, 214–224. 41. Christian Smith, The Emergence of Liberation Theology: Radical Religion and Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), Chapter 7. 4 2. Ibid., 19–20. 4 3. Ibid., 176–177. 4 4. Angel  D.  Santiago-Vendrell, Contextual Theology and Revolutionary Transformation in Latin America: The Missiology of M. Richard Shaull (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2010), 85. 4 5. Paul E. Sigmund, Liberation Theology at the Crossroads: Democracy or Revolution? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 31. 4 6. Smith, Emergence, 176–177. 47. Ibid., 116–117. 48. Gustavo Gutiérrez, “Notes for a Theology of Liberation,” Theological Studies 31, no.2 (June 1970), 243–261. 4 9. Smith, Emergence, 25–50; Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation; History, Politics, and Salvation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988 [1971]), 8, 60. 50. On the “waves” of Latin American insurgency, see Timothy P. Wickam-Crowley, Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America: A Comparative Study of Insurgents and Regimes since 1956 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), especially Chapter 9. 51. Hal Brands, Latin America’s Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 165. 52. Schwaller, History of the Catholic Church, 254–256. 53. Margaret Crahan, “Religion and Politics in Revolutionary Nicaragua,” in Scott Mainwaring and Alexander Wilde, eds., The Progressive Church in Latin America (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 41–63. 54. Phillip  J.  Williams, “The Catholic Church in the Nicaraguan Revolution: Differing Responses and New Challenges,” in Progressive Church in Latin America, eds. Scott Mainwaring and Alexander Wilde (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), “68–79; Crahan, “Religion and Politics in Revolutionary Nicaragua,” 50–51. 55. Penny Lernoux, Hearts on Fire: The Story of the Maryknoll Sisters (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011), 239. 56. Crahan, “Religion and Politics in Revolutionary Nicaragua,” 49. The Catholic Church holds that the Eucharist, after its sanctification by the priest during Holy Mass, is transformed into the literal body of Christ, and the communion wine likewise is transformed

Catholicism, Revolution, and Counter-Revolution   193 into the blood of Christ. This doctrine (known as “transubstantiation”) is an essential understanding of the mechanism by which grace is imparted to the faithful through Holy Communion. Great care and reverence are shown to the Eucharist after its sanctification, and thus the protest at the church and the physical threat to the bishop represented a serious affront to Catholic worship. 57. Schwaller, History of the Catholic Church, 257–258; Crahan, “Religion and Revolution,” 13–14. 58. Jeffrey Klaiber, SJ, The Jesuits in Latin America, 1549–2000: 450 Years of Inculturation, Defense of Human Rights, and Prophetic Witness (St. Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2009), 298–299. 59. Horacio Verbitsky, El silencio. De Paulo VI a Bergoglio. Las relaciones secretas de la iglesia con la ESMA (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2005), 58–61. 60. Sergio Rubin and Francesca Ambrogetti, El Papa Francisco. Conversaciones con Jorge Bergoglio (Buenos Aires: Ediciones B, 2013).

chapter 11

Bishops, Pr iests, a n d CEL A M Erika Helgen

In their “Message to the Peoples of Latin America,” the Catholic bishops gathered at the 1968 Medellín episcopal conference declared: As Latin Americans, we share the history of our people. The past definitively identifies us as Latin Americans; the present places us in a decisive crossroads, and the future requires of us a creative labor in the process of development.1

This bold statement of their ecclesial identity defined their status as particularly Latin American bishops, with a shared history and common duty to engage and develop their community. In the past, the Latin American Catholic Church had not regarded itself as distinct in identity or mission. The sheer geographical size of the continent, combined with underdeveloped transportation and communication networks, ensured that for centuries Latin America’s clergy had operated in isolation from one another, with little sense of belonging to a broader regional community. In the place of horizontal relationships between clergy and churches, vertical relationships among priests, bishops, and Rome dominated ecclesial life. These norms began to change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as councils, conferences, and organizational meetings brought bishops and priests together. The intensification of contacts heightened awareness of the uniquely Latin American issues that faced the Catholic Church. This chapter addresses how priests and bishops responded to these issues, and how such responses shaped their own experience, self-image, and mission as ecclesial leaders. The history of the Latin American clergy in the twentieth century consists essentially of two related processes: (1) the development of a uniquely Latin American ecclesial identity, and (2) the evolution of the pastoral role of priests and bishops. This work examines these processes in the context of the shifting social, political, and ecclesial situation of the twentieth century, focusing on the creation of new forms of clerical and episcopal organization, such as the Latin American Episcopal Conference, Consejo

196   Erika Helgen Episcopal Latinoamericano, CELAM], as well as the emergence of new ideas regarding clerical training, pastoral care, and hierarchical obedience. This chapter argues that such developments not only shaped the way in which priests and bishops approached social and political issues, but also affected how they thought about the most basic ecclesiological questions regarding the Catholic Church’s nature and mission. Throughout this period of transformation, Latin American Catholics projected their influence beyond their immediate national and regional churches to shape the future of the universal Church as a whole.

CELAM and the Development of a Latin American Clerical Identity The first attempts to organize the Latin American Catholic clergy as a cohesive group did not originate from the region’s Church leaders themselves, but rather from Rome. The nineteenth century was full of challenges for the Church. Ideas associated with liberalism, secularism, positivism, and atheism threatened the Church’s moral authority, while the rise of liberal state regimes undermined its political strength. The Church saw itself as participating in an epic struggle against the forces of godless disorder that threatened the traditional fabric of society, and believed that its divine duty was to employ all of its energy, strength, and resources in an effort to ward off impending chaos. Priests and bishops, as the direct representatives of Church authority, were the first line of defense.2 However, by the second half of the nineteenth century, Vatican authorities examining the state of the priesthood in Latin America found it woefully unprepared to meet the challenges of the new era. They viewed Latin American priests as backward, uneducated, morally lax, and lacking respect for their hierarchical superiors. The reputation of Latin American priests was so poor that Rome believed that this caused the Church’s other “crisis”: the shortage of priests. As Lisa M. Edwards has noted, the Vatican believed that “if the clergy was not respected, the people would be less likely to follow its moral exhortations, and parents would be less likely to encourage their sons to enter the priesthood.”3 In response, the Church implemented wide-ranging reforms aimed at modernizing and professionalizing the Latin American clergy. Central to these reforms was the curricular overhaul of seminary education with additional courses and lengthened subjects. Using European and North American seminaries as models, Latin American seminary rectors renewed emphasis on clerical discipline, scholastic theological education, language training, and Catholic social doctrine. New seminaries were founded, many which brought together seminarians from disparate dioceses, consolidating seminary education and promoting national unity (and uniformity) amongst Latin American priests. However, the most famous new seminary was not in Latin America, but in Rome. Founded in 1858, this Colegio Pío Latino Americano brought the region’s most promising seminarians together to give them an orthodox, Roman Catholic

Bishops, Priests, and CELAM   197 education. Graduates became the bishops, archbishops, and cardinals who would lead the future Latin American Church.4 Seminary reform was one part of a broader project known as “Romanization.”5 In the nineteenth century, as emerging Latin American republics severed official ChurchCrown relationships, ties between Latin American national churches and the Vatican were reinforced. The Holy See used its newfound influence in the region to promote a series of “Romanizing” reforms with two main goals: (1) to strengthen Vatican control over local churches, and (2) to make the Latin American Church more orthodox and modern. This effort was at once an administrative and cultural project, seeking to “purify” Latin American religious culture through the privileging of “universal” (that is, “European”) devotions, liturgical practices, and organizational structures over their national counterparts. Romanized attempts to generate a specifically “Latin American” Church were less about cultivating a Latin American Catholic ecclesial or cultural identity than about bringing the Latin American Church more firmly under Roman influence, both hierarchically and culturally. In this spirit, the Vatican convoked the 1899 Latin American Plenary Council in Rome.6 This first-ever meeting of Latin American bishops represented a key moment in the development of the Latin American Church; for the first time, Latin American bishops came together as a cohesive group, met one another, and saw themselves in regional terms. Yet the most immediate effect was to bring the Latin American bishops closer to Rome, and to ensure that the issues important to the central hierarchy were taken seriously. The next official gathering of the Latin American hierarchy would not take place for another fifty-six years. This time, however, the hierarchy created a lasting institution that had a profound effect on the future of the Latin American Church: the Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano, or CELAM. Still, the groundbreaking nature of CELAM was not immediately apparent. When it was founded at a 1955 conference in Rio de Janeiro, the organization seemed as if it would be a mere extension of Romanizing reform projects begun nearly a century before. Vatican officials predetermined the conference agenda, which consisted of age-old issues: the lack of priests and of clerical vocations, the decline in religious piety and fervor, the ignorance and superstitions of the faithful, and the Church’s many historic “enemies,” such as liberals, Masons, Protestants, Spiritists, and atheists. The conference’s concluding document was a bit more forward-looking, giving more attention to “the Social Question” and the role of Catholic social doctrine in addressing the crises brought on by rapid industrialization and urbanization. In a rather unconventional move, the text also spoke of the need to improve, in both quantitative and qualitative terms, the Church’s presence in indigenous communities, in order to ensure that “indigenous persons and possessions be sheltered and protected, always and everywhere.”7 For the most part, however, the conference was a reflection of the Romanizing concerns of the previous century. The bishops emphasized a defensive strategy meant to combat the Church’s competitors, control social tensions, strengthen top-down ecclesiastical hierarchies, and “purify” the faith of a supposedly superstitious and heterodox laity.

198   Erika Helgen Thus, CELAM was originally intended as simply an organizational body to better coordinate and communicate between Latin American church leaders and to achieve the conference’s goals with more precision and efficiency, all while remaining under the watchful eye of the Vatican. In this spirit, the conference endowed the Council with four defined functions: (1) to study the issues facing the Latin American Church; (2) to coordinate the Church’s activities in the region; (3) to promote and aid Catholic charitable organizations; and (4) to prepare future conferences. There was little sense that CELAM would be anything more than a conduit through which Vatican directives and traditionalist reform projects would be implemented in Latin America.8 Nevertheless, the creation of a permanent transnational leadership organization headquartered in Latin America, not Rome, was a deeply significant development. Bishops and priests who were previously organized into individual dioceses and archdioceses, each reporting directly to Rome were now part of a wider regional network that crossed national borders. Similarly, members of religious orders (both male and female) were now part of a transnational organization, the Confederation of Latin American Religious (CLAR), whose creation the Vatican had approved in 1959. The shift had both concrete and intangible consequences. The annual meetings of CELAM and CLAR, as well as the various works of their advisory councils and study commissions, were opportunities for bishops, priests, men and women religious, and theologians to meet one another, exchange ideas, and form new networks of communication. More importantly, clerics, women and men religious, and other laypersons could now begin to view themselves as Latin American ecclesial leaders, with a mission at once common and unique. Yet the creation of a uniquely Latin American ecclesial identity—what Edward Cleary called the “Latinamericanization” of the Church—was not a foregone conclusion.9 Though the structures were in place, the sense of a common unique mission did not exist. This started to grow gradually over the following years, until it was “jolted into existence” by one of the most important events of Catholic history: the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council. The significance of this historic gathering of prelates is difficult to overstate. Convoked by the newly elected John XXIII (October 1958–June 1963) and held from 1962 to 1965, this Council dramatically changed the Church’s relationship with modern society.10 Catholicism would now embrace the world, reforming itself in order to better interpret and respond to the “signs of the times.”11 These Vatican II reforms were wide-­ ranging as they were game-changing: priests would celebrate Mass in the vernacular, rather than in Latin; the Church would foster respectful and ­collaborative relationships with non-­Catholic churches and secular groups; theologians would abandon purely Thomistic formulaic approaches and promote broader theologies—some that Vatican authorities had previously deemed heterodox. The very nature of the Church would change; from a top-down model that emphasized rigid hierarchies and clerical primacy to a model that saw the Church as a “People of God” and promoted horizontal leadership structures and lay participation. The Church would become a place in which “all are called to sanctity and have received an equal privilege of faith through the justice of God.”12 Of the 2,860 bishops who attended the Council, 601 were from Latin America. During three years of Council sessions, Latin American ecclesial leaders strengthened and

Bishops, Priests, and CELAM   199 expanded the connections that had been previously forged at the annual meetings of  CELAM. Under the leadership of Chilean Bishop Manuel Larraín and Brazilian Archbishop Dom Hélder Câmara, Latin American Council participants in Vatican II began to view themselves—and to be viewed by other Council fathers—as a cohesive group.13 While the Latin Americans did not have a decisive impact on the larger Council, they did influence a number of of the Vatican II documents, particularly those that dealt with social justice, such as Gaudium et Spes (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World)14 Furthermore, the Council’s support of collegiality—the doctrine that bishops, in communion with the pope, have “supreme and full power over the universal church”—gave episcopal conferences such as CELAM new importance.15 As a result, CELAM was no longer limited to administrative and coordinative responsibilities; instead, it functioned as an authoritative voice on theological, ecclesiastical, and social issues.

“Go to the People”: Social Justice, Human Rights, and the Clergy In 1965, the Vatican II participants returned to Latin America, they were determined to implement the Council’s reforms in their dioceses and parishes. However, as they examined the “signs of the times,” the region’s bishops confronted a reality very different from that encountered by European prelates. The primary challenges for the Catholic Church in Europe were secularization and religious indifference. In Latin America, secularization was of secondary importance; the issues of poverty, economic and social inequality, land concentration, and political repression were more urgent. As Pablo Richard, a Chilean theologian, declared “[i]n Europe, the theological challenge to the Church was the structural atheism of modern society and its proclamation of the death of God. In  Latin America, the theological challenge was exploitation and underdevelopment which was causing the death of the human being.”16 In the decades following Vatican II, the fight against injustice would become one of the chief activities defining clerical identity in Latin America. Before Latin American Catholics could denounce injustice and work towards eradication, they needed to become aware of the injustice itself. Vatican II had encouraged clergy to leave the isolation of the rectory and engage with the modern world. More than mere distributors of sacraments, the priests and bishops were to be authentic pastors, reaching out to their parishioners to serve their spiritual and social needs. But the Romanized seminaries in Latin America were not preparing priests for such work. Instead, these “closed seminaries” cultivated a self-contained culture designed to instill in priests an otherworldly that separated them from the laity. There was little emphasis on pastoral care or social awareness. As Dom Hélder Câmara described it, seminarians lived lives of constant contradiction, “prepar[ing] ourselves to serve the

200   Erika Helgen people by keeping our distance from them for years and years.”17 Such isolationism formed a clergy ill prepared to engage with Latin American society. Yet, the first calls for reform did not come from the Vatican Council fathers or CELAM bishops, but from the seminarians themselves. As Kenneth Serbin has shown, in the latter half of the 1950s—years before Vatican II commenced—seminarians in southern Brazil organized themselves in protest against the isolation and discipline of the “closed seminary.” Using the seminary newspaper, O Seminário, to disseminate their ideas, this reform movement quickly spread throughout the rest of the country. By the 1960s, the seminarians were demanding dramatic changes to seminary life and curricula, as they called for the professionalization of the ministry, the introduction of social sciences into seminary curriculum, and even the end to clerical celibacy. Above all, the seminarians wanted more pastoral training and closer contact with the outside world, especially with the poor. Their movement bore fruit: in 1967, the pioneering Instituto Teológico do Recife (ITER) was founded, which sent seminarians to live “among the people” in pequenas comunidades located in the poorest neighborhoods.18 Just as seminary students had precipitated reform, so too members of the clergy would “go to the people,” long before Vatican II or CELAM endorsed such a plan. After World War II, Latin America experienced the rise of labor unions, peasant leagues, popular fronts, and other organizations rallying for social and economic change, forming a movement in favor of “socialized democracy and democratized socialism.”19 There was a recognition that the ever-increasing inequality between the rich and the poor was a problem that needed to be aggressively addressed. While there was little agreement about the exact nature of needed reforms, it was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the extreme poverty and injustice that surrounded the clergy. Consequently, priests’ relationship with society changed as clerics became involved in emerging community movements. In Paraguay, priests became coordinators of Christian Agrarian Leagues providing economic services, cooperative support, mutual aid, and education to rural communities.20 In Peru, Maryknoll missionaries “turned the image of priests upside down by taking a pro-indigenous approach to mission, [by] initiating a range of sociopolitical programs and acting as models of integrity.”21 In Guatemala, Maryknollers, both male and female, promoted the cursillo movement in which groups of youth, clergy, and religious sisters “would meet to discuss their faith and social justice and would act to promote both.”22 In many cases, programs that ecclesiastical leaders had initially introduced in their dioceses with the hope that they would act as conservative (and even Romanizing) forces eventually evolved into vehicles for progressive change. This was especially evident in the case of Catholic Action (CA), which was present throughout Latin America, and particularly active in Brazil, Guatemala, and Chile. CA began as a top-down effort to create a lay apostolate that would “purify” local religious practices and protect the Catholic faithful from communist and Protestant influences.23 By the 1960s, members of CA, both clerical and lay, utilized this apostolate as an organizing tool to enable young Catholic students and workers to advance social and political change. Using the methodology of “see-judge-act,” which was first pioneered by Belgian priest Joseph Cardijn

Bishops, Priests, and CELAM   201 and his Young Christian Workers association (JOC), Latin American Catholics began to move away from earlier charitable and corporatist solutions to Latin American social ills, instead proposing more radical solutions to social questions. In 1968, CELAM held its second general conference in Medellín, Colombia. The fact that many Catholic social movements were well underway before 1968 does not diminish the importance of the Medellín conference. Medellín represented a key moment in the creation of a Latin American ecclesial identity, as it sought to place Vatican II reforms alongside emerging Latin American theological and social innovations, allowing them to illuminate one another. The title of the conference, “The Church in the Present-Day Transformation of Latin America in the Light of the Council,” was indicative of its broader significance.24 For many Latin American Catholics, Vatican II’s reconciliation of the Church with the modern world necessitated denouncing the evils of that world: poverty, inequality, and exploitation. While the term “preferential option for the poor” was not officially used until the 1979 Puebla Conference, one could see such an option present throughout the concluding document of Medellín. Gustavo Gutiérrez, the “father” of Latin American liberation theology, described Medellín’s significance in the following terms: “What is demanded by Medellin is to change the focus of the church—the center of its life and work—and to be present, really present, in the world of the poor—to commit the church to living in the world of the poor.”25 Medellín gave official support to Catholics already involved in social movements, and it inspired others to join existing movements or even to start new ones. For many priests and seminarians, this episcopal gathering represented a turning point in their pastoral journey. Not only did they now have permission to venture more boldly beyond the walls of their seminaries and rectories, but the Church’s new identity as a “Church of the Poor” seemed to demand such actions from its clerics. Medellín also changed the way progressive bishops viewed their role in both secular society and the wider universal Church. For the first time, these leaders saw that their collective statements had a broad impact on Catholic life throughout Latin America. Medellín’s final document was widely distributed throughout national and international communities; base communities discussed the conclusions, priests used it as a model upon which to build parish life, and its progressive spirit spread throughout the region. In the aftermath of the conference, the prophetic role of bishops was heightened, as prelates increasingly used their authority to condemn injustice, corruption, and violence. One of the bishops’ most important undertakings was to denounce human rights abuses committed by Latin American authoritarian regimes. As governments embarked upon increasingly violent campaigns of repression, torture, and counterinsurgency, the Catholic Church was often the only institution that had the resources and independence necessary to publicly contest the authority of dictatorial states. Brazilian bishops were some of the earliest voices speaking out against their country’s military regime; prelates in northeastern Brazil, such as Dom Hélder Câmara, clashed with state authorities from nearly the beginning of the dictatorship. In 1971, São Paulo archbishop Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns published the damning results of an investigation into the regime’s

202   Erika Helgen extensive use of torture. In the years that followed, the Conference of Brazilian Bishops (CNBB) would become one of the strongest voices defending human rights.26 In Chile, Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez and the Chilean national bishops’ conference published multiple open letters criticizing the Pinochet regime, while also supporting the creation of the human rights organization known as Vicaría de la Solidaridad.27 As was the case in many places, the Vicaría created in response to regime violence against everyday Chileans, also became a prime target for violence. Nowhere was this pattern of escalating government violence more tragically apparent than in El Salvador, where state-sponsored assassinations and forced disappearances compelled the once-moderate Monseñor Oscar Romero to publicly and passionately defend human rights and social justice, which brought him into direct conflict with the Salvadoran dictatorship and ultimately ended in his assassination. Not all episcopates entered into confrontational relationships with the state. In countries such as Argentina, anti-communist bishops cultivated a closer relationship with the military regime. Furthermore, recent scholarship has demonstrated that even in countries with outspoken anti-regime episcopates like Brazil, both conservative and progressive bishops participated in discussions and negotiations with military regimes in an attempt to reduce state-sponsored violence and torture.28 Bishops’ conferences not only significantly impacted national events, but also influenced the development of the universal Catholic Church as a whole. One of the first and most famous documents issued after Medellín was the Peruvian bishops’ “Justice in the World,” published on the eve of the world synod of bishops in 1971. The missive used unequivocal and bold language to support liberation theology and progressive social policies, declaring: [T]o construct a just society in Latin America and Peru is to be liberated from the present situation of dependency, oppression, and plunder in which the great majority of our people live. On the one hand, liberation implies the rupture with all that keeps persons from self-fulfillment, as an individual and in community; on the other hand, it means the construction of a new society which is more human and fraternal.29

In addition to making concrete “requests for government action,” the document also addressed itself to the world synod of bishops to call upon the universal Church to condemn injustice throughout the world. Accordingly, when the synod met in Rome in November 1971, the contribution of the Latin American bishops played a decisive role in shaping the tone of the conference. The final document reproduced both the spirit and many of the concrete reforms put forth in the Peruvian bishops’ preparatory document, which used liberationist language and imagery, giving unqualified support to the Church’s involvement in social justice movements. “Action on behalf of justice and participation in the transformation of the world fully appear to us as a constitutive dimension of the preaching of the gospel or, in other words, of the church’s mission for the redemption of the human race and its liberation from every oppressive situation.30

Bishops, Priests, and CELAM   203 Observers such as Alfred Hennelly could not help but note the “astonishing” t­ ransformation that had taken place since Vatican II; just a few years after being a marginal and largely overlooked presence at the Council, the Latin American Church was now a “confident and outspoken” force on the international Catholic stage.31 And while not all Latin American bishops’ conferences were as progressive as the Peruvian conference—some, such as the Colombian and Argentine conferences, were decidedly conservative and anti-liberationist—the progressive conferences would have the greatest impact on the international Church in the ensuing decades, and would come to represent the uniquely “Latin American model” for ecclesial and social reform.

The Clergy and the “Church of the People”: Toward a New Ecclesiology The role of bishops and priests in the social and political sphere was not the only element of clerical life that changed in the post-Medellín era. In a process that was in some ways even more conflictive than the Church’s encounter with Latin American social movements, the role of priests and bishops within the Church began to evolve. One of the most significant consequences of the Second Vatican Council was the shift that occurred in Catholic ecclesiology. Ecclesiology deals with questions of a seemingly intangible nature. Who is the Church? Where is the Church? What does it mean to be Church?32 These broad questions are fundamental to the Church’s very existence and, more importantly, are the true determinants of the worldly manifestation and mission of the Church. The answers to these ecclesiological questions determine the answers to another set of questions that are more concretely related to the Church’s worldly presence: How should the Church be structured? How is ecclesiastical authority exercised? What are the roles of bishops, priests, and the laity? At Vatican II, a dramatic shift in ecclesiological thinking took place. Instead of a Church whose identity was rooted in its institutional structures, with power concentrated in the pope, bishops, and priests, the Church rooted itself in the image of the “People of God” whose presence was found in the wider Catholic ecclesial community. This broader sense of the Church implied a more horizontal authority structure that emphasized participation and dialogue over subordination and obedience. Latin American Catholics not only embraced the idea of the Church as the People of God, they expanded upon it and, most importantly, put forth a concrete example of what such a Church could and should look like in the post–Vatican II world. Liberation theologians and progressive Catholics began to advocate for a “popular Church” or a “Church of the People,” which drew its wisdom, theology, mission, and authority from everyday lay Catholic men and women, the majority of whom were poor and oppressed.33 Theologians such as Leonardo Boff spoke of the creation of the popular Church as the “natural end” of the process begun at Vatican II, that is, the moment when the

204   Erika Helgen “hierarchology” that had pervaded Catholic identity for centuries was replaced by a more authentic expression of the Christian experience.34 While theologians developed the theoretical ecclesiological framework for the Church of the People of God, parish priests, in their pastoral and community work, provided the practical foundation upon which this vision of the Church could be built. One of the most direct manifestations of the popular Church’s vision were the Comunidades Eclesiales de Base (CEBs). Base communities were small groups of Catholic individuals and families that met once or twice a week to “hear the word of God . . . , share their comments on biblical passages, create their own prayers, and decide as a group what their tasks should be.”35 On the surface, groups of Catholics gathering to pray and reflect on the Bible were not performing an inherently radical act. However, base communities were far from the image of the passive, obedient, clergy-oriented organization that their description initially evoked. Instead, they were communities in which theological creativity, ecclesial autonomy, and lay leadership were meant to flourish. Their objective was to empower poor and marginalized Catholics, who society had traditionally deemed “insignificant,” “nameless,” and “irrelevant,” to be leaders of the Church, steering it toward the path of justice.36 Priests were supposed to listen to and learn from their poor parishioners, rather than give directives and demand obedience. This viewpoint, inspired by the popular pedagogical methodology of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire pervaded all CEB activities.37 For example, when the group studied the gospel message of the weekly Mass, group members would often propose their own exegeses of the Bible passages, relating the biblical stories to their personal lives and struggles. Progressive theologians and priests believed that the poor had a special knowledge—perhaps even a special purity (often expressed in the form of “simplicity”)— that made them uniquely qualified as moral and spiritual leaders. According to Nicaraguan priest Ernesto Cardenal, one of the pioneers and strongest supporters of popular theologizing, “the commentaries of the campesinos are usually of greater profundity than that of many theologians, but of a simplicity like that of the Gospel itself.” He went on to declare: “This is not surprising: the Gospel, or ‘Good News’ (to the poor), was written for them, and by people like them.”38 Rather than disqualify poor and marginalized individuals from contributing to the Church’s teaching office, poverty singularly endowed these Catholics with a privileged perspective from which to interpret the gospel message. Theology was not the only sphere in which priests ceded space to lay people. As priests became increasingly committed to building a popular Church, lay people in base communities began to take positions of administrative, pastoral, and even sacramental authority, performing tasks usually reserved for ordained clergy. Accordingly, the lay coordenador/a or animador/a of a CEB led celebrations of the Word, organized catechesis, visited the sick, and directed Bible studies.39 Theologians such as Leonardo Boff even suggested that, in addition to baptisms and marriages, coordenadores could also lead celebrations of the “Lord’s Supper,” which were ceremonies that closely resembled the Catholic Mass, complete with the distribution of bread and wine.40

Bishops, Priests, and CELAM   205 Although a priest or female religious might “start” a base community and be the initial impetus for its activities, a layperson would often “take over” the leadership by becoming the official coordenador/a or animador/a through democratic election. The democratic nature of base communities was fundamental; their “leitmotif ” was making all decisions through “votes, elections, [and] acclamations.”41 For liberationists, a clear contrast was created between base communities, in which everyone had an equal voice and decisions were made from below; and the hierarchical Church institution, in which laypersons were subordinate to the hierarchy and all decisions were imposed from above. Consequently, the role of the priest changed dramatically as barriers between clergy and laity eroded and weakened the clerical identity so painstakingly cultivated by the “closed seminaries” of the past century. This breakdown of the otherworldly clerical identity was not limited to Latin America; this post–Vatican II phenomenon occurred throughout the Catholic world. However, the Latin American experience demonstrated in unequivocal terms that this breakdown was not a mere “side effect” of the cultural forces unleashed by Vatican II, but rather part of a conscious movement on the part of both Latin American laypersons and priests to address injustice and inequality within the Church. Therefore, the evolution of clerical identity was neither passive in nature nor narrow in scope. Ultimately, priests sought to modify their positions, and the positions of their lay parishioners vis-à-vis the ecclesiastical hierarchy. As Carlos Mesters, a Dutch Carmelite who worked in base communities in Brazil, declared: The base communities represent a process that is developing in the direction of a new Church. Therefore, they should be identified as true Church, since they live in horizontal communion with one another, forming a renewal that calls into question the so-called vertical communion, in which the ecclesial base does not participate. As something new that arises, the people perceive the Ecclesial Base Communities [CEBs] as the “Church of the Gospel” in opposition to the “Church of Tradition.”42

Toward this end, theologians began to view base communities as a model upon which to a build a new version of the Church, in which vertical authority structures gave way to collective decision-making. This potentially radical project posed a direct threat to the conservative Catholic hierarchy. If the new model were to prevail the pope—along with his appointed cardinals and bishops—would no longer be the sole determiners of the Church’s theology, direction, and mission; the Catholic community as a whole, ­organized into and represented by base communities, would now have an authoritative voice. Not all base communities adhered to this ecclesiological vision; nor did all CEBs encourage popular exegesis, lay leadership, or other activities commonly associated with the popular Church. As many scholars have shown, some base communities could be vertically organized, dependent upon hierarchical structures, and representative of only a small sector of the local Church.43 Additionally, some priests saw base communities as little more than vehicles to more effectively organize and control their parishes, and many did not agree that their parishioners possessed theological, pastoral, or sacramental authority on a par with their own. Even in those base communities that did promote

206   Erika Helgen the popular Church model, members did not necessarily see themselves as creating new ecclesiological standards; even fewer viewed their communities as opposing the “official” hierarchical Church. However, this did not diminish the significance of the vision of the popular Church for the Latin American Church and, as time passed, for the universal Church as a whole. The horizontal ecclesiology manifested in base communities changed the ways Latin American priests interacted with their parishioners, as well as struck at the heart of a debate that was consuming the universal Church. In the years following the Second Vatican Council, so-called progressive and conservative theologians and clergy engaged in a struggle over the interpretation and implementation of the ideas expressed in the Council’s final documents. Progressives believed that the Council was more than the sum of its documents; they contended that there was a “spirit of Vatican II” that would continue to propel the Church toward further and more radical reforms, such as the democratic election of priests and bishops, an end to the absolute authority of the Magisterium, and more aggressive ecumenical initiatives.44 In the past, such discussions took place amongst European and North American theologians alone, and Latin Americans were expected to “import” their conclusions. However, by the 1970s, Latin American Catholics had reversed the traditional flow of Church knowledge and practice, and the former “peripheries” of the majority would become the new centers of theological and pastoral innovations that would now be imported by Europe and the United States. Latin American liberationists such as Gustavo Gutiérrez, Leonardo Boff, Jon Sobrino, and Enrique Dussel began to contribute to the main European progressive theological journals such as Concilium, and their thinking moved the discussions in new, and often more radical, directions.45 On a more fundamental level, the Latin American Church as a whole was becoming the model upon which Latin American and North American progressives constructed their ideal. European theologians such as Edward Schillebeeckx began to promote a “theology of basic communities” inspired by Latin American CEBs.46 North American priests such as Father Leo Mahon undertook “reverse missions” in which they introduced ideas and pastoral practices from Latin America to their home parishes in the United States.47 The center of post–Vatican II Catholicism was no longer in Europe, North America, or even Rome—it was in Latin America.

From Puebla to Santo Domingo: Conflict, Restoration, and the Clergy Yet, while the image of the Latin American Church being projected around the world was that of the progressive Iglesia popular, within Latin America itself there was great conflict over the Church’s mission and nature. Not all Catholics agreed with the direction the Latin American Church was taking. Almost immediately following the 1968

Bishops, Priests, and CELAM   207 Medellín conference, bishops who opposed the shift toward progressivism embarked on a campaign to reign in the liberationist reforms. A key turning point occurred in 1972, when conservative Archbishop Alfonso López Trujillo was elected secretary general of CELAM. The Colombian archbishop became the leader of the conservative opposition to liberation theology, and CELAM soon established itself as a strong defender of traditionalist ecclesiology and pastoral work. The role of the priest and his relationship with both the laity and his hierarchical superiors was of particular concern to conservatives. Throughout the 1970s, CELAM affiliates published articles and books criticizing progressive priests’ involvement in “Marxist” social movements, organized conferences promoting traditionalist pastoral roles, and brought together conservative theologians to form “Theological-Pastoral Reflection Teams” that condemned, among other things, base communities that fomented “tensions in relation to the hierarchy.”48 In this conflictive atmosphere, CELAM organized the 1979 Puebla Conference. Conservative Catholics viewed the conference as an opportunity to reverse the “excesses” of the previous decade, while liberationists saw it as a stage upon which to defend their ideas and projects, and perhaps even advance them. It was a “drama-filled” episcopal conference. Conflicts erupted before the conference even began. The conference’s preparatory document, written under the direction of López Trujillo, was so controversially conservative that the text had to be thrown out entirely and replaced by a new and more moderate document. National bishops’ conferences prepared their own position papers, which were dissected and analyzed by Catholic observers, eager to see which “side” they supported. Most notably, conference organizers sparked an uproar when they failed to appoint liberationist theologians as participants to the conference. This last act backfired in a spectacular fashion, as the excluded theologians traveled to Puebla and created a makeshift liberationist “headquarters” at a hotel located just a few blocks from the conference seminary. From there, they served as unofficial advisors to progressive bishops, holding late-night meetings in which the theologians critiqued and rewrote conference documents.49 They also spoke at daily press conferences, providing real-time commentary of conference events for the nearly 2,200 journalists in attendance. These press events directly challenged the views being expressed in the official CELAM press conferences, led by CELAM spokesperson Monsignor Darío Castrellón, a Colombian cardinal who later, under Pope John Paul II, became the prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy. The tension between the two groups was palpable and public. As a result, it is not difficult to understand why liberation theologians later referred to the conference as “the Battle of Puebla”—an exaggeration, to be sure, but nevertheless reflective of the conflictive atmosphere that pervaded Puebla and, more generally, the post-Medellín Church.50 Yet while the much-hyped “battle” between Latin American progressives and conservatives consumed the attention of the international media—and even the theologians and ecclesial leaders themselves—a quieter presence was making itself felt at Puebla. The Vatican had always been involved in CELAM affairs, but the extent to which Rome influenced the workings of the Puebla conference and exerted its authority over participants was truly impressive. Sebastiano Baggio, the Vatican’s prefect of the Congregation

208   Erika Helgen of Bishops, was co-president of the conference, alongside Archbishop López Trujillo and Dom Aloísio Lorscheider, and many believed that he “dominated the [presidential] troika.”51 Rome appointed Vatican representatives in nearly every Working Commission (the groups responsible for the writing of the texts that would eventually form part of the Final Document), and even put two or three representatives on Commissions that dealt with “hot-button” subjects, such as ecclesial base communities.52 This did not go unnoticed by conference participants. One bishop went so far as to publicly denounce the heavy-handed Vatican intervention in a press conference, and to declare that the “intense pressure on behalf of the members of the Roman Curia and even an overbearing treatment on their part” had stifled discussion and intimidated conference participants.53 However, the Vatican official with the most influence over the conference proceedings was neither Sebastiano Baggio nor any of the Working Commission representatives, but rather the recently elected Pope John Paul II. Puebla marked the first international trip of his papacy, and progressives and conservatives alike believed that it would be the moment in which he would give his “verdict” on liberation theology and the progressive Latin American Church. The address the Pope gave at the opening of the conference thus had a profound influence on the tone and scope of the Puebla proceedings. The Pontiff ’s speech was divided into three sections, each of which described a unique role of Catholic bishops: (1) “Teachers of the Truth”; (2) “Signs and Builders of Unity”; and (3) “Defenders and Promoters of Human Dignity.” The first two sections, as the titles suggest, were traditionalist interpretations of episcopal power. They stated that bishops, as part of the Magisterium (in communion with the pope), were the sole sources of biblical and theological authority, and that “an attitude of mistrust fostered toward the ‘institutional’ or ‘official’ Church” was undermining the Church’s unity.54 The third part, however, struck a different tone. In it, Pope John Paul II declared that “an indispensable part of [the Church’s] evangelizing mission is made up of works on behalf of justice and human promotion,” denounced the “massive increase in violations of human rights,” and in one of the most quoted phrases of the inaugural address, stated that “there is a social mortgage on all private property.”55 This did not mean that the pope supported the entire sociopolitical program of liberationists: he was quick to condemn Catholic activists’ “recourse to ideological systems”; he insisted that the bishops needed to broaden (and some would say, dilute) the idea of liberation by promoting a more general “liberation from sin.”56 Overall, the speech was representative of what Penny Lernoux called the pope’s “populist integralist” character: he showed a personal sympathy for the poor and offered qualified support for social justice movements, while at the same time demanding strict hierarchical obedience and doctrinal orthodoxy.57 The most immediate effects of the pope’s speech were seen in the outcome of the Puebla conference: while the conference famously called for a “preferential option for the poor”—a phrase that would become a watchword for universal Church as a whole—and committed itself to promoting social justice and supporting base communities, the conference also condemned those who would “turn [Christ] into a politician, a leader, a revolutionary, or a simple prophet” and lamented how the idea of the popular Church “suggests a division within the bosom of

Bishops, Priests, and CELAM   209 the Church and seems to imply an unacceptable denial of the hierarchy’s function.”58 At the end of the day, there were no clear winners in the “battle of Puebla”—except, perhaps, the Vatican. The dynamics present at Puebla would shape the following decade. Progressive Catholics continued to press forward in their efforts to renew both Church and society, making especially radical advances on the ecclesiological front. In 1981, Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff published Church, Charism and Power, which attacked the absolute authority of the pope and Magisterium, and advocated for lay leadership and administration of sacraments. At the same time, three Nicaraguan priests were defying the authority of their archbishop and pope by remaining in the Sandinista government after being expressly ordered to step down from their posts. The Vatican, for its part, increased its pressure on the Latin American Church, particularly in matters of hierarchical authority. In 1983, John Paul II made a dramatic and conflict-ridden trip to Central America, in which he publicly scolded the disobedience of one of the Nicaraguan Sandinista minister-priests, Ernesto Cardenal, and condemned the “dangerous and absurd” Iglesia popular.59 The following two years saw the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s publication of the highly critical “Instruction on Certain Aspects of the ‘Theology of Liberation,’ ” as well as its silencing of Leonardo Boff. Yet in the end, it was the Vatican’s episcopal appointments that would have the longestlasting impact on the Latin American Church. Throughout his pontificate, the Pope consistently appointed conservative bishops who shared his sociopolitical and ecclesiological views.60 John Paul II’s appointments not only transformed the makeup of CELAM and the national bishops’ conferences, but also had practical consequences for the day-today workings of parishes, base communities, seminaries, and Catholic social initiatives. One of the most dramatic examples of these consequences was seen in the Brazilian archdiocese of Olinda and Recife, which was led by the progressive pioneer Dom Hélder Câmara until his retirement in 1985. Dom Helder’s successor, the conservative Dom José Cardoso Sobrinho, spent much of his tenure dismantling the programs put in place by his predecessor and making the archdiocese an inhospitable place for progressive Catholics. Within just five years, he closed the groundbreaking ITER seminary, broke ties between the archdiocese and the Catholic Church’s Commission of Justice and Peace, and shuttered the archdiocese’s human rights office.61 The most immediate results of the Vatican “restoration,” as it was called by many, could be seen in the fourth conference of CELAM, held in Santo Domingo in 1992 to mark the five hundredth anniversary of “Christian evangelization in the Americas.” For progressive Catholics, if Medellín and Puebla were “a leap forward” and a “dainty step forward,” respectively, then, in the words of Alfred Hennelly, Santo Domingo would have to be thought of as “a shaky step into the future.”62 Scholars such as João Batista Libânio called it a definitive “rupture” with the ideals of Medellín, as it abandoned the see-judge-act methodology and folded the option for the poor into a broader “evangelizing option” that stepped away from its earlier sociopolitical connotations.63 Liberationist Catholics attributed the conservative spirit of the

210   Erika Helgen document to the “clear imposition of the Vatican over the conference”—in many ways, Santo Domingo was the culmination of a decade of increasing Vatican control over the Latin American Church.64 Yet, on a more general level, one might note that while the “Vatican offensive” in Latin America certainly had a profound effect on the fate of the Church, it was not the sole driver of change. Latin America was entering a new era, with new social, political, and ecclesial realities. As many scholars argued, the return to democracy, the increase in religious pluralism and the rise of Protestant (particularly Pentecostal) churches, the onset of popular disillusionment with the modernist project, and the progressive Church’s own failures to respond to shifting popular needs all profoundly changed the way the Church viewed its role in society.65 That being said, the way the Church hierarchy responded to these new realities—adopting a defensive position and emphasizing moral issues over prophetic social leadership—was undoubtedly shaped by the increasingly conservative perspective of its highest episcopal leaders.

Conclusion: Aparecida and Beyond If CELAM conferences and official Church policies are used as the sole markers of the Latin American Church’s nature and mission, then seemingly the contemporary Church had moved away from earlier paths of renewal and innovation, turning inward to focus on issues of doctrine, orthodoxy, and internal Church authority. An examination of the 2007 CELAM conference in Aparecida offers hope for a more open dialogue surrounding the role of Catholicism in addressing the inequalities of the modern world, but, as Daniel Levine argues, it also depicts a Church overcome with “a pervasive fear of change and loss of control.”66 While the Aparecida conference was more inclusive and ideologically balanced than the Santo Domingo meeting, the final document was heavily concerned with combating the many forces that threatened the Church’s moral authority in the region: Protestantism, secularization, urbanization, “cultural disintegration,” global media, and “ideologies of gender,” to name just a few.67 However, if we follow the lead of Jan Hoffman French and view the reforms of the past half-century not as a concrete set of theologies, organizations, and institutions, but rather as a “flexible project implemented by successive generations of priests, nuns [and other religious] and bishops,” our view of their impact on the present-day Church changes.68 In her analysis of rural clergy in the Brazilian rural Northeast, Hoffman French demonstrates that, while the official Church may have changed its attitudes and language, priests are still committed to their roles as pastors who live among their parishioners and try to serve their needs in the best way possible. Even under the authority of a conservative bishop, Catholic leaders are able to support their communities in their struggles for land rights and cultural advancement, and to create new structures that are more appropriate for the time and place in which they find themselves. Other scholars have pointed to more general “legacies” of the twentieth-century reforms. Anthropologists such as John Burdick have highlighted the Church’s involvement in the

Bishops, Priests, and CELAM   211 Black Pastoral and its continuing support for land reform movements such as the Movimento Sem Terra (MST) as evidence of their lasting influence.69 The most dramatic legacy, however, may turn out to be the 2013 election of Pope Francis. The fact that an Argentine prelate who was an avowed opponent of liberationist theology can be the twenty-first-century advocate of a more open and compassionate “Church for the Poor” demonstrates the extent to which key elements of the liberationist message have come to pervade the Latin American hierarchy—and now, the world Church.70 In the first seven months of his papacy alone, the pope expressed his preference for viewing the Church as a “People of God,” declared that the role of bishops is “to serve, not to dominate,” demanded that pastors “go out through [the] door to seek and meet the people,” denounced the developing world’s mistreatment of immigrants, and criticized Catholics who “insist on issues only related to abortion, gay marriage, and the use of contraceptive measures.”71 Even Leonardo Boff, whose persecution by Rome and subsequent departure from the priesthood were deemed one of the clearest examples of the “death” of liberation theology, has seen in Pope Francis a “new direction” for the Church. “With [Pope Francis’s] experience as a pastor, with a new view of things from below, he will be able to reform the Curia, decentralize the administration, and give the Church a new credible face.”72

Notes 1. The Second General Conference of Latin American Bishops, “The Church in the PresentDay Transformation of Latin America in the Light of the Council” in Liberation Theology: A Documentary History, ed. Alfred T. Hennelly, 89–119 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990), 90. 2. For more on the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century, see Austin Ivereigh, ed., The Politics of Religion in an Age of Revival: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Europe and Latin America (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 2000). 3. Lisa Edwards, “Latin American Seminary Reform: Modernization and the Preservation of the Latin American Church,” The Catholic Historical Review 95.2 (April 2009): ­261–282, 264. 4. Edwards, “Latin American Seminary Reform.” For the Colegio Pío Latino Americano, see: Edwards, Roman Virtues: The Education of the Latin American Clergy in Rome, 1858–1962 (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2011). 5. For more on the Romanization process in Latin America, see Kees de Groot, Brazilian Catholicism and the Ultramontane Reform, 1850–1930; Kenneth Serbin, Needs of the Heart, 54–109; Manuel A. Vásquez, The Brazilian Popular Church and the Crisis of Modernity, 104; Jeffrey Klaiber, The Catholic Church in Peru, 1825–1985, 45–47; Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, The Maryknoll Catholic Mission in Peru, 1943–1989, 5–13; Edward Wright-Ríos, Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism, 43–72. 6. For a more detailed description of council preparations and proceedings, see Anton Pazos and Diego Piccardo, El concilio plenario de América Latina: Roma 1899 (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2002). 7. Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano, Primera conferencia general del episcopado latinoamericano: documento conclusivo, 89(a). The Rio conference and its conclusions are ­analyzed in João Batista Libânio, Conferências gerais do episcopado latino-americano (São Paulo: Paulus, 2007).

212   Erika Helgen 8. François Houtart, “L’histoire du CELAM ou l’oubli des origines,” Archives de sciences sociales des religions 62, no.1 (July–September 1986), 93–105, 95. 9. Edward L. Cleary, Crisis and Change: The Church in Latin America Today (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1985), 22. 10. The literature on the Second Vatican Council is extensive; some of the best overviews are: Giuseppe Alberigo, A Brief History of Vatican II, trans. Matthew Sherry (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2006); Giuseppe Alberigo, Jean-Pierre Jossua, and Joseph Komonchak, The Reception of Vatican II, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1987); John O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); Raymond F. Bulman and Frederick J. Parrella, eds., From Trent to Vatican II: Historical and Theological Investigations (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006). 11. Gaudium et Spes n.4. 12. Lumen Gentium n.32. 13. The influential role of Bishop Manuel Larraín and Dom Hélder Câmara has been recorded by a number of scholars, including Cleary, Crisis and Change, 20; Enrique Dussel, The History of the Church in Latin America: Colonialism to Liberation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1981), 140; and Penny Lernoux, Cry of the People (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1980), 32–33. 14. Houtart, “L’histoire du CELAM,” 100. 15. Lumen Gentium n.22. On the role of collegiality in Vatican II and its importance for Latin American bishops, see Melissa J. Wilde, “How Culture Mattered at Vatican II: Collegiality Trumps Authority in the Council’s Social Movement Organizations,” American Sociological Review 69, no.4 (2004), 576–602. 16. Pablo Richard, quoted in Liberation Theology: A Documentary History, ed. Alfred Hennelly (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 199) 40. Emphasis in original. 17. Quoted in Serbin, Needs of the Heart, 107. 18. Ibid., 144–180; for more on ITER, see 248–291. 19. Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America and the Cold War (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 6. 20. Margaret Hebblewaithe, “How Base Communities Started: Paraguay’s Christian Agrarian Societies,” in Unfinished Journey: The Church 40 Years after Vatican II, ed. Austen Ivereigh (London: Continuum, 2003), 240–256. 21. Fitzpatrick-Behrens, The Maryknoll Catholic Mission in Peru, 1943–1989, 81. 22. Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, “From Symbols of the Sacred to Symbols of Subversion to Simply Obscure: Maryknoll Women Religious in Guatemala, 1953–1967,” The Americas 61, no.2 (October 2004), 189–216, 208. 23. For more on Catholic Action, see, María Luisa Aspe Armell, La formación social y política de los católicos mexicanos: la Acción Católica Mexicana y la Unión Nacional de Estudiantes Católicos, 1929–1958 (México D.F.: Universidad Iberoamericana, 2008); Marina Bandeira, A Igreja católica na virada da questão social (1930–1964): anotações para uma história da Igreja no Brasil (Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 2000); Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, “Maryknoll Sisters, Faith, Healing, and the Maya Construction of Catholic Communities in Guatemala,” Latin American Research Review 44.3 (2009): 27–49; Luiz Alberto Gómez de Souza, A JUC, os estudantes e a política (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1984). For Catholic Action in the United States, see Jeremy Bonner et al., eds, Empowering the People of God: Catholic Action Before and After Vatican II (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2014).

Bishops, Priests, and CELAM   213 24. Second General Conference of Latin American Bishops, “The Church in the Present-Day Transformation of Latin America in the Light of the Council,” 89–119. 25. Gustavo Gutiérrez, “Church of the Poor,” in Born of the Poor: The Latin American Church since Medellín, ed. Edward L. Cleary (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 18. Emphasis in original. 26. Thomas Bruneau, The Political Transformation of the Brazilian Catholic Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), and Scott Mainwaring, The Catholic Church and Politics in Brazil, 1916–1985 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986). 27. Brian H. Smith, The Catholic Church and Politics in Chile: Challenges to Modern Catholicism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982). 2 8. Kenneth Serbin, Secret Dialogues: Church-State Relations, Torture, and Social Justice in Authoritarian Brazil (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000). 29. Bishops of Peru, “Justice in the World,” in Liberation Theology: A Documentary History, ed. Alfred Hennelly, 125–136 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990), 127–128. 30. Synod of Bishops, “Justice in the World,” in Liberation Theology: A Documentary History, ed. Alfred Hennelly, 137–142 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990), 138. 31. Bishops of Peru, “Justice in the World,” 125. 32. For a more detailed discussion of the meaning of “being church” in Latin America, see Daniel H. Levine, Popular Voices in Latin American Catholicism, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 146–148. 33. For more extensive examinations of the popular Church, see Vásquez, The Brazilian Popular Church and the Crisis of Modernity; Daniel H. Levine, “Colombia: The Institutional Church and the Popular,” in Religion and Political Conflict in Latin America, ed. Daniel H. Levine, 187–217 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); David Lehmann, Democracy and Development in Latin America: Economics, Politics and Religion in the Postwar Period (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). 34. Leonardo Boff, “Las eclesiologías presentes en las comunidades eclesiales de base,” Páginas 5–6 (1976), 16–23, 19–20. 35. Leonardo Boff, Church, Charism and Power: Liberation Theology and the Institutional Church (London: SCM Press Ltd, 1985), 125–126. 36. The relationship between poverty and social disempowerment is discussed in Gutiérrez, “Church of the Poor,” 16. 37. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York, NY: Continuum, 2000). 38. Ernesto Cardenal, The Gospel in Solentiname, trans. Donald D. Walsh (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1982), vii. Emphasis in original. 39. See Carlos Zarco Mera, “The Ministry of Coordinators in the Popular Christian Community,” Concilium 176, no.6 (1984), 65–70; Pedro Gilberto Gomes, “A autoconsciência eclesial do leigo nas CEBs,” Revista Eclesiástica Brasileira 43, no.171 (1983), 513–532. 40. Leonardo Boff, Ecclesiogenesis: the Base Communities Reinvent the Church, trans. Robert R. Barr (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986), 62. 41. Antônio da Silva Pereira, “Participação dos fiéis nas decisões da Igreja (I),” Revista Eclesiástica Brasileira 41, no.163 (1981), 443–473, 447. 42. Carlos Mesters, “Logros alcanzados y problemas relevantes que deben enfrentarse,” Páginas 5–6 (1976), 24–27, 24. Emphasis in original. 43. David Lehmann, Struggle for the Spirit: Religious Transformation and Popular Culture in Brazil and Latin America (Oxford: Polity Press, 1996); John Burdick, Looking for God in

214   Erika Helgen Brazil: the Progressive Catholic Church in Urban Brazil’s Religious Arena (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993); Malik Tahar Chaouch, “La teología de la liberación en América Latina: una relectura sociológica,” Revista Mexicana de Sociología 69, no.3 (July–September 2007), 427–456. 44. These ideas were discussed in issues of Concilium such as Edward Schillebeeckx, “The Christian Community and its Office-Bearers,” Concilium 133 (1980), 95–127. For background on the post-Vatican II struggle between progressive and conservative theologians and its relation to Latin American liberation theology, see Ralph Della Cava, “Vatican Policy, 1978–1990: An Updated Overview,” Social Research 59, no.1 (1992), 169–199; and Harvey Cox, The Silencing of Leonardo Boff: The Vatican and the Future of World Christianity (London: Collins Religious Publishing, 1989). 45. For a small selection, see Gustavo Gutiérrez, “The Poor in the Church,” Concilium 104 (1977): 11–16; Leonardo Boff, “Is the distinction between Ecclesia docens and Ecclesia discens justified?,” Concilium 148 (1981), 47–51; Jon Sobrino, “A Crucified People’s Faith in the Son of God,” Concilium 153 (1982), 23–28; Enrique Dussel, “Exodus as a Paradigm in Liberation Theology,” Concilium 189 (1987), 83–92. 46. Edward Schillebeeckx, “The Teaching Authority of All—A Reflection about the Structure of the New Testament,” Concililum 4, no.180 (1985), 12–22, 20. 47. Robert Pelton, From Power to Communion: Toward a New Way of Being Church Based on the Latin American Experience (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 65–66. 48. Alfonso López Trujillo, Liberación marxista y liberación cristiana (Madrid: Editorial Católica, 1974); Equipo de Reflexión Teológico-Pastoral del CELAM, “Las comunidades eclesiales de base en América Latina,” in Documentos CELAM, ed. CELAM (Bogotá: Oficina de Prensa y Publicaciones del CELAM, 1977), 2. 49. Many chronicles and “eyewitness accounts” of Puebla were published in the immediate aftermath of the conference. See: Bernardino Hernando, Los pasillos de Puebla (Madrid: PPC, 1979); Frei Betto, 17 días de la iglesia latinoamericana (México D.F.: Centro de Reflexión Teológica, 1979); Teófilo Cabestrero, Los teólogos en Puebla (Madrid: PPC, 1979); Harvey Cox, “A Puebla Diary,” Commonweal (March 1979), 141–145; Enrique Dussel and Felipe Espinosa, “Puebla: Crónica e historia,” Cristus (1979), 520–521; Gary MacEoin and Nivita Riley, Puebla: A Church Being Born (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1980); Phillip Berryman, “What Happened at Puebla,” in Churches and Politics in Latin America, Daniel  H.  Levine, ed, 55–86 (London: Sage Publications, 1979); Alberto Methol Ferré, Puebla: proceso y tensiones (Buenos Aires: Editorial Documenta, 1979). 50. Juan Ignacio González Faus, ed., La batalla de Puebla (Barcelona: Editorial Laia, 1980). 51. Gary MacEoin, “The Stakes at CELAM III: competing ecclesiologies in Latin America,” Commonweal (August 1978): 495–498, 496. Although there were four members of the Puebla presidency, the “troika” to which the author was referring included the three most influential members of the Presidency: Archbishop López Trujillo, Cardinal Lorscheider and Cardinal Baggio. The fourth member, Archbishop Corripio Ahumada, was appointed for ceremonial reasons, due to his status as the (former) Archbishop of Puebla. For this reason, his presence was usually not taken into account by observers analyzing the power structure of the presidency. 52. Boaventura Kloppenburg, “Génesis del documento de Puebla,” Medellín 5, nos.17–18 (March–June 1979), 189–207, 194–197.

Bishops, Priests, and CELAM   215 53. Hernando, Los pasillos de Puebla, 94. 54. Pope John Paul II, “Opening Address at Puebla,” in Puebla: Evangelization at Present and in the Future of Latin America: Conclusions, ed. National Conference of Catholic Bishops (Washington, DC: National Conference of Catholic Bishops), I, 8. 55. Ibid., III, 2; III, 5; III, 4. Emphasis in original. 56. Ibid., I, 8. 57. Penny Lernoux, People of God: the Struggle for World Catholicism (New York, NY: Viking, 1989), 35. 58. Third General Conference of Latin American Bishops, Puebla: Evangelization at Present and in the Future of Latin America: Official English Edition (Washington, DC: National Conference of Catholic Bishops, 1980), no. 1134, no. 263. 59. Pedro Ribeiro de Oliveira, “O Papa na Nicarágua: uma análise dos acontecimentos,” Revista Eclesiástica Brasileira 43, no.169 (1983), 5–9; Penny Lernoux, People of God, 58–62. 60. Ralph Della Cava, “The ‘People’s Church,’ the Vatican, and Abertura,” in Democratizing Brazil: Problems of Transition and Consolidation, ed. Alfred Stepan (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1989). 61. James Brooke, “Two Archbishops, Old and New, Symbolize Conflict in the Brazilian Church,” The New York Times, November 12, 1989, A14; “Roma fecha Seminários em Recife,” Revista Eclesiástica Brasileira 49, no.196 (1989), 964–966. 62. Alfred  T.  Hennelly, “A Report from the Conference,” in Santo Domingo and Beyond: Documents and Commentaries from the Fourth General Conference of Latin American Bishops, ed. Alfred T. Hennelly, 24–36 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 24. 6 3. Libânio, Conferências gerais do episcopado latino-americano, 32. 64. Jon Sobrino, “The Winds in Santo Domingo and the Evangelization of Culture,” in Santo Domingo and Beyond: Documents and Commentaries from the Fourth General Conference of Latin American Bishops, ed. Alfred T. Hennelly, 167–187 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 170. 6 5. Vásquez, The Brazilian Popular Church and the Crisis of Modernity; Daniel  H.  Levine, Politics, Religion and Society in Latin America (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2012); Edward  L.  Cleary and Hannah Stewart-Gambino, Conflict and Competition: The Latin American Church in a Changing Environment (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1992); John Burdick, Looking for God in Brazil. 6 6. Levine, Politics, Religion and Society in Latin America, 26. 67. Levine, “The Future as Seen from Aparecida,” in Aparecida: Quo Vadis?, Robert S. Pelton, ed., 173–190 (Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 2008). 68. Jan Hoffman French, “A Tale of Two Priests and Two Struggles: Liberation Theology from Dictatorship to Democracy in the Brazilian Northeast,” The Americas 63, no.3 (January 2007), 409–443, 413. 6 9. John Burdick, Legacies of Liberation: the Progressive Catholic Church in Brazil (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2004). 70. Robert  W.  McElroy, “A Church for the Poor: Pope Francis Makes Addressing Poverty Essential,” America, October 21, 2013, 13–16. 7 1. Antonio Spadaro, “A Big Heart Open to God,” America, September 30, 2013, 15–38, 18; Joshua  J.  McElwee, “Pope Francis: A bishop serves, not dominates,” National Catholic Reporter, October 24, 2013, http://ncronline.org/blogs/francis-chronicles/pope-francisbishop-serves-not-dominates; John Allen, Jr., “Francis blasts ‘­globalization of indifference’

216   Erika Helgen for immigrants,” National Catholic Reporter, July 8, 2013, http://ncronline.org/blogs/ ncr-today/francis-blasts-globalization-indifference-immigrants. 72. Quoted in Thomas C. Fox, “Leonardo Boff: major Pope Francis supporter,” National Catholic Reporter, March 16, 2013, http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/leonardo-boff-major-popefrancis-supporter.

chapter 12

Acti v ist Chr isti a ns, the H um a n R ights Mov em en t, a n d Democr atiz ation i n L ati n A m er ica Nick Rowell

Introduction Human rights activism with ties to Christianity became a socially organized and politically robust force from the late 1960s until the 1980s. This was in no small measure because prominent religious leaders and activists founded and led many of the region’s earliest human rights organizations. Since the 1980s, religious-based human rights activism has undergone a number of significant changes. Christian human rights activists now operate alongside secular human rights organizations, largely democratic institutions, and within a much more pluralistic religious environment. Before discussing the literature on Christian activism in Latin America’s human rights movement, a few definitions and related conceptual distinctions are necessary. The first pertains to the era of activism discussed in this chapter. A long but uneven ­tradition exists in Latin America of Christian activists who draw on religious notions of human dignity to challenge prevailing socio-political institutions. However, this chapter will focus on the role of Christianity in the human rights movement in Latin America in the post-1964 period. This period follows Vatican II reforms in the Catholic Church, which shifted theological attention toward the modern world, including modern social problems. In various segments of the Catholic Church, these reforms also eroded some of the paternalistic attitudes associated with earlier forms of Christian human rights advocacy.1

218   Nick Rowell The 1960s also roughly coincide with the earliest years of accelerated growth of evangelical Protestant churches in the region, which in subsequent decades would transform the environment in which religious leaders, religious adherents, and Christian activists would operate.2 Finally, 1964 marks the rise of Latin America’s first bureaucratic authoritarian regime in Brazil in late March of that same year, followed by over a decade of democratic breakdowns and periods of intensive human rights abuses.3 The second conceptual distinction pertains to defining “grassroots activism” in the context of Latin American Catholicism. Typically, to speak of grassroots activism implies an emphasis on participatory, “bottom-up” organization. However, to be a Catholic grassroots organization is minimally tacit acceptance of the proposition that various levels of the Church’s hierarchical structure (e.g., local, national, regional) possess some moral authority. While the contours of this shared authority may be disputed and are continually renegotiated, even so at times fundamental aspects of Catholic activism rely on cooperation with or appeal to upper echelons of the hierarchy, including priests, bishops, cardinals, and the pope. When activist lay people work alongside clergy who hold power in the institutional Church, the resulting power asymmetry raises important questions about whether or not such activism can be correctly labeled grassroots. Catholic lay people who organize themselves are undoubtedly grassroots. The same is true for organizations in which clerics participate as members or passive advisors. However, where clergy play leadership roles in organizations, the distinction is blurred because organizations’ tactics, goals, and priorities may be subsumed by Catholic orthodoxy or strategic considerations that emanate from elsewhere in the Church hierarchy. Despite this, deacons, priests, and bishops have led and participated in activism that challenges the state over policies that erode religious notions of human dignity by engaging directly with victims and those sympathetic to their ordeal. This work will confine itself to scholarship describing this form of human rights activism. Organizations or activity that primarily pursue corporatist, elite collusion or participate in conventional modes of partisan competition as a means of achieving political objectives will be excluded. Thus, human rights offices overseen by bishops are included, but secret, pro-human rights negotiations between bishops and military leaders are not.4 Likewise, contentious activism calling for more equitable distribution of land is included, but pro-Chavismo sentiment among Venezuelan evangelicals is not.5 Third, in the context of Latin America, human rights is best defined broadly, including popular demands for what some have termed the expansion of “social rights” within a democratic, capitalist society.6 The basis for most religious advocacy for human rights, such as rights to life, freedom of conscience, various civil liberties, and so on stems from valuing fundamental human dignity over alternative priorities articulated by the state.7 This frame has been used to encompass a broad array of issues. Even during the precedent-setting ecumenical response to human rights abuses in Chile (discussed later in the chapter), the earliest human rights organization not only collected information about political prisoners, disappearances, and other rights abuses, but also provided legal assistance, medical care, food, and other basic social services to students, families

Activist Christians and the Human Rights Movement   219 of victims of repression, and the unemployed.8 Thus, conventional human rights movements that documented state-sanctioned violence against civilians included organizations that called on the state to take action on major social problems. In the political environments that followed transitions to democracy (often accompanied by neoliberal austerity measures and structural adjustment programs), this broad frame became even more relevant. Today, Christian activists engaged in movements that call for greater attention to the urban poor, street children, indigenous groups, unequal land distribution, women’s rights, and gang violence, among other issues, continue the work of organizations that explicitly adopted the rhetoric of human rights in previous decades. Finally, though mentioned explicitly where possible in the following, the last decade of scholarship on religious politics in Latin America has highlighted the importance of acknowledging and studying the internal pluralism among and within religious traditions.9 In other words, adherence to a religious group that teaches a specific theology does not by itself translate into specific beliefs or actions. Thus, recent scholarship has begun to break down overgeneralizations and binary stereotypes about the political attitudes or political engagement of evangelicals, Catholics, or other groups. For example, whereas some evangelical leaders sought close ties with the authoritarian Pinochet regime in Chile, other evangelical leaders have founded strongly progressive movements to confront racism in Brazil.10 Catholic activists, who display remarkable progressivism with respect to poverty, might also display a lack of interest in issues such as violence against women.11

Growth of Christian Activism in Latin America Catholic human rights activism in Latin America grew out of organizational experiments that first appeared in the early twentieth century and doctrinal changes in the Church that occurred before and after Vatican II (1962–1965). Early in the twentieth century, the Catholic Church launched Catholic Action, which initiated new forms of  associational life among Catholic laity. A few commonly noted examples include Catholic women’s organizations, student organizations, class conciliatory trade unions, and peasant organizations. Catholic Action organizations remained under the control of clergy, and by extension, Catholic bishops. Although membership in these organizations began to decline by the 1950s, they were crucial formative experiences for future leaders of many social movements. Daniel  H.  Levine suggests that Catholic Action’s decline is at least partially attributable to basic conflicts that arose between members seeking organizational autonomy and clergy seeking to maintain their control. Levine further suggests that in places like Peru and Brazil, Catholic Action tended to persist longer where clergy granted some level of autonomy.12 Mainwaring’s seminal study of

220   Nick Rowell the Catholic Church in Brazil (1986) supports this observation, as does the experience of Guatemala’s strong Catholic Action movement in rural areas.13 During the 1960s, progressive papal encyclicals and Vatican II reforms shifted attention within segments of the institutional Church toward more direct engagement with social problems and a larger role for the laity within the Church. In the Latin American episcopacy, these changes culminated in CELAM’s Medellín (1968) and Puebla (1979) conferences, which issued statements calling for an end to “institutional violence” and recommending that the Church adopt a “preferential option for the poor.”14 This doctrinal shift opened a new space within the Church for the creation of institutions and popular organizations with new political priorities. In some national contexts, this space was filled with robust new forms of associational life, but in countries such as Argentina and Colombia traditional patterns of organization persisted.15 New, social rights–oriented institutions created under the sponsorship and direct authority of the institutional Church included organizations like Brazil’s Pastoral Land Commission, Indigenous Missionary Council, and Peace and Justice Commission, which were devoted to studying and addressing social problems associated with marginalized communities. Peace and Justice Commissions, which specifically worked on human rights–related issues, were created in other countries during the 1960s and 1970s as well.16 Meanwhile, clergy-led political organizations were increasingly replaced by organizations led by the laity. Key examples of such activism included the creation of peasant unions, rural cooperatives, and early experiments in popular education.17 The 1970s saw the rise of ecclesial base communities (CEBs, comunidades eclesiales de base), which brought together small groups of Catholics to reflect on scripture. CEBs varied widely in their composition and orientation toward political activism. Many were interested only in devotional activity, and many others were political but generally conservative. However, those CEBs that were both politically active and progressive formed the basis of activism tied to the Church throughout the 1970s and 1980s.18 The timing and the political orientation of the Catholic Church’s new political ­postures, institutions, and networks of grassroots activists set the stage for conflict with authoritarian regimes. As authoritarian regimes seized power and initiated waves of repression targeting progressive activists, the Church sometimes was pulled into a conflict over human rights.19

Authoritarian Period The 1964 military coup in Brazil marked the beginning of a new type of authoritarianism in Latin America. The rise of Brazil’s post-coup bureaucratic authoritarian regime presaged the emergence of similar regimes in Argentina in 1966 (and again in 1976), and Chile and Uruguay in 1973.20 These regimes systematically dissolved and repressed democratic institutions and representative channels through the restriction of basic civil rights and liberties and the intimidation or outright closure of legislatures, political

Activist Christians and the Human Rights Movement   221 parties, labor unions, and the press. Targeting activists from the left in particular, authoritarian regimes systematically committed human rights abuse, including murder, kidnapping, torture, and forced exile.21 Among the most notorious examples was the wave of state repression carried out in Argentina between 1976 and 1983, when, security forces murdered or disappeared between 20,000 and 30,000 people, held 30,000 political prisoners, and forced 500,000 people into exile. In neighboring Chile, between 1973 and 1989, security forces murdered or disappeared between 3,000 and 5,000 people, held 60,000 political prisoners, and forced 40,000 people into exile.22 During this period, various other authoritarian regimes often justified repression and broad restrictions on basic political rights with continual references to national security threats posed by real or imagined subversive political activists. In El Salvador, for example, during the civil war between the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and the state (1979–1992), of the 22,000 reports of violence, kidnapping, and torture collected by the UN Truth Commission, 95 percent were carried out by state security forces rather than the FMLN.23 In this environment, religious organizations, especially segments of the Catholic Church, played crucial roles in the earliest phases of developing the broader human rights movement. Though theoretical interpretations of the emergence of social movements vary, the most influential perspective remains political process theory.24 Political process theory explains the emergence of social movements through four key processes: (1) the emergence of “political opportunity” in which activists perceive mobilization to be both possible and potentially effective; (2) “mobilizing structures,” or existing networks and sources of material support that facilitate the mobilization of activists; (3) “framing processes,” or the imagination of a conceptual lens through which activists understand and communicate the significance of their movement’s actions and goals; and (4) “repertoires of contention,” the typical public manifestations of the movement such as demonstrations, marches, strikes, and so on. Christian organizations played a central role in providing, sustaining, and shaping these processes as the human rights movement emerged in response to waves of repression.25 In many highly repressive environments, the Catholic Church was the only segment of civil society that was allowed to continue operating with relative autonomy. Where Church leaders saw human rights as an issue worthy of Church involvement, this autonomy created a small but ultimately important political opportunity. Christian activists assumed important early leadership roles in the human rights movement because preexisting religious networks in which they were already embedded afforded them access to mobilizing structures. In many cases, Church leaders themselves assumed early leadership roles in the human rights movement. Óscar Romero in El Salvador, Raúl Silva Henríquez in Chile, and Dom Hélder Câmara and Dom Paulo Arns in Brazil are perhaps the most prominent examples. From leadership positions, such activist figures could draw on existing networks of support to create new organizations, begin gathering information, and devise political strategies. Óscar Romero, for example, engaged in an active dialogue with the progressive academic clergy of the University of Central America (UCA) about

222   Nick Rowell the sociopolitical role of the Catholic Church and Catholic clergy. Though Romero was initially hesitant to involve the Church in political conflicts, this dialogue continued as Romero’s perspective on his own involvement in human rights advocacy evolved throughout the late 1970s. Moreover, Romero’s involvement with UCA faculty helped maintain a space in El Salvador’s Church for their academic work on the region’s oppressive political and economic structures. The same UCA faculty would go on to play a formative role in the development of liberation theology.26 Even where Church leaders did not assume leadership roles, the provision of basic mobilizing structures controlled by the Church, such as meeting places, information, and transportation, was a tremendous boon to early organizers. Critical cases of such support tend to be centered in specific Catholic dioceses or archdioceses under the authority of a sympathetic bishop or cardinal: Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez in the archdiocese of Santiago, Chile; Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns in the archdiocese of São Paulo; Archbishop Hélder Câmara in the archdiocese of Olinda and Recife in Brazil’s Northeast; Archbishops Oscar Romero and Arturo Rivera Damas in the archdiocese of San Salvador in El Salvador; and (after 1984) Archbishop Próspero Penados in Guatemala City and Guatemalan bishop Juan Gerardi.27 Both Oscar Romero and Juan Gerardi were later murdered by right-wing forces for the leadership roles they played in documenting and publicizing human rights abuses in El Salvador and Guatemala, respectively. Among the best comparative accounts of the importance of the role of the Catholic Church in this regard is the work of Mara Loveman.28 Observing that “early risers” in human rights movements engaged in particularly high-risk forms of collective action, Loveman argues that only those human rights organizations under the protective umbrella of a larger organization were sustainable. Loveman highlights the Catholic Church in Chile as a clear example. Despite this, Catholic activists became victims of state repression in every national context. Thus, Loveman’s concept of a protective umbrella is relative to the intensity of repression at the time. As Loveman and others have pointed out, support from Catholic bishops was far from a universal phenomenon. In Argentina, for example, human rights activists who sought Church support were rebuffed. The result was that the earliest human rights activism began under the auspices of other organizations. Human rights activism initiated by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo was joined by Adolfo Perez Esquivel’s SERPAJ-AL, the Argentine chapter of an international organization with ties to the Quakers. Esquivel and others created the Ecumenical Human Rights movement shortly thereafter.29 The involvement of Catholic bishops in the human rights movement varied both within and across national boundaries. Explaining this variance has engendered a substantial amount of research. Brian Smith has argued that repression specifically targeting the Church motivated different political commitments.30 Scott Mainwaring argues that the experience of bishops working in particularly impoverished regions made them more or less sympathetic to political activists who fell victim to repression, thereby motivating public condemnation of repression.31 Anthony Gill argues that ­competition from evangelical Protestants drove bishops to take more overtly

Activist Christians and the Human Rights Movement   223 ­ ro-democracy/anti-authoritarian stances in an effort to more effectively appeal to p potential adherents and those contemplating a departure from the Church.32 Benjamin Goldfrank and I contend that histories of close Church-state ties impeded independent ideological evolution of bishops’ conferences and created material disincentives to denounce authoritarian regimes.33 Though less prominent than Catholic activism, Protestant activist involvement in the  human rights movement in Latin America was important.34 Beyond relatively local support, the position of both Catholic and main-line Protestant churches in the international community provided critical mobilizing structures by securing international resources and support. International religious networks included universities, religious orders, Vatican diplomatic channels, and the Protestant World Council of Churches.35 Even in Argentina, where Catholic leaders generally avoided participation in the human rights movement, grassroots Catholic activists drew on linkages within the ecumenical networks to lobby the Carter administration to take a tougher line on the Argentine junta’s deplorable human rights record.36 The international network of Protestant churches played a significant role in efforts to lobby Washington about human rights abuses in Latin America as well. Keck and Sikkink point to Joe Eldridge, a Methodist missionary living in Chile during and after the coup, as one high-profile example of the importance of Protestant and ecumenical networks.37 Upon his return to the United States, Eldridge and other activists (some religious, some secular) helped found the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), which began lobbying the US government to respond to human rights abuses in the region. In 1974, the Methodist Church even offered to pay Eldridge’s salary as director of WOLA.38 Missionary activists from the Presbyterian Church also played critical roles in this international network.39 Key figures include Jaime Wright and Charles Harper, Presbyterian ministers who, during the 1970s and 1980s, played leadership roles in coordinating international human rights advocacy among the World Council of Churches, Amnesty International, and various organizations in Brazil. Wright’s close collaboration with Catholic Archbishop Paulo Evaristo Arns produced some of the earliest documentation of not only victims of state-sanctioned violence in Argentina and Brazil, but also individuals accused of carrying out torture. Another major contribution of the involvement of Christian activists in human rights struggles involved framing. Bureaucratic authoritarian regimes tended to justify their seizure of power and subsequent repressive measures as efforts to save “Western Christian civilization.” Where Christian activists became involved in struggles to defend human rights, Christian activists, and religious leaders in particular, were well positioned to frame their opposition in terms of moral authority. This role has been emphasized by Pamela Lowden in Chile and Amy Edmonds in Uruguay.40 Edward Cleary and Daniel Levine have also suggested a relationship between this moral authority frame and the emergence of a repertoire of contention that emphasized nonviolence.41 Christian human rights activism in Pinochet-era Chile is particularly well documented and occupies a prominent place in the literature.42 A number of factors contribute

224   Nick Rowell to its status. First, Keck and Sikkink’s seminal study on the emergence of transnational social movements regards the 1973 coup in Chile as a “watershed moment” in the development of the international human rights movement in Latin America.43 In addition, after a few months of cautious silence, the Chilean Catholic Church’s condemnation of human rights abuses was much clearer and more forceful than other more ambiguous responses in the region.44 Furthermore, Chilean religious activists’ ­organizational response to rights abuses, especially after 1974, set a precedent for human rights activism under authoritarian rule that was later imitated as a “model” for other human rights organizations in the region.45 Within three weeks of the coup, a number of Chilean religious leaders drew on preexisting relationships to form COPACHI (Committee for Cooperation and Peace in Chile), an ecumenical organization that included Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish participants and provided assistance to victims of government repression and their families. Over roughly the next year and a half, repression targeting COPACHI activists gradually increased until Pinochet launched a sustained public attack on the organization. As 1975 came to a close, COPACHI dissolved and was replaced by two leading organizations. Under the auspices of Cardinal Silva and the direct leadership of Father Christian Precht, the Catholic Church launched the Vicariate of Solidarity, which documented allegations of human rights abuses and gathered evidence against the regime. At the same time, a coalition of Protestant groups formed FASIC (Foundation for Social Help of the Christian Churches), which offered social services to victims of torture and political prisoners. After 1978, new human rights organizations began to appear. These tended to be secular, but still drew on Christian activists, including priests. With the retirement of Cardinal Silva in 1982, the institutional leadership of the Catholic Church shifted its focus from explicit work on human rights to facilitating negotiations, first between ­centrist and leftist opposition to the Pinochet regime, and later between the opposition and Pinochet himself. These negotiations ultimately resulted in the formation of Concertación and the 1988 plebiscite on Pinochet’s rule.46

Transitions and the Consolidation of Democracy Between 1979 and 1990, twelve authoritarian regimes in Latin America held democratic elections marking transitions to democratic regimes. These elections represented significant turning points in terms of respect for basic human rights, but after these transitions the socioeconomic environment was still characterized by high levels of poverty, inequality, uneven development, and criminal violence. Similarly, challenges associated with the rule of law, including corruption, impunity, and criminal and state-sanctioned violence, remained persistent features of the region’s political environment. State-led

Activist Christians and the Human Rights Movement   225 attempts to rein in these problems were generally curtailed by neoliberal economic policies that, among other features, relied on structural adjustments that exacerbated unemployment in the short term and tight spending constraints that curtailed social assistance programs. Thus, just as new political space opened up, the ability of civil society organizations and other representative institutions to make demands of the state was reduced to what O’Donnell terms “low intensity citizenship.”47 In the post-transition political arena, Christian activists faced additional new challenges. The region’s transitions facilitated a rise in political pluralism. Social activists no longer needed the protection of the Catholic Church, and alternative sources of mobilizing structures were growing. A multiplicity of civil society organizations, political parties, and various other forms of associational life gradually presented new opportunities for activists. Some of these new vehicles for political activism created opportunities for collaboration with Christian activists, while others offered competing worldviews. As a result, some activists moved from religious organizations to ­secular ones. Furthermore, the institutional Church withdrew support from many human rights organizations it had supported during the authoritarian period. For example, The Vicariate of Solidarity in Chile was closed in 1992. The Church-run Tutela Legal, El Salvador’s most intrepid and respected human rights organization during the years of the civil war, was closed by order of the Archdiocese without warning in 2013. Staff arrived in the morning to find the doors padlocked and guarded by private security, leaving many concerned about the ultimate fate of the records held by the office. Other organizations saw a sharp decline in funding from international sources. Among the most frequently observed trends associated with the transition was the decline of progressive and liberationist CEBs that often formed the basis of grassroots activism in the 1970s and 1980s. This decline has been attributed to a number of interrelated and reinforcing causes. Pope John Paul II, who ascended to the papacy in 1978, systematically appointed conservative bishops, which eroded institutional support for politically progressive Catholic activism and worked in a number of other ways to rein in (and in some cases silence) activist clergy and liberation theologians.48 Others have emphasized the effect of the new strategic environment in which Church leaders abandoned their support for mobilization of adherents through CEBs, instead seeking rapprochement with the state and more successful, less overtly political, forms of evangelization, such as the Catholic Charismatic Renewal.49 These changes were reflected in the documents produced by bishops at the major CELAM conferences of the 1990s and 2000s. Unlike the explicitly political output of the Medellín (1968) and Puebla (1979) conferences, documents produced at the Santo Domingo (1992) and Aparecida (2007) conferences emphasized the importance of the Church’s social mission in terms of spiritual evangelization, rather than confrontational political action.50 At lower levels of the Church’s hierarchy, Ottman argues that progressive activism became institutionalized within segments of the progressive Church and therefore dependent on continued clerical support. The result was a gradual delegitimization of Church-based popular movements.51 Perhaps as a culmination of these changes, others

226   Nick Rowell emphasize the departure of Catholic activists from Church-affiliated institutions to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) or secular social movements outside of Church control.52 The net result in many contexts is an increase in proportion of new priests who are drawn to the spiritual and devotional aspects of clerical life rather than the Church’s social mission. In Chile, for example, Hannah Stewart-Gambino finds that activist priests of the 1980s have been replaced by a generation more interested in attending to matters such as declining mass attendance and repairing neglected parish infrastructure.53 While CEBs have declined in number and influence, Christian activism has not disappeared with the transition to democracy. Rather, Christian activism related to human rights advocacy has evolved in ways that have both shaped and responded to the challenges of democratic consolidation. Three sometimes overlapping frameworks describing this evolution have arisen in the literature: Catholic episcopacy-led efforts to position the Church “above” politics and isolate activists; religious origins of important secular social movement organizations (SMOs); and Christian activists’ contribution to social capital. Many scholars assess the role of Christian activism in the post-transition environment by tracing Catholic-initiated efforts to demobilize Catholic activists so that the Church might secure a position “above politics.” Where Catholic episcopacies achieved such neutral status, Church leaders were sometimes able to moderate or facilitate negotiations that brought an end to periods of conflict or violence that produced horrific human rights abuses. In some cases, these negotiations helped bring about the transition to democracy itself, as in Chile, or the resolution of more communal-level conflicts, as in the Dominican Republic.54 In other cases, negotiations helped end civil wars, as in El Salvador.55 Most recently, Catholic bishops played significant (if not leading) roles in negotiating truces between warring transnational gangs, substantially reducing homicide rates in El Salvador and Honduras.56 However, in some cases achieving a position “above politics” meant distancing the Church from its “preferential option for the poor” and revoking institutional support for human-rights oriented social movements. Such was the case in El Salvador under the leadership of the once-outspoken progressive Archbishop of San Salvador, Arturo Rivera Damas.57 In an alternative framework, several scholars have argued that important secular social movements in contemporary Latin America can be traced, in part, to work performed by Catholic activists in earlier decades. While related to the social capital approach discussed in the following, this emphasis on direct organizational lineage is more closely associated with political process theory’s focus on SMOs’ responses to political opportunities. Though it is impossible to summarize all such studies and cases, three noteworthy examples illustrate this line of research. Arguably the most well-known example of an important, contemporary, secular SMO with roots in Catholic activism is Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST). The MST, a peasant movement that uses encampments to occupy unused land and gain ownership via state intervention, began in the 1970s. Today, it is arguably one of Latin

Activist Christians and the Human Rights Movement   227 America’s largest and most important social movements, having secured land for millions of families.58 The MST’s origins were encouraged and facilitated by support from the Brazilian Catholic Church’s Pastoral Land Commission (CPT). The CPT provided critical information, telephones (scarce in rural Brazil at the time), access to some international funding, and meeting places during the movement’s earliest occupations. In addition to these mobilizing resources, the CPT helped early MST participants frame their struggle in religious terms that drew on the story of Moses and the people of Israel’s search for the Promised Land. However, since the mid-1980s, the MST has insisted on autonomy from the Church, and many leaders have adopted a MarxistLeninist ideology that severs ideational ties with the progressive Church.59 Another important line of research traces some segments of contemporary indigenous movements to organizing work performed by Catholic activists in earlier decades.60 For example, Carmen Martinez Novo traces the role of progressive Salesian missions in raising consciousness and organizing indigenous communities in rural Ecuador.61 Since the 1960s and 1970s, Martinez Novo explains, this Catholic Order has worked on rural development projects in indigenous areas. As a means to that end, Salesians intentionally sought to build and reinforce a sense of indigenous identity through the creation of schools, self-sufficient development projects, and the creation of other organizations. Since the creation of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) in 1986 and the indigenous uprising of 1990, Ecuador’s indigenous movement has operated independently of the Catholic Church. Today, Ecuador’s indigenous movement remains perhaps the most important, organized, anti-neoliberal constituency. Guillermo Trejo observes a similar pattern in the origins of the indigenous movement in Mexico.62 Trejo, however, problematizes subnational variation in Catholic support for the formation of indigenous identity. Using subnational data, Trejo argues that variable support for the creation of indigenous movements was caused by subnational variation in the religious competition faced by the Catholic Church. Where more competition from competing faiths existed, the Church was more willing to embrace and encourage indigenous organizing.63 Indeed, many trace the emergence of the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) in Chiapas to Catholic and Protestant organizing efforts, especially the Indigenous Congress of 1974.64 Since at least the 1994 uprising, however, the EZLN has remained autonomous from Christian organizations. Finally, some scholars trace the spread of segments of the contemporary women’s movement in Latin America to international networks of activists that frame their activism in religious terms.65 Most prominent among these is Catholics for a Free Choice (CFC), an international advocacy NGO unaffiliated with the institutional Catholic Church. Based in North America, CFC supported the creation of Latin American chapters by local activists beginning in the late 1980s. The first chapter appeared in Montevideo in 1989, followed by others in the 1990s, in Argentina, Brazil, and elsewhere. Since that time, the CFC has come to play an important role in terms of

228   Nick Rowell providing information and support to women alongside other organizations in the reproductive rights movement.66 Though the emergence of this activist network represents an important development, its influence in the region is constrained. Access to abortion on request in the first trimester in Latin America is only legal in Uruguay (since 2012), Mexico City (since 2007), and Cuba (since 1965). Meanwhile in Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic, abortion remains illegal even after women are raped or when their lives are at risk. In general, public opinion remains largely opposed to broad legalization, though there is greater tolerance for the legalization of abortion in cases of rape and various health concerns.67 Consequently, in the 1990s and 2000s, Catholics for Choice and their allies in reproductive rights movements tended to focus their efforts on decriminalizing abortion in cases of women who were raped or whose lives were in danger.68 This activism provoked widespread condemnation from the institutional church and a counter-mobilization by an international network of the religious right.69 The influence of this movement has varied. In Chile and Argentina, for example, policy stalemates continue despite a long series of left/center-left governments and multiple presidential terms carried out by women presidents who have sought reform. In these contexts, Catholics for Choice has often maintained an important and consistent ­organizational presence, but has struggled to mobilize supporters effectively and win attention from the media.70 Meanwhile, in Brazil, though debates about abortion still trigger sharp criticism from the institutional church, figures such as Catholic nun Ivone Gebara’s public calls for the legalization of abortion, Catholic activist Frei Betto’s discussions of legalizing abortion as a means to protect the lives of women, and Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns’s defense of the rights of women who have been raped to seek emergency medical attention to “prevent” pregnancy, have opened more space for prochoice voices that frame their positions in religious terms.71 At a broader theoretical level, Carol Drogus and Hannah Stewart-Gambino offer an especially compelling explanation for why legacies of Catholic activism have declined in some places and grown in others.72 While the Church was involved in serious human rights activism in the 1970s and 1980s in both Chile and Brazil, over the last few decades, Catholic activism in general appears to have declined in Chile, but not in Brazil. Drogus and Stewart-Gambino argue that in Chile, Catholic activists during the authoritarian period received significant material and moral support from the institutional Church. Upon the transition to democracy, this support was withdrawn, and Catholic activism entered a period of decline. Meanwhile in Brazil, where in previous decades the institutional Church tolerated but provided less support to Catholic activists, those activists had to develop strategies that relied on support from other places. Consequently in Brazil, Catholic activists tended to be more open to alliances with other organizations, a strategy that has allowed Catholic activism to persist during the period of democratic consolidation. Contributors to this literature would do well to investigate this thesis in additional cases, such as Catholic activism in El Salvador, which has experienced a trajectory similar to that of Chile.

Activist Christians and the Human Rights Movement   229 The final post-transition framework focuses on Christian activist, organizing, advocacy, or social work and the effects of these efforts on cultural change within democratization. This framework points to religious organizations’ ability to help generate social capital amidst the social dislocations of contemporary Latin American politics and society.73 This framework asserts that religious organizations are capable of building associational life, engendering a sense of empowerment among adherents, and contributing to a worldview in which increased interpersonal trust facilitates commitments to positive social change. Rubin, Smilde, and Junge emphasize the importance of religion in contemporary Latin American “zones of crisis.”74 In these zones, religion and social movements interact to shape everyday life, beliefs, and the cultural framework in which social and political struggles are understood by marginalized communities. Levine emphasizes the value of this approach as well, though he cautions that religious organizations display a mixed record in their capacity to build social capital. As Levine puts it, in the religious arena, “[c]reative innovation and heroic commitment to mobilization are often accompanied by affirmation of routine and by an insistence on control that stifle autonomy and hinder the emergence of new leaders.”75 Two notable recent examples of this work are Robert Brenneman’s work on religious responses to gang violence in Central America and Kevin O’Neill’s recent work on gang ministries in Guatemala.76 Brenneman observes that recently, gang members who wish to leave gangs are often allowed to do so when evangelical households take them in. Though evangelicals engaging in such work do not articulate it as human rights activism, Brenneman argues that their work creates opportunities for reintegration into society that otherwise would not exist, particularly in the era of mano dura antigang policies.77 In essence, Brenneman argues, evangelicals participating in this movement use Christianity to create a safe space. Though operating at the communal level, the use of religion to create safe spaces harkens back to Church sponsorship of early human rights activists under authoritarian regimes. Kevin O’Neill’s work on gang ministry grapples with a similar set of observations. Broadly, O’Neill’s work describes how the day-to-day practices of evangelicals shape adherents’ understanding of the practice and obligations of citizenship. More specifically, O’Neill probes how the practice of evangelization of gang members shapes perceptions about the potential for rehabilitation, and thus the citizenship rights of gang members. In turn, as conversion makes it possible for gang members to end their affiliation, Central American states have begun to court the services of evangelical ministers.78 Another notable example of the social capital approach is Catalina Romero’s analysis of Catholicism’s ability to create new public spaces in Peru.79 Romero argues that the contemporary Catholic Church is well positioned to foster a robust revival of civil society. This potential stems from the ability of the Church to create its own “ecclesial civil society,” in which multiple forms of associational life within the Church allow Catholics to engage in dialogue and shared experience. These interactions contribute to the practice and observance of pluralistic values and social trust, but they are only possible to the extent that Church leaders are willing to tolerate dissenting voices and organizations within the Church.

230   Nick Rowell

Conclusion The role of activist Christians in Latin America’s human rights movement has changed considerably over that last five decades. Christian activists played critical roles in founding the region’s human rights movement in response to waves of repression ­initiated by authoritarian governments that seized power in the late 1960s and 1970s. Embedded in preexisting national and international organizational networks and able to frame movements in terms of moral authority, religious activists were well positioned to form organizations that opposed repressive violence or worked to mitigate the disastrous effects of that violence. This was particularly true for the Catholic Church, as it was often afforded a degree of autonomy that allowed it to offer resources and some protection to human rights activists with whom it associated. As the movement matured, religious-affiliated human rights organizations were joined by more secular organizations. With the transition to democracy, Christian activism evolved in response to a new environment. Some institutions, including various segments of the Catholic episcopacy, sought to withdraw from political entanglements, instead exerting influence on human rights issues by mediating conflicts. Faced with an increase in both political and religious pluralism, some activists left movements tied to religion for secular movements or NGOs. Some movements that began under the auspices of Catholic and Protestant missionaries severed these ties and become fully autonomous SMOs. Still others have focused on human rights activism in new cultural spaces, such as communal-level interactions that address social problems or dialogue within religious institutions. Scholarship focused on these issues has evolved as well. Early scholarship on activist Christians focused on Catholic CEBs, especially by focusing on the grassroots challenge they posed to traditional, corporatist, clergy-led forms of Catholic political action. Analysis became more sophisticated as political process theory described the critical contributions of Christian activists to the emergence of the human rights movement. With the maturation of the movement and the transition to democracy, political process theory remained relevant, but failed to capture some of the key challenges and opportunities experienced by Christian activists, as opposed to social activists in general. Thus, scholarship focused on organized religion’s capacity to build social capital and sustain meaningful Christian social and human rights activism has surged to the forefront of the literature. Given this evolution, the literature on Christian human rights activism has room to grow. Scholarship that draws theoretical inspiration from political process theory must better specify the political opportunities, mobilizing structures, and framing processes that have sustained Christian activism in an era where secular SMOs have grown rapidly. Likewise, scholarship focusing on social capital must better specify conditions that allow associational life to foster social activism in some circumstances and suppress it in others. Finally, though there is much to be gained by immersion in

Activist Christians and the Human Rights Movement   231 detailed, single-case studies so common in this literature, scholars working in both theoretical schools would be wise to employ comparative analyses that cross national boundaries. Works by Edward Cleary, Daniel Levine, Jeffrey Klaiber, Mara Loveman, Michael Fleet and Brian Smith, Carol Ann Drogus and Hannah Stewart-Gambino, and others remain relevant in large measure because they draw their insights from crossnational comparisons.80 Such research designs are better able to probe national-level differences that interact with Christian activism, such as state regulation of religion, party systems, as well as interactions with secular SMOs and the resurgence of leftwing governments.

Notes 1. For a helpful discussion of the impact of Vatican II–era reforms on the Catholic Church in Latin America, see Daniel H. Levine, Religion and Politics in Latin America: The Catholic Church in Colombia and Venezuela (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1981), Chapter 2. 2. David Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant? (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990). 3. Guillermo O’Donnell, Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics (Berkeley, CA: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1973). 4. See Kenneth Serbin, Secret Dialogues: Church-State Relations, Torture and Social Justice in Authoritarian Brazil (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000). 5. See David Smilde, “Contradiction without Paradox: Evangelical Political Culture in the 1998 Venezuelan Elections,” Latin American Politics and Society 46, no. 1 (2004), 75–102. 6. Kenneth Roberts, “The Mobilization of Opposition to Economic Liberalization” Annual Review of Political Science 11 (2008): 327–349. 7. Roberto Calvo, “The Church and the Doctrine of National Security,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 21, no. 1 (1979), 69–88. 8. Edward Cleary, The Struggle for Human Rights in Latin America (Westport, CT: Praiger, 1997), 4–5. 9. David Smilde, “Evangelicals and Politics in Latin America: Moving Beyond Monolithic Portraits,” History of Religions 42, no. 3 (2003); Frances Hagopian, “Introduction: The New Landscape,” in Religious Pluralism, Democracy, and the Catholic Church in Latin America, ed. Frances Hagopian (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 18–29. 10. John Burdick, “Why Is the Black Evangelical Movement Growing in Brazil?” Journal of Latin American Studies 37, no. 2 (2005), 311–322. 11. John Burdick, Legacies of Liberation: The Progressive Catholic Church in Brazil at the Start of the New Millennium (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004). 12. Daniel  H.  Levine, Politics, Religion, and Society in Latin America (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2012), 128. 13. Scott Mainwaring, The Catholic Church and Politics in Brazil, 1916–1985 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), 61–62; On Catholic Action in Guatemala, see Greg Grandin, “To End with All These Evils: Ethnic Transformation and Community Mobilization in Guatemala’s Western Highlands, 1954–1980,” Latin American Perspectives 24, no. 2 (1997), 7–34.

232   Nick Rowell 14. See Levine, Religion and Politics in Latin America; Jean Daudelin and W.  E.  Hewitt, “Churches and Politics in Latin America: Catholicism at the Crossroads,” Third World Quarterly 16, no. 2 (1995), 221–236; and Jeffrey Klaiber, The Church, Dictatorships, and Democracy in Latin America (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998). For collected documents from the Medellín Conference, see Joseph Gremillion, ed., The Gospel of Peace and Justice: Catholic Social Teaching since Pope John (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1976). 15. On Argentina, see Michael Burdick, For God and Fatherland: Religion and Politics in Argentina (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995); on Colombia, see Levine, Religion and Politics in Latin America. Though this differential is often noted and thoroughly described in the literature, its source is understudied. Elsewhere, I have argued that the primary cause of this differential is the extent to which close Church-state ties were retained in the first half of the twentieth century as political elites negotiated an end to the clerical/anticlerical dimension of the Latin America’s liberal/conservative conflict. The retention of close church-state ties sustained traditional forms of organization. See Nick Rowell, Church-State Ties, Roman Catholic Episcopacies, and Human Rights in Latin America (PhD diss., University of New Mexico, 2012). 16. Daudelin and Hewitt, “Churches and Politics.” 17. Marcos McGrath, “Ariel or Caliban?” Foreign Affairs 52, no. 1 (1973), 75–95; Andrew Kirkendall, “Paulo Freire, Eduardo Frei, Literacy Training and the Politics of Consciousness Raising in Chile, 1964–1970,” Journal of Latin American Studies 36, no. 4 (2004), 687–717. 18. Levine, Politics, Religion and Society, 132; William Hewitt, Base Christian Communities and Social Change in Brazil (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1991); Scott Mainwaring and Alexander Wilde, “The Progressive Church in Latin America: An Interpretation,” in The Progressive Church in Latin America, eds. Scott Mainwaring and Alexander Wilde (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 1–37. The literature on CEBs is expansive. For an account of the inner workings of a CEB that would become revolutionary, see Ernesto Cardenal, The Gospel of Soletiname (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010); see also Daniel  H.  Levine, Popular Voices in Latin American Catholicism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 19. Edward Cleary, Crisis and Change: The Church in Latin America Today (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1985); Calvo, “The Church,” 69–88. 20. O’Donnell, Modernization; David Collier, The New Authoritarianism in Latin America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). 21. The literature describing patterns of repression and the targeting of the left is a large one, including final reports issued by truth commissions. For good descriptions and analyses of these patterns of repression, see Pablo Policzer, The Rise and Fall of Repression in Chile (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), and Charles Brockett, Political Movements and Violence in Latin America (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 22. Anthony Pereira, Political (In)Justice: Authoritarianism and the Rule of Law in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), 21. 23. United Nations Truth Commission for El Salvador, From Madness to Hope: The 12 Year War in El Salvador. Report of the Commission on the Truth for El Salvador (New York and San Salvador: United Nations, 1993), 35–36. 24. On political process theory, see Douglas McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, “Toward an Integrated Perspective on Social Movements and Revolution,” in Comparative Politics, eds. Mark Lichbach and Alan Zuckerman (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Activist Christians and the Human Rights Movement   233 Press, 2009): 260-290; Douglas McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). For a critical perspective on political process theory, see Jeff Goodwin and James Jasper, “Caught in a Winding Snarling Vine: The Structural Bias of Political Process Theory,” Sociological Forum, vol. 14, no. 1 (March 1999), 27–54. 25. For the most direct application of political process theory to the role of religious activists in helping to create the human rights movement in Latin America, see Cleary, The Struggle for Human Rights. 26. Teresa Whitfield, Paying the Price: Ignacio Ellacuria and the Murdered Jesuits of El Salvador (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1994); Robert Lasalle-Klein, Blood and Ink: Ignacio Ellacuria, Jon Sobrino, and the Jesuit Martyrs of the University of Central America (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2014). 27. While this list highlights the most well-known such cases, it is not exhaustive. Case study accounts of this role abound, and a comprehensive accounting of such studies is well beyond the scope of this chapter. For particularly helpful volumes surveying a number of countries, see Klaiber, The Church, Dictatorships, which focuses almost exclusively on the role of the Catholic Church. See also Cleary, The Struggle for Human Rights, which situates religious activism within the broader development of the human rights movement in Latin America. 28. Mara Loveman, “High-Risk Collective Action: Defending Human Rights in Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina,” The American Journal of Sociology 104, no. 2 (1998), 477–525. 29. Levine, Politics, Religion and Society, 185–186; see also Ronald Pagnucco and John McCarthy, “Advocating Non Violent Direct Action in Latin America: The Antecedents and Emergence of SERPAJ,” in Religion and Politics in Comparative Perspective: Revival of Religious Fundamentalism in East and West, eds. Bronislaw Misztal and Anson Shupe (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992), 120–150. 30. Brian Smith, The Church and Politics in Chile (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982). 31. Mainwaring, The Catholic Church and Politics in Brazil. 32. Anthony Gill, Rendering unto Caesar: The Catholic Church and the State in Latin America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 33. Benjamin Goldfrank and Nick Rowell, “The Church, the State, and Human Rights in Latin America,” Politics, Religion and Ideology 13, no. 1 (2012), 25–51. For a similar argument that is global in scope, see Daniel Philpott, “Explaining the Political Ambivalence of Religion,” American Political Science Review 101, no. 3 (2007), 505–526. 34. Paul Freston, “Religious Pluralism, Democracy and Human Rights in Latin America,” in Religion and the Global Politics of Human Rights, eds. Thomas Banchoff and Robert Wuthnow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 101–128. 35. Cleary, The Struggle for Human Rights, 7, 128–132. 36. Gustavo Morello, “Secularización y derechos humanos: actores católicos entre la dictadura Argentina (1976) y la administración Carter (1977–1979),” Latin American Research Review 47, no. 3 (2012), 62–82. 37. Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). 38. Ibid., 91–92.

234   Nick Rowell 39. James  N.  Green, “Clerics, Exiles, and Academics: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States, 1969–1974,” Latin American Politics and Society 45, no. 1 (2003), 87–117. 40. Pamela Lowden, Moral Opposition to Authoritarian Rule in Chile, 1973–1990 (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1996); Amy Edmonds, “Moral Authority and Authoritarianism: The Catholic Church and the Military Regime in Uruguay,” Journal of Church and State 55, no. 3 (2013), 644–669. 41. Cleary, The Struggle for Human Rights, 9; Levine, Politics, Religion and Society, 184–188. 42. See Smith, The Church and Politics; Lowden, Moral Opposition; Cleary, The Struggle for Human Rights, 1–24; Klaiber, The Church, Dictatorships; Michael Fleet and Brian H. Smith, The Catholic Church and Democracy in Chile and Peru (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997); and Mario Aguilar, “Cardinal Raul Silva Henriquez, the Catholic Church, and the Pinochet Regime, 1973–1980: Public Responses to a National Security State,” The Catholic Historical Review 89, no. 4 (2003), 712–731. 43. Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders, 88. 44. Klaiber, The Church, Dictatorships; Goldfrank and Rowell, “The Church.” 45. Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders, 90. 46. Fleet and Smith, The Catholic Church; see also Carl Meacham, “Changing of the Guard: New Relations between Church and State in Chile,” Journal of Church and State 29 (Autumn 1987), 411–433. 47. Guillermo O’Donnell, “On the State, Democratization and Some Conception Problems,” Kellogg Institute, Working Paper #192 (April 1993): 14; see also Guillermo O’Donnell, “Delegative Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 5 (1994): 55–69. 48. On the effect of John Paul II’s conservative appointments, see Ralph Della Cava, “Vatican Policy 1978–1990: An Updated View,” Social Research 59, no. 1 (1992), 169–199; Madeleine Adriance, “The Paradox of Institutionalization: The Roman Catholic Church in Chile and Brazil,” Sociological Analysis 53, Spring (1992), 51–62. On actions taken against activist clergy and liberation theologians, see Mainwaring and Wilde, “The Progressive Church.” 49. On rapprochement with the state, see Carol Ann Drogus, “The Rise and Decline of Liberation Theology: Churches, Faith, and Political Change in Latin America” Comparative Politics 27, no. 4 (1995), 465–477. On Catholic Charismatic Renewal, see Andrew Chesnut, “A Preferential Option for the Spirit: The Catholic Charismatic Renewal in Latin America's New Religious Economy,” Latin American Politics and Society 45, no. 1 (2003), 55–85. 50. See Alfred T. Hennelly, ed., Santo Domingo and Beyond: Documents and Commentaries from the Historic Meeting of the Latin American Bishops’ Conference (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993); Daniel Levine, “The Future of Christianity in Latin America,” Journal of Latin American Studies 41, no. 1 (2009), 121–145. 51. Goetz Frank Ottmann, Lost for Words? Brazilian Liberationism in the 1990s (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002). 52. Roberto Blancarte, “The Changing Face of Religion in the Democratization of Mexico: The Case of Catholicism,” in Religious Pluralism, Democracy, and the Catholic Church in Latin America, ed. Frances Hagopian (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009): 225–256; Burdick, Legacies of Liberation; Helene Riviere d’Arc, “Has Basismo Disappeared?” Bulletin of Latin American Research 18, no. 2 (1999), 199–209. 53. Hannah Stewart-Gambino, “Las Pobladoras y la iglesia despolitizada en Chile,” América Latina Hoy 41 (2005), 121–138.

Activist Christians and the Human Rights Movement   235 54. On Chile, see Fleet and Smith, The Catholic Church; Meacham, “Changing of the Guard.” On the Dominican Republic, see Emelio Betances, “The Catholic Church and Political Mediation in the Dominican Republic: A Comparative Perspective,” Journal of Church and State 46 (2004), 341–364. 55. Edward Brett, “Archbishop Arturo Rivera Damas and the Struggle for Social Justice in El Salvador,” The Catholic Historical Review 94, no. 4 (2008), 717–739; Klaiber, The Church. 56. Steven Dudley, “The El Salvador Gang Truce and the Church: What Was the Role of the Catholic Church?” CLAS White Paper Series, no. 1 (2013). 57. Brett, “Archbishop Arturo Rivera Damas.” 58. On the Church and the MST, see Miguel Carter, For Land, Love, and Justice: The Origins of Brazil’s Landless Social Movement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). See also Patricia Rodriguez, “With or Without the People: The Catholic Church and Land-Related Conflicts in Brazil and Chile,” in Religious Pluralism, Democracy and the Catholic Church in Latin America, ed. Frances Hagopian (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 185–224; Burdick, Legacies of Liberation. 59. Carter, For Land, Love, and Justice; see also, Burdick, Legacies of Liberation, 101–106. 60. See Edward Cleary and Timothy Steigenga, eds., Resurgent Voices in Latin America: Indigenous Peoples, Political Mobilization, and Religious Change (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004). 61. Carmen Martinez Novo, “Building an Anti-Neoliberal Nation with the Indigenous Movement: The Salesian Missions of Ecuador,” in Bridging the Gaps: Faith-Based Organizations, Neoliberalism, and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean, eds. Tara Hefferin, Julie Adkins, and Laurie Ochipinti (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009): 213–228. 62. Guillermo Trejo, “Religious Competition and Ethnic Mobilization in Latin America: Why the Catholic Church Promotes Indigenous Movements in Mexico,” American Political Science Review 103, no. 3 (2009), 323–342. 63. For a broader institutional perspective on this topic, see Christopher Hale, “Religious Institutions and Civic Engagement: A Test of Religion’s Impact on Political Activism in Mexico,” Comparative Politics 47, no. 2 (2015), 211–230. 64. George Collier and Elisabeth Lowery Quaratiello, Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas (Oakland, CA: Food First Books, 1999), 62–70. 65. On the relationship between organized religion and the origin of women’s movements in Latin America, see also Drogus and Stewart-Gambino, Activist Faith. 66. Burdick, Legacies of Liberation, 87–95; on the role of the women’s movement in the struggle for reproductive rights, see Mala Htun, “Life, Liberty, and Family Values: Church and State in the Struggle over Latin America's Social Agenda,” in Religious Pluralism, Democracy, and the Catholic Church in Latin America, ed. Frances Hagopian (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009): 335–364; Cora Fernandez Anderson, Impact of Social Movements on State Policy: Human Rights and Women Movements in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 2011), 333–4, 394. 67. Mala Htun, Sex and the State: Abortion, Divorce, and the Family under Latin American Dictatorships and Democracies (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 155. 68. Anderson, Impact of Social Movements, 343–344. 69. Htun, Sex and the State. 70. Anderson, Impact of Social Movements, 408–409, 413–414, 446. 71. Burdick, Legacies of Liberation, 89–92.

236   Nick Rowell 72. Carol Ann Drogus and Hannah Stewart-Gambino, Activist Faith: Popular Women Activists and Their Movements in Democratic Brazil and Chile (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005). 73. On the concept of social capital, see Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 74. Jeffrey Rubin, David Smilde, and Benjamin Junge, “Religion, Social Movements and Zones of Crisis in Latin America,” Pardee Center Paper Series, Issues in Brief 25, November (2012), 243–248. 75. Levine, Politics, Religion and Society, 157. 76. Robert Brenneman, Homies and Hermanos: God and Gangs in Central America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Kevin Lewis O’Neill, City of God: Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010). 77. Mano dura, or “iron fist,” policies refer to the use of hard-line “law and order” tactics to combat organized crime. Such policies typically include the simultaneous expansion of police discretion and contraction of civil liberties. The results are often associated with police violence and mass arrests of suspected gang members on the basis of their physical appearance. Among other things, mass arrests contribute to overcrowded and otherwise deplorable prison conditions. 78. Kevin Lewis O’Neill, “The Reckless Will: Prison Chaplaincy and the Problem of Mara Salvatrucha,” Public Culture 22, no. 1 (2010), 67–88. 79. Catalina Romero, “Religion and Public Spaces: Catholicism and Civil Society in Peru,” in Religious Pluralism, Democracy, and the Catholic Church in Latin America, ed. Frances Hagopian (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009). 80. Loveman, “High-Risk Collective Action”; Klaiber, The Church, Dictatorships; Cleary, The Struggle for Human Rights; Fleet and Smith, The Catholic Church; Levine, Religion and Politics.

chapter 13

Prophetic M a rt y r dom i n Moder n L ati n A m er ica Two Definitions of Christian Martyrdom Edward T. Brett

In the 500-plus-year history of Latin American Christianity, many have suffered violent death because of their adherence to their religious values. One of the first was Bishop Antonio de Valdivieso. After being named bishop of Nicaragua in 1544, he began writing letters to Spanish authorities, informing them of the mistreatment of the indigenous population. Although he received death threats, he continued his quest for justice. Consequently, in 1550, a group of Spaniards angered by his denunciations of their behavior, murdered him.1 In 1565 Father Ignacio de Azevedo was charged with conducting an inspection of Jesuit missions in Brazil. After spending two years in the Portuguese colony, he sailed to Rome, where he asked that additional Jesuits be assigned to Brazil. His request was approved and in June 1570, forty Jesuits, including Azevedo, boarded a ship bound for Brazil. It never reached its destination. It was captured by French Huguenots, who executed all forty clergymen.2 No doubt Azevedo and his companions were exemplary priests. Yet it seems fair to say that when they decided to sail to Brazil, they did not expect to be executed. They were killed because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. This was not true, however, for Valdivieso. He knew that his actions could result in his death, but it was a chance he was willing to take, and in the end he paid with his life. Nevertheless, whereas Azevedo and his companions were declared Catholic martyrs in 1854, the Church has never granted this title to Valdivieso. Why is this so? Kenneth Woodward sheds light on this question in Making Saints: How the Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes a Saint, Who Doesn’t, and Why, pointing out that there is a theological rationale for who qualifies as a “martyr of the

238   Edward T. Brett church.” He writes, “According to the church’s criteria, only those who have been killed ‘in odium fidei’ (in hatred of the faith) qualify as Christian martyrs.”3 Azevedo and his companions met the criteria since they were executed by Protestants in odium fidei, while Valdivieso was murdered by those who were Catholics. This theological distinction has its origin in the early Church, when Christians were killed by Roman authorities who “hated Christianity.” As Woodward further notes, early Christian martyrs all met the correct criteria, and thus proof of their martyrdom was “easy to come by.” However, by the twentieth century the situation had changed. Most martyrs were victims of “political movements” and “the burden of showing ‘hatred of faith’ [had] become more difficult.”4 Between the seventeenth century and the 1920s there were few Catholics in Latin America who died in odium fidei. This changed, however, during the Mexican Revolution. During the presidency of Venustiano Carranza, radicals gained control of the 1917 Constitutional Convention and passed a new constitution. It included anticlerical statutes, which, if implemented, would strip the institutional Church of almost all its power and wealth. Since these measures went beyond what Carranza supported, he refused to enforce them, as did his successor, Álvaro Obregón. Nevertheless, tension between Church and state resulting from the new constitution did not diminish and, following the presidential victory of Plutarco Calles in 1924, it turned into violence. Calles, an atheist who viewed the Catholic Church as an obscurantist obstacle to revolutionary reform, decided to vigorously enforce the anticlerical laws. In 1926 he promulgated the so-called “Calles Law,” which forbade priests from voting and wearing clerical garb in public and authorized the imprisonment of priests who criticized the government. When several priests were incarcerated, the bishops announced the suspension of all Church services and called for an economic boycott in protest against the Calles Law. Viewing this as sedition, Calles had several priests arrested and executed. In response, some Catholics formed the Cristeros, an anti-government military force that fought to overthrow Calles. The Cristero War lasted from 1926 to 1929, and the repression of the Church continued for nearly a decade. During this time over 90,000 people were killed; at least forty of these were priests.5 The most famous was the Jesuit, Miguel Pro, who was arrested on false charges in 1927 and executed without trial by direct order of Calles. With the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940), a modus vivendi gradually developed between Church and state that lasted until the 1970s. Whereas the anticlerical measures of the Constitution of 1917 remained in effect, they were for the most part not enforced. The institutional Church, for its part, rarely spoke out on social questions and avoided political conflict with the government.6 Following the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), the institutional Church in Mexico tentatively began to speak out on social issues, and in 1977 two priests, Rodolfo Aguilar Álvarez and Rodolfo Escamilla García, were murdered because of their support for workers’ rights. On the day before his ordination, Aguilar wrote the following to his bishop:

Prophetic Martyrdom in Modern Latin America   239 Today and always in the history of humankind, salvation is liberation, Easter, renunciation of all infidelity, oppression, and injustice. With my own life I want to fashion a prophetic and priestly response to the call of God, my Father, and to the call of humankind, my brothers and sisters. Full of enthusiasm, I freely agree to live the life of proclaiming the gospel that Jesus lived. I am duty-bound to my oppressed brothers and sisters, and I willingly offer my life for their and my liberation. I renounce forever any human privilege or personal desire, any private possession, in order to be able to dedicate myself freely and utterly to the creation of a new human community.7

Like Valdivieso centuries earlier, Aguilar and Escamilla saw themselves in the mold of the Old Testament prophets who called out for the liberation of the poor and an end to their oppression. They knew that their prophetic commitment to a utopian ideal of justice for all could cost them their lives, but they were willing to pay that price if necessary, and eventually they did. In 1988, Miguel Pro, the executed Cristero priest, was beatified by Pope John Paul II and, since he was killed on orders of Calles in odium fidei, he was named an official martyr of the Church. Scores of others who had been killed during the Calles era were later beatified and declared martyrs, since they were presumably killed “in hatred of the faith.” Yet, like Valdivieso, the official “saint-makers” of the institutional Church have ignored Aguilar and Escamilla. No doubt this is at least in part because they were not killed in odium fidei. Such technical definitions of Christian martyrdom, however, are irrelevant to poor and oppressed Catholics of Mexico. To them, Aguilar and Escamilla, following the example of Jesus, sacrificed their lives on behalf of the downtrodden and have therefore earned the right to be called martyrs.

The Post–Vatican II Period Although the Latin American Church frequently clashed with the state in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such discord resulted primarily over the state’s attempt to diminish the institutional Church’s power and usurp its wealth. Traditionally, the Church had been a conservative entity in Latin American society that saw itself as a spiritual monarchy, operating in a hierarchical, paternalistic manner. It saw its mission in terms of maintaining the proper social order that it felt was most conducive for saving souls. Its clergy placed primary emphasis on dispensing the sacraments. Priests in their homilies railed against personal sins such as drunkenness and fornication, but little was said concerning economic, social, and political institutional structures that robbed the masses of their dignity. At their best, clergy served as middlemen, using their prestige to soften the mistreatment of peasants at the hands of excessively harsh landowners. At their worst, they indirectly supported the unjust status quo by encouraging the oppressed masses to accept their lot with humility and passivity.

240   Edward T. Brett By the 1930s, Catholic Action groups were formed in an attempt to bring Latin American society more in harmony with the teachings in the papal social encyclicals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But Church concern for the suffering of the masses took a giant leap forward as a result of Pope John XXIII’s aggiornamento, his call for the renewal of the Church, culminating in the Second Vatican Council. Not only priests, but all Catholics were now told that championing human development and social justice went hand in hand with saving souls. The council’s longest document, Gaudium et Spes, strongly emphasized this. Following the council, the Latin American hierarchy agreed to hold a general conference of Latin American bishops at Medellín, Colombia, in order to apply the principles of Vatican II to the Latin American situation. After two years of preparation in which the new theology of liberation was a major factor, the conference convened in 1968. Using the methodology of Gaudium et Spes, it changed the direction of the Latin American Church by attempting to create a new social order based on justice for the poor. The Church employed various devices, such as  the creation of comunidades eclesiales de base (base communities) and literacy programs, to raise the consciousness of the poor by teaching them to dialogue among themselves. Many base community members would later go on to hold offices in labor or peasant unions and opposition political parties. Some Church leaders became champions of land reform and justice for indigenous peoples. Several bishops publicly denounced dictators and refused to invite them to participate in traditional liturgical services, thereby symbolically delegitimizing them in the eyes of the people. In some countries the Church established human rights offices that documented cases of torture, imprisonment, killing, and disappearances. When military dictatorships were set up in the mid-1960s and 1970s, it was Church authorities who, often after first supporting these governments, eventually became the primary force in legitimizing democratic movements and providing safe spaces for various opposition groups to come together to work in unity. In some countries, bishops created the structures for national debates where opposition groups could come together to dialogue. They also served as mediators in peace talks between governments and rebel forces. But as many post–Vatican II/Medellín bishops, priests, religious, and lay leaders aligned themselves with the poor and became outspoken critics of the unjust status quo, they faced pressures from secular elites, as well as from conservative elements within the institutional Church. Church leaders who criticized the status quo were accused of meddling in politics and were labeled by government and business elites as Marxists. They were forced to live under the threat of violence, and many were kidnapped, tortured, and murdered. Likewise, they were criticized by conservative Latin American bishops who continued to follow a pre–Vatican II ecclesiology. These traditionalists blamed the influence of Marxism and liberation theology, rather than the ideology of the violence-oriented national security state, for the breakdown of social order, and they found sympathetic allies in some members of the Vatican inner circle of power, especially following the election of John Paul II.

Prophetic Martyrdom in Modern Latin America   241

Brazil and Chile In March 1964, the Brazilian military staged a coup that toppled the government of João Goulart, thereby ushering in Latin America’s first national security state and twenty-one years of repression. Nine years later, in September 1973, the Chilean armed forces, led by Augusto Pinochet, followed the Brazilian model and overthrew the Marxist government of Salvador Allende, setting up a dictatorship that lasted until 1990. Other Latin American countries soon followed suit; by the end of the 1970s, military dictatorships were the rule in most of the southern region of the Western Hemisphere. Initially, most Catholic bishops supported, or at least did not oppose, military rule, since such governments were anti-communist, promised to restore law and order, and claimed to respect Christianity. However, it soon became clear that these governments were employing violence on a massive scale to achieve their goals. Moreover, many of their victims were priests, religious, and lay Catholics who had died because they were following the social justice teachings of Vatican II and Medellín. Some bishops then became outspoken critics of military rule. Due to the prestige associated with their episcopal position, they were able to play a leading role in the struggle against governmentsponsored violence and for the return of democracy. But in their quest for justice, they were challenged not only by the military and the elites, but by conservative bishops who claimed that the progressive wing of the Church was interloping in the political sphere, which, in accordance with traditional Catholic teaching, should be left to the secular realm. By involving the Church in politics, the conservatives argued, the progressives had undermined the time-tested balance between Church and state, thereby damaging the Church immeasurably and causing its credibility to be questioned. The Brazilian Church by the end of the 1960s had become the most progressive church in Latin America, and three priests, along with many Catholic lay workers, were killed for their commitment to the poor. Antõnio Pereira Neto was the first priest to be murdered. He worked with the Juventude Universitária Católica, and when students began to suffer violence at the hands of security forces, he publicly criticized the government. In March 1969, after ignoring several death threats, he was kidnapped and killed. Father Rodolfo Lunkenbein, a German Salesian who assisted Indians in Mato Grosso in their struggle to keep their land, was assassinated in July 1976, along with his indigenous associate, Simão Cristino. Five months later, João Bosco Penido Burnier, a Jesuit priest, was shot dead by a soldier when he intervened at a jail in the Amazon region in an attempt to stop the torture of two women.8 During the Pinochet regime, the Church in Chile distinguished itself for its defense of human rights and its courageous protest against the government. Among the more than 15,000 who were murdered by government forces after the military coup were three foreign priests who worked with the poor. Juan Alsina, a Spaniard, was a hospital chaplain and a member of Acción Católica Obrera. He was arrested in September 1973 at San Juan de Dios Hospital. His bullet-ridden body was later found under a bridge.9

242   Edward T. Brett Michael Woodward, a Chilean-born Englishman who worked with the poor in Valparaiso and was a member of the radical Christians for Socialism, was arrested just after the 1973 coup; he was tortured and killed while in detention on the Esmeralda, a ship used by the Pinochet government to hold prisoners.10 Years later, in September 1984, Andrés Jarlan, a French priest and member of Acción Católica Obrera, was shot dead by police in Santiago while observing a national march against the government.11 These six priests killed in Brazil and Chile knew they were placing themselves in grave danger by taking a prophetic stand for justice. Yet none was killed by an assassin who “hated the faith,” and therefore they were deemed ineligible by the institutional Church for the title of martyr.

Argentina The military junta in Argentina was the most repressive in South America. In the name of “Western Christian civilization” it murdered nearly 30,000 people. But unlike in Brazil and Chile, where the Church hierarchy worked against government-sponsored violence, in Argentina the more than eighty bishops, with about six exceptions, remained silent or supported the military government.12 Even before the military staged a coup in March 1976, several priests were killed by right-wing death squads. The first was Carlos Mugica, a leading figure in the organization Priests for the Third World. An outspoken critic of government violence, he was placed under military surveillance and began to receive death threats. Although his apartment was bombed in a failed attempt to assassinate him, he would not be silenced. In May 1974, after he had presided at Mass in his parish in the Villa Luro slum of Buenos Aires, he was shot dead by a member of the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance.13 Five other priests who were killed before the coup included Carlos Dorniak, Nelio Rougier, Miguel Úrusa Nicolau, Francisco Soares, and Pedro Fourcade.14 Ten additional priests and two bishops would be murdered following the military takeover. An undetermined number of lay Catholics and Protestants who worked through the Church with the poor were also either killed or disappeared in the 1970s.15 The best-known of these was Mónica Mignone, who volunteered in a Jesuit slum parish in Buenos Aires. On May 14, 1976, she was kidnapped by security forces and brought to the Naval Technical School. Six of her associates were likewise abducted. All disappeared without a trace. Mónica Mignone differed from other desaparecidos, however, in that her father, Emilio Mignone, was rector of the National University of Luján and had once been a high official of the Organization of American States. Despite his important contacts, he was unable to find any information on his daughter’s fate. Consequently, he decided to write a book, Iglesia y Dictadura , about his failed attempt. Translated into English as Witness to the Truth: The Complicity of Church and Dictatorship in Argentina, it did much to expose Argentina’s “Dirty War” and the silence of the Argentine hierarchy.

Prophetic Martyrdom in Modern Latin America   243 In the Belgrano district of Buenos Aires, three Pallottine priests and two s­ eminarians—Pedro Duffau, Alfredo Kelly, Alfredo Leaden, Salvador Barbeito, and Emilio Barletti—were massacred on July 4, 1976. The killers left a message behind: “This is what happens when you poison the minds of the young.” Four of the dead had been Catholic schoolteachers and evidently the tone of their instruction was seen by their killers as subversive.16 One of the few Argentine bishops to follow the social justice directives of Vatican II was Enrique Angelelli. Appointed bishop of La Rioja in 1968, he denounced the oppressed condition of the rural workers in his diocese, supported the formation of farm cooperatives, and called for land reform. He also encouraged a social justice orientation in his clergy. These actions incurred the wrath of the large landowners and the military. Soon Church people from his diocese were being arrested. Desperate for help, Angelelli sought support from the Argentine Bishops’ Conference, but to no avail. Then, in July 1976, Fathers Gabriel Longueville and Juan Carlos de Dios Murias, both members of Priests for the Third World, were arrested and executed by the police. Angelelli officiated at their funeral Mass, concelebrating with Bishop Vicente Zaspe of Santa Fe, Papal Nuncio Pio Laghi, and forty-three priests. Stunned by the absence of all but one of his fellow prelates, Angelelli wrote to a friend: “Among my brother bishops in Argentina I stand alone.”17 A week later, Wenceslao Pedernera, a Catholic lay leader who was involved in the farm cooperative movement that Angelelli supported, was shot and killed in front of his wife and children. Although the bishop remarked to his niece and several diocesan coworkers that he felt he might be the next victim of the death squads, he continued his quest for justice.18 He filled a briefcase with evidence on the Longueville-Murias murders, and on August 4 he and Father Arturo Pinto drove toward La Rioja. Soon two cars came from behind and forced their vehicle off the road, causing it to turn over several times. Father Pinto was knocked unconscious but survived. Angelelli’s lifeless body was found about twenty-five yards from the wreckage. Testimony from experts was later provided in court that showed conclusively that the bishop’s body could not have gone through the windshield or car window and that it was highly probable that he was killed by a blow from a blunt instrument and then dragged away from his vehicle. His briefcase containing information on the Longueville and Murias killings was missing. Angelelli’s death was ruled an accident. Later in 1983, following the fall of the military junta, the case was reopened and, after a thorough investigation, the presiding judge changed the official verdict, stating that the bishop’s death “was not due to a traffic accident, but rather to a coldly premeditated homicide, which the victim was expecting.”19 In July 1977 another progressive bishop, Carlos Ponce de León of San Nicolás de los Arroyos, died in a manner eerily similar to that of Angelelli. He and Víctor Martínez, a Church lay leader, were driving to Buenos Aires to deliver to the papal nuncio evidence of kidnappings and torture in their diocese. Following “an automobile accident,” both men were taken to the San Nicolás clinic. After the bishop’s personal physician was denied permission to enter the intensive care unit, Ponce de León died. Martínez, who

244   Edward T. Brett survived, was imprisoned and tortured. He later stated that during his interrogation, he was continually asked for information on the “subversive” activities of Ponce de León.20 Stonewalled by security forces and ignored by the bishops, several mothers of the desaparecidos, desperate to find information on their missing children, took matters into their own hands and formed the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. On Thursday, April 30, 1977, fourteen of these women processed around the Plaza wearing white headscarves with their kidnapped child’s name embroidered on it. On every Thursday thereafter, the Madres would repeat their silent procession. Soon other mothers joined them, until their numbers reached about 2,000. Their courageous actions brought not only international attention to the “Dirty War,” but also the wrath of the authorities. In a futile attempt to intimidate the Madres, death squads in December 1977 kidnapped six of them, along with two French nuns who collaborated with them—Alicia Doman and Léonie Duquet. The eight were never seen alive again.21 Other priests who were kidnapped and killed during Argentina’s “Dirty War” were Pablo Gazzari and Mauricio Silva Iribarnegaray, who disappeared in 1977. They, along with Nelio Rouger, who was arrested and murdered in 1975, were members of the Little Brothers of the Gospel, a French congregation dedicated to living with the poor.22 As with victims elsewhere in Latin America, the previously mentioned Argentines were murdered by military or paramilitary death squads because they worked to ameliorate the lives of the poor. Most realized that their efforts could result in death, but they were willing to risk that possibility. As noted earlier, according to canon law none of these victims was eligible for the title of “martyr of the Church” since they were not killed in odium fidei. But some Catholic theologians by the 1980s, contending that this definition was inadequate for the present time, began calling for a broader canonical definition of “martyr,” one that included those who, following the example of Jesus and the prophets of the Old Testament, died in defense of social justice.23

Guatemala Guatemala has historically been the most important of the Central American countries and probably the most violent. In 1871, Liberal attempts to confiscate Church properties resulted in a persecution of the Church that in Latin America was second only to Mexico in viciousness. The Church lost most of its power and land and for the next seventy-five years or so spent the bulk of its energy attempting in vain to recoup from its losses. Extreme poverty had long been widespread in Guatemala, especially among the Maya, who made up the majority of its population. Reform was sorely needed, but until the mid-1940s the country was ruled by dictators who upheld a status quo that favored rich landowners and foreign investors. But when Jorge Ubico was forced to resign as president in 1944, the nation had its first honest election. The reformer Juan José Arévalo easily won. His inauguration in March 1945 ushered in a decade of social progress that scholars refer to as the “Ten Years of Spring.” The right to vote was granted to literate

Prophetic Martyrdom in Modern Latin America   245 women and was expanded to include illiterate men. Schools were opened for the poor, political parties were permitted to organize, and unions were allowed to form and encouraged to grow. In 1951 Jacobo Arbenz was elected to succeed Arévalo after promising to expand on his predecessor’s achievements by adding much-needed land reform. In 1952 his agrarian reform bill was passed into law by the legislature. Over a thousand large landholdings that had lain uncultivated were now expropriated and turned over to more than 100,000 landless peasant families. The US-based United Fruit Company (UFCO), the largest landholder in Guatemala, was especially affected by the new law, in that approximately 400,000 of its 550,000 acres were confiscated. Although the law stipulated that owners of expropriated properties were to be compensated by the government based on the assessed tax value of the land they had lost, UFCO had previously bribed government officials to drastically undervalue its holdings. Consequently, it stood to lose heavily. UFCO had powerful connections in the Eisenhower administration, however, and the Central Intelligence Agency was commissioned to overthrow Arbenz. It successfully did so in July 1954.24 For the next four decades, Guatemala’s government was dominated by right-wing military dictators and the reforms of the “Ten Years of Spring” came to an abrupt end. Disgusted by what had taken place, some young army officers, inspired by Fidel Castro, attempted to overthrow the government in 1960. When their coup failed, they formed a Marxist guerrilla front. A civil war ensued that lasted until 1996 and resulted in the deaths of tens, even hundreds of thousands, of Guatemalans. The Guatemalan Catholic hierarchy and some US missionary priests had clandestinely worked with the CIA to bring down the Arbenz government and had subsequently supported and thereby helped to legitimize the dictatorial rule that followed. The institutional Church’s conduct began to change, however, in the 1970s and, as in other Latin American countries, priests and other Church workers paid with their lives because of their “option for the poor.” The first priest to die was William (Guillermo) Woods, a US Maryknoll, who served an indigenous community in Huehuetenagno. After the government opened the Ixcán jungle for settlement, Woods moved indigenous people into the area. When he attempted to obtain land titles for them, however, he incurred the wrath of the military. He ignored warnings to leave the country, and in November 1976 he died with four others in a “plane crash” on a crystalline clear day. His death was ruled an accident, but strong evidence exists to indicate otherwise.25 Following the fraudulent presidential election in 1978 of Fernando Lucas García, violence became commonplace. Priests and Church workers were not exempt. On June 30, Father Eufemio Hermógenes López was gunned down. He had supported his peasant parishioners in their struggle to prevent a company from diverting the town’s water supply and had criticized the army for illegally kidnapping young men into the military. Therefore, he had been marked for assassination.26 Because of their support for striking workers in Escuintla, two Immaculate Heart of Mary missionaries were murdered in 1980. On May 1, Father Conrado de la Cruz and his catechist, Herlindo Cifuentes, disappeared, and on May 12, Father Walter Voordeckers was

246   Edward T. Brett shot dead by four men who attempted to kidnap him. Voordeckers had earlier received death threats from the Ejército Secreto Anti-Communista, which painted on the walls of his church, “Walter communist, the ESA is looking for you” and “Walter go home.”27 Before the end of the year, two Spanish Sacred Heart priests were assassinated in the department of El Quiché. José María Gran Cirera was ambushed and killed, along with his lay assistant Domingo del Barrio Batz, on June 4 as they traveled toward Chajul. Witnesses said the victims had been followed by an army helicopter just prior to their deaths.28 Faustino Villanueva was gunned down in his rectory on July 10 by two men on a motorcycle, who were later seen entering the treasury police barracks.29 In an obvious attempt to further intimidate the Church, four more priests were murdered before the end of 1981. Carlos Gálvez Galindo, a diocesan priest, was killed in his house in Tecpán on May 14.30 On July 2, Tullio Marcello Maruzzo, an Italian Franciscan, was ambushed and murdered with one of his catechists as they traveled back to his parish in Quirigua.31 Stanley Rother, a US priest working with indigenous people in Santiago Atitlán, was shot and killed in his rectory on July 28. He had earlier left Guatemala after his name appeared on a death list, but returned because he felt he could not abandon his people.32 On August 2, Carlos Pérez Alonso, a Spanish Jesuit and chaplain at a military hospital, was kidnapped and was never seen again.33 On February 13, 1982, US Christian Brother James Miller was gunned down by masked men as he repaired a wall at the De La Salle Indian School in Huehuetenango. Two days earlier, another brother had visited the local military headquarters in an attempt to force the army to release a student who had been illegally conscripted. Some speculate that Miller’s assassination was a warning to the Christian Brothers to cease interfering in army affairs.34 Shortly before his murder, Brother James had written to friends in the United States. His words are telling: I am personally weary of violence, but I continue to feel a strong commitment to the suffering poor of Central America. . . . God knows why He continued to call me to Guatemala when some friends and relatives encouraged me to pull out for my own comfort and safety, but I have been a Christian Brother for nearly 20 years now, and my commitment to my vocation grows steadily stronger in the context of my work in Central America. I pray to God for the grace and strength to serve Him faithfully by my presence among the poor and oppressed of Guatemala. I place my life in His Providence; I place my trust in Him.35

In March 1982, General José Efraín Ríos Montt took over the reins of power in Guatemala in a coup that toppled the previous military government. Although widespread human rights abuses continued during his seventeen-month dictatorship, in June 1983 he issued a Decree of Amnesty for all guerrillas who turned themselves in to the authorities. In truth, the decree was no more than a façade, meant to project an image to other countries of a new “respectable” Guatemala. Ironically, however, it indirectly cost a mild-mannered Franciscan his life. Augusto Ramírez Monasterio, a priest in the parish of San Francisco el Grande in Antigua, was hearing confessions when a

Prophetic Martyrdom in Modern Latin America   247 campesino entered the confessional and asked his help in obtaining amnesty. Soon thereafter, the priest took the campesino, a former guerrilla, to a nearby municipal building, where he intended to assist him in completing the necessary paperwork. To the surprise of both men, however, local governmental officials turned them over to the National Police, who tortured them. Ramírez, but not the former guerrilla, was eventually released. Thereafter he received threatening phone calls demanding that he leave Guatemala. On November 7, 1983, he was kidnapped; his battered body was discovered in the morgue the next day.36

El Salvador The 1960s saw impressive economic growth in El Salvador, but it was growth that ­primarily benefited the rich. For the first time in its history, the oligarchy welcomed large-scale foreign investment, and between 1961 and 1971 manufacturing grew by 24 percent. But the new capital-intensive industries did not absorb the available labor force. Moreover, in the late 1960s, prices dropped for Salvadoran exports, causing economic hardship for workers. Recently formed unions now became more active; strikes occurred with more frequency, and with them government-sponsored repression. In 1967 General José Medrano, head of the National Guard, founded ORDEN, a paramilitary organization. Under its direction, a spy system was set up in the countryside to aid the Guardia in controlling unrest, much of it stemming from the oligarchy’s refusal to grant land reform. Thus, by the 1970s, repression of both the urban and rural poor had intensified and this, in turn, led to the formation of leftist guerrilla groups. Following the 1968 Medellín Conference, Archbishop Luis Chávez y González of San Salvador and his Auxiliary Bishop Arturo Rivera Damas created an impressive reform program that attempted to blend the social justice concepts of Vatican II into the Salvadoran Church’s methodology. Yet they received little support from the country’s other bishops. In 1977, as government repression intensified along with episcopal infighting, the elderly Chávez retired. Although he recommended that Rivera succeed him as archbishop, the Vatican appointed the less controversial Oscar Romero. Seventeen days later, the new archbishop’s friend Rutilio Grande was assassinated. Father Grande and three fellow Jesuits had been assigned to Aguilares, north of San Salvador, in September 1972. The team was to implement a social justice–oriented pastoral program among the region’s sugarcane workers. Within the next year, numerous catechists were trained and comunidades eclesiales de base were established. When refinery workers went on strike in 1973, local elites blamed the Jesuits for the workers’ newfound boldness. Soon the pastoral team was receiving death threats. Tensions intensified over the next few years, and on March 12, 1977, as he drove from Aguilares to El Paisnal, Grande and two peasants who were riding with him were assassinated.37

248   Edward T. Brett Archbishop Romero, who had earlier criticized Grande’s team for being too political, traveled to Aguilares for his funeral. He viewed the bloody bodies of the three deathsquad victims and saw the grief of the peasants who had flocked to the funeral. This experience transformed Romero. From this time until his death, he would be called the “voice of the voiceless.” But the Salvadoran Church would pay a heavy price for its “option for the poor.” Soon fliers circulated throughout the capital city stating: “Be a Patriot! Kill a Priest!” Five more priests, along with a substantial number of lay Church workers, would be killed before Romero’s own assassination. Two months after Grande’s death, a second priest, Alfonso Navarro Oviedo, was killed. Navarro, who was pastor of a church on the outskirts of San Salvador, taught religion classes in a local high school. He was soon accused of corrupting the minds of his students and received death threats that were made all the more real when his residence was attacked and his garage and car destroyed. On the afternoon of May 11, he was ordered to report to presidential headquarters, where he was interrogated by security forces and accused of subversive activities. He was eventually allowed to leave, but just minutes after he returned to his residence, four men appeared at his door. Navarro and a boy who answered their knock were shot dead.38 Octavio Ortiz Luna joined the list of prophetic martyrs in January 1979. He was conducting a retreat for young men. While the participants were sleeping, security forces, using an armored vehicle, smashed through the fence that enclosed the retreat center. Within seconds, Ortiz and four young men were murdered. According to eyewitnesses, the police next dragged the five lifeless bodies to the roof of the center and placed them in positions so it looked like they had been in a shootout with government forces. Photos were taken that appeared in the next day’s newspapers, along with a report claiming the retreat house was actually a guerrilla base. The victims’ funeral mass was held at the cathedral and was concelebrated by Romero and over a hundred priests. Over 10,000 people gathered outside in the square because the cathedral was filled to capacity. In his homily Romero called the government charges “a lie.” When he called for a “cleansing of the corrupt security system of our country,” the crowd roared in approval. They applauded as the pallbearers carried the casket of Ortiz from the cathedral, but when the archbishop processed from the church, the applause became deafening.39 Without a doubt, by this time Romero had become one of the most popular Churchman in Latin America and an international hero. The next priest to die violently was Rafael Palacios. He began his priesthood in the San Vicente Diocese, but was suspended by his bishop, the ultraconservative Pedro Aparicio, because of his progressive approach to pastoral ministry. He was accepted by Romero into the San Salvador Archdiocese, where he immersed himself in the Christian base community movement and was outspoken in his criticism of government-sponsored terrorism. On June 14, he found a white hand with the letters UGB painted on his car. This was a clear warning from the White Warrior Union. He was assassinated a week later.40 In his homily at Palacios’s funeral, Romero said that the priest was a casualty of “the structural sin built into, embedded in our society.”41 He then added: “It would be sad,

Prophetic Martyrdom in Modern Latin America   249 if in a country where murder is being committed so horribly, we were not to find priests also among the victims. They are the testimony of a church incarnated in the problems of its people.”42 Romero’s profound words encapsulate the meaning and value of prophetic martyrdom. The last priest to be assassinated before Romero was Alirio Napoleón Macías. A week before his death, the archdiocesan newspaper, Orientación, had published an article revealing the arrest and murder of eleven people from his parish. Although the paper did not disclose the source of its information, it had been Macías. On August 4, three national guardsmen in civilian clothing gunned him down in his church.43 In attempting to publicize and thereby possibly mitigate the violence inflicted by security forces, Macías put his own life in jeopardy and died as a result. By the end of 1979, security forces and their paramilitary associates were murdering hundreds of Salvadorans. In his Sunday homilies, which were broadcast over YSAX, the archdiocesan radio channel, Romero often read the names of those who had died violently during the week, while also pleading for an end to the killing. By this time he had become internationally known. He had been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and had received several peace awards and honorary degrees from institutions throughout Europe and the United States. More than anyone else, he had brought to the attention of the world the horrors of what was taking place in his nation, and for this reason he was despised by those in the Salvadoran power structure. He was also excoriated by all but one of his fellow Salvadoran bishops, who complained to the papal nuncio that his meddling in “politics” was a major reason for the deaths of so many priests. It was clear that his life was in danger. Although Romero feared assassination and spoke frankly about its possibility to his confessor, he continued to speak out. After reading in a local newspaper that the United States had decided to send military aid to El Salvador, he composed a letter calling on President Jimmy Carter to terminate the plan, noting that such aid would be used to further oppress the Salvadoran people. Before sending the letter, however, he read it publicly in his Sunday homily, thereby infuriating military authorities. About three weeks later, on March 9, he celebrated a Mass for Mario Zamora, a Christian Democratic leader who had been kidnapped from his home by security forces and murdered. The next morning, a workman in the basilica found a suitcase containing seventy-two sticks of dynamite that had failed to go off.44 But this unsuccessful attempt to kill him only made him more intense in his struggle for justice. In his Sunday homily on March 23, he appealed to the enlisted men in the army to disobey orders from their officers to kill their fellow campesinos. The next day, while saying Mass in a hospital chapel near his residence, he was killed by a sniper. About two weeks prior to his death, in a telephone interview with a journalist from the Mexican newspaper Excelsior, he had said the following: I have often been threatened with death. I must tell you, as a Christian, I do not believe in death without resurrection. If I am killed, I shall arise in the Salvadoran people. . . . Martyrdom is a grace of God that I do not believe I deserve. But if God

250   Edward T. Brett accepts the sacrifice of my life, let my blood be a seed of freedom and the sign that hope will soon be reality. Let my death, if it is accepted by God, be for my people’s liberation and as a witness of hope in the future.45

Perhaps more than anything ever written by theologians on the concept of prophetic martyrdom, these passionate words cut to the heart of the matter and make clear that those killed because of their Christian commitment to social justice bear witness to some of the noblest ideals of the Christian faith. Moreover, although it was not Romero’s intent, his statements in this interview laid bare the inadequacy of the institutional Church’s official definition of martyrdom, while making a compelling case for its expansion. Before 1980 had ended, four more priests—Cosme Spezzotto, Manuel Reyes Monico, Ernesto Abrego, and Marcial Serrano—had been killed, along with José Othmero Caceres, a seminarian.46 The clergymen were not known as radical progressives. Even so, during this turbulent time, merely to be a priest was enough to place one’s life in grave danger. On December 1, 1980, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel and lay missionary Jean Donovan had dinner at the residence of Robert White, US ambassador to El Salvador. Both were part of a Cleveland mission team that worked with poor peasants in La Libertad. Sometimes they would work with two US Maryknoll missionaries, Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, transporting campesinos from conflictive areas to refugee centers set up by the Archdiocese of San Salvador. Due to a curfew in the capital, Kazel and Donovan spent the night at the ambassador’s home. The following morning, they left in their minivan for the airport, where they picked up Ford and Clarke, who were returning from a Maryknoll retreat in Nicaragua. Once the four left the airport, their minivan was halted by six National Guardsmen, who drove them to a remote area, where they were brutally raped and murdered.47 They had received warnings to leave the country or suffer the consequences, but they refused to do so. In a letter written by Donovan to a friend two weeks before her death, she explains her reason why, and in so doing articulates the mindset of the prophetic martyr: [T]he Peace Corps left today, and my heart sank low. The danger is extreme and they are right to leave, but it seems that the more help is needed, the less help is available. Now I must assess my own position, because I am not up for suicide. Several times I have decided to leave—I almost could except for the children, the poor bruised victims of adult lunacy. Who would care for them? Whose heart would be so staunch as to favor the reasonable thing in a sea of their tears and loneliness? Not mine, dear friend, not mine.48

But this time the Salvadoran death squads had miscalculated. As Anna Peterson notes, the murder of the four women “sparked more outrage in the United States than all the killings [in El Salvador] that had preceded [it].”49 North American people of faith now came together in significant numbers in a decade-long attempt to pressure the US government into terminating military aid to El Salvador. Although their efforts were mostly

Prophetic Martyrdom in Modern Latin America   251 unsuccessful, they did have one positive result. With such pressure being exerted on the US Congress and the Reagan administration, the Salvadoran security forces could not afford more bad publicity from the murder of additional Church people. Consequently, with the exception of Sister Silvia Arriola, who was killed in Santa Ana in a battle between guerrillas and government forces in 1981, not a single priest or religious died violently in El Salvador over the next nine years. While the killing of priests and nuns was suspended, that of other Salvadorans escalated into the tens of thousands. Ten of the dead were members of the National Federation of Salvadoran Workers, whose union headquarters was bombed in October 1989 by security forces. In response to this brutal killing, guerrilla leaders of the Frente Farabundo Martí de Liberación Nacional (FMLN) launched a major offensive in November, which caught the military by surprise. The initial success of the guerrillas embarrassed and infuriated the Salvadoran armed forces. Looking for a scapegoat, the military blamed the uprising on the Jesuits at the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA), who they erroneously contended were the intellectuals behind the FMLN. Following a meeting of the military high command, twenty soldiers from the elite US-trained Atlacatl Battalion entered the Jesuit living quarters at the UCA on November 16, in the middle of the night. Their orders were “to kill Father Ellacuría and leave no witnesses.”50 By the time they left, six Jesuit priests, their cook, and her daughter were executed. Father Ignacio Ellacuría, as rector of the UCA, had spearheaded the reshaping of the university into a center that, through teaching and scholarship, worked to uncover the causes and to find solutions for El Salvador’s poverty and oppression. Father Ignacio Martín-Baró, vice rector and a prolific scholar, was the director of the University Institute of Public Opinion, which conducted surveys on the psychological effects that the harsh realities of Salvadoran life had on the nation’s people. Father Segundo Montes was the director of the UCA’s Human Rights Institute, which conducted research on refugee issues. Father Juan Ramón Moreno was director of the Center for Theological Reflection. Father Amando López, a philosophy/theology professor, also served as pastor of the Tierra Virgen community in Soyapango, a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of San Salvador. All five Jesuit professors were contributors to Estudios Centroamericanos, a university-based magazine of social commentary that was quite critical of the Salvadoran military and government and a major force in efforts to create a peace dialogue. The sixth priest-victim, Father Joaquín López y López, who was not a member of the faculty, was the director of the Fe y Alegría movement in El Salvador. Under his leadership, 48,000 young people in poor neighborhoods, who would otherwise have had no opportunity for education, were able to receive vocational training.51 The execution of the six Jesuits and two women shocked much of the world and increased international pressure on the Salvadoran government to take peace talks seriously. As a result, the government and the FMLN finally signed a peace accord in January 1992, ending the twelve-year civil war.

252   Edward T. Brett

Conclusion Between 1968 and 1990, over a thousand priests and nuns were exiled, imprisoned, tortured, or killed in Latin America by authoritarian governments. A much larger number of lay Church workers, whose names are mostly unknown, were also incarcerated or murdered. Some were killed because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but most died because they prophetically worked for social justice, thereby knowingly placing their lives in jeopardy. Yet none of these victims fits the traditional Catholic definition of Christian martyrdom. As noted at the beginning of this study, these Latin American men and women were killed not by people who denied the truth of Christianity and hated the faith, but by men who were baptized Christians. Indeed, under the auspices of the national security state, the government architects who planned these murders claimed that they were acting as defenders of a Western Christian social order whose very existence was threatened by an anti-Christian, Marxist philosophy that had infiltrated the Catholic Church. Many of these architects attended Sunday Mass and socialized with ultraconservative bishops who claimed that those victimized by security forces were ideological leftists who died in defense of political ideals that the Church opposes. Apologists for the national security state, including these bishops, further contended that the deaths of these activists had little to do with religion. They were killed, they said, in retaliation for their political subversion and consequently do not meet the necessary criteria to be declared Christian martyrs by the Church. Progressives likewise admitted that Catholics killed by Latin American death squads did not fit the traditional norms needed for canonization as martyrs. They argued, however, that the Church’s definition of martyrdom was too rigid and outdated and needed to be expanded to include those who, like the prophets and Jesus, died in defense of social justice. They further contended that in modern-day Latin America, more than bearing witness to Jesus’s divinity was needed. Christians had to strive to make the ­utopian ideals envisioned by Jesus a reality. As the theologian Karl Rahner notes: [I]t should not be overlooked that the faith to which martyrdom gives witness in ultimate existential radicality—death—also embraces moral values (social justice, love of neighbor, and the like) and not just abstract theological principles of faith only obliquely related to concrete life.

Consequently, adds Rahner, even when the Latin American martyr was “directly involved in the service of a socio-political ideal, [his or her] actions flowed from an expressly Christian motivation and inspiration.” Therefore, he or she meets the criteria for true Christian martyrdom.52 For the oppressed and for progressive bishops and theologians, Archbishop Romero serves as the model for prophetic martyrdom. Yet since Archbishop Rivera Damas of San Salvador initiated the official process for his canonization, his cause had been

Prophetic Martyrdom in Modern Latin America   253 blocked by conservative prelates at the Vatican. Just six weeks after his election as pope in 2013, however, Pope Francis personally intervened to unblock his case and has assured that the process will now sail smoothly toward a rapid conclusion. The Argentine pontiff has also used his influence to begin the process toward the beatification of the five Pallottines and Father Carlos Murias, who were assassinated in his home country in 1976. It seems safe to assume that the cases of other modern-day Latin American martyrs will soon be opened and, if this happens, then the prophetic Latin American Christians who gave their lives in the cause of social justice will have rewritten the criteria for ­martyrdom that was established in ancient times. But regardless of what the institutional Church does, it is certain that those prophets who died in the struggle for social justice in Latin America will be considered Christian martyrs by the poor masses. Indeed, they are already seen as such. Following his papal election, Pope Francis changed the criteria needed under canon law for martyrdom. Those who are killed because they chose to work for the justice that Jesus calls for in the gospels are now considered to have died in odium fidei. This change is significant because the “prophetic Martyrs of Latin America” are now eligible for canonization.

Notes 1. Enrique Dussel, A History of the Church in Latin America (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1981), 52–53, 266; José Alvarez Lobo, Fray Antonio de Valdivieso: Obispo mártir de Nicaragua, 1544–1550 (San José, Costa Rica: Editorial Lascasiana, 1992). 2. Leo A. Kelly, “Bl. Ignacio de Azevedo,” The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York, NY: Robert Appleton Company, 1910), vol. 7. www.newadvent.org/cathen/07639b.htm. 3. Kenneth L. Woodward, Making Saints: How the Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes a Saint, Who Doesn’t, and Why (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 45. 4. Ibid. 5. Jürgen Buchenau, Plutarco Elías Calles and the Mexican Revolution (Denver, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006); Robert E. Quirk, The Mexican Revolution and the Catholic Church (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1973). 6. Jeffrey Klaiber, The Church, Dictatorships, and Democracy in Latin America (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998), 242–243. 7. Quoted in Martin Lang and Reinhold Iblacker, Witness of Hope: The Persecution of Christians in Latin America (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1981), 81. 8. Fernando Prandini, Victor Petrucci, and Romeu Dale, As relações Igreja-Estado no Brasil (São Paulo: Centro Pastoral Vergueiro; Edições Loyola, 1986–1987) vol. 2, 163–167; vol. 4, 219–229, 273–274; Klaiber, 20–41. 9. Jaime Escobar, Persecución a la iglesia en Chile: Martirologio, 1973–1986 (Santiago: Terranova Editores, 1986), 76. 10. Edward Crouzet, Blood on the Esmeralda: The Life and Death of Father Michael Woodward (Stratton-on-the-Fosse, Radstock: Downside Books, 2002). 11. María Angélica Cruz, Iglesia, represión y memoria: El caso chileno (Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno de España Editores, 2004), 86–87. 12. Klaiber, The Church, 76–77.

254   Edward T. Brett 13. Martin De Biase, “Entre dos fuegos,” vida y asesinato del Padre Mugica (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor, 1998). 14. Emilio  F.  Mignone, Witness to the Truth: The Complicity of Church and Dictatorship in Argentina, 1976–1983 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986), 131–132, 147–149. 15. For a list and commentary on some of these see Mignone, Witness, 133–136. 16. Ibid., 146–147; Eduardo Gabriel Kimel, La Masacre de San Patricio (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Dialectica, 1989). 17. Mignone, Witness, 142; Lang and Iblacker, Witness of Hope, 112. 18. Mignone, Witness, 142. 19. Ibid., 142–143. 2 0. Ibid., 145–146. 21. Marguerite Guzman Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1994), 77–78. 22. Mignone, Witness, 147–148. 23. See for instance, Karl Rahner, “Dimensions of Martyrdom: A Plea for the Broadening of a Classical Concept,” Concilium 163 (1983), 9–11; Juan Hernández Pico, “Martyrdom Today in Latin America: A Stumbling Block, Folly, and Power of God,” Concilium 163 (1983), 37–42; and Anna Peterson, Martyrdom and the Politics of Religion: Progressive Catholicism in El Salvador’s Civil War (New York, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), 66–136. 2 4. Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 25. Donna Whitson Brett and Edward T. Brett, Murdered in Central America: The Stories of Eleven US Missionaries (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988), 68–88. 26. Phillip Berryman, The Religious Roots of Rebellion: Christians in Central American Revolutions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984), 190–191. 27. Ibid., 200–201; Guatemala: Memoria del silencio, Anexo 1: Volumen 1, Caso ilustrativo No. 56, Ejecución del sacerdote Walter Voordeckers, shr.aaas.org/Guatemala/ceh/mds/ Spanish/anexo1/vol1/. 28. Observatorio Pastoral-CELAM, www.celam.org/observatoriopas/Images/img_noticias/ docu4d0e346231f; Berryman, The Religious Roots, 201; Tonibandin’s Weblog: Noticias que nos competen a todos, tonibandin.wordpress.com/2011/02/01/padre-jose. 29. Berryman, The Religious Roots, 204. 30. New York Times (May 16, 1981). 31. Ordo Fratrum Minorum>blog.servants: https://ofm.org/blog/servants-god-tulliomaruzzo-ofm. 32. Brett and Brett, Murdered, 89–118. 33. Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Organization of American States, “Report on the Situation of Human Rights in the Republic of Guatemala,” Chapter  6, OEA/Ser.L/V/II.53 (October 13, 1981). 34. Brett and Brett, Murdered, 140–158. 35. Ibid., 158. 36. “Fray Augusto Ramírez Monasterio, mártir de los pobres de Guatemala,” Pircas y Trincheras (November 7, 2009), pircasytrincheras.blogspot.com/ . . . augusto-ramirez. 37. Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Organization of American States, “Report on the Situation of Human Rights in El Salvador,” Chapter 2, Right to Life. OEA/Ser.L/V/ II.46,doc.23,rev.1 (November 17, 1978). www.cidh.org/countryrep/ElSalvador78eng/ chap.2.htm.

Prophetic Martyrdom in Modern Latin America   255 38. Ibid. 39. Mons. Oscar A. Romero: Su pensamiento, VI (San Salvador: Publicaciones Pastorales del Arzobispado, 1981), 130; James R. Brockman, Romero: A Life (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1989), 155. Brockman was in attendance at the funeral Mass. 40. Brockman, Romero, 175–176. 41. Ibid., 176. 42. Ibid., 177. 43. Ibid., 181–182. 44. Ibid., 238. 45. Orientación, April 13, 1980. Quoted in Brockman, 248. 46. “No Reprieve in an Ugly War,” Time (July 7, 1980); “Padre Marcial Serrano, Desaparecido en El Salvador,” Pircas y Trincheras (December 29, 2009). Peterson, Martyrdom, 65. 47. Brett and Brett, Murdered, 189–320. 48. Ibid., 252. 49. Peterson, Martyrdom, 65. 50. United Nations Truth Commission for El Salvador (April 30, 1993), 21. 51. Teresa Whitfield, Paying the Price: Ignacio Ellacuría and the Murdered Jesuits of El Salvador (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1995); United Nations Truth Commission, 20–25. 52. Karl Rahner, Forward to Martin Lang and Reinhold Iblacker, Witness of Hope: The Persecution of Christians in Latin America (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1981), xiv.

chapter 14

Th e A m bi va l ence of Catholic Politic s i n L ati n A m er ica Ideology, Interests, and Institutions Amy Edmonds

Introduction Almost a century after the majority of national Catholic Churches in Latin America were formally separated from their states, the Church remains a powerful source of authority and legitimacy within the political sphere.1 Although the growth of Protestantism has challenged the hegemony of the Catholic Church in Latin America, the Catholic Church is still dominant; about 70 percent of Latin Americans consider themselves Roman Catholic, and in a 2000 World Values Survey in ten Latin American countries, 88.7 percent of people calling themselves Roman Catholic said that ­religion was “very important” or “rather important” in their lives.2 According to a Latinobarometro poll in 2004, over 70 percent of Latin Americans expressed confidence in the Church, the highest level of confidence in any institution.3 Explaining the variety of political actions by the Catholic Church has been a major theoretical question undertaken by Latin Americanists in recent years, and several important contributions have illuminated the causes of ambivalent Catholic politics in Latin America. Current theories tend to focus on three categories of causal variables: ideology, organizational interests, and institutional arrangements. This chapter outlines the strengths and weaknesses of the explanations for the Catholic Church’s actions by synthesizing research on these factors in relation to opposition to authoritarianism and the different political strategies of the Catholic Church to maintain political influence within democratic and pluralist societies.

258   Amy Edmonds

Catholic Response to Authoritarianism A large body of research on religion and politics in Latin America examines the distinctive responses among national Catholic episcopacies to prevalent authoritarianism, violence, and human rights abuse in the time period between 1960 and 1990. In some countries, like Chile and Brazil, the institutional Church responded to authoritarianism and repression by becoming a critical force of opposition and a defender of human rights; the Church also helped to broker agreements that paved the way for democracy.4 In Nicaragua and El Salvador, the Church advocated for democratic transition and helped mediate between guerrilla forces and the government.5 In other countries, such as Argentina, Honduras, and Guatemala, the institutional Church stayed silent or even supported the military regimes.6 This variation of response to authoritarianism and violence has proven to be a subject that illuminates the processes of how religious institutions and actors make particular political choices. Explanations for the political positions and actions of religious organizations tend to center around political theology: the “set of propositions about politics that people hold in their minds, share and develop through language and discourse, and use to persuade and motivate”—this set is generally assumed as a central contributing factor to the Church’s political orientation and a cause of political actions.7 Within the context of Latin America, scholars frequently focus on the rise of progressive ideology within the laity and the clergy as a key explanatory variable for religious opposition to authoritarianism and violence.8 Progressivism in the Latin American Catholic Church is defined as support for laity empowerment, an adherence to liberation theology, and the commitment to promote social justice.9 The presence or absence of progressive ideology among the clergy is a factor often used to explain the distinctive cases of Chile and Argentina. The Catholic hierarchy in Chile adopted progressive reforms and proclaimed political positions promoting social justice and human dignity in the 1950s and 1960s. Moreover, during military authoritarianism from 1973 to 1990, Church leaders were motivated by their beliefs to support human rights and to criticize authoritarianism.10 Conversely, the core leadership of the Argentine Catholic Church was almost uniformly conservative and tended to espouse the norms of tradition and stability; it resisted Vatican II reforms and continued to be suspicious of democracy. The ideology of Catholic nationalism, prominent within both the Argentine Church and state, painted the Catholic Church as the provider of longestablished values and synthesized Catholicism with nationalism.11 It sought to preserve the nation’s fundamental values and feared the threats of immigration, liberalism, socialism, and democracy. For Catholic nationalists (also known as integralists), the “most desirable situation for the Church is that found in the ‘Catholic State’ ”; in this arrangement, the power and the legitimacy of the state and of the Church are shared and reinforce each other.12 These

The Ambivalence of Catholic Politics in Latin America   259 values motivated the Church to ally itself with the authoritarian regime that ruled from 1976 to 1983 and to support it not only through public statements, but also by providing land for torture centers, identifying suspect individuals and groups, and refusing to defend Church members kidnapped and tortured by the military.13 Although progressivism is clearly associated with political opposition to authoritarianism and human rights abuse, it did not spread uniformly throughout Latin America. To explain this uneven ideological trend, many scholars focus on internal factors, such as changes within the Church that allowed it to embrace a new ethical orientation. The beginnings of Catholic progressivism can be found in the encyclicals Rerum Novarum, issued in 1891 by Pope Leo XIII (1878–1903), and Quadragesimo Anno (After Forty Years), issued in 1931 by Pope Pius XI (1922–1939). These papal documents critiqued economic exploitation and the deficiencies of capitalism. They called on Catholics to apply Christian values to social problems like child labor, inequality, and revolution, and prompted the formation of Church-affiliated unions and Catholic Action groups to encourage educated lay leaders to promote Catholic values in society. Inspired by the social encyclicals and educated by Catholic Action groups, laity in many Latin American countries formed successful Christian Democratic parties that called for reforms and a third way between capitalism and communism.14 The Christian Democratic parties of Chile, Costa Rica, and Venezuela, all founded in the 1930s and 1940s, became major political parties with significant influence by mid-century. The most important event to promote progressivism within the Catholic Church was the Second Vatican Council, which took place in four fall sessions throughout 1962–1965. In an effort to make Church doctrine relevant and increase lay participation, the use of Latin in the liturgy was no longer mandatory and the importance of the laity in the Church was emphasized. Clergy and laity alike were encouraged to engage in worldly affairs and were urged to promote temporal issues like economic equality, human dignity, and political freedom, all of which were integral parts of the gospel. The endorsement of social justice, democracy, decentralized Church structures, and a larger role for the laity in its ministries reinforced progressive initiatives and reforms that many Latin American episcopacies were already implementing.15 Another key event that facilitated the spread of progressivism throughout Latin America was structural reform of the Church’s internal organization. Until 1955 the Catholic Church in Latin America was organized around the diocese. Each diocese was formally separate and had a bishop who communicated directly with Rome. The effects of this structural arrangement were “institutional fragmentation, organizational ­isolation, and uncoordinated policy.”16 In 1952 the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops (CNBB; Conferȇncia Nacional dos Bispos do Brasil) was organized, and other Latin American countries quickly followed with their own national councils. This organizational advancement led to the creation of the Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM), which held its first meeting in Rio de Janeiro in 1955. The emphasis on relating the Christian gospel to the political and economic realities in Latin America was expanded at CELAM II in Medellín, Colombia, in 1968. The resolutions adopted in Medellín asserted the Church’s solidarity with people aspiring to

260   Amy Edmonds liberation from all forms of slavery and called on national episcopacies to help organize popular sectors of society to apply political pressure for social justice.17 The Medellín conference also created the Commission of Peace and Justice based in Rio de Janeiro, which would later play an important role in documenting and publishing human rights abuses in Brazil and would provide a model for later similar initiatives in Chile and El Salvador.18 The ideological shifts in Catholic theology exemplified by Vatican II and the CELAM meetings did not unvaryingly promote progressivism in Latin America. Many national episcopacies, such as those in Argentina and Colombia, remained almost uniformly conservative despite the reforms. The majority of priests in these countries defended the status quo and strove to maintain the Church’s connections with elites and the military, as well as the Church’s special state privileges. While internal Church reforms apparently helped to accelerate ideological changes in some areas, they did not necessarily serve as the impetus for the adoption of progressivism. Another problem with the focus on progressivism as an explanation for opposition to authoritarianism is that it assumes what Ivan Vallier calls the “Belief-Motivational Model,” in which social phenomena are explained through observation of the way that religious beliefs and values lead to individual motivations. This model tends to ignore the interdependency between “religious structures and a society’s total system of social control, power structures, and integrative base.”19 Beliefs are not independently created, but emerge from a particular context and structure. Thus the progressive political ideology of clergy and laity may be a necessary factor for understanding political opposition to authoritarianism, but it is not sufficient to explain what caused the ­ideological changes among Church leaders in the first place. For many scholars of religion in Latin America, it is the Church’s organizational interests and in particular its desire to protect its power and privileges (and not its particular religious beliefs) that best explain the Church’s political behavior. This argument posits that the Church is inherently conservative and will naturally pursue an alliance with the state unless it comes under attack from the government or faces external competition. According to some studies, the extreme repression carried out by authoritarian regimes caused the imprisonment, torture, and even death of Catholic laity and priests, and led to episcopal denunciations of the government and its defense of human rights. For example, the Chilean hierarchy contained not only progressives but also moderates and conservatives. These disparate groups were unified in opposition to the Pinochet regime by the government’s attacks on clergy and Church programs. In contrast, in Peru the military government did not attack or challenge the Church or its institutions, and the Peruvian bishops, therefore, remained divided and pursued a strategy of elite persuasion, rather than confrontation or opposition to the Morales Bermudez government. Hence, this theory relies on the existence of state repression to understand what galvanized the Church in Chile and Brazil to oppose authoritarian regimes.20 However, it cannot explain the absence of opposition in countries such as Argentina, where clergy and laity suffered intense human rights abuses, but the vast majority of the upper-level clergy maintained their acquiescence to the military regime.

The Ambivalence of Catholic Politics in Latin America   261 Another explanation for progressive political action, similarly rooted in the Church’s defense of its institutional interests, comes out of the rational choice paradigm. Anthony Gill’s seminal work, Rendering unto Caesar (1998), posits that episcopal political actions are primarily motivated by competition from other providers of religion such as Protestantism; essentially, the need to retain and gain more parishioners forces the Church to cater to its grassroots through progressive reforms. In areas where strong Protestant competition existed, such as Chile, the Church had to compete for parishioners and therefore adopted progressivism and other reforms supported by the lower classes; it opposed repressive regimes in order to maintain its credibility and its parishioners. Similarly, Neuhouser claims that competition from Protestantism and socialist movements, as well as priest shortages, helped lead to the radicalization of the Brazilian Church.21 In contrast, there was a much smaller percentage of Protestants in places like Argentina and Uruguay, and Gill asserts that this lack of religious competition led to apathy within the Catholic hierarchy regarding the masses and to cooperation with the military. Gill’s (1998) study provides a valuable example of how a theory may be tested (and not just posited) by using the comparative case study method, and it has had a strong influence on the field of religion and politics in Latin America.22 Perhaps the most valuable outcome of Gill’s work was the flurry of interest and challenges it engendered. One key criticism is the difficulty in determining whether progressivism actually followed Protestant growth in the given timeline, as Gill claims. As MacKin shows in a case study on Mexico, progressivism within a Catholic diocese in Mexico actually preceded a rise in Protestantism. MacKin concludes that Protestantism played “little or no role” in the radicalization of Bishop Sergio Méndez Arceo of Cuernavaca. Rather, the bishop’s progressivism “facilitated the growth of non-Catholic Churches.”23 Although Gill’s model demonstrates correlation between Protestant competition and progressive Catholicism, it does not necessarily indicate causation.24 Moreover, Gill’s model does not show consistent correlation between Protestant competition and opposition to authoritarianism. For example, although Gill classifies the Guatemalan Church as “pro-authoritarian,” the 6.3 percent growth of its Protestant population from 1900 to 1970 was much higher than in several countries classified as “anti-authoritarian,” such as El Salvador, Panama, and Nicaragua. On the other hand, Ecuador, which Gill classifies as anti-authoritarian, had a 2.9 percent growth in Protestants between 1900 and 1970, smaller than several of the pro-authoritarian cases like Honduras and Bolivia.25 Moreover, progressivism and opposition to authoritarianism were not guaranteed to appeal to the masses and gain the Church more parishioners. Throughout Latin America, there were many cases in which both the poor and the Protestant Churches supported authoritarian governments, and “even more where both [were] apolitical.”26 In Chile and Brazil, for example, Pentecostals either were silent or enthusiastically supported the military regime.27 Although Protestant competition may help spur a Church to become more progressive, Gill’s own numbers suggest that it is not a sufficient cause (as in the case of Guatemala) or a necessary factor (as in the case of Ecuador). Gill’s argument that the Church’s political actions can be explained exclusively by the presence or absence of competition is

262   Amy Edmonds straightforward and simple, and this is both its strength and its weakness. This theory is parsimonious and therefore easily testable, but it ignores other potentially interdependent factors. Retention of the laity is undoubtedly a significant organizational interest pursued by the Church. Yet Gill disregards the possibility that the Church’s interests, and the manner in which it pursues those interests, can change depending on the ideas adopted by Church leaders. As Mainwaring notes, “There are no objective interests that a Church is compelled to pursue. Within the Church there are many conflicting views of the institution’s true interests and how to pursue them. Depending on one’s model of the Church, pursuing a given interest can be seen as absolutely essential or as wrong.”28 In other words, ideology is essential to the formation of interests. The last explanation for opposition to authoritarianism takes both ideology and interests into account, but posits that both are dependent on the particular way the Church is connected with “control structures,” or other powerful institutions, such as the state and civil society.29 According to this approach, the nature of these connections strongly influences how the Church responds to competition and crises. An early pioneer in the study of religion and politics in Latin America, Ivan Vallier identified five stages of Church-state relations and noted that the ideology and interests of the Church varied depending on the particulars of the institutional interaction between the Church, the state, and society. When the Church was established as a branch of the state, its ideology was generally conservative and its interests were best served by maintaining a close connection to political elites. As Churches became independent, they shifted their focus to emphasizing missionary programs and social justice initiatives to increase their appeal to parishioners. Vallier argued that the most influential position for the Church is one in which it is separated from the state but linked to society through grassroots organizations (like Catholic universities, hospitals, Catholic education, etc.). In this institutional arrangement, the Church is more likely and better able to promote social justice, democracy, and human rights. Although Vallier’s theory was written before the 1970s, its emphasis on how different institutional power structures result in distinctive ideological stances and understandings of the Church’s interests has been recently corroborated by several works. In Nicaragua the Catholic Church was very supportive of the Somoza regime before 1970, and for many years delayed the adoption of progressive reforms, which happened only after Medellín and resulted in deep divisions within the hierarchy. In Honduras the Church adopted progressivism and worked for rural reforms even before Vatican II took place, and this tradition of progressive work “made the application of practices advocated at Medellín far less problematic than in Nicaragua.”30 The Church helped create student, educational, and charity groups, which in turn helped promote social reforms. Shepherd explains these distinct paths by noting that in Honduras, the Catholic Church and the state were largely independent, and the autonomy of the Church allowed it to adopt and promulgate progressive positions. In contrast, in Nicaragua, the “incestuous relationship” between the Church and state stymied progressive changes. Comparison of the Nicaraguan and Honduran cases demonstrates that analyses of

The Ambivalence of Catholic Politics in Latin America   263 political actions (or lack thereof) by religious actors must take into consideration the historical relationship between Church and state structures. Utilizing a path-dependent analysis of historical Church-state relations in Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, Goldfrank and Rowell find that in countries where there were few ties between the Church and state, the hierarchy was more likely to adopt progressive reforms, criticize the governing regime, and take concrete steps to protect human rights, but in countries with significant state control over the Church, the hierarchy maintained a neutral or even a pro-authoritarian stance. In Argentina, several institutional arrangements closely intertwined the Church and the state; not only was the Church established and dependent on the state for financial support, but there was also a military vicariate where several Church clergy were responsible for ministering exclusively to military members. These institutional relationships meant that the Church had a strong interest in ingratiating itself with political elites and supporting the state, and this institutional relationship was reinforced by the ideologies of Catholic nationalism and integralism. Where Church-state ties were minimal, as in Chile and Uruguay, the bishops were willing to confront the state relatively quickly. This approach can also explain the more nuanced case of Brazil, where the Church did not denounce military abuses for six years. Although the state could not regulate internal Church affairs, it did financially subsidize the Church, which meant that the Church was eager to maintain a positive relationship with the state. Hence, there was an initial hesitancy to acknowledge the human rights abuses, and even then the Church attempted to dialogue with state officials privately, rather than expose them in public. Only once Pope Paul VI and the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace condemned the Brazilian military regime in 1970 did the national episcopacy issue a major public criticism of the government.31 Goldfrank and Rowell’s study helps to remedy a key weakness in much of the literature on religion and politics in Latin America because it exposes the path-dependent nature of religious interests and ideas. Churchstate ­relations determined the particular content of the Church’s interests. Once the state became “a primary source of material resources for a given religious organization, the interests of that organization and that regime begin to overlap. The greater the ­support lent by the state, the more the interests of the organization’s leadership involves maintaining state favour.”32 Church-state arrangements also influenced the Church’s receptivity to ideological trends: established Churches were significantly less likely to adopt progressive reforms than those (like in Chile and Uruguay) that were independent from the state. This suggests that the arrangement of institutions strongly influences the sociopolitical choices of religious institutions. Organizational interests and the ideology of the Church elites definitely matter, but the interests and ideology of the Church are not fixed; rather, they vary in accordance with the arrangements between the Church and the state. Another institutional arrangement that appears to be important for understanding opposition to authoritarianism is the relationship between the Church and society. An embedded, diffuse network of institutional connections between the Church and other sectors of society enables the Church to serve as a base for societal mobilization.

264   Amy Edmonds Moreover, transnational ties can provide the Church with financial and personnel resources, as well as other forms of support and protection. In Chile, the Catholic Church was informally tied to the Christian Democratic Party, Catholic unions, Catholic student groups, and other professional organizations. Thus once the Pinochet regime shut down these other forms of civil society, the Church was able to quickly form and expand organizations to protect human rights because of its “preexisting ties and solidarity among certain religious leaders, academics, politicians, and professionals (e.g., lawyers, social workers).”33 The creation of the Committee for Peace and later the Vicariate of Solidarity provided the space from which the Church would defend human rights and eventually mobilize the opposition against the Pinochet regime. The Chilean Church’s international funding and societal resources enabled the Church hierarchy to provide a shield that protected people from the abuses of the Pinochet regime. In contrast, in the case of Uruguay, the Catholic Church initially opposed the military regime but was quickly stymied. Although the Church leadership was progressive and therefore willing to speak out against human rights abuses, it did not have the institutional resources or connections necessary to withstand the government’s repression.34 Hence the Church’s institutional relationships with the government and with civil society are crucial factors for understanding what motivates and enables it to oppose authoritarianism.

Democratization and New Variations of Political Behavior In the 1980s, nearly all authoritarian regimes in Latin America transformed into democracies. Democratization allowed for the rebirth of political parties, interest groups, and other organizations, and, as a result, the Church “no longer felt compelled to speak for civil society in the same way.”35 Democratization resulted not only in more freedom and political competition, but also in more religious pluralism and secularism— both of which challenged the Catholic Church’s cultural hegemony. In some countries the Church responded to these changes by initially reducing its political presence and decreasing its funding of lay-led grassroots Catholic organizations. One reason for the decline was Vatican pressure on the hierarchy to focus on traditional spiritual objectives. Pope John Paul II forbade involvement by official Church representatives in partisan political movements and regularly replaced retiring progressive bishops with those considered to be more conservative.36 Both the Vatican and national Church leaders were particularly concerned about the appearance of Catholic political partisanship; they worried that the political nature of lay groups was alienating to parishioners, thus making it more difficult to compete with the charismatic Pentecostal churches. Refocusing the Catholic Church on its orthodox message and traditional rituals was thought to help ensure its ability to compete with increasing Protestantism.

The Ambivalence of Catholic Politics in Latin America   265 Political withdrawal was especially pronounced in Chile. Following democratic elections in 1990, the Catholic hierarchy closed down the Vicariate of Solidarity, leaving other grassroots organizations without access to funding, training, or a coordinating structure. Chilean Catholic activists perceived a “clear withdrawal from support of grassroots activism and popular empowerment and a reassertion of vertical, hierarchical, and traditionalist control.”37 Reasons for the Church’s political withdrawal vary, but internal debate about its political role within a democracy was a clear cause. While the majority of both progressive and conservative priests in Chile agreed that the Church should support democracy in the face of authoritarian regimes, after democratization the consensus regarding the Church’s role in politics fell apart, and many priests and lay members believed that the Church should return to a purely pastoral role and allow the newly formed political parties and other organizations to conduct politics.38 Vatican pressure, worries about Protestant competition, and the re-emergence of civil society that accompanied democratization all contributed to the decline of Catholic political activism. Yet decreased levels of Catholic political involvement and lay mobilization after the return to democracy were not enduring; in hindsight, the Church’s retrenchment was part of an initial downward trend in political engagement during which the leadership formed new goals and strategies.39 Today, the Catholic Church continues to be politically active and pursues a broad and sometimes contradictory political agenda. Prominent issues for the Church include social and economic justice, issues of sexual morality (such as opposition to abortion, birth control, homosexuality, and divorce), and protection of the Church’s special organizational privileges (such as subsidies for Catholic schools or Catholicism as a constitutionally protected religion). In many countries the Church actively argues in defense of its traditional positions on issues related to women, sexuality, and the family.40 The Chilean Church hierarchy, for example, released several statements pertaining to politics in the 1990s and 2000s, but these focused almost exclusively on speaking out against birth control, divorce, and premarital sex. Although there is increasing social discourse and deliberation over moral issues, in many cases the Catholic hierarchy in Latin America has exercised an “indirect veto” over legislative reforms regarding the contentious issues of abortion and same-sex unions.41 For example, in Uruguay the electoral threat of being labeled un-Christian and immoral by the Catholic Church successfully deterred a majority of Uruguayan senators from voting for a law to decriminalize abortions in 2002. In 2006, the Nicaraguan hierarchy succeeded in pushing an absolute abortion ban through Congress. In a few cases, abortion laws have been liberalized despite the objections of the Catholic Church, but this has occurred only in situations where the decisions-makers were insulated from Church condemnation (i.e., when appointed officials or courts made the decision, or when legislators were at the beginning of an electoral cycle). The Catholic Church in today’s Latin America continues to influence the political sphere, especially regarding moral issues, in powerful ways. In other countries, however, the Church hierarchy has focused more on political issues pertaining to social justice. Similarly to Chile, the Catholic Church in Central

266   Amy Edmonds America withdrew from the political sphere following the cessation of the region’s civil wars in the 1990s and focused on parish ministry and issues of individual and family morality. But in 2003 the Central American regional body of Catholic bishops (Secretariado Episcopal de América Central) introduced People Improving Communities through Organizing (PICO), a community-organizing effort designed to promote Catholic activism based on the PICO national network in the United States. The strategy of PICO was to utilize the Catholic structure of parishes, lay movements, and the pastoral social projects to create civic faith-based organizations that would organize for local reforms, exert democratic influence by keeping officials accountable, and create a public voice for Catholic values in Central America. The PICO project in El Salvador, for instance, organized to improve trash collection, obtain better access to health services, and stop pollution of local water sources. The clergy did not directly negotiate for these improvements with political elites, but instead empowered Catholic laity to dialogue and negotiate with political representatives, thus helping to promote accountability and culturally institutionalize democracy. This collaborative approach to mobilizing Catholic laity to work for community improvements and political reforms appears to be “an effective vehicle for promoting social policy change and democratic consolidation in the region.”42 PICO Central America also illustrates a new strategy to gain political influence within a democratic context. Church officials do not attempt to exert political influence by engaging directly with political elites; rather, the Church enables democratic action by the laity, thereby extending Catholic influence in politics but through indirect means. This suggests that it is possible for the Catholic Church to have political influence and also support the democratic process, but it requires the Church to create and support lay organizations that can promote Catholic goals. Social justice issues continue to be prominent among the Church’s political concerns. Throughout Latin America, Catholic bishops draw attention to the “moral illegitimacy” of free-market economic reforms and denounce endemic poverty and inequality.43 However, certain episcopacies have done more than others to mobilize action on social justice issues. The Brazilian episcopate not only has spoken out on inequality and a fair minimum wage, but also has created pastoral commissions to aid the landless, migrants, the homeless, and marginalized women.44 A particularly important Catholic pastoral initiative in Brazil is the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT; Comissão Pastoral da Terra). This commission helps rural landless communities through promotion of agrarian reform, protection of human rights by monitoring and reporting on violence in rural areas, and mobilization of workers such as rubber tappers and coconut gatherers.45 In Chile, the Church has also created an Indigenous Pastoral Commission, but it has been much more cautious and less effective regarding its advocacy for human rights and land reform for the Mapuche Indians when compared to the CPT in Brazil. Rodriguez (2009) explains this variation by comparing the internal institutional arrangements of the Chilean and Brazilian Catholic Churches. The CPT is relatively independent from the CNBB, which means it can participate in local struggles without explicit permission from the CNBB. The CPT not only has autonomy from the CNBB, but also has helped

The Ambivalence of Catholic Politics in Latin America   267 persuade the institutional Church to embrace land reform. In contrast, the clergy members in the Chilean Indigenous Pastoral have little freedom to become involved in land disputes or to mediate without the permission of the Chilean Episcopal Conference (Conferencia Episcopal de Chile). Moreover, indigenous groups in Chile have limited accessibility to Church institutions because there are no local or regional Church representatives that can act independently of the episcopacy. Therefore, Chilean Catholic Church involvement and influence in the Mapuche Indian conflict is significantly weaker than the Brazilian Catholic Church’s role in indigenous land reform.46 These cases suggest that internal structure is a key determinant in providing the Catholic Church with political influence. Pastoral commissions, whether created with the goal of defending human rights or mobilizing underrepresented groups, help to link the institutional Church to grassroots organizations, thereby giving the Church more influence within a democracy. Commissions that are given more freedom to respond immediately and that are provided with access to Church resources will be more influential than those under the strict control of the hierarchy. Instead of directly petitioning the elite, the Church can wield the most political influence when it mobilizes and supports the laity to participate in politics. Although examining the structure of internal Catholic organizations helps us to understand the new methods being used to exert influence, it does not necessarily provide an answer as to why the Church decides to support such institutions in the first place. In a seminal study, Guillermo Trejo argues that indigenous mobilization in Mexico is best explained as the breakdown of both religious and political monopolies. Protestant competition alongside the growth of political party competition “empowered indigenous communities to engage in large-scale movements for land redistribution and government agricultural support.”47 Similar to Anthony Gill, Trejo demonstrates that increases in the number of Protestants in particular dioceses led clergy to embrace progressive causes. Additionally, clergy also responded to competition by promoting new venues for lay participation, such as Bible study groups and economic and social cooperatives. These decentralized regional associations “transformed” indigenous communities into “highly organized and connected communities capable of engaging in many different forms of collective dissent.”48 Competition spurred the Church to change both its ideological framework and its organizational infrastructure. These changes provided the ideological justification for the indigenous to fight for land redistribution and ethnocultural rights, as well as an institutional base enabling mobilization. Trejo’s study offers a comprehensive examination of how multiple factors interact to produce a particular political behavior. He identifies the Church’s organizational interest in maintaining its number of parishioners as the primary motivating factor, but he suggests that other factors were also crucial for enabling indigenous mobilization. The Church provided a progressive narrative that “helped indigenous parishioners in the process of cognitive liberation and creation of the social norms and identities for ­persistent collective action.”49 The decision to create decentralized regional networks with multiple lay leaders enabled mobilization and provided resilience against government

268   Amy Edmonds repression. Although Protestant competition was the initial factor that spurred the Church to act, progressive ideology and the Church’s institutional arrangements were key to enabling indigenous mobilization. Frances Hagopian’s edited volume, Religious Pluralism, Democracy, and the Catholic Church in Latin America, is the most ambitious and comprehensive recent work to examine the Latin American Catholic Church’s political strategies for dealing with the challenges of democracy, secularism, and pluralism. Hagopian outlines the Church’s three fundamental goals: institutional interests (maintaining parishioners, public support for its influential institutions such as schools and hospitals, financial security), morality in the public sphere (prevention of divorce, abortion, gay marriage), and the advancement of social and economic justice.50 The Catholic Church’s social doctrine does not fall neatly on a left-right continuum on the ideological spectrum, and this presents difficulties in pursuing all three goals simultaneously. Hagopian posits that Catholic Churches prioritize and choose which interests they will pursue based on four factors: religious hegemony, the Church’s capacity to mobilize society, political orientation of the laity, and the political risk the Church faces to its institutional interests and policy agenda. Where the Church has a high capacity to mobilize but faces religious competition, the laity will have the most influence on the religious hierarchy. If the Catholic electorate is moderate to progressive (as in the case of Brazil), then the Church will prioritize advocacy for social justice. If religious hegemony is high and the capacity to mobilize is low (as in the case of Peru and Argentina), or if the Church faces serious political risks, such as loss of its institutional privileges, autonomy, or support for Church-sponsored schools, then the Church will focus on defending its institutional interests and promoting its moral agenda. Of the four factors that Hagopian identifies, her emphasis on the Church’s capacity to mobilize the laity is the most important contribution to the literature. In a democratic context, the actions of the collective laity will inevitably be of more influence on the political sphere than those of the few clergy. Thus, in order to wield political influence, the Church must be able to mobilize the laity by institutionally embedding itself within civil society. This suggests that increasing scholarly attention should be given to studying lay attitudes regarding both morality policy and social justice issues, as well as to the Church’s connections to civil society. Hagopian’s book is a major contribution to scholars of religion and politics in Latin America because she provides a comprehensive framework for understanding why the Church pursues varying political goals in particular contexts. She takes into account many of the significant aforementioned explanatory variables—religious hegemony, capacity to mobilize, ideological orientation, and political risk. Moreover, she examines the variables in combination with each other, making her assessment multifaceted as well as thorough. However, there is a notable omission. Although she looks at the institutional relation­ ship between the Church and state in the context of the political risk the Church could face from threats to its legal advantages, she neglects the crucial question of how that relationship might influence the Church’s perception of its institutional interests and its moral positioning. Indeed, the changing history of religion and politics in Latin

The Ambivalence of Catholic Politics in Latin America   269 America demonstrates that the aforementioned variables are not discrete and fixed categories; rather, interests are shaped by an institutional context and understood through a particular ideological lens. These factors are mutually dependent on each other, and therefore the changing nature of not only ideas but also interests must be taken into account when seeking to understand and predict the political choices of religious actors.

Conclusion An interesting implication of this chapter is that within a democratic and pluralistic context, the Church’s political influence is most effective when it empowers the laity to act politically in their own interests. In other words, the Church may be the most effective in promoting a Catholic agenda when it gives up attempting to influence politicians directly. Studies on Church influence on abortion policy appear to corroborate this finding; where the Church mobilized social pressure on elected officials, particularly when elections were imminent, proposed bills liberalizing abortion laws failed. Moreover, when Church leaders threatened politicians with excommunication (as in Mexico City in 2007), they failed to stop the legislation, and the politicians were not punished by voters.51 If the Church wishes to maintain an influential voice in a democratic system, it “must rely on the strength of its arguments to convince voters and policymakers of its position.”52 Scholars should watch how national ecclesial hierarchies respond to this change. There are significant divisions in the attitudes of lay Catholics regarding issues of economic justice and sexual morality; the hierarchy “may not be able to count on ­sufficient Catholic lay support to sustain its public agenda in the years ahead.”53 In order to understand the political influence of the Catholic Church in modern Latin America, scholarly attention should be focused on the Church’s relationship to its laity, as well as more generally to civil society. As Vallier foresaw, the locus of religious control in the democratic and pluralistic context is transferred to the layperson supported by the congregation, rather than in the hierarchy supported by the laity.54 Whether the Church can influence and mobilize the laity will clearly be important, but so will the ability of the laity to influence the clergy. If the Catholic hierarchy is responsive to the demands of its grassroots, it will be more likely to maintain political relevance. The research indicates that when faced with religious competition, the hierarchy is more likely to respond to its laity. Further research should be done on the religious organizational arrangements that enable the laity to express their political positions and promote political empowerment. The theories arising from the literature on religion and politics in Latin America are both wide and deep and provide a vast range of testable hypotheses. These theories should be further tested both within and outside of the Latin American context in two ways. First, numerous studies have been done on Chile, Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina,

270   Amy Edmonds but there have been very few analyses on religion and politics in Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia. Scholars should re-examine the theories discussed here in light of lesser-studied Latin American countries. In conditions of democratic deterioration, analyses should examine whether the Church decides to again pursue a strategy of elite influence. Second, there should be more dialogue between scholars studying the nexus of religion and politics in Latin America and those examining other regions.55 A larger number of cases can help refine and reify the arguments and lead to robust theories that are also generalizable. More data need to be collected to enable large investigations. The most important way to discover the generalizability and the richness of theories this field has produced is to now test them in other areas of the world.

Notes 1. For an in-depth analysis of this point, see Edward L. Cleary, How Latin America Saved the Soul of the Catholic Church (New York, NY: Paulist, 2009). 2. Frances Hagopian, Religious Pluralism, Democracy, and the Catholic Church in Latin America (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 19. 3. Mala Htun, “Life, Liberty, and Family Values: Church and State in the Struggle over Latin America’s Social Agenda,” in Religious Pluralism, Democracy, and the Catholic Church in Latin America, ed. Frances Hagopian (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 336–337. 4. Virginia M. Bouvier, Alliance or Compliance: Implications of the Chilean Experience for the Catholic Church in Latin America, Foreign and Comparative Studies/Latin American Series (Syracuse, NY: Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, 1983); Thomas  C.  Bruneau, The Church in Brazil: The Politics of Religion (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1982); Michael Fleet and Brian H. Smith, The Catholic Church and Democracy in Chile and Peru (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997); Pamela Lowden, Moral Opposition to Authoritarian Rule in Chile, 1973–1990 (New York, NY: St. Martin’s, 1996); Scott Mainwaring, The Catholic Church and Politics in Brazil, 1916– 1985 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986); Brian  H.  Smith, The Church and Politics in Chile (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982). 5. Philip Berryman, The Religious Roots of Rebellion: Christians in Central American Revolutions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984); Michael Dodson and Laura  N. O’Shaughnessy, Nicaragua’s Other Revolution: Religious Faith and Political Struggle (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Phillip  J.  Williams, The Catholic Church and Politics in Nicaragua and Costa Rica (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989). 6. Rodolfo Cardenal, “The Catholic Church and the Politics of Accommodation in Honduras,” in Church and Politics in Latin America, ed. Dermot Keogh (London: Macmillan, 1990); Jeffrey Klaiber, The Church, Dictatorships, and Democracy in Latin America (New York, NY: Orbis Books, 1998); Emilio F. Mignone, Witness to the Truth (New York, NY: Orbis Books, 1988). 7. Daniel Philpott, “Explaining the Political Ambivalence of Religion,” American Political Science Review 101, no.3 (2007), 509. 8. Berryman, Religious Roots; Thomas  C.  Bruneau, The Political Transformation of the Brazilian Catholic Church (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1974); Daniel Levine,

The Ambivalence of Catholic Politics in Latin America   271 Popular Voices in Latin American Catholicism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Daniel Levine, Politics, Religion, and Society in Latin America (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2012); Mainwaring, Catholic Church and Politics; Scott Mainwaring and Alexander Wilde, The Progressive Church in Latin America (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989); Paul Sigmund, Liberation Theology at the Crossroads: Democracy or Revolution? (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1990); Christian Smith, The Emergence of Liberation Theology: Radical Religion and Social Movements (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991); David Tombs, Latin American Liberation Theology (Boston, MA: Brill Academic, 2001). 9. Mainwaring and Wilde, Progressive Church. 10. Fleet and Smith, The Catholic Church and Democracy; Lowden, Moral Opposition. 11. Michael A. Burdick, For God and Fatherland: Religion and Politics in Argentina (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), 28. 12. Mignone, Witness to the Truth, 95. 13. Levine, Politics, Religion, and Society, 182. 14. Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully, Christian Democracy in Latin America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). 15. Bruneau, Political Transformation; Fleet and Smith, The Catholic Church and Democracy; Levine, Popular Voices; Mainwaring, Catholic Church and Politics; Mainwaring and Wilde, Progressive Church; Sigmund, Liberation Theology. 16. Smith, Emergence of Liberation Theology, 81. 17. David Lehmann, Democracy and Development in Latin America (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1990); Howard  J.  Wiarda and Margaret  M.  Mott, Politics and Social Change in Latin America (London: Praeger, 2003). 18. Tombs, Latin American Liberation Theology. 19. Ivan Vallier, Catholicism, Social Control, and Modernization in Latin America (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 161. 20. Berryman, Religious Roots of Rebellion; Fleet and Smith, Catholic Church and Democracy; Mainwaring and Wilde, Progressive Church. 21. Kevin Neuhouser, “The Radicalization of the Brazilian Catholic Church in Comparative Perspective,” American Sociological Review 54 (1989): 233–244. 22. For example, see R. Andrew  Chesnut, Competitive Spirits: Latin America’s New Religious Economy (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2007), and Guillermo Trejo, “Religious Competition and Ethnic Mobilization in Latin America: Why the Catholic Church Promotes Indigenous Movements in Mexico,” American Political Science Review 103.3 (2009): 323–342. 23. Robert S. MacKin, “Becoming the Red Bishop of Cuernavaca: Rethinking Gill’s Religious Competition Model,” Sociology of Religion 64, no.4 (2003), 499. 24. Benjamin Goldfrank and Nick Rowell, “Church, State, and Human Rights in Latin America,” Politics, Religion & Ideology 13, no.1 (2012), 25–51. 25. Anthony Gill, Rendering unto Caesar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 107. 26. Philpott, “Explaining the Political Ambivalence,” 513. 27. Brian H. Smith, Religious Politics in Latin America: Pentecostal vs. Catholic (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998). 28. Mainwaring, Catholic Church and Politics, 5. 29. Vallier, Catholicism, Social Control, and Modernization, 22. 30. Frederick M. Shepherd, “Church and State in Honduras and Nicaragua Prior to 1989,” in Religion and Democracy in Latin America, ed. William H. Swatos (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1995), 127.

272   Amy Edmonds 31. For more details, see Kenneth P. Serbin, Secret Dialogues: Church-State Relations, Torture, and Social Justice in Authoritarian Brazil (Pittsburg, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000). 32. Goldfrank and Rowell, “Church, State, and Human Rights,” 50–51. 33. Mara Loveman, “High-Risk Collective Action: Defending Human Rights in Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina,” The American Journal of Sociology 104, no.2 (1998), 492. 34. Amy Edmonds, “Moral Authority and Authoritarianism: The Catholic Church and the Military Regime in Uruguay,” Journal of Church & State 56, no.4 (2014), 644–669. 35. Mainwaring, Catholic Church and Politics, 240. 36. Smith, Religious Politics, 11–13. 37. Carol A. Drogus and Hannah Stewart-Gambino, Activist Faith: Grassroots Women in Democratic Brazil and Chile (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 78. 38. Hannah Stewart-Gambino, The Church and Politics in the Chilean Countryside (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1992); Levine, Politics, Religion, and Society. 39. Drogus and Stewart-Gambino, Activist Faith. 40. Liesl Haas, “The Catholic Church in Chile: New Political Alliances,” in Latin American Religion in Motion, eds. Christian Smith and Joshua Prokopy (New York, NY: Routledge, 1999), 42–65. 41. Htun, “Life, Liberty, and Family Values,” 337. 42. Stacy Keogh and Richard L. Wood, “The Rebirth of Catholic Collective Action in Central America: A New Model of Church-Based Political Participation,” Social Compass 60, no.2 (2013), 286. 43. Smith, Religious Politics in Latin America, 56. 44. Hagopian, Religious Pluralism, 312. 45. For information about the Church’s informal connections and support for the movement of landless, see Miguel Carter, “The Landless Rural Workers Movement and Democracy in Brazil,” Latin American Research Review 45 (2010), 186–217. 46. Patricia  M.  Rodriguez, “With or Without the People: The Catholic Church and LandRelated Conflicts in Brazil and Chile,” in Religious Pluralism, Democracy, and the Catholic Church in Latin America, ed. Frances Hagopian (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 185–224. 47. Guillermo Trejo, Popular Movements in Autocracies: Religion, Repression, and Indigenous Collective Action in Mexico (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 7. 48. Ibid., 8. 49. Ibid., 110. 50. Hagopian, Religious Pluralism, 261. 51. Htun, “Life, Liberty, and Family Values,” 360. 52. Haas, “Catholic Church in Chile,” 63. 53. Smith, Religious Politics in Latin America, 83. 54. Vallier, Catholicism, Social Control, and Modernization, 118–119. 55. An excellent example of a recent scholarly work that takes religion and politics in Latin America and places it in comparative perspective is Levine’s Politics, Religion, and Society, Chapter 8.

chapter 15

R ights, R eligion, a n d V iolence at M ex ico’s Bor ders Christine Kovic

During Easter Week of 2014, Franciscan priest Tomás González and activist Ruben Figueroa organized a migrant Via Crucis (Way of the Cross) at Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala to draw attention to the human rights abuses suffered by Central American migrants. The Viacrucis, commonly carried out in Catholic communities to recall Christ’s suffering leading up to his crucifixion and resurrection, carries powerful symbolism to make suffering visible and, with Christ’s resurrection, to make hope visible. In southern Mexico, a migrant dressed as Jesus and carrying a cross led the procession, and participants carried signs with slogans such as “dignity has no borders,” “Christ also was a migrant,” and “no human being is illegal.”1 Father González observed, “We are making visible what for many years has been invisible . . . the death that our governments cause us, the economic system, which is the most responsible for forcing us to leave, which give us death. We cannot continue to die. We have to transform this pathway of death into a pathway of life.”2 This was the fourth annual Viacrucis, and in past years, migrants primarily from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, walked a relatively short distance along the railway tracks where migrants jump the freight train to avoid migration checkpoints. At the initiative of the migrant participants, the 2014 event grew into a twenty-day, thousand-mile journey extending from Mexico’s southern border to its northern border with the United States. The Viacrucis participants publicly demanded respect for immigrant rights, the free transit through Mexico, an end of Mexico’s National Immigration Institute, support of a new institution promoting “human security” instead of “national security,” and regional public policies to end the conditions of structural violence that cause “forced migration.”3 Migrants, including Catholics and Protestants, joined the Viacrucis as it moved through Mexico, with over one thousand taking part when it arrived in Mexico City. As migrants traveled through Mexico, local churches, community organizations,

274   Christine Kovic and shelters connected to Catholic parishes offered food, lodging, transportation, and logistical support. A group of forty to fifty eventually reached the United States– Mexico border, crossing at Reynosa, Tamaulipas, to McAllen, Texas, where they sought political asylum. The migrant Viacrucis is one of many examples of popular religion’s relevance to politics and human rights struggles in Mexico and Central America. Religion serves as a source of inspiration, moral credibility and authority, and resources (symbols, narratives, rituals, material goods, safe space) for the concrete needs of migrants and for the broader struggle for justice. The event illustrates several themes regarding violence and the role of faith and religious institutions in responding to violence. First, in crossing Mexico on foot and by bus, the migrants physically connect their countries of origin in Central America to Mexico and the United States. This is a transnational activist network in which migrants and their allies work across borders to defend immigrant rights; activists also recognize that the roots of the oppression cross borders.4 The unequal historic, political, and economic connections among these nations underlie the political and structural violence that very frequently cause people to emigrate from their homelands in the first place. The security policies of the United States prevent working-class migrants from gaining visas to enter the country, and the United States has pressured the Mexican government to close its southern border to Central American migrants. Recognizing this connection, migrants and their allies challenge “national security,” which is not only different from, but also opposed to security for migrants.5 Second, structural violence and political violence are closely connected. Poverty, racism, and sexism, alongside political and physical violence, are at the root of why people leave their countries. Third, the faithful organize around their own belief that faith obligates them to defend the poor against exploitative practices and violence, even as they frequently find limited support from the institutional church. Direct acts of solidarity with migrants, such as preparing and sharing food, emerged from the community level more than from the institutional church. In sum, the migrant Viacrucis makes visible the crossings of people and policies through borders and the connections of stories and histories from past to present. This chapter follows these themes of crossings in exploring several interrelated questions about religion, violence, and the oppression and resistance that shape migrant experience. How do the faithful, poor and non-poor alike, live their everyday faith in the context of poverty, violence, and oppression? How have different sectors of church leadership understood and responded to poverty and violence? How have acts of the faithful pressured members of the church leadership to respond? These questions are particularly salient in contemporary Mexico, where more than 50 million people, over 50 percent of the population, live in poverty; where an estimated 70,000 people have been killed in the militarized Drug War since 2006; and where thousands of Central American migrants face violence, including death, kidnappings, extortion, detention, and other abuses, in their attempts to cross the nation to reach the United States.6 The chapter focuses on Mexico and its borders, sites that are closely connected to both Central America and the United States because of migrants crossing the region,

Rights, Religion, and Violence at Mexico’s Borders    275 transnational activism, and political and economic policies of the US and Mexican governments to limit migration. It begins with an overview of the ways that religious actors, especially the Catholic Church, conceptualized political and structural violence in the 1960s and 1970s and supported concrete projects to challenge root causes of poverty. The following section addresses the Church’s response to unequal distribution of land and wealth and the violence in the region. The subsequent sections address the faith-based work in support of Central American and Mexican refugees and migrants at the US-Mexico border and in Mexico, respectively, beginning in the 1990s. In contrast to the work of earlier decades, individuals, shelters, and organizations support migrant populations in transit with limited support from institutional churches.7 The chapter concludes with an analysis of the changing forms of violence in Mexico and Central America, as well as the changing response to this violence by religious actors.

Conceptualizing Poverty and Violence through the Lens of Christianity Either the Church is the Church of the poor or it is not the Church of Jesus Christ. —Samuel Ruiz García, Bishop of Chiapas, Mexico8

In Central America in the decades of the 1970s–1990s, hundreds of thousands were killed in the political violence of civil wars. In Guatemala during 1962–1996, an estimated 200,000 people were killed or disappeared, and the Commission for Historical Clarification estimates that the military or paramilitary forces were responsible in 93 percent of the cases.9 In El Salvador more than 75,000 were killed during the civil war from 1980 to 1992, the vast majority civilians. Of the cases documented in the Truth Commission’s report From Madness to Hope, 85 percent were attributed to state agents. The US government, under the justification of fighting communism, trained hundreds of military officials in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua in counterinsurgency tactics at the School of the Americas and sent millions of dollars in aid to repressive military governments. Structural violence was entwined with political violence in causing death and suffering. Inequalities in land distribution in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Chiapas, Mexico, meant that rural producers had to work for wages, often on fincas (plantations producing coffee, cotton, bananas, or other cash crops), under conditions of great exploitation. The lack of medical care and potable water contributed to high rates of infant mortality and low life expectancy, especially in rural and indigenous communities. To use the words of the colonial cleric Bartolomé de las Casas, structural violence meant that the poor were “stripped of their lives before their time.”10 Organizations resisting political

276   Christine Kovic violence and structural violence under repressive military regimes clearly identified the state and its structured systems of inequality as the cause of injustice.11 In response to the violence in Mexico and Central America, progressive sectors of the Catholic and main-line Protestant churches supported social movements to resist repressive governments, including structural violence, state violence, and human rights abuses. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the lens of liberation theology provided an important framing of the structural and historic causes of violence. In contrast to traditional theological understandings of poverty as the will of God or simply a fate to be passively accepted, liberation theologians conceptualized poverty as going against God’s will and pointed to the structures in society that created and maintained repression. As such, sin was likewise viewed not only as a disordered individual moral act, but also as emanating from unjust social structures, a point emphasized at the Latin American Bishops Conferences in Medellín, Columbia, in 1968 and in Puebla, Mexico, in 1975. The Puebla meetings referred to stark inequalities—the “luxury of the few” in contrast to the “wretched poverty of the masses”—as “social sinfulness.”12 Bishops and pastoral workers in Mexico and Central American denounced poverty and inequality as causes of suffering and death. Connecting political and structural violence meant working for structural change as an integral part of the pastoral work of progressive churches. Mexican Bishop Samuel Ruiz criticized the development and modernization paradigms dominant in the 1960s and 1970s for labeling the poor as “behind, underdeveloped, and deprived of the fruits of progress.”13 He noted that liberation or structural change was necessary to prevent even greater dependency. In Chiapas, Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador, the Catholic Church supported land redistribution, concientización (critical consciousness), community-based activism, and human rights organizations, among other projects, in response to the structural and political violence pervasive in the 1960s and 1970s. Challenging the structural issues underlying poverty—especially to challenge the profound inequality in land distribution—brought members of communities and the Church who supported them in direct conflict with those in power. As campesinos ­organized to gain access to land through legal struggles, occupations, marches, and other forms of political protest, they were met with state violence. As organized struggles against structural violence led to increased state violence, in many cases churches increasingly allied with victims of violence.14

“To Recover Our Dignity and Our Right to Land” Migration and forced displacement have a long history in Mexico and Central America, tied to inequalities in land distribution. The violence of colonialism, dating back ­hundreds of years, destroyed many indigenous communities through war, disease, and

Rights, Religion, and Violence at Mexico’s Borders    277 dispossession. From the late 1800s to 1970s, “land poverty”—the lack of sufficient land for self-subsistence—forced members of rural communities to live as peones acasillados, or to seasonally migrate to work on fincas.15 In Chiapas, peones acasillados (literally “housed peons”) worked as indentured laborers on their ancestral lands and could be evicted if they stopped working. Land poverty, deliberately constructed to create ­dependence, meant that indigenous peoples provided low-wage labor for the state’s agriculture and the vast majority of indigenous men “were moving around the state each year from one harvest to another.”16 In Chiapas, Tzeltal Mayas in the rural community of Ocosingo in the Lacandon jungle recalled the painful and exploitative experience of working as peones: We remember that we were servants since 1880; because of this we have been here for 119 years in this finca. We have to remember that the owners were natives of Germany and that we worked without pay from six [in the morning] to six in the afternoon and from six to six in the morning the next day. Our jobs included grinding cane, milking cows, caring for pigs, planting corn, clearing pastures, fixing fences and at the same time, we were the “carriers” from Yajalón to San Cristóbal de Las Casas and Ocosingo. In this period, they treated us like mules. The items we carried included barbed wire, flour, lard, and salt. At the same time the women worked too; the jobs they did were caring for hens, preparing food for the pigs, washing clothes, mopping the floor of the big house. We have to mention that when the owner got sick, we cared for him, we gave him food. And when he died, we carried him to the air landing strip.17

In another Tzeltal community, San Rafael, Ocosingo, elders shared stories of their ancestors working on the finca for decades as peones. “The women were woken up at four in the morning to present themselves to the owner and his wife and to begin to grind [corn]. Women just like the men didn’t earn anything. The ranch owner said, ‘work, you are living on my land and you have to pay with your work. I am not going to pay you because you are my son.’ ”18 Land poverty, the scarcity of social services, political repression, and the systematic violation of human rights pushed Samuel Ruiz García (Bishop of the Diocese of San Cristóbal de las Casas, 1960–2000), priests, and pastoral agents to ally themselves with the poor. The 1974 Indigenous Congress of Chiapas served as a critical opportunity for pastoral agents to listen to the voices of indigenous inhabitants of the Diocese. The event marked a turning point in land organizing because 2,000 representatives of indigenous communities met for three days to share their experiences, and in doing so, found commonalities in demands in diverse regions and formed alliances for future work. Even though the Congress was a secular event, the Catholic Diocese of San Cristóbal played a key role in its organization. Anthropologist Gaspar Morquecho recalled preparations for the Congress, which involved dozens of community-based meetings, where people shared their “word,” that is, their concerns, ideas, and, most important, their commitment to work together for change. The Diocese carried out this community organizing in rural communities as pastoral work, putting into practice their commitment to social

278   Christine Kovic justice. “The methodology was simple and efficient. It involved planting and harvesting the word. With the participation of thousands of indigenous peoples—men and women—the word multiplied, in their communities, they shared their hardships and suffering, their desires and aspirations. The word was created at meetings and regional pre-congress gatherings. The word was of everyone, it became collective and of one heart on the 13th, 14th, and 15th of October, 1974.”19 Of the four demands addressed at the Congress—on land, education, commerce, and health—the demand for land echoed most powerfully. “We demand the communal lands that were taken from our fathers and never returned . . . I think that land and work are at the root of the misery that we are affected by in all parts . . . we have confronted this sinkhole for 500 years . . . .” Following the Congress, the Diocese formally committed to the preferential option for the poor. This led to myriad projects, including productive cooperatives, legal support for cases of access to land, and the defense of human rights.20 This is an important example of the institutional church challenging the root causes of poverty and oppression. A number of organizations formed as a result of the Indigenous Congress. Quiptic ta Lecubtesel, a cooperative initially linked to the Catholic Church, was run by catechists from more than 150 communities in Ocosingo. In the 1980s the Diocese strengthened its work in promoting access to land for the rural poor, supporting Guatemalan refugees fleeing the violence of the civil war, and founding the Fray Bartolomé Center for Human Rights in 1989. Organizations such as Pueblo Creyente (People of Faith, founded in 1991), Las Abejas (The Bees, of the highland community of Chenalhó, founded in 1992), and Xi’ Nich’ (The Ant, formed in northeast Chiapas in 1991 with Ch’ol, Tzeltal, and Zoque Indians) had a strong Catholic identity, with prayer, fasting, and pilgrimage playing a central role in their protests. These organizations worked through the organizational structure of the Diocese of San Cristóbal to connect with different communities and actors.21 On January 1, 1994, in an act designed to coincide with the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation took over seven towns in Chiapas. They demanded basic human rights—land, housing, jobs, food, democracy, and an end to the racism and marginalization experienced by indigenous peoples for hundreds of years. The Zapatistas are a secular movement, and Bishop Ruiz and other bishops of the state responded that they did not support the use of armed violence. However, they recognized the validity of Zapatista demands; Ruiz added that if he had not helped raise the consciousness of indigenous peoples about their rights in his many years as bishop, then he had not effectively carried out his work. In addition to supporting peasant struggles against structural violence, Bishop Ruiz, like other religious leaders in Central America, documented state violence and mediated peace talks between armed groups and the government. Beginning in 1994, Ruiz served as official mediator between the Zapatista Army of National Liberation and the Mexican government, with the first round of peace talks taking place in San Cristóbal’s Cathedral. Bishop Ruiz noted that peace could not be a return to earlier situations of inequality. He noted that peace must be a work of reconciliation with God, a labor that demands “the construction of justice.”22

Rights, Religion, and Violence at Mexico’s Borders    279

Refugees and Solidarity at the Border: “The Good Samaritan” The biblical story of the Good Samaritan has provided important symbolism and moral credibility to organizations to defend their work with refugees and migrants at the US-Mexico border. In the New Testament parable (Luke 10:25–37), robbers leave a man half-dead at the side of a road. After a priest and Levite pass by without helping him, a Samaritan stops and, “moved by compassion,” cares for the man, washing his wounds and transporting him to an inn. The Good Samaritan parable has been read as a message about treating one’s neighbor with mercy, and as such has been used to provide theological justification for humanitarian work. Helene Slessarev-Jamir reads the story as more than a parable in caring for those in need. The story embodies “Jesus’ boundary-crossing vision of God’s reign” because the Samaritan cared for an Israelite, at a time “when Israelites were antagonistic toward the Samaritans.”23 At the US-Mexico border, the image of the Good Samaritan supports such boundarycrossing transgressions. Activists, Christians and others, support migrants, especially the unauthorized, who are criminalized in law and rejected by broad segments of society. In Mexico and along the US border region, as activists have been harassed, threatened, and arrested for their support of the marginalized, they appeal to religious validation and symbols to defend their so-called transgressions. The imagery of the Good Samaritan contrasts, in many ways, with that of earlier struggles against social sin in southern Mexico and Central America. Although the parable illustrates individual compassion and exposes the hypocrisy of believers who refuse to assist, it does not necessarily challenge the conditions causing poverty. Crossing boundaries to support refugees and migrants has a decades-long history in the region. In the 1970s and 1980s, religious organizations supported refugees fleeing civil wars in Central America. As thousands of Guatemalan refugees crossed into Chiapas in the early 1980s, they were received, first and foremost, in rural, impoverished communities, which provided food and a place to stay. The Catholic Diocese of San Cristóbal, motivated by what Bishop Ruiz García called the “prophetic solidarity” of rural communities, formed the Christian Solidarity Committee, which coordinated its work with the Guatemalan Church in Exile. The Diocese supported refugees in creating health and education committees in which local promotores (promoters) organized themselves to provide services in refugee settlements. Government officials targeted the Diocese because of this support. In February 1982, twenty armed men broke into the Mission of Guadalupe directed by the Marists in Comitán, a town near the Guatemalan border that at the time hosted many refugees. The intruders physically attacked the Marist brothers, ransacked several rooms, and took tape recorders, documents, and money. Just days later, the Mission was attacked again when nine police entered to gather information and intimidate the Marists.24 As Central American refugees began to arrive in the United States in the 1970s and early 1980s, religious communities assisted in their survival and settlement. They

280   Christine Kovic denounced US political and economic support for the Guatemalan and Salvadoran military governments.25 Although a significant body of scholarship exists on the role of religion in supporting refugees, the critical role that Central Americans themselves played in the US-Central American Peace and Solidarity Movement, including the Sanctuary movement, is often overlooked.26 Immigrant kin networks initially received and supported the refugees; immigrant-based organizations, including CARECEN (Central American Resource Center), were central to the founding of the Sanctuary Movement.27 Central Americans revolutionaries living in the United States shared their stories in public forums such as churches to mobilize North American allies. Perla notes that the Central American activists insisted on being “protagonists” who played a key role in decision-making and organization of the Sanctuary movement.28 As activists provided humanitarian assistance to Central American refugees, they also challenged the injustice of US immigration and refugee policy. In Arizona, faithbased volunteers from the Catholic, Jewish, Quaker, Presbyterian, and other progressive faith communities joined together to find legal assistance for the refugees, initially assuming that these refugees would be granted political asylum. Yet they soon learned that the US government systematically denied asylum applications under Cold War policies.29 In Tucson, Arizona, under the leadership of lay-Quaker Jim Corbett, they began to offer shelter and transportation.30 In 1982 ,Presbyterian Reverend John Fife sent a letter to US Attorney General William French Smith, publicly declaring that the South Side Presbyterian Church would openly violate the law and provide “sanctuary” for undocumented Central Americans.31 John Fife, Jim Corbett, and others cited the historical experience of the US underground railway for escaped slaves as an example of defying an immoral law.32 By 1984, the sanctuary movement included 150 churches, and by 1987, more than 420 groups, in a number of cities, with members of the Unitarian, Catholic, Episcopal, and Methodist Churches, the Jewish community, and secular activists such as university students taking part.33 In the 1990s activists began to condemn the increasing number of migrant deaths at the US-Mexico border. Secular activists such as Maria Jimenez and Isabel García of the Immigration Law and Enforcement Monitoring Project connected the increase in migrant deaths to US policies, in particular the 1994 “prevention-through-deterrence” strategy designed by the Immigration and Naturalization Services to create obstacles to discourage undocumented immigration. Increased enforcement in urban areas, traditionally the safest regions for unauthorized migrants to cross the border, created a “funnel effect,” pushing migrants to more dangerous regions, and the number of deaths increased twenty-fold from 1990 to 2005.34 Building on earlier work in the Sanctuary Movement, faith-based groups responded to the increase in deaths in Arizona. In the year 2000, ten churches in Tucson established Humane Borders to provide aid to migrants in the desert region, and its volunteers placed water drums in sites frequented by migrants. Reverend Robin Hoover, a Disciples of Christ pastor and founder of the organization, labeled providing water an act of Christian compassion. In Tucson in 2004 the faith-based organization No More Deaths began to organize volunteers to set up camps in the desert, where they provide food,

Rights, Religion, and Violence at Mexico’s Borders    281 water, and medical supplies to migrants in distress, especially during the deadly summer months.35 Through the efforts of Catholic Bishop Gerald Kicanas, together with members of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian groups, No More Deaths drafted five Faith Based Principles of Immigration Reform, including a challenge to militarized border enforcement and recognition of the economic and environmental roots of contemporary migration.36 Activists use religious imagery and rituals to make border deaths visible and to denounce migrant suffering. The Arizona Human Rights Coalition organizes an annual pilgrimage for Day of the Dead, with participants carrying small, white wooden crosses to remember those who have died. Since 2000 the group has created 2,771 crosses, the number of migrant remains recovered in Arizona from 2000 to 2014. In California, an annual Posada sin Fronteras (Posada without Borders) is held at the US-Mexico border, with participants on both sides of the border re-enacting the story of Mary and Joseph’s search for shelter as a parable about immigration.37 In Texas, where border deaths surpassed those of Arizona in 2012, activists and communities have used religious symbols and rituals to make visible the increased number of deaths and the failure to identify remains. Hundreds of migrant border crossers have died in Brooks County as they walked through the harsh brush to circumvent the Border Patrol checkpoint at Falfurrias, in the Texas Rio Grande Valley. At a press conference on February 20, 2013, activists stood at the Brooks County Courthouse steps carrying large white crosses bearing images of migrants who had disappeared while crossing South Texas. The activists demanded that the county take DNA samples on all unidentified remains in compliance with state law. In another event to remember those who died, La Antorcha Guadalupana, a ­bi-national torch run from the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, passed through Brooks County on October 30, 2014. Mexicans and immigrants in the United States carry the torch as “messengers of dignity for a people divided by the border.”38 The Antorcha Guadalupana draws on Catholic and Mexican symbolism, with the Virgin of Guadalupe connecting people in Mexico to their family members in the United States and vice versa. As the Antorcha runners pass through communities, they raise awareness of the unjust “suffering of immigrants” and work to build support for immigrant rights.39 In the Brooks County Antorcha, participants walked for over a mile along the edge of ranchlands where migrants have died. At the South Texas Human Rights Center, directly in front of the county courthouse, participants read from white crosses with the names or “unknown” for the sixty-one migrants who had died in the past year. Participants, both runners from Mexico and residents of Falfurrias, responded with “presente” (present) to mark each life and placed the cross in a small plot of land next to the office. Family members searching for their missing loved ones are the motor of human rights work to prevent deaths and identify the dead. With limited resources, families in the United ­ ersistently for their loved ones, States, Mexico, Central America, and elsewhere search p seeking knowledge of their whereabouts. Their stories, like those of Central American refugees in earlier decades, motivate work for immigrant rights.

282   Christine Kovic

Mexico’s Vertical Border: Sharing Food for Life As increasing numbers of Central American migrants passed through Mexico enroute toward the United States in the late 1990s, individuals, parishes, and faith-based organizations created a series of shelters and humanitarian projects to assist in their journey. Most recently, Mexico’s Plan Frontera Sur (Southern Border Plan), with millions of dollars in funding from the United States through the Merida Initiative, has further militarized this region, especially through the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Mexico’s narrowest point, resulting in increasingly dangerous and violent conditions for migrants.40 With names such as Brothers in the Road, Home of Mercy, and San Juan Diego, migrant shelters extending from Guatemala through Mexico create a transnational network of support for migrants. Many shelters are connected to Catholic parishes or religious orders such as the Jesuits, Scalabrinians, or Franciscans. They provide food, medical care, information, and a relatively safe place to spend the night or rest. Some shelters, or their “sister” organizations, engage in documenting and denouncing human rights abuses. They have publicly condemned government agents—police, military, local, state and federal officials—as well as narco-traffickers who kidnap, extort, attack, and even kill migrants. One of many examples of documentation of human rights abuses is the booklet Narrativas de la Transmigración centroamericana en su paso por México (Narratives of Central American transmigration in its passage across Mexico), a project of shelters linked to the Catholic Church and Jesuit Migration Service. It documented 487 abuses against migrants in the first half of 2013, including robbery, extortion, and threats. Because government agents, narco-traffickers, and common criminals view migrants as “merchandise”—a way to make money through theft, bribery, or extortion—the protection offered through shelters threatens their “profits.” As a result, attacks on immigrant rights activists and shelters are common. Most of the individuals and organizations in Mexico who accompany unauthorized migrants are at the margins of society and the institutional church, rather than at the center of social and ecclesial power. Individuals along the railway tracks, women in neighborhood organizations, parishioners, priests, and nuns are at the forefront of supporting Central American migrants at shelters, soup kitchens, and other sites of migrant support. To give one example, thirteen Catholics on the outskirts of Comitán (a city fifty miles from the border with Guatemala) built a shelter for Central American migrants, donating land, materials, and labor from their own community. Inaugurated in September 2013, the shelter’s day-to-day operations represent one of many acts of solidarity with Central American migrants. The small shelter accommodates six men and six women, and its location on a residential street protects migrants from criminals and gangs. Its name, Casa Mambré, derives from Genesis (18:1–15), in reference to an oak tree of Mamre, where three men visited Abraham and Sarah. As they do not initially recognize the

Rights, Religion, and Violence at Mexico’s Borders    283 visitors as messengers from God, Abraham offers them food and water to wash their feet. He tells them, “refresh yourselves; and afterward you may go on your way.” In Comitán, residents of the immediate neighborhood, people who are poor themselves, provide the meals for those who visit, cooking it in their own homes and bringing it to the shelter. The sign at the shelter entrance, taken from Genesis, reads “No pases a mi lado sin detenerte” (“Don’t pass by without stopping”). Another example of solidarity with migrants involves those who share food with migrants riding on freight trains. In La Patrona, Veracruz, one of the many communities the train passes through, a group of Catholic women have been preparing food and water daily to give to Central Americans since 1995. These campesina women work on their own, without the support of the government, a nongovernmental organization, or their Catholic Diocese, and began to prepare food because they recognized the basic needs of the migrants. They saw increasing numbers of migrants pass by on the train near their own homes, but in extremely difficult conditions. The request from migrants, “Mother, I’m hungry,” pushed a small group of women to organize themselves to prepare and distribute food. The women are called Las Patronas, referring to the name of their town (denoting their patroness, the Virgin of Guadalupe), but the term also translates as “protectors.” In the film De Nadie, Norma Romero, a member of Las Patronas, responds to the question of her motivation by saying that she does not want to see suffering.41 She adds that she hopes her son will never migrate and that he will never suffer. In the summer of 2014, these women cooked up to 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of dry rice and beans each day; then they placed small servings of food in dozens of plastic bags, together with tortillas or bread, and passed the food to the migrants on the train. They also washed out hundreds of plastic bottles, filled them with water, and tied them together at the tops with string to pass to the migrants. If a large group of migrants pass through on the morning train and all the food is distributed, these women prepare more for the next group, as up to three trains pass through daily. Also working from the margins of the Catholic Church in resisting violence in contemporary Mexico is poet and journalist Javier Sicilia. When Sicilia’s son Juan Francisco was killed by gang members in March 2011, he began a march from Cuernavaca to Mexico City and on to Ciudad Juarez at the US-Mexico border. Thousands joined along the way, especially family members who had likewise lost loved ones to Calderon’s militarized drug war, forming the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity. In a 2012 letter to Pope Benedict, Sicilia wrote of the suffering caused by the drug war: “Mexico and Central America, Beloved Benedict, are at the moment the body of Christ abandoned in the Garden of Gethsemane and crucified between two thieves.”42 Sicilia criticizes the violence of the Mexican government, the consumption of drugs in the United States, manufacturing of arms in the United States, and the silence of the Catholic Church in the face of such violence. Connecting the violence of the drug war to the United States, the secular Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity traveled from Tijuana to San Diego, California, and to twenty-six more US cities, including Washington, DC. Churches, along with a variety of community organizations, were key in providing lodging and

284   Christine Kovic food to the more than one hundred caravan participants as they traveled through the country, and image of the Virgin of Guadalupe was prominently displayed at events.43

Conclusion Decades after the Central American peace agreements, violence continues to be a significant problem in the region, although the contemporary violence seemingly stems from non-state actors including common criminals, narco-traffickers, and gangs in Mexico’s militarized war on drugs and the high homicide rates in El Salvador and Guatemala. The deaths of thousands of Mexican and Central American migrants in their journey across Mexico’s vertical border, the US-Mexico border, and South Texas appear to result from accidents due to jumping the freight train, drownings, or exposure to extreme heat in the Arizona desert or South Texas. In all these cases, the neoliberal state reframes “death as accidental, as natural, as peripheral to the project of politics, to neoliberal practices and strategies of rule.”44 This differs significantly from the “liberationist Catholic notion of structural sin—of social ills that are caused by clearly identifiable responsible agents.”45 Yet structural violence including poverty, racism, and sexism has created a new violence of security and insecurity, whereby those who are poor are more likely to be victims of violence, detention, or deportation. In Mexico’s drug war, the poor disproportionately experience violence, death, and long prison sentences.46 Activists identify the state’s role in violence through negligence and impunity; direct participation in disappearances, torture, and assassinations; creating and sustaining poverty through cuts to social services and free trade in implementing structural adjustment policies, and in border militarization and enforcement policies. For example, in Mexico, following the well-publicized disappearance of forty-three students from a rural teachers’ college in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, in September 2014, government officials proclaimed their innocence and blamed drug cartels. Families of the students and thousands of supporters in Mexico and the United States responded with the oftrepeated cry, “it was the state.” In another example of pointing to the role of the state, activists of the Mesoamerican Migrant Movement—the group that organized the Migrant Viacrucis described in this chapter’s introduction—denounce the security policies of the US and Mexican governments for causing violence and human rights abuses against migrants. As compared to earlier decades, faith-based human rights work to resist contemporary violence comes more from individuals or groups, rather than from the institutional church. The Casa Mambré shelter and the sharing of food and water from Las Patronas are grassroots efforts of volunteers who organize around their belief that faith obligates their solidarity with the poor to challenge exploitation and violence. Yet, limited support from the institutional Catholic Church in terms of material resources and moral credibility and authority means that these acts are less visible, and perhaps less effective, than broad-based institutionally supported mobilizations of earlier decades. Indeed, Bishop

Rights, Religion, and Violence at Mexico’s Borders    285 of Saltillo Raul Vera—an outspoken critic of the government and former auxiliary Bishop of San Cristóbal under Samuel Ruiz García—has denounced the hierarchical Catholic Church’s failure to take leadership to condemn violence and promote human rights. He openly criticized Mexico’s Episcopal Conference (CEM) for failing to support migrant rights and criticized the “butcher economic model” for increasing misery in Latin American nations and causing forced migration.47 Pastoral work along the migrant route differs significantly from earlier organizing work in southern Mexico and Central America. The Chiapas Indigenous Congress of 1974 led to a long-term pastoral process that accompanied the organizing and leadership of indigenous and rural communities. In contrast, contemporary shelters provide material, legal, and spiritual support to Central American migrants, essential forms of assistance. Earlier efforts accompanied communities in struggles to gain autonomy within a given territory, while shelters support migrants as they pass through territories where they are defined as “illegal.” It is difficult, if not impossible, for shelters to carry out long-term community organizing with migrants because they are a population in transit. Many who work or volunteer at the shelters, often at great risk, denounce human rights abuses against migrants, challenge state and federal authorities in Mexico, and support or organize events demanding immigrant rights, such as the Migrant Viacrucis. As migrants walked, marched, and rode on buses through Mexico, they made visible their presence and demanded the right to migrate free from violence. As such, migrants are the agents pushing society and the institutional church to respond to migration and violence.

Notes 1. Mexicans in the United States have organized annual immigrant Viacrucis in New York City, Chicago, and elsewhere, connecting Christ’s suffering to that of immigrants. Alyshia Gálvez, Guadalupe in New York: Devotion and the Struggle for Citizenship Rights among Mexican Immigrants (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2010), 133. In El Salvador, the Viacrucis is a lay-run ritual that “reinforces the identification of Jesus as a poor person, victimized by the wealthy.” Anna L. Peterson, Martyrdom and the Politics of Religion: Progressive Catholicism in El Salvador’s Civil War (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), 76. 2. Martha Pskowski and Alex Mensing, “Viacrucis: Migrants Step out of Shadows into the  Streets,” Americas Program, June 3, 2014. See https://www.americas.org/viacrucismigrants-step-out-of-shadows-into-the-streets/. 3. Letter from La 72, Hogar-Refugio para Personas Migrantes, Tenosique, Tabasco, April 14, 2014. 4. Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). 5. Donald Kerwin, “Rights, the Common Good, and Sovereignty in the Service of the Human Person,” in And You Welcomed Me: Migration and Catholic Social Teaching, eds. Donald Kerwin and Jill Marie Gerschutz, 93–121 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009); Christine Kovic, “Violence of Security: Central American Migrants Crossing Mexico’s Southern

286   Christine Kovic Border,” Anthropology Now 2, no. 2 (2010), 87–97; Olivia Ruiz, “Immigrants at Risk, Immigrants as Risk: Two Paradigms of Globalization,” Migration, Religious Experience, and Gobalization, eds. Giacchino Campese C.S. and Pietro Ciallella C.S., (Staten Island, NY: Center for Migration Studies, 2003). 6. World Bank Development Indicators, Mexico 2012, http://data.worldbank.org/country/ mexico; Shaylih Muehlmann, When I Wear My Alligator Boots: Narco-Culture in the U.S.Mexico Borderlands, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014); Christine Kovic, “The Violence of Security,” (Anthropology Now, 2010). 7. The paper draws from interviews and observations conducted in southern Mexico at migrant shelters and with several caravans of Central American and Mexican women searching for their loved ones who were “disappeared” as a result of violence. It also draws from as well as archival and secondary sources. 8. “1994–2004: La gran ilusión . . . La gran frustración.” El Proceso, January 1, 2004. 9. Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico, Guatemala memoria del silencio. Conclusions and Recommendations (Guatemala City: United Nations Office for Project Services, 1999), 18, 20; Beatriz Manz, Paradise in Ashes: A Guatemalan Journey of Courage, Terror and Hope (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 3. 10. Bartolomé de las Casas, Historia de las Indias, cited in Gustavo Gutiérrez, Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books 1995), 4. 11. Anna Peterson and Brandt Peterson, “Martyrdom, Sacrifice, and Political Memory in El Salvador,” Social Research 75, no. 2, 511–542. 12. Cited in Gustavo Gutiérrez, We Drink from Our Own Wells: The Spiritual Journey of a People (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984). 13. Samuel Ruiz García, “Mons. Oscar  A.  Romero: Martir de la Opción por los Pobres,” Kellogg Lecture Series, Latin American/North American Church Concerns, Kellogg Institute of Notre Dame (March 18, 2003), 4. 14. Daniel Levine, Politics, Religion and Society in Latin America (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2012). 15. Jan Rus, Shannan  L.  Mattiace, and Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo, “Introduction,” Mayan Lives, Mayan Utopias: The Indigenous Peoples of Chiapas and the Zapatista Rebellion (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). 16. Ibid., 3. 17. Patricia Gómez and Christine Kovic, Con un pueblo vivo en tierra negada (San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas: Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, 1994), 41. The quote is from a 1988 case file of a land conflict. 18. Ibid., 40. 19. Gaspar Morquecho, “El Congreso Diocesano Pastoral de la Tierra Madre,” América Latina en movimiento, January 14, 2014, https://www.alainet.org/es/active/70495. 20. Christine Kovic, Mayan Voices for Human Rights: Displaced Catholics in Highland Chiapas (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2005). 21. Kovic, Mayan Voices for Human Rights. 22. Samuel Ruiz, “Mensaje para la reconciliación y la paz,” Chiapas: El evangelio de los pobres: iglesia, justicia y verdad. Mexico City: Temas de Hoy, 1994. 23. Helene Slessarev-Jamir, Prophetic Activism: Progressive Religious Justice Movements in Contemporary America (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2011), 140. 2 4. Pablo Iribarren Pascal, O.P., and communities of San Cristóbal and Ocosingo, “Experiencia: Proceso de la diócesis de San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, México” (1985). Mimeograph.

Rights, Religion, and Violence at Mexico’s Borders    287 25. Sharon Erickson-Nepstad, Convictions of the Soul (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004); Christian Smith, Resisting Reagan (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996); John Fife, “From The Sanctuary Movement to No More Deaths: The Challenge to Communities of Faith,” Religious and Ethical Perspectives on Global Migration, eds. Elizabeth W. Collier and Charles R. Strain (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014). 26. Hector Perla, Jr., “Si Nicaragua Venció, El Salvador Vencerá: Central American Agency in the Creation of the U.S.-Central American Peace and Solidarity Movement.” Latin American Research Review 43 (2008), 136–158. 27. Cecilia Menjívar, Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000). 28. Perla, “Si Nicaragua Venció, El Salvador Vencerá,” 154. 29. In 1982, approximately 2 percent of all Salvadorans applying for asylum were accepted. Menjívar, Fragmented Ties, 83. 30. Fife, “From The Sanctuary Movement to No More Deaths”, 257–272. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Norma Stoltz Chinchilla, Nora Hamilton, and James Loucky, “The Sanctuary Movement and Central American Activism in Los Angeles,” Latin American Perspectives 36 (2009), 105. 34. Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith et al., “The ‘Funnel Effect’ and Recovered Bodies of Unauthorized Migrants Processed by the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner, 1990–2005,” Report Submitted to the Pima County Board of Supervisors (Tucson, AZ: Binational Migration Institute, 2006). 35. In 2005, the US Border Patrol arrested two volunteers who were taking three migrants to seek emergency medical care for transporting undocumented immigrants. Although the charges against them were eventually dismissed, the government has also charged volunteers for “littering” for leaving water jugs in the desert for migrants. Judith Adler Hellman, The World of Mexican Migrants: The Rock and the Hard Place (New York, NY: The New Press, 2008). 3 6. Sue Lefebvre, No More Deaths, A Short History of Our 10 Years (Tucson, AZ: No More Deaths, 2014). Beginning in 2008, No More Deaths operated as ministry of the United Universalist Church of Tucson. 37. Hondagneu-Sotelo, God’s Heart Has No Borders: How Religious Activists Are Working for Immigrant Rights (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008). 38. Flyer announcing Antorcha Guadalupana (2014), Houston, Texas. 3 9. Gálvez, Guadalupe in New York, 156. 40. Martha Pskowski, “Mexican Immigration Authorities Impede Humanitarian Aid to Central American Migrants,” Americas Program, December 2014, https://www.americas. org/13833/. 41. De Nadie, directed by Tin Dirdamal, 2006, executive producer, Mons. Raul Vera. 42. Cited in Gerald MacCarthy, “A Christian Response to the Mexican Drug Wars,” Thinking Faith, (November 2012). 43. Sicilia’s much-repeated phrase, “Estamos hasta la Madre” (We’re fed up), appeared atop a banner with the Virgin of Guadalupe at many events. He notes that it is Mexican slang, but has a religious meaning. “The mother, like the Virgin of Guadalupe is sacred. To say your [sic] hasta la madre means they’ve insulted our mother proctor; they’ve committed a sacrilege.” Stephen Andes, “A Pope, A Poet, and a Drug War,” Religion Dispatches, (March 21, 2012).

288   Christine Kovic 44. Anna Peterson and Brandt Peterson, “Martyrdom, Sacrifice, and Political Memory in El Salvador,” 536. 45. Ibid. 46. Muehlmann, When I Wear My Alligator Boots. 47. Carolina Gómez Mena, “ ‘Fallas’ de la CEM en el tema migratorio, dice Vera,” La Jornada, (July 10, 2014), 14, https://www.jornada.com.mx/2014/07/10/politica/014n2pol.

pa rt I I I

A T R A NSNAT IONA L SPI R I T M I S SIO NA R I E S A N D C HA R I SM

chapter 16

Pen tecosta lism a n d N eo -Pen tecosta lism i n L ati n A m er ica Two Case Studies Virginia Garrard and Justin M. Doran

Pentecostalism, the branch of Protestant Christianity that emphasizes the ­“experience” of God through ecstatic bodily signs (e.g., healing, speaking in tongues, etc.), collectively known as “baptism in the Holy Spirit,” is one of the most rapidly growing socio-religious movements in Latin America today. During the second half of the twentieth century and especially since the 1960s, Protestantism and Pentecostalism in particular experienced dramatic growth across Latin America—dramatically disseminating widespread religious pluralism to a region of the world that had been a Catholic stronghold since the Iberian conquest. It bears noting that Catholicism, while hegemonic, was never, in fact, monolithic in Latin America, where many variations on Catholic popular religion, indigenous practices, and African-based beliefs have long been present. Nevertheless, while increased religious pluralism is expressed in many forms—from Protestantism to Islam to a variety of new religious movements, and even to secularism—Pentecostalism, above all, has come to define Latin America’s new ­religious landscape. In 2006, a study conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life noted that 73 percent of Protestants in Latin America were Pentecostals. Even more significant, the Pew study demonstrated an upsurge in what it termed “renewalist” religion within their ten-country study, meaning that people who belonged to religious groups that were not historically Pentecostal—mainline Protestants and, especially, Catholics—had adopted a “Pentecostalized” set of beliefs and practice (a Pentecostal habitus) to enrich their own traditions. In Guatemala, for example, Pew found that eight in ten Protestants were Pentecostal. In this respect, Guatemala serves as a bellwether for what we argue here is the Pentecostalization of Latin American religion at large.1

292   Virginia Garrard and Justin M. Doran Guatemala is hardly unique in its charismatic focus. For example, Pentecostals make up around a third of the population in three of the other five Central American countries (El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua). Nor is this preference unique to Central America. Farther south, about a third of all Chileans report themselves to be renewalists (though in this case, Catholic charismatics outnumber Pentecostals). Brazil, numerically Latin America’s most “Catholic” nation, is also among the most Protestant—nearly half of all Brazilians are either Catholic or Pentecostal renewalists.2 Although many scholars and students of popular culture characterize Pentecostalism as a relatively “new” movement in Latin America, its presence in the region dates back a century, even though its influence and popularity did not fully register until the 1980s. In his work on Brazil, sociologist Paul Freston described three waves of Pentecostal activity, a chronology that closely correlates to the rest of Latin America as a whole.3 The “first wave” of Pentecostalism, according to Freston, came to Latin America in the early decades of the twentieth century, in the vanguard of the Azusa Street Revival, brought by foreign missionaries who were themselves new converts to Pentecostalism. Reviled by both Catholics and other Protestants, the first-wave Pentecostals established something of a permanent presence in some locations (especially in Brazil, where Swedish evangelists founded the Assembleia de Deus, now the largest non-Catholic denomination in the country), but at the time, for the most part, this religious movement did not ­penetrate the cultural membrane of the receiving nations.4 The second wave of Pentecostals appeared in the late 1950s and early 1960s with the arrival of media-based evangelism and national “crusades.” In some locations, this second wave, though motivated primarily by the need to proselytize, was also weighted by political impulses in that Cold War era. These same concerns also led to a proliferation of what Freston calls “nationalist” churches that grew out of, but separated themselves from, earlier missionary cultural trappings and aesthetics.5 Freston’s “third-wave” Pentecostalism emerged in the 1980s. Unlike the earlier two waves, which were ­typically—if not always—driven by foreign clergy, mandates, and epistemologies— third-wave Pentecostalism has developed from local leadership and “consumer tastes.” Despite local leadership, third-wave Pentecostalism is part and parcel of what Karla Poewe identified as a larger “global charismatic culture” that transcends national boundaries and is, at the same time, radically “local” at the grassroots.6 In particular, third-wave Pentecostals differ from their predecessors by emphasizing the “here and now,” as opposed to the eschatological concerns and focus of other Pentecostals, who remain so focused on Christ’s imminent Second Coming that they have little concern for temporal “worldly” matters. Third-wave Pentecostals, often called neo-Pentecostals, are fiercely presentist. Like other Pentecostals, neo-Pentecostals sacralize the Baptism by the Holy Spirit. But their orientation is firmly grounded in the quotidian, as neo-Pentecostals believe that self-improvement and material advancement are signifiers of God’s grace and favor. From this temporal orientation, neo-Pentecostals believe in pragmatic religious doctrines, such as prosperity theology, which proposes to bring about improvement in the everyday world through celestial intervention.7

Pentecostalism and Neo-Pentecostalism   293

Background What, then, is Pentecostalism, and how does it differ from other forms of Christianity? To be a Pentecostal is not to belong to a particular denomination; in fact, many Pentecostals do not actually use the term to describe themselves or their churches, and some are not even familiar with the word itself. Basically, Pentecostalism is defined as a particular body of beliefs that places great emphasis on the power of the Third Entity of the Trinity—the Triune God (Father, Son, Holy Spirit), the Third Person, the Holy Spirit—which appears in the Book of Acts 2–40. Pentecostals (whether they embrace the nomenclature or not) believe they must receive “Baptism in the Holy Spirit,” a somatic and often dramatic religious experience. This is typically manifest by such “signs and wonders” as “speaking in tongues” (glossolalia), miraculous healing, and spirit possession exhibited through dance, shouting, song, or other forms of ecstatic behavior. Pentecostalism is by no means unique to Latin America, and has its modern roots in the bitter debates that fractured Western, mainly Protestant, Christianity at the end of the nineteenth century. During this period, fierce debates (some of which still rage) broke out between two emergent groups—Christian modernists and fundamentalists—over issues of the “higher criticism” of biblical texts and the rationalization of faith and science. As a highly emotional practice and a transcendental system of belief, Pentecostalism provided an alternative for those who either shunned the modernists’ efforts to reconcile faith and science or felt shut out by the logos (and literacy-based) faith of the new fundamentalists, who believed the Bible to be the inerrant Word of God and the sole source of divine revelation.8 While both fundamentalists and Pentecostals place great emphasis on the authority of both the Bible and the Holy Spirit, fundamentalists place much greater weight on the former, Pentecostals on the latter. Of even greater distinction is a perceptual difference concerning the nature of salvation, which for fundamentalists is framed around an individualistic, contractual arrangement (“Do you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?”) versus the experience of God through sanctification (“Have you been baptized in the Spirit?”). Although believers locate their origins in the Pentecost experience described in the Book of Acts, modern Pentecostalism generally traces back to an event known as the Azusa Street Revival that took place in Los Angeles, California, between 1906 and 1915. Azusa’s founder, William J. Seymour, introduced ecstatic experiences, many of them associated with African-American Christianity (especially speaking in tongues, vibrant music and preaching, and [holy] spirit possession), into worship. The revival attracted a wide interracial following of religious seekers (drawing not only from the traditional American binary of black and white, but also, significantly, from the large resident Latino/a population in Los Angeles, even in those days), while drawing the ire of many in the US religious establishment.9 By the time the Azusa Revival closed down in 1915, new Pentecostal evangelists—inspired, but not supported by, the mission—had already begun work in Africa, India, and, especially, Latin America.

294   Virginia Garrard and Justin M. Doran

First- and Second-Wave Pentecostalism: Case Study, Guatemala Because Guatemala was one of the first countries in Latin America to claim a large Pentecostal population, it offers a valuable case study in Pentecostal history in the region. Prior to the arrival of the Pentecostals, Protestant missionaries had been present in Guatemala since 1872, when the first permanent Protestant missionary, an American Presbyterian, came to work in the country. Between 1872 and 1914, four other missions— the Society of Friends, the Church of the Nazarene, an evangelistic group called Central American Mission, and the Primitive Methodist Church—all put down roots in Guatemala. Guatemala’s original Protestant missionaries, like other main-line missionaries across Latin America, saw themselves, simultaneously, as the children both of the Enlightenment and of “the long nineteenth century,” the era that introduced many of the initial inventions in travel, communication, and daily life that define life today. Far from being the prissy and atavistic figures they are portrayed as in popular culture, North American Protestant missionaries to Latin American during the Victorian era were often optimists and enthusiastic social innovators whose sense of vocation was driven almost as much by a compulsion to implement the popular social and political theories of the era as by their desire to propagate the gospel. This made them natural allies of the liberal governments across Latin America that were seeking to rapidly modernize their countries.10 Main-line Protestants were influential institution builders in Latin America: in Guatemala, as elsewhere across the continent, US Protestant missionaries established hospitals, clinics, printing presses, and, above all, schools—the sine qua non of Protestant endeavors, since reading the Bible was essential to the Christian life.11 These projects all helped to build up the infrastructure of the host nations, and Protestant institutions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries helped educate a rising generation of Latin American statesmen and intellectuals. But they were not successful in converting Catholics to their religion. By around 1950, Guatemalan converts numbered probably in the low thousands at best, a tiny religious minority in an overwhelmingly Catholic country, although the institutional Church had been greatly weakened by nearly a ­century of anticlerical policies and restrictions. But in Guatemala and elsewhere in the early twentieth century, main-line Protestant missionaries, to their surprise, realized that Catholicism was not their only competition. In the wake of Azusa, a small wave of new missionaries arrived in Guatemala to preach “baptism in the Spirit,” where they almost immediately ran afoul of other Protestant missionaries already established in the country. In Guatemala, main-line missionaries referred to Pentecostal evangelists as “tongues people” and “convolutionists,” and accused them of “dipping from the net,” which was certainly true enough, as recent Protestant converts were much more likely to become Pentecostals than were Catholics.12 In the early twentieth century, this scenario played out all over Latin America, whenever Pentecostals moved into the mission field; the hostility between these groups would be enduring.13

Pentecostalism and Neo-Pentecostalism   295 Guatemala’s first Pentecostal missionaries were Charles Truman Furman and Thomas Pullin, both affiliated with the United and Free Gospel Society, in 1916. In order to close ranks against potential Pentecostal incursions, the mainline denominations reasserted a “Comity Agreement” (a non-competition pact) that they had devised in 1904 to carve the country into inviolate denominational spheres of influence that included only themselves.14 Despite this, in 1917, Furman and Pullin opened a Pentecostal mission in Zacapa, a town that was firmly in the Quaker sphere of influence. Fearing serious Pentecostal incursions into their own work, the normally peaceable Quakers drove Furman and Pullin out of Zacapa, and they eventually returned to the United States in 1920.15 The two returned to Guatemala in 1921, where they submitted to the doctrine and teachings of the moderate Primitive Methodist Church for more than a decade.16 The embers of the Spirit, however, inevitably flared, and in 1932, Furman began to introduce Pentecostal practices into Primitive Methodist worship. Shortly thereafter, he allied himself with a then small North American Pentecostal denomination called the Church of God, originally based in Cleveland, Tennessee, thus introducing into Guatemala what would in time become one of the most dominant Pentecostal entities in the world. The last straw came in early September 1936, when John Franklin, a missionary of the Assemblies of God, received permission to establish a new Pentecostal mission in Guatemala that almost immediately began to attract both a sizable congregation and the consternation of the main-line missionaries.17 At the end of 1936, in a desperate, but effective, effort to seal off the country from further Pentecostal encroachment, the five historic denominations organized themselves into a single umbrella organization known as the Evangelical Synod to oversee missionary matters in Guatemala; this arrangement corralled off the Pentecostals from further expansion until the 1950s. Were the main-line missionaries justified in their fears that Pentecostalism would overwhelm the mission field? Even without benefit of hindsight, the answer seems to be a definitive yes. Furman and the other Pentecostal missionaries were aggressive evangelists, and clearly had no more qualms about “dipping from the net” of the “lifeless” Protestant denominations than they had about evangelizing Catholics. The Church of God quickly developed an active and engaged indigenous pastorate that “grew the denomination” into one of the largest in the country within two years of the transfer from the Primitive Methodist Church, a status it retains to the present day. Under the circumstances, ­main-line missionaries could hardly avoid the conclusion that the “babes in Christ” were indeed highly susceptible to Pentecostalism’s allure.18

The Boom Years: Guatemala Despite all this, Protestantism, either main-line or Pentecostal, was largely absent in Guatemala prior to mid-century. Notwithstanding the presence of Protestant-run schools and hospitals, second-generation evangélicos (the term commonly used in Spanish to describe any non-Catholic Christian), and the unheralded hum of small Pentecostal churches in the remote countryside, the Protestant population of Guatemala by around

296   Virginia Garrard and Justin M. Doran 1960 numbered only around 5 percent—a modest figure, made even more so when ­taking into account that it also included resident Protestant foreigners and Germanheritage Lutherans. Yet by the mid-1980s, Guatemala would become one of the most “Protestant”—and majority Pentecostal—countries in Latin America, with a growth rate so sharp that church planners were prognosticating a Protestant majority by the year 2000.19 The fact that this prediction fell well short of the mark does not diminish the remarkable change to Guatemala’s religious landscape that took place between the mid1960s and mid-1990s. Guatemala’s second wave of Pentecostalism, by Freston’s typology, would be a tsunami. Guatemala’s Protestant boom—essentially a Pentecostal boom, since more than 80 percent of Guatemalan Protestants are also Pentecostal—is unique, since it is inexorably linked to that nation’s tragic history. This was defined by a thirty-six-year long armed conflict between leftist guerrillas, who hoped to correct Guatemala’s profound social and economic injustices through a Cuban-style revolution, and an intractable military government. The conflict reached its nadir between 1982 and 1983, a period Guatemalans now call la violencia, when the military government under a Pentecostal general named Efrain Ríos Montt launched a deadly efficient scorched-earth policy against the insurgency and all who might potentially support it. Coincidentally or not— we suggest not—the rapid expansion of Protestantism in Guatemala roughly corresponds to this period. Interestingly, Guatemala’s Protestant boom also corresponds to the dramatic expansion of Pentecostal Protestantism elsewhere in Latin America, including places—Brazil, for instance—that are very much unlike Guatemala.20 If one sees, as Jean Franco ­suggests, Guatemala’s peculiar and tragic history as one that reflects the brutal anxieties of late-stage capitalism, then its Protestant soteriology is illustrative of the expansion of Protestant/Pentecostalism in the late twentieth century elsewhere in Latin America (and also in Africa and Asia), even as the particulars of the Guatemalan case are unique.21 The scholarly assessment of Pentecostalism’s worldwide expansion in recent decades tends to focus on modernity, and how Pentecostalism offers an “escape” or “refuge” from modernity’s challenges (Lalive D’Epinay) or an alternative imaginary for alienated souls (Meyer), or serves as a practical resource for getting ahead via religious social networks and, in a manner of speaking, sympathetic magic (Gifford).22 Among the most compelling arguments is that of Jean and John Comaroff, who update Weber in arguing that Pentecostalism offers modern (and postmodern) subjects a means of “re-enchanting” a world governed by latter-day neoliberal capitalism and hyper-rational market forces.23 Although Guatemalan Pentecostals would probably not consciously subscribe to any of these theories, all, in some way, help both to unpack Guatemala’s “salvation narrative” and to make this particular story illustrative of Pentecostal expansion and the appeal of Pentecostalism in other parts of Latin America and beyond. Within Guatemala’s unique historical matrix, certain key factors support these ­interpretations. The first is expressly political, having to do with the beginning of the armed conflict in the early 1960s. Here, new US evangelical groups entered the country to offer what they called a “spiritual alternative to communism.” These efforts involved

Pentecostalism and Neo-Pentecostalism   297 new media campaigns, and the arena-style revival method pioneered by Billy Graham became part of a new repertoire of Protestant evangelization throughout Latin America, and spawned a first generation of Latin American media ministries. By the mid-1960s, inspired by the wave of revivals and evangelization campaigns, many small congregations began to sprout up, but now led by Guatemalan pastors rather than foreign missionaries. Within a relatively short time, Guatemalan Protestantism began to assume a local character—and that, more often than not, usually meant an affinity for Pentecostalism. If the arc of autochthonous Protestantism had its true start in the 1960s, a single event was responsible for Guatemala’s Pentecostal boom in popular memory, if not in actual reality: a catastrophic earthquake that roiled the country on February 4, 1976. The earthquake killed tens of thousands of people, destroyed much of the infrastructure of the capital city, and broke wide the grievous fault lines that paved the way for widespread social unrest and change. The natural disaster also revitalized the nation’s languishing guerrilla movement, thus setting off a wave of violent insurgency and counterinsurgency that would precipitate the darkest days of the civil war. But the earthquake also opened the door to religious aid workers who offered succor to quake victims. Although cynics quipped that such pragmatic intervention offered an example of lámina por ánima—free corrugated roofing in exchange for one’s soul—Guatemalans, especially in the most affected rural areas— ignored their critics and flocked to Pentecostal churches in droves.24 As Guatemala swirled downward into a vortex of violence over the next few years, Pentecostalism grew by leaps and bounds. Although the statistics are imperfect, in 1960, as seen, approximately 5 percent of Guatemala had been Protestant. By 1980, they made up just more than a quarter of the overall population.25 And two years later, one of those post-earthquake converts—a non-Indian elite general named Efraín Ríos Montt, who belonged to the neo-Pentecostal church Iglesia Cristiana Verbo—became Guatemala’s president in a coup d’état. It is easy to conclude, as many have, that Ríos Montt’s very public association with Pentecostalism (he “preached” every Sunday night on TV, addressing the nation on a variety of patriotic and religious themes), alongside the scorched earth violent campaign his government waged against the guerrillas and much of the civilian population, was a type of “holy war.”26 Proponents of this view argue that the Pentecostal general’s terror in the countryside forced Guatemalans into Pentecostal churches either out of a desire for safety or out of political expediency, particularly in an era when Catholics were often associated with liberation theology and politics of the left—a dangerous proposition indeed in that time and place. But there is ample evidence to demonstrate that the strong attraction that Guatemalans have felt for Pentecostalism that began in the mid-1970s, instead, had more to do with the promises of the faith—its claims to heal, to pour supernatural balm over hurting souls, and to provide a clear salvation narrative in the midst of an unfolding crisis of literally biblical proportions—earthquake, war, and terror, but soon to be redeemed by the imminent return of Jesus Christ. Of course, General Ríos Montt’s strong association with Pentecostalism and the counterinsurgency strategy unquestionably influenced many—Mayans who lived in the so-called zones of c­ onflict

298   Virginia Garrard and Justin M. Doran in particular—to convert to Protestantism in the interest of self-preservation, as people used evangélico identity as a shield to protect themselves from the violence raging in the countryside.27 Yet to attribute the conversion boom to simple expedience underestimates the impact that Protestant conversion had on society and individual lives. The all-out military assault on the highlands had destroyed families, villages, and Catholic churches, and, where it had still been strong, the costumbre, or all-encompassing epistemology, that had lent indigenous communities their distinctive identities for hundreds of years. In those spaces of utter despair, hope grew back. Small Maya Pentecostal congregations formed in society’s remnants, an effort at recovery that one pastor referred to as “trench faith.” Shaped around local knowledge but with a Protestant theology and sensibility, people found ways to reconstruct shattered lives and to wrest meaning from the anomie of violence. Pentecostalism offered a remedy that was, for many, both diagnostic and prescriptive for a temporal apocalypse.28 By the end of hostilities in Guatemala in late 1996, however, the rates of conversion to Protestantism/Pentecostalism had begun to plateau. This was in response both to a  change in political and social milieu and to a gradual shift within Guatemalan Pentecostalism itself, which was beginning to make a transition from what might be called “traditional” Pentecostalism—that is, focused on signs and wonders, and in Guatemala, with a strong apocalyptic bent that focused the gaze heavenward rather than on the here and now—to the more temporal allures of neo-Pentecostalism, the third wave of Freston’s typology. As the case study in Brazil that follows will show, ­neo-Pentecostalism differs from classical Pentecostalism in that it is much more focused on God’s gifts in the temporal world. One of the best examples of this is “prosperity ­theology,” an enormously popular and instrumentalist teaching in neo-Pentecostal churches, which preaches that God rewards faith through material aggrandizement and earthly success in work and family. Though prayers, fasting, and petitions, neoPenteocostals believe they can “name it and claim it” and that success in this world is in itself a witness to God’s grace and favor. In Guatemala, as in other parts of the world, neo-Pentecostalism is more likely to attract middle- and upper-class members (like Ríos Montt himself) or aspirants than traditional Pentecostalism, which characteristically recuses itself from affairs of the world. And what a world it is! While Guatemala’s long war is over, the violent civil society it left in its wake, characterized by crime, drug trafficking, violent abuse of women so endemic that it has its own name ( femicide), hyper-urbanization, political corruption, floods and drought from climate change, are distinctly Guatemalan, yet most of them are ills common to nearly every Latin American megalopolis today. Little wonder that Guatemalans, like so many other Latin Americans today, feel the need for some kind of spiritual re-enchantment. In the meantime, Pentecostalism has left an indelible mark on Guatemalan religion. Outside of the Catholic Church—where the most vigorous sector today is the Charismatic Catholic Renewal, Catholicism’s answer to Pentecostalism—all of Guatemala’s largest and, even now, fastest-growing churches are Pentecostal. The Fraternidad Cristiana,

Pentecostalism and Neo-Pentecostalism   299 a church that had its origins in the tumult of the late 1970s (only one of Guatemala City’s several megachurches), seats some 12,200 members at its regular services.29 This places it roughly on a par with Joel Osteen’s well-known Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, which is one of the bright stars in the constellation of worldwide Pentecostalism. Another, Carlos Enrique “Cash” Luna, the pastor of Ministerios Cash Luna, has become one of the most well-known (and, as his nickname implies, richest) televangelists in northern Latin America today.30 Pentecostals, then, are no longer on the margins of society, but are at the very core. Outside of the Pentecostal churches, stalwart main-line Protestant denominations have incorporated some charismatic practices in their liturgies, while even some practitioners of traditional Maya religion have started to borrow a little from the Pentecostal repertoire. Above all, Catholic charismatic renewal is on the rise as well, reinvigorating many Catholic parishes around the country.31 Guatemala has not become a Protestant majority, and perhaps it never will. But it is not too much to say that, leading the way for many countries in Latin America, religion in Guatemala has indeed become “Pentecostalized.”

Case Study: Pentecostalism in Brazil Demographic gains for Protestants in Brazil across its boom years were modest when compared to Guatemala, increasing from 5 percent of the total population in 1970 to 22 percent in 2010.32 Brazil’s role in the dynamics of Pentecostal expansion is perhaps better represented by the spread of its signature practices of exorcism across Latin American Protestantism. The Pew Research Center found in 2014 that 56 percent of Protestants in Brazil had seen the Devil being driven out of a person, compared to only 15 percent of Catholics. Similarly, large differentials in the practice of exorcism were found between Protestants and Catholics in all Latin American countries surveyed. While exorcism was present in the second wave, it became central during the third wave of Pentecostal expansion in Brazil.33 Missionaries from the early Pentecostal movement arrived in Brazil as early as 1910. Although none of those early Pentecostal missionaries to Brazil was born in the United States, they were all baptized in the Holy Spirit under the ministry of William Durham in Chicago, Illinois. During its boom years, Durham was one of the Azusa Street Mission’s most ardent supporters including a short term serving as visiting pastor. The early ­missionary activity that grew out of Durham’s ministry led to the foundations of the Congregação Cristã (CC) in São Paulo and the Assembleia de Deus (AD) in Belém. Rather than maintaining connections with North America, early Pentecostal churches in Brazil took root in the ethnic enclaves of their founders. The founder of the CC, Luigi Francescon, succeeded through his ability to evangelize within the Italian Presbyterian community of São Paulo. The two founders of the AD, Gunnar Vingren and Daniel Berg, sustained their denomination through their transatlantic networks with their Swedish homeland. The

300   Virginia Garrard and Justin M. Doran AD was financially supported and ministered by Swedish missionaries until 1930, when the denomination became autonomous. Eschewing the congregationalist polity of their origins, the Swedish leaders of the AD established a national Brazilian denomination over which they exercised substantial control. Although the denomination maintained ties with the General Council of the Assemblies of God in the United States, the Brazilian AD was an independent organization since its inception. Today, the AD has roughly four times as many adherents as the Assemblies of God in the United States and claims the most members of any Protestant denomination in Brazil, with 12.3 million.34 During the first half of the twentieth century, the AD quietly pioneered the cultural framework for Pentecostalism in Brazil. Harold Williams’s National Evangelization Crusade in 1953, with its emphasis on new evangelism techniques and technologies, represented an inflection point for Pentecostal expansion in Brazil. Williams was a Hollywood actor and missionary for the Foursquare Gospel Church. He had been evangelizing in South America with his wife since the late 1940s, and arrived in Brazil in the early 1950s. During a visit back to the United States, he attended revivals by Billy Graham and Oral Roberts that inspired him to import a circus tent to São Paulo for the purpose of hosting a revival.35 He also opened the doors (or flaps, as it were) to missionaries from all denominations who emphasized the power of the Holy Spirit to act in the modern world.36 This revival became the National Evangelization Crusade, and established a foothold for the Foursquare Gospel Church, which was contextualized to Brazil as the Igreja do Evangelho Quadrangular (IEQ). Although the IEQ maintained a doctrinal core akin to the AD and other transnational Pentecostal denominations, their new priorities fit better with Brazil’s urbanizing population and rapid modernization. Their growth has been ongoing, resulting in the IEQ becoming an independent denomination in 1988 that has 1.8 million members today.37 Another foreign evangelist who was drawn to urban Brazil during this period was a Canadian named Robert McAlister. McAlister was the son of a superintendent of the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada. McAlister arrived in Brazil in 1958 through an invitation by Lester Sumrall—an American evangelist who founded World Harvest Radio International. Sumrall was conducting a crusade in Maracanãzinho, a newly built indoor stadium in Rio de Janeiro. In 1959, McAlister invited his wife Gloria to move to Rio de Janeiro with their two small children. McAlister’s Brazilian ministry began with a radio program called A Voz da Nova Vida (the Voice of the New Life), broadcast across Rio de Janeiro by Radio Copacabana. Initially, McAlister held meetings in the rooms adjacent to the program’s studio, but eventually rented out the auditorium of the Brazilian Press Association.38 McAlister achieved substantial local success during his first two decades in Southeastern Brazil, and the church he founded continues to retain 90,000 predominantly urban-dwelling members as of the 2010 census. The third wave of Brazilian Pentecostalism arose during a period when Brazil’s population was highly urbanized and Brazilians imagined themselves as a modernizing nation.39 While McAlister’s INV was part of the second wave, its major contribution to the history of Brazilian Pentecostalism was to convert the iconic third-wave preacher, Edir Macedo, to Pentecostalism. Today, Macedo is the wealthiest pastor in Brazil and

Pentecostalism and Neo-Pentecostalism   301 the face of new controversial forms of Pentecostalism that gained traction in the 1980s and became a national spectacle in the 1990s. But when he converted to Pentecostalism in the early 1960s, he was one of many thousands of Brazilians who were adjusting to the transition from rural to urban life in Rio de Janeiro. Macedo grew up as an uncommitted Catholic who dabbled in Spiritism and other Brazilian healing traditions. His family moved from an outlying town on the border of Minas Gerais to the city of Rio de Janeiro in 1960. After his sister, Elcy, was cured of her chronic bronchitis during McAlister’s crusade, Macedo began attending services at the INV’s temporary home at the Brazilian Press Association. Meanwhile, he earned a ­college degree in statistics and became employed by Loterj, the state lottery of Rio de Janeiro. Eventually, he became a full member of the church, but the leadership of the INV never felt that Macedo had the “anointing” to do the work of the church.40 In 1974, Macedo left the INV, along with several other pastors including his brother-in-law R.  R.  Soares. After three years of short-lived affiliation with several other nascent Pentecostal organizations, in 1977 Macedo established the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, henceforth IURD). His brother-in-law, a talented televangelist, broke from the IURD three years later to form the Igreja Internacional da Graça de Deus (International Church of the Grace of God), which holds similar doctrines, but has fewer members. Macedo inherited from Robert McAlister an acute concern for the influence of ­Afro-Brazilian religious traditions in the lives of his congregants. While Macedo was a member of McAlister’s church, the Canadian minister published two small books that examined Afro-Brazilian religions and concluded that they were demonic pollutions in Brazilian life.41 In 1990, Macedo published a book that carefully examined and criticized Afro-Brazilian traditions as demonic.42 Macedo’s early IURD crusades commonly included public exorcisms of Afro-Brazilian ritual experts called mães-de-santo.43 Today, one day a week he continues to dedicate himself to exorcisms during liturgy, which the church calls “liberation.”44 The IURD’s practices grew out of Macedo’s theology of sacrifice, which runs through the core of the IURD’s doctrinal framework.45 Macedo drew his interpretation of sacrifice from the Christian Old Testament and applied it to life in the modern world. According to Macedo, the sacrificial formula that operated in the Old Testament was not made obsolete by Jesus’s crucifixion. Although the crucifixion did ensure ultimate salvation for the faithful after death, sacrifices to God in the Holy Temple still work for this-worldly requests. With the Temple destroyed, those sacrifices can be made anywhere the faithful congregate in ritual worship, including IURD churches in Brazil. Macedo interprets that sacrificial formula through multiple biblical lenses, but Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac serves as the prototype. Offerings are made in the form of monetary donations to the church. Macedo carefully, and repeatedly, explains, however, that “[t]he offering is not money and money is not the offering. Money, in truth, materially represents the confidence of those that receive it. . . . When one tithes or gives an offering, there is a confidence that God will fulfill His promises and return His blessings.”46 Monetary offerings are usually collected multiple times per service, and services occur multiple times per day, every day of the week.

302   Virginia Garrard and Justin M. Doran In less than fifteen years, the IURD in Brazil grew enormously from around sixty churches in 1983 to almost one thousand in 1991. This growth corresponded to increasingly massive revivals in football stadiums throughout the country, and increased scrutiny from the Brazilian press. Throughout the 1980s, the church accumulated a substantial fortune and used those resources to continue its expansion.47 The IURD also entered the political arena, sponsoring two members of the church as candidates in the 1986 state and federal elections, both of them winning seats.48 The real turning point for the IURD, however, came in 1989, when Edir Macedo purchased the struggling Rede Record, the third-largest television network in Brazil. The network has since eclipsed its closest competition, becoming the second-largest network behind Rede Globo. Globo is the highest-grossing television network in Latin America, and second in the world to ABC. The purchase of Rede Record signified Edir Macedo’s new position as the most influential Pentecostal in Brazilian public life, and the IURD as the most publicly recognizable church in a new and controversial generation of Latin American Pentecostalism.

From Crentes to Evangélicos: Brazilian Pentecostalism Goes Public The IURD and Edir Macedo were at the center of a cultural shift in the early 1990s, as a result of two highly publicized controversies: a television miniseries that was perceived as demeaning toward Pentecostals, and an IURD pastor kicking a plaster image of Brazil’s patron saint on television. From those controversies, Macedo forged a new identity for members of his church and Pentecostals, removing them from the paternalistic categories of crentes or aleluias and defining them simply as evangélicos, a broader term that signifies any non-Catholic Christianity and enlists the wider community of Brazilian Protestants. The progression of these controversies illustrates the tensions that Pentecostal expansion in Latin America has created in a region historically dominated by Catholic understandings of religion and society. In 1992, Rede Globo produced and aired a miniseries called Decadência (Decadence)—a thinly veiled fictionalization of Edir Macedo’s life and rise to prominence. The miniseries begins with the protagonist attending a small, joyful church filled with stereotypically peaceful Pentecostals. The protagonist quickly descends into power-hungry debasement as he bilks the poor congregants out of their earnest incomes. The series crescendoes with a scene depicting the protagonist stripping a female member on stage, pouring liquor onto an open bible, and burning it while maniacally laughing over the pulpit as his minions collect huge sacks of cash donations. Through the melodrama of the Brazilian television miniseries format, Rede Globo succeeded in presenting the Brazilian public with a visceral critique of the neo-Pentecostal practices regarding monetary donations.49 Although Christian churches commonly require monetary donations to survive

Pentecostalism and Neo-Pentecostalism   303 (either through voluntary donations or tithing), Macedo’s critics claimed that his views on tithing and offerings made an inappropriate, direct connection between devotion and money. This observation was often accompanied by the accusation, either implicit or explicit, that Macedo’s theology was intentionally and ruthlessly designed to enrich himself. This viewpoint, combined with the reality of Macedo’s immense wealth, produced the hostility displayed in both his arrest and in the television program Decadência. Although not ostensibly in response to the airing of Decadência, Macedo’s later ­interpretation of the controversies held that the offense given to evangélicos (Protestants, generally) from the miniseries led to the now infamous “kicking the saint” incident in 1995. During a late-night sermon televised by Rede Record, a bishop of the IURD named Sérgio Von Helde kicked a plaster image of Brazil’s patron saint, Our Lady of Aparecida. Von Helde’s message was that plaster idols held no special sacred power; the image of a Protestant pastor kicking the saint was rebroadcast by Rede Globo and was interpreted as a violent affront to Brazilian Catholics. In response, Von Helde was charged with inciting prejudice of religion through mass media, was convicted, and was sentenced to two years in prison. Because it was his first offense, he avoided actual imprisonment and was instead put on probation. After the dust had settled, Macedo expanded his media empire, and his church thrived across Brazil and Latin America. The IBGE (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística) shows the church’s official membership in 2010 to be about 1.8 million members in Brazil, while the church itself claims more than 8 million members globally. But the lasting effect of Macedo’s aggressive involvement in Brazilian public life carved out a political and cultural space for evangélicos: Brazilian Pentecostals who perform their religious lives in public.50

Conclusion If one city corner could represent the complex dynamics of Pentecostal expansion in Latin America, it would be the intersection of Avenida Celso Garcia and Rua João Boemer in São Paulo. On one corner sits AD Brás, a five-thousand capacity hyper-modern church that is owned by the Assembleia de Deus, Brazil’s first and largest Pentecostal denomination. On the opposite corner, occupying an entire city block, sits the Templo de Salomão, a recently completed replica of the Temple of Solomon built by the IURD, which, during its grand opening, hosted both Edir Macedo and Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff. On the third corner is São João Batista do Brás, an old, yellow Catholic church that has stood there since 1908, two years before Pentecostalism arrived in Brazil. Staged as living monuments to the history of Brazil’s Pentecostalization, the street corner offers a single vantage point from which to look out and view the diversity of Latin American Christianity. Some accuse Edir Macedo of thinking of his enormous Templo de Salomão in São Paulo as Pentecostalism’s Vatican, and perhaps, in a sense, it is. The Templo, in some

304   Virginia Garrard and Justin M. Doran ways, is similar to the Vatican, but not in terms of hierarchy and dogmatic authority. Rather, in its audacious grandeur, it stands as an expensive and very intentional symbol of Pentecostalism’s domination of the religious landscape not just in Brazil, but also of much of Latin American and, indeed, in the Global South, today. The Templo’s fortress-like façade signals to all who did not already know it (whoever those few might be) that Pentecostalism and neo-Pentecostalism have long ago shed their lowdown and transgressive reputations. Instead, the multi-racial, rambunctious, Spirit-filled meetings that so scandalized visitors to the Azusa Street Revival have become the templates for “doing church” in even many more staid main-line denominations, which nevertheless continue to watch their membership ebb away to the Pentecostals. Even the Roman Catholic Church, which for so very long defined “True Religion and virtue” in Latin America, has found its own Pentecostal analog in Catholic Charismatic Renewal, itself the fastest growing sectors of the Church. The Catholic Church in Latin America, then, continues to hold its ground, aided by Catholic Renewal and, perhaps, thanks to what some call the “Francis Effect” of the first, and very popular, Latin American pope. Nevertheless, as these case studies of Brazil and Guatemala demonstrate, religion in Latin America over the past few decades has become Pentecostalized. The evidence of this seems clear enough. As noted earlier, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s study in 2006 found that 73 percent of Protestants in Latin America were Pentecostals, and it noted an upsurge in “renewalist” religion among religious groups that were not historically Pentecostal (main-line Protestants and, especially, Catholics), in which practitioners had adopted a “Pentecostalized” set of beliefs and practice—belief in faith healing and speaking in tongues, for example—to enrich their own traditions. In Guatemala, Pew found that while eight in ten Protestants were Pentecostal, six in ten Catholics also practiced charismatic religion, making for an overall Christian population that was, in total, more than 60 percent “renewalist.”51 Brazil noted a somewhat lower percentage of renewalists—49 percent—but Brazilians outside of Christianity also embraced additional practices such as Spiritism and African diasporan faith that also employed pneumatic and miraculous practices that made them functionally, if not theologically, similar to Pentecostals.52 In 1990, anthropologist David Stoll posed the question, “Is Latin America turning Protestant?”53 For now, the answer is no: despite strong Protestant expansion, the majority of Latin Americans remain Catholic. But Latin American religion across the board has been deeply touched by charismatic and spirit-filled faith. The enchantments of the Spirit continue to expand to influence belief and public life across the region.

Notes 1. “Spirit and Power—A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostals,” Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, October 6, 2006, http://www.pewforum.org/2006/10/05/historical-overview-ofpentecostalism-in-guatemala/. 2. “Estimated Size of Renewalist Populations,” Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2006, http://www.pewforum.org/2006/10/05/spirit-and-power/.

Pentecostalism and Neo-Pentecostalism   305 3. Paul Freston, “Pentecostalism in Brazil: A Brief History,” Religion 25 (1995), 119–133. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 119–33; see also Marlise Simons, “Latin America’s New Gospel,” New York Times Magazine, November 7, 1982. 6. Karla Poewe, ed., Charismatic Christianity as a Global Culture (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1949). 7. Jesús García-Ruiz and Patrick Michel, “Neopentecostalism in Latin America: Contribution to a Political Anthropology of Globalization,” International Social Science Journal (61, no. 202 (2010), 411–424. 8. Kate Bowler, Blessed: A History of American Prosperity Gospel (New York, NY: Oxford, 2010). 9. Daniel Ramírez, Migrating Faith: Pentecostalism in the United States and Mexico, 1­ 906–1966 (Durham, NC, and Raleigh, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). 10. Dennis A. Smith and Leonildo Silveira Campos, “Concentrations of Faith: Mega Churches in Brazil” in Jonathan D. James, ed., Mega Churches: A Moving Faith Goes South (London: Sage Publications, 2015), 1–2. 11. See Rachel McCleary, Chapter 19 in this Handbook. 12. Central American Bulletin, 107, no. 1 (November 15, 1919). 13. Allan Anderson, An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 14. Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Protestantism in Guatemala: Living in the New Jerusalem (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1998), 29–30. Primary sources for this information come from the Board of Foreign Mission records for the Presbyterian, Central American Mission, Quaker, and Nazarene churches. 15. Virgilio Zapata, Historia de la iglesia evangélica en Guatemala (Guatemala: Genesis Publicidad, 1982), 101. 16. Dove, “Local Believers, Foreign Missionaries, and the Creation of Guatemalan Protestantism, 1882–1994,” PhD diss., University of Texas, 2012, 227–242. 17. Archivo General de Centro América (AGCA), Relaciones exteriores, “Religiosos y asuntos religiosos,” September 19, 1936. 18. CAM, 117, no. 2 (July 15, 1921). 19. Servicio Evangelizadora para América Latina, La hora de dios para Guatemala (Guatemala: Editorial SEPAL, 1983). 20. Edward L. Cleary and Hannah Stewart Gambino, Power, Politics, and Pentecostals In Latin America (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996). 21. Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America and the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 22. Christian Lalive d’Epinay, Haven of the Masses: A Study of the Pentecostal Movement in Chile and Brazil (Lutterworth: World Studies of Church in Mission, 1969); Brigit Meyer, “Pentecostalism and Globalization,” in Allan Anderson et al., eds., Studying Global Pentecostalism: Theories and Methods (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010), 113–130; Paul Gifford, Ghana’s New Christianity: Pentecostalism in a Globalizing African Economy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004). 23. Jean and John  L.  Comaroff, Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 24. Deborah Levenson-Estrada, “Reactions to Trauma: The 1976 Earthquake in Guatemala,” International Labor and Working Class History 62 (2002), 60–68. 25. See PROCLADES, Proyecto centroamericano de estudios socio-religiosos (Costa Rica: Servicio evangelizador para América Latina, 1981).

306   Virginia Garrard and Justin M. Doran 26. See Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala under General Efraín Ríos Montt, 1982–1983 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010). 27. Tomás Guzaro and Terri Jacob McComb, Escaping the Fire: How an Ixil Mayan Pastor Led His People Out of a Holocaust during the Guatemalan Civil War (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2010). 28. Itzmar Rivera, pastor Iglesia Primitiva Metodista, interview, Santa Cruz del Quiché, May 23, 1985. 29. Fraternidad Cristiana claims 15,000 members. http://frater.org. 30. http://www.cashluna.org 31. See Edward L. Cleary, The Rise of Charismatic Catholicism in Latin America (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2011). 32. Pew Research Center, Brazil’s Changing Religious Landscape: Roman Catholics in Decline, Protestants on the Rise (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, July 18, 2013), 2, http:// www.pewforum.org/2013/07/18/brazils-changing-religious-landscape/. 33. Pew Research Center, Religion in Latin America: Widespread Change in a Historically Catholic Region (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, November 13, 2014), 65, http:// www.pewforum.org/2014/11/13/religion-in-latin-america/. 34. IBGE—Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística, Censo Demográfico 2010: Carac­ terísticas gerais da população, religião e pessoas com deficiência, 2010, http://www.ibge. gov.br; Paul Freston, “Prostestantes e política no Brasil: da constituinte ao impeachment” (PhD diss., Departamento de Ciências Sociais do Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 1993), Chapter 5. 35. Paul Risser, An Eye for Miracles (Lake Mary, FL: Creation House, 2010), 211. 36. Paul Freston, “Pentecostalism in Brazil: A Brief History,” Religion 25, no. 2 (April 1995), 126. 37. IBGE—Instituto Brasileiro de Geografía e Estatística, Censo Demográfico 2010: Carac­ terísticas gerais da população, religião e pessoas com deficiência. 38. Ricardo Mariano, Neopentecostais: Sociologia do novo pentecostalismo o Brasil (São Paulo, SP: Edições Loyola, 1999), 51–53. 39. Freston, “Pentecostalism in Brazil,” 120. 40. Edir Macedo, Nothing to Lose: Moments of Conviction That Changed My Life (Barcelona; Madrid: Lunwerg, 2013), 149. 41. Robert McAlister, Mãe de santo: Georgina Aragão dos Santos Franco ([Rio de Janeiro], GB: Empreendimentos Evangélicos, 1968); Robert McAlister, Crentes endemoninhados: a nova heresia (Rio de Janeiro, Brasil: Igreja de Nova Vida, 1975). 42. Edir Macedo, Orixás, caboclos e guias : Deuses ou demônios? (Rio de Janeiro: Universal Produções, 1990). 43. Mãe-de-santo literally translates to “mother-of-saint,” but could be translated as “priestess.” 44. The allusion to Catholic liberation theology appears to be intentional, and Macedo has made explicit criticisms of that theology in Edir Macedo, A libertação da teologia (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Gráfica Universal, 1992). 45. See Paulo Mattos, “An Introduction to the Theology of Bishop Edir Macedo (Universal Church of the Kingdom of God): A Case Study of a New Brazilian Pentecostal Church” (S.T.M. thesis, Christian Theological Seminary; Indianapolis, 2002). 46. Edir Macedo, A voz da fé: O segredo para uma vida bem-sucedida, 1st ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Unipro Editora, 2009), 107.

Pentecostalism and Neo-Pentecostalism   307 47. Eric W. Kramer, “Possessing Faith: Commodification, Religious Subjectivity, and Collectivity in a Brazilian Neo-Pentecostal Church” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2001), 59. 48. Ibid., 58. 49. Roberto Farias and Ignácio Coqueiro, “Decadência” (Rede Globo de Televisão, September 5, 1995). 50. Eric  W.  Kramer, “Law and the Image of a Nation: Religious Conflict and Religious Freedom in a Brazilian Criminal Case,” Law & Social Inquiry 26, no. 1 (Winter 2001), 36. 51. Pew Forum, “Spirit and Power,” http://www.pewforum.org/2006/10/05/historicaloverview-of-pentecostalism-in-guatemala/. 52. Ibid. 53. David Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant? The Politics of Evangelical Growth, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).

chapter 17

Con v ersion Proce sse s a n d Soci a l N et wor ks i n L ati n A m er ica Henri Gooren

Introduction: The Success of Global and Latin American Pentecostalism Since the 1980s, success has been the driving narrative of global Pentecostalism. The numbers game documented the rise of the different varieties of Pentecostalism, which was adding almost 20 million members every year1 and now represents over a quarter of Christians worldwide. The vast majority of these Pentecostals live in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In Latin America, countries like Guatemala, El Salvador, and Brazil have become 20 to 30 percent Protestant in only a few decades, with Pentecostals dominating the Protestant communities in almost all countries (see Table 17.1).2 What makes Pentecostalism so attractive to millions in the global South? Table 17.2 presents a model for Pentecostal church growth, developed earlier for the case of Guatemala—one of the most Protestant countries of Latin America, with estimates for the Protestant population proportion ranging from 25 to 30 percent.3 The church growth model provides several clues as to why this is the case. The first US Protestant missionaries arrived in Guatemala beginning in the 1870s, starting churches, schools, and clinics (factors 1b and 1c). Between 1935 and 1960, the first Pentecostal churches built their own institutions and gradually relied more on Guatemalan leaders. Growth was steady in 1960–1976, with strong increases in the late 1960s, and an explosion after the devastating 1976 earthquake. Between 1976 and 1986, six factors converged to create the Protestant explosion in Guatemala. (1) An explosion of anomie (factor 2c) was created by the earthquake, civil war, political repression, and a severe economic recession. Anomie is

310   Henri Gooren

Table 17.1  Religious Affiliation in Latin America, 2003 Country

Brazil Chile Guatemala El Salvador Puerto Rico Nicaragua Panama Honduras Argentina Costa Rica Bolivia Peru Venezuela Mexico Uruguay Ecuador Paraguay Colombia

Percent Catholic

Percent Protestant

Percent Pentecostal

Pentecostals as Percent of Protestants

61% 57% 67% 71% 69% 76% 62% 73% 77% 74% 84% 69% 85% 85% 50% 82% 90% 91%

29% 27% 25% 22% 22% 19% 18% 18% 13% 13% 12% 10.6% 7.4% 7.2% 6.4% 6.2% 6% 5%

24% 24% 17% 17% 16% 12% 12% 11% 11% 7% 5% 4% 6% 4% 2.7% 2.2% 3% 3%

83% 89% 68% 77% 73% 63% 67% 61% 85% 54% 42% 38% 81% 56% 42% 35% 50% 60%

Sources: Main source for Table 17.1: Gastón Espinosa, “The Pentecostalization of Latin American and U.S. Latino Christianity,” Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 26, no. 2. (2004): 262–292, 270–271, based on 2003 statistics from Todd M. Johnson and Peter Crossing at the Center for the Study of World Christianity. Data for Paraguay are based on the 2002 census (Holland, “Paraguay,” in Andrew Riggs, ed., Worldmark Encyclopedia of Religious Practices, Vol. 3: Countries M–Z [Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2006], 205). The data for Bolivia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, and the anomalous case of highly secularized Uruguay are based on Patrick Johnstone and Jason Mandryk, Operation World (Carlisle, UK: Paternoster Lifestyle, 2001), 112, 205–206, 230, 516, 664.

the absence—or strong erosion—of generally accepted norms and values, which threatens to cause the disintegration of society. Durkheim was especially worried that with the gradual unfolding of the “modernization process,” human needs and desires could not be kept under control by society, leading to a situation of anomie.4 (2) Many new Protestant churches and missionaries arrived as part of the 1976 earthquake relief effort (factors 1b and 1c). (3) More evangelization campaigns (1b) were organized than ever before. (4) The war created high urban growth in 1980–1985, leading to anomie and a search for communities among the new city dwellers (2c). (5) The traditional cargo system of indigenous groups had lost strength all over the country (2a). (6) The Roman Catholic Church hierarchy was slow to respond to Protestant growth (factor 2b), delaying until 1985 support for the Catholic Charismatic Renewal in order to counter defections to Pentecostalism.5

Conversion Processes and Social Networks   311

Table 17.2  A Model of Pentecostal Church Growth  

(1) Internal Factors

Religious Factors

(1a) Appeal of the doctrine and rituals: liturgy, (2a) Weak socialization into, lack of speaking in tongues, healing, music, deliverance support in, or general dissatisfaction (pull factors) with Catholicism (push factors)

 

(1b) Evangelization activities (including missionary force)

(2) External Factors

(2b) Responses to Pentecostal growth from the Catholic hierarchy (example: support Catholic Charismatic Renewal)

Nonreligious (1c) Appeal of the organization (including social (2c) Social, economic, and/or Factors networks) psychological anomie  

(1d) Natural growth and membership retention (2d) Urbanization process

Source: Table 17.2 was adapted, with some minor changes, from Gooren, “Reconsidering Protestant Growth in Guatemala, 1900–1995,” in James W. Dow and Alan R. Sandstrom, eds., Holy Saints and Fiery Preachers: The Anthropology of Protestantism in Mexico and Central America, (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 177.

The early literature on Pentecostal growth in Latin America stressed structural f­ actors that were external to the churches, shown in Table  17.2, column 2, as (2c) social, ­economic, and psychological anomie (caused by poverty and political violence), as well as (2d) the urbanization process, which uprooted people and made them more susceptible to join a new church.6 Many of the first Pentecostals occupied marginal positions in their own communities or were traders who did not depend on their (Catholic) ­community members.7 The early literature paid lip service to weak Catholic socialization or, alternatively, (2a) dissatisfaction with Catholicism as a cause for conversion to Pentecostalism,8 including the time and money demands of the cofradía system.9 Early scholars also stressed the importance of (1b) evangelization activities in recruiting new members. Recruitment to a church was seen as synonymous with conversion, although Gooren shows the value of distinguishing between joining and converting; the first only requires filling out some paperwork and showing up regularly on Sunday, whereas the second involves a gradual or sudden change of identity and worldview.10 As actor-oriented approaches became more dominant since the 1980s, scholars increasingly stressed that people joined Pentecostal churches because they found something there that was unique, something that helped them cope with problems like  poverty, alcoholism, illness, and domestic violence.11 Many authors stressed the ­importance of the church organization (1c in Table 17.2), offering voluntary association through participation in church assignments, the opportunity to gain leadership, teaching, and administrative skills, and so on.12 These explanations were certainly valid; however, they are not unique to Pentecostalism. Anomie and urbanization could equally lead to a growth of small Catholic parishes, ­perhaps even base communities or lay apostolic movements like the Legion of Mary, mainstream Protestant churches (like Anglicans or Methodists), or even Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses.13 They create the structural conditions for a reservoir of people who are open to changing their religion.14 However, the new religion that people visit

312   Henri Gooren and eventually perhaps join is often influenced by chance encounters with missionaries, an invitation to visit the church of a friend or relative, and increasingly through radio, television, or surfing the Internet.15 In order for people to join, there have to be clear attractions pulling them to the new religion. More recent literature especially emphasized the attractions that are unique to Pentecostalism.16 These include (1a in Table 17.2) the appeal of Pentecostal doctrine and rituals: emotional worship meetings full of rousing prayer and music, being filled with the Holy Spirit, speaking, praying, or singing in tongues, deliverance (exorcism), prophesying, and the central role of healing. As Pentecostal churches became bigger, some leaders eventually found it more effective to emphasize (1d) natural growth through birth and by stressing member retention.17 As Pentecostalism became more popular and more accepted, conversion gradually became easier, no longer leading to ostracism in committed Catholic families or harassment from neighbors. The Bishops’ Conferences in several Latin American countries issued increasingly critical pastoral letters on the growth of the “sects” in the 1980s and 1990s. Pope John Paul II at the 1992 Santo Domingo bishops’ conference urged them to defend their flock against “rapacious wolves” out to steal their sheep.18 Responding to Pentecostal growth (factor 2b), the bishops soon became more accepting of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal in countries like Brazil and Guatemala. Sometimes they even stimulated it as a means to offer access to the Holy Spirit under the guidance of priests and bishops.19 However, interreligious competition for members between the Roman Catholic Church and the Pentecostals not only increased, but also occurred in a steadily more competitive religious market made up of more and more options: popular Catholicism, liberationist Catholicism, charismatic Catholicism, mainstream Protestantism, indigenous Protestantism, indigenous Pentecostalism, progressive Pentecostalism, and conservative neo-Pentecostalism—not to mention Mormonism and Adventism.20 Generalizations about Protestant and Pentecostal growth in Latin America are nowadays more hazardous than ever before.21

Pentecostal Conversion Careers in Paraguay and Chile Paraguay is one of the least Protestant (and least Pentecostal) countries in the region, whereas Chile is one of the most Protestant and one of the most Pentecostal (see Table  17.1). Chile is also the birthplace of autochthonous Pentecostalism in Latin America: the Iglesia Metodista Pentecostal (IMP), the country’s biggest Pentecostal church, founded in 1909. Pentecostalism in Chile exploded in the 1920s and 1930s, stabilized in the 1960s, and exploded again in the 1970s and 1980s during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990).22 Protestants currently make up over one-quarter of the total

Conversion Processes and Social Networks   313 Chilean population, which is among the highest percentages in South America.23 The vast majority of Protestants are Pentecostals, estimated at 85 percent.24 Pentecostal growth in Paraguay, in contrast, started as late as the 1980s, during the final years of the Stroessner dictatorship (1954–1989), and continues until the present day. In 2002, Pentecostals made up only 3 percent of the Paraguayan population, and mainstream Protestants, especially Mennonites, Baptists, and Lutherans, another 3 percent.25 Popular elements of Pentecostalism started to find their way into mainstream Protestantism, marking the start of the Pentecostalization process.26 Many Baptist and especially Spanish-speaking Mennonite churches in Asunción used Pentecostal songs and worship styles, but stopped short of allowing members to speak in tongues. In the entire Protestant community, only two churches were highly successful in terms of membership growth, and both were Pentecostal. Más que Vencedores specialized in targeting young people. The Centro Familiar de Adoración successfully brought in families, thanks to its charismatic leader Emilio Abreu, its high visibility, sophisticated evangelization methods, and use of mass media. I conducted fieldwork research in Asunción and Santiago.27 In each metropolitan area, fifteen congregations in ten different churches were visited, including four Catholic charismatic groups. Together with local experts,28 I selected a representative sample of successful Pentecostal or Pentecostalizing groups for in-depth study through participant observation. This implied going to Sunday meetings and other events for at least a month, conducting interviews with leaders and members, collecting books and ­brochures, watching Pentecostal TV programs, and analyzing the contents of church websites. A total of nine religious congregations in Chile and Paraguay were studied in depth. In Asunción, Paraguay, three Protestant churches were selected as case studies: 1. Centro Familiar de Adoración (Family Worship Center), a mixed-class neo-­ Pentecostal mega-church with a Sunday attendance of 3,000 to 4,000 located in a huge white auditorium in Barrio Herrera, eastern Asunción. 2. Más que Vencedores (More than Conquerors), a mixed-class independent Pentecostal church with a Sunday attendance of about 500, located in a new building a little east of downtown Asunción close to the Avenida Mariscal López. 3. Villa Anita, Hermanos Menonitas, a mixed-class Pentecostalizing Spanishspeaking Mennonite church with a Sunday attendance of about 120 in Ñemby on the southern outskirts of the metropolitan area of Asunción. These were the two Protestant case studies in Santiago, Chile: 1. Viña Las Condes (Las Condes Vineyard), a mixed-class Vineyard church with many Pentecostal elements and a Sunday attendance of about 600 in Las Condes, eastern Santiago de Chile. 2. La Trinidad (Trinity), a middle-class Pentecostalizing Anglican congregation with a Sunday attendance of about 400 in Las Condes, eastern Santiago de Chile.

314   Henri Gooren I included one additional church case, the Pentecostalizing Mennonite congregation, from Paraguay, as there is hardly any literature available on religion in that country. I  had one student assistant in Paraguay and five in Chile; they conducted some ­interviews and made transcriptions. The total numbers of semi-structured interviews was 90 for Paraguay and 98 for Chile; only 22 interviews (11 percent) were not recorded.29 The focus here is on the role of social networks in conversion processes among the informants with higher levels of church commitment, defined as conversion and confession in the conversion career typology. The conversion career includes all episodes of higher or lower participation in one or more religious organizations during a person’s life.30 It is a tool to analyze the interplay of factors between the individual actor, the ­religious organization, and the wider social and cultural context. Conversion here is defined in the limited sense as a comprehensive personal change of religious worldview and identity, based on both self-reports and attributions by others. The others obviously include people from the same religious group, but may also include significant others who are not members. Confession describes a core-member identity, involving a high level of participation inside the new religious group and a strong missionary attitude toward non-members of the group. Pre-affiliation is the term used in the conversion career approach to describe the worldview and social background of potential members of a religious group, in their first contacts to assess whether they would like to affiliate themselves on a more formal basis. The term affiliation denotes formal membership of a religious group, without making it a central aspect of one’s identity. Finally, disaffiliation refers to (the process of) detaching one’s involvement in an organized religious group. The sequencing of these changes and the levels of commitment are elaborated in Gooren, Religious Conversion.31

Contextual, Individual, and Institutional Factors in the Conversion Process The great majority of the informants (almost 80 percent) converted in their teens and twenties, roughly coinciding with the 1980s and 1990s. This was a period of great upheaval, characterized by ongoing urbanization, an economic crisis (1982–1985), and massive protests against the aging military dictators Stroessner in Paraguay (1987–1989) and Pinochet in Chile (especially in 1988–1989). These factors are included in the church growth model of Table 17.2 under 2c (anomie) and 2d (urbanization). The starting confessional point of conversion for all informants was their parents’ religion, which in all but seven cases (all Chileans) meant Catholicism. The main ­difference here was between the more committed Catholic households, about onequarter, and the nominal Catholic households with a weak socialization into Catholicism

Conversion Processes and Social Networks   315 (factor 2a in Table  17.2). The following are some typical quotes from the fieldwork research. A thirty-nine-year-old woman in Chile, who later converted to the Iglesia Metodista Pentecostal (IMP) Jotabeche “cathedral” in Santiago, said: Like everybody, we went to the Catholic Church as children. I was baptized as an infant and all that. But my parents were typical passive Catholics who baptized you and afterwards never went to church again.32

And here is a telling quote from a nominal Catholic family in Paraguay from a ­thirty-seven-year-old woman, who converted to the Pentecostal Centro Familiar de Adoración (Family Worship Center) mega-church in Asunción when she was twenty-nine (eight years ago): My mother went [to Mass], but we were not religious. That is, we went out of ­custom, not because we felt a need.[. . .] In the Catholic Church you sit down and every Sunday it’s the same. You sit down, you wait, you get up, you sit down, you say goodbye, and that’s it. There is no spontaneity, there is no worship.33

A thirty-five-year-old male assistant pastor in the independent Pentecostal church Más que Vencedores (More than Conquerors) in Asunción was even more negative about popular Catholicism in Paraguay, suggesting a connection between witchcraft and Marian “idolatry”: Catholicism is like another protection against the different types of occultism that people practice here in Paraguay. There are these witches [. . .] and the worship of the image of the Virgin Mary.34

Although the literature stresses that most evangelicals come from nominal Catholic households,35 in Paraguay almost one-third of the informants came from committed Catholic parents who were active in traditional parishes or in apostolic lay movements like the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, Schoenstatt, or the Neo-Catechumenal Way.36 A thirty-something female assistant pastor in Más que Vencedores (More than Conquerors) said: I came from a Catholic family. Yes, I considered myself a practicing Catholic. Every morning before I went to work, I went to Mass at 6 a.m.[. . .] Ever since we were little, my mother always took us to retreats with the [Catholic] charismatics. She always took us and for me it was normal to go to church and turn to God and think of God. My mother was really a woman of faith. My mother had gifts, too. The gift of tongues.37

In line with the literaturemost informants described reaching a crisis of meaning-making, which was often combined with other crises: poverty, loss of a job, divorce, or problems with children.38 Some committed Catholics could not find adequate support in the

316   Henri Gooren Roman Catholic Church and became more open to trying other religious options ­(factor 2a). Nominal Catholics were often the subject of intense personal evangelization activities (factor 1b) by evangelical churches and described feeling attracted especially by their rituals (like healing, deliverance from demons, and speaking in tongues) and their worship styles and music (factor 1a): The first day, when I arrived at this church, I saw a lady who had her arms in the air. She had her eyes closed and a face full of happiness. I told myself: “I want to feel like that person is feeling.”[. . .] Literally, I wanted to feel well inside. I didn’t come because of a problem, an illness, problems with my son or money problems. I came because something attracted me. I discovered that I felt so at home, so comforted, even though I didn’t understand practically anything.39 I was delivered from evil spirits here [in church]. It happened five months after arriving here. It happened during a prayer. I realized what I needed. When the pastor was speaking, he made a call, and I went forward. It happened after worship. I really felt troubled, because I could not worship God with all my strength and I felt very frightened. Afterwards I realized that was all because of the presence of the Enemy. My sister-in-law was also sick; she was possessed. She was also delivered there in church.40

The potential converts often also felt attracted by the appeal of the new church organization (1c) and the messages in the preaching (factor 1a again). A forty-four-year-old convert to the Pentecostalizing Spanish-speaking Mennonite church Villa Anita in Asunción told me: “I listened to the sermon of Pastor Holovaty and there I was convinced. He was actually dealing with a theme that talked about faith.”41 And a fifty-six-year-old lay preacher from the Jotabeche “cathedral” of the Iglesia Metodista Pentecostal (IMP) in Santiago de Chile said: “What I liked most about the church was the worship and the message of the Word, the preaching.”42 Keeping in mind that the seven informants quoted here all maintained higher levels of church involvement (conversion or confession in the conversion career typology), a few elements stand out. Confirming the literature was the fact that most informants converted in their teens and twenties, coinciding with the economic crisis and the protests against the aging military dictators of the 1980s.43 Most informants came from nominal Catholic families, although one-third in Paraguay had at least one committed Catholic parent (typically the mother). Still, my earlier finding that a weak socialization into Catholicism is a prime predictor of later conversion to Pentecostalism (factor 2a) was confirmed.44 Informants coming from committed Catholic households typically described a lack of support in their church during a crisis (again 2a). At the same time, they were often invited to visit Protestant churches by friends (factor 1b) and felt attracted to the liturgy, special rituals such as speaking in tongues and deliverance, the message in the preaching, or the warmth between believers (factors 1a and 1c). Yet individual factors, such as socialization into a prior religious worldview or a need for religious meaning-making, were instrumental in predisposing people to having a conversion experience in the first place, in combination with social networks. The next section explores the role of social networks in the conversion process.

Conversion Processes and Social Networks   317

Social Network Factors in the Conversion Process The literature consistently stresses the essential role of social networks in the conversion process.45 The findings from Paraguay and Chile confirmed this. Most informants made their first contact with the new church through a good friend (eighteen cases), a spouse (fifteen cases), a neighbor (seven cases), their mother (five cases), their sister-in-law (four cases), or their son or daughter (two cases): Well, it was because . . . I’d say it was a call from God first of all. My sister-in-law had friends who attended this church and, well, she invited me to go and we went there and until this day we are there. I’d say it was really a call from God. The time had come and nothing else, because there was no problem or anything extraordinary. But it was really the moment that God wanted it and so we went.46

After joining the new church, the social networks of recent converts gradually start to change. There were only two exceptions of people who maintained strong contacts with their former circle of Catholic friends. The typical pattern is that one year after conversion, (almost) all of their friends are fellow church members or at least evangelicals: The great majority of my friends are evangelicals. I have many friends in other [Iglesia Metodista Pentecostal] congregations.47 Well, my friends are all believers. I have only few who are not.48 My friends are all here in church with me. I’ve lost contact with Catholic friends of before.49 After being introduced in church by a person of trust and feeling attracted to the new church’s rituals and organization, the potential converts still have to build up a testimony—to develop their own conversion story. The standard conversion story format is well known, typically a variation on the theme “you have to go through hell in order to get to heaven,” so here I will only review three powerful testimonies that stand out among many.50 The first is the conversion story of a thirty-seven-year-old woman, who joined the Pentecostal Centro Familiar de Adoración mega-church in Asunción six years ago. Her first impressions were described in the first of the two quotes in the previous section. She continued: One week later I went to the altar. I was already prepared to go that day; I had dressed up for it. And when Pastor Abreu made the altar call, I was there. Even though I didn’t understand what I was doing, I knew I had to do this. One month later I went to a spiritual retreat. The Lord opened my understanding; there it happened that I, literally, was converted. It was a retreat of three days in another city. There the Lord revealed Himself in my life and I understood the judgment of God, who I was, and all the garbage that I had inside. On that same day, they said ‘Who wants to get baptized?’ and I said: ‘I!’ And the following Sunday I was already getting baptized.[. . .]

318   Henri Gooren One month after that three-day retreat, I got up one morning and I felt physically strange.[. . .] I went from one place to another, but it was a perfect work schedule where everybody paid me, invited me, opened their door to me. . . . It was something supernatural; something like that had never happened to me. And when I got back to my office again I told the Lord for the first time ‘I worship you’ and I opened my arms. That is, I felt that everything was so perfect that moment, everything He did, that I could see so many things happening around me. . . . And the only thing I could say was: ‘Thank you, I worship you.’ [. . .] I felt that someone physically touched me. I felt a pressure in the head and something started to come down and flow through my arms. I felt it like that and I began to speak in tongues. For forty-five minutes I couldn’t stop moving my mouth. I got down on my knees and I said: ‘Finally I can talk to you; now finally I can tell you everything that I wanted to tell you and couldn’t.’ [. . .] I entered another spiritual level from that moment on. I started to understand many things when I was doing spiritual warfare, in the sense that you pray in tongues. [. . .] Apart from that I started to have and understand visions.51

The second is the conversion story of a forty-one-year-old pastor of an independent Pentecostal church in Asunción that illustrates the classic theme of going from extreme hedonism to salvation: My conversion experience was long, very long. I was a very depraved person in my youth. I had a life of pleasures, all sorts of pleasures that society, the world, offered and I liked that life. When I was about twenty-six, my parents took me to a meeting of the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship Internationalin Foz de Iguazú [Brazil]. There was a musical introduction there, they sang to music, and that music made an impact on my heart. The lyrics of the music said that I mattered, ‘the Holy Spirit moves in you, God paid a price for you, you are valuable. You are valuable, you are valuable.’ That was the beginning of my conversion: understanding that I was valuable as a person, in spite of the life of pleasure that I had. I lived a very lonely life. My life was very . . . I prostituted myself sexually, with alcohol, in all possible ways. But I lived a very lonely life and I felt very much without peace. So God used this music to start the process. I started to visit churches at times, I got emotionally involved with the church, I began to see Christ as my Lord. Sometimes I left and returned to my former life, until God finally had mercy on me. In one of the churches I visited I accepted Christ completely.[. . .]52 Something broke in me and after that day I wanted to have a life with God. There God began to show me things in my life which impeded that relationship and I had to make an effort to give up some things. For example, give up some vices like smoking, give up alcohol, give up sex, give up bad language—those were huge efforts for me. The power to do this was not mine but from God, working in me.53

The third conversion story is non-traditional, from someone who was born a Pentecostal. It is again from the fifty-six-year-old lay preacher from the Jotabeche “cathedral” of the Iglesia Metodista Pentecostal (IMP) in Santiago de Chile:

Conversion Processes and Social Networks   319 We’re from a Protestant family of more than four generations, because we’re talking about grandparents, grandfather, father, and I. So they always put us on the right path, although it’s true that you need to have a personal encounter with God and in my case this happened at fourteen in 1968.[. . .] The very air you breathe—in spite of being contaminated [in Santiago], I’m talking about the day of my conversion—is like deeply breathing in clean air where nothing is fundamentally evil. And later as you acquire better understanding you start finding things that are not correct, but ultimately the encounter is with the Lord; it’s personal.[. . .] The feeling of the forgiving of sins, in the case of the Methodist Pentecostals or of Pentecostals in general we talk of the supernatural power of the Spirit, is what convinces people. First it was the emotion, afterwards weeping and not being able to stop weeping. And internally your old nature is being burned and a new birth begins, between quotation marks, through the forgiving that you experience. And there begins the process of looking at evil not as something alien but as: ‘Uh, I was doing that; I was involved in that.’54

My findings from Paraguay and Chile confirmed the essential role of social networks in the conversion process.55 The networking happened in two different ways. First contact with the new church was often made after an invitation by a friend or relative (factors 1b and 1c), while the informants’ social networks gradually changed post-conversion to include more fellow church members or evangelicals in general (1c). In the first story, conversion happened after an altar call in Asunción’s Centro Familiar de Adoración church and attending a three-day retreat, followed by great success at work and a supernatural experience involving energy flows and speaking in tongues. The second story was a healing from meaninglessness, hedonism, and prostitution to acceptance of Christ and a new lifestyle, originally caused by hearing Pentecostal worship music. The third story involved a fourth-generation IMP Pentecostal in Chile who had an emotional personal encounter with God that made him understand sin, repent, and be reborn. These cases vividly illustrate not only the importance of liturgy, retreats, supernatural experiences, healing, music, and rituals (factors 1a and 1c), but also the role of evangelization activities (1b).

Conclusion Although the main conclusions presented here apply to both countries, there were some country-specific differences. In Paraguay, more informants came from committed Catholic families, and most informants had at best one Protestant friend in their social networks. Chile had less converts and more informants coming from multi-generation Protestant families; Chilean Protestants often had a few Catholic friends, just as most Catholics had some Protestant ones. These relatively minor differences were probably due to the fact that although Chile has a high population percentage of Protestants, church growth ended in the 1980s. Paraguay may be a much less Protestant country, but

320   Henri Gooren church growth here continues to the present—although at a lower rate than in the 1970s and 1980s.56 The data from Paraguay and Chile showed, first of all, that contextual, individual, and institutional factors were all important in the conversion process. Context in a majority of cases included environmental factors, such as having a few Protestant friends in one’s social network, sometimes listening to a Protestant radio station, and occasionally living near a Protestant church.57 While context created the predisposing circumstances that made people more open to changing their religion, an individual need for meaningmaking was required to get them started on their conversion career. Yet the institutional factors proved to be even more instrumental, especially the message of the preaching, the liturgy, and the unique rituals of Pentecostalism (such as speaking in tongues, ­healing, and deliverance). However, the importance of these institutional factors by themselves did not lead to the sequence I summarized as the “institutional affiliation pattern” in Latin America,58 where masses of people visited Pentecostal churches, yet only half of them stayed active in them. This led me to see the Pentecostal boom and the numbers game in Latin America in a somewhat different light: “I argue that many informants did not really convert to a Pentecostal church in the strict sense of having a change of worldview and identity. Most people only joined the Pentecostal church for a while (that is, affiliation in the conversion career typology).”59 My book reported that for people in this pattern, affiliating with a Pentecostal church was a temporary event that would typically end when they ran into disagreements with leaders or other members, or when keeping up the new religion’s code of conduct (no alcohol, no infidelity, a strong focus on the nuclear family) proved to be (too) hard to maintain.60 By contrast, the informants presented here all described having a conversion experience in the sense of a change of identity that led to continued commitment and participation in the new religion. So did my informants from Paraguay and Chile conform either to the “social conversion pattern” or to the “individual confession pattern”?61 Almost all informants quoted here were located at the higher levels of the conversion career approach. A few were leaders spending over five hours a week in church, corresponding to the confession level. The forty-one-year-old Pentecostal pastor of an independent Pentecostal church in Asunción was the only one who started a personal quest for meaning and religious expression, integrating traumatic life events into his conversion story, in line with the individual confession pattern. All other informants had experienced a conversion (defined in my approach as a change of worldview and identity) that was primarily caused by social networks. Hence, I think the social conversion pattern describes them very aptly— while keeping in mind that they do not necessarily represent the majority of all Pentecostal believers in Latin America. That is, the informants presented here formed the “hard core” of committed members in their congregations, carrying out many of the volunteer tasks that are crucial to both their continued functioning and the recruitment of new members. How should the social network factor in the conversion process be conceptualized theoretically? The early conversion literature already documented the essential role of

Conversion Processes and Social Networks   321 social networks in establishing first contact with the new religion, helping build up commitment to it, offering new role models, and gradually changing post-conversion.62 David Smilde’s Reason to Believe made theoretical progress by showing how social networks affected conversion both directly and indirectly. Smilde concluded that conversion in Caracas, Venezuela, was caused by living with an evangelical instead of one’s family of origin, especially when also experiencing life problems. “Conversion to Evangelicalism depends largely on interpersonal contexts that facilitate exposure to the  meaning system or at least do not hinder cultural innovation,” Smilde writes. “People are often spurred to imagine alternatives through contact in their households with people embodying those alternatives. Alternatively, they are often prevented from imagining alternatives by contact with people in their households who maintain traditional meanings.”63 Although I encountered only one case where living with an evangelical eventually led to conversion, I found Smilde’s theoretical perspective helpful in analyzing my informants in Paraguay and Chile because he begins by asking the pertinent question: “Can people decide to believe?” In order to answer it, Smilde juxtaposes two types of rationality from the literature. On the one hand, “instrumental rationality” (like practice theory) sees “religious and cultural practices as forms of agency that are chosen by people according to the challenges they confront.”64 However, the problem with this approach is that it downplays the importance of structural forces, like society and religious organizations, in limiting people’s freedom of choice. On the other hand, “substantive rationality”65 argues that people are not calculating consumers, but rather “moral, believing animals.”66 Within this approach, human agency and empowerment are more difficult to explore and analyze, because people are conceptualized to be more bound and restricted by their culture, religion, kinship ties, and social networks. James Spickard’s cathekontic rationality, which is based on the responsibilities following from a certain individual’s social networks, explores this issue from a fascinating theoretical perspective that exposes the limits of a monocausal and strongly individualist rational-choice approach.67 As a possible alternative combining the best of both approaches, Smilde then develops his concept of imaginative rationality: “People encounter problems, create new projects to address them, and then reflectively evaluate the success of these projects.”68 Evangelical churches assist in this process by offering action-oriented metaphors to help converts make sense of their confusing life problems. Destructive behavior (substance abuse, violence, gambling) gradually comes to be seen as caused by the Devil.69 Smilde ­concludes that “human beings cultivate meanings to further their goals”70 and that “concepts enable action by reducing alternatives,”71 thereby greatly simplifying life for people. He labels these combined findings cultural agency, and this concept clearly has importance beyond the study of evangelicalism. Finally, the informants’ life stories and more recent experiences in Paraguay and Chile should be put in the wider context of major changes in the continent in the last decade. Latin America is making steady progress economically, although democratic

322   Henri Gooren political and judicial institutions still lag behind.72 In this study, most informants in Paraguay and Chile belonged to the upper lower class or (lower) middle class and struggled to send their children to good schools, so they would have a better future. Social ­networks were just as important for them—psychologically, socially, economically, and religiously—as they were for my Guatemalan informants in the 1990s.73 If they were disappointed by Catholicism, or never properly socialized into it in the first place, they were more open to invitations from friends, spouses, and relatives to visit Pentecostal churches. They felt attracted by Pentecostal worship styles, the music, the happiness on believers’ faces, and so on. If they liked the preaching and were impacted by unique Pentecostal rituals such as speaking in tongues, healing, and deliverance, they were more likely to convert. Afterward, the recent converts’ own social networks gradually changed, evangelicals gradually made up an ever-bigger part of their circle of friends, and contact with old Catholics friends typically weakened. The converts’ social environment thus steadily became more supportive of their Pentecostal church involvement, making it more likely that they would maintain their church commitment at the highest levels the conversion career approach identifies: conversion (in the limited sense of a change of identity and worldview) and confession.

Notes 1. Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 63. Allan Anderson, An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1. 2. R. Andrew Chesnut, Competitive Spirits: Latin America’s New Religious Economy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 8, reported that Pentecostals on average make up 75 percent of all Protestants in Latin America. However, Pentecostals constitute less than 50 percent in Bolivia, Uruguay, Peru, and Ecuador (see Table 17.1, column 5). 3. Henri Gooren, “Reconsidering Protestant Growth in Guatemala, 1900–1995,” in James  W.  Dow and Alan  R.  Sandstrom, eds., Holy Saints and Fiery Preachers: The Anthropology of Protestantism in Mexico and Central America, (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 170, 189–192); Gastón Espinosa, “The Pentecostalization of Latin American and U.S. Latino Christianity,” Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 26, no. 2. (2004), 170; David L. Clawson, Latin America and the Caribbean: Lands and Peoples, 5th ed. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012), 250. 4. Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology (New York, NY: Free Press, 1966 [1987]), 253; see also Gooren, “Reconsidering Protestant Growth,” 179. 5. See Gooren, “Reconsidering Protestant Growth,” 190–191; Virginia Garrard-Burnett, A  History of Protestantism in Guatemala: Living in the New Jerusalem (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1998). 6. Emilio Willems, Followers of the New Faith: Culture Change and the Rise of Protestantism in Brazil and Chile (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1967); Bryan  R.  Roberts, “Protestant Groups and Coping with Urban Life in Guatemala,” American Journal of Sociology 73, no. 6 (1968), 753–767; Lalive d’Epinay, Haven of the Masses: A Study of the Pentecostal Movement in Chile (London: Lutterworth, 1969).

Conversion Processes and Social Networks   323 7. Eugene A. Nida, “The Relationship of Social Structure to the Problems of Evangelicalism in Latin America,” Practical Anthropology 5, no. 3 (1958), 101–123; Benson Saler, “Religious Conversion and Self-Aggrandizement: A Guatemalan Case,” Practical Anthropology 13, no. 1 (1965), 107–114. 8. James D. Sexton, Campesino: The Diary of a Guatemalan Town (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1985). 9. Sheldon Annis, God and Production in a Guatemalan Town (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986); Liliana  R.  Goldin and Brent Metz, “An Expression of Cultural Change: Invisible Converts to Protestantism among Highland Guatemala Mayas,” Ethnology 30, no. 4 (1991), 325–338; Timothy J. Steigenga, “Protestantism, the State, and Society in Guatemala” in Coming of Age: Protestantism in Contemporary Latin America, ed. Daniel  R.  Miller, 143–172 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994); James W. Dow, “The Theology of Change: Evangelical Protestantism and the Collapse of Native Religion in a Peasant Area of Mexico,” in Frank A. Salamone and Walter R. Adams, eds., Explorations in Anthropology and Theology (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997), 113–123. 10. Henri Gooren, Religious Conversion and Disaffiliation: Tracing Patterns of Change in Faith Practices (New York, NY: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010). 11. Annis, God and Production; Cecilia Loreto Mariz, Coping with Poverty: Pentecostal Churches and Christian Base Communities in Brazil (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); Elizabeth E. Brusco, The Reformation of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion and Gender in Colombia (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1995); R. Andrew Chesnut, Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and the Pathogens of Poverty (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997); Henri Gooren, Rich among the Poor: Church, Firm, and Household among Small-Scale Entrepreneurs in Guatemala City (Amsterdam: Thela [Latin America Series, number 13], 1999). 12. David Martin, Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); David Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant? The Politics of Evangelical Growth (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990); Gooren, Rich among the Poor. 13. Henri Gooren, “The Dynamics of LDS Growth in Guatemala, 1948–1998,” Dialogue 34, no. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 2001), 55–75; “The Mormons of the World: The Meaning of LDS Membership in Central America,” in Cardell  K.  Jacobson, John  P.  Hoffman, and Tim B. Heaton, eds., Revisiting Thomas F. O’Dea’s “The Mormons”: Contemporary Perspectives (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 2008), 362–378; “Comparing Mormon and Adventist Growth Patterns in Latin America: The Chilean Case,” Dialogue 46, no. 3 (Fall 2013), 45–77; “The Growth and Development of Non-Catholic Churches in Chile,” Review of Religious Research 57, no. 2 (June 2015), 191–218. 14. Lewis Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). 15. Gooren, Religious Conversion and Disaffiliation. 16. Daniel Míguez, To Help You Find God: The Making of a Pentecostal Identity in a Buenos Aires Suburb, PhD diss., Free University Amsterdam, 1997; David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World and Their Parish (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002); André Droogers, “Paradoxical Views on a Paradoxical Religion,” in Barbara Boudewijnse, André Droogers, and Frans Kamsteeg, eds., More than Opium: An Anthropological Approach to Latin American and Caribbean Pentecostal Praxis (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 1998), 1–34; Chesnut, Competitive Spirits; Gooren, Religious Conversion.

324   Henri Gooren 17. Gooren, Religious Conversion. 18. Peter Steinfels, “Latin Bishops Reopen Debate on Church Role,” New York Times, October 13, 1992, http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/13/world/latin-­bishops-reopen-debate-onchurch-role.html. 19. Anthony Gill, Rendering unto Caesar: The Catholic Church and State in Latin America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Chesnut, Competitive Spirits; Gooren, “The Catholic Charismatic Renewal in Latin America,” Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 34, no. 2 (2012), 185–207; Jakob E. Thorsen, Charismatic Practice and Catholic Parish Life: The Incipient Pentecostalization of the Church in Guatemala and Latin America (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2015). 20. Gooren, “The Catholic Charismatic Renewal”; Matthew  C.  Samson, Re-Enchanting the World: Maya Protestantism in the Guatemalan Highlands (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2007); Bernardo J. Guerrero, De indio a hermano: Pentecostalismo indígena en América Latina (Iquique: Ediciones Campus, 2005); Timothy Steigenga, “The Politics of Pentecostalized Religion,” in Timothy J. Steigenga and Edward L. Cleary, eds., Conversion of a Continent: Contemporary Religious Change in Latin America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007); Frans Kamsteeg, Prophetic Pentecostalism in Chile: A Case Study on Religion and Development Policy, PhD diss., Free University Amsterdam, 1995; Donald Miller and Yamamori Tetsunao, Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007); Edward L. Cleary, “Protestants and Catholics: Rivals or Siblings?” in Daniel R. Miller, ed., Coming of Age: Protestantism in Contemporary Latin America (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994), 205–233; Daniel H. Levine, “Protestants and Catholics in Latin America: A Family Portrait,” in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds., Fundamentalisms Comprehended (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 155–178; Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000); Manuela Cantón Delgado, Bautizados en fuego: Protestantes, discursos de conversión y política en Guatemala (1989–1993) (South Woodstock; Antigua: Plumsock Mesoamerican Studies; CIRMA, 1999); Kevin Lewis O’Neill, City of God: Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010); Henri Gooren (“The Dynamics of LDS Growth in Latin America,” “The Mormons of the World,” “Comparing Mormon and Adventist Growth Patterns,” “The Growth and Development of Non-Catholic Churches in Chile”). 21. See Steigenga, “The Politics of Pentecostalized Religion.” 22. Edward  L.  Cleary and Juan Sepúlveda, “Chilean Pentecostalism: Coming of Age,” in Edward L. Cleary and Hannah Stewart-Gambino, eds., Power, Pentecostals, and Politics in Latin America (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 100. The Protestant percentages in Chilean censuses since 1907 are: 1907, 1 percent; 1920, 1.4 percent; 1930, 1.5 percent; 1940, 2.3 percent; 1952, 4.1 percent; 1960, 5.6 percent; 1970, 6.2 percent; 1992, 13.2 percent; 2002, 15.1 percent (Cleary and Sepúlveda, “Chilean Pentecostalism,” 106; see also Victor Hugo Masías-Hinojosa; Paola Ramírez-Pérez; and María Inés Winkler-Müller, “Construcción de identidad en personas convertidas a la iglesia Metodista Pentecostal de Chile,” Forum: Qualitative Social Research 9, no. 1 (2008), 3. 23. Patrick Johnstone and Jason Mandryk, Operation World (Carlisle, UK: Paternoster Lifestyle, 2001), 156. 24. Cristián Parker, “Religion and Culture,” in Cristián Toloza and Eugenio Lahera, eds., Chile in the Nineties (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 624.

Conversion Processes and Social Networks   325 25. Clifton L. Holland, “Paraguay,” in Andrew Riggs, ed., Worldmark Encyclopedia of Religious Practices, vol. 3: Countries M–Z (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2006), 205. Johnstone and Mandryk, Operation World, 514, reported 5 percent mainline Protestants and 3.6 percent Pentecostals for 2000. 26. Pentecostalizing mainstream Protestant churches adopt Pentecostal elements (such as worship styles, music, healing, and sometimes even speaking in tongues) to improve their chances of competing for members with the Pentecostal churches (for a full elaboration of the Pentecostalization process, see Henri Gooren, “The Pentecostalization of Religion and Society in Latin America,” Exchange 39, no. 4 (2010), 355–376). 27. Fieldwork was conducted in Asunción, Paraguay (June–August 2010 and 2012) and Santiago de Chile (June–August 2011). My individual research project “The Pentecostalization of Religion and Society in Paraguay and Chile” was funded by the Pentecostal-Charismatic Research Initiative (PCRI), which was sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation and  administered by the University of Southern California (see http://crcc.usc.edu/ initiatives/pcri). 28. The Templeton research project had funding to recruit and twice bring together an International Research Panel of leading experts on Pentecostalism from across the world, which included esteemed local researchers such as Dr. Martin Eizen and Dr. Roberto Zub in Paraguay, as well as Dr. Cristián Parker and Dr. Juan Sepúlveda in Chile. 29. The author translated all excerpts from the fieldwork interviews in Asunción and Santiago de Chile from Spanish into English. 30. Gooren, Religious Conversion, develops the new conversion career approach in full detail. 31. See, e.g., Gooren, Religious Conversion, 136–138, 139–142. 32. Chile interview 40; Santiago de Chile, July 20, 2011. 33. Paraguay interview 20; Asunción, August 5, 2010. 34. Paraguay interview 56; Asunción, July 3, 2012. 35. William  R.  Read et al., Latin American Church Growth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1969), 257; Gooren, “Reconsidering Protestant Growth,” 178; Steigenga and Cleary, “Understanding Conversion,” 9; Gooren, Religious Conversion, 121, 126, 128. 36. See Chesnut, Competitive Spirits; Cleary, The Rise of Charismatic Catholicism; and Gooren (“The Catholic Charismatic Renewal”) on the Catholic Charismatic Renewal in Latin America. On Schoenstatt, see Michael Fleet and Brian H. Smith, The Catholic Church and Democracy in Chile and Peru (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000 [1997]), 148–154; and Jonathan Niehaus, “Aspects of Schoenstatt’s Marian Spirituality,” Marian Studies 54 (2003), 61–69. On the Neo-Catechumenal Way, see R.  McDermott, “The Neo-Catechumenal Way: Background, Exposition, and Canonical Analysis of the Statue,” The Jurist 62 (2002), 92–113; and Tony Hanna, New Ecclesial Movements: Communion and Liberation, Neo-Catechumenal Way, Charismatic Renewal (Staten Island, NY: Alba House, 2006). 37. Paraguay interview 60; Asunción, July 18, 2012. 38. Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion, 44–55; Gooren, Religious Conversion, 52, 127–128. 39. Paraguay interview 20; Asunción, August 5, 2010. 40. Paraguay interview 89; Asunción, July 29, 2012. 41. Paraguay interview 80; Asunción, July 22, 2012. 42. Chile interview 42; Santiago de Chile, August 3, 2011.

326   Henri Gooren 43. Gooren, Religious Conversion, 135, 140. 44. Ibid., 76, 128. 45. See, e.g., Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion; Stark and Finke, Acts of Faith; Gooren, Religious Conversion; and Ines A. Jindra, A New Model of Religious Conversion: Beyond Network Theory and Social Constructivism (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2014). 46. Paraguay interview 71; Asunción, July 16, 2012. 47. Chile interview 42; Santiago de Chile, August 3, 2011. 48. Paraguay interview 71; Asunción, July 16, 2012. 49. Paraguay interview 20; Asunción, August 5, 2010. 50. Gooren, “Conversion Narratives,” 93. See also, e.g., Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion, Gooren, Religious Conversion, and Jindra, A New Model. 51. Paraguay interview 20; Asunción, August 5, 2010. 52. The Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International is a lay organization aiming to convert businessmen to evangelical Christianity, which was founded by Assemblies of God preacher Demos Shakarian in California in 1952; Gooren, Rich among the Poor, 61. 53. Paraguay interview 44; Asunción, August 24, 2010. 54. Chile interview 42; Santiago de Chile, August 3, 2011. 55. See, e.g., Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion; Gooren, Religious Conversion; and Jindra, A New Model. 56. Gooren, “The Growth and Development of Non-Catholic Churches in Paraguay,” in Donald  E.  Miller, Kimon  H.  Sargeant, and Richard Flory, eds., Spirit and Power: The Growth and Global Impact of Pentecostalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 91–93. 57. One female Paraguayan informant had a mother who was very active in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal and regularly spoke in tongues. The nonrandom selection of the informants does not allow me to conclude whether this was a unique case or a recurring pattern, but it should be addressed in future research. 58. Gooren, Religious Conversion, 138. 59. Ibid., 116. 60. Ibid., 135–136. 61. See Gooren, Religious Conversion, 138ff., for an elaboration of the three main conversion career patterns in Latin America, based on the prime factor responsible for conversion: the religious organization (institutional), social networks, or individual confession. 62. John Lofland and Rodney Stark, “Becoming a World-Saver: A Theory of Conversion to a Deviant Perspective,” American Sociological Review 30, no. 6 (1965), 862–875; Arthur L. Greil, “Previous Dispositions and Conversion to Perspectives of Social and Religious Movements,” Sociological Analysis 38, no. 2 (1977), 115–125; James T. Richardson, Conversion Careers: In and Out of the New Religions (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1978); David A. Snow and Richard Machalek, “The Sociology of Conversion,” Annual Review of Sociology 10 (1984): 167–190; Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion. 6 3. David Smilde, Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 155. 6 4. Ibid., 45. 6 5. Ibid., 49–51. 6 6. Christian Smith, Moral, Believing Animals (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Conversion Processes and Social Networks   327 67. James  V.  Spickard, “Rethinking Religious Social Action: What Is ‘Rational’ about Rational-Choice Theory?” Sociology of Religion 59, no. 2 (1998), 99–115. See also the discussions in “[Review of] Competitive Spirits by R.  Andrew Chesnut,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 73, no. 2 (June 2005), 524–528 and Gooren, Religious Conversion, 54–56. 68. Smilde, Reason to Believe, 52. 69. Ibid., 61. 70. Ibid., 211. 7 1. Ibid., 215. 72. Michael Reid, “So Near and Yet So Far: A Special Report on Latin America,” The Economist, September 9, 2010, http://www.economist.com/node/16964114; David L. Clawson, Latin America and the Caribbean: Lands and Peoples, 5th ed. (New  York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 73. See Gooren, Rich among the Poor.

chapter 18

A N ew Pen tecost Conversion in the Caribbean Luis N. Rivera-Pagán

Come, Holy Spirit, heavenly Dove, With all Thy quick’ning powers; Kindle a flame of sacred love In these cold hearts of ours . . Dear Lord! and shall we ever live At this poor dying rate? Our love so faint, so cold to Thee, And Thine to us so great? Come, Holy Spirit, heav’nly Dove, With all Thy quick’ning powers; Come, shed abroad the Savior’s love And that shall kindle ours. —Hymns and Sacred Songs, 1707–09, Book II, number 34, Isaac Watts

Fated to Poverty: A Worker in the Cane Sidney W. Mintz’s Worker in the Cane: A Puerto Rican Life History, published in 1960, is a classic text in anthropology.1 This work magisterially follows the life and travails of Anastacio (Taso) Zayas Alvarado, a cane worker of poor origins and somber destiny, who from his childhood was destined for the crushing manual labor typical of Caribbean sugar cane plantations. This is, sadly, the story of many Latin Americans who struggle to overcome grievous poverty while striving to confer meaning to a human existence at the margins of any social hierarchy.

330   Luis N. Rivera-Pagán Most scholars who examine the text stress the futile efforts of Taso Zayas to forge a brighter economic future for his family, but frequently have disregarded what truly astounded Mintz: Taso’s unexpected conversion to Pentecostalism. From that dramatic religious experience arose Taso’s profound conviction that, despite the severe social ­conditions of his life, his existence had now gained an eternal significance, he had been blessed with heavenly salvation, had become a child of God and temple of the Holy Spirit.2 This is a story of extraordinary healing, both physical and spiritual, that could provide a panoptic view into the sudden and dramatic irruption of Pentecostal Christianity in Latin America. This charismatic way of conceiving and living the Christian faith has transgressed the boundaries of what for centuries had been the normative dogmatic and  ecclesiastical expression of Christianity in the region. It has reconfigured the self-understanding, family life, and communal existence of millions of working-class men and women.3 In short, this chapter deals with a narrative of unexpected existential transformation that in its particularity becomes paradigmatic of a religious revolution of epochal consequences for Latin American Christianity. Mintz’s initial interest in Taso Zayas’s life had nothing to do with religiosity. Neither the scholar nor Taso seemed to care much about sacred issues, matters of doctrine, liturgical rites, or theological creeds. Mintz’s scholarly concern was typical of the midtwentieth century: namely, how the process of modernization and industrialization affected and shaped the existence of rural workers. Taso was one of a multitude of men and women in Latin America who lacked schooling, land, or house, who from cradle to grave were in bondage to an accelerated capitalization of one product, geared toward export and controlled by foreign corporations. In the Caribbean, during the first half of the twentieth century, that meant sugar cane. The region had become a huge plantation devoted to sweetening the consumption habits of metropolitan cities all over the world while embittering the lives of so many native workers, modern versions of the African slaves who used to sweat and die in the fields of the islands.4 Taso Zayas was nothing more than another humble worker at a sugar cane plantation, constantly striving and yet failing to make ends meet as he worked from sunrise to ­sunset to provide food and clothing for his common-law wife Elizabeth and his twelve children, of whom three died in their early childhood. Fatherless at the age of ten months (1908) and motherless when he was twelve (1920), he suffered from painful aches caused by the hard labor he had to perform daily. Continual bickering with Elizabeth plagued his domestic life—not exactly an image of family happiness and personal comfort of any kind. Taso was not a passive pawn in the winds of social destiny, for at times he was very active in Puerto Rico’s general confederation of workers and in the reformist Popular Democratic Party. The 1940s were for him a decade of intensely felt social illusions, ­followed by bitter frustrations. Everything promised to change; everything remained the same. Taso did not seem to fit well into the social patterns of power struggles. Labor union organizing and political activism resembled Sisyphus’s curse.

A New Pentecost   331

Healing, Conversion, and Spiritual Baptism Yet in 1950, as he was plagued by poverty, pain, and frustration, something astonishing happened in Taso’s life, a radical disruption of his previous self-understanding and ­existence. As has been so frequent though paradoxical in Latin American patriarchal society, the women of the house took the first step. His wife, Elizabeth, and their oldest daughter, Carmen Iris, went to a Pentecostal healing crusade. They came back with amazing stories of miraculous healings, charismatic happenings, and conversions. Extraordinary events seemed to be taking place, bringing joy where suffering prevailed and hope where despair ruled. Elizabeth’s life was seriously haunted by the sinister memory of her father, who had drunk heavily and had mistreated her mother, and by her constant fights with Taso, caused by her suspicions about his possible dalliances with other women. One night in the midst of a Pentecostal revivalist session, she felt herself possessed by a supernatural power that gave her the exceptional capability of speaking in strange tongues. The preacher’s interpretation, to the joyful exclamations of the congregation, was that Elizabeth had been baptized by the Holy Spirit. She had been transformed into a new creature, her soul had been redeemed, and she was assured of eternal salvation. Mintz was astute enough to perceive the significance of female priority in the religious conversion of this family. Indeed, as happens throughout Latin America, conversion to evangelical Protestantism or to Pentecostalism usually entails a sweeping reconfiguration of family life. Probably it is too much to claim that such a religious ­conversion fundamentally alters the patriarchal hierarchy of authority, for the biblical literalism to which it is closely linked is suffused with notions of masculine primacy. But such conversion frequently transforms the patterns of behavior of the husband/father, who adopts a sterner moral discipline, and now abstains from investing money and energy in drinking, womanizing, and betting.5 The patriarchal hierarchy might be left in place and even theologically reinforced by biblical allusions to female submission in the New Testament epistles (I Corinthians 14:34; Ephesians 5:22; Colossians 3:18; I Timothy 2:11–12; I Peter 3:1), but the shape of masculine behavior is nonetheless substantially reconfigured. The patriarchal household code acquires a benevolent aspect. Taso had always considered himself Roman Catholic, but throughout his life he had regarded church activities as something alien to his daily labors, sorrows, and illusions. He heard with some reservations the strange stories narrated by his wife and daughter, but decided to attend one of the evangelistic campaigns of a visiting North American preacher. As the evening progressed, Taso experienced something strange and unexpected: “Brother Osborne began to pray for the sick . . . I felt something in my body a thing—an extraordinary thing—while he was praying for the sick.6 And later, after he finished that prayer, I felt an ecstasy—something strange. . . . And afterward I did not feel

332   Luis N. Rivera-Pagán that pain that I had been feeling. . . . And up to the present, thank God, I have never felt that pain again”7 Miraculous healing is nothing new in Latin American religious traditions. There are several sites considered sacred, where healing divine grace is implored and received. The most famous of all is the basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe, in Mexico. The basilica brims with thousands of ex-votos of gratitude for the healing miracles performed by the Guadalupe.8 Since her first alleged appearance to the Indian Juan Diego, in December, 1531, countless acts of divine healing have been attributed to the Patroness of Mexico and Latin America. Though the Guadalupe has also fulfilled a meaningful role in the formation of the Mexican national identity,9 it might probably be true to say that common people throughout Mexico, Latin America, and the Hispanic diaspora in the United States look to the Virgin more as a source of maternal extraordinary favors in situations of grave distress than as a patriotic icon. These healings are usually attributed to a holy person, most of the time the Mother of Christ, and take place in a sacred place, in this case the Tepeyac. Both the holy person and the place are linked to a sacred myth of origin that first circulated orally and then was recorded in writing. The healing of Taso, however, belongs to a different genre. Stories now abound in Latin America of healings that occur in many scattered places, with no sacred myths of origin, performed after the intercessory prayers of evangelists unrecognized by mainstream churches. Such healings take place under the aegis of churches and congregations of relatively new origins and picturesque names (e.g., “Iglesia del Buen Pastor,” “Iglesia del Getsemaní,” “Fuente de Agua Viva,” “Roca de Salvación”), many of them founded by self-appointed preachers. They might take place anywhere—a football stadium, a recently opened storefront church, the town square, places not usually considered sacred—and are performed by ministers not accredited by any theological academy or any of the ancient Christian confessions. One might speak of a radical democratization and popularization of divine healing. The healings are usually perceived as extraordinary events. However, as happens so frequently in the history of the Christian faith, this movement is also a process of the retrieval of a tradition not entirely erased from the memory of the believing community. After all, miraculous healings abound in the Gospels and the chronicles of the first apostles. “Signs and wonders” (John 4:48) were part and parcel of the early Jesus movement and were considered indications of a decisive irruption of divine power and mercy in human history. When John the Baptist had doubts about the identity of Jesus, he sent some of his disciples to question the Galilean. Jesus, true to form, replied indirectly by signaling his acts of healing: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me” (Matthew 11:2–6). Jesus’s first commission to his disciples, according to an early memoir, included the performance of similar “signs and wonders”: “Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons” (Matthew 10:8). The first controversial public act of the apostles Peter and John was to cure someone lame since birth (Acts 3:1–10). The religious authorities were strongly annoyed, not only

A New Pentecost   333 because an act of divine grace had taken place outside the margins of the sacred place, in the portico of Jerusalem’s temple, but also because the authors were “uneducated and ordinary men” (Acts 4:13) who lacked the social, academic, and ritual credentials traditionally required to mediate divine grace. The “wonders and signs” (Acts 2:43) of those “uneducated and ordinary men” were construed as a serious challenge to the authority of the priesthood and scribal experts.10 The “signs and wonders” of Pentecostalism that bewilder so many of its observers are an expression of a characteristic common to most Christian reform movements—an attempt to recover lost dimensions of the early Christian apostolic community. In this case, those lost dimensions are physical healings, reception of the Holy Spirit, glossolalia, passionate devotion to the faith, and priority of the poor, “uneducated and ordinary” people in the worshipping community. Taso’s healing was neither unique nor peculiar. In twentieth-century Latin America, healing divine grace seemed to abound, manifesting itself in multiple forms outside the boundaries of the established Church. Acts of healing and exorcism occurred thanks to the intercession of evangelists whose ministry was ignored by most mainstream churches, and for the benefit of common people like Taso Zayas, truly a marginal human being according to social hierarchies. Once again, as so many times before in history, divine grace seemed to surpass and overwhelm the hierarchical patrolling of ecclesiastical frontiers.11 Despite the constant attribution to Latin American Pentecostalism of ethereal ­spiritualism and otherworldliness, researchers are astounded by the importance of corporeal healing for many charismatic Pentecostal churches. The body recovers the centrality that it enjoyed in the early Jesus movement. There are sensible reasons for this. These are men and women whose physical and social survival is predicated upon their ability to perform hard manual labor and who therefore need to have strong and healthy bodies to provide for the well-being of their families. They are poor and do not have the financial resources to pay for expensive medical services. They are also denizens of nations that lack adequate social health institutions. Thus a debilitating illness becomes a serious matter of life and death. In such a grave and powerless situation, sometimes their only hope appears to be divine intervention. For countless rural and urban poor workers, serious sickness becomes the occasion to implore the Virgin or to attend a healing crusade with anxious hope in their hearts that they might become beneficiaries of merciful divine power. In the twentieth century, new and more accessible healing competitors to the Virgin suddenly began to spread across Latin America. Divine grace took a more popular and democratic shape. Dozens of “uneducated and ordinary men [and women]” became mediators of divine healing power.12 This process simultaneously implied a critical downgrading of the Virgin Mary’s role in creedal faith and religious rites, a dimension of the antagonism of Latin American evangelicals and Pentecostals toward Roman Catholicism. Physical healing might have been the starting point, but conversion, as Taso explained to Mintz, entailed other decisive dimensions. After attending the worship services of

334   Luis N. Rivera-Pagán the Pentecostal chapel in his barrio for several weeks, he experienced an extraordinary event usually known in that ecclesiastical tradition as baptism by the Holy Spirit. Taso was a man of few words, but his narration of the blessing the Holy Spirit had subtle tinges of deep spiritual gratification: “And while one is praying one feels as if something comes and fills one . . . I received a blessing . . . at the same time one receives the tongues. And when one is baptized with the Spirit . . . one feels most content . . . when a person thus receives the blessing of the Holy Ghost, it is a great joy that a Christian feels. . . . One is exceedingly happy . . . ” A man whose life had been extremely difficult—in continuous bondage to strenuous work and poverty, plagued by debilitating pain, in perennial marital stress, and with a history of disappointments in labor union and political affairs— suddenly felt joyful, thanks to the divine blessing of the baptism by the Holy Spirit. Taso’s taciturn and somewhat trite witness lacks eloquence, but nonetheless expresses the radical newness of his self-understanding by stressing that he felt “full”: “One receives the Spirit . . . that comes and fills one. . . . Yes something comes and fills one”.13 Plenitude has displaced hollowness at the core of his mind and heart. The experience of an “uneducated and ordinary” person speaking in divine tongues under the blessing of the Holy Spirit is not only memorable; it also leads to a momentous reappraisal of his or her entire existence. The hearing of the gospel, preached in clear, simple words, awakened in Taso a deep sense first of guilt and then of absolution. “In truth at times one feels, eh—guilty of many things . . . all of those things must be changed.” Taso was not one to belabor the “things” he used to do that he now considered sinful, and it would be unfair to attempt to fill in the blanks, but the idea is emblematic of many similar experiences: a rejection of a former lifestyle now perceived as violating God’s will, the sense of having been forgiven, and the decision to lead a holier life. Sanctification is taken seriously as a necessary consequence of spiritual baptism. In this narration, the emphasis is not upon the traditional baptism by water—Taso and Elizabeth do not even mention it—but upon the spectacular event of the reception of the Holy Spirit. Elizabeth was more loquacious, more expressive with words, and her description of the baptism by the Spirit was more dramatic than Taso’s. “There came this peculiar thing. It invaded my whole body . . . I began to tremble . . . my body was moving more . . . until at last something . . . compelled me to dance . . . I could not control myself. . . . And then I spoke in other languages, like Hebrew or something like that . . . meanwhile . . . there were those strong movements in my body . . . and for the sheer pleasure of it, one goes speaking in tongues. . . . I felt as if my face were being lighted up by a flashlight. And I felt more alive than ever, and happier than ever…” A poor woman, who had seen her mother mistreated by her drunkard father, who felt disregarded by her husband, who had suffered three of her children dying in their infancy, and who was overworked in caring for her other children, suddenly felt “more alive than ever, and happier than ever” due to being baptized by the Holy Spirit. Divine power—“there is something powerful . . . beyond the firmament one sees”—she thought, had abided in her and conferred her amazing gifts.14 Elizabeth and Taso describe their incorporation into a Pentecostal church, but curiously neither mentions the traditional sacrament of water baptism. It probably took place, but as a sacramental

A New Pentecost   335 event, it was overshadowed by the spiritual baptism. This constitutes an important, though usually overlooked, recasting of the theological understanding of baptism. Baptism by the Spirit, not by water, becomes the decisive transforming and empowering experience. One important outcome of conversion and spiritual baptism is peace of mind. Joy and hope displace anger and frustration. It is first expressed in family life. The bitter fights between husband and wife disappear. “When you seek God,” according to Taso, “then you are made a new creature and then you have peace in your home, then you have ­contentment”. But his wider communal context also changes. This is signaled mainly by his continual references to the members of his church as “brothers” and “sisters,” an indication that Taso and Elizabeth are now members of a new type of family and that their church functions not only as a place for common worship, but also as a network of vital support and solidarity. For Taso the solutions once searched for in the labor union or in the political party are now to be found in the community of believers. Indeed, Pentecostal congregations in Latin America frequently perform useful services of ­solidarity in situations of social distress so common in the lives of their members.15

A People of the Book? Conversion did not drastically change the socioeconomic situation of Taso and his family. They were poor before it, and remained poor afterward. “His work takes him to the cane, along the railroad tracks and on the spurs, eight hours a day in the sun. . . . He and Elí and seven of their children live in their little house, eating their rice and beans and drinking black coffee, entertaining themselves with the Bible and the tambourine and the gossip of the barrio”. In fact, one might suspect that the mid-century decline of sugar cane production in the island and its replacement by small manufacturing plants requiring higher levels of technological skills possibly placed Taso’s family in more severe ­economic stress. Despite the connections that some scholars predict, in a too facile optimist Weberian mood, between conversion to a morally stern religiosity and socioeconomic upward mobility, more frequently than not the poor remain poor. After all, modern economic globalization never truly intended the elimination of poverty. Its preferred biblical mantra is probably Matthew 25:29 (“for to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have in abundance”).16 And indeed, the second half of the twentieth century was not generous to the Latin American poor. The glad tidings of socialist revolution, national security military juntas, liberation theology, or neoliberal globalization had all been proclaimed, leaving behind a trail of broken promises and frustrated hopes. However, millions of Latin Americans, in the midst of dreadful poverty and turbulent revolutions, still believe firmly that their lives have changed significantly. They hold fast to the conviction that, thanks to the Holy Spirit, they possess a new identity and are now “children of God,”

336   Luis N. Rivera-Pagán members of the community of saints, chosen for eternal salvation. They gather assiduously in austere temples and chapels, built by their own hands and devoid of the grandeur of Roman Catholic sacred architecture, to praise God, study the Bible, perform acts of exorcism, heal the sick, and share in the tribulations and good news of their fellow “brothers” and “sisters.” The story of Taso and his wife has the virtue of being superbly narrated by Sidney Mintz, who could not hide his surprise at their conversion to the newly arrived Pentecostal evangelists. Mintz was no apologist for the newcomers, and his last sentences poetically betray his secularist perspective. “Taso’s story has no moral. . . . Or perhaps the reader will see the waste I think I see: the waste of a mind that stands above the others as the violet sprays of the flor de caña tower above the cane”. A wasted mind? Maybe from the perspective of an academician who values intellectual achievement, but that is not how Taso and Elizabeth perceived themselves. When asked, they emphasize the healing of their bodies and the salvation of their souls. They have been healed, have received the blessing of the Holy Spirit, and have the Bible, as the Word of God, constantly within reach. They are now members of the community of believers and possess the assurance of eternal redemption. They have come to see themselves as privileged citizens of the kingdom of heaven. They even learned to play the tambourine. At the core of all of these phenomena lay another crucial change in the minds of people like Taso and Elizabeth that seems to have escaped Mintz: they have become readers. In the more than two hundred pages of Mintz’s study of Taso’s life before his conversion, it is obvious that Taso did not care for books or any type of reading. He apparently was not analphabet, but illiterate certainly he was. Totally absorbed in daily labors, he had neither time for nor interest in books or journals. After their conversion, he and his wife may still not be people of books, but they have certainly joined the company of the people of a Book. Now Taso and Elizabeth read the Bible constantly, in the congregation and in their house. Conversion entails a novel source of certainty regarding the place of humanity in the divinely ordered cosmos. The Bible is now perceived as the Word of God. In the mid-twentieth century, evangelicals in Latin America could be distinctly recognized by a book they carried constantly and quoted ceaselessly, the Bible. It was always at the center of the congregation and in the living room of the house. The Bible was seen as an infallible font of firm convictions and ideas. It functioned symbolically as  a talisman, an apotropaic amulet, when risky activities were to be undertaken. Only after the reforms approved by Second Vatican Council, in the mid-1960s, would the Roman Catholic Church promote a similar mass publication of the Bible in easily accessible editions. Taso explained how in his church they gathered around the Bible and in a collegial way conversed about biblical doctrines. “Any other doubt I might have I resolved in the Scriptures,” he affirms with confidence. Notice the prominence of the “I” in this statement; it is not the case that the believers receive a body of doctrines from a ­hierarch equipped with credentials of ecclesiastical authority. What they now share is a

A New Pentecost   337 sacred book to be read and interpreted by many “uneducated and ordinary men [and women],” people like Taso. They have become the people of the Bible, but the Bible has also become the book of the people. Merely one book is indeed a rather limited intellectual horizon. Yet if someone, no matter his or her educational background, diligently reads the poetry of the Psalms, the biographical narrations of the gospels, the irate apostrophes of the prophets, or the subtle theological deliberations of Paul, it is difficult not to surmise that such a practice would indeed expand his or her repertoire of words, images, and ideas. Taso and Elizabeth did not become biblical scholars, by any means. Their textual interpretations might be naïve, but it is hard to imagine their not acquiring a wider stock of linguistic and intellectual skills simply by reading what is, after all, not an undemanding text. Their reading of the Word increases their repertoire of words and, what for them might be even more decisive, simultaneously transforms drastically their understanding of the world.

The Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of This World Several scholars currently take a critical view of Christian Lalive d’Epinay’s thesis about the otherworldliness and lack of political awareness of the Pentecostal churches in Latin America. This rethinking takes place in the wake of the emergence of neoPentecostal mega churches and evangelical political parties all over Latin America. Demographic growth has increased their political power and influence. Numbers do make a difference when votes are counted.17 The time has come when many Pentecostal churches take more interest in the kingdom of this world and in their earthly citizenship, and the debate is now shifting its focus to the shape of their social engagement (including the intriguing question about the possible emergence of a Pentecostal theology of liberation). The political awareness and activism of the Pentecostal churches in Latin America, however, is a rather new process that has mainly taken place in the past two decades. In the mid-twentieth century, the community of the saints stressed separation and distinction from the world, functioning as a refuge from its sorrows and temptations. When prompted and challenged to confront controversial political and social matters, most evangelical and Pentecostal churches would quote Jesus’s words to Pilate as the legitimizing text for their political abstention: “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). The severe Johannine strictures against the “world” were some of their favorite biblical leitmotifs. The “world” was conceived as ruled by demonic powers, under the tyranny of Satan. The most that could be asked of the state was its protection of the right of the new churches to preach and expand. Religious freedom might indeed have important consequences for the democratization of any society, and mainstream

338   Luis N. Rivera-Pagán Protestant churches were usually aware of the link. Yet the concern of most mid-century Pentecostal congregations was their right to proclaim their charismatic version of the gospel, free from restrictions by the state or any legally established church. For their part, Taso and Elizabeth seemed undisturbed by the mid-century political and social turbulences taking place in Puerto Rico, including the formation of a strong independence party, a nationalist insurrection, the industrialization of the island, and the establishment of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, an ambiguous juridical relationship with the United States.18 In the midst of poverty and sociopolitical transformations, Taso and Elizabeth were relatively serene, for their minds and hearts revolved around the community of saints, the joy of the Spirit, and the promise of eternal salvation. In political issues, they tended toward quietism rather than activism.19 Taso did not continue his work in union-related and political matters. He saw those activities as part of his former self, from which he has been freed. The church now became the center of his aspirations and exertions. We cannot tell from Mintz’s account whether at a later date Taso became disenchanted with it as well, as had happened with the syndicate and political party, but it can be ascertained that some years after his unexpected and dramatic conversion, he still felt at home ensconced in church a­ ctivities. “He seems serene” is Mintz’s terse description.

The Transfiguration of Latin American Christendom However, the spread of evangelical charismatic Christianity across Latin America has not left the social situation intact. The growth of these congregations has indeed changed the continental public landscape considerably. Since their colonial inception, an official linkage between the state and the Roman Catholic Church has characterized Latin American nations. The Iberian Crowns exercised royal patronage that entailed the acknowledgment by the Church of the sovereignty and authority of the metropolitan state, but also the state’s recognition of the Roman Catholic Church’s exclusivity in religious affairs.20 Sometimes this was a source of acute conflicts, whenever the ethical conscience of priests, missionaries, and theologians clashed with the Crown’s severe exploitation of the native communities.21 Yet this was frequently a convenient arrangement for both partners, for it c­ onferred a sacred aura to the metropolitan sovereignty and conversely provided the Church with state protection. The governments of the new states, which emerged after the nineteenth-century wars of independence, promptly recognized the advantages of the royal patronage and tried to preserve it. This heritage forged a particular brand of Christendom closely linking the state and the Roman Catholic Church in Latin American countries, a condition juridically inscribed in many national constitutions and Vatican concordats.22

A New Pentecost   339 This official connection between Church and state was venerable, but also vulnerable. It became embroiled in countless disputes of jurisdiction that sometimes resembled the renowned dispute between Henry II and Becket, though most of them never produced martyrs deserving similar fame or memory. Sometimes archbishops and bishops became decisive protagonists in the national drama, diminishing the powers of the state and restricting the possibilities of religious competition; at other times, the sword of the state curtailed severely the rights and powers of the Church. In a critical phase of the Mexican Revolution, the Church lost legal recognition, its property was nation­ alized, and religious houses were closed. During the Colombian civil war, on the other hand, Catholics massacred members of the evangelical minority under the excuse that the Protestants usually aligned themselves with the liberal faction. In general, only the Roman Catholic Church had the legal and political credentials to influence national destinies. Conversion experiences like those of Taso and Elizabeth Zayas have substantially changed and dramatically complicated the religious landscape of Latin America. Titles like that of David Stoll’s book—Is Latin America Turning Protestant?23—might be hyperbolic and misleading, but it is indeed true that evangelical and Pentecostal churches of all kinds and varieties are sprouting up all over the continent. In Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Brazil, or Puerto Rico, any given Sunday morning possibly more hymns are sung, sermons are preached, exorcisms take place, and prayers are offered to God in churches that do not recognize the primacy of the bishop of Rome than in those that do.24 The exceptional growth of the variegated Pentecostal expressions of the Christian faith has indeed reshaped the religious configuration of the entire region.25 In changing the religious landscape, widening the horizons of religious liberty, and forging a ferocious competition for the souls and hearts of believers, these charismatic congregations have fragmented the traditional Latin American model of Christendom. Their presence and activities constitute one of the most important transformations of the Latin American human landscape of the past century. No history of twentiethcentury Latin America is complete that leaves outside its margins the evangelical and Pentecostal reshaping of the continental religious configuration. It has become a meaningful part of the story of many men and women who, in very severe socio-economic straits, strive simultaneously to create an earthly home for their bodies and to affirm their belonging to a heavenly home. Some scholars have made the case that despite their initial isolation from the public and political arenas and their tendency toward a conservative stance regarding ethical issues, the evangelical and Pentecostal churches widen the democratic character of Latin American societies. They point out, first, that to become a member of any of these congregations, which lack the aura of traditional social legitimation, requires a free and conscious decision—a crucial building block of any democracy. Second, these churches’ liturgy tends to be more participatory and less restricted by a professional clergy, thus inspiring a less passive attitude on important community issues.26 The jury is still out regarding the political consequences of the increase in the diversity of evangelical and Pentecostal expressions of Christianity in Latin America. Some of

340   Luis N. Rivera-Pagán these new churches tend to be very congregational and participatory; others, however, are under the ferrous control of their founders and self-designated apostles and tend to mirror the autocratic character of traditional haciendas and plantations. Some might question traditional norms of social conduct; others, on the contrary, espouse very conservative social and sexual ethics. What is undeniable is that traditional monopolistic Christendom, as known for centuries in Latin America, has been superseded by a bewildering variety of forms of living and thinking the Christian faith. The actions of the Holy Spirit, contrary to Augustine’s enclosure of the Spirit to the confines of the Catholic Church, seem to promote diversity, division, and, from time to time, even bitter competition for the hearts and the souls of the people. Under the proclaimed aegis of the Spirit, Latin American Christendom is indeed undergoing a dramatic and profound religious transfiguration.

Provisional Predictions Historical uncertainties make it difficult to ascertain with a high degree of certitude the long-range consequences of the impressive growth of Pentecostal Christianity in Latin America, but some provisional suspicions may be suggested. There has been a dramatic battle for the spirit of the poor between the Pentecostal churches, with their pneumatological emphasis, and the Catholic ecclesial base communities inspired by liberation theology. Liberation theology made the preferential option for the poor a cardinal theological and ecclesiastical principle. It also foregrounded the primacy of the hermeneutical perspective of the poor. Ernesto Cardenal’s famous The Gospel in Solentiname (1978) became its poetical hermeneutical paradigm. Many poor, however, have opted for the religiosity of the Spirit, rather than for a theology of political and social resistance. This tendency does not necessarily lead us to the dirge of liberation theology prematurely sung by some conservative critics. But it certainly complicates the image of the historical protagonism of the poor, in the midst of continuing poverty and the new waves of enthusiasm for drastic social transformation shaking Latin America during the first decades of the twenty-first century. Intriguingly enough, during the past two decades, there are increasing signs of an emerging Pentecostal Latin American theological production. The script of Latin American liberation theology might yet be redrafted, this time with unexpected charismatic contours.27 If we speak of the Latin American poor, then their racial and ethnic identities must also be taken into account. Many of them are Native Americans (most prominently in Guatemala, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Mexico), African Americans (Haiti, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico), or mestizos, generated by the multiple forms of miscegenation that have taken place during the past five hundred years. These ethnic and racial communities have suffered social discrimination and degradation,

A New Pentecost   341 and many are now attracted to the promise of spiritual dignity conveyed by the ­religions of the Spirit. “Syncretism” has always been a risky and potentially misleading term in religious matters, but it is difficult to avoid the impression of certain intimate interactions, in ­several autochthonous communities, between the spirits of the ancestors and the Spirit of the new Pentecost thriving all over Latin America. The boundaries between the Christian Spirit and the spirits of indigenous and African religiosities are frequently porous and symbiotic. It is not necessarily a conscious synthesis, but this author at least gets the impression that the primacy of orality in their liturgy, the narrative style of their homilies, and their flexibility in integrating popular rhythms and melodies into their worship constitute points of contact of many Pentecostal churches with the spirituality enshrined in the aesthetic traditions of autochthonous peoples. This has led some scholars to perceive indigenous Pentecostalism, in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa, as part and parcel of a process of ethnic revitalization.28 Religion matters in Latin America. And it matters even more in its increasing and astounding variety. The traditional binary confrontation between the secular state and the Roman Catholic Church is now being displaced by an array of multiple relations among religiosities of assorted theological and ritual configurations. The fissiparous proliferation of many of these congregations suggests a complex and confusing Latin American religious map in the future. Such a spiritual configuration promises to become a bewildering and anfractuous maze, analogous to the fantastic labyrinths found in some of Jorge Luis Borges’s stories. Diversity and complexity seem to be decisive hermeneutical keys in the religion of the Spirit of this postmodern Zeitgeist. Scholars and missiologists have recently stressed a crucial change in the global demographics of Christianity.29 While the proportion of Christians in the Western and Northern churches diminishes, the churches in the South are growing geometrically. Some even predict the emergence of a “next Christendom,” dominated by the churches of Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia. If that is a valid point, then much of the credit belongs to the explosion of indigenous Pentecostal churches throughout the Third World. Future historians might consider twentieth-century Pentecostalism as the most significant global religious upheaval since the birth of Islam and the Protestant Reformation. What this might entail for the political social conflict engendered by neoliberal ­globalization is hard to envisage. The leadership of many of these churches is frequently authoritarian, conservative, isolationist, and fundamentalist. The hierarchies of some Pentecostal churches, influenced by the North American “theology of prosperity,” seem more interested in apostolic success than in apostolic succession. However, there is a growing body of critical Pentecostal literature, open to political radicalism that challenges the prevailing socio-economic powers and is ready to engage in ecumenical dialogue with other Christian partners. The future might be less bleak than the one foreseen by many contemporary Cassandras.

342   Luis N. Rivera-Pagán Indeed, the vigorous spread of Pentecostal churches and movements in the twentieth century has complicated enormously another of the main dimensions of that century’s Christianity—the ecumenical movement. Ecumenical dialogue has taken place mainly among main-line Protestant churches, Roman Catholicism, Eastern and Oriental Orthodox churches. With few exceptions, the Pentecostal movement, the fastest growing sector of Christianity during the past hundred years, has kept its distance from the ecumenical dialogue and has frequently viewed it with some degree of distrust. The Pentecostal churches are very young and still rather anxious to forge a clear sense of their own identity. They have emerged and developed in a social and ecclesiastical environment of contempt and disdain, engendering their tendency toward isolation and clear boundaries of separation. The time might probably come when many of them will look more positively toward dialogue and ecumenical collaboration with other Christian churches. The success of Pentecostalism has promoted a mimetic reaction in other branches of Christianity, as attested by the increasing popularity of the charismatic renewal movement in many Roman Catholic Latin American dioceses. The enthusiastic Pentecostal style of worship is also strongly influencing mainstream Protestant congregations. This has led some scholars to perceive, in analogy to Paul Tillich’s “Protestant principle,” a “Pentecostal principle,” a tendency toward “Pentecostality” that is not restricted to Pentecostal denominations, but that is shaping the liturgical practices of many other Christian churches.30 This liturgical convergence might constitute a bridge of ecumenical dialogue and rapprochement between churches that usually have stressed their doctrinal and theological differences. Several times in the history of Christianity, an age of the Spirit has been foreseen, predicted, and desired. The hierarchical Church, with its emphasis on orthodox doctrine, traditional liturgy, and accredited priesthood, has frequently looked with distrust at these enthusiastic aspirations, for it well knows how difficult it is to control and restrain its possible consequences. The Spirit tends to overwhelm and transgress the boundaries so carefully drawn by ecclesiastical hierarchies. “For the pneûma [spirit/ wind] blows where it chooses . . . but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes” (John 3: 8). We began this chapter with Sidney Mintz’s engaging story of the astounding conversion to charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity of Anastacio (Taso) Zayas Alvarado and his wife Elizabeth, two poor, “uneducated and ordinary people,” from the Latin American Caribbean. Some skeptical minds might recall John Locke’s ironic observation regarding this type of charismatic enthusiasm: “I ask how shall any one distinguish between the delusions of Satan, and the inspirations of the Holy Ghost?”31 Still, for many other trustful believers, their story of healing, spiritual baptism, and conversion was one of many similar signs that the age of the Spirit had finally arrived. Like the wind from the Caribbean Sea, whose stormy blows disarray and redesign so  many constructions in the sands of human affairs, the new Pentecost of the Spirit  seemed to  be reconfiguring in unexpected ways the contours of the people’s ­history of Christianity.

A New Pentecost   343

Notes 1. Sidney  W.  Mintz, Worker in the Cane: A Puerto Rican Life History (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 1974 [1960]). Henceforth this book will be cited as WC, followed by the page numbers. 2. David Martin is one of the few scholars who have noticed the importance of the ­conversion of Taso Zayas to Pentecostalism in Mintz text. See David Martin, Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 191–197. 3. On Pentecostalism, see the useful essays in Allan H. Anderson and Walter Hollenweger (eds.), Pentecostals after a Century: Global Perspectives on a Movement in Transition (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999). Informative is Harvey Cox, Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in The Twenty-First Century (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995), a text in which the former “secular city” theologian becomes an advocate of the “spiritual city.” For a sociological analysis of global Pentecostalism, see David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). Martin is another theoretician of secularization now bewildered by the new Pentecostal religious revival. Useful as reference text is Stanley  M.  Burgess, Gary B. McGee, and Patrick H. Alexander, eds., Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1988). 4. See the splendid study of the cultural consequences of the sugar cane plantation for the Caribbean by Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1992 [1989].) Sidney Mintz has written an elegant and intelligent text on the development of the sugar cane plantations in the British Caribbean. Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1986). 5. Cf. Elizabeth Brusco, “The Reformation of Machismo: Asceticism and Masculinity among Colombian Evangelicals,” in Virginia Garrard-Burnett and David Stoll, eds., Rethinking Protestantism in Latin America (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993). Also Maria das Dores Campos Machado, Carismáticos e Pentecostais: Adesão Religiosa na Esfera Familiar (Campinas: Ed. Autores Associados/ANPOCS, 1996). 6. Tommy Lee Osborn (sometimes spelled Osborne) was a self-appointed American ­evangelist who conducted healing crusades through the Caribbean (Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Cuba). His book Healing the Sick (Tulsa, OK: Harrison House, 1986 [1951]) has sold over one million copies. It contains a short summary and photos of the healing campaign (February 1950) in which Taso Zayas alleges to be healed. Healing the Sick, 416–421. 7. (WC, 211f). 8. David A. Brading, Mexican Phoenix. Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 9. See Jacques Lafaye, Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness, 1531–1813 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976). According to Octavio Paz, the Virgin of Guadalupe has been the main source of the Mexican sense of nationhood, more influential in its shaping than the official nationalist myths of the several republican and revolutionary governments of the last two centuries. Octavio Paz, Sor Juana, or, The Traps of Faith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 478. 10. Cf. Donald  W.  Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1987), 115–142.

344   Luis N. Rivera-Pagán 11. Candy Gunther Brown, ed., Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011). 12. Miraculous healings have not been restricted to the first wave of Pentecostal evangelization in Latin America. The phenomenon has also been one of the keys for the exceptional growth of the Brazilian Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, considered by some scholars as a neo-Pentecostal church that promises not only spiritual benefits, but also social and economic prosperity. Cf. Leonildo Silveira Campos, Teatro, Templo e Mercado: Organização e marketing de um empreendimento neopentecostal (Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 1997). See also the theological conversation about “healing and deliverance” between the Pentecostal Cheryl Bridge Johns, the Roman Catholic Virgil Elizondo, and the Reformed feminist Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel in Jürgen Moltmann and Karl-Josef Kuschel, eds., Pentecostal Movements as an Ecumenical Challenge (London and Maryknoll, NY: SCM Press and Orbis Books, 1996), 45–62. 13. Ibid., 223. 14. It would be interesting to compare the ecstatic experiences of Taso and Elizabeth with that of John, the protagonist, a rather skeptical young man, of James Baldwin’s novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). John’s possession by the Holy Spirit takes place in the early 1950s, in a storefront Harlem Pentecostal church with the significant name of The Temple of the Fire Baptized. 15. Edward L. Cleary and Hannah Stewart-Gambino eds., Power, Politics, and Pentecostals in Latin America (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996). 16. On this issue, see R. Andrew Chesnut, Competitive Spirits: Latin America’s New Religious Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 17. Cf. Christian Lalive d’Epinay, The Haven of the Masses (London: Lutterworth Press, 1969); Paul  E.  Sigmund, ed., Religious Freedom and Evangelization in Latin America: The Challenge of Religious Pluralism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999); and Cleary and Stewart-Gambino, Power, Politics, and Pentecostals in Latin America. 18. Cf. Raymond Carr, Puerto Rico: A Colonial Experiment (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1984); José Trías Monge, Puerto Rico: The Trials of the Oldest Colony in the World (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1997); Efrén Rivera Ramos, The Legal Construction of Identity: The Judicial and Social Legacy of American Colonialism in Puerto Rico (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2001). 19. Compare Rowan Ireland, Kingdoms Come: Religion and Politics in Brazil (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992). 20. For the Iberian royal patronage in Latin America, and the debates it engendered, see William Eugene Shiels, S.J., King and Church: The Rise and Fall of the Patronato Real (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1961); and Luis N. Rivera-Pagán, “Formation of a Hispanic American Theology: The Capitulations of Burgos,” in Daniel Rodríguez-Díaz and David Cortés-Fuentes eds., Hidden Stories: Unveiling the History of the Latino Church (Decatur, GA: Asociación para la Educación Teológica Hispana, 1994), 67–97. For its history before and after the independence of the Latin American nations, see Hans-Jürgen Prien, La historia del cristianismo en América Latina (Salamanca: Ediciones Sígueme, 1985). 21. See Luis N. Rivera-Pagán, “Violence of the Conquistadores and Prophetic Indignation,” in Kenneth  R.  Chase and Alan Jacobs, eds., Must Christianity Be Violent? Reflections on History, Practice, and Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2003), 37–49, 239–243;

A New Pentecost   345 “A Prophetic Challenge to the Church: The Last Word of Bartolomé de las Casas,” The Princeton Seminary Bulletin XXIV, no. 2, New Series (July 2003), 216–240; and “Freedom and Servitude: Indigenous Slavery in the Spanish Conquest of the Caribbean,” in General History of the Caribbean, vol. I: Autochthonous Societies, ed. Jalil Sued-Badillo (London: UNESCO and Macmillan, 2003), 316–362. 22. See, for example, the intelligent discussion of the history of the juridical bonds between state and the Roman Catholic Church in Argentina by José Míguez Bonino, in his article, “Church, State, and Religious Freedom in Argentina,” in Paul Sigmund, ed., Religious Freedom and Evangelization in Latin America, 187–203. Samuel Silva Gotay has made an important recent contribution to the study of the relations between the Roman Catholic Church and the state in Puerto Rico, first in the nineteenth century, when the island was a colonial possession of Spain, and then during the first decades of the twentieth century, when it became a territory of the United States. Samuel Silva Gotay, Catolicismo y política en Puerto Rico bajo España y Estados Unidos: Siglos XIX y XX (San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 2005). The classic text about the whole region is that of J.  Lloyd Mecham, Church and State in Latin America: A History of Politicoecclesiastical Relations (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1966). 23. David Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant? The Politics of Evangelical Growth (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990). 24. See the recent Pew Research Center report, Religion in Latin America: Widespread Change in a Historically Catholic Region (November 13, 2014). http://www.pewforum.org/2014/11/13/ religion-in-latin-america. 25. For the spread of Pentecostalism in Latin America, see the variety of perspectives in Benjamin Gutiérrez and Dennis Smith, eds., In the Power of the Spirit: The Pentecostal Challenge to Historic Churches in Latin America (Arkansas City, AK: Asociación de Iglesias Presbiterianas y Reformadas en América Latina; Centro Evangélico Latinoamericano de Estudios Pastorales; Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Worldwide Ministries Division, 1996); and Cleary and Stewart-Gambino, Power, Politics, and Pentecostals in Latin America. 26. See, for example, Michael Dodson, “Pentecostals, Politics, and Public Space in Latin America,” in Cleary and Stewart-Gambino, eds., Power, Politics, and Pentecostals in Latin America, 25–40. 27. Cf. Carmelo Álvarez, Pentecostalismo y liberación (San José, Costa Rica: DEI, 1992); Richard Shaull and Waldo Cesar, Pentecostalism and the Future of the Christian Churches: Promises, Limitations, Challenges (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000); Douglas Petersen, Not by Might nor by Power: A Pentecostal Theology of Social Concern in Latin America (Oxford: Regnum Books, 1996); Eldin Villafañe, The Liberating Spirit: Toward an Hispanic American Social Ethic (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993); Elizabeth Salazar-Santana, “Pentecostalism in Latin America: A Look at Its Current Challenges,” in Harold D. Hunter and Neil Ormerod, eds., The Many Faces of Global Pentecostalism (Cleveland, TN: CPT Press, 2013), 114–125; and Agustina Lúvis-Nuñez, “Approaching Caribbean Theology from a Pentecostal Perspective,” in Hunter and Ormerod, eds., The Many Faces of Global Pentecostalism, 126–138. 28. See the doctoral dissertation of the Chilean Pentecost theologian Juan Sepúlveda, Gospel and Culture in Latin American Protestantism: Toward a New Theological Appreciation of Syncretism (PhD thesis, University of Birmingham, 1996).

346   Luis N. Rivera-Pagán 29. Andrew Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996); Lamin Sanneh, Whose Religion Is Christianity? The Gospel beyond the West (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003); Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 30. Bernardo Campos, De la reforma protestante a la pentecostalidad de la iglesia: Debate sobre el pentecostalismo en América Latina (Quito: Ediciones CLAI, 1997). 31. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (New York, NY: Dover Publications, 1959 [1690]), bk. 4, Chapter 19, par. 13, vol. II, 438.

chapter 19

Prote sta n t I n novati v e Eva ngelizi ng to Or a l Cu lt u r e s i n Guatem a l a Rachel M. M c Cleary

So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. —Romans 10: 17, King James Version of the Bible

Evangelizing in a highly illiterate society poses challenges to the traditional method of establishing churches, schools, seminaries, medical clinics, and emphasizing reading of the Bible. Protestant missions to Guatemala, in varying degrees and forms, incorporated innovative oral, visual, and audio evangelizing strategies in their proselytizing. When radio was introduced in the 1940s, Protestants immediately began purchasing airtime for religious programs in Spanish and later in indigenous languages. By shifting from the Protestant mainline emphasis on literacy and the printed gospel to evangelizing through oral, visual, and aural means, the first Protestant missions to Guatemala adapted to the illiterate context using technologies and evangelizing strategies that eventually allowed Pentecostals and later neo-Pentecostals, to become the fastest growing segment of Guatemala’s religion market.1 The introduction and use of communication technologies served the purpose of mass evangelization to indigenous cultures that orally perpetuate their cultural values, behavioral norms, spiritual beliefs, ancestral myths and legends, and collective identity.2 I would like to thank participants in the Political Economy of Religion Seminar at Harvard University, Sascha Becker, Robert Barro, Manuel Arturo Vasquez, and Rick McArthur for their comments, Jonatan Lemus for his research assistance. My appreciation to the editors of this handbook for their editorial suggestions and substantive comments.

348   Rachel M. McCleary The use of oral, visual, and auditory technologies reached large numbers of people in ways that limited numbers of printed copies of translated Bibles and religious literature could not. Furthermore, the introduction of electronic mass communication technology overtook the printed word as the means of disseminating the Gospel. The thesis of this chapter is that Guatemalans were converting to Protestantism ­primarily not through reading the written Bible, but through audio and visual technologies—­ lantern projectors (used in the 1880s), portable pump organs (1800s), wind-up ­phonographs (invented in 1913), reel-to-reel tape recorders (1930s), videos (1951), fingerfonos (1957), cassette recorders (1963), light-weight portable bullhorns (operated on commercially viable alkaline batteries, invented in 1959), portable projectors (commercial use introduced in the late 1950s), and radio programs in Spanish (1940s) and indigenous languages (1959).3 As new technologies were developed in the United States and Europe, missionaries brought them to Guatemala and introduced them into their evangelizing work. The technologies permitted US missionaries to evangelize outside the traditional church service, carrying these new technologies by mule, enabling them to reach large numbers of people and thereby increase conversions. The analysis presented here examines Protestant evangelizing strategies introduced in the late 1800s up to the 1960s. Oral, audible, and visual strategies made the Protestant message culturally accessible to indigenous cultures. Protestant conversions in indigenous regions of the country did not take place, as some scholars contend, through the translation of Scripture portions, books of the New Testament, and eventually the entire Bible into indigenous languages.4 These scholars argue that translations of the Bible into indigenous languages increased conversions to Protestantism through the reading of the written word.5 This argument is flawed for two fundamental reasons. First, given the historical persistence, up to the twenty-first century (see Figure 19.1), of low literacy rates in Spanish among the twenty-six indigenous linguistic groups—up to the twenty-first century (see graph 19.1) as well as the lack of access to formal education, printed Bibles, Scripture portions, and religious tracts in Spanish—meant that they were not often read. Second, small numbers of printed copies were disseminated in relation to the population size. This meant that the printed word was not a mass communication tool. Starting in 1898, books of the New Testament, scriptural portions, and religious tracts translated for Protestant evangelization into indigenous languages were available.6 In 1932, the first New Testament translated into an indigenous language, the Kaqchikel New Testament, by Cameron Townsend with Trinidad Bac and José María Chocol, had a print run of 3,000 copies. Protestant missionaries such as Townsend sold  the New Testament whereas they distributed free of charge religious tracts and Scripture portions. Yet, who could afford to buy the New Testament? Indigenous buyers paid with “egges, starch, cocoa beans, logwood and oddments.” Itinerating missionaries would exchange a New Testament for a night’s room and board. And who would be motivated to buy a Protestant publication? The more difficult part was overcoming the antiProtestant bias in Guatemala that persisted well into the 1960s (the time period covered in this chapter). The destruction of Protestant religious materials when they fell into Catholic hands and threats by priests should one buy such a heretical publication contributed to many of the printed New Testaments, Scripture portions, and religious

Protestant Innovative Evangelizing to Oral Cultures   349 .8 .7

Literacy Rate

.6 .5 .4 .3 .2 .1 .0

1880

1893

1921

1950

1964

All Departments Baja Verapaz Totonicapan

1973

1981

1994

2002

2010

Alta Verapaz Quiche Zacapa

Figure 19.1  Literacy Rates in Departments with over 50% ethnic population where HolinessPentecostal Missionaries first began Evangelizing.

tracts being lost. By the time a revised 1931 Kaqchikel New Testament was printed in 1954, five different cassette tape recordings in Kaqchikel of Scripture portions were in circulation. This second printing of the Kaqchikel New Testament had a run of 5,000 copies. To put it in perspective, according to the 1950 national census, 59.8 percent of the Guatemalan population was literate in Spanish. In those departments with large populations of Kaqchikel speakers, Chimaltenango and Sololá, literacy rates in Spanish in 1950 were, respectively, 21 and 11 percent.7 The large numbers of conversions to Protestantism over the decades cannot primarily be attributed to the reading of the Bible. A print-based conversion, in other words, becoming a convert by reading, requires a reliance on mnemonic devices, rhymes, cadences, local idioms, and story-telling imagery. This is not the same as learning to read, that is, literacy, and having the skill to read anything you choose in your native language. This bias favoring the “triumph of literacy” over oral/audible forms of learning sidetracked those missionaries and their organizations away from direct evangelization and toward investing significant financial and human resources into vernacular translations of the Bible and other religious materials.8 This bias underestimated the persistence of high illiteracy rates and the need for mass literacy programs.9 Furthermore, the literacy bias ignored cultural persistence in valuing oral/aural methods of communication and learning, thereby making the introduction of literacy arduous.10 Pentecostal churches more readily adopted oral and aural communication technologies, which is evident today. Pentecostalism has a nucleus of characteristics, primary among them is the orality of the religious experience.11 Glossolalia, speaking in tongues, is fundamental to the missiology of the Christian church.12 The New Testament book of

350   Rachel M. McCleary Acts, Chapter 2 describes Christ’s interactions after his death with his disciples. Central to those interactions is the spiritual experience of Holy Spirit baptism accompanied by speaking in tongues, known as the Pentecost. Christ’s message to his apostles, to evangelize the world, is interpreted through the supernatural phenomenon of Holy Spirit baptism as a sign of the second coming of Christ (Matthew 24:14). Glossolalia’s theological significance is essentially oral and aural. As a physical religious experience, it is the unmediated baptism by the Holy Spirit in the “control of the speech organs by the Holy Spirit who is praying through the believer in “a heavenly ­language.”13 The speaking in tongues, known and unknown, is oral and aural evidence of a religious experience occurring in the moment. The oral/aural dynamic is also essential to the personal testifying of one’s faith to family, friends, acquaintances, and strangers. The delivery of sermons is an oral performance relying on those congregated in a church, or at home near a radio, to hear and interact with. The oral performance of the sermon is “open to negotiation between preacher and congregation, that negotiation taking place during the performance itself.”14 A give-and-take is created by the cadence, rhythm, and pitch of the delivery so as to fully engage the congregation’s involvement in the performance. The clapping of hands are a form of invocation, the oral “Amens” and “Hallelujahs” punctuate the sermon, with the preacher persuading, cajoling, and encouraging, bringing the congregation along with his sing-song cadence.15 Shouting, crying, and praying out loud are frequently spoken and heard playing a liturgical role in the religious service. Pentecostals value shared communal and spontaneous worship involving singing, music, clapping, praying out loud, spiritual exhortations, testimonials, miracle healing, prophesying, interactive sermons, divine healing, and glossolalia.16 Reading a Bible or a hymnal has marginal utility in a church service of this type. Although the Bible is central to the religious service, it is central not because it is written and read, but because it is the inerrant word of God. Biblical authority, not biblical interpretation, guides and justifies a believer’s actions.17 Pentecostal as well as neoPentecostal churches and denominations were not involved in vernacular translations of the Bible and literacy teaching programs conducted by other Protestant missions to Guatemala. Pentecostals continued to emphasize the oral/aural dynamic of evangelizing. With self-proclaimed indigenous preachers, a decentralized structure, and an emphasis on orality, Pentecostalism readily adopted and remained committed to oral, audible, and visual innovative evangelizing technologies.

The Missions and Their Response to the Indigenous Context “They are Indians, and mostly very ignorant . . . but we trust the Holy Spirit to carry the word to their hearts, as He is doing already.” Amos Bradley, Pentecostal Holiness Church missionary, The Pentecostal Holiness Advocate (June 14, 1917), 1011.

Protestant Innovative Evangelizing to Oral Cultures   351 At the end of the nineteenth century, Guatemala had at least twenty-eight indigenous languages with no standardized transcription.18 Only two, K’iche’ and Kakchiquel, had a Latin alphabet with colonial Spanish orthography. The majority of Protestant missionaries barely spoke “a smattering” of Spanish. Religious tracts, scriptural portions, hymns, and the Bible were written in Spanish. Religious services and itinerant evangelizing were conducted in Spanish for ladinos and indigenous communities. English services were held for the expatriate community. Presbyterian missionary Edward Haymaker in 1897 noted of his work in Quetzaltenango that 90 percent of that town’s population spoke only K’iche’. Given these circumstances, learning K’iche’ was “forced upon us.”19 Both the Presbyterian Church and the Central American Mission, the first two Protestant agencies in Guatemala, had a long-standing policy of banning evangelization in indigenous languages.20 Mission policy set in the United States did not account for circumstances on the ground. In 1897, Haymaker began a translation of the Gospel of Mark into K’iche’ but could not continue due to his responsibilities in Guatemala City to the English- and Spanish-speaking congregations. Another Presbyterian missionary, Eugene McBath, began learning K’iche’ in 1902 and attempted to translate the Gospel of John. In 1919, frustrated with the Spanish-only language policy of the Presbyterian mission board, McBath resigned. At the end of the 1940s, the Presbyterian mission board decided to formally assign its first missionary to indigenous work. The Presbyterian and Primitive Methodist missions, both working among K’iche’ speakers, jointly founded the K’iche’ Bible Instiitute. Cameron Townsend and Edward Robinson joined the Central American Mission in 1918 and began work among the Kakchiquel. Townsend learned the indigenous language, wrote a Kakchiquel grammar book, and translated the New Testament, which was completed in 1929. In 1932, over disagreements involving indigenous-ladino evangelization, Townsend resigned from the Central American Mission.21 The Central American Mission continued into the 1950s with its focus on Spanish evangelizing. Not a single Central American missionary since Townsend had learned Kaqchikel.22 But the same could not be said of the Church of the Nazarene which had entered Guatemala in 1915. Before the 1940s, not a single Nazarene missionary could speak K’ekchi, Pocom, or Rabinal-Achi, the languages of the native speakers they served.23 Guatemalan anthropologist Antonio Goubaud observed in his 1949 study of the town of San Juan Chamelco that it was rare to find a K’ekchi’ Indian who could read. The “esoteric” language of the Spanish-speaking preacher was translated or summarized into K’ekchi’ by a bilingual convert.24 Indigenous-speaking communities did not speak or read Spanish even though missionaries interacted with them and conducted religious services in that language. Illiteracy rates among indigenous peoples (measured in Spanish) were at the beginning of the nineteenth century and are today the highest in those departments with a majority indigenous population and where several indigenous languages are spoken (see Graph 1). In fact, a negative relationship exists between literacy rates and the ethnic share of the population.25 Spanish was, and remains, the official language in which financial and legal transactions occurred. Some indigenous communities resented pressure from the national

352   Rachel M. McCleary government and ladinos to acculturate to Spanish culture. Protestant missions were viewed as part of this trend, increasing resistance to their evangelizing. Other indigenous communities, sensitive to the negative stigma attached by the minority ladino urban culture to indigenous cultures, adopted Spanish and began to assimilate to ladino culture.26 Early missionary work in Guatemala in varying degrees embodied the “indigenous church” approach to missions by focusing on training native preachers and creating autonomous Guatemalan churches.27 What is termed the “indigenous approach” to missions was developed and promulgated by Rufus Anderson of the American Board of  Commissioners for Foreign Missions and Henry Venn of the Christian Mission Society.28 Both men, one in the United States and the other in Great Britain, argued that foreign missions should be “self-supporting, self-governing and self-propagating.”29 This approach continued well into the twentieth century, although not without logistical and cultural conflicts arising as to when missionaries should turn over church property, funds, and leadership to Guatemalan Christians.30 Guatemalan churches such as Príncipe de Paz (a split from Assemblies of God) and Ministerios Elim (the founding pastor was from Central American Mission) have in turn parented multiple thirdgeneration independent churches. The Pentecostal churches, as part of a broad US religious movement, engaged in evangelizing from their beginnings. They founded their churches on Jesus’s command to his apostles to evangelize, known as the Great Commission (Matthew 28:16–20). Pentecostal churches had barely formed, and they were sending out missionaries “on faith.” These individuals immediately immersed themselves in indigenous communities, taking on indigenous cultural living habits and conditions.31 The Pentecostal missionaries were individuals without organizational structure or financial support, in contrast to the Presbyterians and, to a lesser extent, Central American Mission missionaries. The early lack of funding for all the Protestant missions only hastened the process of indigenizing the church. From the beginning, all missions were insufficiently funded by their home churches or mission agencies in the United States. The Central American Mission, following the model of the China Inland Mission, did not financially support its missionaries. Initially, the financial policy was “[t]o go to God in prayer for all wants, to solicit no gifts, take no collections, and to receive such sums as are voluntarily contributed by the children of God.”32 This policy evolved to allowing missionaries to actively raise their own funds, and board members of the Central American Mission actively engaged in fundraising. Pentecostal missionaries were equally dependent upon the generosity of believers through offerings raised by prayer groups known by the Wesleyan term “band.”33 Missionaries visited churches periodically to secure commitments from individuals and congregations to send money on a regular basis to the mission office or directly to Guatemala. Offerings collected at evangelical rallies and through appeals in official newsletters such as the Pentecostal Mission’s Living Water, the Assemblies of God’s The Weekly Evangel, and the Central American Bulletin were sent to the missionaries.34 Often, funds were easier to raise for specific projects (purchasing Bibles and religious materials) than for general missionary support. Even the Presbyterian Church, which had a mission board

Protestant Innovative Evangelizing to Oral Cultures   353 raising funds on behalf of their missionaries, maintained their Guatemalan missionaries on a fixed “safe minimum” salary with neither living expenses nor funds for special projects.35 In 1903, discussions took place on the possibility of the Central American Mission taking over the Presbyterian work, but nothing came of it.36 The Presbyterians, unlike their Central American Mission counterpart, found it difficult to carry out mission work on a shoestring budget. Their focus on institution-building, which included medical facilities, schools, and a Bible institute, placed the Presbyterians at a competitive disadvantage with those missions that singularly focused on evangelization.

The Orality of Translations of the Bible The harvesting of Indian souls is a work of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of the illiterate people, who are hearing the gospel in their own language. —Margaret N. Hays, Primitive Methodist Church (1972), 34.

In January 1921, an ecumenical meeting of Protestant missionaries took place in the indigenous highland town of Chichicastenango, El Quiché.37 The result of the meeting was the creation of a faith agency—the Latin American Indian Mission—focused on translating the gospel into the indigenous languages of Guatemala. The two major linguistic groups—Kaqchikel and K’iche’—had survived the Spanish conquest with written languages in a Latin alphabet and Spanish colonial orthography. An immediate action on the part of the new agency was to fund indigenous colporteurs and to cooperate in the translation of the Bible into indigenous languages. Out of this conference evolved “Camp Wycliffe,” founded in 1934 for missionaries to train in translation methods. Missionaries of different denominations and faith agencies attended the Camp Wycliffe workshops. By 1942, Camp Wycliffe was known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL International), engaged in linguistic translation education, and Wycliffe Bible Translators (WBT) was the mission agency, sending self-supporting missionaries to work among the linguistic group for whom they were translating the Bible and to whom they were evangelizing.38 Although translation of Bible portions and the entire Bible into indigenous languages has been integral to indigenous evangelization, contrary to some claims, translations of the Bible into indigenous languages were and have not been sufficient to provide indigenous communities with the autonomy to establish their own churches without missionary support or knowledge.39 Translating the Bible into indigenous languages is time-consuming. Hugh Milton Coke estimated that a translation of the New Testament (based on translations from 1882 to 1977) required twelve to thirty-five years of work, an average of twenty-two years.40 The Pocomchí New Testament, completed after Coke’s dissertation, took seventeen years to be translated.41 Although new technologies speed up the process of a translation,

354   Rachel M. McCleary the upfront investment of translation remains lengthy, averaging over ten years, even with books of the Bible previously translated.42 From the reader’s perspective, vernacular Bibles require indigenous speakers to have literacy in their own language. This is a new concept for indigenous communities, which are characterized by oral transmission of information with no written language and high illiteracy rates in Spanish. In general, the successful adaptation of the vernacular Bible by indigenous communities depended upon their use in worship. Simply having Scriptures, hymns, religious tracts, and Sunday school materials in the vernacular did not create the demand for these products. A persistent pattern encountered by missionaries among indigenous communities was that they were oral communicators. Some responded that they believed in God but had no use for the Bible.43 Their language had no written orthography, which meant that there was no culture of reading. The central issue was to create a demand for the vernacular Bible. Acclimating indigenous speakers to hearing the Scriptures in their own language before the written vernacular Bible (and portions thereof) was completed was part of the strategy of the missions involved in translation work (Presbyterian, CAM, Primitive Methodist, Nazarene, and Wycliffe Bible Translators). Missionaries would begin with a convert, teaching him or her the Bible in his or her own language through recordings. Cassette recordings were popular, particularly among adults.44 Pastoral commitment by lay evangelists and colporteurs of all the denominations, churches, and Bible societies increased the potential for adoption of translations by indigenous communities. Cameron Townsend experienced firsthand the necessity for missionaries and lay leaders not only to promote vernacular Bible translations, but also to be capable of doing so if such translations were going to be used by native speakers.45 The dynamic of the translation process was for missionaries to first acquire moderate language skills so as to be able to translate a book of the New Testament. Having accomplished this, the missionaries continued their linguistic work while engaging in evangelistic campaigns that “brought to our table indigenous leaders” who worked alongside the missionaries.46 Indigenous evangelists orally preached newly translated Scripture portions on itinerant visits to villages. The evangelists provided feedback after their visits, and translation changes were incorporated into the work. In villages where churches existed, translators worked closely with local pastors so that they might orally transmit the gospel to a largely illiterate linguistic group. Often indigenous translators were the evangelists who visited villages on weekends. Their preaching of the translated Scripture portions led to churches forming. In numerically smaller linguistic populations, church growth correlated with the time period in which the translation of the Bible was occurring.47 The process of oral interaction with linguistic communities before written translations were completed raised awareness of the Bible’s evangelistic message increasing conversion rates within the linguistic group. Guatemalan colporteurs and lay leaders were able to more readily engage people oneon-one, distribute religious literature, and evangelize to their own linguistic groups.48 Once translations were completed and published, pastors were taught to read the Bible and, in turn, to read Scripture out loud to others and preach to communities in their

Protestant Innovative Evangelizing to Oral Cultures   355 native language.49 Reading was not a traditional cultural activity. Literacy workshops were set up with the goal of teaching a small group of people how to read simple materials “so that they would gain the ability and confidence to read the Bible.”50 The translation process had a specific end goal, to have the New Testament and the entire Bible available in all the indigenous languages. This goal could only be accomplished through the oral transmission of the New Testament message to large groups of people.

The Coming Deluge: The Rise of Pentecostalism “Jesus is coming soon and we want to meet Him with many sheaves, to lay them at His feet.” Willie Etta Barnett, Pentecostal Holiness Church missionary, Bridegroom’s Messenger 9, no. 184 (July 1, 1916): 3.

The first wave of Pentecostalism in Guatemala, 1901–1932, was small and unable to ­compete with the original Protestant missions.51 Of the original thirteen Pentecostal missionaries sent to Guatemala between 1901 and 1915, four had died of yellow fever, four had left the mission field, and three joined other Protestant missions.52 This changed with the arrival of two young men, Charles Truman Furman and Thomas Pullin, affiliated with the United Free Gospel and Missionary Society.53 They arrived in 1916, the year the Protestant missions drew up a second comity agreement.54 That same year, the Church of the Nazarene assumed the missionary work of the Pentecostal Holiness Mission, which had merged with the Nazarenes. The Church of the Nazarene, an evangelical church, holds the position that glossolalia, or ecstatic speech or “prayer utterance,” is contrary to the biblical and historic position of the Church. The Primitive Methodist Church, like the Nazarenes, prohibits the practice of glossolalia. When glossolalia began to occur in their congregations, the Primitive Methodist Church removed the Pentecostal missionaries, who then joined the Pentecostal denomination the Church of God. The Pentecostal missionaries who left holiness evangelical denominations continued to evangelize directly in indigenous communities. By contrast, the Nazarenes and Primitive Methodists joined the Presbyterians and Central American Mission in translation work, thereby altering their approach to indigenous evangelizing to literate, print-based means, centered on translation and literacy education. The more emphasis and resources a mission placed on translation work, the less it engaged in evangelizing, church-planting, and sustaining those churches. By contrast, Pentecostal missionaries did not engage in translation work. From the beginning, Pentecostals evangelized directly in indigenous communities, training indigenous lay pastors who, on their own initiative (“on faith”) and time, as they received little if any financial assistance, evangelized in their native language and were responsible

356   Rachel M. McCleary for the churches they established. The operational strategy of Pentecostals was to develop indigenous churches independently of missionary and ladino oversight. The growth of indigenous churches for missions involved in translation work came later in the 1950s, whereas the growth of Pentecostal indigenous churches was earlier, in the late 1930s and 1940s, and always was based on indigenous authority. Furman and Pullin began their missionary work under the mentorship of independent Pentecostal missionaries C. Albert and Inéz Ruth Hines (funded by the Assemblies of God). They began evangelizing in indigenous areas of the northwestern highlands in the departments of El Quiché and Totonicapán. Urban, ladino evangelizing work for the Pentecostals began in Guatemala City in 1940. The Presbyterian Church and the Central American Mission initiated their work in the late 1800s in Guatemala City among Spanish-speaking ladinos. This meant that their first colporteurs and national evangelists were ladinos.55 The Society of Friends (Quakers) evangelized for the first several decades in Spanish in the eastern, primarily ladino, region of Guatemala. The Presbyterians, Central American Mission, and the Friends had a ladino Spanish-orientation for several decades. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Pentecostal religious experience was and remains oral/aural, transmitted through participation in communal religious ­worship marked by singing, praying, glossolalia, clapping, exhortations, crying, and personal testimonials. Public conversion practiced by Pentecostal, neo-Pentecostal, and some evangelical churches is a group experience. Once a person converts, conversions occur along family networks, and it is common for male relatives to become evangelists.56 Revivals were the hallmark of Pentecostals. Pentecostals were beginning to succeed among K’iche’ communities due to their indigenous evangelizers, who were responsible for revivals in 1932, 1936–1937, 1938, 1939, and 1942.57 At most of the revivals, typified by glossolalia, only indigenous evangelists were present when they began. The revivals were characterized by loud worshipping and speaking in tongues, often scaring observers and causing some indigenous evangelists to be arrested.58 In 1934, the Church of God (Full Gospel) recruited the Furmans as missionaries. As part of their denominational switch, the Furmans took with them two-thirds, or fourteen, of the Primitive Methodist churches they had been serving.59 The Primitive Methodists reached an accommodation, signing over church property in the towns of San Cristóbal, Chuicacá, and Paquí, all in the department of Totonicapán, to the Church of God.60 Continuing to work closely with the Pullins who, in 1944, also became Church of God missionaries, the two couples actively evangelized among the K’iche’ in the departments of Totonicapán, El Quiché, and Quetzaltenango.61 The Furmans and Pullins encountered competition from the Assemblies of God, who primarily evangelized to ladinos in the eastern part of the country. The Assemblies of God, like the Presbyterians, Central American Mission, and Friends, evangelized in Spanish to ladino populations. As a result, their indigenous church growth was initially small, attracting only those indigenous populations that were ladino-oriented and bilingual.62 Pentecostal revivals, beginning in the 1930s and culminating in the 1950s, created a paradigm shift in evangelizing strategy on the part of Protestant churches.63 Building on

Protestant Innovative Evangelizing to Oral Cultures   357 the success of the Pentecostal revivals among indigenous populations, the Church of God in the 1940s began an aggressive evangelizing campaign among urban ladinos. A revival led by Guatemalan pastor Ramón Ruano in Guatemala City on August 14, 1943, began the legitimization of Pentecostalism for Guatemala City’s urban ladino population. Until this revival, the other Protestant churches, particularly the Presbyterians and Central American Mission, had not been confronted with direct competition from Pentecostals. The intense schedule of revivals during the 1940s and 1950s resulted in thousands of conversions during evangelism campaigns led by Guatemalan lay pastors and Church of God missionary James C. Beaty and evangelist T. L. Osborn.64 Beginning in 1951, Beaty held revivals in several cities. In 1953, at the invitation of the Church of God in Guatemala, T. L. Osborn held five weeks of a “mass miracle crusade” in Guatemala City, with dramatic miracle healings, marriages, and thousands of conversions, requiring the construction of a sixty-foot-long cement baptismal tank.65 After Osborn’s visit, Beaty and Church of God pastors engaged in a series of Osborn-style revivals characterized by miracle healings and glossolalia.66 During the early 1950s, the Church of God experienced a 50 percent growth in membership.67 In 1958, the Evangelical Alliance of Guatemala (to which historically the Pentecostal denominations did not belong) held regional evangelistic campaigns (revivals and door-to-door evangelizing) throughout the country, culminating in Billy Graham’s two-day evangelical crusade in Mateo Flores Olympic stadium, Guatemala City, with an estimated crowd of 50,000 in attendance.68 By the mid-1960s, the Church of God grew dramatically throughout the country.69 The success of the growth has been partially attributed to the financial support of the T. L. Osborn Evangelistic Association (Tulsa, Oklahoma), as well as Gordon Lindsay’s Christ for the Nations.70 Pentecostalism, accepting no geographic boundaries, introduced to the Guatemalan religion market two new trends: Protestants competing against Protestants for adherents; and church schisms, with congregations splitting, and a faction affiliating with another Protestant church, or becoming an independent national church. In the 1950s, a gradual withdrawal of mission funds and an increase in local fundraising began to put the churches on a self-supporting basis. By the 1960s, the plan was to make each church “self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating.”71 The Protestant churches began turning over leadership to Guatemalan Protestants in the late 1950s with the Assemblies of God (Asambleas de Dios in 1957), Church of God (Iglesia de Dios Evangelio Completo in 1959), the Guatemalan Presbyterian Church (1962), the Nazarene Church (1968), and the Primitive Methodists (early 1980s). It is interesting to note that the two Pentecostal denominations nationalized before the other Protestant missions. Pentecostal churches, since their beginning, have given priority to evangelizing, stressing the power of prayer, divine healing, glossolalia, and other forms of baptism of the Holy Spirit. Imitating the successful revival of the Pentecostals, other Protestant denominations and churches by the 1960s and into the 1970s were holding their own evangelistic campaigns. Through the 1970s, churches held their evangelizing campaigns with open-air meetings and door-to-door evangelizing.72 Films such as the “Life of

358   Rachel M. McCleary Christ” were shown, music was played, and choirs sang. Contrary to the view of evangelist John Raleigh Mott (1865–1955) that mass evangelization would prove an obstacle to conversion, Pentecostals, and soon other Protestant churches and denominations, understood quite well the effectiveness of evangelizing to large crowds.

Innovative Indigenous Evangelizing The Lord used these cassettes to prepare the hearts of the people for the coming of the printed Word. —David and Carol Fox, Wycliffe Bible Translators in Guatemala

The missionaries were well aware that oral, audible and visual evangelization had a ­significant impact. Through hearing and seeing the missionaries were able to reach large numbers of individuals. Cognizant that the written word was not the most effective or efficient medium for evangelizing, Protestant missionaries turned to musical instruments, particularly the portable organ, and music recordings (phonographs, cassettes, finger-fonos, digital players) of hymns, Bible readings, and sermons, as well as videos and films dubbed in indigenous languages and later filmed in local contexts with indigenous actors.73 Music.  In contrast to Catholic Tridentine emphasis on chants and polyphony led by a choirmaster (maestro cantor), Protestants welcomed “loud” wind instruments, flutes (chirimía), drums (tun), trumpets, organs, accordions, guitars, and violins, as well as singing loudly at the top of one’s voice. As Catholic Sunday masses ended, missionaries would stand in front of the Catholic Church playing a portable pump organ, singing loudly, reading the Scriptures (sometimes with a megaphone), and handing out religious tracts.74 The playing of music on a portable pump organ, accordion, or guitar, accompanied by singing, would draw a crowd to the missionaries, to which they could testify and preach.75 Hymns were set to traditional indigenous music.76 The missionaries encouraged the use of indigenous instruments, the woodwind (chirimía), a small drum (tun), a three-string violin (shirin), and others. One year, the missionaries brought a fifteen-piece Rabinal Achí orchestra, which included three missionary children.77 Recordings.  Wind-up phonographs played recordings in Spanish and indigenous languages. During the 1960s, the lightweight “Cardtalk” cardboard phonograph was introduced, on which records were played.78 The taping of Scriptural readings, entire church services, and religious music served many venues for audible and oral evangelizing. Tapes were played over loudspeakers on market days, at annual town fairs, on religious holidays, and during itinerant evangelizing trips.79 Tapes could be turned into records to be played on portable phonographs. The recorded religious message on tape allowed a missionary who was evangelizing without an indigenous preacher to visit indigenous villages.80

Protestant Innovative Evangelizing to Oral Cultures   359 Missionaries used tape recorders to audibly convey the Scriptures and sermons in native languages.81 The tape recorder would be left playing in an open window so that indigenous people passing by would hear the Bible in their own language. The fingerfono, a hand-operated, plastic phonograph on which recordings were played of Scripture readings in indigenous languages, was lent out.82 Finger-fonos, as well as cassette recorders, were given, loaned, or sold to indigenous converts, who would play them in remote villages and fincas where strong resistance existed to missionaries and Protestantism.83 The significance of the recordings was that they provided religious instruction or evangelism to illiterate persons in their own language. Today, evangelizing includes many digital technologies, of which the Proclaimer is an innovative and popular one. The Proclaimer is a battery-operated, hand-held device with a microchip on which Scriptures are recorded. The chip will not erase or wear out from frequent playing. The Proclaimer has a built-in generator and solar panel to charge the battery. The solar panel, in addition to charging the battery, will operate the Proclaimer even without battery power as long as there is sunlight. The Proclaimer was introduced in 2006, and since then over 11,000 Proclaimers are in use in Guatemala. The sound is digital quality and loud enough to be heard clearly by groups as large as 300. Although the Proclaimer is primarily aimed at groups of illiterate adults within a church context, entire congregations hear the recording. The Bible Society of Guatemala distributes a Proclaimer where several churches in a community benefit from having use of a Proclaimer. The Proclaimer is heard by an entire congregation, which includes people of all ages. Given that women attend religious activities more regularly than men and indigenous rural women have the lowest literacy rate in the country, the Proclaimer is reaching a highly underserved female population. It is noteworthy that the Pentecostal denominations are the ones using the Proclaimer (Church of God, Assemblies of God, and Príncipe de Paz).84 Technology and Innovative Evangelizing.  Early on in their work, Protestant missionaries evangelized on street corners and visited house to house, handing out tracts and proselytizing.85 Street preaching commonly included singing, handing out tracts, and selling Scriptures and Testaments in Spanish.86 Another form of evangelizing was to hold open-air services in town squares (plazas) where traditionally communal public events occur.87 Tents were sometimes used, music played, and films were shown. Portable bullhorns were commonly used to evangelize as missionaries visited town after town. The invention of the alkaline battery in 1957 not only transformed existing portable equipment, but also expanded the range of items one could use without the need for electricity. For example, a loudspeaker that operated on alkaline batteries weighed only eight pounds and could be carried easily over rugged mountainous trails to isolated villages. The T. L. Osborn Evangelistic Association contributed sixteen-millimeter projectors, films, sermon tapes, and portable public-address systems with built-in tape recorders for the mass evangelizing efforts of the Church of God. With this type of equipment, a lay preacher could immediately evangelize on a street corner, in a town square, or in a large building. The Church of God, with the use of the electronic equipment, established

360   Rachel M. McCleary approximately forty preaching stations.88 Even today, all over Guatemala, Protestant evangelists can be heard preaching over loudspeakers or megaphones, and occasionally two preachers will be dueling it out over their loudspeakers in a town’s plaza. Many missionaries took advantage of the weekly market day and annual patron saint’s day fairs to sell Bibles, New Testaments, and tracts.89 On market days and at public gatherings, particularly the saints’ feast days, missionaries would place themselves in the middle of the activities, preaching and handing out tracts. The Presbyterians traveled in their geographically designated area to towns holding fiestas.90 For many years, the Nazarenes in the city of Cobán, Alta Verapaz, attended the annual saint’s day. For the seven days of the festivities, with a stall in the middle of the fairgrounds equipped with “the largest loudspeakers,” they played religious music and K’ekchi Bible portions at full volume. They sold Bibles and handed out free literature.91 Another strategy of the Protestants was to evangelize at the annual patron saint’s feast day. A patron saint’s feast (fiesta) transpires over several days, with dances, religious rituals, drinking, eating, and a fair where goods are sold.92 Evangelizing during a saint’s feast day is an optimal opportunity for missionaries to reach a wide regional audience, not just local townspeople. Bands of musicians and fireworks technicians are hired from other towns, dance costumes are rented from a morería (a business that makes and rents dance costumes) in another department, and candles are purchased from a major city.93 Merchants from a wide geographic area come to sell their goods. Families from ­surrounding communities bring livestock and goods to exchange or sell. Missionaries and lay evangelists set up a booth or pitch a tent and play music (live or recorded), show a film, hand out literature, and preach over a portable bullhorn.94 Missionaries, since 1897, have attended the feast of the Esquipulas Black Christ to sell Bibles and religious tracts. Putting up a sign (Santa Biblia de venta), the missionaries sold all their Bibles in a day and a half, as well as distributed two thousand tracts in one afternoon. The missionaries described the feast day as consisting of “drunkenness, gambling and robbery around on every hand.”95 One Nazarene missionary described a fiesta crowd as “[o]utwardly they looked like the dregs of humanity. Many had been drinking; practically all had been wandering through the streets during the day. . . . Some were cut and bleeding from brawling fight.”96 A Pentecostal missionary described the fiesta as “all restraint is lifted and the Indians who barely exist in normal circumstances get dead drunk. . . . One can see victims lying in the streets and in gutters, some never to rise again.”97 Another missionary described the image of the Virgin Mary during one festival as “laughable” but then realized that it was an idol of worship.98 The missionaries referred to the “poor deluded people” who gave the statue “so much money” so as to be miraculously healed of some ailment. The missionaries declared the Black Christ “by far the biggest robber of them all.”99 Yet, the missionaries took full advantage of the fiestas to proselytize and gain converts. Visual. The “magic” lantern projector, invented around 1870, was the first visual technology to be used in evangelizing.100 Haymaker could draw up to 400 people by showing slides of comics, famous sites from around the world, and The Life of Christ.101 Films, in particular, were useful in evangelizing, as the visual medium attracted crowds of people,

Protestant Innovative Evangelizing to Oral Cultures   361 creating trust.102 Films such as the Life of Christ were shown, and children’s classes were conducted under a tent.103 In an inhospitable, sometimes violent, social environment the missionaries appealed to children so as to indirectly reach reluctant parents and adult relatives. “We believe this is one of the best ways of reaching this people”104 Other missionaries saw an orphanage as the most efficient means of training indigenous children to become colporteurs, Bible girls and women, and catechists. Missionary women were put in charge of establishing small homes to care for these “outcast” children.105 The overall goal was to bring missionaries “into more intimate relations with the people.”106 Traveling from town to town with a portable projector and generator, missionaries and lay workers showed films on a sheet hanging between two trees. This evangelizing technique is still used today, but with newer equipment—a backpack containing a solarpowered portable video system, a collapsible screen, and mini-speakers—carried by lay evangelists.107 The Jesus Film is being shown in villages around Guatemala.108 Films, in particular, are useful in evangelizing, as the visual medium attracts large crowds of ­people regardless of their literacy levels.109 Radio.  Radio became an important part of expanding evangelizing for all the Protestant missions and their national churches. The term “saturation” is often used to refer to the strategy of reaching large numbers of persons through broadcasting. Spanish-ladino, rather than indigenous, churches and individuals dominate religious radio programming.110 In the early 1940s, the Presbyterians in Quetzaltenango were broadcasting music and short sermons. At the end of the 1940s, the Church of God began radio programing.111 In 1950, the Central American Mission set up Radio Cultural TGNA (shortwave) and TGN (AM medium wave) in Guatemala City, which continues to be a major religious radio station in the country.112 In 1954, the Defenders of the Faith, an evangelical church, began a Spanish radio program that increased their church growth.113 In 1959, programming in indigenous languages began, with the K’iche’ Bible Institute (Presbyterian and Primitive Methodist) broadcasting on a local radio station in Spanish and K’iche’. People who heard the radio programs began attending church services.114 A second Central American Mission radio station, Radio Maya TGBA Barillas, was started in Barillas, Huehuetenango, in 1962. The radio station transmitted programs in at least five indigenous languages, as well as a few in Spanish.115 A strategy for preparing indigenous language speakers for forthcoming written translations of the Bible was to broadcast Scripture readings in their native language. By 1967, hundreds of individuals were converting to Christianity, having heard the broadcast of evangelical programs.116 In 1967, Radio Buenas Nuevas went on the air broadcasting Mam evangelical programs from the city of Huehuetenango. One missionary noted that Mam-language radio programs, not direct missionary efforts, were leading to conversions along family networks in Mam-speaking villages.117 By the early 1960s, six Protestant denominations and churches had radio programs on commercial stations.118 In 1962, Pentecostals Carlos Eason and Gustavo Rosales Román founded Voz Evangélica de América.119 By 1969, the Church of God had twelve daily radio programs.120 In 1979, at least four “religiously oriented” radio stations were operating in Guatemala, including the Seventh-day Adventist Unión Radio station.121

362   Rachel M. McCleary Local churches also purchased times on commercial radio stations to broadcast ­religious programs in Spanish and indigenous languages.122 Individual churches were broadcasting weekly and daily programs on commercial stations.123 By 1988, nineteen Protestant radio stations (as compared to ten Roman Catholic) were broadcasting.124 By 1994, two more evangelical radios went on the air, Radio Kekchi and Radio Cultural Coatán.125 During the late 1990s, the first radio broadcasts in Tektitek began from a radio station in Tectitán, Huehuetenango.126 The 1996 peace accords stated that Mayan (indigenous) communities were to have access to radio. Some interpreted the peace accords to be stating that communities have a legal right to radio frequencies. Radio frequencies are controlled by law and by the Superintendendencia de Telecomunicaciones (SIT). The law is clear in that only frequencies authorized by the SIT and backed by a document known as a TUF (Título de Usufructo is a fifteen-year lease) can legally be used. The SIT auctioned off a great number of frequencies from 1997 to about 2001, and the Mayan communities had the opportunity to participate. Almost none did. Individuals, associations, and churches were able to purchase frequencies, which are being used to broadcast in many Mayan languages. The vagueness of the law contributed to between 800 and 1,200 illegal stations currently broadcasting with no permit and causing great havoc and interference in the spectrum. However, very few, if any, of these are operated by Mayan communities. About 80 percent of the pirate stations are evangelical, many are commercial, and although many do use Mayan languages, their interest is chiefly commercial.127 Since these stations are illegal, the government does not subsidize equipment (although the government is not trying very hard to close down the pirates, despite a few successful cases). Some of these pirates operate out of a mayor’s office, and various congressional representatives have been known to hand out frequencies illegally as favors. Currently, an estimated sixty legal radio stations are religious (Protestant and Roman Catholic).128 Some of these are commercial stations that sell airtime to churches and other religious entities. The number of these stations broadcasting primarily in indigenous languages is between fifteen and twenty stations.129 The style of programming the Protestants air—witnessing, live programs including talk shows and musical performances, Scripture readings in Spanish and indigenous languages—and the number of hours on air have a significant impact.130 The AM wavelength in Guatemala is dominated by Protestant programming (Evangelical, Pentecostal, neo-Pentecostal).131 Radio remains instrumental in introducing biblical portions and sermons to a wider audience, particularly in indigenous languages. Radio has expanded the linguistic and geographical reach of Protestant churches, has increased their memberships, and has become a popular medium for remaining in contact with congregants. Television.  Unlike radio, today’s religious television programming in Guatemala has been strongly influenced by Pentecostal evangelist Jimmy Swaggart’s programs, shown in the 1980s.132 Currently there are two full-time Protestant channels in Guatemala. Canal 21, which is part of Enlace Worldwide, and is owned by a consortium of five neo-Pentecostal mega-churches in Guatemala City. These are the stars of Guatemalan neo-Pentecostalism: Leonel Sobranís, Ministerios Verbo; Dr. Jorge  H.  López, Fraternidad Cristiana de Guatemala; Apostle Job Eliú Castillo, Iglesia El Calvario; Apostle Josué Muñoz, Ministerios

Protestant Innovative Evangelizing to Oral Cultures   363 Apostólicos YESHUA; and Apostle Harold Caballeros, Ministerios El Shaddai.133 Also affiliated with this station is Carlos “Cash” Luna, Ministerios Casa de Dios, a fervent Pentecostal evangelist who holds special miracle crusades in Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States. His mega-church has the largest following in Guatemala City. Canal 21 can be viewed nationwide (both television and cable). Neo-Pentecostal church services are shown live, as well as recorded, on this channel. Canal 21 does fundraising on a continual basis (every two months). The other Protestant channel is Canal 27, which is owned by Luis Fernando Solares, founder of the mega-church La Familia de Dios, also located in Guatemala City. The station has coverage throughout the country. Channel 27 primarily caters to the more traditional Pentecostal denominations and churches and their programming.

Conclusion Some of of the early missionaries to Guatemala were holiness and Pentecostal, sharing premillennial beliefs of the urgency of converting the world to Christianity and the “near-inevitability of its attainment,” and the imminent second coming of Christ on earth.134 Differences on how conversion was to be achieved—through reading and ­literacy on the one hand, or oral/aural on the other—led to divergences between those Protestant missions that invested in Bible translations and literacy, on the one hand, and the Pentecostals who remained committed to the immediacy of orality/ aurality of evangelization. The means by which a person attains salvation, that is, with knowledge of doctrine and the realities of the Bible as text, are not as important. The experience of personal salvation and baptism of the Holy Spirit, rather than doctrinal and theological issues, are the focus of one’s religiosity and religion. Investment in human capital in the form of literacy and formal education is secondary to the ­religious experience. Pentecostals emphasize receiving a calling from God (“el llamado”). Today, this remains the one requirement for becoming a Pentecostal pastor. Pentecostalism from its beginnings recognized indigenous pastors and lay evangelists who were responsible for their churches. Pentecostalism with its oral/aural forms of worship (singing, clapping, testimonials, miracle healing, prophesying, loud group praying) and a decentralized structure was easily adaptable to indigenous cultures. By not relying on vernacular translations of the Bible, that is, by side-stepping vernacular translation work completely, Pentecostals continued to employ innovative evangelizing strategies by introducing electronic audible and visual technologies that did not require literacy. By contrast, those missions that engaged in Biblical translation work could only be successful if they had literate pastors and congregants. Protestant denominations requiring literacy and some type of higher education (which might include ordination) invested significant resources and time in the training of their pastors. As missionaries sought to cultivate and educate particularly talented indigenous converts, they deviated from their original mission of evangelization.

364   Rachel M. McCleary All the Protestant missions in varying degrees employed innovative evangelizing methods incorporating oral, audible, and visual technologies. The Pentecostals when it came to church growth, had the winning strategy by persisting in the use of oral, aural, and visual technologies in their evangelizing, particularly mass revivals, thereby transmitting religious beliefs and values without becoming secularized through literacy education.

Interviews and Correspondence (in alphabetical order) Beltran, Leticia. Director, Americas Area, The Seed Company, telephone interview with the author, April 21, 2014. Carey, Tim. Summer Institute of Linguistics missionary, writing in an email to Rick MacArthur, October 24, 2011. García Guidel, Heberto. National Superintendent, Church of God Full Gospel, interview with the author, January 9, 2012. McArthur, Rick. Summer Institute of Linguistics, email correspondence with the author, October 24, 2011. Martinez, Marco Vinicio. Director of Programs and Projects, Guatemala Bible Society, interview with the author, August 1, 2011. Montejo, Cristobal. General Superintendent, Assemblies of God, interview with the author, January 12, 2012. Moreno, Gil. International Coordinator for the Americas, Hosanna, email correspondence with the author, March 29, 2011. Sywulka, Steve. CAM International missionary, email correspondence with the author, March 30, 2011. Vasey, William. Primitive Methodist Missionary, Guatemala, email correspondence with the author, August 31; September 5, 6, and 8, 2011.

Notes 1. William R. Hutchison refers to seven mainline or liberal Protestant groups as the Seven Sisters of American Protestantism in his book, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 113–122. The seven are: United Methodist Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Presbyterian Church, Episcopal Church, USA, United Church of Christ, American Baptist Churches, USA, and Disciples of Christ. In his earlier work, Hutchison identified Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregational, Episcopal/Anglican, Baptist, Disciples of Christ within the liberal movement. The Pew Research Center Religion and Public Life, “America’s Changing Religious Landscape: Christians Decline sharply as Share of Population; Unaffiliated and Other Faiths Continue to Grow,” (May 12, 2015) identifies Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Baptist, Episcopalian/Anglican, Congregational, Disciples of Christ, Restorationist, Anabaptist, Friends (Quakers), Reformed and other smaller churches as mainline. An evangelical is defined as believing in: (a) the supreme authority of inspired Scripture for faith and practice; (b) the divinity of Jesus Christ as incarnate God; (c) Jesus

Protestant Innovative Evangelizing to Oral Cultures   365 Christ as savior and the only means of saving sinful humanity; (d) the importance of personal conversion as the central criterion for salvation; (e) a commitment to sharing the transforming “good news” of new life in Jesus Christ which comes by God’s Grace alone through faith in the crucified and risen savior. Evangelicalism experienced diverse growth and expanded into a much broader category made up of numerous subgroups (Marsden, George 1991). Pentecostals derived their theology from common sources in the nineteenth century including the Christian higher life or Keswick movement and the teachings of J.N. Darby (dispensational premillennialism). These were movements heavily influenced by the holiness tradition coming out of Wesleyan perfectionism. In this chapter, I use the term “evangelical” to encompass holiness churches and denominations that formed during the first decades of the twentieth century, including Keswickian faith missions such as the Central American Mission (CAM), known today as Camino Global, Wycliffe Bible Translators and its sister organization, Summer Institute of Linguistics, and Christian and Missionary Alliance/Christian Missionary Alliance. Pentecostals are defined as sharing the characteristics of evangelicals plus the belief in the experience of glossolalia—speaking in tongues—accompanying Holy Spirit baptism. The evidence of glossolalia was interpreted as a return to the apostolic experience of the Book of Acts and one of the signs of the second coming of Christ. Pentecostals also believe in miracles, particularly miracle healings, and other manifestations of the Holy Spirit. The two largest Pentecostal denominations in Guatemala are the Church of God Full Gospel and the Assemblies of God. Neo-Pentecostals, in Guatemala, share a slightly different understanding of who they are from the U.S. definition of neo-Pentecostal. Neo-Pentecostals in Guatemala define themselves as: (1) emphasizing the anointing with the Holy Spirit and the use of charismas; (2) a strong emphasis on miracles, wonders, and prophecying; (3) an emphasis on evangelization; (4) salvation as a gift of God’s grace which cannot be lost; (5) the gospel of health and wealth; (6) spiritual warfare between good and evil, and (7) an increasing trend emphasizing post-millennial eschatology. Two important distinctions need to be made. First, unlike historical Pentecostals, neo-Pentecostals do not stress Holy Spirit baptism accompanied by glossolalia. Second, neo-Pentecostals should not be confused with neo-Charismatics. Neo-Pentecostals are Protestants. By contrast, neo-Charismatics, within the Guatemalan context, are Roman Catholics who believe in charisma. “Whenever some groups made up of people from the Catholic Church practice “these gifts” and are called “Charismatics,” the Protestnats who use the same “gifts” or “charismas” (at least in Guatemala), prefer not to be called “Charismatic” in order to be differentiated from the Catholic groups. These groups are relatively new, and their emphasis is similar to the traditional Pentecostals, and they call themselves “Neo-Pentecostals” (Virgilio Zapata 1982: 151–152). 2. Hana Muzika Kahn, “Modern Guatemalan Mayan Literature in Cultural Context: Bilinguaging in the Literary Work of Bilingual Mayan Authors” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, 2008). 3. Radio was introduced to Guatemala in the 1940s and the transistor radio was invented in 1952 with its introduction quickly made into Guatemala. 4. Abigail  E.  Adams, “Making One Our Word: Protestant Q’eqchi’ Mayas in Highland Guatemala,” in Holy Saints and Fiery Preachers: The Anthropology of Protestantism in Mexico and Central America, ed. James W. Dow and Alan R. Sandstrom (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 205–34; Virginia, Garrard-Burnett, Protestantism in Guatemala: Living in the New Jerusalem (Austin, TX: University of Texas, 1998).

366   Rachel M. McCleary 5. Adams, “Making One Our Word: Protestant Q’eqchi’ Mayas in Highland Guatemala,” 217, suggests that the first Gospel to be translated into indigenous languages in Guatemala was the Gospel of John. In fact, the first book of the New Testament to be translated into an indigenous language tended to be the Gospel of Mark, the first translation occurring in 1898 by Felipe Silva in K’iche’. In 1980, as the Kakchiquel Multiple Translation Project was beginning, the political situation was such that it was uncertain how long the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) staff would be able to work in Guatemala. Kakchiquel Multiple Translation Project indigenous leaders made the decision to translate at least one Gospel in each of the dialects of Kakchiquel. “Mark, being the shortest of the four seemed the ideal choice. Next, a practical epistle, James was chosen if we should get the chance to continue with translation. Then Acts, as it would complete the NT history section, then John, as the gospel differed from the other three, then 1st Thessalonians- Philemon, as easier epistles to translate, and no particular order after that.” Tim Carey, Summer Institute of Linguistics missionary, writing in an email to Rick MacArthur, Summer Institute of Linguistics missionary to Guatemala, October 24, 2011. Also, Adams, in her article, “The Transformation of Tzuultaqa\Jorge Ubico, Protestants and Other Verapaz Maya at the Crossroads of Community, State and the Transnational Interest,” The Journal of Latin American Anthropology 6, no. 2 (2001), 222, cites James Hudson, former missionary Director of the Nazarene Church in Guatemala: “In 1953, the mission established a Q’eqchi’ Educational Center in San Juan Chamelco, where both men and women could learn to read and write in Q’eqchi’, and then in Spanish (Hudson 1976).” More precisely, the Nazarenes established a K’ekchi-Pocom Bible training school in San Juan Chamelco primarily for evangelizing purposes; see, James Hudson, Guatemala: 60 Years (Kansas City, MO: Nazarene, 1976), 55, and Lorraine O. Schultz, Bringing God’s Word to Guatemala. The Life and Work of William and Betty Sedat (Kansas City, MO: Nazarene, 1995), 51–52. The distinction between an “educational center” and a “Bible training institute” is significant. Nazarenes were teaching the K’ekchi and Pocom speakers to be Christians and to acquire skills (music, teaching methods, child evangelism, doctrinal topics) so that they could be “sent into neighboring villages and plantations to teach such lessons as the Ten Commandments and the Bible way of salvation” (Schultz, Bringing God’s Word to Guatemala, 51–52). The K’ekchi-Pocom Bible training institute in San Juan Chamelco was eventually moved to Cobán. 6. The 1898 K’iche’ Gospel of Mark was commissioned by the British and Foreign Bible Society under the supervision of F.de P. Castells, sub-agent for the Society. The translation was done by Felipe Silva, a government official. The government printing press in Guatemala City published 1000 copies of the K’iche’ Gospel of Mark. Castells distributed all of the copies within four months of the printing. A second printing was done in Costa Rica and a third in Belize. By 1909, 7000 copies of the K’iche’ Gospel of Mark were printed and distributed. William A. Canton, History of the British and Foreign Bible Society, vol. 5 (London: John Murray, 1910), 351–55. 7. Literacy rates in indigenous languages were not measured as the government’s goal was the castellanization and assimilation of the indigenous populations. Ivonne Heinze Belcazar, “Education Policy and Language Shift in Guatemala,” in International Perspectives on Bilingual Education: Policy, Practice, and Controversy, ed. John E. Petrovic (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2010), 43–68; especially 49. 8. For a discussion of the bias of the supremacy of literate/print based societies over oral/ aural ones, see Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man (New

Protestant Innovative Evangelizing to Oral Cultures   367 York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1964), Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1982), and Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things, Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), and Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communication and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, vols. I and II in one volume. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), especially Chapter 4, “The Scriptural Tradition Recast: Resetting the Stage for the Reformation,” 303–452. 9. The Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) officially entered Guatemala in 1948. “The SIL required formal government invitation but was actually invited in by the Protestant missions such as the Central American Mission, Presbyterian Church-USA, and Primitive Methodist Church.” Interview with Steve Elliott, August 7, 2011. The first National Linguistic Conference (Congreso Linguistico Nacional) was held in 1949 to address the indigenous problem of integration into Spanish-speaking society and the high illiteracy rates. It was decided that a standard orthography would be developed for the four main languages: K’iche’, Mam, Kakchiiquel, and Ke’kchi. The other languages would follow the same model once it was decided upon. The SIL was set up as the legal entity within Guatemala to work on the standard orthography for the four major indigenous languages (Alfabeto para los Cuatro Idiomas Indigenas Mayoritarios de Guatemala: Quiche, Cakchiquel, Mam y Kekchi. Publicaciones especiales del Instituto Indigenista Nacional No. 10. Edicion extraordinaria, Guatemala City: Ministerio de Educacion Publica, 1950). In 1970, SIL signed a contract with the United States Agency for International Development and the Government of Guatemala to set up pilot primary schools in rural areas for indigenous and ladino children. The purpose was to introduce didactic materials developed by SIL in Spanish and the principal indigenous language into the classroom. The ultimate goal of the program with regard to indigenous children was their assimilation into Spanish and the Spanish-speaking ladino culture (Interview with Steve Elliott, August 7, 2011; William L Svelmoe, “ ‘We Do Not Want to Masquerade as Linguists’: A Short History of SIL and the Academy,” Language 85, no. 3 (September 2009), 619–29. 10. The case of Tzutujil speakers in and around San Pedro La Laguna, Sololá, is an example of oral/aural culture that has resisted literacy. One might argue that the introduction of cassette tapes in the late 1960s and early 1970s, before public schools were prevalent, might have buttressed the linguistic group’s resistance to literacy. However, this is not a  viable argument as the Tzutujil use Spanish in economic and other activities. (“The Tzutujil and the Butlers: A lesson in orality,” http://www.vinyastudios.org/en/home/ gtcontext/oralliteracy.php). 11. David Douglas Daniels uses five categories to analyze the history of Pentecostal sounds: Sonic, soundscape, sound, soundways, and syntax. In this chapter, my focus is on the oral and aural nature of Pentecostalism when compared with those Protestant missions that focused on translation of the Bible, backing into literacy as a result, see David Douglas Daniels III, “’Gotta Moan Sometime’: A Sonic Exploration of Earwitnesses to Early Pentecostal Sound in North America.” Pneuma 30 (2008), 5–32. 12. Karl-Wilhelm Westmeier, Protestant Pentecostalism in Latin America: A Study in the Dynamics of Missions (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999), 21. 13. Virginia H. Hine, “Pentecostal Glossolalia toward a Functional Interpretation,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 8, no. 2 (Autumn 1969), 212. 14. Bruce A. Rosenberg, “The Message of the American Folk Sermon,” Oral Tradition 1, no. 3 (1986), 700.

368   Rachel M. McCleary 15. Quentin  J.  Schultze, “Catholic vs. Protestant: Mass-Mediated Legitimation of Popular Evangelicalism in Guatemala,” Public Relations Review 18, no. 3 (1992), 259; Rosenberg, “The Message of the American Folk Sermon,” 713. 16. Russell P. Spittler, “Implicit Values in Pentecostal Missions,” Missiology: An International Review 16, no. 4 (October 1988), 411–16. 17. Spittler, “Implicit Values in Pentecostal Missions,” 420. 18. The Summer Institute of Linguistics lists 27 individual indigenous languages for Guatemala. Of these, 26 are living and one is extinct. See http://www.ethnologue.com/ country/GT. The Guatemalan government recognizes 21 indigenous languages, not including Spanish. 19. Edward Haymaker, cited in Hugh Milton Coke, “An Ethnohistory of Bible Translation among the Maya” (PhD diss., Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA, 1978), 171. 20. Protestant missions in geographic regions where Catholicism had a monopoly, for example Guatemala, succeeded in large part due to an indolent Catholic hierarchy, a paucity of national priests, official prohibitions on vernacular Bibles coupled with limited reading of the Latin Vulgate by ordained clergy or, in their absence, by a native maestro cantor. A culture of discouraging lay access to reading the Bible was actively enforced by the Catholic Church up until Vatican II. 21. William Lawrence Svelmoe, A New Vision for Missions: William Cameron Townsend, the Wycliffe Bible Translators, and the Culture of Early Evangelical Faith Missions, 1896–1945 (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2008), 24–30. 22. Svelmoe, A New Vision for Missions, 216. 23. Hudson, Guatemala: 60 Years, 33–34. 24. Antonio Goubaud Carrera, “Notes on San Juan Chamelco, Alta Verapaz,” University of Chicago Microfilm Collection of Manuscripts of Middle American Cultural Anthropology, No. 23 (1949), 76. 25. Rachel M. McCleary and Jonatan Lemus Avila, “Evangelizing at the Expense of Educating,” unpublished manuscript, 2011. 26. The term “ladino” as commonly used in Guatemala refers to a Spanish-speaking person (female or male) whose clothing, language, and customs are not expressions of an indigenous culture; see Paul Burgess, Justo Rufino Barrios: A Biography (Quetzaltenango: El Noticiero Evangelico, 1946), 27n1. According to Sol Tax, the term “ladino” was first used in the sixteenth century to refer to indigenous people who were acculturated to Spanish culture; see Tax, “World View and Social Relations in Guatemala,” American Anthropologist, New Series, 43, no. 1 (January–March 1941), 28. Amos Megged suggests that the term ­“mestizo” was frequently subsumed within the term “creole” for reasons of legitimating illegitimate children as well as the increasing mestizo population in colonial Guatemala. See Megged, “The Rise of the Creole Identity in Early Colonial Guatemala: Differential Patterns in Town and Countryside,” Social History 17, no. 3 (October 1992), 427, 429. 27. Hudson, Guatemala: 60 Years, 26; Wilkins Bowdre Winn, “A History of the Central American Mission as seen in the Work of Albert Edward Bishop, 1896–1922” (PhD diss., University of Alabama, 1964), 127–31; Wilkins Bowdre Winn, “Albert Edward Bishop and the Establishment of the Central American Mission in Guatemala, 1899–1922,” in Militarists, Merchants, and Missionaries, ed. Eugene R. Huck and Alfred Barnaby Thomas (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama, 1970), 98.

Protestant Innovative Evangelizing to Oral Cultures   369 28. Rufus Anderson, Foreign Missions, Their Relations and Claims (New York, NY: Scribner, 1869), and Wilbert R. Shenk, Henry Venn, Missionary Statesman (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983). 29. Venn quotation in Melvin Hodges, The Indigenous Church (Springfield, MO: Gospel, 1953). 30. The humanitarian response to the 1976 earthquake in the form of funds and equipment from the United States brought to the fore existing tensions between indigenous leadership and missionaries. For example, the Primitive Methodist missionaries were confronted by the Guatemalan National Conference to decide the distribution of emergency funds from the International Missionary Board and to oversee reconstruction projects; see Margaret N. Hays, An Outline History of Fifty Years, 1922–1972 (Primitive Methodist International Mission Board, 1972), 61–63. 31. Alice Pullin, In the Morning, Sow (Cleveland, TN: Church of God Foreign Missions, no date), 13, 15. 32. Central American Bulletin 1.1 (1893): 2. 33. Smaller than the Wesleyan class meetings were the homogenous band-meetings consisting of four or five persons; see Matthew Simpson, Cyclopedia of Methodism, rev. ed. (Philadelphia, PA: Louis H. Everts, 1880), 84–85, and Frank Baker, John Wesley and the Church of England (London: Epworth Press, 2000), 77. The smaller band group was originally intended to be an opportunity to raise issues unique to those sharing similar circumstances or characteristics. Wesley instituted the bands as a forum for moral teaching and enforcement of the moral code of Methodist (Simpson, Cyclopedia, 84–85). The mission bands of the Pentecostal and evangelical churches in the late 1800s and early 1900s were formed to s­ upport missions and missionaries through prayer and offerings. 3 4. John T. Benson, Jr., Holiness Organized or Unorganized? A History 1898–1915. Pentecostal Mission Incorporated, Nashville, Tennessee (Nashville, TN: Trevecca Press, 1977), 63; Svelmoe, “A New Vision for Missions,” 73–74; Central American Bulletin 222 (1939): 1–2. 35. Edward  M.  Haymaker, “Footnotes to the Beginnings of the Evangelical Movement in Guatemala” (Guatemala: Unpublished manuscript, 1946), 17, 20; Anna Marie Dahlquist, Burgess of Guatemala (Langley, BC: CEDAR Books, 1985), 135, 143. 36. The 1902 earthquake, centered near Quetzaltenango, destroyed the Presbyterian station for a couple of years, with the missionaries leaving for the United States. The Presbyterian missionary in Guatemala City, Edward Haymaker, was having a difficult time. By contrast, the Central American Mission was expanding, working with the Holiness-Pentecostal missionaries and Bible colporteurs (agents who travel distributing Bibles and religious materials). Coke, “An Ethnohistory of Bible Translation among the Maya,” 175, n9; Thomas Edward Bogenschild, “The Roots of Fundamentalism in Liberal Guatemala: Missionary Ideologies and Local Response, 1882–1944” (PhD diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1992), 126–27. 37. Anna Marie Dahlquist, Trailblazers for Translators: The Chichicastenango Twelve (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1995), 26–43. Both the Presbyterian Board of Missions and the Central American Mission board had institutional policies of Spanish-only mission activities. Both boards were opposed to missionaries in the field introducing a new focus on indigenous groups, as it went against the policy in Guatemala of integrating the indigenous population into the ladino, Spanish-speaking culture. The Central American Mission had a theological objection as well. Cooperation with other Protestant denominations was “the anathema of God” (Dahlquist, Trailblazers for Translators, 50). However,

370   Rachel M. McCleary unlike the Presbyterian board, the Central American Mission board quickly accepted the indigenous approach to missions and the Latin American Indian Mission (Svelmoe, A New Vision for Missions, 98). 38. “SIL International is a faith-based nonprofit organization committed to serving language communities worldwide as they build capacity for sustainable language development. SIL does this primarily through research, translation, training and materials development. Founded in 1934, SIL (Summer Institute of Linguistics, Inc) has grown from a small summer linguistics training program with two students to a staff of over 5,500 coming from over 60 countries. SIL’s linguistic investigation exceeds 2,590 languages spoken by over 1.7 billion people in nearly 100 countries. The organization makes its services available to all, without regard to religious belief, political ideology, gender, race or ethnolinguistic background.” http://www.wycliffe.org/About/AssociatedOrganizations/SILInternational.aspx. 39. Adams, “Making One Our Word,” 217. 40. Coke, “An Ethnohistory of Bible Translation among the Maya,” 163–66, 164, Figure 9. 41. Schultz, Bringing God’s Word to Guatemala, 84. 42. Telephone interview with Leticia Beltran, Americas Area Director, the Seed Company, Wycliffe Bible Translators Affiliate, April 21, 2014. Translators today enter their work into a software called Paratext put out by the United Bible Societies (http://paratext.ubs-translations.org/). The software allows them to upload onto the website (it is a database), where it can be accessed by other translators. 43. Winn, “A History of the Central American Mission,” 31. 44. Hays, An Outline History of Fifty Years, 41; Albert Julian Lloret, “The Maya Evangelical Church in Guatemala” (PhD diss., Dallas Theological Seminary, Dallas, TX, 1976), 130, 132. 45. Coke, “An Ethnohistory of Bible Translation among the Maya,” 187–88; Schultz, Bringing God’s Word to Guatemala, 51–52. 46. Haymaker, “Footnotes,” 84. 47. Lloret, “The Maya Evangelical Church in Guatemala,” 138; Coke, “An Ethnohistory of Bible Translation among the Maya,” 199. 48. Coke “An Ethnohistory of Bible Translation among the Maya,” 196–97. 4 9. Mildred W. Spain, “And in Samaria”: A Story of More than Sixty Years’ Missionary Witness in Central America, 1890–1954, rev. ed. (Dallas, TX: The Central American Mission, 1954), 168. 50. Eunice  V.  Pike, Not Alone (Chicago, IL: The Moody Bible Institute of Chicago, 1964), 148–49. 51. Reverend John Thomas and Lena Hertenstein Butler, accompanied by Emma Goodwin, were the first Pentecostal Mission missionaries (Hudson, Guatemala: 60 Years, 21). They first went to El Rancho in the department of El Progreso, and then moved to the town of Zacapa, the capital of the department by the same name. The Butlers were financed by the proceeds from the sale of the Pentecostal Mission’s weekly paper, Living Water (Benson, Holiness Organized or Unorganized?, 63; William  J.  Strickland with H.  Ray Dunning, J. O. McClurkan: His Life, His Theology, and Selections from His Writings (Nashville, TN: Trevecca Press, 1998), 26). Conway G. Anderson and Miss Willie Barnett, missionaries of the Tabernacle Church of Greenville, South Carolina, settled in Zacapa. In 1904, Conway’s nephew, Richard Anderson, and his wife, Annie Maude, became Tabernacle missionaries to Guatemala. In 1906, Effie Mae Glover, a student of the Altamont Bible and Missionary Institute, Greenville, South Carolina (today the Holmes Bible College), began mission work in Guatemala with Reverend J. T. Butler and his second wife, Mary. In 1908, Amos Bradley arrived in Guatemala as an independent Pentecostal missionary supported by

Protestant Innovative Evangelizing to Oral Cultures   371 Mrs. Frank Nabors of Birmingham, Alabama (June Canavesio, “International Pentecostal Holiness Church, Guatemalan History for Simultaneous Principle,” International Pentecostal Holiness Church Archives and Research Center, Oklahoma City, OK, unpublished manuscript, 2005, 2). In 1909, Effie and Amos Bradley were married in Zacapa. They continued working as independent Pentecostal missionaries in San Jerónimo, Baja Verapaz. In 1912, the Bradleys joined the Holiness Pentecostal Church and went to El Salvador. Amos and Effie Bradley were supported by the Georgia Pentecostal Holiness Convention and later the North Carolina Pentecostal Holiness Church (The Pentecostal Holiness Advocate 4, no. 49 [April 7, 1932], 9). When Conway Anderson left the Guatemalan mission field in 1916 because of the adverse effects of the tropical weather in Zacapa, they lived in Guatemala City and commuted by train to Zacapa, their appointed mission area. After the devastating 1918 earthquake, the Bradleys were recalled from Guatemala. In 1922, the Bradleys returned as Primitive Methodist missionaries in the department of Totonicapán, residing in San Cristóbal, and later Chichicastenango, El Quiché (Hays, An Outline History of Fifty Years, 16; Canavesio, “International Pentecostal Holiness Church,” 6). They ended their affiliation with the Primitive Methodist Church in 1930 and returned to the United States. It is noteworthy that the Primitive Methodist Foreign Missionary Board was contracting Pentecostals to serve in Guatemala. The Bradleys were Pentecostals in that they believed in Holy Spirit baptism and glossolalia. The second Pentecostal couple to be hired by the Primitive Methodists were Carrie and Charles Truman Furman, who were of Turtle Creek, Pennsylvania, affiliation. Unlike the Bradleys, who were holiness-Pentecostal, the Trumans were strictly Pentecostal. Doctrinal differences over glossolalia between the Primitive Methodist Church, which is holiness evangelical, and the Trumans created disputes, leading to a schism in 1934. The Bradleys, unlike Charles Truman Furman, had good relations with the other missionaries (Dalhquist, Trailblazers for Translators, 118–20; Canavesio, “International Pentecostal Holiness Church,” 6). Bradley, with Presbyterian missionary Paul Burgess, translated the Gospels of John and Matthew into K’ekchi’. This represents the beginning of the Primitive Methodist’s mission board’s commitment, both in terms of translators and funds, to the translation of the Bible in K’iche’. Bradley did not continue translation work when he became a missionary in 1932 for the Pentecostal Holiness Church. (Bradley had been a Pentecostal Holiness Church missionary in El Salvador and Guatemala during 1912–1918.) However, the Primitive Methodist translation work continues today with missionary William Vasey and indigenous translators (email correspondence with William Vasey, August 31; September 5, 6, and 8, 2011). 52. Hudson, Guatemala: 60 Years, 23. 53. In 1916 two brothers, Frank and William Casley, founded The United Free Gospel and Missionary Society, an independent Pentecostal church, with an early emphasis on missions. Similar to the Assemblies of God in doctrine, the Society changed its name in 1957 to the Free Gospel Church. Stanley M. Burgess and Gary R. McGee, eds., Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movement (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, Regency Reference Library, 1988), 57. 54. A comity agreement was a non-compete informal contract in which other missions agreed not to enter into the designated geographic territory of other Protestant missions for evangelizing purposes. The first comity agreement was in 1907 between the Presbyterian, Central American Mission, Friends, and Nazarenes (Thomas Edward Bogenschild, “The Roots of Fundamentalism in Western Guatemala, 1900–1944,” Paper presented at the

372   Rachel M. McCleary Latin American Studies Association Meeting, Crystal City, Virginia, April 4, 1991, 6n13). The second comity agreement was in 1916 among the Presbyterian, Central American Mission, Friends, and the Nazarene missions. In 1916, the Church of Nazarene’s first missionaries to Guatemala were Richard and Anna Maude Anderson. Their church, Tabernacle Church, merged with the Nazarene Church in 1916. The Church of the Nazarene is an evangelical denomination that does not believe in glossolalia. 55. Lloret, “The Maya Evangelical Church in Guatemala,” 126–27. 56. Denzell Teague, “A History of the Church of God in Guatemala” (Master of Arts thesis, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Lee College, 1966), 45, 64, 68; Hays, An Outline History of Fifty Years, 34; Lloret, “The Maya Evangelical Church in Guatemala,” 75, 81, 104, 110, 136–37, 152, 181–82, 204–05; Pullin, In the Morning, Sow, 58; Richard Eugene Waldrop, “An Historical and Critical Review of the Full Gospel Church of Guatemala” (PhD diss., Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA, 1993), 47, 60–61. 57. The revivals took place in indigenous municipalities and towns: 1932, San Cristóbal, Totonicapán and spread to Nebaj; 1936–1937, Llano Grande, Nebaj, El Quiché; 1938, Chichicastenango, El Quiché; 1939, Santa Cruz del Quiché, El Quiché; 1942, Guatemala City as a result of guest preaching by José María Enriquez, José Cruz Figueroa, and Herminio Cabrera (Waldrop, “An Historical and Critical Review of the Full Gospel Church of Guatemala,” 31). 58. Pullin, In the Morning, Sow, 54–57. 59. Charles W. Conn, Where the Saints Have Trod: A History of the Church of Gods Missions (Cleveland, TN: Pathway Press, 1959), 134–36; Hays, An Outline History of Fifty Years, 19–20. See footnote 16 for a detailed account. 60. Hays, An Outline History of Fifty Years, 20. 61. Peggy Humphrey, J.  H.  Ingram: Missionary Dean, Church of God World Missions (Cleveland, TN: Pathway Press, 1966), 72–73; Pullin, In the Morning, Sow, 60–61. 62. Lloret, “The Maya Evangelical Church in Guatemala,” 195–97. 63. In the 1950s, US-based mass evangelistic crusades occurred in Guatemala. The first “United Evangelistic Campaign” held in Guatemala took place in 1950, coinciding with the Central American Sports Games and a National Fair in Guatemala City (Clifton L. Holland, Expanded Status of Christianity: Country Profile: Guatemala, 1980, rev. ed. 2006, San Pedro, Costa Rica: Latin America Socio-Religious Studies Program [PROLADES], 1982, 85). Rev. Harold Van Broekhoven, a Central American Mission missionary, coordinated the crusade with Virgilio Zapata, a Guatemalan who was an influential Christian evangelist. A large tent was put up in the Mateo Flores Olympic Stadium in Guatemala City. Over the course of four weeks, thousands of people attended the services. The evangelistic campaigns of the Church of God in the 1950s led to a definite shift in evangelizing strategy on the part of Protestant churches in the early 1960s, bringing attention to the need for a focus on a national level to indigenous evangelization. For example, in 1960 a Nazarene Church held an evangelical crusade named “Evangelism First” (Evangelismo Primero) (Hudson, Guatemala: 60 Years, 48–50). Unlike previous evangelical campaigns that focused primarily on Guatemala City, in 1962 the Evangelism in Depth (at that time part of Latin American Mission) evangelistic campaign was nationally coordinated and conducted throughout the country. The campaign focused on educating congregations and their leaders in evangelism techniques such as door-to-door visitation, prayer cells, testimonials (personal evangelism), and stewardship (Hays, An Outline History of Fifty Years, 34). One only need read accounts of the US evangelist Dwight  L.  Moody’s (1837–1899)

Protestant Innovative Evangelizing to Oral Cultures   373 revival  campaigns to see where the missionaries and the Latin American Mission borrowed their techniques. Moody’s evangelistic career occurred within a revival tradition that includes George Whitfield, John Wesley, Charles Finney, Billy Sunday, Billy Graham, and others. Moody’s revival campaigns included weekly prayer meetings and city-wide door-to-door canvassing, with volunteers distributing thousands of religious tracts, Bibles and portions thereof, as well as his religious newspaper. Moody’s revival services were based on Charles Finney’s principle that God spiritually revives people through their “excitability,” which extends beyond the individual believer to the entire crowd. Revival meetings were characterized as “an epidemic of frights and frenzies,” “a restless energy” with “fiery appeals and tearful songs” (Bruce J. Evensen, “ ‘It is a Marvel to Many People’: Dwight L. Moody, Mass Media, and the New England Revival of 1877,” The New England Quarterly 72, no. 2 [June 1999], 265). 64. In a three-month period—February to March of 1953—James Beaty informed his mission board that 8,000 individuals had been converted and hundreds faith-healed (Teague, “A History of the Church of God in Guatemala,” 73). 65. Teague, “A History of the Church of God in Guatemala,” 63; T. L. Osborn, Personal Diary Notes: Centennial Crusade, February 1953 (Tulsa, OK: Osborn, 2001). 66. Waldrop, “An Historical and Critical Review,” 85–86. 67. Teague, “A History of the Church of God in Guatemala,” 74. 6 8. Hays, An Outline History of Fifty Years, 34. 69. Teague, “A History of the Church of God in Guatemala,” Plate VI. 7 0. Ibid., 81. 7 1. Hays, An Outline History of Fifty Years, 28. 7 2. Ibid., 53. 73. Andy and Karen Weaver, The CAB Family, 1952–2001 (Guatemala: Instituto Linguistico de Verano de Centroamerica, 2001), 31. 74. Winn, “A History of the Central American Mission,” 29. 75. Russell Birchard and Margaret Anderson, Richard Simpson Anderson: Pioneer Missionary to Central America (Kansas City, MO: Nazarene, 1990), 21–22; Pullin, In the Morning, Sow, 13, 26, 30. 76. Coke, “An Ethnohistory of Bible Translation among the Maya,” 241. 77. Olive G. Tracy, We Have Seen the Sun: The Work of the Nazarene among the Indian Tribes of Guatemala (Kansas City, MO: Nazarene, 1961), 80. 78. “The simple CardTalk cardboard player was developed to play phonograph records without electricity. It’s ingenious design allowed the sound to be played through a needle on the  cardboard sleeve, which doubled as an amplifier.” http://globalrecordings.net/en/ cardtalk. 79. Tracy, We Have Seen the Sun, 26. 80. “Some friends, the Sywulkas, translated the whole Bible for the Mam language. But before the missionaries were able to get the language written down, Gospel Recordings had been there. People were hearing the Word from the recordings!” retired missionaries to Guatemala, Bob and Dorothy Rice, http://globalrecordings.net/en/testimony-guatemala. 81. Schultz, Bringing God’s Word to Guatemala, 62. 82. “In the late 1950s, the American Bible Society devised the finger-fono, powered by the turn of one finger. The finger-fono produced sound through a diaphragm (an acoustic device) and a needle located in the arm, and required no electric power, spring or mechanical device. It was made of plastic, inexpensive to produce, easy to ship and practical for use in

374   Rachel M. McCleary all climates. The purpose of the finger-fono was to make the Scriptures available to people who could not read.” American Bible Society News accessed http://news.americanbible.org/article/ Scripture-via-phonograph, November 9, 2015. The numbers of finger-fono records distributed in Guatemala between 1958 and 1964 was: K’ekchi 995 records; K’iche’ 305; Conob 511; and Mam 152. The author’s email correspondence with Kristin Miller Hellmann, Manager of Library Services American Bible Society, March 21, 2011. 83. Tracy, We Have Seen the Sun, 28–29; Lloret, “The Maya Evangelical Church in Guatemala,” 130; Coke, “An Ethnohistory of Bible Translation among the Maya,” 300. 8 4. Príncipe de Paz is a national Pentecostal denomination that split off from the Assemblies of God in 1955. Interview with Marco Vinicio Martínez, Director of Programs and Projects, Guatemala Bible Society, August 1, 2011; interview with Cristobal Montejo, General Superintendent, Assemblies of God, January 12, 2012; interview with Heberto García, General Superintendent, Church of God Full Gospel, January 9, 2012. 85. Haymaker, “Footnotes,” 29; Winn, “A History of the Central American Mission,” 30; Winn, “Albert Edward Bishop,” 93; Pullin, In the Morning, Sow, 26. 86. Winn, “A History of the Central American Mission,” 36; Teague, “A History of the Church of God in Guatemala,” 100. 87. Hays, An Outline History of Fifty Years, 53. 88. Waldrop, “An Historical and Critical Review,” 37. 89. Winn, “A History of the Central American Mission,” 29–30. 90. Dahlquist, Trailblazers for Translators, 131. 91. Schultz, Bringing God’s Word to Guatemala, 91. 92. The saints’ cults were introduced by the Spaniards in 1540 as a means of converting the indigenous population to Roman Catholicism. “Each indigenous community over time was assigned [the process was, of course, not always top down, with towns sometimes generating their own saints or miraculous events] a saint and feast day” (Antonio de Remesal, Historia general de las Indias occidentales y particular de la gobernación de Chiapa y Guatemala, tomo I, Libros I a VI. Edición y estudio preliminar de Carmelo Sáenz de Santa María [Madrid, España: Ediciones Atlas], 246). Today, cities, towns, and indigenous communities (cantones and caseríos) have a saint feast day that is celebrated over a short period of days with dancing, religious ritual, and social interaction at a fair (Ruben E. Reina, Chinautla, a Guatemalan Indian Community: A Study in the Relationship of Community Culture and National Change. Publication no. 24 [New Orleans, LA: Middle American Research Institute, Tulane University, 1960], 133; 142–62). A saint’s feast day is a fiesta del pueblo, or public communal event, at which performances of dances take place and a fair occurs. Musicians and fireworks technicians may be hired from outside the community, dance costumes are rented from a morería in another town, and candles are purchased from a major city. Merchants from the region come and sell their goods at the fair as part of the celebration. 93. A morería is a business, owned by a family, where costumes for the various dances are made. Morerías were concentrated in the towns in the highlands, as only indigenous communities perform the traditional dances. The more well-known ones are located in Totonicapán and El Quiché. 94. Tracy, We Have Seen the Sun, 80–81; Teague, “A History of the Church of God in Guatemala,” 100–01; Central American Bulletin 403 (1967): 10–11; William C. Vaughters, Fruits of Progress: The Church of the Nazarene in Mexico and Central America (Kansas

Protestant Innovative Evangelizing to Oral Cultures   375 City, MO: Nazarene, 1968), 102; Lloret, “The Maya Evangelical Church in Guatemala,” 150; Schultz, Bringing God’s Word to Guatemala, 90–91. 95. Winn, “A History of the Central American Mission,” 35. 96. Tracy, We Have Seen the Sun, 66. 97. Pullin, In the Morning, Sow, 35–36. 98. The Weekly Evangel (1969): 11. 99. Winn, We Have Seen the Sun, 35. 100. Haymaker, “Footnotes,” 30. 101. Bogenschild, “The Roots of Fundamentalism in Western Guatemala, 1900–1944,” 9. 102. Weaver, The CAB Family, 193. 103. Hays, An Outline History of Fifty Years, 55. 104. Carrie Mae Casey, “Central America,” Bridegroom’s Messenger 6, no. 131 (April 15, 1913), 4; Willie E. Barnett, “Coban, Guat. C.A.” Bridegroom’s Messenger 6, no. 133 (May 15, 1913), 4. 105. “Remember the little brown faces among the hills in Central America, roaming here and there with not enough clothes to cover them; they perhaps have never had a good, warm bath. They are going through the streets looking and longing for something, they perhaps do not know what, but you mothers know they are longing for someone to love them.” Carrie May Casey, “From Central America,” Bridegroom’s Messenger 2, no. 43 (August 1, 1909), 3. “I see more and more the need, as I hear the pleas of mothers to me to take their fatherless children, mothers being too poor to take care of them.” Eula Fay Watson, “Coban, Guatemala, C.A.” Bridegroom’s Messenger 5, no. 104 (February 15, 1912), 3. 106. Amos Bradley, “From Central America,” Bridegroom’s Messenger 3, no. 49 (November 1, 1909): 2. 107. http://jesusfilm.org/. 1 08. The Jesus Film map shows where the film has been shown and in which languages. http:// worldmap.org/country.php?ROG3=GT. 1 09. Weaver, The CAB Family, 193. 110. Schultze, “Catholic vs. Protestant,” 258. 111. The Weekly Evangel (April 9, 1949): 11. 112. TGNA (shortwave) and TGN (AM medium wave) are both known as Radio Cultural. 113. Lloret, “The Maya Evangelical Church in Guatemala,” 211. 114. Hays, An Outline History of Fifty Years, 33. 115. Lloret, “The Maya Evangelical Church in Guatemala,” 142–143. 116. Central American Bulletin (February 1967): 11. 117. Ibid. 118. Schultz, Bringing God’s Word to Guatemala, 258. 119. Holland, Expanded Status of Christianity, 83. 120. The Weekly Evangel, October 19, 1969, 26. 121. James Smallwood, “Radio Station TGNA in Guatemala,” Journal of the North American Shortwave Association (May 1979): 2–4. 122. The groups broadcasting were Central American Missions, Church of God Foreign Mission Board, Primitive Methodist Foreign Mission Board, Seventh-day Adventists, Southern Baptist Convention Foreign Mission Board, and the United Presbyterian Church/USA (Clyde  W.  Taylor and Wade  T.  Coggins, Protestant Missions in Latin America: A Statistical Survey (Washington, DC: Evangelical Foreign Missions Association, 1961), 152.

376   Rachel M. McCleary 123. Lloret, “The Maya Evangelical Church in Guatemala,” 288. 124. Thirteen of the evangelical radio stations were nonprofit (Schultze, “Catholic vs. Protestant,” 259). Roman Catholic radio stations were primarily established during the 1980s, many of them community radio stations with low frequencies. 125. A list of radio stations is being compiled with frequency strength and times programming in broadcast. The strongest frequency religious radio is TGNA. The Roman Catholic network has several radio stations in Guatemala. 126. Weaver, The CAB Family, 46. 127. Steve Sywulka, CAM International missionary, email correspondence, March 30, 2011. 128. Out of an estimated 620 radio stations in Guatemala. 129. Steve Sywulka, CAM International missionary, email correspondence, March 30, 2011. 130. Schultze, “Catholic vs. Protestant,” 259. 131. Néstor Raciel and Morales Mazariegos, “Análisis de contenido de spots radiofónicos de emisoras cristiano-evangelicas de amplitud modulada en la ciudad de Guatemala” (thesis, Universidad de San Carlos, Escuela de Ciencias de Comunicación, April 2008). 132. Schultze, “Catholic vs. Protestant,” 260–61. 133. The title “Apostle” is self-conferred in that each person claims that God declared this for him. 134. William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 95.

chapter 20

Liber ation Th eol ogy ’ s Spir itua l L egacy for the L ati n A m er ica n Ch u rch Harold Segura

The stormy decade of the 1960s occurred when, together with the stirring of new social and political revolutions, churches were also asking themselves how to renew their message of faith and how to proclaim the gospel in the midst of the poverty, social inequality, and violence that characterized Latin American countries in those years. The Catholic Church was experiencing the renewal movement of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), and Pope John XXIII, the “good pope,” announced that the moment to open the windows of the Church had arrived, so that the fresh breezes of renewal would blow upon and through her. This was the era of aggiornamento, of breathing in fresh air and giving a new face to the Church. Society in general was searching for answers to the rising problems of violence, social inequality, and the absolutism of many governments. Struggles within the Church were no small matter. The laity demanded a greater role in the life and liturgy of the community of faith. The Church sought to make authentic popular worship a reality, to validate the Bible in the theology and life of the entire Church, to interact with different cultures from the vantage point of the faith, and to open up spaces for ecumenical dialogue with Protestant churches, as well as with major non-Christian religions and new religious movements.1 Moreover, base communities of the so-called Third World countries raised their voices to demand that the Church take a stand against inequality and therefore demonstrate to a doubting world that the Church really was concerned about the miserable situation of the world’s poor.

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The Church of the Poor Months before the Second Vatican Council began, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli (Pope John XXIII) had expressed the urgency to focus on three points that could no longer be delayed. The first concerned how the Council should study the way in which the Church could speak about God in an increasingly atheistic world with numerous unbelievers. The second dealt with the unity of Christian believers and sought to answer the question, “How can we speak about Christ if we are separated in various Christian confessions?”2 Interestingly, some Latin American bishops recalled a story the pope told several of them a few days before the opening of the Council. Based upon their conversation, the pope “proposed an enlightened third issue. ‘The Church, faced with people of developing nations, discovers who she is and who she should be: the Church of the poor, that is, the Church of everyone.’ ”3 In mentioning “the poor,” they were not referring to poor individuals, but rather to the poverty of the world, and to something that would eventually become a central theme in the subsequent development of Latin American liberation theology: structural poverty. When the pope referred to this poverty, he was identifying the responsibility and guilt of unjust economic systems that contributed to the creation, emergence, and growth of poverty. When sessions began, Giovanni Batista Montini (who became Pope Paul VI), whom Pope John XXIII had named to be a personal assistant to the Council, addressed a group of bishops in a private meeting and said to them: Brother Bishops, we must discuss the option for the poor. We are not going to treat it as one theme in the Council, but as the theme of the Council. And if we don’t deal with it in depth, we will not have dealt with the other two topics: “how to speak about God in the face of atheism” and “the unity of Christians.” If we don’t have a Church that opts to stand with the poor, we are left without an answer for the other two challenges.4

In spite of the interest that John XXIII, his assistant, and a moderate group of bishops expressed in making poverty the central theme of the Council, this concern did not expand much further. The Council met in Western Europe. As such, this put a limit on giving priority to poverty because there simply were not many poor people there. Bishop Samuel Ruíz said that . . . the greatest poverty was hidden under the border that separated the First World and the Third World. If there weren’t many poor people in Europe, then you couldn’t really choose to have an option for them. Because the Church in Europe had almost no experience in becoming incarnate in the world of the poor, they could hardly have theological reflection about a non-existent pastoral activity. Therefore, although the topic of poverty was treated in theory, and on every page of the Council you can find mention of the poor, the topic was not dealt with in depth until the fathers who had attended the Council returned to Latin America.5

Liberation Theology’s Spiritual Legacy   379

In Light of Vatican II In Latin America, concerns were different. Therefore, in 1968, when the Second Latin American Episcopal Conference (CELAM) met in Medellín, Colombia, the deepest continental concerns emerged, with poverty being the most profoundly felt. The general theme of CELAM was “The Church in the Current Transformation of Latin America in Light of Vatican II.” Three major concerns were dealt with at Medellín. The first was the advancement of individuals and groups of people toward the values of justice, peace, education, and family. The second was the evangelization and the development of the faith of common people and elites through a new emphasis on catechism and liturgy. The third and final challenge was to deal with the problems faced by members of the Church—problems that were rooted in the new conditions of the continent—in unity and via pastoral action through the visible structures of the Church. However, of the three, the one that had the most repercussions was the first, the concern to advance the betterment of humanity. This one dealt with the risky themes of justice, peace, ­pastoral care among the poor, and other concerns that produced new, and frequently polemical, political commitments. With frankness, the Medellín conference affirmed its preferential option for the poor and it denounced many injustices. The final document reads, We wish to emphasize that the principal guilt for economic dependence of our countries rests with powers, inspired by uncontrolled desire for gains, which leads to economic dictatorship and the international imperialism of money (2.9e). . . . We here denounce the imperialism of any ideological bias that is exercised in Latin America either indirectly or through direct intervention (2.10). . . . Peace is, above all, a work of justice. It presupposes and requires the establishment of a just order in which men and women can fulfill themselves as men, where their dignity is respected, their legitimate aspirations satisfied, their access to truth recognized, their personal freedom guaranteed; an order where a man is not an object, but an agent of his own history. Therefore there will be attempts against peace where unjust inequalities among men and nations prevail (2.14).

As such, one can correctly affirm that 1968 witnessed a type of birth of liberation theology in the context of renewal stimulated by the Second Vatican Council and articulated in Medellín.

A New Way of Doing Theology Liberation theology, or liberation theologies—as preferred by some analysts—opened the door to the possibility of doing theology on the continent in a different way through a new form of living the faith and experiencing the Church.6 The Chilean Bishop Bernardino Piñera, speaking of his own experience, notes,

380   Harold Segura For us it was more like the rebirth of a Church that was committing itself to the poor and wanted to become incarnate among the people, that wanted to promote Base Ecclesial Communities, a new style of pastoral care, and a Church of the people.7

This way of theologizing was a new way of living out the faith; projecting it with effective love toward the impoverished. The newness of this theology was neither in the themes of oppression and injustice, nor the instrumental use of the social sciences, nor even the transformation of society into becoming more just and equitable. The newness really was . . . [T]he living incarnation of the theologian among the poor, understood as a ­collective reality, active and conflictive. . . . Everything begins with the poor. This is what separates the . . . liberation theology from all other theologies.8

Therefore, the theological task of this method, properly understood, begins when it attempts “to read that reality in light of the Word,” which means “going back to the sources of revelation,”9 as well as taking advantage of the social sciences and their analysis of our societal reality: . . . [T]his theology proposes a total liberation of humanity and reality: humanity’s holistic salvation here and now. Salvation is understood in terms of political liberation, a deep commitment to the poor and to the liberation from the oppressive structures in which they live.10

As for the pastoral dimension of this theological method, work with the “ecclesial base communities” (with their Bible study method: see, judge, and act) was intensified. There was a greater motivation for ecumenical dialogue, and new forms of interpreting popular Catholic religiosity emerged. Significantly, a new spirituality emerged that was more oriented toward compassionate action with the poor and the struggle for liberation.11 As a result of this process, Latin America began a fertile period of theological activity that led to deeper commitments to the social and political realities that had been so neglected by traditional theologies.12 But this theological endeavor also triggered a period of heated debates, premeditated judgments, ideological polarizations, and harsh persecutions. Pope John Paul II opposed the principal liberation theologians and sanctioned several of them, accusing them of being Marxist and of changing the faith of Jesus into a political ideology. In August 1984, more than ten years after Father Gustavo Gutiérrez had published his famous work Teología de la Liberación (1972), the prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, at that time Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI) issued a document warning faithful Catholics of the danger of “certain forms of Liberation Theology.” In the introduction, the Cardinal stated that the document’s purpose was . . . to draw the attention of pastors, theologians, and all the faithful to the deviations, and risks of deviation, damaging to the faith and to Christian living, that are brought

Liberation Theology’s Spiritual Legacy   381 about by certain forms of liberation theology which use, in an insufficiently critical manner, concepts borrowed from various currents of Marxist thought.13

From Medellín to Santo Domingo During the papacy of John Paul II (1978–2005), an “involution of the Church” took place, as the Chilean priest Pablo Richard appropriately named it—one that reinforced the Roman Curia, and its centralized institutional power, in contrast with the reforms that began with the Second Vatican Council. Another clear step away from the reforms of the Council was the extraordinary Bishop Synod in 1985 in which a crucial principle of the Second Vatican Council was abandoned: the concept of Church-People was substituted with Church-Communion. In Latin America, this “involution” became evident in the two subsequent Bishop Conferences after the Medellín conference in 1968. This was particularly obvious in the Santo Domingo conference of 1992.14 During these years, Pope John Paul II acted from Vatican City as the Church’s highest authority. He had moments of prophetic lucidity, such as when he spoke about foreign debt, the invasion of Iraq, world peace, and of being on the side of the world’s poor. He even caused an uproar in Brazil when he said that “liberation theology was not only timely, it was also useful and necessary.”15 However, between prophetic pronouncements and conservative decisions, in the end the results were negative, especially for all who participated in the liberation theology movement, as well as for those who had hoped that the Council called by John XXIII (1958–1963) would make progress during these times. The first years of the surging liberation theology created, on the one hand, a rich experience of social ministry among the popular roots of the Church, and on the other, a Church that was more attached to its institutional traditions, more fearful of losing its institutional vitality, and theologically reactionary. Pablo Richard, the eminent Catholic theologian, explains: Dogma, Power and the Law that became absolute in a Counter-Reform ecclesiastical movement were able to do much more than the Theology and the Spirit of the Reform of the Church that began in the Second Vatican Council. Here we have the root of the current Catholic conservatism.16

After more than four decades of history, liberation theology continues to be strong south of the Río Bravo and, in the rest of the world, such theology continues to serve both as a benchmark of theological social commitment and as a conceptual framework to deepen the relationship between faith and society and Christianity and politics, which is even stronger now, with the surprising change observed in Catholicism under the papacy of Pope Francis (born in Argentina, in the southern part of Latin America). Some ill-informed journalists have dared to say that a Marxist pope who is a follower of liberation theology rules the destinies of the Church from Vatican City. Such comments

382   Harold Segura demonstrate not only the ignorance of the theological temperament of Francis, but also ignorance about liberation theology. To honor the truth, one cannot ignore the fact that the liberating approach occurred not only within the Catholic Church, but also among Protestant and evangelical Christian movements of the hemisphere—although the impact among non-Catholic Christians may not have been as strong with respect to speculative theology as it was for practical spirituality. That is, spirituality teaches that the faith of Jesus cannot disregard the social realities of its context because, if it does, it fails in its fidelity to the gospel. Spirituality recognizes that God loves justice and God’s followers should become promoters of peace, dignity, and life lived in its fullest (John 10:10). Thus, the impact of liberation theology was not reduced only to the broad militant sectors of the Catholic Church and to the scarce, although significant, groups of Protestantism in those years. Yet, perhaps, what has helped most to awaken consciences, even more than the ­dogmatic approaches or doctrinal discussions, is liberation theology’s model of the ­spirituality of commitment, service, and solidarity within a hemisphere where social inequality advances with gigantic strides and where social injustices prevail throughout its long history.

Our Strongest Possession Almost all of the arguments against liberation theology have centered on condemning its theoretical foundations—its theological scaffolding, its philosophical framework, and its political preferences. However, few criticisms were leveled against its spirituality. Sadly, liberation theology’s critics were unaware of the primal motivation that inspired these theologians to give up their lives and to face the empire of political and ecclesiastical powers. Those who died as martyrs—and there were many—did so inspired by their spirituality. Those who condemned them thought that they had won a theoretical debate (Ratzinger, among them) but, seemingly, they were unaware of the spirituality that grounded the movement. (Or were they so detached, distant, abstracted, from the life of the poor, that these critics could hardly understand the deeper theological statements made by liberation theologians?) Luis Espinal, a priest assassinated in Bolivia on March 21, 1980, wrote this in one of his many poems: ¡Qué impotente es nuestro amor, Aunque sea lo más fuerte que poseemos! (How impotent is our love, Even though it is our strongest possession!)17

Truly, love is the strongest motivation for those involved in the liberation theology movement; their love for their neighbor and their immense, sometimes crazy, love for God moved them. Love is the essence of Christian spirituality, and they were experts in

Liberation Theology’s Spiritual Legacy   383 this love. Ernesto Cardenal, another of God’s “crazy lovers” for the cause of God’s poor of the world, said in one of his prayers, written as a poem: Yo nací para un amor extremista. Tal vez por eso nos comprendemos. ¡Más extremista sos vos! Y yo te conozco poco todavía. (I was born to express radical love. Perhaps that is why we understand each other so well. You are more radical than I! And I am just beginning to get to know you.)18

Since the very first years of the movement, emphasis was given to the spirituality that nurtured the commitment to the poor and the struggle against injustice. In his first published work in 1972, Gustavo Gutiérrez, the so-called father of liberation theology, knew that it was not sufficient to articulate a theology if it were not grounded in spirituality. He recognized that “theological categories are not sufficient. We need to have a living, global and synthetic attitude that shapes both the totality of our lives as well as every detail: a ‘spirituality.’ ”19 He defined “spirituality” as “a concrete expression, moved by the Spirit, of living the Gospel.”20 With this clarification, we can see that, from its earliest years, the liberation theology movement was a new way of doing theology, accompanied by a new way of living the gospel of Jesus. This same conviction was confirmed in the “Summa Teológica” of liberation theology— a work published in 1990 in two voluminous volumes entitled Mysterium liberationis: Conceptos fundamentales de la teología de la liberación and written under the direction of Ignacio Ellacuría and Jon Sobrino. Ellacuría was assassinated that same year in the city of San Salvador, El Salvador. In the chapter titled “Espiritualidad y seguimiento de Jesús,” Sobrino says, In Latin America, liberation theology has been very attentive to spirituality, and its task has been led by a determined spirit from the beginning . . . it has attempted to be a creative synthesis of what it means to be human and to be Christian in today’s real world.21

Spirituality, but Not Just Any Kind of Spirituality In the first twenty years of liberation theology, during the 1980s and the 1990s, liberation theologians searched for a relevant way for that theology to have a corresponding ­spirituality, but not just any kind of spirituality. The spirituality of the movement/ theology was one that encouraged commitment, an incarnational lifestyle, and a faith that had an impact in society. As such, a more effective and less contemplative spirituality was needed, one that would take the best of the Christian tradition, but one that

384   Harold Segura could incarnate itself in new challenges and experiences. In 1987, Segundo Galilea, a Latin American theologian and pastor, affirmed that “[t]he ‘new’ or renewed spirituality that we are seeking is at the same time traditional and ‘revolutionary,’ in the evangelical and not the ideological meaning of these terms.”22 However, Galilea explained that it was necessary to develop a spirituality that would not degenerate into mere social activism, but rather would reaffirm the essence of Christianity: . . . Christian spirituality is not merely a commitment to the wellbeing of our neighbors or to the cause of the poor. . . . It is also the motivation and the mystique that bathes and inspires our commitment. Spirituality is not merely giving yourself to a larger cause that helps you to overcome selfishness. . . but rather evangelical motives for what you do . . . it is the mystical inspiration that becomes an explicit experience of faith and following of Jesus.23

From this integration between inspiration and experience, between mysticism and commitment, between contemplation and projection, came the biggest contribution to spirituality in Latin America. Among its distinctive traits are its prophetic value, supportive attitude, ecumenical openness, utopian passion, political commitment, ecological responsibility, passion for life, pastoral zeal, and work in favor of peace with social justice.24 Thoughtful reflection upon this legacy of liberationist spirituality is one of the unfinished challenges for both the Catholic and Protestant faith in Latin America. Next, this chapter highlights some of liberation theology’s major contributions to Christian spirituality.

Effective Love, the Soul of Spirituality This affirmation says nothing new. The truth is that all the great classics of spirituality accentuated a love for God and for neighbor as fundamental to spiritual life. In the eleventh century, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, for example, had already taught in his De amore Dei that there existed two degrees of fundamental love (the carnal and the ­spiritual,) and that the combination of these two would result in the four ways to love God: “And we love spiritually when by charity we postpone our spiritual occupations for the good of the neighbor.”25 Bernard concluded, “We demonstrate spiritual love when, because of love, we postpone our spiritual activities for the wellbeing of our neighbor.”26 Bernard’s words are an echo of classical spirituality. In it the emphasis lies on loving both God and neighbor. Liberation theology assumes this tradition of love expressed toward God and neighbor, but makes a distinctive contribution to affirm the social and political dimension of love. This is accomplished by recognizing that those who love their neighbor, especially the poor, commit themselves to changing the neighbor’s reality so that this love becomes reasonable and effective. Gutiérrez explains this as follows:

Liberation Theology’s Spiritual Legacy   385 Authentic love tries to start with the concrete needs of the other and not with the “duty” of practicing love. Love is respectful of others and therefore feels obliged to base its action on an analysis of their situation and needs. Works in behalf of the neighbor are not done in order to channel idle energies or to give available personnel something to do; they are done because the other has needs . . . .27

An inseparable complement to effective love is what Sobrino calls honoring what is real. This consists in accepting the truth about reality, unmasking the numerous lies that accompany it, and committing oneself to changing that reality. More precisely it means, . . . arriving at understanding the truth and arriving at responding to the truth. Well, this is accomplished not only by overcoming ignorance and indifference but also by overcoming the innate tendency of putting down truth and avoiding its reality. To understand and accept the truth first and foremost means permitting that truth to be what it really is, without distorting it according to one’s tastes or interests.28

For the Latin American evangelical reader, this discourse about effective love might seem mistaken, because it might seem excessively political, and for this reason it is frequently rejected. Yet, seemingly, most evangelicals prefer to serve and love without considering the macro-structural significance of their actions, without “recognizing that the demands of Christian love are conditioned by social structures and by the challenges of each era of history.”29 In this, likely evangelicals have been naïve. As Archbishop Romero used to say, “The world of the poor teaches us how Christian love should be. . . . It must certainly be free, but it also must seek to be effective in an historical setting.”30 Through the path of efficacy, Protestant spirituality could be renewed and lead them into areas that previously have been off limits. These include promoting justice, defending human rights, building peace, and fostering solidarity. None of these areas of human concerns belonged exclusively to the liberation theology movement. To say so would be anachronistic. None of these areas of human concerns belonged exclusively to the liberation theology movement. But all of them, along with others, recognized that social and political commitments were a constitutive element of Christian faith. This was clearly in line with the thinking of the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945), who worked in the resistance movement against Nazism. In a letter to his brother Karl-Friedrich on January 14, 1935, he affirmed: The life of a Christian has to belong to the church and to the misery that surrounds it [. . .] at the beginning, theology seem[s] to me to be an academic endeavour [. . .] I think I have the certainty that, to truly arrive at a clear inner understanding about everything and to be sincere, I have no other way than to take seriously the Sermon of the Mount [. . .] there is something worth committing ourselves completely and I believe that social justice and peace or, to say it properly, Christ, is that something.31

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Following Jesus, the Paradigm and Example for Our Spirituality Latin American theology has been recognized for having contributed to the recovery of  the essential dimension of Christianity: following Jesus. Just as the gospels teach, if there is a relationship with Jesus and if there is genuine faith in Him, this is demonstrated by following that same Jesus. A person is a true believer if he or she follows Jesus. The Greek verb “to follow” (ákolouzein) appears ninety times in the New Testament, and it is almost always used to refer to following Jesus; only on limited occasions does it refer to something else. The term most often appears in the gospels: twenty-five times in Matthew, eighteen times in Mark, seventeen times in Luke, and nineteen times in John. Therefore, this verb is an essential gospel concept. Following Jesus has to do with an experience, whose first step is a personal encounter with Jesus as the Way, the Truth, and the Life. From here it is then participating in his mission and incarnating his commitments in the here and now. José María Castillo clarifies it well; “Recovering Jesus does not mean having a mere knowledge of what Jesus was in history: his life, mission and destiny. It means participating in his life and reproducing it throughout history.” he says. “ Following Jesus therefore becomes the abbreviated synonym of Christianity, because it captures both the recovery of Jesus and the way to recover him.32 The effect that this emphasis has upon spirituality is significant: it breaks with a traditional vision that understands the way of the Spirit as something individual, private, passive, and heavenly, in order to locate it in the real place of collective, radical, and historical commitments. The goal is not, as in traditional spirituality, the perfection of the individual, but rather the commitment of the individual with the cause of Jesus in the real history of daily life. Jon Sobrino, speaking of following Jesus, notes: Christian spirituality is nothing other than living the fundamentalspirituality described in the concrete example of Jesus and according to the Spirit of Jesus. This is following Jesus. This following of Jesus has two dimensions that are closely interconnected: the Christological and the Pneumatological. The historical life of Jesus is the norma normans, and it is the Spirit that incarnates Jesus throughout human history.33

To follow Jesus is to recognize him as Lord and as the paradigm for humanity. This is not venerating the figure of Jesus as a “mystical archetype,” but rather recognizing his footsteps in the concrete history of his day and translating that example to our present days. Following him is doing what he would do today in our history. Therefore, logically Latin American theology has paid special attention to the studies of the historical Jesus, in order to uncover his humanness and thereby recognize the footprints of his journey and his faith. In this sense, Christian spirituality is not only having faith in Jesus, but

Liberation Theology’s Spiritual Legacy   387 rather having the faith of Jesus. To have faith in Jesus alludes to our confidence in his saving grace and his redeeming forgiveness. Yet to have Jesus’s faith involves living as Jesus lived, trusting as Jesus trusted, and giving oneself to the cause of the Kingdom of God in the courageous and vigorous way as Jesus did. Christian spirituality has paid attention to the concept of following, as many classics of spirituality refer to it. However, the difference is that, in some cases, following Jesus is confused with imitating Jesus, as if one were trying to “repeat” Jesus without recognizing that no two historical contexts are identical. Liberating spirituality does not teach an ahistorical repetition, but rather a historical following, that is, implementing his life and his cause (the Kingdom) in each moment and in each particular context. As Boff says, “Following Jesus is to continue his work, pursue his cause and obtain his fullness.”34 From this perspective, you follow Jesus by doing what he did: announcing the Kingdom, serving those whom he served (the most needy), and living as he lived, immersed in the reality of his people and faithful to the will of God in spite of all the risks. The apostle John says it best, “If we claim to have fellowship with Him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth” (1 John 1:6). Bishop Pedro Casaldáliga, reinforcing the scriptural passage’s emphasis on this following of Jesus, states that it . . . responds to a question that is both central and centers all the rest: how do you maintain the dialectic between the way that Jesus lived in obedience to his Father and how does this relate to the way we Christians live our faithfulness to Jesus here and now? . . . If Jesus was the presence of God and the Kingdom, there is no other way to live life as the children of God than the way he lived.35

The Lord Who Transforms: Holistic Conversion, the Fundamental Requirement of Spirituality Effective love, within this spirituality, is not the result of a political decision; rather, it is a personal encounter with the Lord that transforms and makes followers into new people. Gustavo Gutiérrez continually reiterated this point. Conversion, according to him, was “the starting point of every spiritual journey. It involves a break with the life lived up to that point; it is a prerequisite for entering the kingdom.”36 In his first work in 1972, he defined conversion as “a radical transformation of ourselves” and a change that would mean “thinking, feeling, and living as Christ—present in exploited and alienated man.”37 This conversion is very different from the act of “joining” a new church or “receiving Christ” as is understood in the majority of evangelical churches. Liberating spirituality speaks “not only of a change in conviction (theory), but principally of a change in attitude (practice).”38 This conversion presupposes that the individual begins a different

388   Harold Segura way of life, and breaks with the stranglehold of a lifestyle that is selfish and consumerist and that favors the injustices of the world. For this very reason Gutierrez state . . . conversion is not something that is done once and for all. It entails a development, even a painful one that is not without uncertainties, doubts, and temptations to turn back on the road that has been traveled.39

As such, this conversion is a process that moves forward by breaking the old patterns of life that have been imposed on us by the world and by appropriating the Kingdom values of solidarity, justice, and effective love. Every “conversion implies that we recognize the presence of sin in our lives and our world.”40 When making reference to integral conversion, one recalls Jesus’s message that to convert means to change one’s life and, thus, to transform the relations of the person not only with God, but also with his neighbor and with everything concerning one’s ­existence. No part of life is excluded from Christian conversion! A good example of holistic conversion is that of Zacchaeus, according to the narrative of the evangelist Luke. This tax collector had amassed a fortune as the fruit of his dishonesty and his many injustices. His encounter with Jesus transformed him (Luke 19:1–10). Zacchaeus returned what he had stolen and even gave more to make amends for his wickedness (he had so much money!). His spiritual experience affected every dimension of his life: personal, social, economic, communal, and others. “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount” (Luke 19:8). It is important to highlight the inclusion of the poor in his conversion decision, and the effect that this decision had upon the life of the immediate community. Jesus thus confirms that those who surrender to him and follow him also decide to change their social relations. That is why Jesus says to Zacchaeus, “Today salvation has come to this house” (Luke 19:9). Today, a spirituality that encourages this same type of salvation is needed: that it be holistic (all areas of life), radical (implies transforming decisions), and inclusive (including the powerful and the dominant).41 This conversion contemplates the ­individual dimension (moral change of the individual) together with the social dimension (ethical change of society). This is not merely a change of interiority, but a  fundamental change of the entire human person—a change that impacts all of ­society, people and the contexts in which they live. This is precisely what happened with Zacchaeus. Regarding this gospel pericope about Zacchaeus, Segundo Galilea, outstanding Chilean pastoralist, applies it to the Latin American context when he states that [t]he gospel establishes, simultaneously, that the salvation of the rich and powerful deals with her/his commitment for the liberation of her/his siblings who are poor. Zacchaeus—in contraposition to Epulon, the rich man—is saved because he gave half of his gains to the poor, and because he returned quadruple the amount to

Liberation Theology’s Spiritual Legacy   389 the ones he had exploited. . . . The Final Judgment (Matthew 25:31ff) exemplifies this relation. Such real commitment is sign and demand in the following of Christ himself. . . . In our own time and in Latin America, this commitment with the poor is translated, in good measure, in the effective commitment towards real societal transformation en route for justice, participation, equality, and liberty for everyone. This is the commitment for Liberation.42

Counterculture Leadership and an Active Ecclesiology Now needing consideration is the relationship between this spirituality of effective love, Christ-centeredness, and a continuous conversion, along with the model of leadership that needs to accompany it. This final theme was of special interest to the pastoral agents who worked in ecclesial base communities (CEBs) and served as shepherds for the peoples’ movements. They proclaimed a model of leadership that was countercultural (that distanced itself from the traditional authoritarian model), democratic (one in which all had the right to a voice), facilitative (the function of the leader was to facilitate group ­processes), and service-oriented (the leaders were to serve the people, just as Jesus did). Leonardo Boff and his brother Clodovis, as well as Segundo Galilea, Juan Antonio Estrada, Víctor Codina, José María Castillo, Alberto Parra, and others, due to their own pastoral and theological vocations, became interested in the theme of power and its relationship with this new style of leadership. The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire43 continued to be foundational for these themes, due to his pedagogical perspectives and his criteria for a liberating education based upon consciousness raising and human development. At the beginning of the 1980s, Leonardo Boff wanted to translate these theological and social doctrines into a definite proposal for church life. He recognized that if he were to propose radical external changes (social), it would be necessary to have similar internal changes (within the community of faith). Therefore, in 1981, he wrote Church: Charism and Power (Igreja: carisma e poder), a work that became quite controversial and, in the end, caused the sanctions imposed upon him by the Catholic Church hierarchy. Interestingly, the hierarchy was not uncomfortable with his writings on Christology or even with his ideological positions. What bothered them was his proposal to transform the Church from within. This was an extremely ambitious proposal: Boff claimed that the Catholic Church did not merely need some minor reforms, but rather a re-creation. He raised the question of whether the institutional Church had really passed the test of power. He recommended that the Church return to its New Testament roots and find in them “the evangelical meaning of authority.”44 He spoke about a new birth of the Church (eclesiogénesis) that would emerge from this old and rancid one. All of these changes were based upon new proposals of leadership, a restructuring of power, and a transformation of the concept of authority. The spirituality of liberation proposes that, for a new leadership to emerge, it is necessary to let the old power structures collapse (“pagan forms of power,” according to Boff).

390   Harold Segura It is not merely having individual leaders who are more like Jesus. It is also necessary to have structures that are more in accord with the participative and humanizing model of Jesus. Power is the power to love. The power of love is different in nature from the power of domination; it is fragile, vulnerable, conquering through its weakness and its capacity for giving and forgiveness.45

From the spirituality of commitment is born a new leadership characterized not by a love for power, but rather by the power of love. Until forty years ago, or a little more, no one talked about Latin American spirituality. Today it is possible to talk about it. Latin American spirituality emerged within the movement of liberation theology, but it has not been a topic of interest for analysts. Today, now that time has passed and the ideological polarization has lost strength, there is an opportunity to take a new look at that spirituality and to appreciate its fruits. One needs to remember that life in the Spirit has to do with this life and that it is here on earth where Jesus wants us to follow Him.

Life before Death A story before we finish: Every question that was raised in the public meeting on that day referred to life after death. The Teacher merely smiled and did not provide a single answer. Later, when his disciples asked him why he had been so evasive, he replied: “Have you observed that those who don’t know what to do with this life are precisely those that want a life that goes on for eternity?” One of the disciples insisted, “But is there life after death or not?” And the Teacher answered enigmatically, “Is there life before death? That is the question!”46

Notes 1. For further treatment of these topics of the Vatican II Council, see Hans Kung, Libertad conquistada (Madrid: Trotta, 2004), 571. 2. Samuel Ruiz, Cómo me convirtieron los indígenas (Santander: Sal Térrea, 2002), 43. 3. Ibid., 43. 4. Ibid., 43–44. 5. Ibid., 44. 6. Samuel Escobar has developed this theme of “liberation theologies” in his book La fe ­evangélica y las teologías de la liberación (El Paso: Casa Bautista de Publicaciones, 1987). 7. Bernardino Piñera, quoted by Julio César Villaverde, Juan Pablo II frenó teología de ­liberación, pero sigue viva, https://www.aporrea.org/actualidad/n58377.html.

Liberation Theology’s Spiritual Legacy   391 8. Clodovis Boff, quoted in Mysterium liberationis: Conceptos fundamentales de la teología de la liberación, vol. I, eds. Ignacio Ellacuria and Jon Sobrino (San Salvador: UCA, 1993), 90. 9. Gustavo Gutiérrez, Teología de la liberación: Perspectivas, 16th ed. (Salamanca: Sígueme, 1999), 27. 1 0. Pedro R. Santidrán, Diccionario breve de pensadores cristianos (Navarra: Verbo Divino, 2001), 284. 11. To consider other impacts of liberation theology, see Pablo Richard, Fuerza ética y e­spiritual de la teología de la liberación (San José: DEI, 2004), 25–35. 12. This brief history of liberation theology does not include a separate section on Protestant examples. Juan Bosch is probably correct in the appreciation that perhaps it is not appropriate to speak of a specific, precise Protestant liberation theology, but rather of a liberationist legacy of certain theologians, and more particularly, of some Protestant organizations with ecumenical commitments. Some of the more noted theologians include José Míguez Bonino (Argentina), Ruben Alves (Brazil), Julio de Santana (Uruguay), Elsa Támez (Mexico-Costa Rica), Sergio Arce (Cuba), Emilio Castro (Uruguay), Ofelia Ortega (Cuba), George Pixley (Nicaragua), and Violeta Rocha (Nicaragua). See Juan Bosch, “Introducción a la teología protestante latinoamericana” in Juan José Tamayo and Juan Bosch, eds., Panorama de la teología latinoamericana. (Navarra: Verbo Divino, 2001). 13. “Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction on Certain Aspects of “Theology of Liberation,” 1984; see http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19840806_theology-liberation_sp.html. 14. Richard, Fuerza ética, 29. 15. Ibid., 28–29. 16. Ibid., 29–30. 17. Luis Espinal, Oraciones a quemarropa (Cochabamba: Verbo Divino, 2002), 96. 18. Ernesto Cardenal, Telescopio en la noche oscura (Madrid: Trotta, 1993), 29. 19. Gutiérrez, Teología de la liberación, 244. 20. Ibid., 245. 21. Jon Sobrino, “Espiritualidad y seguimiento de Jesús,” in Ellacuría and Sobrino, eds., Mysterium liberationis, 451. 22. Segundo Galilea, El camino de la espiritualidad, 6th ed. (Bogotá: San Pablo, 2004), 14. 23. Ibid., 22. 24. For a detailed consideration of the characteristics of Latin American spirituality, see: Fernando Bermúdez, Espiritualidad desde América Latina: Lucha y contemplación (Guatemala: Kyrios, 2004). 25. Bernardo de Claraval, De amore Dei (Madrid: San Pablo, 1997), 176–177. 26. Ibid., 177. 27. Gustavo Gutiérrez, We Drink from Our Own Wells (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984), 108. 28. Sobrino, “Espiritualidad y seguimiento de Jesús,” 453. 29. Juan Arias Luna, Curso de espiritualidad cristiana (Quito: Centro Bíblico Verbo Divino, 2002), 75. 30. Ibid., 40. 31. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Redimidos para lo humano. Cartas y diarios (1924–1942) (Salamanca: Ediciones Sígueme, 1979), 92–93. 32. José María Castillo, El seguimiento de Jesús (Salamanca: Sígueme, 1992), 13.

392   Harold Segura 33. Sobrino, “Espiritualidad y seguimiento de Jesús,” 459. 34. Leonardo Boff, “La fe en la periferia del mundo,” in Italo Gastaldi (ed.), Educar y evangelizar en la posmodernidad (Quito: Abya-Yala, 1994), 81. 35. Pedro Casaldáliga and José María Vigil, Espiritualidad de la liberación (Bogotá: Paulinas, 1992). 36. Gutiérrez, We Drink from Our Own Wells, 95. 37. Ibid., 160, note 1. 38. Leonardo Boff, Una espiritualidad liberadora (Navarra: Verbo Divino, 1992), 46. 3 9. Gutiérrez, We Drink from Our Own Wells, 95. 40. Ibid., 97. 41. Concerning the conversion of the powerful, Franz Hinkelamert says that today we should not aspire to take over power, but rather seek the transformation of the powerful. Today we need to develop a social consensus that would imply for the powerful “a consensus regarding the restructuring of the economy and society that functions based upon human survival.” We need to emphasize a call that never was popular with the left: a call for the conversion of the powerful. “He who dominates has to become converted, they have the power, and if they become absolutely cynical, no movement in the world can do anything against them.” This type of thinking is irksome for old guard leftists who always believed that the proletariat would be the only actors of their salvation. See Franz Hinkelamert, quoted by J. Duque and G. Gutiérrez (eds.), Itinerario de la razón crítica: Un homenaje a Franz Hinkelamert en sus 70 años (San José: DEI, 2001). 42. Segundo Galilea, Salvación de los pecadores y liberación de los pobres, Revista Selecciones de Teología, en: http://www.seleccionesdeteologia.net/selecciones/llib/vol15/60/060_ galilea.pdf. 43. Paulo Freire (1921–1997) was a Brazilian educator and pedagogue with recognized influence as an educational theorist in the twentieth century. Freire worked in the World Council of Churches between 1970 and 1980. Among his more renowned works we find Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2000); also, in the language of the faith that liberates (for those who read Spanish), Los cristianos y la liberación de los oprimidos (Lisbon: Cuestiones BASE, 1978). 44. Leonardo Boff, Church: Charism and Power (New York, NY: Crossroad, 1985 [1981]). 45. Ibid., 59. 46. Anthony de Mello S.J., ¿Quién puede hacer que amanezca? (Santander: Editorial Sal Terrae, 1993), 97.

chapter 21

Pr efer en ti a l Option for th e Spir it The Catholic Charismatic Renewal Brenda Carranza

Introduction Pentecostalism emerged as a revival phenomenon in late nineteenth-century American Protestantism. Focusing on the theology of the Holy Spirit, Pentecostal revival fosters the conviction in its believers of the possibility of experiencing the very same spiritual gifts and charisms that radically transformed the lives of the Apostles and set their hearts on fire with missionary fervor. Through intense emotional and corporal expressions, Pentecostal ministers spread the Word to crowds in search of comfort for both body and soul. In this manner, the faithful are persuaded by promises of deliverance from evil and by testimonies of physical and spiritual healing—both possible, according to this novel Christian revivalism. Indeed, through its over one hundred years of existence, Pentecostalism has become a spiritual torrent that took on stellar proportions throughout the twentieth century. The increase resulted from the ability of this religious movement to adapt quickly to diverse cultures, institutions, and political systems—as scholars clearly noticed.1 A religious expression of this novel Christian revival movement first reached Catholicism in 1967 at Duquesne University in Pennsylvania, when a group of young Catholic students prayed in tongues, experienced spiritual ecstasy, and proclaimed to have received gifts and charisms of the Spirit. Subsequently, thousands of prayer groups proliferated simultaneously throughout the ecclesial geography, and Catholicism would see the birth of Pentecostalism under the name Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR). In a matter of decades, the CCR became present in most Latin American countries, reproducing the same organization of multitudinous events, Charismatic-spirituality study seminars, and social-based prayer groups of the Charismatic movement.2

394   Brenda Carranza Data obtained from an official website estimate that, since the 1960s, more than 120 million Catholics in more than 200 countries had embraced the Charismatic movement.3 The participation of Catholic Charismatics and Protestant Pentecostals in the core of social life is estimated at 27.7 percent of the total Christian population, equal to 584 million followers.4 This dynamic of the Pentecostal phenomenon ignited the process of pentecostalization in Christianity and influenced Christian institutions with its theology and organizational versatility. In Latin America, this process extended to social and political domains to respond to certain deficiencies in the basic needs of citizens. Thus, the right to health care, which should have been the responsibility of the state, became an objective of Charismatic pastors and priests who, in the name of Jesus, offered material and spiritual healings. Similarly, while increasing urban violence left the population in permanent insecurity, churches assumed the role of the state in providing safe spaces of encounters and recreation for the youth. Furthermore, Pentecostalism sought to promote systematic resistance to cultural changes in the field of sexuality, specifically regarding issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and reproductive rights. Allied with conservative sectors in society, leaders decisively interfered to curb such public policies and legal processes and, in doing so, revealed a strong presence in public life and an effective engagement in the political sphere. This trend has been confirmed in countries like Guatemala, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil.5 Among evangelicals, Brazilian Pentecostalism manifests three distinct phases. The first, which pertains to classic mission Pentecostalism (1910–1950), emphasized the eschatological drive to save souls before the second coming of Christ. The second, known as electronic churches (1950–1970), used mass media to evangelize and spread Pentecostalism throughout Brazil. The third, the neo-Pentecostal phase (1980), emerged and was characterized by its affinity with the logic of the market, the theology of prosperity, its incisive intervention in party politics, and its aggressive appropriation of the dynamics of mass media. From this Pentecostal evolution, the CCR intensified confessional participation in partisan politics, as well as engaged in intense negotiations for the maintenance of the church’s historic privileges before the federal government.6 In Brazil, Catholic Pentecostalism, or more specifically Charismatic Christianity, arrived in 1968 to the city of Campinas, São Paulo, through the efforts of the Jesuits.7 As in classic Protestant Pentecostalism, the CCR also promoted, among others things, Bible reading, praise, corporal manifestations while praying, such as clapping of hands, closing of eyes, swaying the body, and casting out of demons. With respect to the electronic Pentecostalism, the Charismatics—as the members of the CCR were designated—also gave priority to the use of mass media for evangelization.8 Within the Catholic hierarchy, the acceptance of Charismatic Catholics came at a cost. Progressive factions rejected the CCR because they perceived the movement as aligned with neoliberal discourse, to intimate postures of praise and prayer, which encouraged handouts and thus diminished commitment to structural transformation of poverty and social exclusion. Other segments denied the truthfulness of Pentecostal theology contained in Charismatic expressions. These factions regarded their magical vision

Preferential Option for the Spirit   395 of the world as unacceptable theology; however, they accepted that this charismatically expressed theology offered pragmatic and successful answers to the needs of popular Catholicism.9 A disciplinary realignment came after three decades, under intense accusations from the CCR about Protestant Pentecostal churches recruiting Catholics. Fears and suspicions reflected in the official demographic census statistics showed that in the 1970s, 91 percent of Brazilians declared themselves Catholic—a percentage that would drop to 83.3 percent by 1990. By 2010, only 68 percent of Brazilians called themselves Catholic. In absolute numbers, this amounted to 126 million Catholics out of a total of 190 million Brazilian citizens. In contrast, Protestant believers saw a rise in their percentages from 15.4 percent in 2000 to 22 percent ten years later. With this, Protestantism has added 42 million faithful, of whom 25 million are of Pentecostal origin. Undoubtedly, the epicenter that leverages this vertiginous rise of Pentecostalism comes to a large extent from Catholicism.10 However, to overcome accusations of being a Catholic version of evangelical Pentecostalism, Charismatics affirmed their collective identity on an ecclesial tripod. On one leg stood the media presence of Pope John Paul II, the “people’s pope.” On the second leg, the 1975 pontifical document Evangellii Nuntiandi called for evangelization by means of mass communication. On the third leg, since the end of 1980, local participation in a Vatican-promoted megaproject, Lumem 2000, promoted the goal of interconnecting all Catholics at that time via satellite. In the light of this last dimension, the Brazilian CCR set out to rectify the Catholic Church’s chronic inefficiency in employing means of social communication. At the same time, Charismatics undertook strategies to legitimize and to affirm their identity, and invested massively in working with young people; as such, they became successfully and pastorally incorporated into the majority of the 214 Brazilian dioceses. Such was the process and progression of Pentecostalism in Christianity that contextualized the growth of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement. This study will now address how the CCR reflects Pentecostal theology and spirituality of the evangelicals; how it is rooted in a sphere of a power struggle with Pentecostals; how the CCR movement fermented a Catholic gospel culture; how it paved the way for a generation of media-oriented priests; and how it inspired the formation of new Catholic Charismatic communities. This study concludes with an analysis of how the CCR contributed to the course of religious trans-nationalization, and with the state of Charismatic Catholicism during the time of Pope Francis.

Near and Far In recent years, the leadership of the Brazilian Catholic Charismatic Renewal began proclaiming that its origins were found in the nineteenth century, curiously, even before the rise of Protestant Pentecostalism. The CCR credits the Italian saint Blessed Elena Guerra (1835–1914) with the inspiring idea of dedicating the twentieth century to the

396   Brenda Carranza Holy Spirit. Accordingly, she suggested to Pope Leo XIII that he proclaim 1897 as the year of the Holy Spirit (Divinum Illud Munus).11 Charismatics regarded this initiative as a guide for action to shape civil society into a Pentecostal culture and to promote Christian values. For the Charismatic movement, this search for historical roots and recourse to the Magisterium of the Church bestowed institutional legitimacy and thereby guaranteed its “ecclesial citizenship.” Meanwhile, in the race for the conversion of Catholics—regarded as idolaters—the Pentecostals, popularly known as crentes (believers), occupied stadiums, sports gyms, public squares, and schools. They were easily identified by their pastors’ peculiar way of preaching; they screamed and espoused the demonic as an etiological explanation of physical illnesses, which justified their practice of exorcisms and divine cures. Believers and pastors were always found with the Bible in hand, which they interpreted literally, as well as by their distinctive dress codes—among others, pastors in suits and ties, and women in modest dresses and with long hair. Not far from this Pentecostal aesthetic, the charismatic movement proliferated in prayer groups—the basic unit of organization of the CCR—where its members professed a Pentecostal theology, prayed in tongues, praised in similar performances as believers (Pentecostals), promoted multitudinous encounters (Cenacles) in sports stadiums and gyms, and encouraged reading the Bible. With or without the support of the hierarchy, thousands of “Seminars of Life in the Spirit” multiplied in dioceses, and systematically studied Charismatic spirituality. On radio stations, the voice of the reborn began to be heard, and TV programs, produced by groups of the CCR, were timidly inaugurated.12 Charismatic characters, such as the Dominican priest Francis MacNutt, began to travel throughout the Latin American ecclesial geography. With him, the devotional dimension of the practices of physical, spiritual, and emotional healing was recovered in Catholicism. In Brazil, MacNutt’s performative style created a certain school of followers; to this day, his healing prayer guidelines are integrated into the literature and training manuals of the CCR on the subject. The “born again” Catholics and evangelicals advanced directly into the very core of society. A question arose in the social imagination, in the media, and in Catholicism itself: Who is Pentecostal and who is Catholic? This query generated discomfort in both camps, because it cast doubt on their denominational and institutional identities. Similar questions were also asked of Pentecostals and Catholics in Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala, Peru, Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and Ecuador.13 To demarcate the limits of identity of any event or television rebroadcast, Brazilian Charismatics intensified the visibility of the indisputable traits of Catholicism, such as devotion to Our Lady (images and rosary), participation in the Eucharist (Mass), exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, confession of sins, and authority of the pope. However, while the self-assertion of the CCR insisted on distancing itself in performance, closeness persisted. Even in this endeavor of symbolic differentiation, both Charismatics and Pentecostals continue to this day to drink from the same spiritual sources and recreate the same strategies of diffusion.

Preferential Option for the Spirit   397 The bearers of this Charismatic spirituality are the faithful laity, women and men, who, empowered by the reception of gifts and charisms of the Holy Spirit, immerse themselves in Christian pentecostalism. This lay empowerment fosters in Catholicism a commitment of the faithful to the institution itself, as well as rekindling their faith in the Holy Spirit and their hope to witness in their daily lives the miracles that alleviate the material and spiritual needs they confront. As a result of this precise theological incursion of the laity and their assisting in the administration of symbolic goods ­(sacraments), they have confronted the hierarchical structure of the Church by two constitutive antagonistic forces in the religious forum: the clergy who hold the theological knowledge and goods of salvation, and the laity who receive the knowledge and goods. The alteration of this order has constituted a structural source of tension—the subversion of the legitimacy of the clergy as carriers of the sacred.14 In like manner, the mass ­promotion of supernatural interventions in Charismatic groups, such as healings and liberation, without necessarily demanding the presence of priests, constitutes a focus of tension for the Church hierarchy.15 This tension tends to worsen when women are involved in the structural subversion, given that women have been historically relegated to ecclesiastical infrastructure and maintenance services in the Church. In addition to Pentecostal theology and performance, hierarchical obedience institutionally frames and genetically anchors the Catholic Charismatic expression, and, according to Pope John Paul II’s 1998 document, “its birth and diffusion brought to the life of the Church an unexpected novelty, sometimes even explosive.”16 This dynamism advanced to maturity in the 1980s as the Brazilian CCR became structured in secretariats, councils, ministries, services, and commissions—all organically articulated throughout the national territory. Additionally, with this insertion into political life, social and political participation became embedded in the Charismatic organization and the nomenclature of its ministries. The management of so many members and initiatives permitted the design of ­pyramidal structures and bureaucratic relations, as well as the optimization of human and financial resources. A masterful example of this mentality, which employed tools from the business world, is the movement’s Strategic Plan. In response to competitive market disputes, planning reflected goals and strategies formulated “after much prayer, sharing and above all listening to the Spirit . . . [because] we want to invest in marketing and resources to get as many people as possible to experience the grace of Baptism in the Holy Spirit.”17 Concomitantly, horizontal discourse maintains an equilibrium in the CCR between the routinization of the charism—which in the Weberian perspective succumbs to bureaucracy—and the allure of the Charismatic in its offering spiritual goods that re-traditionalize the masses of faithful Catholics. Once the goal of organizational expansion and consolidation had been achieved, progress was made by the massive use of social communication. In the 1990s, Charismatic Catholicism approached economic globalization in the same way as did neo-Pentecostalism—whose religious projects can be traced to business management models. That is, Pentecostals identified definite growth targets in their conquest of believers and gave priority to the occupation of urban space with the construction of

398   Brenda Carranza mega churches replete with sumptuous imagery. In this manner, Protestant Pentecostalism broadened horizons for “spiritual conquest” and incorporated bold techniques of diffusion and interaction with its masses of followers. This format of religious management did not escape the intent of the CCR to modernize the Church and to offer new ways of re-institutionalizing the faithful. Therefore, blessed with this evangelizing mission, the CCR turned to religious marketing as a tool to improve administrative and pastoral arrangements in the context of television communication and in the appropriation of media culture. Since the 1990s, professing Catholic groups have achieved operation of public television channels. Although in recent years there has been a certain degree of secularization in the programs—with a greater number of news programs focused on social issues—there still persists a certain parochialization of TV. This is noted in the importance of the tele-transmission of liturgical celebrations (Masses), recitation of the Rosary, novenas, prayers for healing and liberation, devotionals, and veneration of saints, as well as of interviews with hierarchy, of ecclesiastical newscasts, and of copious participation of priests and bishops in the programming. Clearly, the late entry of the Catholic Church into the race to insert itself into communication spaces was shown in a certain difficulty not only in managing transmission vehicles, but also in using appropriate media language. Even so, thanks to the participation of Charismatic groups, decisive contributions to and the insertion of Catholicism into Brazilian religious media have been possible and have nurtured Catholic television programming. It is worth noting that Catholic and evangelical media have not been concerned with the audience, but rather with demarcating their presence in the channels of social communication. This attitude responds to the need to show the moral superiority of their respective churches. In other words, the more media presence, the more power they have with respect to the religious purpose of maintaining the membership of the faithful. This translates into their leaders’ unbridled demand for financial resources to sponsor the high costs of mass media. But, while Charismatics have employed Pentecostal devotional and performative resources, neo-Pentecostals have already assimilated the pragmatic use of media and the creation of market niches of religious goods—learning that has not gone unnoticed in the media. Their reports about events and/or descriptions of characters have usually confronted Charismatics and Pentecostals. For example: The construction of mega-temples shows the force of Christianity, stirs up the dispute for the faithful . . . the Catholic Church inaugurates the Sanctuary of the Mother of God [Theotokos, project of the Charismatic priest Marcelo Rossi], for 20 thousand people seated and 100 thousand in an open area made available in São Paulo . . . Among the Evangelicals, various denominations promise to inaugurate their mega-constructions.18

Another report compares the Catholic priest Marcelo Rossi’s shrine with the neoPentecostal church of Bishop Edir Macedo:

Preferential Option for the Spirit   399 The Temple of Solomon, the seat of the IURD, was inaugurated. With 100 thousand square meters and capacity for 10 thousand people [. . .] has become the largest and most luxurious religious space in the country [. . .] although the largest is the Sanctuary of Fr. Marcelo.19

In these reports, the Theotokos and the Temple of Solomon juxtapose two emblematic figures of Charismatic Catholicism and neo-Pentecostalism: Marcelo Rossi and Edir Macedo. Father Rossi, a diocesan priest, has led the performance appropriation of Pentecostal music and the literature of spiritual self-help, and is the record holder of Catholic mega-gatherings in the country. Bishop Macedo, founder of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, has led numerous religious ventures (TV network, radio, publishers, audio recordings, etc.) and has been involved in various legal proceedings pertaining to charges of financial crimes. While the media have constructed a competitive narrative between Charismatic and Pentecostal groups, in Catholicism, it is necessary to affirm that Catholic Pentecostalism has its origins in Protestant Pentecostalism. However, some Catholics have recently cultivated devotion to an Italian blessed from the late XIX century, Elena Guerra, who during her lifetime, announced that the XX century would be the century of the Holy Spirit. As such, this ingenious tactic has helped make the Charismatic movement a positive Pentecostal phenomenon within the Church—one that is shared with their ­separated brothers and sisters—and, therefore acceptable to Catholic theology and spirituality. Authorized by this legitimacy, leaders and followers enjoyed both the sources and strategies of Christian Pentecostalization. Consequently, Pentecostals and Charismatics gravitated toward relationships of closeness and detachment. This logic was repeated in the political arena, as will be elucidated on the following pages.

Allies of the Spirit At the political level, the visibility of the CCR in the beginning of the twenty-first century gained a new impetus. In the 1980s and 1990s, the movement’s partisan participation was fundamentally Charismatic, with personal partisan trajectories. In recent years, however, the CCR has prioritized an institutional agenda that has included the vocational promotion of its members to engage in political debate and to influence Brazilian legislation on issues related to family, sexuality, and human reproduction. With this, they count on organizational circumstances that support the systematic formation of their representatives in municipal councils and in legislative assemblies of the different states in Brazil.20 In this endeavor, Charismatics wove new alliances with the Pentecostals and neoPentecostals; in time, they added conservative and traditional sectors to the Catholic Church. The common denominator of these three groups was a reactionary agenda. In the past decade, the Brazilian government has launched educational programs to

400   Brenda Carranza promote tolerance and discussions on diversity and sexual orientation. One example was the Ministry of Education’s School Without Homophobia Program, popularly known as the “gay kit.” The educational material aimed, through booklets, books, and videos, to discuss discrimination and violence against homosexuals. The “gay kit” was part of a broader bill to criminalize homophobia and to decriminalize abortion. Interpreted as a teaching of and stimulus to homosexuality, Pentecostal and Charismatic activists activated their networks in church services and prayer groups to pressure the government, whether in the Senate, the National Congress, or state and municipal chambers; they succeeded in vetoing the bill and in preventing the distribution of the material. Another example of the influence of this new alliance pertained to the fierce opposition of Charismatic and Pentecostal members of Congress to the creation of the Committee on Gender Equality. These representatives requested that the name be changed to Anti-Discrimination Committee, the result of which was the issuing of a decree that would suspend the word “gender” from all educational materials and their dissemination. The Minister of Education was also fired. The facts described here are just the tip of the iceberg that depicted religious activism and its efforts to impose its norms on society and, in this case, to prevent the expansion of sexual rights. Both Charismatic and Pentecostal parties were engaged in the spread of sexual panic (a concern exacerbated by sexual issues associated with moral decay), which ultimately resulted in the polarization of political agendas and the creation of a climate of social anomie.21 This panic about “gender ideology”—the terminology used by the Catholic Church to denominate and homogenize gender studies and theory, feminist actions, discursive disputes over identities, and the disciplining of sexual choices—was amalgamated in the social struggles of the late twentieth century. Another complicating factor for conservatives has been sociopolitical and religious pluralism. Sociopolitical pluralism imposed on contemporary Brazil the question of equal rights before the state in accessing political goods; therefore, it resonated with Pentecostal and Catholic alliances.22 Religious pluralism was guaranteed by the secular state. Within this pluralism, Pentecostalism claimed a “Christian citizenship” that displaced a theological axis. Earlier, the imposition of Christian values was invoked in the name of Christian tradition and culture; now these values are legitimized by appeal to secular status, which grants the right of citizens to follow their religious convictions. Political and religious pluralism will be the semantic arena where the state and religious actors struggle for more space and legitimacy.23 Paradoxically, the symbiotic relationship between the state and Catholicism will be dismantled with the rise of evangelicals to the spheres of power. Through political activism, confessional candidates, who were chosen in the name of God and by the electoral processes now occupy seats as representatives in the National Congress. On the one hand, Charismatics and Pentecostals distanced themselves from each other in religious issues by disputes among believers; on the other hand, in politics, they came close to imposing a moral agenda that they argued would save the family from secularist

Preferential Option for the Spirit   401 threats. However, being united in their mutual defense of Christian values does not mean that Protestant Pentecostals are content with the historical advantage that Catholicism enjoys in negotiating its privileges before the state. Aware of this lack of articulation and deficiency of Charismatic candidates, the CCR leaders have in recent years been pushing for measures that subsidize their advancement in the public and partisan sphere by their involvement in the Secretariat of Faith and Politics and the Tomas Moro Institute, as well as by their support of the ecclesiastical initiative EnCristus. These are instances in which Charismatics, as extensive arms of the Catholic Church in civil society, have concretized their fidelity to their teachings and seek to effectively occupy partisan spaces. The first front, the Secretariat of Faith and Politics, consists of identifying potential leaders capable of becoming candidates and of feeling called to influence politics in the name of the Church. For this, the National Office developed systematic training processes through numerous booklets, lectures, and courses. Such political-partisan participation of a confessional character presupposed a personal conversion of the candidates, their engagement in the CCR, and their commitment to occupy strategic positions in the legislature that facilitated the interlocution of the Catholic Church with the state. The second front, the Tomas Moro Institute, proposed to support the electoral disputes of federal and state councilors and congressional representatives.24 The strategic arsenal offered covers techniques for marketing, effective strategies for articulation, creation of networks, professional management, qualification of the advisors, objectivity in the party coalition, assertiveness in alliances, competence in conducting political campaigns, and training in fiscal areas. The implementation of this front, much discussed among Charismatic leaders with party representation, followed the Pentecostals’ strategy. The third front, EnCristus, was born in Buenos Aires during the first decade of this century, and was inspired by Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio (now Pope Francis), who incentivized the creation of an ecumenical space to discuss common political agendas. The initiative called for participation from various Christian groups and obligated the inclusion of partisan strategies in defense of ethical and moral positions in society. This ecumenical alliance has moved forward, but the political agenda has gradually been replaced by theological discussions, biblical meetings, and exchange of preaching among the more than 200 Pentecostal pastors, politicians, candidates, and parliamentarians working in the political environment. To a greater or lesser degree of success, this political ecumenism has deepened relations between Charismatics and Pentecostals, and has also created the possibility of a new political player, which seemingly would triumph over the Ministry of Education’s initiatives. Certainly, in the complex activity of political chess, Pentecostals and Charismatics each play their part in the game with advancements and setbacks. While shifting their discourse from theology to citizenship, they have won ethical-moral battles in the name of ecumenical alliances and religious pluralism. At the same time, they have unleashed

402   Brenda Carranza a strategic war of professionalizing cadres among themselves to occupy spaces in the legislative and executive branches that guarantee their institutional privileges. The cultural sphere has operated in much the same way, although now they have contoured different responses to the tension that generates common expressions, as in the naturalization of a Catholic gospel style, as will be seen in detail.

Catholic Gospel in Times of Media-Oriented Catholicism To attract youth to the churches, pastoral musicians have become professionals in the genre of gospel music. Delighted at the results, the CCR, more than once, drank musical rhythm from Protestant sources, to which Pentecostalism enshrined the standardization of worship and of theology, as well as reduced praise and worship as key to publicity. With dubious melodic and poetic quality, the gospel rhythms imposed themselves as a catalyst for gestures of religious sentiments as the faithful danced, sang, cried, closed their eyes, swayed their bodies, lifted their hands, and jumped in choreographed and synchronized movements.25 Originating from North American evangelical music, as well as seminal to the global industry of the Spirit, this style that mediated religious communicability was immediately “Brazilianized” by Pentecostal and Charismatic singers, pastors, and musical groups. The music business and the industry of cultural goods perceived in the effervescence of the gospel music explosion promised a market niche: the consumption habits of the religiously minded. Consumption is understood here as the appropriation and use of goods, signs, and values individually, but is contextualized in institutions such as churches. Thus, dislocations happen: the pastor and the priest reduced their prominence to that of a performer, with the altar as a stage, the music ministry as a musical performance, the assembly as a public audience, and the faithful as a spectator. In Brazilian cities in the 1990s, along with the gospel explosion, there was the merger of the imagery of social rejuvenation and a healthy life to aesthetic care as an expression of self-esteem—the valuing of the self. Regardless of the financial resources required of citizens, in urban centers and peripheries, there was exponential growth in attendance at fitness centers and engagement in bodybuilding, as well as submission to food restrictions and consumption of dietary products. Fulfillment and success required realignment to this pattern of consumption and encompassed not only the youthful, but also another consumer segment: the elderly. In this climate of social rejuvenation, the gospel spirit was precipitated in the parochial activities of the Catholic Church. There is little difficulty in imagining that the faithful, mostly adults and the elderly, associated the gospel style with religious modernization and the need for ecclesial rejuvenation. The media christened show-Masses, whose celebrations were realized on large stages in open-air venues. These Masses, where

Preferential Option for the Spirit   403 priests were singer-presenter-and-celebrant, combined the spectacle and the liturgical into a liturgical continuum that directed the show of musical groups. A constellation of youth and Charismatic singing priests took over the massive celebrations of the CCR and regarded social media as a privileged locus of evangelization. They were artists, who transmitted through religious media, the radiophonic sphere, programs in auditoriums, religious and secular magazines, and features in Globo TV film studios. Consequently, there emerged a generation of priests who reap millions in profit from their actions in editorial and recording markets, shows, events, and so on. From this constellation, two prominent stars of Charismatic Catholicism stand out. They are the diocesan priests from São Paulo: Marcelo Rossi (b. 1967) and Fabio de Melo (b. 1971). The first, as mentioned previously, built a shrine (Theotokos) and pioneered a Pentecostal style while remaining Catholic. Directed to the populace, Father Marcelo Pentecostalized popular devotions with his religious products (songs, dances, rosaries, novenas). In turn, Father Fábio focused successfully on the female middle-class audience. He is known for melodic romanticism in his music and for his discourse of self-help psychology. With his captivating personality, Fábio de Melo organizes spiritual cruises and lectures; he gives interviews regularly and participates in debates on TV programs. Both priests have been commercially successful, and their editorial production always has a best seller. They inaugurated a new generation of singing priests, inspired many seminarians, and, above all, were leveraged by the most important secular media in Brazil: Rede Globo. However, Father Marcelo delimits boundaries of space while reaching a popular audience and mediating the forces with neo-Pentecostals, while Father Fábio strives to maintain the image of an enlightened priest by using academic language to signal a promising market for ­spiritual self-help. As sacred carriers of Charismatic Catholicism, priests-artists established affinity between rejuvenation that dominated socially and the appetite for spectacles and for religious entertainment. Perceptively, a leitmotif transforms the act of consuming into a subjective act, because a continuum is established between the acquired product and the subjective value attributed to it; therefore, its representation is generated. Thus, understandably, the success of advertising and media discourse lies in capturing the processes of subjectivation to which the products made available by the market refer. If this continuum is transferred to religious experience, a certain subjectivation can be observed at the moment of the purchase of the religious product, because the product is laden with sacred representation. In the case of the sacred carriers, the singing priests, they are the ones who establish the subjective continuum between the product and the religious experience, thus potentializing market sales.26 As places of production and reception of symbolic and immaterial goods, churches are also cultural mediators with dialogical and communicational potential, favoring the interaction of the individual with society. Mediating institutions establish connections between individual actions and/or of collective motivations; they become meaningful channels.27 From this perspective, the singing priests, as cultural mediators, participate

404   Brenda Carranza in the processes of religious subjectivation of goods and products that drive the booming consumer market of Brazilian Pentecostalization. Another lever of the Catholic gospel movement is found in the CCR’s creativity in offering youth various formats of religious socialization. One important innovation is reflected in the transformation of the Brazilian Carnival to the “Carnival of Jesus.” Spiritual retreats are promoted for the young as places for dancing, praying, confessing, and catechizing—all to the beat of religious music. Packaged within this climate of apparent secularity, priests and laity urge young people to remain “pure and chaste” and to move away from the gendered ideology that they believe contaminates schools and universities. They remind them that the “enemy,” understood as the devil in Christianity, is about to seduce them into sexual debauchery far from the doctrinal positions of the Catholic Church. This vision is echoed insistently in writings by Benedict XVI and John Paul II, who emphasized the harmful consequences of hedonism and individualism that  pull youth away from religious transcendence—from God and the Christian ­virtues proposed by the Church. In addition to the Carnival of Jesus in thousands of locations, in small and large ­cities, hundreds of young people are found in Chistoteques (Christ-discotheques) and barzinhos (little bars) on Saturday nights, listening to baladas santas (holy ballads). Faced with urban violence that dominates the Brazilian metropolis, the lively gospel dances constitute places of security. The Chistoteques are officially embraced by the Brazilian episcopate under the title of Pastoral de Evangelização Nocturna (pastoral night evangelization), and the episcopate has offered to implement the baladas santas in every diocese. To this end, bishops encouraged the Pastoral Noturna by proposing the formation of animators of the ballads by Catholic DJs and teams of angels (volunteers who watch over the environment of the Christoteques to avoid expressions of sensuality). This signals approval of the Charismatic evangelization style that stimulates the ­creation of differentiated spaces, while favoring conservative indoctrination and crystallizing Catholic gospel. It is possibly an attempt to spiritually colonize the secular culture and to satiate the taste for emotive songs that may alleviate the afflictions of urban youth. Catholic gospel music was elevated in the implementation of the 2013 World Youth Day held in Rio de Janeiro, where hundreds of artists and bands gave support to the event. Its creative style added another element to the developments of the Brazilian CCR: media-oriented Catholicism. Understood as a set of actions, it prioritizes the use of communication media in evangelization, religious marketing, and liturgical modernization. In tune with the sensitivity of social and ecclesial rejuvenation, Catholic Pentecostalism has become a model for conservative evangelization of the youth.28 In this way, the missionary zeal of lay communities, dedicated to the task of maintaining access to the flame of Charismatic spirituality and media-driven Catholicism, germinates within the CCR. From these groups and from the CCR emanates the missionary impulse to re-Catholicize the world—a subject that is ­discussed in the following.

Preferential Option for the Spirit   405

Spring of the Spirit Being good disciples becomes a conviction of some groups of the CCR, while “New Communities . . . in the face of the traces of a secularized mentality or that promotes ­religious indifference in many Latin American environments . . . are the Spring of the world and the Church.”29 The urgency of Christian culture overlapping the secular culture in contemporary society will be the spring of the theological, Charismatic, and organizational development of the new communities. These Charismatic Catholic communities constitute a lay vocation that, under the imperative of bringing God into the world, innovate traditional structures of community life in the Church. Composed of women and men, couples and celibates, priests and religious, the new communities follow an intense aspiration to community life, poverty, and prayer. At one time, the hierarchy feared the organizational and economic autonomy of these groups, but the hope of having a skilled workforce at no cost to dioceses and parishes has mitigated episcopal resistance. Although they share the same breath of the spirit of the CCR, the new communities are independent of the CCR. Most of the founders, many still alive, aroused veneration, generated followers, awakened individual forces of self-realization, and energized a radical companionship, grounded in mutual love.30 Around such ideals, the new communities are organized internally into two types: communities of Life and communities of Alliance. The first type, communities of Life, dedicate themselves exclusively to religious work; for this, its members live collectively, and are directly responsible for the expansion of the community, the maintenance of the mission houses, the media projects, the collection of economic resources, and the formation of missionaries inside and outside of Brazil. The second type, communities of Alliance, share the same missionary spirit, but its members reside with their families; they also make economic donations to maintain community life, perform professional functions, and manage their own wages. In these new communities, the fulfillment of an ideology of holiness exerts a strong religious appeal of radicality, demanding ruptures with the secular world. Sexual chastity, both for celibacy and marriage, and the option for poverty or renunciation of material goods imply the submission of one’s will to the imperative of obedience to others, under a mandate held as divine.31 In this capacity to reorient the lives of thousands of people resides the novelty of Charismatic communities. In developing a pedagogy of the nest, they give due appreciation to welcoming their members, watching over the relationships they establish between themselves and non-members, and monitoring the fulfillment of their tasks and works. Taken together, these communities set themselves up as authentic emotional refuges for young people and adults, by providing devices to resist the temptations of modern consumerism. They provide security in the face of a reality of violence confronting the rest of society; they establish invisible walls that separate those from within (the community) from those outside (the secular world).

406   Brenda Carranza In cultural terms, one can affirm that the new communities generate a level of intermediary communities of meaning in the same way as do the singing priests. Many followers find a personal rule in the variety of certitudes that life on the margins offers to  perplexing questions and financial instability. Among other factors, this helps to explain why there is an abundance of vocations, many originating in Charismatic circles. In full harmony with the logic of the production of symbolic and religious goods, these austere apostles of the twenty-first century have as an assignment to make the media their charism. Although in apparent contradiction with their restrictive mystique toward modern consumerism, these communities produce and distribute their products in the religious media—all in the name of evangelization and ecclesial modernization. This might be the logic that equates or paradoxically structures a dynamic that denies in practice what it affirms in spirituality. This allows the natural coexistence of contradictions that demand resistance in the name of the community’s charism. Herein is a masterful example of acceptance of religious modernization and of rejection of the values of modernity. Two communities, Canção Nova and Shalom, are models of accommodation to these contradictions and of reference for other communities for their own national and international projection. In the pull of Charismatic communities, they deserve distinction because they are historically the oldest; they have constituted great potential for media growth , and have developed innumerable religious products. Founded by a religious priest at Canção Nova in São Paulo in 1978 and by lay people at Shalom in the Brazilian Northeast in 1982, the two communities hold an immense media heritage with national projection; both have developed ministries in TV, radio, and publishing, as well as a large infrastructure dedicated to the implementation of the web and its digital interaction, and even a faculty of higher education. Their economic resources come from the sale of their products, collection campaigns with viewers and radio listeners, taxpayers’ club, and donors. Resources are invested in the maintenance of countless formation houses, in missionary projects, and in the physical establishment of the buildings that house the community. Canção Nova can host up to 200,000 people. Both communities attract numerous young people, including many called to the priesthood and religious life. To form their own clergy, they also have established partnerships with diocesan seminaries; later these priests will lead religious media programs. Another peculiarity has characterized these two communities: their strong international missionary mobility. In the face of the migratory movements that brought globalization to Brazil, homesickness, and the inability to feel at home in a new society, religion has acted as a vector that promotes a collective identity.32 In the wake of this religious transnationalization, the diaspora has provided missionary opportunities that have integrated Canção Nova and Shalom. In order to follow projects of evangelization with the churches in the diaspora, they have established numerous networks of contacts with local churches. There are missionaries in Israel, Mozambique, Angola, Cameroon, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, the United States, and Canada. The main destinations of the new communities in Europe are responding to the pontifical call to carry out a second evangelization there.

Preferential Option for the Spirit   407 The missionaries leave with enthusiasm to collaborate in the creation and maintenance of religious media in European dioceses with the goal of animating the faith and ­re-Catholicizing the inhabitants. Their pastoral actions and vision draw on the cultural capital of Brazilian Charismatics and are tempered with attitudes of acceptance of the Europeans, and with sympathy and affection for them. Additionally, unlike the Pentecostals, who propose to convert those who have abandoned Christianity, Charismatics seek to attract and to re-institutionalize non-practicing Catholics. But re-Christianizing Europe is a difficult task that goes beyond the economic considerations of those who move from poverty to wealth. On the one hand, the missionary experience includes anti-migratory sentiment, as reported in the media in recent times.33 On the other hand, there is a certain cultural resistance on the part of Europeans to the geo-ethnic shift: from whites converting non-whites, to believing-and-God-fearing blacks and Luso-Latin Americans trying to convert secularized whites.34 This conversion effort of Charismatics and Pentecostals is called reverse or inverted mission. They not only move as leaders who accompany communities in the diaspora, but intend to return back home to the areas from which they first received the Christian message. Such a counterpoint reverses the interaction between discourses and pastoral practices that originally emanated from the metropolis to the colonies, from the white bearers of the authentic message to the Latin American spiritual potential to be converted. That is, the inverted mission targets the European society in which the migrant is inserted and where the fervent missionaries propose to reveal “authentic Christianity.” Moreover, those who hold that cultural traits are a value to share—the Brazilian missionaries, and for those who receive these missionaries—the aforementioned countries, frequently there is ethnocentric conflict faced by missionaries and this does not spare them religious rejection from the locals. As such, frequently, Pentecostals and Charismatics are seen as incapable of creating new alterities based on consistent theologies.35 Even so, the mission houses of the new Charismatic communities contractually embraced the inversion of the colonial historical process begun when missionaries first came to Brazil.

Challenges of Catholic Pentecostalization The consolidation of Catholic and Evangelical Pentecostalism has contributed to the redesign of Brazilian Christianity. New relationships have arisen in this Christian Pentecostalism that make the symbolic goods market more competitive. No doubt there are strategic relationships characterized by approaches to impose Christian values ​​on a secularized and pluralized society, but distancing occurs when competition imposes itself to maintain and/or extend its privileges to the state. Both Pentecostal expressions shared the same theology, aesthetic gospel culture, bodily performance, and a similar epochal spirit of social rejuvenation, as well as technological

408   Brenda Carranza and religious modernization. Although Charismatics and evangelicals appear as ­enemies in a religious war, in fact, they are differentiated actors who work together in a common scenario, differing only in the nuances of interpretation. As such, this justifies the efforts of believers and Charismatics to strive to forge identity borders as a form of affirmation of their denominational origins and of their differentiation in religious disputes—even if the dissonance continues, or for the media and the faithful, this does not prevent Christian Pentecostalism from projecting itself into the political and ­cultural sphere, thus confirming its capacity for social insertion. For its part, Catholic Pentecostalism irrigates the ecclesial capillarity, whether in the CCR version, or in media Catholicism and the new communities. The CCR attributes its success to its utilization of the tripod of devotional reinvention, religious modernization, and bureaucratization of the charism. As language rejuvenated devotion to the Holy Spirit, the Pentecostal performance became attuned to the potential market for symbolic goods as enshrined in the gospel culture. The social bases of Catholicism— working classes and the middle class—were struck by the new generation of priests and lay singers who hailed the emergence of Catholic Gospel. However, in the expansion of Charismatic Catholicism, there is a significant displacement of its own novelty: the emergence of priestly leadership to the detriment of lay protagonism, which substituted charism for power, and embraced a spirit of discipline. In spite of this, or perhaps because of this, the Brazilian Charismatics have directed themselves toward the epicenter of the Church, thereby raising the status of their ecclesial model, while enhancing their own ability to go beyond inserted boundaries that act as headwinds of reverse mission. If, in the times of Francis’s papacy, the constant call is for the church to retake the social and existential peripheries, to abandon the sacristies and careerism, and to become poor with the poor, certain sectors of the Catholic Church of Brazil seem to be moving against it. These seek to retake the spaces of moral hegemony, to preach the ideology of gender, and to excel in the social visibility of a Christianity of the past. Meanwhile, the preferential option for the Holy Spirit offers us an evangelizing proposal, swayed by the logic of marketing but confronted by the culture of consumption and entertainment—a culture that distances itself from the dialogical and ecumenical style of Francis. Yet, the Charismatic movement in Brazil is heterogeneous, with its five decades of existence and the complexity of a mass movement, so certain internal dissent toward political, religious, and social practices more in tune with Pope Francis’s proposals are perceptible.

Notes 1. Michael Wilkinson, “The ‘Many Tongues’ of Global Pentecostalism,” in Global Pentecostal Movements: Migration, Mission, and Public Religion, ed. Michael Wilkinson (Leiden-Boston, MA: Brill, 2012), 3–13; Henri Gooren, “The Pentecostalization of Religion and Society, in Latin America: First Findings from Chile,” in Papers from the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion—SSS (Milwaukee, WI: October 28, 2011), 16–36; Paul Freston, “Introduction,” in Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Latin America (Oxford:

Preferential Option for the Spirit   409 University Press, 2008); Andrew Chesnut, Competitive Spirits: Latin America’s New Religious Economy (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2003); Hilario Wynarczyk, “La guerra espiritual en el campo evangélico,” Sociedad y Religión 13: 111–126; David Martin, Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990); David Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant? (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990). 2. Edward L. Cleary, The Rise of Charismatic Catholicism in Latin America (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2011), 11–39. 3. http://www.iccrs.org/en/about-iccrs/(January 6, 2017). 4. “Spirit and Power—A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostals: Executive Summary (Pew Forum, October 2006). http://www.pewforum.org/2006/10/05/spirit-and-power (October 7, 2016). 5. Ari Oro and Hilário Wynarczyk, “Pentecostalismo en América Latina,” in Pentecostalismo globalizado, ed. Alberto da Silva Moreira and Pino Lucà Trombetta (Goias: Editora PUCGoias, 2015), 32–46. 6. Paul Freston, “Introduction,” in Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Latin America. (Oxford: University Press, 2008), 34. 7. This neophyte Catholic Charismatic movement was due to the efforts of two US Jesuits: Father Harold Rahm and Father Edward Dougherty. 8. Brenda Carranza, Renovação carismática católica: Origens, mudanças e tendências (Aparecida: Santuário, 2000). 9. The academic milieu was engaged in the analysis of opposition between the CCR and Liberation Theology. Such an approach assumed that Charismatics promoted alienating religious experiences without social commitment because of a conservative restoration policy of the Church and a backdrop of social movements. From this perspective, the CCR was identified as a strategy of conservative sectors to invest in the containment of the Pentecostal advance. 10. “Annual censuses” (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, IBGE). https://agenciadenoticias.ibge.gov.br/agencia-sala-de-imprensa/2013-agencia-de-noticias/ releases/14244-asi-censo-2010-numero-de-catolicos-cai-e-aumenta-o-de-evangelicosespiritas-e-sem-religiao http://www. ibge.gov.br. (March 28, September 10, 2019). 11. Founder of a female religious congregation, Elena Guerra was later considered an apostle by the CCR for being the saint who wrote the most about the Holy Spirit; they call her a prophetess of the “writings of fire.” Papal documents such as Provida matris charitate (1895) are attributed to her inspiration. 12. Martin Lindhardt, “La globalización pentecostal: Difusión, apropiación y orientación global,” Revista Cultura y Religión V, no. 2 (2011), 117. 13. Cleary, The Rise of Charismatic Catholicism, 188–198. 14. Pierre Bourdieu, A economia das trocas simbólicas (São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 2002). 15. The requirement of disciplinarization by the priests to the movements, meetings, and prayers of healing and liberation is recorded in the presentation of Ardens felicitates (2000). http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_ doc_20001123_istruzione_po.html (April 4, 2016). 16. João Paulo II, “Mensagem do Papa João Paulo II, “À fraternidade católica de comunidades e  associações da carismática” (1998), http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/pt/ speeches/1998/june/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_19980601_carismatici.html (March 28, 2019). 17. Planejamento Estratégico de Evangelização, in Renovação carismática católica: Semeando a cultura de pentecostes, 2010–2017 (Pelotas: Editora RCC, 2010).

410   Brenda Carranza 18. Humberto Junior Maia, “Os novos centros da fé: a construção de megatemplos,” Revista época (December 19, 2011), 57–63. 19. The following websites show the sumptuousness of both temples, their parish, and activities: http://sites.universal.org/templodesalomao/and www.theotokos.com.br (June 14, 2017). 20. Maria das Dores Campos Machado, “Carismáticos e pentecostais, concorrentes e aliados,” in Paper Presented at the Annual International Meeting for National Association of Postgraduate and Research in Social Sciences [ANPOCCS] (Águas de Lindóia, São Paulo, Brasil, September 23–27, 2013), 16. 21. Adriana Piscitelli, Maria Filomena Gregori, and Sergio Carrara, “Apresentação,” in Sexualidade e saberes: Convenções e fronteiras, ed. Adriana Pisciteli, et al. (Rio de Janeiro: Garamond, 2004), 7–22. 22. Maria das Dores Campos Machado, “Aborto e ativismo religioso nas eleições de 2010,” Revista Brasileira de Ciência Política 7 (2012), 25–54. 23. Cristina Vital and Paulo Lopes, Religião e política: Uma análise da atuação de parlamentares evangélicos sobre direitos das mulhere e de LGBTs no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Heinrich Böll & Instituto de Estudos da Religião [ISER], 2013), 4–15. 24. Marcos Vinicius Reis,“Política e religião: o envolvimento dos católicos carismáticos na política brasileira,” PhD diss. (São Paulo: São Carlos Federal University, 2011), 119. 25. Magali do Nascimento Cunha, “A serviço do Rei, uma análise dos discursos cristãos midiatizados,” Revista de Estudos da Religião 3 (September 2008), 46–68. 26. Brenda Carranza, Catolicismo midiático (São Paulo: Ideias & Letras, 2011), 86. 27. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, Modernidade, pluralismo e crise de sentido (Petrópolis: Vozes, 2004), 25. 28. Brenda Carranza, “A JMJ cristalizou a consagração da cultura gospel católica no Brasil,” in O Papa Francisco no Brasil, alguns olhares (Cadernos de teologia pública, unisinos, ano VII, n. 79, 2013), 31–37. 29. Stanislaw Rylko, “Mensagem VII congresso nacional das novas comunidades,” http:// novascomunidades.wordpress.com/informações (September 17, 2016). 30. Brenda Carranza and Cecília Mariz, “Catholicism for Export: The Case of Canção Nova,” in A diáspora das religiões brasileiras, eds. Cristina Rocha and Manuel Vásquez (São Paulo: Ideias & Letras, 2013), 148. 31. Cecília Mariz and Luciana Aguilar, “Shalom: Construção social da experiência vocacional,” in Novas comunidades católicas, eds. Brenda Carranza et al. (Aparecida: Idéias & Letras, 2009), 266. 32. Manuel Vásquez and Cristina Rocha, “Introduction: Brazil in the New Global Cartography of Religion,” in The Diaspora of Brazilian Religions, eds. Cristina Rocha and Manuel Vásquez (Leiden-Boston, MA: Brill, 2013), 1–42. 33. There are many testimonies available at the website of the Canção Nova community; they narrate pastoral experiences of members in European mission houses. 34. Paul Freston, “Reverse Mission: A Discourse in Search of Reality?” in Penteco Studies 9, no. 2 (2010), 153. 35. Claudia Währisch-Oblau, “We Shall be Fruitful in This Land: Pentecostal and Charismatic New Mission Churches in Europe,” in Fruitful in This Land, Pluralism, Dialogue and Healing in Migrant Pentecostalism, eds. A. Droogers and C. Van der Laar (Zoetermeer: Ed. Boekencentrum, 2006), 33.

chapter 22

A lter nati v e Chr isti a n itie s Mormons, Seventh-day Adventists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses Ronald Lawson, Kenneth Xydias, and Ryan T. Cragun

Introduction The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), Seventh-day Adventists (Adventists), and Jehovah’s Witnesses (Witnesses) are three of the most successful American religious exports. All three groups started in the United States and have now expanded internationally, with a presence in most countries around the world. They are prominent in Latin America, where they now have millions of members, from Mexico to Chile. In this chapter we describe their origins, explain their motivations for international expansion—emphasizing their interest in Latin America—and detail their efforts and current status there. In describing their history and development in Latin America, we discuss their differing motivations, proselytizing styles and techniques, targeted converts, and examine how these differences have resulted in varying outcomes.

Origins and Proselytizing Motivations The oldest of the three religious groups is the Mormon Church, which was founded in upstate New York in 1830 by Joseph Smith, Jr. Proselytizing efforts began immediately, with initial outreach to Canada, and then to Britain in 1837.1 As a millennialist religion, Mormons feel an urgency to spread their faith. They believe that the “fullness of

412   Ronald Lawson, Kenneth Xydias, and Ryan T. Cragun the gospel” of Jesus Christ, which, as “the Latter-day Saints,” is theirs exclusively, and must be preached in every nation (Matthew 24:1–4) before Christ will return to usher in the millennium.2 This sense of urgency has led Mormons to evangelize in nearly every country around the world. However, a number of factors have combined to tether that urgency. Early in their history a decision was made by the leadership to encourage “gathering” the Saints in Zion—a physical location—rather than “establishing” congregations throughout the world.3 As a result, Mormons did not develop strong footings in most of the countries where they proselytized until much later than the Adventists or the Witnesses. Additionally, once their polygamy was made public in 1853, Mormons became engaged in significant struggles in the United States to ensure their survival, which dampened their outreach efforts.4 It was not until the struggles over polygamy were resolved in the early twentieth century that outreach efforts were re-emphasized, which can be seen in their statistics. People of Native American ancestry have been of particular interest to Mormon evangelistic efforts. This is because the Book of Mormon, the primary book of scripture that distinguishes Mormonism from other faiths, purports to be a history of Native Americans: it claims they are the descendants of Jews who left Israel before the invasion by Babylonians around 600 bce.5 Missionaries were sent to Native American tribes within six months of the founding of Mormonism, following revelations received by Joseph Smith that are recorded in the Mormon Doctrine and Covenants (D&C 19:26–27; 28:8; 32:2).6 While today many Mormon apologists, and increasingly the LDS Church itself, have, on the basis of anthropological, archaeological, and genetic evidence, distanced themselves from the idea that the Book of Mormon details the history of Native Americans,7 it is clear that there was—and for many Mormons, remains—a belief that Native Americans are the living descendants of the people described in the Book of Mormon.8 Early outreach to Indigenous peoples was driven by an interest in sharing with them what Mormons believed was a history of their ancestors.9 Later outreach to Latin America may not have been driven by an urgency to convert the “Lamanites,” but Mormons believed that they had a special message for the Amerindians throughout the Americas—a unique record of their ancestors (though this is less emphasized today). This was used as a tool for proselytizing to those of Native American ancestry until recently. Adventists were slow to launch an outreach program. They traced their origins to the “Great Disappointment” of 1844, when Christ did not return as founder William Miller had predicted, though they continued initially to see Christ’s return as imminent. Since only Millerites were eligible for translation, further outreach was pointless.10 However, when others sought to join them, they were eventually persuaded that the door to salvation had not closed, and began to publish Present Truth and to recruit others around them.11 Their initial small numbers made it seem impossible to spread their message abroad. They comforted themselves by seeing immigration to the United States and Canada as God’s solution to their problem of taking the gospel to “all the world,” as Jesus had commanded: he was guiding representatives from “every nation” to

Alternative Christianities   413 the United States to hear God’s final warning message.12 When Adventists organized formally between 1861 and 1863, they made no endeavor to establish a foreign mission board to evangelize abroad.13 However, converts with foreign ties and roots proved eager to share their new beliefs with friends and relatives abroad: many sent Adventist publications. Consequently, church leaders received requests for teachers, and they began to see it as their responsibility to respond. In 1869 they created a Foreign Mission Society to respond to such requests when there seemed to be significant interest in hearing the Adventist message.14 Within a few years, through their prophet, Ellen White, Adventist leaders came to understand that theirs was a mission to the whole world.15 Some of the strongest early calls for help came from people in Switzerland, who were so eager that they sent a delegate to Church headquarters to press their request. The General Conference responded by sending the first missionary there in 1874.16 Adventists rapidly spread their activity to Germany and then many other parts of Europe, from Britain to Russia, Norway to Cyprus, since so many of their converts had roots in that continent. However, even as they spread throughout Europe, they also responded to requests from Egypt, Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, and parts of Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, the South Pacific, and Africa. By 1900 they had established beachheads on every continent, and 20 percent of their members lived outside North America.17 Expansion prompted Adventism to reshape its structure in 1903, when it formally created regional headquarters where decisions could be made promptly. Germany, Britain, Australia, and South Africa joined North America as “home bases” responsible for finding missionaries for particular regions.18 These launched missions in rapid succession, as requests multiplied and Adventists sought to blanket the world. By 1921, 50 percent of Adventists were located outside North America.19 Over time they extended gradually into poorer countries. Their numerical growth remained relatively slow, for demand in premodern societies was modest, but the service provided by their educational and medical institutions gained them credibility and positioned them for rapid growth when demand accelerated during modernization in other decades.20 Charles Taze Russell, founder of the Bible Students, a renovationist group, began to spread his ideas in 1879 through the magazine Zion’s Watch Tower and Herald of Christ’s Presence (“Watchtower”), early publications of what would come to be known as the Jehovah’s Witnesses.21 He also published a six-volume series known as Studies in the Scriptures, often referred to as Millennial Dawns or Dawns, which he considered to be key to understanding the Bible. Russell incorporated Zion’s Watch Tower Tract Society in 1884; the name was later changed to the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania (WTBTS). Its purpose, according to its 1884 charter, was to spread Bible truths through books, magazines, tracts, pamphlets, and other legal means.22 Initially, there was little evangelism by the membership. Russell used colporteurs (bible sellers) to sell his books and to solicit subscriptions to the Watchtower.23 He also used “Pilgrims,” or traveling preachers who were WTBTS employees, to give talks at facilities rented by local congregations for that purpose. His weekly sermons were syndicated and, at one

414   Ronald Lawson, Kenneth Xydias, and Ryan T. Cragun time, were published in over 3,000 newspapers, reaching an estimated 15 million people.24 By the time of his death in 1916, Russell’s Bible Student movement had adherents in about ten different countries, including the United States. Joseph Franklin Rutherford, the Society’s legal counsel, assumed the presidency after Russell’s death. Rutherford’s ascension to the presidency led to conflict and eventually to  schism. He advocated centralized control over the Bible Students and instituted organizational changes, such as eliminating Russell’s practice of local church governance. Rutherford required that congregational leaders be appointed by him. These and other changes resulted in numerous schisms. Eight Bible Study groups whose beliefs and practices were more closely aligned to those of Russell were formed. Most of these groups are still in existence today. To distinguish the segment that continued to follow him, Rutherford renamed them Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1931.

Entrance into Latin America While Mormon evangelism in Latin America was sporadic before the twentieth century, about 4,000 Mormons migrated to Mexico in order to avoid prosecution over polygamy after the passage of the 1885 Edmunds Act, which outlawed the practice of polygamy in the United States.25 Many of these settlers returned to the United States after Mormons discontinued the practice of polygamy in 1890 and banned it formally in 1905.26 Some efforts at evangelism began in Mexico during these years, but more extensive and widespread efforts were delayed until the 1950s.27 Mormons began formal proselytizing efforts in many countries later than Adventists and Witnesses because of these conditions and their policy of refraining from outreach in countries until they received formal recognition.28 Adventists were motivated to evangelize in Latin America by what they now saw as their God-given commission to broadcast their message globally. Since they believed that they alone were God’s “remnant” and the preaching of all other groups was incomplete and thus false, Adventists proceeded with energy and commitment. Members acting independently of the Foreign Missions Board to “share the Adventist Message” initiated first contacts with almost every country in Latin America. Some had personal ties to Latin America; others made it their focus. Some chose to become “ship missionaries,” persuading ship captains to take a parcel of Adventist publications and drop it on a wharf, in the hope that they would be found and distributed. For example, a resident of British Guiana, seeing such a parcel in 1883, shared the contents with friends, some of whom were persuaded, wrote for more, and requested a teacher; the Mission Board responded by sending a pastor and a colporteur, who arrived in 1887. In other instances, immigrants converted in the United States, then returned home to share their new faith. One of these returned to the Bay Islands of Honduras in 1885. When a missionary followed her there in 1891, and a church-wide offering provided him with a 50-foot schooner, that vessel became the means whereby Adventism spread

Alternative Christianities   415 to English-speaking coastal and island communities from there as far as Venezuela. Other US immigrants sent Adventist books to their relatives and friends with similar results—for example, a parcel sent to Jamaica in 1889 resulted in requests for more publications that drew colporteurs there. A pastor followed in 1893, and the first congregation was organized in 1894; by 1903 there were 1,200 members on the island. In other instances, people moved from the United States to various Latin American countries as self-supporting missionaries, founding medical facilities and English-language schools, selling books, or working at other occupations and evangelizing in their spare time. Adventists were not prepared linguistically for widespread work in Spanish-and Portuguese-speaking countries when its new Foreign Missions Board began operations in 1889. While colporteurs were the first Adventists to enter many countries, they were initially limited because Adventists had no publications in Spanish or Portuguese until 1899 and 1900. Consequently, they targeted English-, German-, and French-speaking people, depending on the country. Contacts made through German publications were the engine leading to the founding of the first Adventist churches in Argentina (1894), Chile (1895), and Brazil (1896); English publications in Honduras (1891), Jamaica, and Mexico City (1893); and French publications in Haiti (1907). Later, colporteurs bearing Spanish publications opened up Cuba (1905), Venezuela (1911), Ecuador (1912), and the Dominican Republic (1917).29 Adventism grew fastest initially in the English-speaking Caribbean (Jamaica). German-speaking converts laid an important foundation for Adventism in southern Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. Once Spanish and Portuguese publications became available, Adventism initially grew fastest in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, and later in Mexico, Central America, and South America, especially Peru, southern Mexico, and Brazil. By 1920 Adventism in that region had clearly become Latin.30 Adventists were established in almost all of Latin America decades ahead of both Mormons and Witnesses: once established in a country, they persisted and grew. By 1940, when they were active in all countries except French Guiana, their official baptized membership was 59,940, compared with 5,153 Mormons (4,307 of whom were in Mexico), and 1,838 Witness “publishers.”31 The entrance of Witnesses to Latin America was, like that of the Adventists, not due to a special theological urgency, but rather to the general desire to spread their teachings and was driven largely by colporteur and pilgrim activity. Congregations established during the Russell years remained small. They only began to grow in number when Rutherford emphasized the idea that membership included an obligation to participate in the distribution of his books and to use them as source material for teaching others about what the Bible had to say. Colporteurs were renamed Pioneers in 1931.32 Special Pioneer service was instituted in 1937.33 They were called that because they entered new territory, and were expected to work full time in field service.34 Branch offices in one country often had responsibility for the work in new mission territories and sent pioneers to develop congregations there. Table 22.1 illustrates the entry into Latin America of Mormons, Adventists, and Witnesses. For each country, two dates are provided—the date when a country was

Table 22.1  Year of Initial Entry, Year Established, and 2011 Population of Mormons, Adventists, and Witnesses in Latin America Country Argentina Belize Bolivia Brazil Chile Columbia Costa Rica Cuba Dominican Republic Ecuador El Salvador French Guiana Guatemala Guyana Haiti Honduras Jamaica Mexico Nicaragua Panama Paraguay Peru Puerto Rico Suriname Uruguay Venezuela Total

Initial Entry

Mormons Established

2011 Pop.

1924 1980 1961 1913 1851 1960 1944 ~1965 1965 1948 1989 1942 1988 1977 1952 1853 1874 1953 1940 1939 ~1956 1945 1969 ~1925 1966

1925 1983 1964 1930 1956 1966 1950 1978 1966 1951 1989 1948 1989 1980 1953 1970 1879 1959 1941 1948 1956 1970 1988 1944 1966

399,440 4,018 177,475 1,173,533 570,833 176,128 39,861 50 122,024 202,935 111,969 362 231,776 5,198 17,407 147,958 5,449 1,273,199 76,011 47,427 82,542 508,812 20,940 1,261 97,619 153,701 5,647,928

Initial Entry 1890 1885 1897 1879 1885 1901 1900 1903 1907 1904 1915 1944 1908 1883 1879 1887 ~1889 1891 1892 1897 1892 1898 1901 1894 1891 1907

Adventists Established

2011 Pop.

Initial Entry

Witnesses Established

2011 Pop.

1894 1902 1907 1896 1895 1922 1903 1905 1917 1912 1916 1959 1913 1887 1907 1891 1894 1893 1914 1901 1907 1905 1903 1940 1896 1911

112,907 37,213 79,997 1,309,791 113,022 295,852 66,516 32,211 284,789 46,896 210,272 2,272 232,996 58,323 374,399 249,497 263,168 693,450 118,747 96,999 11,845 355,873 37,442 4,385 7,441 251,949

1924 1933 1924 1923 1924 1929 1900 1913 1945 1934 ~1931 1947 1932 ~1914 1930 1930 1899 1910 1946 ~1909 1924 1932 1907 1918 1924 1924

1924 1944 1946 1924 1933 1945 1941 1935 1945 1947 1945 1960 1945 1923 1944 1945 1924 1930 1946 1941 1939 1947 1941 1946 1938 1946

141,301 2,151 20,770 720,896 71,128 148,767 26,264 93,254 32,876 73,500 37,081 2,079 30,512 2,562 16,412 19,482 11,866 724,690 22,633 13,466 8,557 108,264 25,814 2,464 11,447 120,533

5,348,282

2,488,769

Alternative Christianities   417 entered, and when a permanent presence was established there. Initial entry includes events such as a member of the group moving there or a missionary making a visit. An established presence is typically some sort of permanent organization, such as the first organized congregation or mission in that country. We include both dates because entry into a country is more of a process than an event, as it takes time for a religious group to gain a foothold. Patterns varied from group to group. In general, Adventists were the earliest to become established, followed by Witnesses and then Mormons. Adventists were established in twenty-four countries between 1887 and 1922; Suriname and French Guiana followed later. Although Mormons entered Mexico before Adventists entered any country, they did not enter another country until 1925. Witnesses, after establishing themselves in four countries in 1923–1924, expanded rapidly between 1930 and 1947, when they added twenty-one more countries. After entering Mexico in 1879, Mormons added two more countries in 1925 and 1930, and then twenty-two more countries fairly steadily over forty-eight years from 1941 to 1989. They finally became established in Cuba in 2012.

The Current Situation in Latin America Understanding the current situation of Mormons, Adventists, and Witnesses in Latin America requires a clear understanding of a number of factors,35 but two of those are particularly important. First, the three groups differ in how they conduct outreach and evangelism. Second, they each count members in markedly different ways that make it extremely difficult to compare their membership statistics. We discuss these in turn.

Outreach and Evangelism The fit of outreach strategies with the cultures where they are employed has an important influence on growth. Both Mormons and Witnesses primarily use door-to-door approaches as their prime strategy, their goal being to arrange studies with the occupants that will result in baptisms. These are essentially “one-size-fits-all” approaches. Adventists, by contrast, employ a variety of approaches. Mormon proselytizing efforts have changed over time, but today they are uniform throughout the world. Their earliest missionaries were often married adult men, who typically traveled alone, preaching to those who would listen and relying upon the generosity of those they encountered for room and board.36 Over time, this pattern shifted, and by the mid-twentieth century, Mormon outreach was largely conducted by young, unmarried men, for specified periods of time (usually two years).37 In addition to formalizing who served missions, the approach that missionaries used to share their

418   Ronald Lawson, Kenneth Xydias, and Ryan T. Cragun message was also regulated, leading to uniformity in how missionaries contacted people, shared Mormon beliefs with them, and even in what missionaries wore.38 Several additional modifications have occurred more recently. Young Mormon women have been allowed to serve missions, though at a slightly older age (until 2012 it was 21 but is now 19; for men it was 19 until 2012 but is now 18).39 Female Mormon missionaries serve for eighteen months instead of twenty-four. Additionally, elderly, retired couples are allowed to serve missions. Adventist colporteurs also originally went door to door. However, Adventist strategies have always been much more varied. Where interest emerged, this usually led to “reaping” meetings and ultimately to Bible studies in homes or classes that usually lasted many months. Adventists typically opened grade schools soon after they organized churches, and often clinics. Their purpose was to meet the needs of people, to demonstrate and teach their lifestyle and beliefs, and to anchor the communities they formed. Schools were open to the children of members, to found them in the faith, and also to others, so they might spread their faith. High schools, colleges, and hospitals were added as Adventism expanded. In 2011 Adventists had 29 universities and colleges, including two with medical and dental schools, 603 secondary schools, and 1,060 primary schools in Latin America; student enrollment totaled 403,101. They also sponsored 27 hospitals and 17 clinics.40 Latin America was the first region in the developing world where Adventists transferred local leadership to nationals. In the late 1930s such leaders initiated a major shift in evangelistic focus, from biblical prophecies to family, personal, and social health benefits.41 The number of baptisms subsequently doubled, and the new approach spread widely. Over time, Adventists became more eager to experiment with new outreach methods. They began regular radio broadcasts in the United States in 1930, and this was copied rapidly in Latin America. They began using television shortly after World War II. In 1971 they began broadcasting on short-wave radio. Meanwhile, their public evangelism became increasingly diverse, ranging from local meetings featuring pastors or laypeople as speakers to international satellite transmissions with instantaneous translation of professional evangelists.42 The Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA), formed in 1956 and funded largely by governments, became a significant humanitarian presence in Latin America.43 In 1966, Adventists established an Institute of World Mission in recognition of the high demand that had appeared in many former colonies. The goal was to train missionaries to be culturally aware, in contrast to their earlier “one-size-fits-all” approach.44 The trajectory of expansion for Jehovah’s Witnesses was somewhat different from that of Mormons and Adventists. The initial focus of the founder of the Bible Students was on outreach, though it may have been more about selling books and pamphlets than gaining converts. Even so, the early Bible Students relied heavily on colporteurs and then pioneers to spread their message. Over time, the focus shifted to having members do the proselytizing, and this eventually—by the 1940s—became a requirement. Once the name was changed to Witnesses, they also employed radio and other media advertising during the mid-twentieth century and opened a school specifically to

Alternative Christianities   419 train missionaries, but their focus has remained on door-to-door proselytizing by the lay members. Witnesses are probably best known for their door-to-door ministry, though the other two groups also utilize this strategy. The goal of these efforts for all three groups is to start studies and gain new converts. Each group provides its own extra-biblical study materials and then draws selectively on scripture for proof texts. Adventist and Witness studies typically last longer than do Mormon studies; Mormons tend to urge baptism before converts are aware of some of the more central and peculiar beliefs.45 All three groups also hold weekly services geared toward strengthening and reinforcing the beliefs of the members, but these services differ substantially. Mormons have a three-hour block of meetings on Sundays (two hours as of 2019) with three components—a combined meeting for all members that includes sermons from lay members with singing; the distribution of the sacrament or Lord’s Supper; and two Sunday School blocks, divided by age and sex, that alternate weekly as of 2019. Children attend the sacrament service with their parents, but are taught separately during the other two blocks; each block is roughly one hour. There are additional activities throughout the week as well as expectations that members will read scriptures and will study approved materials produced by the group—like their magazines and books—on a regular basis. Adventist services—on Saturday, not Sunday—include a thirty- to forty-minute ­sermon, with hymns and choir or solo music. There are also Sabbath School classes, with divisions for all age groups. Adventists are encouraged to independently study approved materials, like the Sabbath School Quarterly, which explores a particular theme for a quarter. For Witnesses, each Sunday there is a thirty-minute public talk given by a male Elder, as well as an hour-long Watchtower question-and-answer study of a recent Watchtower article. The ones who answer do so by paraphrasing the printed answers. This question-and-answer format began in the late 1930s.46 Witness services differ from those of Mormons in that there is no separation by age; children attend the same meetings as adults and are expected to be active in door-to-door ministry, except during school hours. There is an annual, rather than weekly, distribution of the Lord’s Supper, shared by a select few. Witness services are also unique in that Elders are not allowed to deviate from the authorized lesson plans. Mormon and Adventist instructors are also discouraged from doing so, but often draw upon external sources to supplement lessons. There are additional similarities and differences among the three religions. Witnesses are encouraged to restrict their association to other Witnesses,47 to not engage in “worldly” activities, and to spend as much time as possible in the preaching work.48 For Adventists and Mormons, who are not told specifically to distance themselves from non-members, their lifestyles—that is, food and activity prohibitions—often have the same effect of encouraging strong in-group ties. There is also no requirement for regular, formal evangelism for lay Adventists and Mormons in order to be considered a member of the religion. All three religious groups encourage members to marry members.

420   Ronald Lawson, Kenneth Xydias, and Ryan T. Cragun All three groups follow up on members who reduce their attendance at weekly meetings, but Witnesses are the most strident. Should someone miss a meeting, another Witness will call and inquire as to why. If meetings are frequently skipped or the hours spent in the preaching work slacken, Elders will make “shepherding” visits to ferret out the problem and see what can be done to rekindle interest. All three religions police their members with the threat of “dis-fellowshipping,” or excommunication, based on adherence to the teachings and policies of the religion. Members who violate moral codes—or for Witnesses, those who question the leadership, smoke, or work for the  military—and are not repentant can be “dis-fellowshipped.” This practice has declined in recent years among both Mormons and Adventists, but is still strictly enforced by Witnesses. Witnesses are also the only group to encourage shunning of dis-fellowshipped or disaffected members a practice that is, among other Witness actions, heavily criticized by former members.49 Women form a majority of the active members of all three groups, so the openness of each group to women’s input and activity has an important impact on their strategies and growth. The Witnesses’ governing body is exclusively male, and women are not eligible to lead congregations or, since 1986, attend Gilead classes, which offer advanced training in preaching and evangelization, unless their husbands are also enrolled; however, they are prominent among those witnessing door to door. In 2013 the School for Kingdom Evangelizers was established, which does accept single women.50 Likewise, most Mormon missionaries are men, but women also serve. Women are absent from the highest levels of the Mormon hierarchy and from congregational leadership, but they play major roles in maintaining congregations locally.51 Here, the Adventists are the exception that proves the rule. The Adventist prophet Ellen White was a woman, and during her lifetime women frequently served as officers, pastors, and evangelists. However, from 1915, when White died, through 1970 women were pushed into the background. Since then, however, Adventists have gradually made more room for women once again. Women have been appointed as elders of congregations since the 1970s; lay-women increasingly conduct evangelistic series in Latin America; the number of women attending seminaries and serving as pastors, chaplains, and departmental leaders has expanded steadily.52

Membership Statistics Today, all three religious groups have a significant presence in Latin America, with membership totals listed in Table 22.1. However, these data are not readily comparable, for each group uses different criteria in counting adherents. Mormons count baptized members, but also “children of record”—younger children blessed as infants in a church ceremony. In the United States, these may make up as much as 15 percent of the membership.53 The age of baptism for children raised in Mormon families is set firmly at eight, and the names of children who reach the age of

Alternative Christianities   421 nine without being baptized are removed. However, Mormons make no attempt to remove missing and inactive adult members from their rolls, and the whereabouts of large numbers of listed members are unknown. Indeed, it is Mormon policy to retain the names of missing members on their rolls until they reach the age of 110, to avoid the risk of removing any who may be active though apparently missing. Most of these are undoubtedly inactive or dead, and many likely no longer consider themselves to be Mormons.54 Adventists count all baptized members but omit unbaptized children. The age at which they baptize their children varies widely with geographic region; in Latin America, the typical age for baptism is between ten and twelve.55 It is Adventist policy to purge the rolls of members who no longer claim to be Adventists or who cannot be located. They believe that accurate statistics are important to their credibility. When it became clear early in the twenty-first century that membership rolls had become exaggerated during previous decades when rapid growth had been the main focus, the General Conference launched a campaign reminding local organizations to audit their rolls to ensure their accuracy. Such efforts led to substantial decreases in reported membership in some countries. For instance, Adventist leaders in Brazil removed the names of 750,000 missing and inactive members from their rolls between 2006 and 2010, while membership in Bolivia and Ecuador was reduced by more than 50 percent. Witnesses use the most stringent criterion, counting only “publishers”—those reporting regular witnessing to non-members. They exclude baptized members who are not witnessing regularly, but include both children and converts entering the ranks of publishers shortly before baptism.56 Their Yearbook lists both “peak” and “average” publishers. This study uses the latter because they are more representative. Because of these differences in data collection, and the fact that member retention differs among the three groups, it is instructive to compare each group’s official statistics with the number of people identifying with them in available census reports from the region.57 While census respondents do not necessarily attend worship or involve themselves in other activities of the group, their responses do indicate an attachment to the particular religious identity. Moreover, unlike the groups’ official rolls, these are strictly comparable. Table 22.2 compares recent census reports with official membership/ publishers, using data for the same year as the census in each case. Relevant census data are available for only seven countries in the region. The data from the seven census reports show similar patterns to a remarkable degree. This is revealed in the similarity of the ratios between the census and official totals for each group in each country. A ratio of 1.00 would indicate that the totals by both measures are equal. However, each of the three religious groups has very different ratios, which occur consistently in all censuses. From these we derived a ratio for each group, derived by weighting all available data. The ratio for Witnesses was 2.15, indicating that more than twice as many people identify as Witnesses in the census data than are listed as publishers. These data show that many who are not active publishers continue to identify as Witnesses, at least when they are asked their religion. They also include children who are not yet publishing,

Table 22.2  Comparison of Census- and Religion-Provided Data on Membership for Mormons, Adventists, and Witnesses Country and Year

Mormons

Adventists

Witnesses

Census

Religion Provided

Ratio

Census

Religion Provided

Ratio

Census

Religion Provided

Ratio

Mexico, 2010 Brazil, 2010 Belize, 2010 Jamaica, 2011 Paraguay, 2002 Chile, 2002 Nicaragua, 2005

332,329 226,509 1,293

1,234,545 1,138,740 3,852

0.27 0.20 0.34

9,374 103,735

53,420 527,972

0.18 0.20

687,503 1,561,071 16,665 322,228 7,804

674,755 1,267,738 35,945 263,168 11,468

1.02 1.23 0.46 1.22 0.68

1,614,202 1,393,208 5,114 50,849 11,805 119,455 42,587

696,749 706,699 2,041 11,866 7,138 60,701 17,596

2.32 1.97 2.51 4.29 1.65 1.97 2.42

Totals

673,240

2,958,529

0.23

2,595,271

2,253,074

1.15

3,237,220

1,502,790

2.15

Alternative Christianities   423 and also probably indicate that some people who have studied at length with Witnesses identify with the group without (yet) becoming publishers or being baptized. The Adventist ratio, 1.15, is partially due to censuses counting young children who do not appear on church rolls. However, given the youth and fertility of Adventist members in Latin America, we would expect the ratio to be somewhat higher than 1.15. However, the overall ratio hides two of the ratios included in Table 22.2, those of Belize and Paraguay, where their official memberships are clearly overstated relative to the ­census data. This discrepancy indicates that Adventist leaders there, as in some other countries, have not yet audited their rolls. The Mormon ratio is very low, 0.23. This indicates that the number of people identifying as Mormons in these censuses is only about one-quarter of those on the church rolls. Since Mormons count the young children of members among their official membership statistics, this suggests that findings by researchers of rapid losses of up to 75 percent of people baptized in some countries of Latin America are in fact widespread.58 The Mormon ratio stands in sharp contrast to those of Witnesses and Adventists, indicating that Mormon membership data are grossly inflated. If we assume that the ratios derived from comparing religious identity as found in these seven census reports with the official data also hold for the other countries in the region, we can estimate new total adherents for each of the groups for the entire region in 2011 based on the data in Table 22.1. Witnesses rise sharply from 2,488,769 publishers to 5,350,853 adherents; Mormons decline dramatically from 5,647,928 listed members to only 1,229,023 adherents; and Adventists increase more modestly from 5,348,282 to 6,150,524. What kinds of people do each of the religious groups pursue, whom do they baptize, and whom of these do they retain? Contrasting social profiles helps to explain the dynamics behind the data presented heretofore. In the section that follows, we draw upon data from the detailed reports of the Mexican censuses of 2000 and 2010 to further examine the characteristics of these three religious groups. Although all groups have adherents covering the entire range from no education to university graduate and beyond, their concentrations differ greatly: Mormons are the best educated, Adventists the least. In 2010, 48.2 percent of Adventists had either no or only some elementary education; 48.2 percent of Witnesses had completed elementary or had some secondary education; and 58.0 percent of Mormons had secondary or university education. The fact that Mormons had the highest education is unexpected, given Gooren’s observation that their converts included a high proportion of poor people.59 This suggests that their retention of those from this class was especially weak. On the other hand, Adventists have a large parochial system of education throughout Latin America. These institutions make both education and employment available to members, while the other groups have none of these. One might therefore expect Adventists to be much better educated than these statistics reveal. On the other hand, Witnesses have long urged their youth to limit their education and to put their time into witnessing. It is therefore very surprising to find them better educated than Adventists. There are parallel contrasts between the mean income received by adherents of the three

424   Ronald Lawson, Kenneth Xydias, and Ryan T. Cragun groups. In the 2010 Mexican census, the average Mormon earned more than three times the average Adventist and nearly twice the average Witness. The differences in education and income are related to where the adherents of the three groups are concentrated. Mexican Mormons are concentrated especially in the Central region, which includes Mexico City and, to a lesser extent, in the prosperous Northeast and Northwest region. Witnesses have a similar pattern, though less in the Central region than Mormons. On the other hand, over three-quarters of Adventists are concentrated in the rural, mountainous region of the South and Southeast. Witnesses and Mormons are also well represented there, but their concentration there is only about one-third that of the Adventists. Adventists are much more rural than the others, with 52.9 percent of their adherents coming from communities of fewer than 2,500 persons. A greater percentage of Adventists speak indigenous languages, and they are more likely to be illiterate than either of the other two groups. Adventists had the lowest average age in the 2010 census, while Witnesses had the highest. All three have slightly higher proportions of women than the Mexican population generally. Intriguingly, fertility rates differ from what might be expected based on data from the United States: Mormons had the lowest fertility rates, while Adventists had the highest. This suggests that socioeconomic status and rural location are stronger predictors of fertility rates than are religious teachings and cultures. How can we account for these contrasting profiles? Mormon missionaries are usually stationed in urban areas, which typically have diverse populations. They often focus on poor residents because they want to be able to report baptisms. These often respond positively to the short series of visits from charming youthful missionaries. However, after the latter have moved on, they often find themselves uncomfortable in congregations with prosperous members who fail to nurture them because the newcomers seem too different and they expect that the latter will, like many before them, soon drop out. That is, most of the poor converts drop out, but the few converts with higher socioeconomic status prove more likely to feel comfortable and put down roots. Witnesses also focus mostly on urban areas. Those they study with successfully need a certain degree of education in order to be able to digest their doctrine and retain interest in a long series of studies. This becomes visible in the educational level and income of adherents, even though Witnesses tend to discourage their youth from continuing their education. The reasons for the low socioeconomic status of Adventists are complex. The early colporteurs throughout Latin America typically worked in cities because of the ease of travel and moving from one potential customer to another. However, Adventists are often concentrated in rural areas and small towns—partly because, suspicious of urban evils, their missionaries typically chose to focus their endeavors, including their educational and medical institutions, there, and partly because they have often proved to be especially successful in reaching fairly poor people who hope to improve their lot, either here or in the world to come. Indeed, Adventist preaching and the existence of its institutions are typically geared to attracting such classes, so that even their urban evangelism often attracts recent immigrants who migrated hoping to improve their situations but are currently fairly low in resources.60 Consequently, many members

Alternative Christianities   425 cannot afford the costs of an Adventist education. It is therefore not surprising that in Mexico in 2010, only 59.9 percent of the students enrolled in Adventist schools were Adventists or from Adventist families. We have been unable to procure the level of detail from any other census that we have from the Mexican censuses. However, the data and observations available indicate that similar patterns occur throughout Latin America. Indeed, while Adventist colleges and universities continue to lift some young Adventists into the middle class almost everywhere, the proportion of Adventist students at their 1,692 schools, colleges, and universities throughout Latin America was only 36.7 percent in 2011, which suggests that on the whole Adventists elsewhere in the region are even poorer than are those in Mexico.61

Future Growth Another area of recent research on these three religious groups in Latin America has been to consider their past growth and what that growth may indicate for future growth. Mormon growth has garnered the most attention, and some estimates of future Mormon growth, which have relied upon faulty assumptions and poor statistical estimates, have projected growth into the future for close to a century and have suggested that there could be hundreds of millions of Mormons in the not too distant future.62 These have also come to similar conclusions concerning the likely future growth of Witnesses.63 These projections have assumed that the future growth of these groups will mirror their past growth, an assumption that ignores context, external and internal factors, and what is known about population growth generally. Given the problems with officially reported data misaligning with census data, scholars may question if the official membership numbers have any relevance at all. We acknowledge the problems with the membership data, but assume that these are ­consistent over time. If that assumption is correct, then growth trends implied by those statistics are probably valid, even though the absolute numbers themselves are questionable. We use the official statistics to describe the historical growth of each group, starting with the earliest years for which we have data, and continuing to 2011. Due to space ­constraints, we focus on just three of the countries, though combined they account for a very large percentage of the membership of Mormons, Adventists, and Witnesses in Latin America. Collectively, Mexico, Brazil, and Chile contained 53 percent, 40 percent, and 61 percent of the official membership of Mormons, Adventists, and Witnesses in Latin America in 2011. Growth is commonly defined as change over time. That change can easily be calculated on an annual basis, simply by subtracting the reported number in any one year from the reported number in the succeeding year. Doing so shows that while there is a general trend with some variation among years, there are years where the variation is so large that the accuracy of the membership data is questionable. Therefore, we thought it was appropriate to subject the membership data to a smoothing process.

426   Ronald Lawson, Kenneth Xydias, and Ryan T. Cragun The smoothing function that best fit the data was LOESS, or locally weighted s­ catterplot smoothing. LOESS requires input of a smoothing constant. Small values result in a trend line that closely tracks the actual data, while larger values result in a trend line that is much smoother. We chose values for the smoothing constant in the range of 0.2–0.3. Growth calculated from the predicted membership reasonably matched growth calculated from the actual data, but the erratic values for some years were much more muted. Smoothing the Adventist membership data for the countries of Brazil and Chile was particularly complex. Membership audits, which revealed that the membership numbers were inflated, have recently been done in both countries. Since there was no attempt to correct for earlier years in official membership data, the membership trajectory for both countries peaks around 2005, declines for the year(s) of the audit, and then increases again. We assumed that this pattern is an artifact of the audit process rather than a description of the actual trajectory, and attempted to reconstruct a trajectory that eliminated the peaks but transitioned smoothly from the years before them, passing through the post-audit data points. In order to do this, we had to discard some of the reported data. We then fitted a growth function to the data, choosing the best-fitting function based on which gave the lowest residual mean square (RMS). The three-parameter Gompertz function was the best fitting for Brazil, while the fourparameter logistic function was the best fitting for Chile. Figures 22.1, 22.2, and 22.3 show the growth of the three groups in each of these countries over time from when they were first established there until 2011. The growth rates shown in Figures 22.1– 22.3 are the year-dependent growth rate, which is a compounded annual growth rate that brings the membership number in any year to the number in 2011.64

Growth rate from year to 2011 (%)

16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0 1900

1910

1920

1930

1940

1950

1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

2010

2020

Year Mormon

Adventist

Witness

Population

Figure 22.1  Year-dependent compound annual growth rate by group and population for Brazil.

Growth rate from year to 2011 (%)

Alternative Christianities   427 18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0 1900

1910

1920

1930

1940

Mormon

1950

1960 Year

Adventist

1970

1980

1990

Witness

2000

2010

2020

Population

Figure 22.2  Year-dependent compound annual growth rate by group and population for Chile.

Growth from year to 2011 (%)

12 10 8 6 4 2 0 1895

1905

1915

1925

1935

1945

1955

1965

1975

1985

1995

2005

2015

Year Mormon

Adventist

Witness

Population

Figure 22.3  Year-dependent compound annual growth rate by group and population for Mexico.

Several points are apparent for Brazil. Year-dependent growth for Adventists shows the least variation. Adventist growth has been steadily dropping since the 1960s; the most recent rate is 3.8 percent. For both Mormons and Witnesses, the initial rates were much higher, but the decline has been steeper. Mormon rates appear to be increasing since the first decade of the 2000s, but it remains to be seen whether this is temporary. They also increased from 1972 to 1978, and then fell sharply until the first years of the

428   Ronald Lawson, Kenneth Xydias, and Ryan T. Cragun 2000s. Based on the long-term trend, it is reasonable to conclude that they will likely drop again in the future. While the year-dependent rates of all three groups remain above the year-dependent population growth, the differences are narrowing. Figure 22.2 tells essentially the same story for Chile, with one exception. That exception is that the annual growth rate for 2010–2011 has essentially converged with the population growth rate of 0.9 percent for the same period. Mormon growth for this last year is 1.0 percent and Witness growth is slightly greater at 1.3 percent. This may be a reflection of the increasing secularization in Chile, which has reduced demand for these religions.65 Figure 22.3 tells a slightly different story for Mexico. The year-dependent rates for Adventists in 1895 were almost as high as those for Mormons and Witnesses in their peak years. Adventists remained in the 6.5–7.0 growth rate range for three decades beginning in 1943, and slowly dropped to 2.6 percent by 2001. Mormons entered Mexico in the late 1800s largely to avoid prosecution for polygamy, and outreach in Mexico was limited, like it was in most of Latin America during the early part of the twentieth century. However, it slowly increased and reached its peak in the 1950s. The pattern depicted in Figure 22.3 is also a reflection of the smoothing function and growth calculations. For Mormons, the year-dependent growth rate increased to 1950 because they had become established in only 30 percent of Latin America by that time and numbers were small. After that point, membership increased enough relative to 2011 membership that the growth rate declined. Growth trends for Witnesses are similar to those of the other countries. For all three groups, growth declined until the 1990s and early 2000s. However, unlike in Chile and Brazil, it appears as though there has been a slight reversal in growth rates in Mexico since the early 2000s. Whether the slightly higher growth rates will continue remains to be seen. Readers will note that the year-dependent growth rate for all three groups in all three countries—and similar trends that are observable in most of the other countries of Latin America—have been converging toward the population growth rates of their respective countries. This suggests that the growth of these three alternative Christianities is slowing substantially from their growth apexes in decades past. Outreach efforts are resulting in fewer converts relative to time expended.66 Current growth rates are aligning with population growth rates. This may not necessarily indicate that current and future growth will come from retaining offspring, since there is evidence that many young people are leaving all three of these religious groups. What it likely suggests is two things. First, some offspring are retained and some people are converted, which, combined, lead to a growth rate that is close to the population growth rate. Second, both population growth and the growth of these three religious groups are likely related to development;67 higher levels of societal development reduce both growth rates. In contrast, then, to other projections of growth for Mormons, Adventists, and Witnesses, we believe their period of rapid growth is over—likely the result of many of these countries passing through the secular transition68—and that their membership trajectory in Latin America and elsewhere will, for the foreseeable future, mirror the population trajectory.

Alternative Christianities   429

Conclusion Mormons, Adventists, and Witnesses all originated in the United States during the ­nineteenth century, but have all engaged in substantial international evangelism. Latin America has played a prominent role in that evangelism for all three, though Mormons imbued the Americas with added incentive because they believed their new book of scripture recounted the history of Native Americans. The dates at which the three religious groups entered the various countries of Latin America varied based on a variety of issues, including whether or not the group waits to be formally recognized by the government of a target country; the specific approaches to proselytizing used; whether the group provides charitable goods and services; and external forces like wars and economic development. In addition to entering the various countries in Latin America at different times, these groups employ different proselytizing techniques that result in both different rates of conversion and converts with differing characteristics. Mormons and the Jehovah’s Witnesses tend to be better educated and more affluent than Seventh-day Adventists for a variety of ­reasons. We also noted that these groups count their members in different ways, which, when combined with census data, results in confusion over the actual number of members in various countries. Finally, we modeled the growth of Mormons, Adventists, and Witnesses in three of the larger countries in Latin America and showed that growth tends to follow expected patterns, and that the growth of all three groups is slowing in the region. Mormons, Adventists, and Witnesses will continue to see limited growth in some countries in Latin America, but the days of rapid growth are over in most countries.

Notes 1. Gary Shepherd and Gordon Shepherd, Mormon Passage (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1998). 2. Max  H.  Parkin, “Lamanite Mission of 1830–1831,” in Encyclopedia of Mormonism, ed. Daniel H. Ludlow, 802–804 (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1992). 3. Ronald  D.  Dennis, “Gathering,” in Encyclopedia of Mormonism, ed. Daniel  H.  Ludlow, 536–537 (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1992); Ronald Lawson and Ryan T. Cragun, “Comparing the Geographic Distributions and Growth of Mormons, Adventists, and Witnesses.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 51, no. 2 (2012), 220–240. doi:10.1111/j.1468-5906.2012.01646.x. 4. Matthew Burton Bowman, The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith (New York, NY: Random House, 2012). 5. Ibid.; Terryl Givens, By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture That Launched a New World Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Simon  G.  Southerton, Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA, and the Mormon Church (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 2004). 6. Parkin, “Lamanite Mission of 1830–1831.”

430   Ronald Lawson, Kenneth Xydias, and Ryan T. Cragun 7. Peggy Fletcher Stack, “Single Word Change in Book of Mormon Speaks Volumes,” The Salt Lake Tribune, November 8, 2007. https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=7403990& itype=NGPSID; John-Charles Duffy, “Mapping Book of Mormon Historicity Debates Part 1.” Sunstone no. 151 (October 2008): 36–62; John-Charles Duffy, “Mapping Book of Mormon Historicity Debates, Part 2: Perspectives from the Sociology of Knowledge,” Sunstone no. 152 (December 2008), 46–69. 8. Givens, By the Hand of Mormon. 9. Ibid. 10. Gary Land, “Shut Door Theory,” in Historical Dictionary of the Seventh-Day Adventists, ed. Gary Land, 272–273 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005). 11. Richard  W.  Schwarz and Floyd Greenleaf, Light Bearers: A History of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church (Nampa, ID: Pacific Press, 2000). 12. Ibid. 13. Review & Herald Publishing Association, “Mission Board,” in Seventh-Day Adventist Encyclopedia, vols. 10–11 of the Commentary Reference Series, 2nd ed. (Hagerstown, MD: Review & Herald, 1996), 97. 14. Ibid. 15. Schwarz and Greenleaf, Light Bearers; Ellen  G.  White, Life Sketches of Ellen  G.  White (Nampa, ID: Pacific Press, 1915). 16. Schwarz and Greenleaf, Light Bearers. 17. Review & Herald Publishing Association, “Missions,” in Seventh-Day Adventist Encyclopedia, vols. 10–11 of the Commentary Reference Series, 2nd ed. (Hagerstown, MD: Review & Herald, 1996), 101–104. 18. Schwarz and Greenleaf, Light Bearers. 19. General Conference, Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research, Seventh-Day Adventist Annual Statistical Report, 1921. 20. Ryan T. Cragun and Ronald Lawson, “The Secular Transition: The Worldwide Growth of Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Seventh-Day Adventists,” Sociology of Religion 71, no. 3 (2010), 349–373; Lawson and Cragun, “Comparing the Geographic Distributions and Growth of Mormons, Adventists, and Witnesses.” 21. Andrew Holden, Jehovah’s Witnesses: Portrait of a Contemporary Religious Movement, 1st ed. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2002); James A. Beckford, The Trumpet of Prophecy: A Sociological Study of Jehovah’s Witnesses (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 1976). 22. Joseph Franklin Rutherford, A. N. Pierson, W. E. Van Amburgh, J. D. Wright, A. I. Ritchie, R. H. Hirsh, and Isaac F. Hoskins, “Charter of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society with Important Notes.” Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, County of Allegheny, 1884. https://faithleaks.org/wiki/documents/7/7f/Wt-charter-1916.pdf. 23. Charles  F.  Russell, 1881; Wanted, 1,000 Preachers, Zion’s Watch Tower, April 1881, 214. https://ia601406.us.archive.org/23/items/WatchtowerLibrary/magazines/w/w1881_E.pdf 2 4. A “Jehovah Witnesses in the Divine Purpose,” Watchtower Bible and Tract Society  of  Pennsylvania, 1st ed., 1959. 322 https://ia601406.us.archive.org/23/items/ WatchtowerLibrary/books/1959_jp_E.pdf. 25. Shirley Taylor Robinson, “Mexico, Pioneer Settlements in,” in Encyclopedia of Mormonism, ed. Daniel H. Ludlow, 895–897 (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1992). 26. Richard  S.  Van Wagoner, Mormon Polygamy: A History (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1989); D.  Michael Quinn, “Plural Marriage and Mormon Fundamentalism,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 31, no. 2 (1998), 1–68.

Alternative Christianities   431 27. Gregory A. Prince and William Robert Wright, David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 2005). 28. Lowell C. Bennion and Lawrence A. Young, “The Uncertain Dynamics of LDS Expansion, 1950–2020,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 29 (1996), 8–32. 29. Schwarz and Greenleaf, Light Bearers; Review & Herald, Seventh-Day Adventist Encyclopedia, vols. 10–11 of the Commentary Reference Series. 30. Schwarz and Greenleaf, Light Bearers. 31. Lawson and Cragun, “Comparing the Geographic Distributions and Growth of Mormons, Adventists, and Witnesses.” 32. Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, International Bible Student Association Yearbook (Brooklyn, NY: Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, 1932). 33. Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses (Brooklyn, NY: Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, 1938). 34. Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, International Bible Student Association Yearbook, 1932. 35. Lawson and Cragun, “Comparing the Geographic Distributions and Growth of Mormons, Adventists, and Witnesses.” 36. Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2007). 37. Prince and Wright, David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism. 38. Bowman, The Mormon People. 39. Peggy Fletcher Stack, “Age Change Should Propel More Mormons into Missions,” The Salt Lake Tribune, December 11, 2012, http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/55035591-78/ldsage-church-women.html.csp. 40. General Conference, Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research, Seventh-Day Adventist Annual Statistical Report, 2013. 41. Schwarz and Greenleaf, Light Bearers. 42. Ibid. 43. Adventist Development and Relief Agency, “ADRA: About Us—Our History” (https:// adra.org/about-adra/history/). 44. Review & Herald, “Institute of World Mission,” in Seventh-Day Adventist Encyclopedia, vols. 10–11 of the Commentary Reference Series, 2nd rev. ed., 1996, 772–3 (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald, 1996). 45. Bowman, The Mormon People. 46. C. f. Rutherford, Model Study 1–3; Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, 1937, 68. https://archive.org/details/ModelStudy1.https://faithleaks.org/wiki/documents/c/c7/ 1941_model_study3.pdf. 47. “Find Security among God’s People,” Study Edition: Watchtower, June 15, 2010, (Watchtower  Bible and Tract Society of New York, 2010), 6–10; https://faithleaks.org/ wiki/documents/5/53/W_E_20100615.pdf. “Enjoying Theocratic Association,” Our Kingdom Ministry (for United States of America), 1989, vol. 32.6, (Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, 1989),  1–2; https://faithleaks.org/wiki/documents/4/44/Km_E_1989_-_Our_Kingdom_ Ministry.pdf. 48. “Making whole-souled sacrifices for Jehovah,” Study Edition: Watchtower, January 15, 2012, (Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, 2012) 21–25; https://faithleaks. org/wiki/documents/3/33/W_E_20120115.pdf.

432   Ronald Lawson, Kenneth Xydias, and Ryan T. Cragun “My dream has come true,” Study Edition: Watchtower, July 15, 2012, (Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, 2012), 32; https://faithleaks.org/wiki/documents/b/be/ W_E_20120715.pdf. 49. Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, “Appendix I: How to Treat a Disfellowshipped Person,” in Keep Yourself in God’s Love (Brooklyn, NY: Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, 2008), 207–209. 50. Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, “Re: School for Kingdom Evangelizers”; Lawson interview with Jolene Chu, Watchtower Society, September 13, 2013. 51. Maureen Ursenbach Beecher and Lavina Fielding Anderson, Sisters in Spirit: Mormon Women in Historical and Cultural Perspective (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992). 52. Ronald Lawson and Armando Miranda, “At the Eye of the Storm: The Continuing Conflict Concerning the Ordination of Women within the International Seventh-Day Adventist Church,” Conference Presentation presented at the Meeting of the Religious Research Association, Houston, Texas, October 2000. 53. Bennion and Young, “The Uncertain Dynamics of LDS Expansion, 1950–2020.” 54. Lawson and Cragun, “Comparing the Geographic Distributions and Growth of Mormons, Adventists, and Witnesses.” 55. Lawson interview with Armando Miranda, June 8, 2015. Lawson and Miranda, “At the Eye of the Storm,” 2000. 56. “Welcome to the best way of life (subsection “Why get baptized?)” Study Edition: Watchtower, 15 February, 2010, (Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, 2010), 24–28; https://faithleaks.org/wiki/documents/8/88/W_E_20100000.pdf. 57. Rick Phillips, “Rethinking the International Expansion of Mormonism,” Nova Religio 10, no. 1 (2006), 52–68. 58. Henri Gooren, “The Mormons of the World: The Meaning of LDS Membership in Central America,” in Revisiting Thomas  F.  O’Dea’s “The Mormons”: Contemporary Perspectives, eds. Cardell K. Jacobson, John P. Hoffman, and Tim B. Heaton, 362–378 (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 2008). 59. Henri Gooren, Rich among the Poor: Church, Firm, and Household among Small-Scale Entrepreneurs in Guatemala City, Latin America Series, no. 13 (Amsterdam: Thela, 1999); Mark  L.  Grover, “The Maturing of the Oak: The Dynamics of LDS Growth in Latin America,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 38, no. 2 (2005), 79–104. 60. Ronald Lawson, “From American Church to Immigrant Church: The Changing Face of Seventh-Day Adventism in Metropolitan New York,” Sociology of Religion 59, no. 4 (1998), 329. 61. Mark Kellner, “Urban Evangelism Is Wilson’s Call to Adventist World Church,” Adventist News Network (October 8, 2011). (https://new.adventist.org/en/all-news/news/go/ 2011-10-08/urban-evangelism). 62. Rodney Stark, “The Rise of a New World Faith,” Review of Religious Research 26, no. 1 (1984), 18–27; Mark Koltko-Rivera, The Rise of the Mormons: Latter-Day Saint Growth in the 21st Century (Amherst, NY: 7th Street Books, 2012). 63. Rodney Stark and Laurence  R.  Iannaccone, “Why the Jehovah’s Witnesses Grow so Rapidly: A Theoretical Application,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 12, no. 2 (1997), 133–157.

Alternative Christianities   433 64. Growth rate = 100*((Num2011/Num_Year)^(1/(2011-Year))-1) Where: Num2011 is the membership in 2011 Num_Year is the membership in any year less than 2011 Year is the year associated with Num_Year. 65. Cragun and Lawson, “The Secular Transition.” 66. Rick Phillips and Ryan T. Cragun, “Mormon Religiosity and the Legacy of ‘Gathering,’ ” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 16, no. 3 (2013), 77–94. 67. Cragun and Lawson, “The Secular Transition.” 68. Ibid.

chapter 23

M a i n Li n e Protesta n tism i n L ati n A m er ica Joel Morales Cruz

In his book Faces of Latin American Protestantism, José Míguez Bonino distinguishes among liberal, Evangelical, and Pentecostal expressions of that tradition. He identifies the first as those churches founded by the “progressive” denominations—the Baptists, Congregationalists, Anglicans/Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans— that could be characterized as coming from and being invested in the larger liberalrepublican-capitalist assumptions of the United States. He describes the second as churches that emerged from the revivalist traditions of the United States and that emphasize conversion, personal piety, and the centrality of the Bible. Finally, he ­classifies Pentecostals as the twentieth-century denominations characterized by ecstatic spiritual experiences, belief in a salvation experience, divine healing, and an apocalyptic eschatology.1 In Latin America, these distinctions become blurred: Protestants, whether tonguespeaking, revivalist, or liturgical, mainstream or marginal, tend to be conflated as evangélicos. Karl-Wilhelm Westmeier uses Christian Lalive d’Epinay’s five distinctions to categorize Latin American Protestantism: (1) diaspora churches composed of expatriates and temporary residents, (2) immigrant churches such as German Lutherans, (3) mainline Protestants who arrived in the mid-nineteenth century and are connected to their historic traditions, (4) Holiness Protestants—the deeply evangelistic churches Bonino would describe as revivalist, and (5) “sectarian Protestants”—mainly connected to Pentecostalism.2 D’Epinay’s descriptors focus on the origin and nature of these traditions. A further distinction allows us to consolidate these five categories into the two more widely used ones—“mainline” and “evangelical.” The first three—the diaspora, immigrant, and mainine churches, corresponding to Bonino’s “liberal denominations”— differ from the revivalist and sectarian/Pentecostal Protestants, or the evangelicals. While most Protestant traditions share some belief in spreading the Christian message,

436   Joel Morales Cruz the nature of “mainline” groups in Latin America may preclude them from aggressively spreading the faith. The latter traditions, however, tend to hold to very strong conversionist beliefs that encourage believers to evangelize.3 This chapter attempts to trace the growth of these historic denominations as they developed their distinctive voices in the region. During the colonial period, the Protestant presence in the Iberian Americas loomed in the shadows as the dangerous Other. However, with the rise of independent republics in the early nineteenth century, Protestant churches took on different roles: challenging Roman Catholicism, debating religious liberty, settling in the countryside, and forming leaders who supported politically liberal causes. For the past century, mainline Protestantism has represented an alternative theological and ecclesial voice seeking to address Latin America’s challenges through their faith traditions.

The Colonial Period (1492–1820) Incursions and Inquisitions The rise of Protestantism is inseparably connected to the imperial, commercial, and military expansion of European powers onto the early modern global stage. Originally a means to acquire wealth and as a counterweight to the threat of the Ottoman Turks, the seafaring journeys of Iberian kingdoms represented imperial expansion through the establishment of colonies whose primary purpose was to benefit economically their respective mother countries—an enterprise layered with religious meaning. The juridical justifications for the Conquest, including the 1493 papal bull Inter caetera, required the evangelization of the native peoples as a prerequisite to the conquest itself.4 Shortly after the Spanish and Portuguese initiated colonization, Protestant powers also pursued the economic potential of the New World. In 1528, German miners from Augsburg took part in an effort to colonize what is now Venezuela. In 1555, with the encouragement of John Calvin, and under the guidance of Admiral Gaspar de Coligny, French Huguenots settled near Río de Janeiro. The next year, a contingent of pastors was sent from Geneva to minister to the colonists and to evangelize the natives—a settlement destroyed by the Portuguese shortly after its foundation. A decade later, in 1562 and 1564, another group of Huguenots arrived in Florida to block the Spanish expansion northward. That also came to naught.5 The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 marked a turning point in the decline of Spanish naval supremacy, emboldening the pursuits of English and Dutch pirates, privateers, and explorers in the New World.6 In 1624, the Dutch seized the Bahia region of Brazil, spreading out over a thousand miles of coastline and founding twenty-two Reformed churches before their expulsion in 1654. A year later, the Spanish colony in Jamaica fell to the English. Meanwhile, capitalizing on the economic potential of the Americas—especially sugar production—the Dutch, Danes, and English established

MainLine Protestantism in Latin America   437 settlements and Protestant churches on a number of Caribbean islands and along the Central American coast.7 The presence and predations of Dutch and English pirates and corsairs in the circumCaribbean bolstered the power of the Inquisition, as well as aided its establishment in Cartagena (1568), Mexico (1571), and Lima (1610)—a tool that reinforced the socioreligious order. Originally founded in Spain to root out insincere Jewish and Muslim converts, in America the Holy Office sought to uncover heresy, idolatry, and violations of the sacraments, such as adultery, blasphemy, and sacrilege among colonists, as well as to censor questionable books and ideas.8 Both outside people and ideas created a ­religious boogeyman. Protestants joined Jews, Moors, and witches as the social, ethnic, and religious Other—with the Inquisition as a mechanism to guarantee safety and uniformity. The accusation of “Lutheranism” against domestic enemies served as an insidious means of social control, regardless of a person’s actual religious views.9 This fear climaxed during the reign of Charles III (1716–1788), when Spanish colonies were beset by external and internal challenges, culminating in the English invasion of Havana in 1762 and the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spanish America three years later. That same decade, the Inquisition condemned several foreign soldiers, as well as  English, French, and Scandinavian residents of New Spain, for being “Lutheran heretics” or “Anabaptists.” Later, between 1790 and 1820, thirty-eight Protestants were reported as “reconciled” by the Inquisition, including English, Dutch, and Danish prisoners of war.10 The Bourbon reforms facilitated international trade as well as the movement of foreign ideas. The Index of Prohibited Books, regulated by the Sacred Congregation, in time expanded to list not only classic sixteenth-century Protestant authors, but also their ascetic and Pietist heirs. Even so, their works continued to enter Spanish America, such as those of John Calvin, the Lutheran theologian Martin Chemnitz, and even William Penn, in addition to Enlightenment thinkers, such as Rousseau, Locke, Montesquieu, and other philosophes, whose books began appearing on the Index midcentury. For the Holy Office, the religious heresies of the former were linked to the socio-political heresies of the latter.11 Heterodoxy, in several cases coming just before the colonial independence movements, took the additional form of belief in liberty of  conscience, toleration, and republican political ideals.12 Bastian notes that the condemnation of political works by Rousseau, Montesquieu, and others includes accusations of Protestant heresy, anti-Catholicism, and inducements to atheism and deism; he connects and contrasts competing notions of state formation: the Catholic medieval state whose hierarchical structure reflects the heavenly court, limits immorality, and encourages piety through its alliance with the Church, and the model represented by the Enlightenment defined by the social contract, individualism, and toleration—a secularized form of the covenant model put forth by Calvinist thinkers to describe the relationship between God and humanity and the Christian society (as envisioned in particular by the English and North American Puritans).13 In this context, not surprisingly, the fathers of Mexican independence, the priests Miguel Hidalgo and José María Morelos, insurrectionists who challenged the Spanish Catholic body politic in 1810,

438   Joel Morales Cruz were both condemned by the Inquisition as traitors, Lutheran-Calvinists, schismatics, and followers of Hobbes and Voltaire, as well as Luther.14

The Early Republics (1820–1900) Religious Liberty and the Bible Throughout much of Latin America, two primary factions emerged from the wars of  independence and would dominate nineteenth-century politics: Conservatives, who sought to preserve colonial structures as much as possible; and Liberals, who worked to bring the emerging nation-states into the world of modernity. Among other things, they debated the role of religion. In general, Conservatives favored maintaining the power of the Catholic Church, if only as a means to consolidate their power. Liberals often challenged the traditional privileges of the Church, abrogating its roles in maintaining the registry of births, marriages, and deaths and the running of schools and charities.15 Since in most places, the Catholic Church remained one of the wealthiest landowners, even after independence, both groups sought to exploit or control it as a means of accessing those resources to support struggling governments or war efforts.16 Though for the most part early constitutions from Mexico to the Southern Cone upheld the spiritual monopoly of the Catholic Church as both a state religion and as the sole legal religious institution, hemispherically, the issue of religious toleration came to the fore along sometimes different paths.17 In general, Conservatives upheld the traditional role of the Catholic Church as an ideological means to create and preserve national unity and stability amidst a racially and economically diverse population.18 Liberals saw the future of their respective nations wrapped in the prospects for religious freedom and economic expansion. Some who admired the Anglo-American economic system believed that Protestantism was key to the commercial success of the United States and Great Britain.19 Consequently, some Liberal leaders echoed the concerns of the eighteenth-century Enlightened Catholics, perceiving popular religion and elaborate Catholic rituals as the causes of Latin American stagnation.20 The aim of the Liberals was not to abolish the Church, but to curtail its hegemonic social power for the good of the nation. Key to this reform was religious freedom. Many Liberals considered religious liberty a virtue, but some feared that religious pluralism would threaten the unity of the heterogeneous populations of their republics. In countries made up of whites, Indians, blacks, mixed-races, wealthy, and poor, religion was considered a social glue that bound people together in a common worldview and morality. Nonetheless, toleration was considered a necessary concession for establishing trade and diplomatic relationships with Protestant Europe and the United States. As a ­compromise, religious freedom, when granted, was limited to foreign populations and often was introduced with the stipulation that Protestant worship remain inoffensive to Catholics.21

MainLine Protestantism in Latin America   439 Though circumstances differed from country to country, eventually, religious t­olerance for foreigners was promulgated throughout the nineteenth century as a practical solution to the challenge of stimulating commercial and political relationships with other countries.22 Chaplains, first Anglicans and then Methodists and Lutherans, arrived at the major ports and urban centers of Mexico and South America to serve expatriates. They considered Latin America Catholic, and therefore a Christianized continent, making proselytism inappropriate. Alternatively, Anglicans and others began to extend their ministries toward native populations who had never encountered Christianity. Allen Gardiner (1794–1851) sought to evangelize in the Bolivian Altiplano, but later dedicated his life to spreading Christianity among the inhabitants of the Tierra del Fuego, founding the Patagonian Missionary Society in 1844. After his death, Gardiner’s son labored in Tierra del Fuego before he and his companions were killed by natives.23 Thomas Bridges (ca. 1842–1898) later established a successful mission in the area.24 Within this context, some of the first Protestants, in the form of Bible colporteurs and Bible societies, entered Latin America to spread copies of the Scriptures throughout the general populace. The most famous and peripatetic of these was James “Diego” Thomson (1788–1854), a Scotsman who trekked from Argentina to Mexico to the Caribbean, often at the invitation of political leaders who wanted to increase literacy through the Lancasterian educational system, a teaching method that used the Bible.25 Representatives of the British and Foreign Bible Society and, later, the American Bible Society encountered mixed responses. Though many met them with suspicion and ­hostility, others, including members of the local clergy, welcomed and aided the opportunity to disperse the Scriptures in the interests of literacy and spirituality.26 These laypeople, clerics and religious, among whom numbered the Mexican statesman and priest José María Luis Mora (1794–1850) and the Colombian Juan Fernández de Sotomayor (1777–1849), represented a reformist strand of clergy who sympathized with liberal goals, often breaking ranks with their superiors on matters related to Church and state, education, or the role of the Church in society.

Nineteenth-Century Missions and Modernity With the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 and with an increasing US ­presence in the hemisphere, US missionaries began to take a greater role in the Protestant evangelization of the region. To grasp the beginnings of these missions, however, it is important to understand their context—a triumphalist, post-millennial type of revivalist evangelicalism that existed within the larger framework of US economic and political expansion.27 The revivals of the Second Great Awakening (1795–1835) had energized US Protestantism with an emotional and optimistic faith that expressed itself in grassroots movements throughout the western frontier of the country. Heir to the theological debates of their sixteenth-century forebears and in reaction to immigrants arriving on its shores, it was stridently anti-Catholic: Catholicism was a superstition and Latin Americans needed to be rescued from its darkness.28 Protestant missionaries

440   Joel Morales Cruz brought with them an emphasis upon the personal biblical word, justification by faith, iconoclasm, and the individual’s unmediated relationship with God; they were also agents of their culture, freely mixing their sociopolitical assumptions with their religious convictions as surely as the Spanish friars had done centuries earlier. Thus, evangelization also meant Americanization (that is, the United States). Freedom was often translated into the socioeconomic sphere as individualism, the “Protestant work ethic,” and ­capitalism; in politics, as democracy and republicanism. Protestant mission churches generally benefited from liberal governments in Latin America that advocated for ­religious freedom, the disestablishment of the Catholic Church, public education, and increased economic ties with the United States.29 This evangelistic faith found part of its motivating energy in the concept of Manifest Destiny—an attitude that posited that the United States was divinely destined to expand outwardly by virtue of the faith, morality, and justice of its people and its institutions, in a mission to bring true religion and democracy to the rest of the world. More a general mindset than a set of policies, it was used to justify the takeover of Indian lands and to wage the Mexican-American War (1846–1848)—a war that swallowed up over half the territory of Mexico. After this US territorial extension, approximately 100,000 Mexicans abruptly became US citizens.30 As a result, evangelists moved westward; yet, only after the Civil War did the missionary enterprise move southward in greater numbers, ­propelled by a newly invigorated and industrialized United States that stretched its economic and military muscles. This worldwide religious movement sent missionaries to Africa and Asia, as well as to Latin America, and was undergirded by a millennial faith that linked progress and civilization to the nation’s fate, and made natural partners of the Protestant denominations seeking new converts. The United States’ postwar prosperity, industry, and advances in transportation and communication greatly aided this effort. In some areas of Latin America, Protestant missionaries worked among reformist clergy and religious groups, such as Mexico City’s Iglesia de Jesús (Church of Jesus) and Puerto Rico’s Bíblicos. The Iglesia de Jesús was organized in the 1850s by clergy in Mexico City who supported President Benito Juárez’s (1806–1872) anticlerical Reform Laws of 1855–1860. Preaching a Christocentric message and rejecting clerical celibacy and papal authority, these Constitutionalist Clergy, as they are often known, sought support from the Episcopal Church and in 1906 came under that denomination’s mission.31 In Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, the Bíblicos consisted of a loose arrangement of clandestine groups meeting to study the Bible. They were led by Antonio Badillo Hernández (d. 1889), who converted to evangelical faith after attending religion classes held by a Protestant merchant. Presbyterian missionaries arriving in the region after 1898 discovered these “Bible people.” They formed the nucleus of Presbyterian efforts in western Puerto Rico.32 These groups represent a phenomenon that merits more study: the rise of free-thought and radical societies in post-independence Latin America and their relationship to the religious issues of the period, including the emergence of Protestantism. Their activities were rooted in the antagonism that existed between the Liberals and Conservatives, as the former took on more radical positions in order to erode corporatist interests associated with the latter.

MainLine Protestantism in Latin America   441 Accordingly, the push toward industrialization and capitalism merged with anticlerical sentiments and legislation. Here, “free thought” societies came into being in Mexico, Chile, Colombia, and Brazil in the 1850s. Their members tended to be laborers (miners, textile workers, and railway workers) and urban professionals (clerks, bankers, teachers)— those who belonged neither to the rural and peasant nor to the established middle classes. These individuals, such as the coffee producers of Colombia and São Paulo, or the ­former soldiers and artisans of Mexico, were unconnected to the land and represented part of the burgeoning industrialization of the urban and suburban regions.33 They were particularly sensitive to the uncertainties and vicissitudes of the economy. Agitating for liberal and democratic reforms and sometimes associating with Freemasonry, these enclaves could also express anti-oligarchical, anticlerical, anti-Catholic, or dissident religious opinions and activities. As with Mexico’s Iglesia de Jesús, which supported both the liberal 1857 Constitution and the vision of a reformed Christian faith governed locally rather than by a distant pope, these societies sought to create a non-Catholic ­religious alternative. When Protestant evangelists began to arrive in the latter half of the century, they built upon and integrated the efforts of these groups into the missions. Thus, Protestantism did not necessarily represent an invasive, alien presence, but rather the evolution of a process already in motion; the grafting of the faith onto the emerging economic and religious demands of a liberal minority composed of reformist clerics, religious liberals, and an anti-conservative emerging middle class. As the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Methodists took advantage of aggressive liberal regimes throughout Central and South America in the latter nineteenth century to establish missions, members of these enclaves and societies benefited from the charities, schools, and other resources established by the Protestants.34 The churches themselves enabled communities of like-minded individuals, networking opportunities, and religious autonomy.35 Early Protestant missions represented a number of traditions and approaches. In the Caribbean, the first Protestant services in the Dominican Republic were held in 1824 by members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, who had been invited by the president to work among the African-American immigrants who had fled racism at home. British Methodists also concentrated their efforts among the immigrant community. Methodist and Episcopal missions to the Spanish-speaking populace would not commence until the 1880s. The link between US expansion and missions was especially apparent in the Caribbean after the Spanish-American War of 1898. Spain lost Puerto Rico and Cuba to the United States, and the major US Protestant denominations divided up the islands among themselves in a comity agreement to establish churches. Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, Congregationalist, Episcopal, and Lutheran missionaries generally worked among the poor and laborers, but soon concentrated on the emerging middle class, who tended to be more critical of Roman Catholic clericalism and more receptive to the republican values espoused by the US presence.36 Melinda Rankin (1811–1888), a Presbyterian teacher, and E. G. Nicholson (d. 1872?), an Episcopal priest, became among the first to begin evangelistic efforts along the Mexico-US border, opening schools for Mexican girls and beginning Bible study groups

442   Joel Morales Cruz after the Mexican-American War. As noted earlier, the Episcopal Church commenced working with the liberal-leaning reform movement, the Church of Jesus, in the 1860s, even as that denomination ministered to English-speaking expatriates. In 1872, Congregationalist, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist missionaries began to establish churches and schools, expanding the Protestant presence during the liberal presidencies of  Benito Juárez and Porfirio Díaz (1830–1915), both of whom looked favorably on Protestantism as a means to increase literacy, education, and morals among the people (and in the case of Juárez, to provide a religious counterpoint to the Catholic Church).37 In 1841, after the breakup of the Federal Republic of Central America, Protestant missionary efforts began there in fits and starts and were dependent upon favorable political conditions. Throughout the turbulent histories of the independent republics, a general pattern repeated itself. Bible societies prepared the way before missionaries from the United States, Great Britain, and even the Caribbean, representing Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, Anglicans, and Baptists, took advantage of anticlerical liberal governments to establish themselves. In some countries, such as Nicaragua, missionary efforts began as early as the 1840s; in others, like Guatemala and El Salvador, they did not begin in earnest until the end of the nineteenth or beginning of the twentieth ­century. After the United States led Panama to declare independence from Colombia in 1903, a number of missions were undertaken among the white workers laboring in the Canal Zone.38 Protestantism was introduced into northern South America through a variety of ways. During his 1824 visit, James Thomson, the Scottish educator who had worked with Liberals in Argentina to introduce new educational methods, formed the Colombian Bible Society. Presbyterians from the United States and Jamaican Baptists began work mid-century. However, a former Capuchin friar turned evangelist, Ramón Montsalvatge (1815–?) made a lasting impression by establishing Presbyterianism in Cartagena in 1855. The Episcopal Church started missions there in 1923, followed by the Baptists and Lutherans in the 1930s.39 Here missionaries followed a pattern that was repeated ­elsewhere throughout the continent: Protestants took advantage of anti-Catholic or sympathetic political leaders to found churches, hospitals, and schools. In Colombia, Protestant denominations from the United States and elsewhere were encouraged by the rise of the anticlerical Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera (1798–1878) in 1860 and sent missionaries to promulgate the faith and liberal, republican ideas through Churchrun schools and other institutions. Well-educated and well-connected, their graduates entered professional and public life, helping to develop Colombia’s middle class and to form the next generation of liberal leaders.40 In Ecuador, religious freedom was granted in 1896, and Church and state were separated a decade later. Consequently, Protestantism appeared relatively later in that country. Though the Methodists arrived in 1900, most of the early missions were undertaken by revivalist denominations, such as the Christian and Missionary Alliance or the Pentecostals. The United Church of Christ and German Lutherans began establishing churches mid-century.41 Severe restrictions on religious liberty in Venezuela prevented Protestants from establishing missions there for decades, despite the presence of Anglican

MainLine Protestantism in Latin America   443 and German Lutheran expatriates and immigrants since the 1830s. Beginning in the 1870s, President Antonio Guzmán Blanco’s (1829–1899) anticlericalism vis-à-vis the Catholic Church opened the door to Methodist (1878), Lutheran (1893), Presbyterian (1897), and Baptist (1924) missions, both among the Spanish-speaking population and English-speaking Afro-Caribbean people.42 Protestantism in the Andes region began with the introduction of Bible societies. Francisco Penzotti (1851–1925), a Uruguayan Methodist and founder of the Peruvian Bible Society, began holding Protestant services in Spanish in 1888. He was jailed for proselytizing in 1890, violating the Constitution’s restrictions on the public exercise of non-Catholic religion. Held in a dungeon and starved, his case became known among the Peruvian elite and his plight was taken up by the New York Herald, which highlighted Peru’s colonial-era policies at a time when that nation sought to encourage foreign investment and trade. When the case reached Peru’s Supreme Court, Penzotti was acquitted, a decision that Protestants there regarded as a victory for religious freedom.43 This event inspired Methodist (1891) and Presbyterian (1894) missionaries from the United States and Europe. A mob attack on a Protestant mission would move the National Congress in 1915 to amend the Constitution’s restrictions on non-Catholic faiths.44 Bolivia also saw several unsuccessful evangelistic efforts from the British and American Bible societies. More concentrated efforts at introducing Protestantism would wait until the twentieth century, when Canadian Baptists (1898), Methodists (1901), and then Lutherans (1938) began work among the Aymara and Quechua.45 In Brazil, Presbyterian missions experienced modest success through the preaching ministry of José Manuel da Conceição (1822–1873), a former Catholic priest. The scandal of his conversion drew the curious, and the Catholic press unwittingly aided him by publishing extensive portions of his sermons in an effort to refute him. Church politics and acrimony between the missions of the northern and southern US Presbyterian churches left da Conceição alienated and virtually forgotten at the time of his death. Dutch Reformed, German Baptists, and Argentine Congregationalists all contributed to the Protestantism in Brazil, but the rampant success of the Pentecostal and charismatic churches beginning in the 1980s eclipsed them all.46 In the Southern Cone, Methodism was established in Argentina in 1867, a successor to the Protestant congregation formed decades earlier by the educator James Thomson. Methodist missionaries were among the first in Paraguay, arriving in 1886. At about the same time, the Patagonian Missionary Society, later the South American Missionary Society, arrived from England to evangelize among the native Guaraní of the River Plate region.47 Meanwhile, in Chile, David Trumbull (1819–1904) worked among Englishspeaking expatriates amid the country’s restrictive conditions before founding the first Spanish-speaking Protestant Church in Chile in 1868. In the 1870s, the intrepid Methodist missionary William Taylor (1821–1902) began to establish churches in Chile and Bolivia and to advocate for self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating congregations. Baptists and Presbyterians arrived toward the end of the century.48 The first Protestant churches in Uruguay were formed by the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1838 in Montevideo. The civil war of 1839–1852 forced that mission to close, and it was

444   Joel Morales Cruz not re-established until 1870. Anglican efforts began in 1866 to serve British residents. Today, what became the Anglican Church of Uruguay has been incorporated into the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone (established 1981), encompassing Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Paraguay. Other Protestant denominations arrived throughout the twentieth century, but the story of mainline Protestantism in the Southern Cone and Brazil would be greatly enhanced by the coming of European immigrant groups.

Protestant Immigration and Inculturation Writing his Essay on Religious Tolerance from Mexico in 1831, the Ecuadorian Vicente Rocafuerte (1783–1847) elaborated on the practical dimension to the issue. He argued that unlike European Catholic immigrants, for whom he held contempt, English, Dutch, German, and Swiss immigrants would benefit the nation. In addition to the agricultural and technological advantages they brought, their example would spread the virtues of hard work and civic responsibility to the rest of the population.49 Liberal governments encouraged European immigration to stimulate their national economies and to promote agricultural development on lands that were either sparsely populated or peopled by indigenous groups. To promote this enterprise, governments guaranteed religious freedom to immigrants. The first Protestant immigrants to Latin America had been the British settlers who took advantage of the Anglo-Portuguese treaty of 1810 between the Great Britain and Portugal. The Portuguese government promised religious freedom with the stipulations that their houses of worship would not resemble churches, that they would avoid proselytizing Brazilian people, and that their services would remain private. Neighboring republics quickly followed suit. By mid-century, British subjects had established Anglican churches in a number of republics, including Argentina, Venezuela, Chile, Uruguay, Costa Rica, and Peru. Other Protestants quickly followed, establishing English-speaking congregations throughout the Southern Cone and elsewhere.50 Many of the British expatriates were tradesmen or diplomatic personnel, and ­therefore not necessarily long-lasting residents. The first permanent immigrant settlers consisted of the Waldensians who arrived from Italy to Uruguay.51 A growing population and economic disasters in Europe convinced them to seek opportunities elsewhere— and Uruguay boasted of such greener pastures and sought colonists to farm them. The first settlements were established in 1856. By century’s end, about four thousand Italian Waldensians were scattered throughout the country in small rural communities. As their numbers increased, they faced challenges of disease, persecution, and internal dissention, leading many to cross into neighboring Argentina, where the government of Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793–1877) had engaged in a violent conquest of the indigenous population to procure land. 52 German Lutherans and Reformed and, later, Scandinavians, fulfilled a labor demand in Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, and Paraguay, where they found work as farmers and industrialized workers.53 After the US Civil War, African-Americans, fleeing rampant

MainLine Protestantism in Latin America   445 racism, settled in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, where they established Methodist churches at the same time that disaffected Confederates formed a settlement in Brazil.54 In the early twentieth century, Armenian Congregationalists (as well as Armenian Orthodox) fleeing genocide settled in Argentina, and Mennonites from Canada and Russia immigrated to parts of Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay.55 These newcomers faced challenges of an agricultural environment vastly different from what they knew, in addition to disease and marginalized status as non-Catholics. Protestant settlers developed their own churches and institutions, remaining somewhat separate from the greater population to maintain their languages and traditions. This impulse resulted in the formation of churches different from those in the mother country. Among the Lutherans and Waldensians, for example, who traditionally depended upon an educated, ordained pastorate, religious leadership began to fall to the laity, because communities had to wait for qualified ministers or send pastoral candidates overseas for training. When these arrived from Europe, tensions invariably arose between the ministers, who knew little of the lives and circumstances of their parishioners, and the laity accustomed to directing their own church affairs. To maintain their cultural and ethnic identities in America, the first immigrants tended to isolate, a choice made easier in the rural hinterlands where many settled. Language and religion became important identity markers. Services were held in the mother tongue, and little evangelistic work was conducted outside the community. This desire to keep true to tradition later created tensions with the second and third generations, who came to identify more with the Americas than with a Europe they never knew firsthand. The global conflicts of the twentieth century contributed to carving out a sense of identity in a new land. In Argentina and Brazil, bitter struggles between “German Christians” who aligned with Nazism and those who found inspiration in the Confessing Church drove immigrant communities to forge their own identity within the South American context, with some emphasizing their European heritage and others extending the Protestant vision outward to their Latin American communities, particularly after the horrors of Nazi Germany highlighted the dangers of xenophobia and ethnocentrism. In 1968, four of the German Lutheran and Reformed synods joined to create the Evangelical Church of the Lutheran Confession in Brazil. Now numbering about 800,000 members in 400 parishes, the Church focuses on social justice issues, administers three theological schools, and participates in ecumenical initiatives that include dialogues with the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Brazil.56 As communities came to identify with their neighbors, they undertook new efforts to extend their distinctive Protestant messages and to contribute to the nation at large through the formation of charitable institutions and schools. The United Evangelical Lutheran Church of Argentina and Uruguay was formed in 1948, shortly after German and Scandinavian congregations began holding services and outreach in Spanish. The Waldensian Evangelical Church of Río de la Plata held its first synod in 1965, representing congregations in Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay.

446   Joel Morales Cruz Latin America continues to draw people in search of opportunity. Those denominations that were once “strangers in a strange land” now meet the spiritual and material needs of recent Hungarian communities. Korean expatriates have formed several Presbyterian denominations in Chile, Argentina, Costa Rica, Paraguay, and Bolivia.57

The Twentieth Century to the Present Protestants Come of Age Protestant missions to Latin America from a variety of traditions—historic and revivalist— continued into the new century, as the United States invested economically and militarily in the region and became the dominant power in hemisphere after World War I.58 These nascent denominations were never large, nor did they attract the numbers that Pentecostal and charismatic traditions later enjoyed. Their social footprint in the form of schools, hospitals, and other institutions only became significant later in the century. They remained on the peripheries of cities arguably because, with the exception of those evangelizing among the indigenous, missionaries focused attention on the small, educated middle classes. These groups were more likely to be sympathetic to the republican and capitalist ideals the missionaries espoused and to anticlerical sentiments that made them more willing to abandon Roman Catholicism before the reforms of Vatican II and the emergence of liberation theology.59 Protestants placed themselves outside the ­customs of many communities; they did not participate in patronal celebrations and did not honor the Virgin or saints; and their code of personal morality was often stricter than that of their neighbors, rejecting alcohol, smoking, and certain forms of entertainment.60 Protestant sympathies toward the liberals, especially on issues of religious liberty and the secularization of institutions such as marriage, placed them at odds with the Catholic Church, conservatives, and local communities. At times, it became all too easy to target Protestants as agents of liberalism and enemies of Catholicism, resulting in sporadic episodes of local persecution.61 Beginning in the late 1910s, Protestant churches in Latin America began a process of transformation. A generation of people had been educated in mission schools and seminaries. As citizens of their homelands, they were full participants in the fortunes and calamities of their compatriots. They were invested in their cultures and contexts. Many continued their education, becoming leaders in their own right.62 In this groundswell, Latin American Protestants began to discover their voice and to interpret the ­tradition through their own national and personal experiences.63 Protestant interdenominational and international organizations that emerged to encourage the evangelization of Latin America strongly contributed to the development of national ministries. The exclusion of Latin America from the 1910 World Missionary

MainLine Protestantism in Latin America   447 Conference held in Edinburgh led a number of Protestant workers and mission agencies to gather in Panama in 1916 for the first Committee on Cooperation in Latin America (CCLA), which marked a turning point in Protestant missions by granting members and their representative churches the first opportunity to come together across borders to address shared social and ecclesial concerns.64 However, North Americans dominated the congress. They determined the agenda and the language of the proceedings, English. Latin American member churches criticized the meeting for representing US and European interests and reflecting, even if unwittingly, North American imperialism. Despite this discord, the participants concentrated on socio-political obstacles to the spread of the gospel, called for the development of socially conscious autonomous churches, and appealed for an expansion of women’s roles in society. Foreign missionaries dominated the committees that emerged to collaborate across a number of areas— particularly education and pastoral formation. The missionaries’ actions gave the impression to many that Latin America was a pet project divided up among them.65 A larger Latin American contingent participated in the Montevideo CCLA conference in 1925, but it remained controlled by missionaries. Of the 165 delegates, only 45 were Latin American (27 percent). Here, a greater emphasis was placed on the social gospel, one that called individuals to salvation and to social reformation. Delegates urged churches to move beyond the dogmatic to the practical as socioeconomic problems produced by industrialized capitalist sectors, temperance, women’s rights, and workers’ struggles were discussed. Additionally, leaders encouraged members to expand beyond the urban centers to evangelize indigenous peoples.66 Finally, in 1929, Latin American nationals marked a turning point for Protestantism in the region when they gained control of the Havana CCLA. Highly educated leaders, imbued with nationalist and populist impulses rippling from national socio-political events, sought to contextualize Protestantism within regional and national contexts. Addressing the concern that Protestants represented a sort of fifth column for US economic and political interests (particularly in light of the Spanish-American War and recent military interventions in the Caribbean and Central America), the delegates sought to distance themselves from US missionary projects. Autonomous churches were to be “Latinized,” not just in name, but in ideology and practice, rooted within the needs, challenges, and cultures of the region.67 They argued that US imperialist economic structures crippled the advancement of the poor and prevented the maturation and development of truly independent Latin American churches.68 However, some delegates closer to the United States, such as the Congregationalist Mexican-American writer Alberto Rembao (1895–1962), lamented the general anti-American sentiment, and others saw this swing toward nationalism and social concerns as symptoms of bolshevism, presaging some of the divisions within Latin American churches in coming decades.69 These tensions echoed across the region during the twentieth century and were evident in the conservative reaction to the conferences held in Montevideo and Havana. Uncomfortable with the leftward swing in theology and social issues, by mid-century some conservative churches and movements began to form and gather in their own

448   Joel Morales Cruz conferences.70 This movement, along with the spread of Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostals across the continent, contributed to the divisions between the mainline and evangelical traditions in Latin America.71 One of the challenges confronting Protestant leaders seeking to Latinize their churches was the accusation that their faith was a foreign import opposed to Latin American identity, so intertwined as it was with Catholicism. Alberto Rembao responded to a Peruvian critic in 1937, arguing that Protestantism was not Anglo-Saxon. By re-centering the Protestant Reformation in sixteenth-century Spanish figures such as Juan de Valdés (ca. 1500–1541), he asserted that the Protestant spirit was that of liberty, a universal value. Anglo-Saxon countries may have nurtured this spirit after it was smothered in Spain by the Inquisition, but by the time Protestant missionaries arrived in Latin America, the independence movements had already filled the region with the spirit of liberty.72 The relationship between liberal values and Protestantism can be seen in the participation of Protestants in Mexico’s social and political events during the first decades of the twentieth century. Fearful that the reforms of the past half-century would be eroded after the end of the Díaz regime, Protestants, particularly Methodists, began supporting the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920).73 Many sympathized with the revolutionaries, who sought land reform and workers’ rights. José Rumbia (1865–1913), an anti-Catholic Methodist pastor, helped organize textile workers. Writing in 1906, he excoriated the intellectual classes, the científicos, for the “lack of disposition among those men of culture and learning to teach and to propagate good ideas on behalf of those whom we call ‘the common people,’ ” who argued that “light and liberty seem to have been made solely for those of high birth and who have the privilege of monopolizing knowledge as if it were any other commodity.” He attacked those who exploited the economy, both foreign and domestic, as “more greedy than patriotic, who desire everything even if the entire world were lost.”74 In Brazil, a number of Protestants, lieutenants in the military, participated in the various tenentist movements and revolutions of the 1920s and 1930s against the oligarchic Old Republic.75 When Getulio Vargas assumed power through a coup d’état in 1930, hundreds of students from the Presbyterian college in São Paulo sacrificed their lives in the Constitutionalist Revolution of 1932. Though the insurrection was defeated, the Vargas government granted some concessions. However, when the president instituted the Estado Novo in 1937 to maintain power under the ruse of an attempted communist takeover, a number of liberal Protestants joined with nationalist leaders to support Vargas and move the country toward modernization. After the government failed to respond to democratic demands, some of these Protestants shifted their allegiance to the Brazilian Workers’ Party.76 The relationship between Protestantism and Cuban liberation movements existed since the 1880s. Cuban refugees fleeing the Ten Years’ War had formed Protestant churches in New York and Key West.77 On their return to the island, these Cuban Protestants began to evangelize among tobacco workers, former slaves, and other members of the poor and lower middle classes.78 Out of the church in Matanzas, Fieles de Jesús, several revolutionary leaders emerged, including Alberto Díaz, Pedro Duarte,

MainLine Protestantism in Latin America   449 and Manuel Delfeu, who, anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish, took leading roles in Cuba’s fight for independence.79 Decades later, Protestants were active in the struggle to restore the 1901 constitution against the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado Morales. When Machado fell and the United States threatened to invade the island to restore order, Cuban Protestants united to protest against US domination. As the movement spread, it  took on anticlerical, anti-missionary attitudes and demanded political and social reforms. The movement was short-lived, however, as Fulgencio Batista assumed power and quashed dissent.80 By the 1930s, a new generation of national leaders, developed through the many schools, seminaries, and distance education programs established by missionaries, began to question their dominance over the churches. What legitimate reason was there to exclude local leaders from controlling their denominations, institutions, and finances? Further, were the churches to reflect the values and traditions of the United States, or would they be permitted to develop their own within the contexts of their own communities? Ministers, laywomen and men began to challenge the status quo that kept the churches under missionary control. In many cases, the ensuing battles were acrimonious. The prejudices and stereotypes common in the United States and Europe regarding the intelligence, capabilities, and morality of Latin Americans were often reflected in the churches. Sometimes these splits remained unresolved for decades, and the new churches suffered from a loss of foreign financial and infrastructural support. Nonetheless, these separations often marked the beginnings of a truly Latin American Protestantism.81

Notes 1. José Míguez Bonino, Faces of Latin American Protestantism, trans. Eugene Stockwell (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995, 1997), 1–77. 2. Karl-Wilhelm Westmeier, Protestant Pentecostalism in Latin America: A Study in the Dynamics of Missions (Cranberry, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1999), 15–16. 3. For example, some mainline churches may hesitate at aggressive evangelism because of theological reasons—a recognition that Roman Catholics or those of other religions do not require conversion because the Divine is present in all traditions, for example. Others may be intimately tied to an immigrant minority and see religion as a trait marking them out from the dominant culture. The reasons underlying the need to evangelize may differ from tradition to tradition. Some may hold to an apocalyptic need to convert others before the Second Coming of Christ; others may see spiritual conversion as the means by which a moral society can be built, while others might seek to spread the good news of physical healing or deliverance from demonic forces. 4. Frank Graziano, The Millennial New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 26–31; on the Alexandrine bulls, see Luis  N.  Rivera, A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1992), 23–32ff. One of the more curious results of the debates over the legal and religious legitimacy of the conquests was the Requerimiento, whereby from 1513, would-be colonizers were to read aloud the claims of the Spanish monarchs to the lands and to entreat the natives to conversion.

450   Joel Morales Cruz Their “refusal” (given that the document was read in Spanish and sometimes even to ­barren beaches) to submit and convert provided the rationalization for taking the lands by force. Cf. Rivera, A Violent Evangelism, 32–41. 5. Jean-Pierre Bastian, Historia del protestantismo en América Latina (México, DF: Ediciones CUPSA, 1986), 46–54; Pablo Alberto Deiros, Historia del cristianismo en América Latina (Buenos Aires: Fraternidad Teológica Latinoamericana, 1992), 591–600. 6. During this period, the English began to explore and settle the eastern coast of North America. 7. Bastian, Historia, 54–65. 8. See, for example, Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); also, Stuart  B.  Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 19–31, and Helen Rawlings, The Spanish Inquisition (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 114–134. 9. Bastian, Historia, 73–78, 95–96. See also Alicia Mayer, Lutero en el Paraíso. La Nueva España en el espejo del reformador alemán (México, DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2008), and Mary E. Giles, ed., Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 5–6, 209–269. 1 0. Bastian, Historia, 85–86. 11. Ibid., 87–91; Hans-Jürgen Prien, La Historia del cristianismo en América Latina (Salamanca: Ediciones Sígueme, 1985), 331–334. 12. Bastian, Historia, 85–86; Prien, La Historia del cristianismo, 332. 13. Bastian, Historia, 88–89. 14. Alfonso Alcalá, ed., Historia General de la iglesia en América Latina, Tomo V: México (Salamanca: Ediciones Sígueme, 1984), 179; Prien, La Historia del cristianismo, 332. 15. Peter Bakewell, A History of Latin America (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 394–396; John Lynch, New Worlds: A Religious History of Latin America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 129–132, 136–137, 153–154; Prien, 392–394; Hans-Jürgen Prien, Christianity in Latin America, Revised and Expanded Edition (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 291–292, 296; Pamela Voekel, Alone before God: The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 16. John Frederick Schwaller, The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America: From Conquest to Revolution and Beyond (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2011), 130–165, and the chapters on the respective nations in Joel M. Cruz, Histories of the Latin American Church: A Handbook (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2014). 17. J. Lloyd Mecham, The Church and State in Latin America: A History of Politico-­Ecclesiastical Relations, rev. ed. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1966). 18. Jean-Pierre Bastian, Los Disidentes: Sociedades protestantes y revolución en México, 1872–1911 (México, DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989), 26–28; Schwaller, The History of the Catholic Church, 144–145; Lynch, New Worlds, 131–132. 19. See for example, Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Living in the New Jerusalem: Protestantism in Guatemala (Austin, TX: University of Texas, 1998), 12–13; Deiros, Historia del cristianismo, 618–619. 20. For more on the Catholic Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Mexico, including the ­critique of traditional devotions, see Brian Larkin, The Very Nature of God: Baroque Catholicism and Religious Reform in Bourbon Mexico City (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2010); also, Voekel, Alone before God: 43–105. 21. Prien, Christianity, 360.

MainLine Protestantism in Latin America   451 22. The Anglo-Portuguese treaty of 1810 allowed British subjects to settle and build churches in Río de Janeiro. In 1825, Argentina and Great Britain concluded a treaty of commerce guaranteeing religious freedom to British subjects to worship in their homes and churches, resulting in Buenos Aires’s first Protestant church, built in 1829. Mexico delayed the question of religious freedom in an 1825 treaty with the United Kingdom, but its revision the following year hesitatingly granted it—though only in private, British residences. Schwaller, The History of the Catholic Church, 159; J.  Lloyd Mecham, Church and State in Latin America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1934, 1966), 226. Prien, Historia, 422; Mecham, Church and State in Latin America, 228; Joel M. Cruz, The Mexican Reformation: Catholic Pluralism, Enlightenment Religion, and the Iglesia de Jesús Movement in Benito Juarez’s Mexico (1859–72) (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2011), 138–139. See also Prien, Historia, 409–489; Cruz, Histories. 23. Ondina  E.  González and Justo  L.  González, Christianity in Latin America: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 218–219. 24. E.  Lucas Bridges, The Uttermost Part of the Earth (New York, NY: Overlook/Rookery, reprint 2007 from 1948 original). 25. Bridges, The Uttermost Part, 209–216; Deiros, Historia del cristianismo, 640–650. 26. The opposition of some members of the Catholic clergy can be explained in part by the distribution of Bibles that lacked explanatory notes that would prevent the faithful from falling into error. Whereas early on, a translation from the Vulgate was used, eventually, the Bible societies began to prefer the Reina-Valera, translated from the original language by Protestant converts in sixteenth-century Spain. In some cases, the Apocryphal books considered canonical by the Catholic Church were omitted, adding to the suspicion that the Bible societies were Protestant infiltrators. Cf. Susan Schroeder, “Father José María Luis Mora, Liberalism, and the British and Foreign Bible Society in Nineteenth-Century Mexico,” The Americas 50, no. 3 (January 1994), 377–397. 27. For a summary of US evangelical missions in their nineteenth-century political-economic contexts, see Daniel R. Rodríguez, La primera evangelización norteamericana en Puerto Rico 1898–1930 (Rochester, NY: Ediciones Borinquen, 1986), 5–99; Samuel Silva Gotay, protestantismo y política en Puerto Rico 1898–1930, 2da edición revisada (San Juan: La Editorial, Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1998), 51–101; Deiros, Historia del cristianismo, 662–676; also Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 184–189; Timothy  L.  Smith, Revivalism & Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957, 1980). 28. For anti-Catholicism in the United States, see Mark Noll, History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992), 208–210; Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1985), 200–203. 2 9. Cf. Prien, Historia, 761–764, 766–769. 3 0. Manuel G. Gonzáles, Mexicanos: A History of Mexicans in the United States (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), 79. 31. Bastian, Disidentes, 32–48; Martin Austin Nesvig, ed., Religious Culture in Modern Mexico, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 78–105; Cruz, Mexican Reformation, 130–186. 32. Luis Martínez-Fernández, Protestantism and Political Conflict in the Nineteenth-Century Hispanic Caribbean (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 59; Ángel L. Gutiérrez, Evangélicos en Puerto Rico en la Época Española (Guaynabo, PR: Editorial Chari, 1997), 27–38.

452   Joel Morales Cruz 33. Enrique Dussel, ed., The Church in Latin America 1492–1992 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992), 328–330; Bastian, Disidentes, 41–8; Bastian, Historia, 135–140; Gotay, Protestantismo y Política, 298–304. For a more detailed treatment of the relationship between liberalism, Freemasonry, and Protestant missions in Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, Central America, and Mexico, see Jean-Pierre Bastian, ed., Protestantes, liberales y francomasones: Sociedades de ideas y modernidad en América Latina, siglo XIX (México, DF: CEHILA/Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1990). 3 4. Dussel, Church, 328–332. 35. For a chronology of Protestant missions, see the respective chapters on individual nations in Cruz, Histories, and the resources and information compiled by the Latin American Socio-Religious Studies Program/Programa Latinoamericano de estudios socioreligiosos (PROLADES) for each country in Latin America at www.prolades.com. See also Deiros, Historia del cristianismo, 677–694, for a survey of Protestant penetration into Latin America by denomination. 36. González and González, Christianity in Latin America, 229. Luis Martínez-Fernández, Protestantism and Political Conflict, 75–161; Armando Lampe, ed., Christianity in the Caribbean: Essays on Church History (Barbados: University of the West Indies Press, 2001), 229–242; Rodríguez, La Primera Evangelización, 182–258; Gotay, Protestantismo y política, 172–191. For the religious background to the Spanish-American War, see Matthew McCullough, The Cross of War: Christian Nationalism and US Expansion in the SpanishAmerican War (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014). 37. Alcalá, Historia General, 288–310; Cruz, Mexican Reformation, 132; Cruz, Histories, 416. 3 8. Garrard-Burnett, Living in the New Jerusalem, 1–20; Carmelo Álvarez, People of Hope: The  Protestant Movement in Central America (New York, NY: Friendship Press, 1990); González and González, Christianity in Latin America, 221, 227–228. 39. Ibid., 225–226; Cruz, Histories, 241. 4 0. Mecham, Church and State in Latin America, 123–133. The connection between liberal policies and Protestantism would prove tragic after conservatives regained power in 1880. The conservative legislature rescinded the anticlerical laws and restored the Catholic Church’s privileges. The 1886 constitution, while recognizing the independence and autonomy of the Catholic Church, also allowed for the exercise of other religions provided they did not offend Christian morality. Under a new concordat negotiated in 1888 between the Colombian government and the Vatican, the Catholic Church regained many lost prerogatives, enabling it to become once again one of the strongest institutions in Colombian society. 41. González and González, Christianity in Latin America, 225. 4 2. Ibid., 226. 4 3. Juan  B.  A.  Kessler, Conflict in Missions: A History of Protestantism in Peru and Chile (Denver, CO: International Academic Publishers, 2001), 32–37; Jeffrey Klaiber, S.J., The Catholic Church in Peru, 1821–1985: A Social History (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1992), 93–94. 4 4. Kessler, Conflict in Missions, 29–39. 45. González and González, Christianity in Latin America, 225. 4 6. Prien, Historia, 788–799; González and González, Christianity in Latin America, 226–227; Cruz, Histories, 182. 47. González and González, Christianity in Latin America, 218–219, 223; Cruz, Histories, 217–218.

MainLine Protestantism in Latin America   453 48. Kessler, Conflict in Missions, 40–51, 96–99. 49. Pablo Mijangos y González, The Lawyer of the Church: Bishop Clemente de Jesús Munguía and the Clerical Response to the Mexican Liberal Reforma (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 22. 50. Bastian, Historia, 105–109; Deiros, Historia del cristianismo, 622ff. 51. In Brazil, after King João VI’s (1767–1826) return to Portugal, his son, Pedro (1798–1834) proclaimed Brazilian independence. The Empress, Maria Leopoldina (1797–1826), was Austrian and encouraged German immigration in order to settle the interior. German Protestants, fleeing poverty, overpopulation, and the Napoleonic Wars, established colonies, first in the southern interior and then to the north. González and González, Christianity in Latin America, 195, 196.Waldensians trace their origins to Peter Waldo (ca. 1140–ca. 1205) a twelfth-century wealthy merchant from Lyons, France, who taught that apostolic p ­ overty was the way to perfection. Persecuted by the Roman Catholic Church and concentrated in the Alps, the Waldensians adopted many of the tenets of the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. 52. Gabriel Audisio, The Waldensian Dissent: Persecution and Survival, c. 1170–c. 1570 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 213; González and González, Christianity in Latin America, 192–195. 53. Eric W. Gritsch, A History of Lutheranism, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 208–210; James  E.  McGoldrick, Presbyterian and Reformed Churches: A Global History (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2012), 380–399. 54. For African-American migration to the Caribbean, see Ryan Mann-Hamilton. “Forgotten Migrations from the United States to Hispaniola,” Trotter Review 19, no. 1, Article 8 (2010). Available at: http://scholarworks.umb.edu/trotter_review/vol19/iss1/8; González and González, Christianity in Latin America, 198–200. For the Confederados, see Cyrus B. Dawsey and James M. Dawsey, eds., The Confederados: Old South Immigrants in Brazil. (Birmingham, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1998). 55. Leonard Sawatsky, They Sought a Country: Mennonite Colonization in Mexico (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971); J. Winfield Fretz, Pilgrims in Paraguay: The Story of Mennonite Colonization in South America (Harrisonburg, VA: Herald Press, 1953); Lorenzo Canas Bottos, Old Colony Mennonites in Argentina and Bolivia: Nation Making, Religious Conflict and Imagination of the Future (Leiden: Brill Academic, 2008). What about this? http://www.ucc.org/about-us_hidden-histories_armenian-congregationalists. 5 6. Cruz, Histories, 172. 57. Ibid., 109, 146, 205, 256, 462. 5 8. Deiros, Historia del cristianismo, 701–702. 59. Ibid., 702–716. For more on the effects of Vatican II and liberation theology on the Catholic Church, see Edward L. Cleary, How Latin America Saved the Soul of the Catholic Church (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 2010), and Todd Hartch, The Rebirth of Christianity in Latin America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 60. These in turn served as identity markers that reinforced distinctives and prerogatives of particular Protestant identities—such as “being in the world but not of it” or of being persecuted for the faith—while also contributing to the very marginalization of those communities. 61. Hartch, The Rebirth of Christianity, 25–27; James  E.  Goff, The Persecution of Protestant Christians in Colombia, 1948–1958: With an Investigation of Its Background and Causes (Cuernavaca, Mexico: Centro Intercultural de Documentación, 1968).

454   Joel Morales Cruz 62. Bastian, Historia, 143–151. 63. A development that, it may be argued, through its efforts to contextualize the Protestant message into the needs and challenges of the people, laid the foundation for later Pentecostal success. One reason, though, that Pentecostalism has experienced more success in doing  so is its grassroots nature, led by Spirit-filled charismatic individuals. Mainline Protestantism was more dependent then, as now, on ecclesiastical structures involving conferences, educated and ordained leaders, and adherence to polity. 64. Deiros, Historia del cristianismo, 717. Congress on Christian work in Latin America, Panama, 1916: Christian Work in Latin America (New York, NY: Pub. for the Committee on Co-operation in Latin America, by the Missionary Education Movement, ca. 1917). 65. Bastian, Historia, 157–163; Deiros, Historia del cristianismo, 717–719; Prien, Historia, 764–765. 6 6. Bastian, Historia, 163–165; Deiros, Historia del cristianismo, 719–724. 67. Cf. Deiros, Historia del cristianismo, 724–726. 68. Ruben Rivera, “Rembao, Alberto (1895–1962) Mexican-Born Ecumenical Protestant Thinker, Journalist, and Advocate for Social Christianity, Democracy, and Internationalism,” Boston University School of Theology, History of Missiology, http://www.bu.edu/ missiology/missionary-biography/r-s/rembao-alberto-1895-1962/. 6 9. Bastian, Historia, 165–168; Deiros, Historia del cristianismo, 725–726. 70. Throughout the twentieth century, conservative fundamentalist and Pentecostal churches and mission societies sent workers throughout the region to spread a more traditional message of sin, personal morality, and redemption from hell. In 1949, the first Latin American Evangelical Conference (CELA I) reunited eighteen churches in Buenos Aires. They focused on evangelization, the presence of Protestantism in Latin America, and cooperation among different church bodies. The diverse nature of Protestantism in Latin America is evident in that among the participating churches were Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, Congregationalists and Baptists, Reformed and Presbyterians, Nazarenes and Pentecostals. Garrard Burnett, Living in the New Jerusalem 46; Bastian, Historia, 200–202. Twenty years later, the First Latin American Congress for Evangelization (CLADE I) met in Bogotá, in part as a conservative Protestant reaction against the more liberal World Council of Churches. Interestingly, they did not disavow the social dimensions of the gospel. Unlike some elements among the US churches that insisted on an either/or dichotomy between evangelization and activism, Latin American evangelicals insisted that the Christian message had to address the everyday ills of the people, together with winning souls for the Kingdom. This insistence on both imperatives anticipated those of the worldwide reunion of evangelicals at the Lausanne Conference (The First International Congress on World Evangelization) held in 1974 in Lausanne, Switzerland, which brought together 2,700 evangelical leaders to discuss the challenges and progress of evangelizing the world. Part of its significance lies in its recognizing the growing prominence of Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Brian Stanley, The Global Diffusion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Billy Graham and John Stott (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2013), 160–175. It was repeated when the Latin American Theological Fraternity (FTL) was founded a year later and in CLADE’s subsequent meetings in Lima (1979), Quito (1992, 2000), and San José (2012). Bastian, Historia, 223–225; Cruz, Histories, 11–15. 7 1. The distinction between Pentecostals and neo-Pentecostals (or charismatics) is usually described as that the former is made up of churches and denominations that have their

MainLine Protestantism in Latin America   455 roots in the Pentecostal revivals of the early twentieth century and which in turn have their roots in the Holiness movement within the revivalist churches. Neo-Pentecostals began to emerge in the 1960s and do not have those connections to Pentecostalism, instead either emerging from Spirit-filled revivals within non-Pentecostal churches (such as Episcopalian or Methodist) or developing independently under charismatic leaders. Cf. Edward L. Cleary and Hannah W. Stewart, Power, Politics, and Pentecostals in Latin America (Oxford: Westview Press, 1997), 8–10. 72. Cleary and Stewart, Power, Politics, and Pentecostals, 107. 73. For more on the role of Protestantism in the Mexican Revolution, see Deborah J. Baldwin, Protestants and the Mexican Revolution: Missionaries, Ministers and Social Change (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990). 74. José Rumbia, “Y dijo Dios, la Luz sea y la Luz fue,” ACI, September 13, 1906, 302–303, as quoted in Bastian, Disidentes, 240–241. Translation by the author. 75. Tenentismo was a political philosophy of junior officers in Brazil’s military who joined with the growing urban middle classes to revolt against the government and call for agrarian reform and unionization. John Charles Chasteen, Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2001), 228–230. 76. Bastian, Historia, 175; Dussel, Church, 333. 77. The Ten Years’ War (1868–1878) was an uprising against Spanish domination. This was the first of three wars for liberation waged by the Cuban people before the Spanish-American War of 1898. 7 8. Luis Martínez-Fernández, Protestantism and Political Conflict in the Nineteenth-Century Hispanic Caribbean (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 130–161. 7 9. Lampe, Christianity in the Caribbean 232–233; Dussel, Church, 333–334. 8 0. Lampe, Christianity in the Caribbean, 248–249. 81. Denominations that formed out of this dynamic include the National Presbyterian Church of Chile, the Evangelical Methodist Church of Costa Rica, the Salvadoran Lutheran Synod, and the Peruvian Lutheran Evangelical Church. Cruz, Histories, 208, 255, 331, 494. See Garrard and Doran, Gooren, Lorentzen, McCleary, Rivera Pagan, Rowell in this volume for later developments in Protestantism.

pa rt I V

C ON T E M P OR A RY C H R IST I A N I T Y I N L AT I N A M E R IC A

chapter 24

Chr isti a n it y a n d Ecol ogy i n L ati n A m er ica Lois Ann Lorentzen

Consideramos algo esencial a nuestra identidad cristiana en el tiempo presente fortalecer la comunión, respeto y cariño que nuestras culturas tienen con la ecobiodiversidad.1  We consider it essential for our contemporary Christian identity to strengthen the communion, respect, and love that our cultures have for ecological biodiversity.

This statement from the Roman Catholic Bishops of Bolivia indicates a connection between Christian faith and concern for environmental issues. This linking of Christian faith with environmental practice is relatively new in Latin America’s history. Given that Latin America boasts the world’s largest concentration of Catholics, the contemporary role of Christian groups in the continent’s environmental struggles merits study.2 Religion, as expressed through myths, rituals, and narratives, provides a framework to understand a group’s relationship to nonhuman nature. Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim write, “In short, religions have been significant catalysts for humans in coping with change and transcending suffering while at the same time grounding humans in nature's rhythms and Earth's abundance.”3 Analyzing the beliefs and actions of religious actors is a complicated task. As such, each group represented in this chapter will be more complex than evidenced by the brief treatment given here. Religious traditions, identities, and institutions are continually contested and reshaped in response to historical, social, economic, and cultural conditions. Even so, with this caveat, taking religious traditions and actors into account deepens one’s understanding of environmental struggles and movements within Latin America. This work explores Christianity and ecology in Latin America by charting religious beliefs and practices of the Roman Catholic Church, liberation theologians, ecofeminist

460   Lois Ann Lorentzen movements and theology, Protestant faith traditions, and diaspora religions of Latin America and the Caribbean. The study tracks the involvement of various Christian groups in the myriad environmental struggles found in Latin America.

Roman Catholicism Roman Catholicism remains the dominant religion in Latin America. Although in rural areas, many campesinos (“peasant” farmers) may practice a “popular Catholicism” that is tied to nature, the official Catholic Church in Latin America itself does not, as Anna Peterson writes, “ . . . have a long tradition of explicit theological and moral reflection about the natural world.”4 Although early Christian and medieval theologians such as Albert the Great, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Francis of Assisi, and Hildegard of Bingen expressed appreciation for nature in their theologies and presumed that a harmonious order among humans and the natural world corresponded to God’s design, their views did not reflect dominant theologies. In 1493, Pope Alexander issued a papal bull granting most of the so-called New World to Ferdinand and Isabella, thus giving the Spanish monarchy church-sanctioned titular dominion over native peoples and their lands. In 1513, the jurist Juan López de Palacios Rubios wrote the Requerimiento (Requirement), a document that provided for some a moral and theological justification for the subjugation of land and peoples, requiring conversion to Christianity as a means of avoiding war and enslavement. A portion of Catholicism that reached the Americas presumed that the domination of nature and other peoples by Christians reflected God’s will. Extraction of resources, destruction of land, and colonizing of “savages” thus posed few theological problems for many in the early years of the conquest. Notable exceptions to triumphalist theologies and justifications of domination certainly existed. The Spanish Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos delivered a scathing attack on the Spanish encomienda system and the abuse of the indigenous peoples of Hispaniola (now Dominican Republic and Haiti). Another Spanish Dominican, Bartolomé de las Casas, both defended the rights of indigenous peoples and extolled the natural world they inhabited.5 Las Casas vehemently protested against the destruction of indigenous peoples and their lands and engaged in numerous debates concerning the Spanish Christian “right” to colonize, enslave, and evangelize them. Contemporary liberation theologians, such as Gustavo Gutiérrez, have championed Las Casas as an apostle for the poor, the indigenous, and the land.6 Issues emerging from the New World greatly influenced the debates and writings of theologians of the Second Scholasticism (see David Lantigua, Chapter 3 in this volume). Scholars from Salamanca, Valladolid, Alcalá, and Évora, Spain, as well as Coimbra, Portugal, debated the rights of indigenous peoples, the legitimacy of conquest, the role of evangelization, the injustice of the encomienda system, and the nature of human rights. These debates may not seem directly related to nature or the environment per se. Yet colonization, often justified through moral, theological, and philosophical arguments, changed land-use patterns through the increased extraction

Christianity and Ecology in Latin America   461 of resources and destruction of the generally more nature-friendly ways of the New World’s indigenous peoples. For many, the Church’s recognition of the Virgin of Guadalupe in 1531 symbolizes a softened theological posture toward native peoples and their lands (see Jeanette Rodriguez, Chapter 25 in this volume).7 Guadalupe, according to Jeanette Favrot Peterson, was a “fusion of an imported European Mother of God with native Mother Goddesses. Like the pre-Columbian earth deities, the Virgin Mary of popular Spanish Catholicism had power over fertility, disease, and natural disasters.”8 But not until the twentieth century was the Virgin of Guadalupe explicitly linked to struggles for the rights of native peoples, the poor, and the land. Officially named the “Patroness of the Americas” by Pope John Paul II, she has been a complicated symbol in Latin America’s history, standing for conquest, earth goddess, nature, the modern nation-state, and indigenous rights.9 In her more recent incarnations, she represents a call for environmental justice.10 Popular Catholicism that blended Iberian practices with indigenous and Africanbased religions of the Americas tended to yield more environmentally friendly practices and beliefs than “official” Catholicism. The prevalence of regional, site-specific saints shows the importance of place in popular Catholicism. Peru’s Virgin of Cuzco is important because she is an Andean indigenous, rather than a European, object of devotion. Carol Damian writes that the Virgin “became the perfect embodiment of an Andean cosmology that emphasized the all-encompassing unity that exists between human beings, spirits, and the land.”11 Similarly, Guatemala’s Mayan Catholics “believe the essence of divinity is present in significant landforms, plants, and animals.12

Liberation Theology This isn’t a middle-class movement as it is in the United States. It’s in the villages, in the highlands. For us, it’s life or death.13

In many regions, the top hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church historically tended to ally itself with local power elites, governments, and the wealthy.14 Yet, in the 1960s, the emergence of liberation theology marked a sea change in the role of the church in Latin America. Liberation theology’s growth came as a response by activist priests, engaged sisters, and concerned laypeople to increased poverty, the failed promises of modernization, and the brutality of military dictatorships. In its early years, liberation theology did not address ecological concerns, focusing instead on the social, economic, and political dimensions of the oppression of the poor. Increasingly, liberation theologians recognized that the destruction of the earth and the oppression of the poor were linked; the poor’s liberation was seen as impossible without defense of the environment. Liberation theologians now frequently promote ecological understanding as a paradigm for interpreting social realities. Liberation theology asserts that God sides with the poor and the oppressed. The Latin American Bishops Conference meetings in Medellín, Colombia, in 1968, and in Puebla,

462   Lois Ann Lorentzen Mexico, in 1979 underscored this “preferential option for the poor” as being at the heart of Christian theology and the gospel mandate. The poor and oppressed are hermeneutically privileged, and all social analysis must begin with their experience. This hermeneutical privilege holds true for environmental issues as well as for theology. Just as the poor of the land are central to theological discourse, they must also be central to ecological discourse. Liberation theology grounded itself in a socioeconomic analysis of the plight of the poor. Believers were to reflect on their social situation, possibly using a Marxist analysis, clearly interpreting scripture in light of social analysis, and then boldly acting in the world. Later, liberation theologians applied this model explicitly to the environment. Salvadoran environmental activists, for example, who were engaged in protesting the destruction of one of the country’s last remaining forest preserves realized that “Christians are to actively engage in the work of the kingdom of God, an earthly labor which involves changing unjust social structures.”15 Liberation theologians emphasize social sin and structural injustice over personal sin. They claim that environmental exploitation stems from structural injustices that affect both the poor and the nonhuman world; ecological problems cannot be resolved until structures of exploitation and domination are transformed. Leonardo Boff writes, “ecological injustice is transformed into social injustice by producing social oppression, exhaustion of resources, contamination of the atmosphere and the deteriorating quality of life.”16 Social sin is not just the poverty and exploitation of people, but also the contamination and destruction of their resources. The violation of nature is a religious offense. The emphasis on structural injustice and economic, political, and social institutions led liberation theologians to the idea of “social ecology.” The United Nations’ first international conference on the environment, held in Stockholm in 1972, had a great influence on theologians such as Carlos Herz and Eduardo Contreras of Peru and Eduardo Guaynas of Uruguay. Participants from less affluent countries called poverty an environmental problem and claimed that the poor suffer most from socio-environmental deterioration. Following the conference, Guaynas wrote, We define social ecology as the study of humans, individually and socially, interacting with the environment. The land shapes human cultural and social manifestations. The human interacts intensely with the environment. Neither can be studied in isolation.17

The political, social, and economic dimensions of environmental degradation and crisis are thus primary; both social ecologists and liberation theologians agree that no divide exists between social and environmental issues. Sharp criticisms of more affluent countries emerge from an analysis based in social ecology and liberation theology. Relations between rich and poor countries are characterized as neocolonial and exploitive. Liberation theologians uniformly denounce the neoliberal model of development and global capitalism for their “anti-ecological character”

Christianity and Ecology in Latin America   463 and their exploitation and appropriation of “natural national resources by large national and international capital.”18 As ecotheology evolved in Latin America, prominent theologians such as Sister Ivone Gebara and former Catholic priest Leonardo Boff departed from a strict social ecology perspective. Yet although Boff ’s ecospirituality draws from cosmic, ecocentric, and biocentric models in environmental thought, he remains firmly rooted in both historical analysis and concrete contemporary cases of “capital sins against ecology.”19 He writes, “This violence was planted in Latin America with the sixteenth-century standard of labour and a relationship with nature that implied ecocide, the devastation of our ecosystems.”20 It continues today in the ecological sins committed in Brazil against the Amazon and its peoples. Boff ’s chronicling of concrete “sins” against nature suggests that “salvation” demands action on behalf of the environment. Activist clergy and laity are central in environmental struggles throughout Latin America. Bishop Luis Santos and Father José Andrés Tamayo Cortez, winner of the prestigious Goldman environmental award, both of Honduras, and Father Marco Arana of Peru have all fought for environmental justice— and have all been persecuted for it. Father Reinel Restrepo of Colombia was killed shortly after speaking to the government to protest the displacement of an entire village for gold mining. Historically grounded liberation theologies, whether adopting social ecology or biocentric and ecocentric models, embrace action as the true test of faith commitment. Christian base communities became the ideal loci for articulation and praxis of an informed ecotheology. Initially formed in areas underserved by priests, Christian base communities provided space for reflection for those generally excluded from theological discourse. Participants in Christian base communities reflected upon Christian scriptures in light of their life situations and started organizing grassroots projects to meet local needs. Many groups and individuals moved on to political activism. Increasingly, base communities addressed environmental issues such as air ­pollution, water contamination, sanitation services, soil erosion, mining, the use of chemical pesticides, logging, and other ecological issues that directly affected their communities’ health and well-being. Christian base communities in Suchitoto and Aguilares, El Salvador, for example, trained peasants in environmentally sustainable land practices. Christian base communities in Brazil’s Amazon River basin have supported and organized rubber tappers and other poor landholders in nonviolent efforts to halt deforestation and the destruction of their way of life. At times these peaceful protests have been met with violence, most notably in the case of the murder of Chico Mendes. The well-known Movement of the Landless (Movimento sim Terra, MST), although technically a secular movement, is also supported by the Roman Catholic Church and Christian base communities. The Landless Movement’s practices come from “Christian base communities’ principles, combining democratic centralism and grassroots assemblies.”21 Miguel Carter notes the Church’s role in providing a “mystique” and an affective dimension for Landless Movement participants.22

464   Lois Ann Lorentzen Throughout Latin America, local Catholic churches have formed ecological committees in order “to promote conversion to ecological community. This conversion denounces environmental damage as a serious affront against the creator, promotes technologies that respect the land and local material cultures, practices agriculture that is sustainable and for local consumption, and actively resists mainstream neoliberal development ­policies.”23 Churches, base communities, and Catholic organizations participate with popular social and environmental movements throughout Latin America to fight for clean water and air, to halt deforestation, and to confront the numerous environmental issues affecting the region’s rural and urban poor. Religious belief and practice are seen as inseparable from environmental struggle.

Ecofeminism Ecofeminism is based on a radical defense of women’s rights and environmental awareness (Coca Trillini)24

Most Latin American ecofeminists come from Christian base communities (and may still be very active within them) and were influenced by liberation theology. Many still consider themselves liberation theologians, or more appropriately, ecofeminist liberation theologians. Sister Ivone Gebara, professor for decades at the Theological Institute of Recife, Brazil, is the most widely known spokesperson for ecofeminist theology from a Latin American perspective. Gebara gained international attention in 1995 when the Vatican, under the auspices of the Congregation of the Doctrine and Faith, silenced her. Gebara had claimed that liberation theology needed to be tolerant of women’s choice for abortion given the hardship of raising children in the context of desperate poverty. The Congregation instructed Gebara not to speak, teach, or write for two years and sent her to France for theological re-education. She returned to Brazil in 1997 and again became active in writing ecofeminist theology and in environmental activism. Ecofeminist theologians such as Gebara, while influenced by liberation methodology, want to move beyond what they see as androcentric tendencies in many theologies of liberation. Gebara defines ecofeminism as the “thought and social movement that refers basically to the ideological connection between the exploitation of nature and the exploitation of women within a hierarchical/patriarchal system.”25 Latin American ecofeminists contend that not only are women and nature linked ideologically and conceptually, but also that environmental destruction affects women differently than men. Women are more likely to provide family sustenance and thus depend on a healthy environment. They must provide clean water for their families; in the countryside, they need trees for fuel, food, and fodder. They bear the brunt of child care as well as care of the sick and elderly; thus, polluted waters that give family members cholera or diarrhea (the largest cause of child death in poor countries) affect them directly. Gebara writes that working with poor women in slums shapes the issues

Christianity and Ecology in Latin America   465 addressed by a “social ecofeminism.” Garbage that overflows streets, poor health care, and the struggle to find uncontaminated water—all daily survival crises faced by poor slum women as they provide for families—are central issues addressed by ecofeminist activism and theology. Uruguayan theologian Gladys Parentelli, one of three Latin American women observers at the Second Vatican Council, claims that ecofeminism introduces a new anthropology, epistemology, and ethics.26 She writes: Anthropological and cosmological paradigms of holistic ecofeminism propose changing the human’s image in the cosmos. . . . We must relocate humans as within rather than above the cosmos. This is incompatible with Christian anthropology that insists humans are owners and rulers of creation, in God’s likeness as Lord of all creation and that the Creator God ordered man to fill and dominate the land.27

Humans are neither exceptional nor transcendent. To be human is to be interrelated with other people, but also with nature. Ecofeminist theologians share with liberation theologians the idea of the hermeneutical privilege of the poor and oppressed. However, they contend that the poor women of Latin America are the oppressed within the oppressed. According to Mary Judith Ress, “Influenced by liberation theology’s option for the poor, feminist theologians stress the feminization of poverty: ‘the poor have a face and it is the face of a woman and her children,’ has become the starting point for much of our theological work.”28 The methodology developed by Latin America’s ecofeminist theologians puts women’s corporality (sexuality, sex, body, etc.) at its center and explores the relationship between the daily life of women and systemic forms of oppression, thus connecting women’s exploitation with environmental and economic exploitation. Says Ress, The methodology yields an ecofeminist ethic that begins with the body embedded in the world. Ethical decisions are contextual, based in one’s experiences and relationships, including with the natural world.29

An ecofeminist ethic expands the focus on the most oppressed to include the environment. Chilean ecofeminist theologian Doris Muñoz says, “. . . each decision is made to promote more equitable less domineering relations with the weak or those without voice, including the land and other beings.” Ecofeminists have participated in social movements throughout Latin America. Salvadoran ecofeminist activists Mercedes Cañas and Gladis Lemus write of Las Vencedoras, an all-women’s fishing cooperative, as one of many grassroots initiatives creating new development models that combine feminism and environmentalism.30 The Con-spirando women’s collective—the most visible movement in Latin America reflecting ecofeminist theology—started in 1991 to create a network of women concerned with the themes of ecofeminism. The collective publishes a quarterly journal, offers a summer school and workshops, and sponsors a yearlong cycle of rituals.31

466   Lois Ann Lorentzen A diversity of class, race, age, and culture characterizes its members, although most come from the Christian tradition. Many members considered themselves liberation theologians at some point and were active in Christian base communities (some remain involved), although all criticize the patriarchal underpinnings of Christian theologies, including liberation theology. Con-spirando self-consciously shapes rituals that mix Christian and indigenous practices. Con-spirando works on environmental issues with grassroots groups and women’s centers in slums, Christian base communities, and universities. A network of collectives similar to Con-spirando exists throughout Latin America, connecting active ecofeminist movements in Peru, Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay, Venezuela, Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Chile. The ecofeminist groups address a range of environmental issues. Not all grassroots women-led environmental movements inspired by radical Catholicism call themselves ecofeminist, however.

Pope Francis and Laudato Si Pope Francis, the former Argentinian Jesuit, captured the world’s attention with the 2015 publication of the encyclical Laudato Si (Praise be to you): On Care for Our Common Home. Although it is a message to the global community, the encyclical reflects Latin American themes. Sections of Laudato Si read like liberation theology. Pope Francis writes, [A] true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate the question of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor, echoing the words of [Leonardo] Boff.32

Francis pays attention not only to “the cries of the abandoned of this world,” but also to the earth’s pain.33 The most marginalized include “the earth herself, burdened and laid waste . . . among the most abandoned and mistreated of our poor.”34 Pope Francis condemns capitalism: “Once more, we need to reject a magical conception of the market, which would suggest that problems can be solved simply by an increase in the profits of companies or individuals.” The impact of global capitalism is felt in “proposals to internationalize the Amazon, which only serve the economic interests of transnational corporations.”35 He claims that “the unbridled exploitation of nature by painting him [sic] [humans] as domineering and destructive by nature” is a misinterpretation of Biblical texts, acknowledging the historical impact of dominion theologies on the environment. Christians “must forcefully reject the notion that our being created in God’s image and given dominion over the earth justifies absolute domination over other creatures.”36 Francis requested materials and books from Boff as he prepared the encyclical; he relies heavily on his concept of “integral ecology” along with Franciscan spirituality. He writes, “I believe that Saint Francis is the example par excellence of care for the vulnerable and of an integral ecology”; the world “is a web of relationships.”37 Ecological

Christianity and Ecology in Latin America   467 conversion, according to Francis, occurs when “the effects of their encounter with Jesus Christ become evident in their relationship with the world around them.”38 The life and figure of Saint Francis helps Christians “realize that a healthy relationship with creation is one dimension of overall personal conversion.”39 Boff, formerly a critic of Francis, praises Laudato Si in interviews and writings, claiming that the document reflects an “evolutionary view of the universe” similar to his own.40 Ivone Gebara, on the other hand, has been sharply critical of the encyclical for excluding women’s voices—not a single source used is female. The encyclical calls God Father and the Earth Mother; feminine language is consistently used for nature and masculine for God, reinforcing a gender dualism seen as harmful to women. Laudato Si contains numerous ecological themes and methods familiar to Latin Americans. Yet, it would be a mistake to consider this a Latin American encyclical. Francis is clear from the outset about his intention to start a “dialogue with all people about our common home . . . a conversation that includes everyone, since the environmental challenge we are undergoing, and its human roots, concern and affect us all.”41

Protestants in Latin America Missionaries from mainline Protestant denominations did not arrive in Latin America in significant numbers until the end of the nineteenth century. Their efforts at evangelization, however, remained largely unsuccessful. Fresh waves of evangelical Protestants arrived in Latin America in the 1950s, laying the groundwork for the rapid expansion of evangelical Protestantism, especially Pentecostalism, in the late twentieth century. Now over 13 percent of Latin Americans are Pentecostals and 15 percent are charismatics across the region. Latin America’s Protestants are not uniformly politically conservative, as is often assumed (see Virginia Garrard and Justin  M.  Doran, Chapter  16 in this volume). Peruvian Pentecostal theologian and pastor Bernardo Campos suggests that “[a]s a religion of the poor, it moves between accommodation and submission and between questioning and protesting.”42 In Venezuela, for example, evangelical Protestants tended to support Hugo Chavez.43 In San Salvador, El Salvador, Emmanuel Baptist Church and Misión Cristiana Elim consistently promote an activist, leftist brand of evangelical Christianity. In Brazil, the Progressive Evangelical Movement of Bahia unites progressive evangelical activists in their struggles against racism and construction of an ethno-religious identity. Urban theorist Mike Davis makes the bold claim that “Pentecostalism is the largest self-organized movement of urban poor in the world.”44 Yet Pentecostal and Charismatic involvement in environmental struggles remains uncommon. Most evangelical Christian groups do not use nature-based symbols or ­rituals in worship, and religious practices generally do not reflect connections to the natural world. Protestants in general rarely speak of sacred spaces or connections to animals, especially in their spirit forms.

468   Lois Ann Lorentzen However, practices of indigenous evangelicals and Pentecostals complicate the preceding generalization. Among indigenous communities, especially in Central America, evangelical Protestantism has grown rapidly. Indigenous evangelical Protestants tend to abandon traditional nature-based religious practices as they adopt Protestant doctrines and theologies. However, Virginia Garrard-Burnett writes, “[w]hile Mayan Protestants officially subscribe to the biblical teaching that God gave humankind dominion over the earth (Genesis 1:28), Mayan Protestants are likely to interpret this ‘dominion’ as a benign guardianship.”45 Indigenous Christians must still work in the natural world and therefore are likely to protect it. She notes that Maya Protestant theology draws heavily from “native cosmology.”46 . . . Mayan Protestants argue that the form and substance of Pentecostal worship does, in some regards, valorize critical aspects of Mayan culture. . . . pastors tend to reflect the common experience, worldview, including the relations between humans and their environment, and language as the members of their congregations.47

Non-indigenous evangelical Protestant groups are generally not actively engaged in environmental struggles, although exceptions exist. For example, Plant with Purpose (PWP) (originally Floresta), an evangelical Protestant nonprofit environmental organization, started in the United States but now boasts locally run projects throughout Latin America. PWP’s twin aims are reforestation and sustainable agriculture; to date their website indicates they have planted 13.5 million trees.48 Mainline Protestant groups are more likely to articulate an environmental ethos than are their evangelical counterparts. When Latin American Protestants are environmentally active, they generally employ a biblically based hermeneutic to argue for ecological stewardship; a notable example is Roy H. May, Jr., formerly of Costa Rica’s Instituto Bíblico Latinamericano (Latin American Biblical Institute). Now retired, May writes Protestant ecotheology from a liberation perspective. His ecotheology is Bible-based; he writes, “For the poor, the land is a major concern, and they want to know what the church and the Bible have to say about it.”49 May looks at Christian scripture and finds a biblical tradition that depicts land as both site of struggle and God’s presence.50

Conclusion Environmental struggles in Latin America emerge first and foremost out of a desperate need for survival. May writes: “Quite simply, ownership and control of land determines who lives and who dies.”51 Environmental activism in Latin America revolves around the struggle to provide basic human needs in the context of environmental destruction. All Christian groups covered in this chapter, with the possible exception of evangelical Protestants, seem to highlight the enduring effects of colonization as well as those of

Christianity and Ecology in Latin America   469 neo-colonization. Contemporary views of the human relationship with nonhuman nature can only be understood in the context of colonization. The nature of environmental struggles and religious responses to the environment clearly reflect a postcolonial posture. Most groups criticize the neoliberal model of development as a new form of colonization by more affluent nations. They utilize religious symbolism, theologies, and practices to provide alternative ways of thinking about development and land, claiming that the land itself provides a lens with which to understand socio-historical reality. Many of Latin America’s Christian-based environmental theologies and movements mix elements from various religious traditions; Christian symbols take on indigenous characteristics. In some cases, this happened over the course of centuries, in others quite self-consciously in the present. Gebara calls this an “ethics of biodiversity” in which religions, regions, and cultures are connected to give a larger vision. For Gebara, biodiversity of religions “goes along with the biodiversity of the cosmos and the earth and with the diversity of cultures,”52 yielding an ethics that “is a network of relationships designed to respect the integrity of all beings, both individually and collectively.”53 Not only are religious traditions mixed together, a blurring occurs between the sacred and the secular as well. Many members of Latin America’s secular environmental movements claim that their inspiration came from liberation theology. In the offices of Centro Salvadoreño de Tecnología Apropriada, a secular environmental organization in El Salvador, one finds pictures of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero (now Saint Oscar Romero), who was assassinated in 1980 for his defense of the poor. Latin America, like much of the world, confronts severe environmental crises. In the face of destructive deforestation, devastating desertification, and a desperate struggle for survival, religious traditions such as Christianity may offer guidance. Taking faithbased environmental organizations, activist movements, and environmental theologies into account deepens our understanding of environmental movements within Latin America and the Caribbean.

Notes 1. Excerpts from this chapter are revised and updated from the essay, “Religion and Environmental Struggles in Latin America,” by Lois Ann Lorentzen and Salvador LeavittAlcantara, in Oxford Handbook of Religion and Ecology, ed. Roger S. Gottlieb (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006), 515–532. By permission of Oxford University Press, USA. Bolivian Bishops Conference, “El universo, don de Dios para la vida: carta pastoral sobre medio ambiente y desarrollo humano en Bolivia” (The Universe, Gift of God for Life: Pastoral Letter on The Environment and Human Development) (Cuaresma, Bolivia: Fundación Jubileo, 2012); https://www.comboni.org/app-data/files/allegati/756.pdf. 2. Latin America has 39% of the world’s Catholics, compared to 24% for Europe, according to  the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, “The Global Catholic Population.” Pew Research Center, February 13, 2013; http://www.pewforum.org/2013/02/13/ the-global-catholic-population/.

470   Lois Ann Lorentzen 3. Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, “Overview of World Religions and Ecology,” The Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale, 2009. http://fore.research.yale.edu/religion/. 4. Anna L. Peterson, “Roman Catholicism in Latin America,” in The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, ed. Bron Taylor (London: Continuum, 2006), 1408. 5. Under the encomienda system, colonists were given land and/or a village, including its native inhabitants. 6. Gustavo Gutiérrez, Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993). 7. For a translation of the legend from the Nican Mopohua, see Virgilio  P.  Elizondo, Guadalupe: Mother of the New Creation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997). 8. Jeanette Favrot Peterson, “The Virgin of Guadalupe: Symbol of Conquest or Liberation?” Art Journal 51, no. 4 (1992), 40. 9. For an excellent history of the meanings of Guadalupe, see David Brading’s Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Images and Tradition across Five Centuries (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 10. Jacek Orzechowski, OFM, “The Virgin of Guadalupe and the Call to Environmental Justice,” Franciscan Action, December 9, 2011, http://franciscanaction.wordpress. com/2011/12/09/the-virgin of-guadalupe-and-the-call-to-environmental-justice-part-i. 11. Carol Damian, “The Virgin of the Andes: Queen, Moon and Earth Mother,” The Free Library, https://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+Virgin+of+the+Andes%3a+Queen%2c+ Moon+and+Earth+Mother.-a0192353137. 12. Garrard-Burnett, “Mayan Catholicism,” 1066. 13. Guatemalan Bishop Álvaro Ramazzini, quoted by Marilyn Berlin Snell, “Bulldozers and Blasphemy: In Latin America, Catholics Are Standing Up To Those Who Covet Their Gold and Timber,” Sierra, September/October 2007, http://vault.sierraclub.org/sierra/200709/ bulldozers.asp. 14. See the history of the Roman Catholic Church’s relationship with Latin American ­governments in José Míguez Bonino, Toward a Christian Political Ethic (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1983). 15. Lois Ann Lorentzen, “Bread and Soil of Our Dreams: Women, the Environment, and Sustainable Development-Case Studies from Central America,” in Ecological Resistance Movements: The Global Emergence of Radical and Popular Environmental Movements, ed. Bron Taylor (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), 64. 16. Leonardo Boff, “Social Ecology: Poverty and Misery,” in Ecotheology: Voices from the South and North, ed. David G. Hallman (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994), 244. 17. Quoted by Ingemar Hedstrom, Volverán las golondrinas?: La reintegración de la creación desde una perspectiva Latinoamericana (San José, Costa Rica: Departamento Ecuménico de Investigaciones, Consejo Editorial, 1988), 44. 18. Boff, “Social Ecology,” 244; and German Gutiérrez, “Ethic of Life and Option for the Poor,” in Latin American Liberation Theology: The Next Generation, ed. Ivan Petrella (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005), 75. 19. Ibid., 86. 20. Boff, “Social Ecology,” 239–240. 21. John  L.  Hammond and Federico Rossi, “Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil,”  in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements, ed. David A. Snow, Donatella della Porta, Bert Klandermans, and Doug McAdam (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 328. See also, Angus Lindsay Wright and Wendy Wolford, To Inherit the Earth: The Landless Movement and the Struggle for a New Brazil (Oakland, CA: Food First Books, 2003).

Christianity and Ecology in Latin America   471 22. Miguel Carter, “The Landless Rural Workers Movement and Democracy in Brazil,” Latin American Research Review 45 (2010): 202. 23. Lois Ann Lorentzen, “Radical Catholicism, Popular Resistance, and Material Culture in El Salvador,” in Technology and Cultural Values: On the Edge of the Third Millennium, ed. Peter D. Hershock, Marietta Stepaniants, and Roger T. Ames (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2003), 259. 24. Marienally Jaroud, “The Main Challenge for Ecofeminism Is Its Own Contradictions: Interview with Coca Trillini,” Inter Press Service News Agency, January 19, 2014, http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/11/qa-the-main-challenge-for-ecofeminism-is-its-owncontradictions/. 25. Ivone Gebara, Intuiciones ecofeministas: Ensayo para repensar el conocimiento y la religión, trans. Graciela Pujo (Madrid, Spain: Editorial Trotta, 2000), 18. 26. Gladys Parentelli, “Una relecutra del Dios Patriarcal desde una perspectiva feminista Cristiana,” El Diario de los Andes, August 1, 2010, from https://palabrademujer.wordpress. com/2010/08/01/una-relectura-del-dios-patriarcal See also Gladys Parentelli, “Teología Feminista y Teología Ecofeminista,” Fempress 164 (June 1995), 12. 27. Gladys Parentelli, “Teología Ecofeminista/Ecofeminismo Holístico en el caso Latinoamericano,” Notas y debates 2, no. 2 (1997), 112–113. 28. Mary Judith Ress, “The Con-spirando Women’s Collective: Globalization from Below,” in Ecofeminism & Globalization: Exploring Culture, Context, and Religion, ed. Heather Eaton and Lois Ann Lorentzen (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 152. 29. Gladys Parentelli, “Ética Ecofeminista,” Revista Venezolana de Estudios de la Mujer 10, no. 25 (2005), 111. 30. Mercedes Cañas and Gladis Lemus, “Surviving with Dignity: Complexities of Sustainable Development,” Canadian Women Studies 23, no. 1 (2003). 31. The Con-spirando website, which lists events and past journal publications, is http://www.conspirando.cl. 32. Pope Francis, Laudato Si (Encyclical On Care for Our Common Home). Vatican website w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/ . . . /papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si, May 24, 2015, Section 49. 33. Ibid., Section 49. 34. Ibid., Section 2. 35. Ibid., Sections 190, 38. 36. Ibid., Section 67. 37. Ibid., Sections 10, 240. 38. Ibid., 217. 39. Ibid., 218. 40. Leonardo Boff, quoted in “Integral Ecology: The Big News about Laudato Si: A Special Interview with Leonardo Boff,” by Patricia Fachin and Joao Vitor Santos, Iglesia descalza: A Voice from the Margins of the Catholic Church, June 18, 2015, http://www.redescristianas.net/entrevista-a-leonardo-boff-sobre-francisco-de-asisjoao-vitor-santos-ypatricia-fachin/. 41. Pope Francis, Laudato Si, 2, 14. 42. Bernard Campos, “Identity and Function of Pentecostalism in the Processes of Social Change,” Pentecostalidad: Revista Latinoamericana de teología pentecostal, 2002, http:// www.pentecostalidad.4t.com/articulos.html. 43. David  A.  Smilde, “Contradiction without Paradox: Evangelical Political Culture in the 1998 Venezuelan Elections,” Latin American Politics & Society 46, no. 1 (2004).

472   Lois Ann Lorentzen 44. Quoted in Raul Zibechi, “Pentecostalism and South America’s Social Movements,” America’s Program, October 15, 2008, http://upsidedownworld.org/main/internationalarchives-60/1529. 45. Virginia Garrard-Burnett, “Mayan Protestantism,” The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, ed. Bron Taylor (London: Continuum, 2006), 1068. 46. Virginia Garrard-Burnett, “Identity, Community and Religious Change among the Maya of Chiapas and Guatemala,” Journal of Hispanic and Latino Theology 6, no. 1 (August 1998), 72. 47. Garrard-Burnett, “Mayan Protestantism,” 1068. 48. Plant with Purpose, https://www.plantwithpurpose.org. 49. Roy H. May Jr., Poor of the Land (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991), xii. 50. See also Roy  H.  May Jr., Tierra: Herencia o mercancía?: Justicia, paz e integridad de la creación (San José, Costa Rica: Editorial DEI, 1993); and Roy H. May Jr., Ética y medio ambiente, hacia una vida sostenible (San José, Costa Rica: Editorial DEI, 1993); in addition, the previously mentioned May, Poor of the Land. 51. May, Poor of the Land, 5. 52. Gebara, Longing for Running Water, 205. 53. Ibid., 90.

chapter 25

M a ry, Moth er of J e sus Consolatrice of the Americas Jeanette Rodriguez

Introduction In a message sent to the participants of the 2006 Latin American Meeting on Marian Pastoral Ministry in Mexico, Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone praised the profound Marian piety of Latin America: [T]hese beloved lands are sprinkled with distinguished shrines and places dedicated to the Most Holy Virgin Mary, under diverse avocations, to which hundreds come on pilgrimage to express their affection, implore her help and consolation in the difficulties of life, or feel her protection more closely in personal, family and societal ups and downs.1

This laudatory statement acknowledges the widespread devotion to the Virgin Mary, but what do we really know about the historical Mary?2 Although the mother of Jesus appears in all four gospels and is featured in 23 verses of the New Testament, there are “relatively few, but meaningful words about her.”3 According to Christian sources, Mary was a first-century Jewish woman who lived under Roman occupation, gave birth to Jesus in a manger, and became the mother of the Christ. During her lifetime, she endured poverty, experienced refugee status, and watched in horror as her son was unjustly judged and brutally crucified. Following the death of her son, and as a widow, she continued to trust in God and lived as an elder dependent on others. From this background we recognize that “. . . in all of these moments, she is sister to the unchronicled lives of marginalized women throughout the ages, and to all who stand in solidarity with them.”4 Many men and women around the world identify with Mary, find solace in her, and experience renewed hope, knowing that she accompanies them in their daily struggles.

474   Jeanette Rodriguez Officially, the Roman Catholic Church recognizes three Marian apparitions: (1) Our Lady of Guadalupe (1531) at Tepeyacac5 in modern Mexico City, (2) Our Lady of Lourdes (1858) in the Pyrenees Mountains in southern France, and (3) Our Lady of Fatima (1917) in Portugal. These apparition accounts illustrate her preferential option for the poor and vulnerable, having appeared to those on the margins of society, most frequently to children. In Tepeyacac, she appeared to a newly Christianized indigenous man, in Lourdes to a fourteen-year-old peasant girl, and in Fatima to three shepherd children. This option for the poor and/or marginalized is heightened in Latin America, where she also appeared in distinct forms to campesinos, indigenous people, and people of African descent (i.e., Our Lady of Charity in Cuba). In the Christian tradition, God always chooses those rejected by society in order to manifest the breadth and depth of Divine power and love. This preferential option resonates in Mary’s prophetic song, the Magnificat. Liberation theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez observes “how this prophetic song, sung by a lowly woman, tells us about the preferential love of God for the marginalized and abused, and of the transformation of history that God’s loving will implies.”6 Understandably, those espousing liberationist views clearly embrace the Virgin Mother Mary, and her transformational presence has also been incorporated into nationalist movements. Her image has been utilized as a transitional figure from Spanish colonialism to Mexican identity. Such utilization raises questions of enculturation, as well as faith.

Nebel’s Three Trajectories In reflecting on the Guadalupe Event in 1531, Richard Nebel identified three distinct possible directions of theological reflection of Mary’s image of Guadalupe.7 The first direction examines the Guadalupan message and finds within it confirmation of the Christian dogma about God and Mary: Mary as the Theotokos (“the one who gives birth to God”), whereas the focus of Our Lady of Guadalupe is as the mother of the One True God for Whom One Lives (in Inantzin in Ipalnemohuani, “little mother of God the Life-giver”).8 The second direction utilizes liberation theology, interpreting the Christian faith from the perspective of the poor and marginalized. From the view of Mary as Theotokos, Ivone Gebara and Maria Clara Bingemer have pointed out “. . . that the gift and service of motherhood inspires the self-understanding of the Church as servant of the poor, because the incarnation brings the good news of liberation.”9 Nebel’s third direction presents an “evangelizing form of theological consideration that interprets the Nican Mopohua (a mid-sixteenth-century narrative written in the native Náhuatl), as the model of the genuine evangelization of the Mexican people,” with evangelization referring to one’s proclamation, transmission, and living out of the Good News of Jesus Christ.10 This Good News has been articulated in the message of Jesus, lived out in the presence of Mary. As a tradition, we have also always made room for conversion and

Mary, Mother of Jesus   475 transformation. The underlying theological issue has been and always will be the dignity of the human person who is made in the image and likeness of God. And while the ­tradition affirms the dignity of each and every person, it has a special place for the most vulnerable. Healing, reconciliation, joy, comfort, and peace are the authentic result of engaging in the Good News (gospel) of Jesus Christ. The following vignettes shed light on Nebel’s three distinct theological trajectories, though the three approaches are both deeply complex and multivalent.

Mariology: The Person of Mary Historically, there are two identifiable and distinct views on Mary. First, there is the Mary of official Church theology, which tends to venerate and love her as a virgin and portrays her as a docile and obedient woman. In this view, she is so elevated that she is untouchable by the people. Second, there is the Mary of the people, who tend to honor and love her for her experience of suffering. In this view, she both understands and helps people in their daily struggles and models for them a faith in God that is both trusting and active. This is a Mary that hears the cry of the poor and is present among the faithful.

The Virgin of the Massacre: Mary of the People On December 22, 1997, the paramilitary stormed into a small chapel in Acteal, Chiapas, Mexico, riddled its adobe walls with bullets, and massacred forty-six men, women, and children. During the onslaught, a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe was broken. The people of Acteal mourned the Virgin, whom they believed died on that fateful day along with their sisters and brothers. A few years later, survivors of the massacre returned to the chapel carrying the same statue of Guadalupe, which was renamed the Virgin of the Massacre—she who had witnessed their tragedy and continued to accompany them. They wanted the Virgin of the tragedy to walk with them on their journey of healing and reconciliation, just as she had been present with them during the massacre. Her presence among the victims and survivors was to serve as a witness to God’s desire to live among us: The human condition is such that we need to hear the promise of peace for our hearts, even (and especially) in the midst of our most desolate and darkest moments. We need to be reassured that we are not alone in the world and that there is a loving God who continually seeks us out and chooses to live among us.11

476   Jeanette Rodriguez Vicente Ruiz Pérez, a survivor, explained: Displaced people and communities recognize the presence of God in the Virgin of the Massacre, jMe’tic.12 We feel her presence in the village. She unites us without regard to differences. She unites us because she is the mother of everyone. She intercedes on our behalf with God. We feel her present in our suffering, in our dreams and in our hopes.13

This vignette exemplified the people’s resilience as well as their journey with Mary, who walked and continues to walk with them in their difficulties because she herself lived through so many traumatic events. According to Catharina Halkes, Mary’s “hearing and keeping the word of God went together with motherhood and were even the preconditions for it” and are not emphasized enough.14 Gifted with the healing grace of God, she responds wholeheartedly and is called to the mission of spreading the gospel and healing those who have suffered. Devotees look to Mary’s unique ability to accompany them in their suffering, while at the same time trusting and believing in the promises of God. This is clearly exemplified in the Magnificat (Luke 1:49–53), where Mary rejoices in the great things that God has done for her, and in so doing, for God’s people. God has shown strength throughout the covenant, has and does exalt and humble, and fills the hungry with good things. Mary is seen as a symbol of the community of redeemed humanity.

Liberation Theologies: A Bond That Encompasses Millions Two examples of Mary’s reflection of God’s love and presence among the poor and ­marginalized are seen in the pilgrimages and acts of devotion in Costa Rica and Cuba. Pilgrimages are visible signs to the whole world of people coming to seek hope and healing. In 2006 alone, more than 1 million Costa Ricans, about 20 percent of the total population, traveled from different parts of their country to visit the shrine of Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles (Our Lady of the Angels).15 These Marian devotees came by foot, horseback, public transportation—by any means possible—to express their love for their “dark virgin” and to draw holy water believed to be miraculously rolling forth from the rock upon which the blessed mother appeared. The description of the Virgin as “dark” is particularly significant in a racialized society, where those of darker skin are on the bottom of the social ladder. The appearance of the mother of God in a vulnerable skin color—their skin color—was both affirming and healing. Similarly, devotion to Our Lady of Charity of Cuba (also known as Nuestra Señora de la Caridad del Cobre) “evokes the social-cultural history of particular relationships among Spanish, Amerindian, and African peoples.”16 In the narrative of Nuestra Señora de la Caridad del Cobre, Juan Moreno, an African slave boy, and two Indian brothers

Mary, Mother of Jesus   477 found the statue of Our Lady of Charity floating in the Bay of Nipe. According to oral tradition, while they crossed the bay, a great storm forced them to bring their canoe ashore. The next morning, they continued on their journey and saw what appeared to be a girl dressed in white hovering above the sea foam. As they got closer, they recognized the image of the Most Holy Virgin with Baby Jesus in her arms, on top of a small wooden plank with the inscription: Yo soy la virgen de la caridad (I am the Virgin of Charity). In seeing that her clothes were not wet, they were full of joy.17 In this story Mary appeared to the most vulnerable and, in so doing, manifested her solidarity with the poor and marginalized.18 In these two versions of Mary’s presence, Nebel’s second theological direction—the liberationist perspective—points to Mary’s relationship with Latin America in her preferential option for the poor. This option has evangelized entire populations and continues to call millions to overcome the barriers of class, gender, and socioeconomic status in order to form just relationships with Mary and with each other. As Virgilio Elizondo stated, “True faith is always ennobling, for we become conscious that as children of God, we are not inferior to anyone else. Faith rehabilitates us in our original dignity as creatures made in the image and likeness of God.19 In examining Latin America and Latin Americans in the diaspora, one would likely discover that many Latin Americans and their descendants express tender and profound Marian devotion through a variety of mediums. These are manifested as a statue or painting adorning a sacred corner of the home, as a medallion worn around the necks of young and old believers, as an image on T-shirts, on the sides of buildings, and even on business logos.20

These manifestations possess a “popular character”—meaning the Lo Cotidiano—the everyday experience of the people. Roberto Goizueta states: Here in the everyday common struggle for survival as a people with a dignity bestowed on us by God, the political and the personal, the economic and the ­spiritual, the intellectual and the emotional, the sacred and the secular are united.21

Through these expressions, people of faith bring their hopes, pains, and sufferings before Mary for relief and solace, knowing she will bestow upon them both healing and mercy. An example of such expression is in the lived experience of the Madres de Las Plaza de Mayo, who, through their faith and identification with the Suffering Mother, are empowered to protest injustice.

Las Madres: An Example of Evangelization to Overcome Injustice On April 30, 1977, fourteen Argentine women gathered at the main plaza in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with pictures of their lost children and grandchildren who had

478   Jeanette Rodriguez “disappeared” during the early stages of the “Dirty War,” a civil war waged by the Argentine military against the citizens of Argentina from 1976 to 1983. At the time, protesting was illegal, so the mothers simply walked slowly in a circle in the center of the square. Instead of normal protest signs or the placards, they wore white scarfs with their children’s and grandchildren’s names embroidered on them. Every Thursday, these Madres de La Plaza de Mayo demanded the return of their children and/or knowledge of their whereabouts. In Latin America, where mothers were elevated in the domestic sphere but not in the public domain, this action was a subversion of the classical marianismo ideal (one of many female gender roles in Latin American culture emphasizing women’s purity and restricted position in the home). With the disappearance of their children, these traditional mothers identified themselves with La Madre Dolorosa, or the Sorrowful Mother, and moved from the private domestic space to the public arena by stepping out of their homes to protest politically for the sake of love. As Mario Suarez-Orosco wrote: . . . the image of the Mater Dolorosa gave them legitimacy and visibility in a culture known for putting mothers on a pedestal. Thus the Madres, usually outside the political, made the personal political by both crying for their lost children in public and by converting a private/personal role (being “madres”) into a public/political role (being “The Madres”).22

The Virgin Mary helped to free these women from stereotyped gender binaries placed upon them by their culture. As María del Rosario de Cerruti, one of the Las Madres, said: One of the things that I simply will not do now is shut up. The women of my generation in Latin America have been taught that the man is always in charge and the woman is silent even in the face of injustice. . . . Now I know that we have to speak out about the injustices publicly. If not, we are accomplices. I am going to denounce them publicly without fear. This is what I learned.23

An Example of Richard Nebel’s Three Trajectories: Our Lady of Guadalupe The paradigm of the Latin American devotion to Mary—or the Empress of the Americas, as Pope John Paul II contended—is the phenomena of Our Lady of Guadalupe, referred to by the indigenous as Tonantzín (Our Mother) Guadalupe.24 The message of Our Lady of Guadalupe calls those with political and ecclesiastical power to leave their palaces, move to the periphery, and stand with the poor and the marginalized.

Mary, Mother of Jesus   479 Like Jesus, the message of Mary and her presence among the people is a force that confronts evil, tragedy, and the suffering of those who believe by restoring life, peace, joy, and healing. The message of Jesus, as well as the continued presence of Guadalupe, instills an ever-burning flame of hope—the sister of theological virtue to human yearning. Both are part of our deepest roots as human beings.25

The Conquest and the Introduction of Mary to the People The Guadalupe Event began in the sixteenth century, a decade following the launch of the European conquest. The first generation of the conquest of Mexico saw a great deal of violence within and against the indigenous people, as well as against their culture and religion. As a result of infighting among the different indigenous groups, the diseases encountered through European contact, and the disruption, devastation, and brutality of the conquest, the indigenous population went from 20 million to 2 million in the sixteenth century.26 From the beginning of the conquest, the mantle of Mary accompanied the conquistadors and was seen as their great protector.27 Acculturation and assimilation followed the crippling of the indigenous peoples’ social, religious, and political worlds, and they began to adapt to a new dominant worldview that included Christianity. The indigenous people also had a mother god known as Tonantzín. With the spread of the oral tradition of the Guadalupe Event, some early Christian missionaries were very suspect of the authenticity behind the apparent embrace of the Virgin Mother Mary and questioned whether this was a ploy by the Indians to continue worshipping their pre-contact gods.28 Nevertheless, the process of evangelization in Latin America followed the pattern of empire and religious expansion employed by many cultures and religions over the centuries. In the so-called New World, all too often, indigenous temples and places of worship were destroyed or built over by the Christians, so that a crucifix or church would show the triumph and truth of Christianity over indigenous religions.

The Nican Mopohua and Nahuatl Culture Our Lady of Guadalupe retrieved and restored the Nahua’s vital roots by appearing to them in their own cultural lens. The Nican Mopohua provides the basic elements of the narrative of Our Lady of Guadalupe’s encounter with a Nahua Indian who had been baptized and renamed Juan Diego. The original language of the Nican Mopohua was a poetic and symbolic language, which communicated its meaning far beyond words and utilized what is known as difrasismo, a way of communicating the most profound

480   Jeanette Rodriguez thought or feeling using a complementary union of two words or symbols that express one meaning.29 The account introduced a different kind of evangelization: “. . . it invited the evangelized to an experience of the divine, into a mystical experience; it produced security, joy, and excitement. It did not just speak about God and the teachings of God; it invited the participant into intimate contact and friendship with God through the mediation of God’s mother.”30 From Indian to Indian, community to community, the word of what had happened to Juan Diego at Mount Tepeyacac began to be told, along with the other marvels that took place in the presence of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The recounted deeds rapidly entered into the traditions of the people.31 Later, according to the demands of the circumstances, the narrative was written down, first in Nahuatl and then in Spanish. Clodomiro Siller-Acuña contends that . . . serious students of the Nican Mopohua agree that the author of the original is Don Antonio Valeriano, an Indian, a student and afterwards a teacher of the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, a translator, an informant for Sahagun, a writer, a Latin scholar, who had many other abilities and responsibilities in both political and academic fields. He was the governor of Mexico City for forty years.32

While Siller-Acuña recognizes the significant contributions that Don Antonio Valeriano made in the transcriptions of the Nican Mopohua, Siller-Acuña also finds it hard to believe that he is the only author of the Nican Mopohua and thus makes a compelling argument that the actual writing of the Nican Mopohua was likely a result of a collegial and collective contribution.33

Our Lady of Guadalupe According to popular tradition, ten years after the conquest, on December 9, 1531, Juan Diego, a recently baptized fifty-two-year-old indigenous man and native of Cuauhtitlán, encountered Our Lady of Guadalupe on his way to Tlatelolco for religious instruction. In this first encounter of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Guadalupe took on the rostro y corazón—the face, the heart, and the language of the Nahua people. In their encounter, Mary identified herself as the mother of the One True God for Whom One Lives, the Mother of the Giver of Life, of the Creator of Persons, of the Owner of What Is Near and Immediate, the Owner of Sky, the Owner of the Land.34 Our Lady asked Juan Diego to go to Bishop Juan de Zumárraga and tell him that the Mother of the One True God for Whom One Lives desired that a sacred house be built on the hill of Tepeyacac, a sacred site where she may show forth her Son by giving her love, compassion, help, and defense to those who called upon her. Through her, many in what was referred to as the New World would come to know her Son.

Mary, Mother of Jesus   481 The location was significant: Tepeyacac resided on the periphery of the centers of political and religious power. She promised that if the people trusted her, loved her, and called upon her, she would listen to their pains and lamentations and respond. Although Juan Diego related what he had seen and heard to the bishop, he was not believed. The bishop requested a sign from the Lady, and Juan Diego returned home discouraged and found that his uncle Juan Bernardino was very ill and dying. (Historical documents indicate that many indigenous people died after contact with the Europeans due to lack of immunity to diseases such as smallpox and measles.) Juan Diego went to retrieve the priest, and as he approached the Mount of Tepeyacac, the Lady descended from the summit and asked: “Juan Diego, Juanito, where are you going?” Juan Diego explained his predicament and promised to return for the sign. At that point, the Lady of Guadalupe told Juan Diego that his uncle would not die and said the most beautiful words in the Nican Mopohua: Listen, be convinced in your heart, my youngest son, what frightened and afflicted you is nothing. Do not let it disturb your face and heart. Do not fear this sickness that afflicts and overwhelms. Am I not here, I, who am your mother? Are you not under my shadow and protection? Am I not the reason for your happiness? Are you not in my lap, in the crossing of my arms? Are you in need of anything else? Let nothing else afflict and disturb you. Do not let your dear uncle’s illness cause you anguish because he will not die of it now. Rest assured in your heart that he is already well.  (Nican Mopohua, 118–120)

Guadalupan scholars agree that these words may be regarded as the quintessential words of the Marian message, for it is here that she articulated, demonstrated, and manifested the spiritual maternity of the mother of God.35 With this statement of solace and the presence of her reassuring love, Juan Diego was relieved and asked what he could do. In return, she told him to climb the summit. There he would find flowers: rosas de Castilla, or roses from Castile, which. the Nahuatl saw as a religious symbol of the deepest truth.36 The significance of the precious flowers lies in the fact that it was December, a time of frost and cold, when nothing grew on the hills of Tepeyacac. Yet, with her presence came the transformation of the hill, from rough and sterile by nature into a garden that resembled the feathers of the great god Quetzalcoatl.37 Juan Diego brought the flowers back to her, and she placed them in his tilma (i.e., mantle or cloak), instructed him to not show anyone, and told him to take the sign to the bishop. At the bishop’s palace, he related to the bishop everything he saw and heard: the music, the glowing landscape, the flowers, and his encounter with Our Lady. Guadalupan tradition states that when Juan Diego released the roses from his tilma, the image of the Virgin was miraculously imprinted upon it. Tradition then tells us that the bishop immediately fell to his knees, asked for forgiveness, rose, untied the cloak from Juan Diego, and placed it in his personal chapel. From that moment, in accordance with the Virgin’s preference, Bishop Juan de Zumárraga of Mexico and others in positions

482   Jeanette Rodriguez of political and religious power were asked (as they are today) to leave their centers of power and stand with the poor and the marginalized. According to oral tradition, the imprinting of Our Lady’s image on Juan Diego’s tilma is said to have occurred on December 12, 1531. However, it is also said the miracle took place on December 22, 1531, the first day of the Winter Solstice, which “according to Aztec cosmology marked the triumph of the sun over the darkness on their calendar year.”38

The Importance of Imagery in the Tonantzín Guadalupe Event Mary, and in particular her manifestation as Our Lady of Guadalupe, transcends time, space, and culture because what lives within the story is that which is deeply human. The original event is transmitted to and received by subsequent generations through narrative, visual images, and popular religious practice, including drama, symbol, fiesta, and other contemporary expressions. All of these live in the visceral, deeply felt dimension of traditional popular Catholicism. These practices impact people’s hearts and draw people to experience their own relationships with Tonantzin Guadalupe. Thus, she becomes a vehicle for communicating with God and drawing people to faith.39 Every detail of her appearance held meaning for the people to whom she appeared: the rays of the sun, the standing on the moon, and the cloak of the stars all reflected the significance of the time, day, and date of the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe. “Religious principles penetrated the very existence of the pre-Columbian people. Everything was under their domination: public and private life; every stage of each person’s progress from birth to death; the rhythm of time; the arts and even games— nothing escaped.”40 This all-pervasive religiosity of the indigenous peoples continues to be a large part of the assumptive world of many Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Tonantzin Guadalupe appeared ten years after the conquest, very early in the morning of Saturday, December 9, 1531. For the indigenous, muy de madrugada (very early in the morning) referred not only to day coming out of darkness and night, but also to the beginning of all time. This meaningful time delineated the Guadalupe Event as foundational, equal in significance to the origin of the world and the cosmos.41 At the time of the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the indigenous people were disenfranchised and downtrodden as a result of the conquest, but, more important, they also felt that their gods had abandoned them. Because they had conducted their daily lives paying special attention to what the gods wanted, they felt there was no longer any reason to live. When Tonantzin Guadalupe stated that she is from the One True God, the God Who Gives Life, the Nahua recognized this God to be their God because El Verdadero Dios, por Quien se Vive (the True God for Whom One Lives) is one

Mary, Mother of Jesus   483 of the names that the Nahua gave to their gods. Thus, the encounter with Our Lady of Guadalupe restored in the Nahua people a reason to hope and to live. While the West has excluded the Marian attributes in its main-line perceptions of God, indigenous understandings of God contained both male and female attributes. The Nahuatl god (Ometeotl) was a god of duality, both masculine and feminine. Known by many titles—the Creator of All, the God Who Gives Life, and others—the identification of Guadalupe with phrases that equaled the name of their gods was restorative for them as a people. This restoration was activated as a power in the people, a power grounded in something greater than themselves, a power not over someone, but having power with someone. This power and dynamism were centered on mutuality, trust, participation, and regard, as evidenced in the narrative of Guadalupe in the Nican Mopohua.42 Therefore, it is important to acknowledge that devotions to Mary in Latin America throughout history have been powerful precisely because of their female representation of the divine. This resurrection of the female image of God migrated and attached itself to the figure of Mary, lending itself to a powerful, affectively charged ­presence and fulfillment of divine intimacy.

Conclusion In Mary: Mother of God, Mother of the Poor, Ivone Gebara and Maria Clara Bingemer provide evidence that many historical peasant movements throughout Latin America (e.g., in Peru, Brazil, Bolivia) were “stimulated by the peoples’ love for the virgin who struggles with them for their liberation.”43 An example of this was seen in the peoples’ devotion to La Purísima (Immaculate Conception) in Nicaragua during the Sandinistas’ struggle against the Somoza regime. In El Salvador, the same love of the people for Mary led Archbishop Oscar Romero (now a saint) to say, “The true homage a Christian can pay the Virgin, is, like her, to make the effort to incarnate the life of God in the trials of our transitory history.”44 In all of these Latin American Marian expressions and manifestations, or encounters with Mary, the spirituality invoked speaks to a yearning, a hope transcending circumstances, and an experience of accompaniment within a world that often rejects and marginalizes. Mary is hope, mother, protector, comforter, and mercy. In Latin America, it is not enough to analyze biblical texts and to analyze texts of previous traditions. It is crucial to recognize what kind of human experience devotion to Mary or relationship with her is. In other words, we must ask to what kind of yearnings, manifest or latent, our relationship with Mary, who lives in God and lives in us, belongs.45

Perhaps more important, Latin American spiritual practices teach us that devotion to Mary is, if anything, grounded within her shared status with so many of the poor and

484   Jeanette Rodriguez vanquished people in the world. She is often referred to as mujer del pueblo, or “woman of the people.” Monseñor Oscar Romero in his homily of December 24, 1978, said, María es la expresión de la necesidad de los salvadoreños. María es la expresión de la angustia de los que están en la cárcel. María es el dolor de las madres que han perdido a sus hijos y nadie les dice dónde están. María es la ternura que busca angustiada una solución.46 Mary is the expression of the needs of the Salvadorians. Mary is the expression of the anguish of those who are in prison. Mary is the pain of the mothers that have lost their children and no one knows where they are. Mary is the tenderness that one looks for in a state of anguish.

Devotion to the Virgin Mary must be a devotion that liberates—a devotion that does not turn its back on the poor. Monseñor Romero goes on to say that we must remember the prophetic side of the Virgin and “not forget that Mary, before anything else, is the prophetic message of Christ, and that in her Magnificat, she remembers the poor and hungry.”47 This connection with the loving presence, with the merciful attentiveness of Mary in all of her manifestations, and with her commitment to the poor must continue to be disseminated in our theology, as well as in our sermons. Whether we are looking at Latin America and/or its indigenous communities in ­particular, Marian devotions are about the heart. The heart, for these cultures, is the dynamic and active part of the person. It is what brings pilgrims from far-off places to sing to their Virgin, to bring flowers, to light the candles, burn the incense, and dance in gratitude to her. In conclusion, we close with the prayer of consecration recited by Pope Francis, consecrating the world to the immaculate heart of Mary: We celebrate in you the works of God, Who never tires of looking down with mercy upon humanity . . . We are certain that each of us is precious in your eyes And that nothing of all that lives in our hearts is unknown to you . . . Hold our life in your arms: Bless and strengthen every desire for good; Revive and nourish faith; Sustain and enlighten hope; Awaken and animate charity; Guide all of us along the path of holiness; Teach us your own preferential love for the little and the poor, For the excluded and the suffering, For sinners and the downhearted; Bring everyone under your protection. . . .48 The devotees of Mary contend that it is only through God that one is able to attain a hope and peace that dispels the darkness one experiences. This loving God is a God who sends signs. This God is a God pregnant with hope, possibilities, and the fullness

Mary, Mother of Jesus   485 of being human. Ultimately, this God is a God of life—por quien se vive, a God of life for whom one lives. May the sign of Guadalupe’s love and concern for all of us fill us with consolation and peace, with the sustained recognition of God’s love, and with the joy to celebrate that love with each other.

Notes 1. “Cardinal Bertone praises Marian devotion of Latin America,” Catholic News Agency, last modified October 3, 2006, http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/cardinal_bertone_ praises_marian_devotion_of_latin_america. 2. The majority of sources consulted are Latin American scholars. US scholars who have studied the tradition of Mary include William Taylor, Stafford Poole, Jacques Lafaye, Louise Burkhart, and Marjorie Becker, along with British scholar D. A. Brading. 3. Diego Irarrázaval, “Mary in Latin American Christianity,” in The Many Faces of Mary 4, eds. Diego Irarrázaval, Susan Ross, and Marie-Theres Wacker (London: Concilium Press, 2008), 98. 4. Elizabeth  A.  Johnson, “Truly Our Sister: A Feminist Hermeneutical Disciplinary Approach,” in The Many Faces of Mary 4, eds. Diego Irarrázaval, Susan Ross, and MarieTheres Wacker (London: Concilium Press, 2008), 14. 5. In the original mid-sixteenth-century narrative, the name was spelled Tepeyacac, a Nahuatl term referring to the ridge of a nose. As described by Ignacio Ramirez, Nahuatl religious leader in Amatzlan, Mexico. Personal communication to the author of this chapter, January 6, 2015. 6. Gustavo Gutiérrez as quoted in Elizabeth  A.  Johnson, “Truly Our Sister: A Feminist Hermeneutical Disciplinary Approach,” in The Many Faces of Mary 4, eds. Diego Irarrázaval, Susan Ross, and Marie-Theres Wacker (London: Concilium Press, 2008), 14. 7. Richard Nebel, “Santa María Tonantzín Virgen de Guadalupe,” as quoted in Robert A. Gonzalez, “The Phenomenon of the Guadalupe Apparitions at Tepeyacac in 1531” (Unpublished manuscript, 2010), 6–7. 8. Nebel, “Santa Maria Tonantzin,” 6. 9. Ibid., 101. 1 0. Clodomiro L. Siller-Acuña, Flor y canto del Tepeyacac: Historia de las apariciones de Sta. Ma. de Guadalupe; Texto y comentario (Xalapa, Vercruz, Mexico: Servir, 1981), 14. The Nican Mopohua is attributed to the learned Indian convert Don Antonio Valeriano (1520–1605), but was published only in 1649 as part of Luis Laso de la Vega’s Huey tlamahuicoitica. Nebel, “Santa Maria Tonantzín Virgen de Guadalupe,” 7. 11. Jeanette Rodriguez, “The Virgin of the Massacre,” in The Treasure of Guadalupe, eds. Virgilio Elizondo, Allan Figueroa Deck, and Timothy Matovina (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 82. 12. Jeannie Berwick, transmitted to the author of this chapter, January 25, 2014. “jMe’tic” means “Our Mother” in both Tzeltal and Tzotsil. Our Lady of Guadalupe is often referred to as jMe’tic. The Virgin of the Massacre is the title that the community renamed her in light of what they witnessed. Once saint images are blessed, people believe that they can be spoken to, and thus their prayers are often very conversational. In this way, jMe’tic actually witnessed the massacre through their eyes. 13. Berwick; Elizondo, Deck, and Matovina eds., The Treasure of Guadalupe, 82.

486   Jeanette Rodriguez 14. Catharina Halkes, “Mary and Women,” in Concilium: Religion in the Eighties: Mary in the Churches, eds. Hans Küng and Jürgen Moltmann (New York, NY: Seabury Press, 1989), 70. 15. “One Million Costa Ricans to Pay Homage to Our Lady of the Angels,” Catholic News Agency, http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/one_million_costa_ricans_to_pay_ homage_to_our_lady_of_the_angles/. 16. Miguel H. Diaz, On Being Human: U.S. Hispanic and Rahnerian Perspectives (New York, NY: Orbis Books, 2001), 75. 17. “Cuba, El Cobre: Nuestra Señora de la Caridad del Cobre, Cachita, Patron and Queen of Cuba, La Virgen Mambisa.” Interfaith Mary, https://interfaithmary.net/ blog?category=Cuba. 18. Diaz, On Being Human, 75–76. 19. Virgilio Elizondo, “Maria de Guadalupe Star of the First and New Evangelization,” in La  recepción eclesial de la doctrina conciliar sobre Maria (2006), 358. See also “Mary, Mother of Evangelization” in The Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium of the Holy Father Francis to the Bishops, Clergy, Consecrated Persons and the Lay Faithful on the Proclamation of the Gospel in Today’s World, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/ apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangeliigaudium.html. 20. Jeanette Rodriguez, Our Lady of Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment among MexicanAmerican Women. (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1994), xxv. 21. Jennifer Najera, “Practices of Faith and Racial Integration in South Texas,” Cultural Dynamics 21, no. 1 (2009), 23. 22. Diana Taylor, “Trapped in Bad Scripts: The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo”. Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War.” (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997), 194. 23. “Speaking Truth to Power: Madres of the Plaza de Mayo,” Women in World History, http://www.womeninworldhistory.com/contemporary-07.html. 24. “Empress of the Americas,” Queen of Angels Foundation, http://www.thequeenofangels. com/mary-the-queen/empress-of-the-americas/. 25. I. Gebera and M. Bingemer, Mary: Mother of God, Mother of the Poor (New York, NY: Orbis Books, 1989), 137. See also Linda B. Hall, Mary, Mother and Warrior: The Virgin in Spain and Latin America (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2004), 107–136. 26. See bibliography in this volume for scholarship related to New Conquest history. 27. Gebera and Bingemer, Mary: Mother of God, Mother of the Poor, 29. See also Louise Burkhart, Before Guadalupe: The Virgin Mary in Early Colonial Nahuatl Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 28. Ondina  E.  Gonzalez and Justo  L.  Gonzalez, Christianity in Latin America: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 58–63. 29. Clodomiro L. Siller-Acuña, “El método de la evangelización en el Nican Mopohua,” in Servir 17 (1993–1994): 255–293. 30. Virgilio Elizondo, “Maria de Guadalupe Star of the First and New Evangelization,” in La recepción eclesial de la doctrina conciliar sobre María (2006), 356. 31. Ibid. 32. Siller-Acuña, Flor y canto del Tepeyacac: Historia de las apariciones de Sta. Ma. de Guadalupe; Texto y comentario, 14. 33. Clodomiro  L.  Siller-Acuña, Para comprender el mensaje de Maria de Guadalupe (Coyoacan: Editorial Guadalupana, 1989), 13–15.

Mary, Mother of Jesus   487 34. Mario Rojas-Sánchez, ed., Nican Mopohua dn. Antonio Valeriano, traducción del náhuatl al castellano (México: Imprenta Ideal, 1978), 26. 35. Controversy surrounds the 100 years of silence in the Guadalupan tradition devotion and the belief in an apparition narrative. See bibliography re. Stafford Poole and a response by Timothy Matovina. 36. Thomas  J.  Ascheman, “The Conversion of the Missionary: An Interpretation of the Guadalupan Narrative” (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Dissertation Services, 1977), 17. 37. Siller-Acuña, Para comprender el mensaje de María de Guadalupe, 23. 38. José Luis Guerrero Rosado, Nican Mopohua: Aqui se cuenta . . . el gran acontecimiento (Mexico: Realidad Teoría y Practica, S.A. de C.V. Cuautitlán, Edo. De Mexico, 2003), 123. 39. Jeanette Rodriguez, “Theological Aesthetics and the Encounter with Tonantzín Guadalupe,” in She Who Imagines: Feminist Theological Aesthetics (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012), 5–6. 4 0. Jacques Soustelle, Daily Life of the Aztecs on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1970), 119. 41. Siller-Acuña, Flor y canto del Tepeyacac: Historia de las apariciones de Sta. Ma. de Guadalupe; Texto y comentario, 37. 42. Rodriguez, “Theological Aesthetics and the Encounter with Tonantzin Guadalupe,” 156–158. 43. Gebera and Bingemer, Mary: Mother of God, Mother of the Poor, 136. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 26. 46. Monseñor Romero: El pueblo es mi profeta (San Salvador: Equipo de Educación Maiz, 1994), 81. 47. Ibid., 80. 48. “Prayer of Consecration to the Blessed Virgin Mary,” Zenit.org, http://www.zenit.org/en/ articles/prayer-of-consecration-to-the-blessed-virgin-mary.

chapter 26

M a rsh a li ng th e Fa ithfu l Popular Religiosity and Institutional Life in Modernizing Mexico Edward Wright-Ríos

For those not immersed in scholarship on Catholicism in Mexico, it is common to view the nation’s colonial period as an era when religion permeated life and the postindependence period as one of advancing secularization. From a certain perspective, public fervor belongs in New Spain, but not in Mexico. Of course, the nature of evidence is partially to blame. On one level, documents from the colonial period produced by civil and confessional institutions are replete with religious commentary. In contrast, officials from the nineteenth century onward sidestepped the topic because of the government’s public stance circumscribing religion to the private sphere—even though they often obeyed such prohibitions solely on paper. The impact of narratives surrounding Church-state conflict is more complex, but has a similar effect. First, the traditional emphasis on politics produced a portrait of simple institutional struggle between a conservative Church and a liberal nation-state. This construct borrowed European scholarship’s intransigence-versus-modernity template, pitting absolutisms (conceptual, moral, and political) against “freedoms.” Although an obvious oversimplification, this paradigm remains anchored in Mexico’s quasi-official history. Not surprisingly, such understandings justified a history of harsh, secularizing, policy actions, justified as steps toward an unavoidable modern reality.1 Ironically, conservatives during the period also spoke of a withering of religious ­custom. They also borrowed European tropes, presenting pre-1800 culture as idyllically devout, and condemning a pernicious modern era bent on the perversion of the oncefervent masses.2 Such analyses offered heroic narratives of pious resistance to liberalism (often caricatured as a maniacal pursuit of change for its own sake).3 In their own way,

490   Edward Wright-Ríos then, Catholic voices also described progressive secularization. In part, it fit their revivalist storytelling arc: in a nutshell, the devout faced persecution while society succumbed to the debauched liberties promised by silver-tongued philosophes. In other words, narratives crafted to mobilize the devout deployed notions of mass apostasy. This plotting of ­history had an obvious value: it gave the Church’s own modern transformation an ­eleventh-hour verve and framed everyday activism and practice as heroic. The point of the present chapter is not to score points on secularization theories or pull back the curtain on Catholic revivalism. The intention, rather, is to sketch a reliable portrait of the evolution of religiosity and the institutions maintained by believers. The argument presented here is that the era was truly dynamic, but it should not be understood in terms of straightforward secularization or a saga of persecution and resurgence. Mexican Catholics (and the nation’s liberal reformers were mostly practicing Catholics) remained devout. However, the manner of organizing devotion and expressing belief changed. As with most complex cultural issues, the key is appreciating interrelated shifts spanning several decades. Generating this kind of perspective requires an acceptance of some limitations. For our purposes, it necessitates a plunge into the history of parish administration—in this case, the Archdiocese of Oaxaca—and a tighter temporal framing, roughly 1880 to the 1920s.4 Of course, there is no region that can be offered up as truly “representative.” However, Oaxaca offers some advantages. First, given its large indigenous population and proudly regionalist, conservative, Hispanic elite, the region represents an area where pre-conquest and colonial traditions had deep roots. Second, Oaxaca produced some of the most important liberal politicians and also served as a hotbed of Catholic activism in the nineteenth century. Thus, the archdiocese offers the opportunity to sample the diversity of Mexican religious culture, in terms of what seemingly endured without much alteration, as well as arenas of transformation. Moreover, although distinctive in many ways, the patterns evident in this ecclesiastical province’s records resonate with what was taking place throughout the nation. Oaxacans were not, as a whole, averse to change. Instead, the dynamics of conflict and cooperation centered more on who defined orthodoxy and who had the authority to lead believers. The evidence suggests that from the archdiocese’s reformist prelate to its many indigenous villagers, most residents of Oaxaca were interested in not only maintaining devotions, but also making them meaningful amidst their experience of modernity. Although sometimes expressed in terms of sustaining tradition, efforts to fuel collective piety entailed trying to mold the manners and modes of devotion. Not surprisingly, new contexts also meant that even time-honored rituals acquired distinct meanings. On another level, in some instances clerical and lay actors championed fully new devotions, institutions, and practices coming from Europe, as well as others rooted in local claims of miraculous experience. All told, the motor of Catholic life during this period was not geared simply to preserve tradition, restore faith, or face down irreligious challenges. Instead, it involved marshaling the faithful for vitally experienced religious activities amid a fluid cultural climate. This required embracing change in some fashion. Not surprisingly, it was a creative process in the hands of committed believers and clergymen—sometimes working together, and sometimes at odds.

Marshaling the Faithful   491 The documentary evidence produced by parish priests offers a running commentary on religiosity over time. One of the best places to find such information is in official questionnaires sent out by prelates to gauge the state of Church administration and piety. In Oaxaca, we have two such surveys issued in the early 1800s and 1900s, respectively. Bishop Antonio Bergosa y Jordán (1748–1817) commissioned the former; Archbishop Eulogio Gillow y Zavalza (1841–1922) sent out the latter.5 These represent bureaucratic records that could help or hurt the ecclesiastical careers of the respondents, and hence they reveal a relatively good understanding of the institutional expectations. To put it another way, they tend to include explanations for how the cleric responding was either making firm steps toward achieving institutional goals or how obstacles—social, political, or cultural—blunted said pastor’s efforts. They also convey a sense for how individual curates distinguished themselves: for example, some emphasized the construction of churches, whereas others stressed efforts to preach and administer the sacraments. By the early twentieth century, another realm of career fashioning became common: the champion of lay associations and devotions linked to Catholicism’s modern revival. As we might expect, different strategies yield distinct portraits of religious culture. However, in many cases, information regarding religiosity and local institutions emerges regardless of the respondents’ narrative schemes. Naturally, the broader array of parish documentation enriches our understanding still further. In general, by the twentieth century a continuum of religious practice emerges: at one end, usually in cities and larger towns where bilingualism or Hispanic culture predominated, we find the priest-centered, sacramental piety favored by Rome well represented; at the other end, often linked to rural, indigenous communities, we find an enduring focus on the collective devotions grounded in long-standing (but not unchanging) local religious calendars. It is crucial to point out, though, that the evidence does not support the notion that Mexico was simply transitioning from an essentially baroque colonial Catholicism to a modernized personal piety. Instead, what it shows is the coeval, and often overlapping, presence of two modes of being Catholic during the era. The Bergoza y Jordán survey offers a baseline snapshot. For the most part, it confirms the scholarly consensus on colonial religiosity as a corporate enterprise. Communities typically maintained a range of cofradías (confraternities), hermandades (brotherhoods), and devociones pías (pious devotions). According to canon law (as one ­respondent noted), the former boasted official charters, while the latter lacked formal bylaws. Yet, in the early 1800s, most Oaxacan sodalities bore the cofradía title, even though the majority functioned without priestly oversight or approved regulations. Indeed, what these records show is that devotional institutions were locally controlled and loosely organized. Often, they managed their own funds and collectively owned land and livestock that supported sodalities’ religious (and non-religious) functions. As the calendars of feasts included in questionnaires indicate, these institutions organized the celebration of a specific saint or sacred image. Typically, the largest cofradías and most important feasts celebrated the parish’s patron saint, an advocation of the Virgin Mary, or an image of Christ. Most parishes maintained a few large fiestas, and many small feasts. In some instances, confraternities were managing the shrines drawing pilgrims from near and far; some feasts doubled as regional trade fairs.

492   Edward Wright-Ríos Sometimes, as priests occasionally complained, sodalities (particularly small ones) were lax about holding their feasts. Either because of penury or bad stewardship, they simply let the appointed day pass. For curates this meant less income. Priests also groused when groups spent cofradía monies on non-devotional costs, but there was ­little they could do about it. Priests often blamed the stubborn and devious nature of native people.6 Such attitudes, although not the rule, remained a staple among clergymen in the twentieth century as well. However, records also reveal that the clergy depended on such organizations. On another level, important contrasts emerge. The colonial questionnaires reveal a general compliance with the era’s standards of orthodoxy (taking part in confession and communion at least once a year). Priests routinely claimed near 100 percent fulfillment of the “Easter Duty,” although some admitted that only half of their flock met this requirement. This is astounding when questionnaires a century later reveal that not a single parish approached 50 percent, and many reported less than 10 percent compliance; a few admitted that only a tiny minority bothered with the sacraments. These statistics, at first glance, suggest a comprehensive decline in religiosity. But such a conclusion ignores the range of practices extending beyond the sacraments. In reality, these figures underscore the challenge that clergymen faced in their efforts to focus the faithful on rituals requiring priestly mediation and practices emphasizing the centrality of “the Church.” As a deeper look at the Gillow questionnaires and other documents shows, Oaxacans remained devout. But colonial priests backed by secular authorities could compel conformity.7 Be that as it may, it does not mean that all of the era’s Catholics anchored their personal faith in sacramental ritual. Certainly fear of sanction must have been a factor, but perhaps these records also reflect shifting expectations regarding the Easter Duty. In any case, mid-nineteenth-century laws put an end to civil enforcement of religious obligations. Almost immediately, Oaxaca’s priests issued warnings regarding the impact this would have on local religiosity.8 This was not, though, the only spark of change. A number of scholars have examined how eighteenth-century clergymen pressed for reforms designed to check festive piety.9 The idea was to generalize the elite, intellectual approach to religiosity that had emerged: a contemplative personal piety. It also bears mentioning that embedded in efforts to alter personal piety was a move to assert greater control of public space. Reformers sought to change how Mexicans used their streets, church atriums, and cemeteries.10 Naturally, such endeavors sparked resistance. For the most part, only elites embraced the somber piety of reformers. There certainly is not much evidence of it in the Bergosa y Jordán survey. Yet, despite the lack of short-term success, such ideas proved influential over time. In truth, disentangling the ideological currents roiling nineteenth-century Mexico can be maddening. Historians stress the inseparable nature of Catholicism and social thought in general during the era.11 Religious ideologies anchored nearly all political debates. Influential critics of eighteenth-century piety passed on their concerns to later generations. In reality, both factions that crystallized in the late 1840s as liberals and conservatives drew on the legacy of colonial religious reformism. Neither group was enamored of the popular festive practice.

Marshaling the Faithful   493 For most liberals, the critique of religious custom was part of their larger argument for rationalism mixed with mounting anticlericalism.12 In a nutshell, they claimed to support a purer Catholicism unburdened by wasteful display and corrupt institutional interests. Many liberals felt that priests had become both lax and backward. The most impassioned critics, though, issued much more damming accusations. They asserted that the clergy’s protection of colonial social hierarchies and unabashed greed had warped the ministry. As the argument went, they were content to exploit the populace’s fanatical tendencies with the revelry and superstitions surrounding images. In short, they argued that the Church sustained backward practices to keep the rabble in thrall, siphon wealth from the poor, and bolster traditional norms of deference.13 When liberal critics elaborated a picture of “proper” Christianity, it often sounded like the austere piety of eighteenthcentury reformers, or, as conservative commentators complained, Protestantism.14 The clergy and its allies, for their part, rejected the liberal critique as a philosopheinspired plot among arriviste politicos. What truly galvanized conservative sentiment were the stubborn instabilities following independence, culminating in the disastrous war with the United States.15 Pondering disunity and dysfunction leading to the ­traumatic loss of territory, they enunciated an effective argument grounded in preservationist pragmatism. In simplest terms, they contended that liberal ideals (characterized as foreign dogmas unsuited to Mexican realities) and the weakening of the Church sewed disorder in the face of anti-Catholic US expansionism. Aside from a curtailment of disruptive “liberties,” they sought to retain a protected Church, arguing that it alone could guide the diverse populace. Moreover, they claimed that shared faith represented one of the few bonds uniting Mexicans.16 However, this was not a call for simple preservation—the most energetic activists wanted to discipline popular piety. Nineteenth-century conservatives, though, lost the struggles of the 1850s and 1860s. These were harsh decades, as acute polarization fueled radicalism and war-ravaged communities. Internal conflict also opened up the nation to yet another invasion, Napoleon III’s attempt to establish a French satellite in the New World. Many Catholic conservatives, and a healthy number of moderate liberals, threw their lot in with the illfated monarchy of Maximilian of Habsburg out of hope that he would bring stability. When liberals emerged victorious in 1867, prelates faced exile and punitive constitutional provisions designed to humble the Church. These included the expropriation of all Church properties, the suppression of religious orders and the exclaustration of their members, the prohibition of religious political organizing, an end to civil enforcement of tithes, and the regulation of clerical discipline and fees. In terms of religious practice, the new national charter banned all public ritual unless civil authorities granted special license. Of course, it is one thing to pass laws, and quite another to enforce them in a predominantly devout society. Nonetheless, for the high clergy, exile in Rome brought them closer to their European counterparts.17 They, too, were coping with anticlericalism and government efforts to weaken religious custom. What would emerge from the Catholic intellectuals and ­prelates contemplating losses over the previous decades was Rome’s blueprint for international revival. This entailed internal reforms stressing hierarchy, professionalization, and discipline, as well as the promotion of novel associations designed to mobilize the

494   Edward Wright-Ríos laity. The reworked vision encompassed a new approach to religiosity that entailed an opening to expressive piety while securing greater control of lay devotion. In essence, the emergent ethos in official Catholic circles encouraged coordinated fervor. Over time the revamped approach to piety accompanied a shrewd honing of the Church’s attitude toward liberal development and assertion of a new social voice, the oft-mentioned Social Catholicism: a critique of unfettered capitalism and the instability stemming from attendant economic disparities.18 In Mexico these trends had considerable impact, but not in a straightforward or immediate manner. It was not as if local prelates could establish new norms by decree. Moreover, the Mexican clergy generally understood their limitations. Here, again, parish administration documents illuminate the complexities. To begin with, liberal reforms did not lead to wholesale apostasy. Some overly dramatic priests issued warnings that religious toleration, as well the end of civil enforcement of minimum standards of orthodoxy, would spark an abandonment of pious traditions. One curate complained in 1868 that liturgical customs and the calendar of ritual events were doomed to extinction.19 Yet looking closely, what really galled priests was how the new era weakened traditions of deference, or, as one priest groused, “But today emboldened by the laws of the reform they do as they please . . . .”20 In fact, the evidence amassed in Oaxaca’s archdiocesan archive reveals that devotions lost little of their attraction, and sodalities kept raising funds and sponsoring feasts.21 Receipts reveal that fireworks specialists, musicians, clerics, and an array of artisans remained busy, enlivening festivals and decorating chapels. Additional evidence appears in the receipts for prints of local images destined to be sold at these festivities in various sizes and on different kinds of paper.22 Clearly organizers anticipated a lasting market for devotional imagery. In other words, collective apostasy was not in evidence. This is not to say that liberalism had no impact. Archival documentation suggests that it did not so much dampen Mexican religiosity as rebalance priest-parishioner relations. The whole spectrum of issues—such as fees, level of pomp, and the actual array of rituals— linked to observance had long been negotiated; but now the laity enjoyed a s­ tronger ­bargaining position.23 Anticlerical legislators inadvertently tipped the scales to their advantage, but the laity showed scant interest in secularization. They were, nevertheless, quite willing to assert their interests. What this meant was that certain celebrations diminished, or even ceased altogether, whereas others gained importance. However, the key difference was that the “customers,” particularly the rural indigenous laity, asserted greater control over these changes, and priests could do little more than fume and sacar sus fiestas (celebrate their feasts). In many respects, it was the priesthood’s loss of sway that clerics interpreted as a cooling of piety. This requires greater explanation because it sheds considerable light on the nature of religiosity. As Bergosa y Jordán’s questionnaire reveals, parishes in Oaxaca had their own calendars, rooted in centuries of custom. Of course, there was considerable overlap between them since most celebrations were time-honored feasts, such as Corpus Christi, but local preferences had shaped the relative importance of observances. Distinct patron saints also led to unique patterns. Priests depended on fees and contributions, as well as the

Marshaling the Faithful   495 labor that parishioners allocated to specific functions and the needs of their pastor. Church authorities did not fund individual curates: they expected the flock to sustain them in a manner worthy of their station. Often appearing in reports, priests supplied charts sketching the cycle of liturgical events, and listing the contributions they expected for specific sacraments. Previously different sodalities organized feasts and paid the priest as celebrations took shape. Often this meant a customary contribution when they asked him to officiate, and then various fees for the various levels of “solemnity” when they occurred. A standard celebration merely included a sung Mass, procession, and sermon. The most important entailed these basics plus vespers, matins, a high Mass with three priests, and exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. Individual parishes typically included several villages, and each maintained its own cofradías and celebrations; thus a rural curate’s life revolved around traveling between pueblos to these events. Relatively wealthy parishes maintained busy schedules and paid considerable fees; logically, poorer communities sustained paltry liturgical calendars. Some of the documents describing these relationships reveal an impressive quantity of goods destined for the pastor’s household.24 In addition to fees, clergymen also expected an array of services. Traditionally, these included the construction and maintenance of a residence and servants of various sorts. Often communities set aside plots to produce food for the priest and provided workers to till and harvest. The clergy of the colonial era and the early nineteenth century also expected their parishioners to tithe, and local authorities were supposed to enforce these traditions. Pastors also counted on the faithful to maintain and decorate churches. In sum, the combination of fees, donations, and services added up. Economic turmoil and ­political unrest, naturally, compounded the strain. Although civil authorities were not always cooperative, prior to the official Church-state separation, the Church counted on them to organize fee collection and labor services. Individual priests were often generous in forgiving debts and officiating for less than stipulated, but sometimes they felt abused. Conversely, communities sometimes chafed at the goods and services consumed by priests. Given this situation, it is not surprising that secularizing reform would catalyze a recalibration of Catholic practice. Pondering this dynamic from a distance of several decades, it seems logical that ­communities would have taken drastic action. They could have redirected all resources to other endeavors, and observance might become a mere individual affair. But Catholic habitus remained strong. Oaxacans cared deeply about their religious traditions. Most of them accepted the importance of priest-mediated ritual and the elevated status of the clergy. Moreover, communities sought to retain the status of parish seat and the authority that came with it. Treating the padre too harshly could inspire ecclesiastical authorities to move him elsewhere. Largely due to the conflictive nature of local politics, Oaxacan villages usually sought the greater autonomy that being both a parish and municipality entailed. However, many of them also embraced the opportunity to trim the costs and reshape the rhythms of practice. The most dramatic shifts emerged from the changes aimed at the parish economics and lay organizational foundations. In truth, long before the era of liberal reform, economic

496   Edward Wright-Ríos depression following independence had undermined sodalities.25 Reforms abolishing the collective lands and livestock held by religious orders and confraternities sparked a reworking of local institutions. We get a sense for this when comparing Oaxaca’s ­nineteenth- and twentieth-century questionnaires: in the former, nearly all confraternities held property; in the latter, almost none did, as far as we can tell. Parish correspondence and Archbishop Gillow’s diaries reveal that some flouted liberal laws for years, but as the decades passed, holdouts became rare. At first many communities merely pretended to privatize the lands and animals funding religious observances, but surreptitious collective wealth was vulnerable to individuals who could denounce them and then petition to assume private ownership. These could be outsiders, or even members of the community. The answer for many rural indigenous believers was to transfer the responsibility for specific feasts to mayordomías (roughly, stewardships) whereby a different individual was charged with raising funds and organizing the celebrations each year. Although an individual became the mayordomo, it was really a family that took on the burden. Organizing the feast became their responsibility, and also a means of gaining prestige within the community. This included contracting the priest and paying him. These new collectivities, however, were hardly independent of local civil authority. In fact, much to the fascination of anthropologists, they were typically organized alongside the local ­secular offices in ladder-like hierarchies (the “cargo system”).26 During the course of a man’s lifetime, if he aspired to social prestige, he moved up the tiers of civil offices and mayordomías. Ritual endured, and many villages supported dozens of such posts. But often the clergy found them even more stubbornly independent than the cofradías. Liberal laws enshrined in the Constitution of 1857 allowed local authorities (the same group from whence mayordomos were chosen) to assert greater control over religious events. They could pressure priests to accommodate local preferences, celebrate with less “solemnity” (i.e., costly extras), or simply push down customary fees. The lever of  renegotiation was simply threatening to enforce federal law: for example, locally ­withdrawing all collective cooperation with the Church and clergy; repurposing the rectory for use as a public school; legally challenging religious fees; or simply curtailing contributions of foodstuffs. Sometimes villages threatened not to hold a feast at all. Lacking options, priests often acquiesced. Particularly in communities that owned important sacred images, mayordomías ­controlled considerable resources, but kept officials and priests in the dark. (In some instances, it is pretty clear that a historical cofradía was merely rechristened as a mayordomía.) Despite their complaints about sodality independence, priests occasionally admitted that these institutions represented the bedrock of local religion. They truly sustained Catholic culture, funding lavish liturgies and publicizing their feasts among potential pilgrims. Some curates praised mayordomías’ diligent maintenance of sumptuous chapels. On another level, new laws stipulated that priests had to pay for personal ­services once taken for granted. Such was the importance of this issue that it merited its own question in the 1908 questionnaire.27 Responses reveal that few communities still provided free servants, and some priests bitterly lamented the loss of this “tradition.”

Marshaling the Faithful   497 Generally, the laity did not take the curtailment of services too far. They had not become atheist Jacobins by any means. Most Oaxacans believed in the efficacy of Catholic ritual. It was not in their interest to starve their padre, and priest-parishioner relations in many communities were quite close. Most still sought out baptism and last rites. The pious among them also attended confession and took communion in weekly services. Still, documents suggest that the core of religiosity remained the cycle of ferias, as in earlier centuries. Changes, however, were brewing. The Catholic clergy and lay activists began plotting how to restore the Church’s ­footing on the heels of defeat. They had tried to block the Constitution of 1857 from taking effect—in newspapers, from the pulpit, at the ballot box, and on the battlefield—to no avail. As always, though, implementation is another matter. For Catholics it became clear that they could work around new regulations while avoiding the appearance of anti-government agitation. Early on, liberals remained focused on consolidating power. A few sought strict adherence to the secularizing charter, but many were content with its promulgation. Moreover, factional intrigues among them absorbed their energies. After Porfirio Díaz seized power in 1876, a practical modus operandi took shape. Centralizing power, neutralizing rivals, and perpetuating the regime emerged as the caudillo’s main concern; adherence to the constitution was of lesser importance. Liberalism’s secularizing dictums allowed Díaz to keep the Church in check, but he showed scant interest in altering Mexican culture. Through unofficial channels, he let the clergy know that it could rebuild as long as it did not challenge his authority or protests his policies. For the Church there were two spheres of action. First, there was an array of internal reforms designed to reinvigorate the clergy, rationalize administration, and stabilize institutional finances. Although important, these reforms are not at the heart of what concerns us here. The second arena of action entailed energizing the laity. Church leaders knew this was crucial. Deprived of state backing, Catholicism still counted on the well of sympathy, custom, and belief ingrained in the populace. Indeed, the laity’s commitment to the faith would prove decisive in blunting revolutionary anticlericalism in the twentieth century as well.28 It was not, however, a question of simply directing believers from the pulpit or episcopal residence. As is often the case when we examine religious culture, much of what took shape in Mexico’s “Catholic resurgence” was not entirely novel. There was a re-emphasizing and re-prioritizing of certain ideas, trends, discourses, and devotions already present, and infusing traditions, such as pilgrimage, with revivalist meaning. Still, just expanding a devotion and suffusing it with new significance could be quite innovative (and effective). Again, such efforts did not necessitate replacing older modes of religiosity. What historical evidence suggests is that Oaxacans worked changes in, alongside the “traditional,” and in some instances innovations inspired cross-pollination as the village clergy and laity adapted new practices to local custom. The way to track these happenings is through the new institutions spreading throughout Mexico (and much of the Catholic world) from the mid-nineteenth century into the 1900s. The activists, priests, and prelates leading the effort had to make some concessions to the

498   Edward Wright-Ríos new state of affairs. They sought new ways to coordinate lay religiosity now that they could no longer count on civil support. As in previous generations, they found the independent streak typical of sodalities frustrating. Furthermore, in grudging acquiescence to new laws, these organizations professed exclusively religious objectives. In the end, what emerged was an array of associations targeting specific social groups and sporting charters that stipulated that they were to promote orthodoxy and support the clergy.29 The clergy called the new collectivities asociaciones canónicamente erguidas (canonically structured organizations). Thus we find groups like the Asociación Universal de la Sagrada Familia (Universal Association of the Holy Family). Others, although similar, were labeled “societies” such as the Sociedad Católica (The Catholic Society) and the Sociedad de la Buena Prensa (Good Press Society). Almost all of them began as urban groups with official charters and international bureaucracies before expanding, thanks to directives emanating from the Church hierarchy. As their names hint, they represent modernizing currents flowing from the Vatican and Mexican episcopacy to the ­countryside. In addition, as one might expect, this also entailed an effort to further Westernize indigenous practice. Organizationally, they featured the centralizing, hierarchical characteristics of many modern intuitions. This meant naming priest directors who answered to their superiors and association bureaucracies, and lay officers handpicked by pastors. Whenever possible, new associations were segregated by sex. In some cases, they featured a cellular structure whereby wards (celadores/as) were charged with monitoring groups of members (socios/as). Again, niche targeting was important. For example, the Hijas de María (Daughters of Mary) indoctrinated girls and young women of relatively elite families, and the Sociedad Católica de San Luis Gonzaga (The Catholic Society of Saint Luis Gonzaga) did the same for young men. There were many such groups, but the most widespread was the Apostolado de la Oración (Apostolate of Prayer). By the early 1900s, the Apostolado featured over 5,000 affiliated groups worldwide, and some 500 branches in Mexico comprising over 250,000 members. It also published its own newspaper.30 According to the documentation, it tended to attract middle-and upper-class Catholics of Hispanic cultural orientation. In fact, priests setting up new associations generally did so with the non-Indian faithful in mind. As one curate noted, in his parish, the Apostolado had been established in the 1890s for los de razón (those of reason: those of European origin.)31 Moreover, although the Apostolado featured branches for women and men, it remained a predominantly female organization, with nine times as many women on its rolls.32 In terms of religiosity, this organization was important for its emphasis on sacrament-centered practice and devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus at a time when the populace remained devoted to festivals and securing celestial help in the proverbial here and now. Organizations like the Apostolado sought to generalize the modernized mode of religiosity focusing on personal spiritual development, and linking belief and practice to conservative political ideology. Their publications and bylaws stipulate that members were to attend Mass frequently and confess and take communion at least once a month, usually at the group’s customary services scheduled on the first Friday of each month. This represents a much greater emphasis on priest-led ritual than the Easter Duty.

Marshaling the Faithful   499 Moreover, the Apostolado’s emphasis on the Sacred Heart placed it at the center of ­conservative militancy since this devotion served as the international standard for the most intransigent sectors of the Church. With both imagery and rhetoric, devotees railed against the irreverent culture of the times and liberal governments. In these ­circles, modern society tortured Christ anew. They found generalized casual impieties galling, and anticlerical reform epitomized widespread collective sacrilege. From a militant perspective, such actions represented violent attacks on the Body of Christ in all of its dimensions; hence the images of the bloody heart impaled by swords and spears.33 Gauging the expansion of the new institutions and the interaction of said organizations with preexisting customs is challenging. Part of the problem is that we (scholars) seek evidence of decisive change when religious change is a slow, patchwork process. Evidence points in this direction regarding the transition from the asset-holding cofradías to ­mayordomías. We tend to forget that for believers at the time, it probably caused less anxiety than we imagine, as long as new organizations served more or less the same function (i.e., rituals took place), and “felt” like their predecessors in terms of local ­control.34 Further evidence of this resides in the fact that priests and the laity were often imprecise in their usage of such terms as asociación, hermandad, and mayordomía. However, we should not be surprised. In societies characterized by diversity, different modes of practice linked to particular social groups often coexist and mix. In fact,the very top of the Church hierarchies assumed that a fervent popular religiosity centered on fiestas, miracles, and images would endure; and, although deemed “superstitious” in some respects, it remained legitimate. (Of course, to the Vatican, they claimed to be gradually guiding the flock toward orthodoxy.) In truth, clerics and Catholic publications tended to romanticize popular devotion in the face of modern impieties. It was undeniably devout, if nothing else. Thus, they often characterized local practice as evidence of an unquestioning bedrock faith. Under no circumstances was the Church interested in dampening devotion. For activists and the clergy, it was a question of how to coordinate fervor. When considered together, sermons, pastoral letters, and publications of the era paint an idealized social order marching to the beat of a Vatican drum. In a sense, they imagined a world such as never existed: a zealous clerical chain of command acting on Rome’s directives; a fervent, charitable elite assiduously leading lay associations; an enthusiastic middle class staffing parochial schools and volunteering in Church-affiliated social programs; eager workers marshaled in confessional guilds to support the clergy; ardent women adorned with confessional insignia (sashes, medals, ribbons. etc.) gathering for spiritual exercises; devoted urban poor embracing the moral precepts and discipline of devotions designed for them; and faithful indigenous peasants led by cherished pastors learning to focus their imagined ardor on confession and communion. Obviously, they conjured this world knowing that reality was far more complicated. Still, documents, such as Archbishop Gillow’s pastoral visit diaries, convey that reformers were loath to offend popular sensibilities.35 As he crisscrossed Oaxaca from 1887 to 1914, the prelate applauded traditional brotherhoods when he found them. He viewed them as evidence of fortitude, although he criticized what he saw as the primitive

500   Edward Wright-Ríos doctrinal understanding and disinterest in the sacraments. In addition, he often also complained about their management, but he only threatened suppression for egregious insubordination. His goal in the countryside was a gradual, guided reform. The archbishop proved largely successful in the realm of urban institutional reform and the establishment of new Catholic associations and schools. Thus, priests in the small city of Tehuacán in southern Puebla (then within the Archdiocese of Oaxaca) reported robust figures for association membership, confessional school attendance, and compliance with the new sacramental expectations.36 Clergymen in indigenous villages only a handful of miles away, however, could not report such news. They tended to speak of slow progress, and blame cultural and political obstacles.37 Gillow, and arguably the high clergy across Mexico, expected such discrepancies. What they hoped for was a powerful demonstration effect stemming from the expansion of new asociaciones and sociedades. The prelate’s writings are quite clear in this regard. Priests were to be paragons of charity and zealous action. Ideally they would establish schools, preach tirelessly, safeguard morals, and lead lay assistants organized in new associations (often he referred to them in the feminine, i.e., socias). These groups, he wrote, must focus on promoting orthodox ritual, while their members demonstrated exemplary piety. The most accomplished individuals, he told his priests, should be chosen to serve as catechists and the leaders of associations. In this third pastoral instruction (1911), he made it clear that he was speaking of organizing the most educated, more Hispanized parishioners.38 All the different associations, he envisioned, would come together for rituals, but the individual members would also organize religious education centers to attract indios y indias (male and female Indians). Once in the company of their indigenous neighbors, ostensibly, association members would gain their confidence and indoctrinate them in more orthodox modes of belief and practice. Eventually, he opined, the exemplary actions of association stalwarts would help generalize the frequenting of the sacraments. Gillow and other Catholic activists explicitly argued that the nation’s Hispanic Catholics needed to follow in the footsteps of colonial missionaries, finishing their campaign to bring native peoples into la comunión civilizada (civilized society).39 Not surprisingly, this rhetoric also echoed colonial notions of social control. For example, an uprising among Chatino Indians in 1896 inspired Oaxaca’s Catholic press to call for a religious education crusade to purge native groups of their savage tendencies.40 Be that as it may, Gillow and his priests, although they talked about sweeping changes in popular culture, understood that any transformation would occur slowly. In retrospect, the endeavor appears only marginally successful, at least in the short term. But tracing it is instructive. Gillow, while on his pastoral visits, advocated the establishment of new associations from the early 1890s. In 1891, for example, he decreed the establishment of the Apostolado in every parish.41 The response was not immediate, but the prelate and his lieutenants were too occupied with internal reforms to focus on religiosity in the countryside. In fact, they zeroed in on this issue only after Gillow’s participation in

Marshaling the Faithful   501 the Latin American Plenary Council of 1899 and the publication the Rome’s official instructions for the region. Even so, Gillow continued to be pragmatic about local collectivities. His sensitivity in this regard was almost certainly due to his own background. Gillow was born in Puebla and was raised in a household attentive to local devotions, but received nearly all of his schooling in Europe. When he visited communities with pilgrimage images—such as the Virgin of Juquila and the Christ of Cuixtla—he mostly sought to convince mayordomías to heed their pastors and manage shrines effectively. He also pushed to standardize fees, and demanded the circumspect stewardship of pious funds. In part, he was preempting secular criticisms of shrine corruption that could justify intervention. The archbishop suspected, not without cause, that local politicians were looking for ways to profit from pilgrimages, which observers claimed drew tens of thousands of devotees.42 Gillow, however, avoided attempts to forcibly change the way believers experienced shrine devotion, or how they prayed and carried out personal vows. His reforms remained focused on modeling the new orthodoxy. For example, he promoted revivallike missions sent from the state capital during festivals to showcase modernized ritual. In a similar vein, in 1909 the archbishop also instituted monthly pilgrimages to Oaxaca City’s shrine of the Virgin of Solitude.43 He assigned parishes specific months in which they were to journey to the archdiocesan seat for the full experience of urban practice. The main focus was to convey the Church’s teachings regarding confession and communion. These were highly choreographed events meant to edify both observers and participants. For a few years, each month hundreds of indigenous Catholics processed into town “captained” by their pastors and then proceeded to the shrine, where numerous priests awaited them. Over the next pair of days, these ministers led individuals through the entire process as envisioned by reformers: reflection, examination of the conscience, full confession, and finally, communion. On the final day, pilgrims experienced a high Mass, sometimes celebrated by Gillow himself, featuring sermons crafted with indigenous believers in mind. In addition, the visitors witnessed the latest fashions in liturgical music. Ideally, those who made the trip would go home and model the new norms of piety for others. No evidence of this actually unfolding as envisioned appears in the archives, but in rural localities it was clear to the parish clergy that Gillow expected them to establish new associations. Still, compliance with the Easter Duty remained low. Greater sacramental frequency, however, seems to have taken root among an influential subgroup. Judging from the occasional figures provided by curates, religious practice appeared as we might expect. Wherever concentrations of predominantly Hispanized society were prevalent (cities and important towns) the more individualized piety gained prominence, although fiesta-centered piety endured as well. Among the relatively privileged, modernized norms of practice increasingly prevailed, and also served to differentiate these groups from the urban poor and indigenous. In contrast, largely monolingual indigenous communities evinced little evidence of change. As the prelate noted, in one such community the handful of female association

502   Edward Wright-Ríos members were routinely mocked.44 Emulation, apparently, was not guaranteed. “In-between” communities along the spectrum of Hispanization, so to say, reveal that  reformist endeavors sparked a mild response. Associations like the Apostolado took  root, and featured modest memberships, almost always dominated by women. Moreover, when priests provided specifics regarding frequency of the sacraments, they usually singled out female association members. Seemingly, their efforts succeeded ­primarily with mujeres de razón (non-Indian women).45 The impact of the Mexican clergy’s attempt to shift the emphasis of practice from ­fiestas to sacraments, however, should not be judged solely on membership lists and communion counts. Devotional activities beyond clerical oversight, in fact, showed their influence. In the most basic sense, documentary evidence suggests that while the common believers may not have embraced new standards of religiosity, many of them were “paying attention,” and sampling (as it were) new devotions and forms of organizing the faithful. Apparently, local believers accessed the stockpile of modern revivalism in a variety of ways. For example, parish administration documents record the emergence of mayordomías in indigenous parishes dedicated to new devotions associated with the era’s anti-modern militancy, like the Sacred Heart and Our Lady of Lourdes.46 In a different vein, Father Felipe Arenas, an accommodating and savvy curate, described how his parishioners in Tlalixtac, Oaxaca, adapted a long-standing shrine sodality to the new orthodoxy.47 By all appearances, they seem to have taken a cofradía of colonial origin, reworked it as a mayordomía in the nineteenth century, and refashioned it again as a canonically structured association in the twentieth century. They even drafted an official charter stipulating their embrace of sacramental frequency, although they continued to manage their Church and miraculous image of Christ without ceding the reins to Arenas. Nonetheless, their pastor vouched that the individuals partaking in confession and communion most frequently were indeed its members. Perhaps the most curious hybrid emerged from a local apparition movement in an indigenous village near Tehuacán in 1911. There an older woman who claimed to speak with an image of Christ developed a local following, and organized a new brotherhood combining elements of traditional sodalities and Gillow’s associations. In fact, as the devotees resisted archdiocesan attempts to extinguish their incipient devotion, they appear to have been imitating the Apostolado (which had been established in the region previously) and the prelate’s other initiatives. They planned Masses for the first Friday of the month, organized separate branches of their brotherhood in nearby villages, coordinated a rotating pilgrimage of their own, and even promised to submit to priestly ­oversight in exchange for official recognition.48 Acceptance was not forthcoming, but the new “tradition” endured, and after years of conflict Church authorities agreed to accommodate the devotees without extending official approval. In conclusion, how can we characterize the transformation of Mexican Catholic ­practice in the modern era? In general terms, between the eighteenth and twentieth ­centuries, religious culture evolved from an era when the fiesta-centered piety associated with baroque culture was the society-wide norm, to a period when the “new” orthodoxy

Marshaling the Faithful   503 of individual piety and sacramental frequency coexisted with “traditional” practices that had been influenced by religious reformism. Despite degrees of cross-pollination, though, it is still common to experience these as distinct realms of custom linked to ethnic and class differences. Thus, for example, it is not uncommon for middle- and upperclass Mexicans today to shun shrine festivals. Likewise, traditions, like re-enactments of the Passion, are understood as indigenous customs. If we could look closely at parish administration records from across the nation, we would likely find a continuum along which we could plot the various regions. In Oaxaca, sacrament-centered piety is probably relatively weak by comparison. My own examination of documentation in Jalisco’s ­archdiocesan archive suggests that priests there were much more successful in making sacramental frequency the norm and in establishing new lay associations.49 In a sense, what we have are the classic polarities that William Christian described for Spain: on one level, we see the practices strongly linked to the interests of Rome and priest-controlled institutions (the “Church Universal”) in some sectors, and the array of grass-roots customs often sustained in spite of shifting Church teachings (“local religion”) predominating in others.50 The Oaxacan evidence, however, reveals how these ostensibly distinct notions of Catholicism coexisted and interacted in a specific region and according to unique local dynamics anchored in the region’s history. Perhaps most important, this process gives us a sense of how changes, borrowings, and conflicts related to historical religious custom were lived.

Notes 1. See, for example, Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1997). 2. See Catholic newspapers, like El Tiempo, particularly the late 1880s editorials. See also Clemente de Jesús Munguía’s publications, as analyzed in Pablo Mijangos y González, The Lawyer of the Church (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2015). The idealizing of colonial religiosity appears in Eulogio Gillow y Zavalza’s Apuntes históricos del ilustrísimo y Reverendísimo Señor Doctor Don Eulogio Gillow (Mexico City: Ediciones Toledo, 1990). 3. For example, José María Roa Bárcena, La quinta modelo (Mexico City: INBA, 1984). 4. For greater detail, see Edward Wright-Ríos, Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 5. Cuestionario del Señor Don Antonio Bergoza Y Jordán Obispo de Antequera a los señores curas de la diócesis, ed. Irene Huesca et al., 2 vols. (Oaxaca: Archivo General del Estado de Oaxaca, 1984). For the 1908 questionnaire, see Archivo Histórico del Arzobispado de Oaxaca (AHAO), Diocesano, Gobierno, Parroquias (DGP), 1908–1909, caja 1 and 2. 6. For example, see Father Francisco Díez Canseco’s response in Cuestionario, ed. Huesca et al., 210–230. 7. See William Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 165. 8. See, AHAO, DGP 1868 through 1871. 9. For example, Juan Pedro Viqueira Albán, Propriety and Permissiveness in Bourbon Mexico (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999).

504   Edward Wright-Ríos 10. Pamela Voekel, Alone before God: The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 11. See Brian Connaughton’s examination of these issues in Dimensiones de la identidad patriótica (Mexico City: UAM, Itztapalapa and Porrua, 2001). 12. On liberalism, see Charles S. Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 1821–1853 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968); and The Transformation of Mexican Liberalism in the Late Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 13. For example, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, La navidad en las montañas (Mexico City: Porrúa, 1943). 14. For the conservative pushback, see La Cruz, a Catholic newspaper of the mid-1850s. 15. Will Fowler and Humberto Morales Moreno, “Introducción,” in El conservadurismo mexicano en el siglo XIX, eds. Fowler and Morales Moreno (Puebla, Mexico: BUAP, 1999), 11–36. See also Erika Pani, “ ‘Las fuerzas oscuras.’ El problema del conservadurismo en la historia de México,” in Conservadurismo y derechas en la historia de México, vol. 1, ed. Pani (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2009), 11–42. 16. This appears in an array of pastoral instructions, sermons, books, and pamphlets, but most of these lean heavily on the writings of two conservative ideologues of the era, Lucas Alamán and Clemente de Jesús Munguía. 17. See, Jorge Adame Goddard, El pensamiento político y social de los católicos mexicanos (Mexico City: UNAM, 1981). 18. Manuel Ceballos Ramírez, El catolicismo social (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1991). 19. See José Manuel C.’s report from Villa Alta, September 19, 1868, AHAO DGP 1868. 20. Manuel A. Casterán, “Cudrante provisional para la parroquia de Santa María Jaltepec,” September 30, 1868, AHAO, DGP 1868. 21. For example, see receipts and accounting records regarding Our Lady of Juquila, Christ of Cuixtla, and Etla’s Señor de la Peña: AHAO DGP 1869, 1870–1871, 1874–1875, 1875, 1876–1877, 1878–1879, 1880–1881, 1884, 1885–1886 and 1890–1892. 22. See the Juquila receipts in AHAO DGP 1876–1879 and also DGP 1889. 23. Daniela Traffano, Indios, curas, y nación (Torino: OTTO, 2001). 24. See, Juan María Muñoscano, “Arancel aproximativo que actualmente rigen en la parróquia de San Francisco Cajonos”, August 25, 1868, AHAO DGP 1868. 25. Margaret Chowning, “The Catholic Church and the Ladies of the Vela Perpetua,” Past and Present, 221, no. 1 (November 2013), 197–237. 26. For example: see James Greenberg, Santiago’s Sword, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981). 27. AHAO, DGP 1908–1909, caja 1 and 2. 28. This is a constant theme in Jean Meyer’s work; see, La cristiada, 3 vols. (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1973); and El conflicto religioso en Oaxaca, 1926–1938 (Oaxaca: IAGO, 2006). 29. For example, see “Reglamiento de la Asociación Piadosa de Caridad, of Ocotlán,” AHAO DGP 1870–1871. 30. See Boletín oficial y revista ecclesiástica (hereafter, Boletín oficial), August 1, 1901. 31. Vicente González, Informe a la sagrada mitra, January 10, 1919, AHAO, DGP 1913–1919. 32. Boletín oficial, August 1, 1901. 33. On the Sacred Heart in Mexico, see Leonora Correa Etchegaray, “El rescate de una ­devoción jesuítica,” in Historia de la iglesia en el siglo xix, ed. Ramon Ramos Medina (Mexico City: Condumex, 1998), 369–380. 34. On this issue, see Terry Rugeley, Of Wonders and Wise Men (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001), 143–167.

Marshaling the Faithful   505 35. Eulogio Gillow y Zavalza, Libros de las visitas pastorales del Señor Eulogio Gillow, Biblioteca Francisco de Burgoa, Fondo Luis Castañeda Guzmán. 36. Francisco Hernández, Cuestionario de Tehuacán, December 31, 1908, AHAO DGP 1908–1909, caja 2. 37. Luis  G.  Nápoles, Cuestionario de San José Miahuatlán, October 31, 1908, AHAO DGP 1908–1909, caja 1. 38. See Gillow, “Tercera instrucción pastoral,” Boletín oficial, April 1 and May 1, 1911. 39. Conclusiones del IV Congreso Católico (Oaxaca: La voz de la verdad, 1909). 40. See “Plagas sociales: ignorancia e inmoralidad de los indios,” La voz de la verdad, May 5, 1896. 41. See Mariano Palacios, “Apuntes para la historia,” Boletín oficial, January 1, 1908. 4 2. La voz de la verdad, December 17, 1899. 4 3. See Wright-Rios, Revolutions, Chapter 3. 44. Biblioteca Burgoa, FLGC, Gillow, Libros de las visitas pastorales del Señor Eulogio Gillow, v. 14, comments penned on March 2, 1910, and “Auto de visita de San Francisco Cajonos,” March 3, 1910. 45. For example, Antonio Romero, Cuestionario de San Pedro Atoyac, November 15, 1908, AHAO DGP 1908–1909, caja 1. 46. Luis  G.  Nápoles, Cuestionario de San José Miahuatlán, October 31, 1908, AHAO DGP 1908–1909, caja 1. 47. Felipe Arenas, Hermandades de Tlalixtac, 1909, AHAO DGP 1904–1909. See also Felipe Arenas, Cuestionario de San Miguel Tlalixtac, January 1, 1909, AHAO DGP 1908–1909. 48. See Wright-Ríos, Revolutions, Chapters 5 and 6. 49. For example, Agapito Ramírez, Informe Cuatrimestral de Tepatitlán, May 1, 1910, AHAG, Gobierno, Secretaría, Correspondencia con Parroquias (GSCP), 1911–1917, caja 16, exp. 1911–1914. For additional reports, see AHAG, GSCP, 1897–1911, caja 15, exp. 1911–1913. 50. William A. Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981).

Archival Collections Archivo Histórico del Arzobispado de Jalisco  AHAJ Archivo Histórico del Arzobispado de Oaxaca  AHAO Biblioteca Francisco de Burgoa, Oaxaca

Newspapers Boletín oficial y revista ecclesiástica de Antequera, Oaxaca El Tiempo, Mexico City La Cruz, Mexico City La voz de la verdad, Oaxaca

chapter 27

Catholic L a it y i n th e L ati n A m er ica n Ch u rch Robert S. Pelton, C.S.C.

Before Vatican II, pastoral theology reflected a clear distinction between the ordained and non-ordained members of the Church, but a gradual nuancing of this issue was ­taking place in Latin America as early as the 1950s. In those areas, there had been rather intensive study of “modern” European theologians.1 Through their writings and pastoral visits to Latin America, these progressive European theologians began to strongly influence the theology of the region—especially in Chile and Brazil. This influence was shown through the beginnings of small Christian Base communities, and through an emphasis on doing “contextual” theology. This is a theology that emphasizes the experiential in the light of tradition, which eventually led to a Latin American liberation theology. Small Christian communities are a good example of this experiential approach. Said to have begun in Brazil with the “Sunday services without priests,”2 small Christian communities were also initiated in Panama’s San Miguelito parish in 1963. They were perceived as a pastoral effort, one supported by the bishops but emerging from local grassroots efforts. This particular effort was supported and facilitated by Father Leo Mahon and other priests of the Archdiocese of Chicago.3 With the advent of the Second Vatican Council, the concept of the Church as the “People of God” also took on much greater significance. One of the ramifications of this was a more formal recognition of the small communities. Significantly, the methodology of the small communities was to examine their “lived reality” within the context of the  Gospel teachings. This, in turn, prepared the way for a further development of ­“contextual theology.” However, Yves Congar, O.P., the great ecclesiologist of Vatican II, had already ­prepared the way for a more fully developed theology of the laity.4 A fuller expression of this ecclesiology can be found in his work True and False Reform in the Church.5

508   Robert S. Pelton, C.S.C. One of the most distinctive teachings of Vatican II is that the lay apostolate is a direct participant in the mission of the Church, not merely an adjunct that shares in the mission of the hierarchy. Whereas the small communities emerged even before Vatican II, they assumed greater clarity after the Second Vatican Council. In 1968, at the CELAM conference at Medellín, Colombia, they were given clear support by the bishops. In 1979, at Puebla, Mexico, they were again affirmed, but with the caveat of being small ecclesial communities, which was done to emphasize their relationship to the Church. In 1992, at Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, their support continued. Having participated in the Second Vatican Council and three of the four General Conferences of the Bishops of Latin America since Vatican II, I was delighted to be selected as an approved journalist at CELAM V—the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean (Aparecida, Brazil, during May 2007). Although it would have been unrealistic to expect CELAM V to equal the extraordinary achievements of the Medellín Conference of 1968, my hope was that CELAM V would strongly reaffirm the distinctive identity of the Latin American Catholic Church; would offer vigorous encouragement and support for small Christian communities (known as CEBs throughout Latin America) and for other faith-based lay programs; and would find new and innovative ways to apply the spirit and thrust of Vatican II (1962–1965), Medellín (1968), Puebla (1979), and Santo Domingo (1992) to the complex and frenetically changing social, economic, cultural, and religious dynamics of twenty-first-century Latin America. Despite excellent work by the 260 delegates at Aparecida, these hopes were not fully realized. Some changes made to the Vatican-approved final document—changes that did not always reflect the views of a significant number of bishops—force me to conclude that the spirit of Medellín and Puebla continues to face significant challenges. Disappointments notwithstanding, much of what emerged from Aparecida, Brazil, was encouraging. There are clear signs that, although challenged, Medellín and Puebla are still alive in today’s Catholic Church—due in large part to the dedication of countless pastors, and especially of laypeople, men and women, at the grassroots level. In all, there is reason for cautious optimism. As in every Bishops Conference since Medellín, CELAM V conceptualized its ­proceedings and conclusions by shining the light of the gospel upon the pressing ­real-world challenges of daily life—challenges that are very different but no less daunting than those of the final decades of the twentieth century. Very significantly, the bishops turned away from the deductive and largely theoretical method of discernment used at  the 1992 Santo Domingo Conference, choosing instead to re-adopt the inductive ­“see-judge-act” methodology that proved so successful at Medellín and Puebla. CELAM V unequivocally approved the roles of ecclesial base communities, the preferential option for the poor, and opposition to structural sin within the modern context of neoliberal economic models. All three are of vital importance both to the Latin American Church and to hundreds of millions of laypeople across the continent. CELAM’s endorsement of small Christian communities can be the key to the growing empowerment of a lay ministry.

Catholic Laity in the Latin American Church   509 Many bishops also voiced acute concerns about the challenges of globalization, overly rapid industrialization, roles of the family and of youth, need for more meaningful d ­ ialogue with indigenous and African-American communities, expansion of decision-making roles for women in the Church, “environmental aggression” against Amazonia, and greater clarification of the roles of ministry and the laity. Although much concrete action in these vital areas was lacking, the bishops demonstrated a deepening understanding of the full scope of Medellín and Puebla, and a growing commitment to adapt and expand the mandate for social justice to more fully meet the demands of our modern world. In this regard, José Escobar wrote: “It appears that the bishops are signaling their strong tacit approval of parish-level initiatives to ‘do justice’ in widening circles of life, even if the Church lacks the resources to provide universal support.”6 In all, there seems reason for cautious optimism about a full renewal of the Second Vatican Council—an optimism that was strong during the 1970s but which slowly eroded since the 1980s and 1990s, when a number of the Vatican’s Episcopal appointments were less assertive than earlier generations of Latin American bishops. However, the 2013 visit of Pope Francis to Aparecida, Brazil—the site of CELAM V—brings more hope for effective renewal. The pontiff spoke very clearly to the bishops, challenging them against assuming the attitude of princes and against choosing a distance from the laity in place of dialogue. Significantly, Pope Francis went on to say (my translation): “The Church is a mother, and neither you nor I know our mothers principally through correspondence. A mother gives warmth, touches, kisses, loves. . . . When one communicates only with documents, it is like a mother who communicates with her son only by mail.”7

Small Christian Communities Comunidades Eclesiales de Base—known variously as CEBs, BECs, and SCCs—are small-to-medium-sized primarily lay groups that come together to study Scripture, to form community and solidarity with their brothers and sisters in an effort to better community life, and to seek social justice in the light of the Gospel, the Second Vatican Council, and Catholic social tradition. Tens of thousands of CEBs are now active across the length and breadth of Latin America, in both rural and urban areas, some under the tutelage of a priest, but many with lay leadership. Their specific agendas, chosen by the members themselves, vary ­tremendously from CEB to CEB, depending upon local needs and resources, but their primary purposes include fulfilling Christ’s teaching to proclaim the Good News to the  poor and the marginalized, to help both themselves and others whose lives are being diminished, and to remind all who will listen that they are loved and that there is reason for hope.8 Some CEBs have changed little since they first formed in the aftermath of the Medellín Conference. Many others now exist in forms that might be almost unrecognizable to

510   Robert S. Pelton, C.S.C. CEB pioneers of the 1970; some of these new forms will probably transform themselves yet again in the future, particularly in cross-fertilization with charismatic currents. It is important to understand that both these models—and the many other CEB forms that exist along the continuum between these two poles are pursuing their missions as perennial works in progress. The raison d’être of CEBs is to meet the most pressing needs of their communities within a specific time and place and to then pursue new goals as soon as they have fulfilled their original purpose. Thinking “on their feet”9 and adapting rapidly to changing needs are signs of their success, not of failure or disarray. The Catholic Charismatic Renewal is also making major contributions, especially in Brazil. It has been particularly effective in attracting young people, re-energizing the increasing numbers of middle-class urban Catholics who have become secularized, and appealing to those who had “fallen away” from Church membership. At the same time, the charismatic movement has frequently come into tension with progressive segments of the Church, since some, but by no means all, charismatic groups seem to avoid issues of social justice and to focus instead on “feel-good” Christianity. A fine study of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal—probably the first English-language history of the Catholic Charismatic Movement in Latin America—is to be found in the late Edward L. Cleary’s “The Catholic Charismatic Renewal: Revitalization Movements and Conversion.”10 An excellent overview of contemporary CEBs is contained in Do Vaticano II a um  novo Concilio (2004) by Dom Luiz Gómez de Souza, and the data have been both confirmed and expanded by a more recent study.11 Significant findings include these facts: 1. CEBs play an activeand often crucial role in modern Latin American society, and the need for them has not diminished over the years. 2. Women comprise approximately 62 percent of CEB membership. This contributes not only to the strengthening of families, but also to a certain empowerment of Latin American women, both within the Church and within civil society. 3. Successful CEBs make concerted efforts to attract young people into membership, both to better understand and serve the needs of the young and to revitalize communities that might otherwise wither due to the advancing age of their memberships. 4. Most CEBs emphasize the Mass, and they provide ample space for communion. 5. Active Church support for CEBs has waxed and waned across the decades, but reports of condemnation are unfounded. The CEBs have received instructions on several occasions, both from the Vatican and from the Latin American Bishops, but these instructions were intended as constructive guidance—not as efforts to constrain or abolish the CEBs. Indeed, the Instrumentum Laboris for the 1997 Synod of America in Rome views base ecclesial communities as “the primary cells of the Church structure” and states they are

Catholic Laity in the Latin American Church   511 “responsible for the richness of faith and its expansion, as well as for the promotion of the person and development.”12 In his Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Ecclesia in America,13 Pope John Paul II praised their promotion of interpersonal bonds within the Catholic Church (N73), and he formally recognized the special ability of CEBs to renew parishes, and thus become a community of communities: One way of renewing parishes, which is especially urgent for parishes in large cities, might be to consider the parish as this community of communities and movements. It seems timely, therefore, to form ecclesial communities and groups of a size that allows for true human relationships.14

During May 2006, in preparation for CELAM V, CELAM sponsored a continental meeting on “Small Christian Communities: Schools for the Followers and Missioners of Jesus Christ” in Quito, Ecuador.15 More than fifty bishops, priests, male and female members of religious orders, and CEB members from eighteen nations gathered to share details of successes, failures, and challenges of CEBs across the continent. They concluded that CEBs were doing well overall, but they also offered specific recommendations to further strengthen the base communities: these pertained to • reduction of dependence upon individual bishops, who might or might not regard CEBs as a priority within their dioceses; • recognition that CEBs must be given “missionary space” to take new forms and grow in new directions; • heightened respect for the works of the Spirit in the grassroots of the Church and for the prophetic role of CEBs; • renewed support for CEBs, as fully functional entities that flow from the teachings of the Second Vatican Council and from the Medellín and Puebla Conferences; • greater awareness that CEBs are not merely mass movements, but rather are the nucleus of the present and future Church, as well as the Church’s ancestor. Although the Latin American Bishops gave strong support to these recommendations in the text they issued shortly before CELAM V, the Vatican-approved final document presents a “watered down” vision of CEBs. No mention was made of their prophetic role, of “missionary space,” or of the need for their support. Instead, the document implies fear—both of the CEBs themselves and of leadership “from below.” Although the Vatican document respects the Medellín emphasis upon CEBs as basic cells of the Church, it combines them with an array of other ecclesial movements—thereby increasing risks that the CEBs might lose their identity. The grassroots base communities will almost certainly continue to function as a model of the Church at the service of the poor and of the struggle against social sin, but there is little question that the alterations made to the final document have made it more difficult for CEBs to fulfill their vital role.

512   Robert S. Pelton, C.S.C.

The Preferential and Evangelizing Option for the Poor The watershed Medellín Conference of 1968 sought the presence of the Church in the transformation of Latin America in the light of Vatican Council II. The preferential option for the poor was only one of many creative applications of conciliar renewal to a continent then gripped by violent political repression, poverty, acute social injustice, and pervasive institutionalized sin, but the option soon emerged as a cornerstone of a Christianity that unites faith with justice and with the promotion of people and society. Even during the Second Vatican Council, the Latin American Bishops were promoting the theme of “Jesus, the Church of the Poor.”16 Five decades later, the preferential option remains a key element of the Church’s social mission and continues to serve as a lifeline for many millions of socially and economically marginalized persons. Once considered “radical” in some quarters, the option has been incorporated into canon law, which states: “[the Christian faithful] are also obliged to promote social justice and, mindful of the precept of the Lord, to assist the poor from their own resources.”17 The preferential option has been affirmed by six successive pontiffs. At CELAM V, the Latin American Bishops expanded the option into the “preferential and evangelizing option for the poor” to underscore an inclusivity and universality that always existed but which was misunderstood by some. By emphasizing that “the poor” include also those who are poor in spirit, socially and politically poor, poor in health, or otherwise deprived in any way, the bishops made it clearer that the preferential option is not solely an issue of economic poverty. Speaking at Aparecida on May 11, 2007, Pope Benedict XVI declared: “The poor are the privileged audience for the Gospel.” In his 2013 visit to Brazil, Pope Francis was more explicit in his challenge to the youth of our day: “The youth who do not protest do not please me. Young people have an illusion of utopia. . . . The young person is essentially a non-conformist. This is fine.” Later, Pope Francis urged young people to go out and serve without fear, and he made it clear that he values the political practice of the faithful in the world and especially that of the young.18 A large majority of experienced Latin American priests regard the option both as a guiding force and as one on the most crucial elements of their ministry. Many younger priests come from wealthier families and grew up under very different circumstances than those experienced by most of their parishioners, and they often leave the seminaries with more conservative viewpoints, but pastoral realities quickly teach many that the preferential and evangelizing option for the poor is vital to the physical, social, and ­spiritual well-being of their parishioners. The need for the preferential option is clearly reflected in the Synthesis of Contributions Received for the Fifth General Conference (2006):

Catholic Laity in the Latin American Church   513 In many Latin American countries, most of [the] Catholic population is made up of poor people who live excluded from the material, cultural, and social riches present in our countries. The preferential option for the poor distinguished the Church of the region and was influential in other churches. Today, this option faces new challenges that demand its renewal, so that it may manifest the fullness of its evangelical roots, its urgency, and its gospel riches.19

In a concrete demonstration of the potential of the preferential and evangelizing option for the poor, the bishops issued a statement to the leaders of the G-8 nations, calling for the elimination of extreme poverty from all the world’s nations, and aspirationally hoping to achieve this goal before 2015. This goal is “one of the most urgent tasks of our time,” they wrote, and one that is “inseparably linked with world peace and security.” The bishops also cited the preferential option as one of the “pastoral aspects that has had the greatest resonance in the life of the Church” (N21); calling for improved integration between the option for the poor and care for the middle class (N82); recognizing the option as a major christological criterion for the missionary path of the Church (N65); recognizing the evangelization of the poor as the great messianic sign that Christians are called to live as Church (N165); and citing weaknesses in observing the option as a sin within the individual Christian that must be repented and corrected (N79).20

Lay Ministry Today “I am the only Bible that most people will ever read,”21 said a lay woman who leads Scripture study and reflection at a Cuban casas de oraciónes—a small community of faithful who meet in members’ private homes. Her words may sound overstated to North American or European ears, but they accurately reflect realities that prevail not only in Havana, but also in thousands of other communities through Latin America. Casas de oraciones and casas cultos—“house churches,” as they are often called—are lectionary based, meet in private homes, and have explicit relationships with their ­dioceses. In addition to the benefits enjoyed by their membership, they also offer an opportunity for lay ministry to be enabled and empowered. In September 1986, the Cuban Catholic Conference of Bishops released The National Meeting of the Cuban Church, which emphasized the importance of Christian ecclesial communities. In doing so, they stressed the importance of co-responsibility of the laity.22 The small communities have played an important role in pastoral plans since that time. Although the totalitarian security states that once ruled many nations with iron fists have now been replaced with civilian governments that are at least nominally democratic, many millions of Latin Americans are still impoverished and marginalized—economically, socially, and spiritually.

514   Robert S. Pelton, C.S.C. The much-discussed “crisis of vocations”—the Catholic Church’s clergy shortage—also plays a role. In Brazil, for example, just over 18,000 priests serve 140 million Catholics— and there are myriad other challenges as well: limited seating in churches that struggle to accommodate rapidly growing urban populations, the distance to churches for those living in remote areas, lack of transportation, widespread feelings of rootlessness and alienation among recently urbanized populations, and the loss of hope suffered by many. For Latin Americans whose lives and faith are blighted by such challenges, lay-led BECs, casas culto and casas de oraciónes congregations, lay ministries, missioners, delegates of the Word, and lay catechists offer not only a new way of being Church but also, in many instances, the only feasible way of being Church. As an example, Fr. José Oscar Beozzo, a leading expert on religious vocations, recently reported that 80 percent of all Sunday celebrations in Brazil are led by the laity.23 Numbers vary from region to region and nation to nation, but the overarching realities are similar across the vast continent. From Sonora to Patagonia, lay men and women at the grassroots of the Church step forward to share the Word with their brothers and sisters in faith who might otherwise rarely hear it. They comfort the ill and the bereaved, translate Scripture into indigenous languages or regional dialects, reassure community members that the Church does not exist solely for the rich and powerful, and find countless other ways to animate the journey and contribute to the People of God as protagonists within the Church. Since many lay ministries are de facto social service agencies as well as communities of faith, they also offer much-needed assistance to sustain and improve the daily lives of marginalized individuals and families. Anything approaching a complete listing of these contributions would fill several volumes, but lay ministries routinely assist in obtaining emergency food, clothing, medicine, child care, and other necessities for those in need; they facilitate vaccination and other health-care programs; they arbitrate disputes in the light of the gospel; they tutor school-age children and teach basic literacy and math skills to adults; they help the unemployed find jobs; and they fill literally hundreds of other temporal needs, both large and small. Perhaps most important of all, their very presence and their willingness to help do much to diminish the pervasive anomie, absence of direction, and loss of the sense of humanity that stem from lack of community. For these reasons and more, the late Edward Cleary, O.P., former director of Latin American Studies at Providence College, called the 1.1 million lay ministers currently active in Latin America as “the Catholic Church’s basic strength there.”24 To Archbishop Juan García Rodríguez of Camagüey, Cuba, the 120 house churches active within the Archdiocese of Camagüey are “one of the greatest treasures in the Cuban Church. They have especially encouraged a marvelous growth in lay ministries.”25 Left unsaid but almost palpable is the fact that the lay-led house churches have spearheaded movements toward greater grassroots freedoms and responsibilities in both the religious and secular spheres. The Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean are keenly aware of the laity’s contributions and of the need to promote still more lay activity—as a Synthesis of the thinking of CELAM V makes clear:

Catholic Laity in the Latin American Church   515 The whole Church is missionary. What is needed for this truth to become reality is that the laypeople be trained; the Christian and secular character of their vocation must be promoted actively without fear; room must be made for them in the Church; their opinions and initiatives must be respected, and room must be opened for them to participate in the decisions of the community. In short, they must be treated as adults in a line of communion and participation as is proper to their baptismal vocation which they subsequently confirmed sacramentally.26

Support from the bishops has long been staunch. Rome has always endorsed lay ministries, but it did so cautiously. In Aparecida, however, Pope Benedict XVI urged the laity to join with priests, religious Brothers, and Sisters in an ambitious program of evangelization and of missionary and pastoral outreach, especially at urban peripheries. Stressing the need for alignment with their pastors and conformity with the orientation of their diocese, the pope strongly endorsed rapid growth in both the number and the scope of lay ministries. The recent book of Robert Hurteau, A Worldwide Heart, describes the development and activities of the Papal Volunteers for Latin America (PAVLA), founded by Father John Considine, M.M., as does Fluent in Faith: The Gift of Mary McCormick.27 On the rear cover of this latter book, Sister Angelyn Dries, O.S.F., Professor Emerita at Saint Louis University, writes: “As I researched my book, The Missionary Movement in American Catholic History, I found Mary McCormick to be an excellent example of a Papal Volunteer who made a lasting impact with and among the people she served. Her story provides further insight into the role of lay missionaries—a movement that began to grow by the late 1940s.”

Maryknoll Lay Missioners Program: Lay Missioners in Action Many orders, dioceses, and large parishes sponsor lay missioners in Latin America.28 A complete and updated guide to lay missionary opportunities can be found in Notre Dame’s The Guide to Postgraduate Service.29 Since limitations on space force us to cite just one, let’s examine the Maryknoll Lay Missioners program (MKLM) to illustrate the value of lay missions.30 Soon after Father James A. Walsh, Father Thomas A. Price, and Mother Mary Joseph founded the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers and the Maryknoll Sisters of St. Dominic a century ago as the first US Catholic organizations dedicated to the missionary outreach of the universal Church, Father Price submitted a plan for a Lay Society of Catholic American Missioners His vision could not be fully implemented until the Second Vatican Council taught the world that the Church is missionary by its very nature and that the proper role of the laity in mission is fully participatory. Also declines in the number of ordained and vowed vocations by the early 1960s were making it clear that the future of the

516   Robert S. Pelton, C.S.C. Church’s missionary work—like the future of Catholic education—would increasingly depend upon laypeople. In 1975, with Father John Sullivan and Sister Mary Anne O’Donnell coordinating the efforts, the Maryknoll Lay Missioners (MKLM) Program became a fully recognized entity within the Maryknoll family. Deeply rooted in the traditions of Catholic Social Teaching, MKLM’s lay missioners strive for justice, peace, and advancement of human rights; minister to the marginalized; seek sustainable solutions to poverty, hunger, disease, and illiteracy; promote the value of life, and with God’s grace, help to improve the quality of the lives of the suffering. Indeed, lay missioners collectively do all of those things, and many also provide pastoral care, preventive health care, nutritional and child-care education, and job training for those who lack employable skills. Some supply food, clothing, and medical supplies during emergencies. Others search for community-based solutions to many of the great challenges of contemporary life: violent conflict, crime, sustainable economic development, environmental protection, HIV/AIDS prevention, and overly rapid urbanization of formerly rural populations. In short, they do whatever is most needed, and their ­ministries are producing measurable improvements in the quality of life of countless communities. Most successes are measured one victory at a time, but some have the potential to benefit huge groups of people. MK Lay Missioner Phil Dahl-Bredine, for example, is leading a reforestation effort that is slowly preserving the topsoil and restoring the fertility of thousands of acres of once-productive farmland in Oaxaca, Mexico. Some MKLM missioners, such as Dr. Susan Nagele, Ann Grieg, and Susan Mach, renew their contracts over and over again, remaining in mission for twenty, twenty-five, or thirty years. Most others return home after completing their initial commitments of three and a half years, but service remains a constant for nearly all of them, either in their choices of profession or in volunteer activities. Most of the 600+ missioners have later used their expertise in continuing service upon their return to the United States. Clearly, there is truth in the MKLM maxim: “Once a missioner, always a missioner.” In the world of lay missioners, words and concepts have the greatest meaning when measured by concrete results, for the gospel is preached not only in homily but within the gritty reality of urban slums and destitute farming villages. Thus, it may be enlightening to consider the ministry of just one of the eight Maryknoll Lay Missioners currently serving in El Salvador. The mortality rate among Salvadoran infants and toddlers has plummeted from 60 percent to 24 percent, and it continues to decline rapidly. Much of the credit belongs to MKLM missioner Ann Grieg and the “Soybean and Health Program” she founded in collaboration with local communities and the National University of San Salvador. A dietitian trained at the University of California, Ann found innovative ways to use the high nutritional value and affordability of soybeans to combat the malnutrition that  is so common among Salvadoran children and their mothers. Initially implemented as a trial in just one community, Soybean and Health proved so successful that the Archdiocese of San Salvador asked Ann to expand the program as quickly as possible.

Catholic Laity in the Latin American Church   517 She trained a network of local volunteer “soy ladies” to prepare soymilk and distribute it to malnourished children, pregnant women, and lactating mothers, which dramatically increased the supply, while simultaneously empowering Salvadorans to perpetuate the  program indefinitely. She also applied to the Ministry of Health for permits to ­bottle soymilk for distribution to communities not previously reached by the program. Within months, the early-childhood death rate fell dramatically in all fifteen communities served. In 2007, Ann secured legal registration of Asociación de Nutravida, which allows her to import higher-yielding strains of soybeans and to develop new soy-based foods. One such supplement—consisting of toasted soy and sorghum flours spiced with ­cinnamon—can be used as a baking mix or made into a nutritious beverage. These supplements entered Salvadoran consumer markets in 2010, and profits from their sale are ensuring long-term sustainability of the program that is saving thousands of lives. Maryknoll began its first century as a tiny group of priests and sisters, but nevertheless made its name synonymous with mission. Maryknoll lay work in Latin America has provided a model for efforts throughout the developing world. Today, hundreds of men and women, inspired by the Spirit to live and work in poor communities in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, are helping to create more just and compassionate societies in a world greatly in need. Even before the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), the Catholic Church was evolving in its understanding of the role and responsibility of its lay missioners; that understanding has accelerated greatly as a result of the Council. The theology of Father Yves Congar, O.P., has been fully embraced by the Church, especially throughout Latin America. Lay volunteerism is no longer regarded merely as “good works” by individuals, but rather as a vital lifeline for the struggling poor, and in fulfillment of Christ’s teachings. “Laying boots on the ground” has become truly essential to carrying out the Church’s mission in the world. Through the CELAM conferences the pastoral ambience has also contributed strongly to this growing appreciation of the Catholic laity,. Combined with priest shortages and the importance of theological reflection within the context of regional realities, opportunities for lay missionary labor provide hope for a challenged but youthful and vibrant Catholic Church of Latin America.

Summary While before Vatican II, a clear distinction between the ordained and the non-ordained prevailed, a gradual nuancing was taking place in Latin America in the early 1950s, which was largely due to young priests’ intensive studies of modern European theologians. Progressive European theologians strongly influenced the theology of Chile and Brazil, especially through small Christian communities and “contextual theology”—which eventually gave rise to liberation theology. As a result of Vatican II, the concept of the

518   Robert S. Pelton, C.S.C. Church as the “People of God” attained far greater significance, particularly through formal recognition of the small ecclesial communities. Examining “lived realities” within the context of gospel teachings prepared the way for “contextual theology,”which was especially influenced by the writings of Yves Congar. The small communities achieved greater clarity after the Second Vatican Council with the clear support of the bishops at the CELAM conference at Medellín in 1968, somewhat weakened affirmation at Puebla in 1979, and reaffirmation at Santo Domingo in 1992 and Aparecida in 2007. After participating in Vatican II and three of the four subsequent CELAM conferences, I was selected as an approved journalist at CELAM V, held in Aparecida, Brazil. Although it was perhaps unrealistic to hope that CELAM V would equal the extraordinary achievements of CELAM II at Medellín, I remained hopeful. Despite excellent work by the 260 delegates, these hopes were not fully realized, and I am forced to conclude that the spirit of Medellín and Puebla continues to face significant challenges. However, much that emerged from Aparecida was encouraging: there are clear signs that Medellín and Puebla are still alive in today’s Catholic Church, due primarily to countless pastors and especially the work of laypeople at the grass roots of the Church. CELAM V shone the light of the gospel on the pressing real-world challenges of daily life. Significantly, the bishops turned away from the deductive, largely theoretical, method of discernment used in Santo Domingo and instead re-adopted the see-judge-act methodology that was so successful at Medellín and Puebla. CELAM V unequivocally approved the preferential option for the poor, opposed structural sin within neoliberal economic models, and approved the roles of small Christian communities. This latter can be the key to a growing empowerment of lay ministry. Although concrete action in vital areas was largely lacking, the bishops demonstrated a growing commitment to expand the mandate for social justice in the modern world. The visit of Pope Francis to the site of CELAM V especially brings hope for effective renewal. Tens of thousands of small Christian communities are now active across Latin America, in both urban and rural areas, some under the tutelage of a priest but many with lay leadership. Their specific agendas—chosen by the members themselves—vary depending upon local needs and resources. The raison d’être of CEBs is to meet the most pressing needs of their communities within a specific time and place and to then pursue new goals as soon as they have fulfilled their original purpose. Excellent overviews of contemporary CEBs are contained in Do Vaticano II a um novo Concilio by Dom Luiz Gomez and in CEBs e os desafios do mundo contemporaneo by Francisco Orofino.31 The Instrumentum Laboris for the 1997 Synod of America in Rome views base ecclesial communities as “the primary cells of the Church structure.” In Ecclesia in America, Pope John Paul II praised the CEBs’ promotion of interpersonal bonds within the Catholic Church as well as their special ability to renew parishes, enabling each to become a community of communities. Similarly, the majority of Latin American Bishops have given strong support to the small Christian communities. These grassroots base communities will almost certainly continue to function in their vital role as a model of the Church at the service of the poor and the struggle against social sin, regardless of the challenges they continue to face.

Catholic Laity in the Latin American Church   519 The preferential option for the poor was only one of many creative applications of conciliar renewal at the Medellín Conference of 1968; the option soon emerged as a cornerstone of a Christianity that unites faith with justice and with the promotion of people and society. Five decades later, the preferential option remains a key element of the Church’s social mission; it has been incorporated into canon law and has been affirmed by all successive pontiffs. Benedict XVI declared at Aparecida that “The poor are the privileged audience for the Gospel,” and Pope Francis made it clear that he values political practice by the faithful, especially that of the young. At CELAM V, the Latin American Bishops expanded the option into the “preferential and evangelizing option for the poor,” clarifying that the preferential option is not solely an issue of economic poverty. This is, of course, in alignment with what Jesus taught: “When you hold a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, [and] the blind” (Lk. 14:13). The need for the preferential option is clearly reflected several times in the Synthesis of Contributions Received for CELAM V, and Rome has always endorsed lay ministries, albeit sometimes cautiously. In Aparecida, Pope Benedict XVI also urged the laity to join with Religious in an ambitious program of evangelization and missionary and pastoral outreach, especially in urban areas, and strongly endorsed rapid growth in the number and scope of lay ministries. The CELAM bishops also cited the preferential option as one of the “pastoral aspects that has had the greatest resonance in the Church,” called for greater integration between the option for the poor and care for the middle class, recognized the evangelization of the poor as the great messianic sign for Christians, and termed weaknesses in observation of the option as a sin for individual Christians. Part of lay ministry today are the Cuban “house churches,” which are lectionary based, meet in private homes, and have explicit relationships with their dioceses. The National Meeting of the Cuban Church, by the Cuban Catholic Conference of Bishops, emphasized the importance of small Christian communities by stressing the importance of the co-responsibility of the laity. These small communities play an important role in pastoral plans, especially in dealing with the impoverishment and social, economic, as well as with the spiritual marginalization that is so pervasive throughout all of Latin America—not merely in Cuba. Functioning as de facto social service agencies, lay ministers throughout Latin America also obtain emergency food, clothing, medicine, child care, and other necessities for people in need; facilitate vaccination and other health-care programs; arbitrate disputes in the light of the gospel; tutor children and adults; find jobs for the unemployed; and fill hundreds of other temporal needs. In like manner and deeply rooted in the traditions of Catholic Social Teaching, the Maryknoll Lay Missioners program strives to bring peace, justice, and advancement of human rights; minister to the marginalized; seek sustainable solutions to poverty, hunger, disease, and illiteracy; promote the value of life; and improve the quality of lives. Their ministries produce measurable improvements in the quality of life of countless communities. For example, one MKLM, Ann Grieg, founded the “Soybean and

520   Robert S. Pelton, C.S.C. Health Program” in collaboration with local communities and the National University of San Salvador. Another missioner, Phil Dahl-Bredine, leads a reforestation effort to preserve topsoil and restore fertility of thousands of acres of once-productive farmland in Oaxaca, Mexico. The list goes on and on. Building on the theology of Fr. Yves Congar, O.P., which has been embraced by the Church and especially throughout Latin America lay volunteerism now constitutes a vital lifeline for the struggling, and a fulfillment of Christ’s teachings. This growing appreciation of the Catholic laity provides hope for a vibrant Catholic Church in Latin America.

Notes 1. For example, a number of young Chilean theologians were taking their advanced degrees in northern Europe. 2. Robert S. Pelton, From Power to Communion (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1994), 64. 3. Mácio Azevedo, Basic Ecclesial Communities (Washington, DC: Georgetown University, 1987). 4. Yves Congar, O.P.: “Not the Walls but the Faithful Are the Church,” Christians Active in the World, (New York: Herder & Herder, 1968). 5. Yves Congar, O.P., trans. Paul Philbert, True and False Reform in the Church (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2011); Originally published as Vraie et fausse réforme dans l’Eglise, (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1950). 6. Liberación a través de Cristo, July 2007, editorial. 7. Pope Francis, television interview with “O Globo” Brazilian television network on the eve of Francis’s July 28 return flight to Rome, July 27, 2013. 8. Kjell Nordstokke, “Christian Base Communities (CBE)”, Encyclopedia of Latin American Religions, https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-3-319-08956-0_ 196-1; also, see Luis Alberto Gómez de Souza, “¿ahora Francisco después de la Jornada,” Paginas 231, Septiembre 2013, 7. 9. Thomas  M.  Kelly, “Ecclesiology in Context,” in his When the Gospel Grows Feet (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2013). 10. Edward Cleary, “The Catholic Charismatic Renewal: Revitalization Movements and Conversion”, 153–173, in Timothy Steigenga and Edward L. Cleary, eds., Conversion of a Continent (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009). 11. Francisco Orofino, CEBs e os desafios do mundo contemporâneo (São Paulo: Paulus, 2012). 12. Robert Pelton, “Learning from the Cuban House Churches”, in Small Christian Communities Today: Capturing the New Moment, eds. Joseph G. Healey, Jeanne Hinton. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005), Chapter 2. 13. John Paul II, The Church in America (Ecclesia in America) (January 22, 1999), http:// w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_jp-ii_exh_ 22011999_ecclesia-in-america.html. 14. Ibid., N41. 15. Robert S. Pelton, “Medellín and Puebla: Dead or Alive in the 21st Century Catholic Church?” in his Aparecida: quo vadis? (Scranton, PA: University of Scranton, 2008), 33.

Catholic Laity in the Latin American Church   521 16. Pierre Sauvage, “Los obispos latinoamericanos en el grupo” and “Jesús, la iglesia y los pobres,” durante el concilio Vaticano II, Paginas 231, Septiembre 2013. 17. Code of Canon Law, Book II: The People of God (Liber II) De populo dei), Part I, Title I: The Obligations and Rights of All the Christian Faithful. (Cann. 208–223), Can. 222:§2. 18. Gómez de Souza, “¿ahora Francisco después de la Jornada,” 233. 19. Pelton, “Medellín and Puebla,” 33. 20. Synthesis of Contributions Received for the Fifth General Conference (CELAM, 2006). 21. Ibid. 22. J. Healey and J. Hinton, eds., Small Christian Communities Today (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005). 23. Encuentro nacional eclesial cubano (Amigo del Hogar, 1988), 110. 24. John L. Allen, “Benedict’s Priorities: Feeding Humanity’s Spiritual and Material Hunger” (NCR, May 11, 2007), https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/all-things-catholic/benedictspriorities-feeding-humanitys-spiritual-and-material-hunger. 25. Encuentro nacional eclesial cubano. 26. Robert Pelton, “Learning from the Cuban House Churches,” in Small Christian Communities Today, eds. J. Healey and J. Hinton (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005). 27. Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean, Concluding arizona.edu/~katie/kt/misc/ Document Aparecida, 13–31 May 2007 https://www.ltrr.­ Apercida/Aparecida-document-for-printing.pdf. 28. Robert Hurteau, A Worldwide Heart: The Life of Fr. John Considine, M.M. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013).; Donald J. Mueller and Jacqueline Hansen Maggiore, Fluent in Faith: The Gift of Mary McCormick (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University, 2012). 29. See https://socialconcerns.nd.edu/content/postgraduate-service. 30. Information from Maryknoll archives and a report prepared by Sam Stanton, Director of the MKLM program—used with permission. 31. Dom Luiz Gomez, Do Vaticano II a um novo Concilio (Loyola, 2004); Francisco Orofino, CEBs e os desafios do mundo contemporaneo (Paulus, 2013).

Complete Bibliography

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526   complete bibliography Bedford, Nancy. La porfía de la resurrección. Ensayos desde el feminismo teológico latinoamericano, Buenos Aires: Kairós, 2008. Bedford, Nancy, and Harold Segura, eds. Sigamos a Jesús en su reino de vida: Cuaderno de participación del quinto congreso latinoamericano de evangelización (CLADE V), Buenos Aires: Ediciones Kairós, 2011. Bedford, Nancy, and Harold Segura. Church: Charism and Power. New York, NY: Crossroad, 1985 (1981). Bedford, Nancy, and Harold Segura, Espiritualidad. Un camino de transformación. Santander: Sal Térrae, 2002. Beecher, Maureen Ursenbach, and Lavina Fielding Anderson. Sisters in Spirit: Mormon Women in Historical and Cultural Perspective. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Belda Plans, Juan. La escuela de Salamanca y la renovación de la teología en el siglo XVI. Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 2000. Benedict XVI. “Inaugural Address to the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean.” May 13, 2007. http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/ speeches/2007/may/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20070513_conference-aparecida. Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1992 [1989]. Bennet, Adam. “Madres de La Plaza de Mayo.” University of Texas at Austin. https://webspace. utexas.edu/cmr485/www/mothers/history.html. Bennett, Herman  L. Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003. Bennett, Herman L. Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 2009. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Bennion, Lowell C., and Lawrence A. Young. “The Uncertain Dynamics of LDS Expansion, 1950–2020.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 29 (1996), 8–32. Benson, Devyn Spence. “Owning the Revolution: Race, Revolution, and Politics from Havana to Miami, 1959–1963.” Journal of Transnational American Studies 4, no. 2 (2012), 1–30. Benson, John  T., Jr. Holiness Organized or Unorganized? A History 1898–1915 Pentecostal Mission. Nashville, TN: Trevecca Press, 1977. Berger, Peter, and Thomas Luckmann. Modernidade, pluralismo e crise de sentido. Petrópolis: Vozes, 2004. Bermúdez, Fernando. Espiritualidad desde América Latina: Lucha y contemplación. Guatemala: Kyrios, 2004. Berryman, Phillip. The Religious Roots of Rebellion: Christians in Central American Revolutions. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984. Berryman, Phillip. “What Happened at Puebla.” In Churches and Politics in Latin America, ed. Daniel H. Levine, 55–86. London: Sage Publications, 1979. Berryman, Phillip, “La generación Medellín y sus sucesores.” In A esperança dos pobres vive: Coletânea em homenagem aos 80 anos de José Comblin. São Paulo: Paulus, 2003. Berryman, Phillip. Latin America at 200: A New Introduction. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2016. Betances, Emelio. “The Catholic Church and Political Mediation in the Dominican Republic: A Comparative Perspective.” Journal of Church and State 46 (2004), 341–364. Betto (Frei). 17 días de la Iglesia Latinoamericana. México DF: Centro de Reflexión Teológica, 1979.

complete bibliography   527 Beuchot, Mauricio. Los fundamentos de derechos humanos en Bartolomé de las Casas. Barcelona: Anthropos Editorial, 1994. Bidegain, Ana María. “From Catholic Action to Liberation Theology: The Historical Process of the Laity in Latin America in the Twentieth Century.” The Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame, Working Paper 48, November 1985, 1–26. Birchard, Russell, and Margaret Anderson. Richard Simpson Anderson: Pioneer Missionary to Central America. Kansas City, MO: Nazarene, 1990. Blancarte, Roberto. “The Changing Face of Religion in the Democratization of Mexico: The Case of Catholicism.” In Religious Pluralism, Democracy, and the Catholic Church in Latin America, ed. Frances Hagopian. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009. Boff, Clodovis. Cartas Teológicas sobre o Socialismo. Petrópolis: Vozes, 1989. Boff, Leonard. Christianity in a Nutshell. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013. Boff, Leonardo. Church: Charism and Power: Liberation Theology and the Institutional Church. New York: Crossroads, 1985. Boff, Leonardo. Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997. Boff, Clodovis. “Is the distinction between Ecclesia docens and Ecclesia discens justified?” Concilium 148 (1981), 47–51. Boff, Leonardo. Ecclesiogensis: The Base Communities Reinvent the Church. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986. Boff, Clodovis. “Las eclesiologías presentes en las comunidades eclesiales de base.” Páginas 5–6 (1976), 16–23. Boff, Leonardo. “La espiritualidad franciscana frente al desafío del desequilibrio ecológico.” Selecciones de franciscanismo, no. 27 (1980), 315–328. Boff, Leonardo. Espiritualidad: Un camino de transformación. Santander: Sal Térrae, 2002. Boff, Leonard. Una espiritualidad liberadora. Navarra: Verbo Divino, 1992. Boff, Clodovis. Feet-on-the-Ground Theology: A Brazilian Journey. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1987. Boff, Leonardo. Francis of Rome and Francis of Assisi: A New Spring in the Church. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2014. Boff, Leonardo. “Integral Ecology: The Big News about Laudato Si: A special interview with Leonardo Boff,” by Patricia Fachin and Joao Vitor Santos, Iglesia descalza: A voice from the margins of the Catholic Church. June 18, 2015. http://iglesiadescalza.blogspot.com/2015/06/ integral-ecology-big-news-of-laudato-si.html Boff, Leonardo. “The Magna Carta of integral ecology: Cry of the Earth, Cry of the poor,” Earth Charter International, June 18, 2015. http://www.earthcharterinaction.org/content/ articles/1149/1/Article-by-Leonardo-Boff-on-the-Popes-Encyclical/Page1.html Boff, Leonardo. “Social Ecology: Poverty and Misery.” In Ecotheology: Voices from the North and South ed. David G. Hallman. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994. Boff, Leonardo. “Trinity.” In Mysterium liberationis: Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology, ed. Ignacio Ellacuría and Jon Sobrino. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993. Boff, Leonardo. Trinity and Society. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988. Boff, Leonardo, and Frei Betto. Mística y espiritualidad. Madrid: Trotta, 1999. Bogenschild, Thomas. “The Roots of Fundamentalism in Liberal Guatemala: Missionary Ideologies and Local Response, 1882–1944,” PhD diss, University of California, 1992. Bogenschild, Thomas Edward. “The Roots of Fundamentalism in Western Guatemala, 1900–1944.” Paper presented at the Latin American Studies Association Meeting, Crystal City, Virgina, April 4, 1991.

528   complete bibliography Bolivian Bishops’ Conference. “The Universe, Gift of God for Life: Pastoral Letter on The Environment and Human Development.” Cuaresma, Bolivia: Fundación Jubileo, 2012. Bonaventure. The Journey of the Mind to God. Trans. Philotheus Boehner. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, [1956] 1993. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Redimidos para lo humano. Cartas y diarios (1924–1942). Salamanca: Ediciones Sígueme, 1979. Bonner, Jeremy et al., eds. Empowering the People of God: Catholic Action Before and After Vatican II. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2014. Bonnin, Eduardo. “La problemática del ambiente en el documento de Puebla.” In ¿Volverán las golondrinas? La reintegración de la creación desde una perspectiva latinoamericana, ed. Hedstrom, Ingemar. San José: Departamento Ecuménica de Investigaciones, 1990. Boudewijnse, Barbara, André Droogers, and Frans Kamsteeg, eds. More than Opium: An Anthropological Approach to Latin American and Caribbean Pentecostal Praxis. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 1998. Bourdieu, Pierre. A economia das trocas simbolicas. São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 2002. Bouvier, Virginia  M. Alliance or Compliance: Implications of the Chilean Experience for the Catholic Church in Latin America. New York, NY: Foreign and Comparative Studies/Latin American Series 3. Syracuse, NY: Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, 1983. Bowler, Kate. Blessed: A History of American Prosperity Gospel. New York, NY: Oxford, 2010. Bowman, Matthew Burton. The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith. New York, NY: Random House, 2012. Bowser, Frederick  P. The African Slave in Colonial Peru 1524–1650. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974. Boyarin, Jonathan. The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Boylan, Kristina A. “Gendering the Faith and Altering the Nation: Mexican Catholic Women’s Activism, 1917–1940.” In Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico, ed. Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughn, and Gabriela Cano. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Brading, David A. Church and State in Bourbon Mexico. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Brading, David A. The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots and the Liberal State, 1492–1867. Rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Brading, David A. Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Brands, Hal. Latin America’s Cold War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Brenneman, Robert. Homies and Hermanos: God and Gangs in Central America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Brett, Annabel  S. Liberty, Right and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Brett, Annabel  S. “Scholastic Political Thought and the Modern Concept of the State.” In Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ed. Annabel Brett and James Tully with Holly Hamilton Bleakley, 130–148. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Brett, Edward. “Archbishop Arturo Rivera Damas and the Struggle for Social Justice in El Salvador.” The Catholic Historical Review 94, no. 4 (2008), 717–739. Bricker, Victoria Reifler. The Indian Christ, the Indian King: The Historical Substrate of Maya Myth and Ritual. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981.

complete bibliography   529 Bristol, Joan Cameron. “Afro-Mexican Saintly Devotion in a Mexico City Alley.” In Africans to Spanish America: Expanding the Diaspora. ed. Sherwin K. Bryant, Rachel Sarah O’Toole, and Ben Vinson III, 114–35. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2014. Brockett, Charles. Political Movements and Violence in Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Brooke, James. “Two Archbishops, Old and New, Symbolize Conflict in the Brazilian Church.” The New York Times, November 12, 1989. Brown, Candy Gunther, ed. Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011. Brown, Michael  F. “Beyond Resistance: A Comparative Study of Utopian Renewal in Amazonia.” Ethnohistory 38, no. 4 (Autumn 1991), 388–413. Brown Scott, James. The Spanish Origin of International Law: Francisco de Vitoria and His Law of Nations. Oxford: Clarendon, 1934. Brown, Vincent. The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Brufau Prats, Jaime. La escuela de Salamanca ante el descubrimiento del Nuevo Mundo. Salamanca: Editorial San Esteban, 1989. Brun, Tony. “Social Ecology: A Timely Paradigm for Reflection and Praxis for Life in Latin America.” In Ecotheology: Voices from the North and South, Hallman, David G. Hallman, ed. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994. Bruneau, Thomas C. The Church in Brazil: The Politics of Religion. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1982. Bruneau, Thomas C. The Political Transformation of the Brazilian Catholic Church. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974. Brusco, Elizabeth  E. The Reformation of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion and Gender in Colombia. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1995. Buchenau, Jürgen. Plutarco Elías Calles and the Mexican Revolution. Denver, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006. Bulman, Raymond F., and Frederick J. Parrella, eds. From Trent to Vatican II: Historical and Theological Investigations. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006. Bunzel, Ruth. Chichicastenango: A Guatemalan Village. Locust Valley, NY: J. J. Augustin, 1952. Burdick, John. Looking for God in Brazil: The Progressive Catholic Church in Urban Brazil’s Religious Arena. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993. Burdick, John. Legacies of Liberation: The Progressive Catholic Church in Brazil at the Start of the New Millenium. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. Burdick, John. “Why Is the Black Evangelical Movement Growing in Brazil?” Journal of Latin American Studies 37, no. 2 (2005), 311–332. Burdick, Michael A. For God and Fatherland: Religion and Politics in Argentina. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995. Burgess, Paul. Justo Rufino Barrios: A Biography. Quetzaltenango, Guatemala: El Noticiero Evangélico, 1946. Burgess, Stanley  M., and Gary  R.  McGee, eds. Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1988. Burkhart, Louise M. “The Destruction of Jerusalem as Colonial Nahuatl Historical Drama,” The Conquest All Over Again: Nahuas and Zapotecs Thinking, Writing, and Painting Spanish Colonialism, ed. Susan Schroeder. Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 2010, 74–100. Burkhart, Louise. The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1989.

530   complete bibliography Burkhart, Louise. Before Guadalupe: The Virgin Mary in Early Colonial Nahuatl Literature. Albany, NY: Institute of Mesoamerican Studies, 2001. Burns, Kathryn. Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Burkhart, Louise  M. Holy Wednesday: A Nahua Drama from Early Colonial Mexico. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Bushman, Richard Lyman. Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2007. Busto Duthurburu, J. A. de San Martín de Porras (Martín de Porras Velásquez). Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1992. Butler, Matthew. Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico’s Cristero Rebellion: Michoacán, 1927–29. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Butler, Matthew. “Keeping the Faith in Revolutionary Mexico: Clerical and Lay Resistance to Religious Persecution, East Michoacán, 1926–1929.” The Americas 59, no. 1 (2002), 9–32. Butler, Matthew, ed. Faith and Impiety in Revolutionary Mexico. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe. Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2011. Cabestrero, Teófilo. Los teólogos en Puebla. Madrid: PPC, 1979. Calancha, Antonio de la, Corónica moralizada del orden de San Agustín en el Perú. ed. Ignacio Prado Pastor, 6 vols. Lima: Universidad de San Marcos, 1974. Calder, Bruce. “Interwoven histories: The Catholic Church and the Maya, 1940 to the Present.” In Resurgent Voices in Latin America: Indigenous Peoples, Political Mobilization, and Religious Change. E. Cleary and T. Steigenga, eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 2004. Calvo, Roberto. “The Church and the Doctrine on National Security.” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 21, no. 1 (1979), 69–88. Cameron, Euan. The Reformation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Campos, Bernardo. “Identity and Function of Pentecostalism in the Processes of Social Change.” Pentecostalidad: Revista Latinoamericana de Teología Pentecostal, 2002. http:// www.pentecostalidad.4t.com/articulos.html. Canavesio, June. “International Pentecostal Holiness Church, Guatemalan History for Simultaneous Principle.” International Pentecostal Holiness Church Archives and Research Center, Oklahoma City, OK. Unpublished manuscript, 2005. Cañas, Mercedes and Gladis Lemus. “Surviving with Dignity: Complexities of Sustainable Human Development.” Canadian Women Studies 23, no. 1 (2003), 153–158. Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Canton, William. A History of the British and Foreign Bible Society, vol. 5. London: John Murray, 1910. Cantón Delgado, Manuela. Bautizados en fuego: Protestantes, discursos de conversión y política en Guatemala (1989–1993). South Woodstock, VT; Antigua, Guatemala: Plumsock Mesoamerican Studies/CIRMA, 1999. Cardenal, Ernesto. The Gospel in Solentiname. Trans. Donald D. Walsh. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1982. Cardenal, Ernesto. Telescopio en la noche oscura. Madrid: Trotta, 1993. Cardenal, Rodolfo. “The Catholic Church and the Politics of Accommodation in Honduras.” In Church and Politics in Latin America, ed. Dermot Keogh. London: Macmillan, 1990.

complete bibliography   531 Cárdenas Bunsen, José Alejandro. Escritura y derecho canónico en la obra de fray Bartolomé de las Casas. Barcelona: Editorial Austral, 2011. Carozza, Paolo G. From Conquest to Constitutions: Retrieving a Latin American Tradition of the Idea of Human Rights. South Bend, IN: Notre Dame Law School Scholarly Works, 2003. Carpentier, Alejo. “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real.” In Representation, Transculturation, Counterconques, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy  B.  Faris, 75–89. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Carr, Raymond. Puerto Rico: A Colonial Experiment. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1984. Carranza, Brenda. Renovação carismática católica: Origens, mudanças e tendências. Aparecida: Santuário, 2000. Carranza, Brenda. Catolicismo midiático. São Paulo: Ideias & Letras, 2011. Carranza, Brenda. “A JMJ cristalizou a consagração da cultura gospel católica no Brasil.” In O Papa Francisco no Brasil, alguns olhares. cadernos de teologia pública, Unisinos, ano VII, n. 79 (2013), 31–37. Carranza, Brenda. “Carismáticos e pentecostais, concorrentes e aliados.” Paper presented at the annual international meeting for National Association of postgraduate and research in Social Sciences [ANPOCCS]. Águas de Lindóia, São Paulo, Brasil, September 23–27, 2013. Carranza, Brenda, and Cecília Mariz. “Catholicism for Export: The Case of Canção Nova.” In A diáspora das religiões brasileiras, ed. Cristina Rocha and Manuel Vásquez, 143–167. São Paulo: Ideias & Letras, 2013. Carro, Venancio  D. “The Spanish Theological-Juridical Renaissance and the Ideology of Bartolomé de Las Casas.” In Bartolomé de las Casas in History: Toward an Understanding of the Man and His Work, ed. Juan Friede and Benjamin Keen, 237–277. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971. Carroll, Patrick  J. Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity, and Regional Development. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, [1991] 2001. Carter, Miguel. “The Landless Rural Workers Movement and Democracy in Brazil.” Special issue, Latin American Research Review 45 (2010), 186–217. Carter, Miguel. For Land, Love and Justice: The Origins of Brazil’s Landless Social Movement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Carvalho, Marcus  J.M.  de. “Agostinho José Pereira: The Divine Teacher.” In The Human Tradition in Modern Brazil, ed. Peter M. Beattie, 23–52. Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2004. Casaldáliga, Pedro, and José María Vigil. Political Holiness: Toward a Spirituality of Liberation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994. Casanova, José. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Castañeda Delgado, Paulino. La teocracia pontifical en las controversias sobre el Nuevo Mundo. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas, 1996. Castillo, José María. El seguimiento de Jesús. Salamanca: Sígueme, 1992. Castro, Daniel. Another Face of Empire: Bartolomé de las Casas, Indigenous Rights, and Ecclesiastical Imperialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Castro, Luis Emilio. Espiritualidad misionera, Bogotá: Ediciones Paulinas, 1991. Catholic Church, Province of Lima, Concilio Provincial, Confessionario para los curas de Indios: con la instrucción contra sus ritos y exhortacion para ayudar a bien morir . . . .1583, Proemio A2 Available on line at https://archive.org/details/confessionariopa00cath.

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534   complete bibliography Cleary, Edward  L., and Timothy  J.  Steigenga, eds. Resurgent Voices in Latin America: Indigenous Peoples, Political Mobilization, and Religious Change. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Clendinnen, Inga. Ambivalent Conquests. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Clendinnen, Inga. “Disciplining the Indians: Franciscan Ideology and Missionary Violence in Sixteenth-Century Yucatán,” Past and Present, 94 (February 1982), 27–48. Codina, Victor. “Evangelizar 500 Años Después” Cuarto intermedio, 5 (1987), 34–51. Cohn, Norman. “Medieval Millenarism: Its Bearing on the Comparative Study of Millenarian Movements.” In Millennial Dreams in Action, ed. Sylvia L. Thrupp. New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1970. Coke, Hugh Milton. “An Ethnohistory of Bible Translation Among the Maya.” PhD diss., Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA, 1978. Coleman, Janet. A History of Political Thought: From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000. Collier, David. The New Authoritarianism in Latin America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979. Collier, George, and Elisabeth Lowery Quaratiello. Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas. Rev. ed. Oakland, CA: Food First Books, 1999. Comaroff, Jean and John L. Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Comblin, José. “Algumas questões a partir da prática das comunidades eclesiais de base no nordeste.” Revista eclesiástica brasileira 50, Fasc. 198 (1990), 335–381. Comblin, José. Called for Freedom: The Changing Context of Liberation Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998. Comblin, José. O espírito santo e a tradição de Jesus. São Bernardo do Campo: Nhanduti Editora, 2012. Comité Nacional de Alfabetización (CONALFA). “Proyecciones de población 2009 con base en el censo de población 2002, INE y registro de participantes en los procesos de alfabetización, año 2009.” Guatemala: Área de Estadística de la Unidad de Informática y Estadística, July 30, 2010. Conclusiones del IV Congreso Católico (Oaxaca: La voz de la verdad, 1909). Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Sacerdotium Ministeriale, 1983. Congar, Yves, O.P. “Not the Walls but the Faithful are the Church.” In Christians Active in the World. New York, NY: Herder & Herder, 1968. Congar, Yves, O.P. True and False Reform in the Church. Trans. Paul Philbert. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2011. Conn, Charles W. Where the Saints Have Trod: A History of Church of God Missions. Cleveland, TN: Pathway Press, 1959. Connaughton, Brian. “¿Politización de la religión o nueva sacralización de la política? El sermón en las mutaciones públicas de 1808–24.” In Religión, política e identidad en la independencia de México, ed. Brian Connaughton. Mexico: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana and Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 2010. Connaughton, Brian. Dimensiones de la identidad patriótica: religión, política y regiones en México, siglo XIX. 1. ed. Biblioteca de signos, 8. México, DF: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana. Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano, Primera conferencia general del episcopado latinoamericano: Documento conclusivo. http://www.celam.org/doc_conferencias/Documento_Conclusivo_ Rio.pdf

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538   complete bibliography Droogers, André. “Paradoxical Views on a Paradoxical Religion.” In More than Opium: An Anthropological Approach to Latin American and Caribbean Pentecostal Praxis, ed. Barbara Boudewijnse, André Droogers, and Frans Kamsteeg. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 1998, 1–34. Dudley, Steven. “The El Salvador Gang Truce and the Church: What Was the Role of the Catholic Church?” CLAS White Paper Series, no. 1 (2013). Duffy, John-Charles. “Mapping Book of Mormon Historicity Debates, Part 2: Perspectives from the Sociology of Knowledge.” Sunstone no. 152 (2008), 46–69. Duque, J. Gutiérrez, G, eds. Itinerario de la razón crítica: Un homenaje a Franz Hinkelammert en sus 70 años. San José: DEI, 2001. Durán, Diego. The History of the Indies of New Spain. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971. Durán, Diego. Historia de las indias de nueva España e islas de tierra firme, 2 vols. Mexico City: Porrúa, 1967. Durkheim, Emile. Suicide: A Study in Sociology. New York, NY: Free Press, 1966 [1897]. Dussel, Enrique. Ethics and Community. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988. Dussel, Enrique. “Exodus as a Paradigm in Liberation Theology.” Concilium 189 (1987), 83–92. Dussel, Enrique. A History of the Church in Latin America: Colonialism to Liberation (1492–1979). Translated by A. Neely. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1981. Dussel, Enrique. The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity. Trans. Michael D. Barber. New York, NY: Continuum, 1995. Dussel, Enrique. Teología de la Liberación Ética: Caminos de liberación latinoamericana II. Buenos Aires: Latinoamericana Libros SRL, 1974. Dussel, Enrique. ed. The Church in Latin America (Tunbridge Wells, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992). Dussel, Enrique and Felipe Espinosa. “Puebla: Crónica e historia.” Cristus (1979), 520–521. Edmonds, Amy. “Moral Authority and Authoritarianism: The Catholic Church and the Military Regime in Uruguay.” Journal of Church and State 55, no. 3 (2013), 1–26. Edmonds, Ennis B., and Michelle A. González. Caribbean Religious History: An Introduction. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2010. Edwards, Lisa Marie. “Latin American Seminary Reform: Modernization and the Preservation of the Catholic Church.” The Catholic Historical Review 95, no. 2 (2009), 261–282. Edwards, Lisa  M. Roman Virtues: The Education of the Latin American Clergy in Rome, 1858–1962. New York: Peter Lang, 2011. Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communication and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe. Vols. I and II in one volume. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Elizondo, Virgilio. “Maria de Guadalupe Star of the First and New Evangelization.” In La Recepcion Eclesial de la Doctrina Conciliar Sobre Maria. 2006. http://www.virgilioelizondo. com/docs/ Elizondo, Virgilio. “Mary and the Poor: A Model of Evangelizing Ecumenism.” In Concilium: Religion in the Eighties: Mary in the Churches. ed. Hans Küng and Jürgen Moltmann. New York, NY: Seabury Press, 1989. Elizondo, Virgilio P. Gudalupe: Mother of the New Creation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997. Elizondo, Virgilio, Allan Figueroa Deck, Timothy Matovina, eds. The Treasure of Guadalupe. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006. Ellacuría, Ignacio. Freedom Made Flesh: The Mission of Christ and His Church. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1976.

complete bibliography   539 Ellacuría, Ignacio. “Church of the Poor, Historical Sacrament of Liberation.” In Mysterium liberationis: Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology, ed. Ignacio Ellacuría and Jon Sobrino, 543–563. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004. Ellacuría, Ignacio. “Utopia and Prophecy in Latin America.” In Mysterium liberationis: Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology, ed. Ignacio Ellacuría and Jon Sobrino, 289–327. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004. Ellacuría, Ignacio, and Jon Sobrino, eds. Misterium liberationis: Conceptos fundamentales de la teología de la liberación, 2 vols. San Salvador: UCA, 1990. Elliott, John H. Imperial Spain, 1469–1716. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1963. Elliot, John H. Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830. New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2006. Escalante, Pablo. “El patrocinio del arte indocristiano.” In Patrocinio, colección y circulación de las artes. ed. Gustavo Curiel. Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de México, 1997, 215–235. Escobar, Jaime. Persecución a la Iglesia en Chile: Martirologio, 1973–1986. Santiago: Terranova Editores, 1986. Escobar, Samuel. La fe evangélica y las teologías de la liberación. El Paso, TX: Casa Bautista de Publicaciones, 1987. Escobar, Samuel. Changing Tides, Latin America & World Mission Today. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002. Escobar, Samuel. En busca de Cristo en América Latina. Buenos Aires: Kairós, 2012. Espinal, Luis, Oraciones a quemarropa. Cochabamba: Verbo Divino, 2002. Espinosa, Gastón. “The Pentecostalization of Latin American and U.S. Latino Christianity.” Pneuma: The Journal for the Society of Pentecostal Studies 26, no. 2 (Academic Brill, Fall 2004), 262–292. Estrada Adorno, Wilfredo. Pastores o políticos con sotanas: pastoral de la guardarraya de Vieques. San Juan: Editorial Guardarrayas, Fundación Puerto Rico, Evangélico, 2003. Ethnologue. http://www.ethnologue.com/country/GT Evensen, Bruce J. “ ‘It Is a Marvel to Many People’: Dwight L. Moody, Mass Media, and the New England Revival of 1877.” The New England Quarterly 72, no. 2 (1999), 251–274. Falla, Ricardo. Quiché Rebelde: Religious Conversion, Politics and Ethnic Identity in Guatemala. Austin, TX, University of Texas Press, 2001. Fallaw, Ben. Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Farias, Roberto and Ignácio Coqueiro, “Decadência.” Rede Globo de Televisão, September 5, 1995. Farriss, Nancy  M. Maya Society under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Farriss, Nancy  M. “Remembering the Future, Anticipating the Past: History, Time, and Cosmology Among the Maya of Yucatan,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 29, no. 3 (1987), 566–593. Fedders, Edward “How the Aymara See Our Priesthood” LADOC 53 (1974), 30–35. Fernandez Anderson, Cora. The Impact of Social Movements on State Policy: Human Rights and Women’s Movements in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 2011. Fernández-Armesto, Felipe. 1492: The Year the World Began. New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2009.

540   complete bibliography Fernández, J., Apostólica y penitente vida de el V.  P.  Pedro Claver de la Compañia de Jesus sacada principalmente de informaciones juridicas hechas antes el ordinario de la ciudad de Cartagena de Indias. Zaragoza: Diego Dormer, 1666. Fernández-Santamaria, José. The State, War and Peace: Spanish Political Thought in the Renaissance, 1516–1559. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Few, Martha. Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion, & the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002. Fife, John, “From The Sanctuary Movement to No More Deaths: The Challenge to Communities of Faith,” Religious and Ethical Perspectives on Global Migration, ed. Elizabeth W. Collier and Charles R. Strain. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 257–272. Fitzpatrick-Behrens, Susan. The Maryknoll Catholic Mission in Peru, 1943–1989: Transnational Faith and Transformation. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. Fitzpatrick-Behrens, Susan. “From Symbols of the Sacred to Symbols of Subversion to Simply Obscure: Maryknoll Women Religious in Guatemala, 1953–1967.” The Americas 61, no. 2 (October 2004), 189–216. Fitzpatrick-Behrens, Susan. “Maryknoll Sisters, Faith, Healing, and the Maya Construction of Catholic Communities in Guatemala.” Latin American Research Review 44, no. 3 (2009), 27–49. Fleet, Michael, and Brian H. Smith. The Catholic Church and Democracy in Chile and Peru. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000 [1997]. Florescano, Enrique. Memoria mexicana: Ensayo sobre la reconstrucción del pasado, época ­prehispá–1821. Mexico City: Editorial Joaquín Moritz, 1987. Florescano, Enrique. Memory, Myth, and Time in Mexico: From the Aztecs to Independence. Trans. Albert G. Bork and Kathryn R. Bork. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1994. Folgado, Avelino. Evolución histórica del concepto del derecho subjetivo: estudio especial en los teólogos-juristas españoles del siglo xvi. Madrid: San Lorenzo del Escorial: 1960. Foucault, Michel. “Governmentality.” In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. G. Burchall, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, 87–104. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Fowler, Will, and Humberto Morales Moreno, eds. El conservadurismo mexicano en el siglo XIX. Puebla: Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 1999. Fox, Thomas C. “Leonardo Boff: Major Pope Francis supporter.” National Catholic Reporter, March 16, 2013. Franco, Jean, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America and the Cold War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Franklin, V. P. “Alonso de Sandoval and the Jesuit Conception of the Negro.” Journal of Negro History 58, no. 3 (1973), 349–360. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York, NY: Continuum, 2000. Freston, Paul. Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Latin America. Oxford: University Press, 2008. Freston, Paul. Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa and Latin America. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Freston, Paul. “Protestantes e política no Brasil: da constituinte ao impeachment.” PhD diss., Departamento de Ciências Sociais do Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 1993. Freston, Paul, “Pentecostalism in Brazil: A Brief History,” Religion 25, no. 2 (1995), 119–133.

complete bibliography   541 Freston, Paul. “Religious Pluralism, Democracy and Human Rights in Latin America.” In Religion and the Global Politics of Human Rights, ed. Thomas Banchoff and Robert Wuthnow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Freston, Paul. “Reverse Mission: A Discourse in Search of Reality?” PentecoStudies 9, no. 2 (2010), 153–174. Freyre, Gilberto. The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986. Frye, Northrop. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. Gagliarducci, Andrea. “The ‘Theology of the People’, According to Pope Francis,” Catholic News Agency. April 27, 2015. http://insidethevatican.com/author/andrea-gagliarducci Galilea, Segundo. El camino de la espiritualidad. 6th ed. Bogotá: San Pablo, 2004. Galilea, Segundo. Salvación de los pecadores y liberación de los pobres, Revista Selecciones de Teología, http://seleccionesdeteologia.net/selecciones/llib/vol15/60/060_galilea.pdf Gallaher, Carolyn. “The Role of Protestant Missionaries in Mexico’s Indigenous Awakening.” Bulletin of Latin American Research 26, no. 1 (2007), 88–111. Gálvez, Alyshia. Guadalupe in New York: Devotion and the Struggle for Citizenship /Rights among Mexican Immigrants. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2010. García-Ruiz, Jesús and Patrick Michel, “Neopentecostalism in Latin America: Contribution to a Political Anthropology of Globalization. International Social Science Journal. 61, no. 202 (2010), 411–424. Garibay, K., Ángel María. “The Spiritual Motherhood of Mary.” In The Handbook on Guadalupe, 9–16. New York, NY: Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, 1997. Garibay, K., Ángel María. “Temas Guadalupanos.” Abside IX, no. 1 (1945): 35–64, 155–169, 243–259, 381–420. Garrard-Burnett, Virginia. Protestantism in Guatemala: Living in the New Jerusalem. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1998. Garrard-Burnett, Virginia. Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala Under General Efraín Ríos Montt, 1982–1983. Oxford University Press, 2010. Garrard-Burnett, Virginia. “ ‘God Was Already Here When Columbus Arrived;’ Inculturation Theology and the Maya Movement in Guatemala” In Resurgent Voices in Latin America: Indigenous Peoples, Political Mobilization, and Religious Change, ed. Timothy Steigenga and Edward L. Cleary. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 2004. Garrard-Burnett, Virginia. “Identity, Community, and Religious Change Among Protestant Maya in Chiapas and Guatemala.” Journal of Hispanic and Latino Theology. 6, no. 1 (1998) 61–79. Garrard-Burnett, Virginia. “Mayan Catholicism.” In The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, ed. Bron Taylor. London: Continuum, 2006. Garrard-Burnett, Virginia, and David Stoll. Rethinking Protestantism in Latin America. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993. García-Rivera, Alex. St. Martín de Porres: The ‘Little Stories’ and the Semiotics of Culture. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995. Gaudium et Spes [Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World]. Pope Paul VI. Vatican City, 1965. http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/ documents/vat-ii_cons_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html. Gebara, Ivonne. “Econfeminism: An Ethics of Life.” In Ecofeminism and Globalization: Exploring Culture, Context, and Religion, ed. Heather Eaton and Lois Ann Lorentzen. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.

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complete bibliography   543 Góngora, Mario. Studies in the Colonial History of Spanish America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. González Faus, Juan Ignacio, ed. La batalla de Puebla. Barcelona: Editorial Laia, 1980. González, Justo  L. Mañana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective. Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1990. González, Justo L. Teología liberadora. Enfoque desde la opresión en una tierra extraña, Buenos Aires: Kairós, 2006. González, Manuel G. Mexicanos: A History of Mexicans in the United States. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999. González Ondina, E., and Justo L. González. Christianity in Latin America: A History. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Gonzalez, Robert A. “The Phenomenon of the Guadalupe Apparitions at Tepeyacac in 1531.” N.P.: Unpublished Manuscript, 2010. Goodpasture, H. McKennie. Cross and Sword: An Eyewitness History of Christianity in Latin America. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1989. Goodwin, Jeff, and James Jasper. “Caught in a Winding, Snarling Vine: The Structural Bias of Political Process Theory.” Sociological Forum 14, no. 1 (March 1999), 27–54. Gooren, Henri. “The Catholic Charismatic Renewal in Latin America.” Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 34, no. 2 (2012), 185–207. Gooren, Henri. “Catholic and Non-Catholic Theologies of Liberation: Poverty, Selfimprovement, and Ethics among Small-scale Entrepreneurs in Guatemala City.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 41, no. 1 (2002), 29–45. Gooren, Henri. “Comparing Mormon and Adventist Growth Patterns in Latin America: The Chilean Case.” Dialogue 46, no. 3 (2013), 45–77. Gooren, Henri. “Conversion Narratives.” In Studying Global Pentecostalism: Theories and Methods, ed. Allan Anderson, Michael Bergunder, André Droogers, and Cornelis van der Laan, 93–112. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010. Gooren, Henri. “The Dynamics of LDS Growth in Guatemala, 1948–1998.” Dialogue 34, no. 3–4 (2001), 55–75. Gooren, Henri. “The Growth and Development of Non-Catholic Churches in Chile.” Review of Religious Research 57, no. 2 (2015), 191–218. Gooren, Henri. “The Growth and Development of Non-Catholic Churches in Paraguay.” In Spirit and Power: The Growth and Global Impact of Pentecostalism, ed. Donald  E.  Miller, Kimon H. Sargeant, and Richard Flory, 83–98. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013. Gooren, Henri. “The Mormons of the World: The Meaning of LDS Membership in Central America.” In Revisiting Thomas F. O’Dea’s “The Mormons”: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Cardell  K.  Jacobson, John  P.  Hoffman, and Tim  B.  Heaton, 362–378. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 2008. Gooren, Henri. “The Pentecostalization of Religion and Society in Latin America.” Exchange 39, no. 4, (2010), 355–376. Gooren, Henri. “The Pentecostalization of Religion and Society in Latin America: First findings from Chile.” In Papers from the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, SSS (Milwaukee, WI: October 28, 2011), 16–36. Gooren, Henri. “Reconsidering Protestant Growth in Guatemala, 1900–1995.” In Holy Saints and Fiery Preachers: The Anthropology of Protestantism in Mexico and Central America, ed. James W. Dow and Alan R. Sandstrom, 169–203. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001. Gooren, Henri. “The Religious Market in Nicaragua: The Paradoxes of Catholicism and Protestantism.” Exchange 32, no. 4 (2003), 340–360.

544   complete bibliography Gooren, Henri. Rich among the Poor: Church, Firm, and Household among Small-Scale Entrepreneurs in Guatemala City. Latin America Series, no. 13. Amsterdam: Thela, 1999. Gordon, C. “Governmental Rationality: An Introduction.” In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. G. Burchall, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, 152. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Gossen, Gary. “Comments on the Zapatista Movement.” Cultural Survival Quarterly, 18, no. 1 (1994). Gotay, Samuel Silva. Catolicismo y política en Puerto Rico bajo España y Estados Unidos: Siglos XIX y XX. San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 2005. Gotay, Samuel Silva. Protestantismo y política en Puerto Rico, 1898–1930: Hacia una historia del Protestantismo evangélico en Puerto Rico. Río Piedras: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1997. Goubaud Carrera, Antonio. “Notes on San Juan Chamelco, Alta Verapaz.” University of Chicago Microfilms, Manuscripts on Middle American Cultural Anthropology, no. 23, 1949. Grandin, Greg. “To End with All These Evils: Ethnic Transformation and Community Mobilization in Guatemala’s Western Highlands, 1954–1980.” Latin American Perspectives 24, no. 2 (1997), 7–34. Grandin, Greg. The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America and the Cold War. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Gratian. The Treatise on Laws. Trans. Augustine Thompson. With The Ordinary Gloss. Trans. James Gordley. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1993. Graziano, Frank. The Millennial New World. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999. Green, James  N. “Clerics, Exiles, and Academics: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States, 1969–1974.” Latin American Politics and Society 45, no. 1 (2003), 87–117. Greenberg, James. Santiago’s Sword. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981. Greenleaf, Richard E. Zumárraga and the Mexican Inquisition. Washington, DC: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1961. Greil, Arthur L. “Previous Dispositions and Conversion to Perspectives of Social and Religious Movements.” Sociological Analysis 38, no. 2 (1977), 115–125. Gremillion, Joseph, ed. The Gospel of Peace and Justice: Catholic Social Teaching since Pope John. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1976. Griffiths, Nicholas. The Cross and the Serpent: Religious Repression and Resurgence in Colonial Peru. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. Griffiths, Nicholas, and Fernando Cervantes. Spiritual Encounters: Christianity and Native Religions in Colonial America. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Grover, Mark L. “The Maturing of the Oak: The Dynamics of LDS Growth in Latin America.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 38, no. 2 (2005), 79–104. Grupo de Oração. “Planejamento estratégico de evangelização.” In Renovação Carismática Católica: Semeando a cultura de pentecostes, 2010–2017, ed. Brenda Carranza. Pelotas: Editora RCC, 2010. Gruzinski, Serge. The Conquest of Mexico: The Incorporation of Indian Societies into the Western World, 16th–18th Centuries. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993, 70–97. Gruzinski, Serge. Images at War: Mexico from Columbus to Blade Runner (1492–2019). Durham, NC: Duke, 2001. Gruzinski, Serge. Painting the Conquest: The Mexican Indians and the European Renaissance, trans. Deke Dusinberre. Paris: Flammarion, 1992.

complete bibliography   545 Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe. El Primero Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno [1615], ed. J.V. Murra, R. Adorno and J.L. Urioste, 3 vols. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1980. Guatemala: Memoria del silencio, Anexo 1: Vol. 1, Caso ilustrativo no. 56, Ejecución del Sacerdote Walter Voordeckers, shr.aaas.org/Guatemala/ceh/mds/Spanish/anexo1/vol1/. Guerra, François-Xavier, “La independencia de México y las revoluciones hispánicas.” In El liberalismo Mexicano, ed. Antonio Anino and Raymond Buve. Münster: Lit, 1993, 15–48. Guerrero  J., Bernardo. De indio a hermano: Pentecostalismo indígena en América Latina. Iquique, Chile: Ediciones campus, 2005. Guerrero-Rosado, Jose-Luis. A New Interpretation of the Story, Apparitions, and Image. Liguori, MO: Liguori Press, 2008. Guerrero-Rosado, Jose-Luis. El Nican Mopohua: un intent de exegesis. 2 Vols. Mexico, DF: Universidad Pontificia de México, A.C., 1996. Guerrero-Rosado, José-Luis. Nican Mopohua: Aquí se cuenta . . . el gran acontecimiento. México: Realidad Teoría y Práctica, S.A. de C.V. Cuautitlán, estado de México, 2003. Guevera-Gil, Armando and Frank Salomon “A Personal Visit: Colonial Political Ritual and the Making of Indians in the Andes,” Colonial Latin American Review 3, no. 1–2 (1994). Guido, Angel. Redescubrimiento de América en el arte. Rosario: Imprenta de la Universidad Litoral. Gutiérrez, Benjamin and Dennis Smith, eds. In the Power of the Spirit: The Pentecostal Challenge to Historic Churches in Latin America. Arkansas City, AR: Asociación de Iglesias Presbiterianas y Reformadas en América Latina; Centro Evangélico Latinoamericano de Estudios Pastorales; Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Worldwide Ministries Division, 1996. Gutiérrez, German. “Ethic of Life and Option for the Poor.” Latin American Liberation Theology: The Next Generation, ed. Ivan Petrella. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005. Gutiérrez, Gustavo. Acordarse de los pobres: Textos esenciales, Lima: Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Perú, 2004. Gutiérrez, Gustavo En busca de los pobres de Jesucristo: El pensamiento de Bartolomé de las Casas. Lima: CEP, 1992. Gutiérrez, Gustavo. Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993. Gutiérrez, Gustavo. “Church of the Poor.” In Born of the Poor: The Latin American Church since Medellín, ed. Edward L. Cleary. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990. Gutiérrez, Gustavo. We Drink from Our Own Wells: The Spiritual Journey of a People. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984. Gutiérrez, Gustavo. “Notes for a Theology of Liberation.” Theological Studies 31, no. 2 (1970), 243–261. Gutiérrez, Gustavo. “The Poor in the Church.” Concilium 104 (1977), 11–16. Gutiérrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation; History, Politics, and Salvation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988 [1971]. Gutiérrez, Gustavo. Teología de la liberación: Perspectivas. 16th ed. Salamanca: Sígueme, 1971. Gutiérrez, Gustavo, and Paul Farmer. In the Company of the Poor. Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books, 2015. Gutiérrez, Gustavo, and Gerhard Ludwig Müller. Del lado de los pobres: Teología de la liberación. Madrid: San Pablo, 2004. Gutiérrez, Gustavo, and Gerhard Ludwig Müller. On the Side of the Poor: The Theology of Liberation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013. Gutiérrez, Angel Luis. Evangélicos en Puerto Rico en la Época Española. Guaynabo: Editorial Chari, 1997.

546   complete bibliography Guzaro, Tomás and Terri Jacob McComb, Escaping the Fire: How an Ixil Mayan Pastor Led His People Out of a Holocaust during the Guatemalan Civil War. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2010. Guzman Bouvard, Marguerite. Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Books, 1994. Haas, Liesl. “The Catholic Church in Chile: New Political Alliances.” In Latin American Religion in Motion, ed. Christian Smith and Joshua Prokopy, 42–65. New York: Routledge, 1999. Habel, Norman  C., Roy  H.  May, and José E.  Ramírez. Tierra Prometida: Abraham, Josué y tierra sin exclusión. Ecuador: Abya-Yala/UPS Publicaciones, 2002. Hadsel, Heidi. “Profits, Parrots, Peons: Ethical Perplexities in the Amazon.” Ecological Resistance Movements: The Global Emergence of Radical and Popular Environmental Movements, ed. Taylor, Bron, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995. Hagopian, Frances. “Introduction: The New Landscape.” In Religious Pluralism, Democracy, and the Catholic Church in Latin America, ed. Frances Hagopian. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009. Hagopian, Frances. Religious Pluralism, Democracy, and the Catholic Church in Latin America. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009. Hale, Charles  A. Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 1821–1853. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968. Hale, Charles A. The Transformation of Mexican Liberalism in the Late Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Hale, Charles R. Más que un Indio/More than an Indian: Racial Ambivalence and Neoliberal Multiculturalism in Guatemala. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2004. Hale, Christopher. “Religious Institutions and Civic Engagement: A Test of Religion’s Impact on Political Activism in Mexico.” Comparative Politics 47, no. 1 (2015), 211–230. Halkes, Catharina. “Mary and Women.” In Concilium: Religion in the Eighties: Mary in the Churches. ed. Hans Küng and Jürgen Moltmann. New York, NY: Seabury Press, 1989. Hammond, John L. and Federico Rossi. “The Landless Workers Movement (MST) Brazil.” The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements ed. David A. Snow, Donatella della Porta, Bert Klandermans, and Doug McAdam. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Hanke, Lewis. The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, 1949. Hanke, Lewis. All Mankind is One. Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974. Hanna, Tony. New Ecclesial Movements: Communion and Liberation, Neo-Catechumenal Way, Charismatic Renewal. Staten Island, NY: Alba House, 2006. Hanson, Randall  S. “The Day of Ideals:’ Catholic Social Action in the Age of the Mexican Revolution, 1867–1929.” PhD diss., Indiana University-Bloomington, 1994. Harrison, Regina. Sin and Confession in Colonial Peru: Spanish-Quechua Penitential Texts, 1565–1650. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2014. Hartch, Todd. The Rebirth of Latin American Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Haskett, Robert  S. Visions of Paradise: Primordial Titles and Mesoamerican History in Cuernavaca. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005. Hassig, Ross. Time, History and Belief in Aztec and Colonial Mexico. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001. Hatch, Nathan. The Democratization of American Religion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989.

complete bibliography   547 Hathaway, Mark and Leonardo Boff. The Tao of Liberation: Exploring the Ecology of Transformation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2009. Haymaker, Edward  M. “Footnotes to the Beginnings of the Evangelical Movement in Guatemala.” Unpublished manuscript, Guatemala, 1946. Hays, Margaret  N. An Outline History of Fifty Years, 1922–1972. Guatemala City: Primitive Methodist International Mission Board, 1972. Healey, J. & J. Hinton, eds. Small Communities Today. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 2005. Hebblethwaite, Margaret. “How Base Communities Started: Paraguay’s Christian Agrarian Societies.” In Unfinished Journey: The Church 40 Years after Vatican II, ed. Austen Ivereigh, 240–256. London: Continuum, 2003. Hedström, Ingemar. Volverán las golondrinas?: La reintegración de la creación desde una perspectiva latinoamericana. San José, Costa Rica: Departamento Ecuménico de Investigaciones, Consejo Editorial, 1988. Heinze Balcazar, Ivonne. “Education Policy and Language Shift in Guatemala.” In International Perspectives on Bilingual Education: Policy, Practice, and Controversy, ed. John E. Petrovic, 43–68. Charlotte, NC: Information Age, 2010. Hellman, Judith Adler. The World of Mexican Migrants: The Rock and the Hard Place. New York, NY: The New Press, 2008. Hennelly, Alfred T., ed. Liberation Theology: A Documentary History. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990. Hennelly, Alfred T., ed. Santo Domingo and Beyond: Documents and Commentaries from the Historic Meeting of the Latin American Bishops’ Conference. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993. Hernández, Ramón, O.P. “Primeros dominicos del convento de San Esteban en América.” ciencia tomista 113, no. 2 (1986), 317–342. Hernando, Bernardino. Los pasillos de Puebla. Madrid: PPC, 1979. Herrejón Peredo, Carlos. Del sermón al discurso cívico: México, 1760–1834. Zamora, Mexico and Mexico City: El Colegio de Michoacán and El Colegio de México, 2003. Herzog, Tamar. Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America. New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2003. Hewitt, William. Base Christian Communities and Social Change in Brazil. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. Heywood, Linda M. “The Angolan-Afro-Brazilian Cultural Connections.” Slavery & Abolition 20, no. 1 (1999), 9–23. Hine, Virginia H. “Pentecostal Glossolalia toward a Functional Interpretation.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 8, no. 2 (1969), 211–226. Hinkelammert, Franz. Lo indispensable es inútil: Hacia una espiritualidad de la liberación. San José: Editorial Arlekín, 2012. Hinkelammert, Franz J. Hacia una crítica de la razón mítica: El laberinto de la modernidad. Materiales para la discusión. San José: Editorial Arlekin, 2007. Hobsbawm, E.J. Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th Centuries. New York, NY: Praeger, 1963. Hodges, Melvin. The Indigenous Church. Springfield, MO: Gospel, 1953. Hoffman French, Jan. “A Tale of Two Priests and Two Struggles: Liberation Theology from Dictatorship to Democracy in the Brazilian Northeast.” The Americas 63, no. 3 (2007): 409–443. Höffner, Joseph Cardinal. La ética colonial española del siglo de oro. Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 1957.

548   complete bibliography Holden, Andrew. Jehovah’s Witnesses: Portrait of a Contemporary Religious Movement. 1st ed. New York, NY: Routledge, 2002. Holland, Clifton L. “Paraguay.” In Worldmark Encyclopedia of Religious Practices: Countries M–Z, vol. 3, ed. Andrew Riggs, 205–209. Detroit, MI: Thomson Gale, 2006. Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. God’s Heart Has No Borders: How Religious Activists are Working for Immigrant Rights. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008. Hoornaert, Eduardo. “The Church in Brazil.” In The Church in Latin America 1492–1992. Ed. Enrique Dussel, 185–200. Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates, 1992. Houtart, François. “L’histoire du CELAM ou l’oubli des origines.” Archives de sciences sociales des religions 62, no. 1 (1986), 93–105 Htun, Mala. Sex and the State: Abortion, Divorce, and the Family under Latin American Dictatorships and Democracies. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Htun, Mala. “Life, Liberty, and Family Values: Church and State in the Struggle over Latin America’s Social Agenda.” In Religious Pluralism, Democracy, and the Catholic Church in Latin America, ed. Frances Hagopian, 335–364. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009. Hudson, James. Guatemala: 60 Years. Kansas City, MO: Nazarene, 1976. Hughes, Jennifer Scheper. Biography of a Mexican Crucifix: Lived Religion and Local Faith from the Conquest to the Present. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010. Hughes, Jennifer Scheper. “Cradling the Sacred: Image, Icon, and Affect in Mesoamerican Material Religion,” History of Religions, 56, no. 1 (2016), 55–107. Humphrey, Peggy. J. H. Ingram: Missionary Dean. Church of God World Missions. Cleveland, TN: Pathway Press, 1966. Hurbon, Laënnec. “The Church and Afro-American Slavery.” In The Church in Latin America 1492–1992, ed. Enrique Dussel. Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates, 1992. Hurteau, Robert. A Worldwide Heart: The Life of Fr. John Considine, MM. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 2013. Hutchison, William R. The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976. Hutchison, William R. Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. IBGE – Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia Estatística, Censo Demográfico 2010: Características gerais da população, religião e pessoas com deficiência, 2010, http://www.ibge.gov.br. Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Organization of American States, Report on the Situation of Human Rights in the Republic of Guatemala, Chapter 6, OEA/Ser.L/V/ II.53. October 13, 1981. Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Organization of American States, Report on the Situation of Human Rights in El Salvador, Chapter 2, Right to Life. OEA/Ser.L/V/ II.46,doc.23,rev.1. November 17, 1978. Interfaith Mary. “Cuba, El Cobre: Nuestra Señora de la Caridad del Cobre, Cachita, Patron and Queen of Cuba, La Virgen Mambisa.” http://interfaithmary.net/blog/cuba?rq=Cuba. Ireland, Rowan. Kingdoms Come: Religion and Politics in Brazil. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992. Iribarren Pascal, O.P., Fr. Pablo, and Communities of San Cristóbal and Ocosingo, “Experiencia: Proceso de la Diócesis de San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, México,” Mimeograph, 1985. Irarrázaval, Diego. “Mary in Latin American Christianity.” In The Many Faces of Mary 4, ed. Diego Irarrázaval, Susan Ross, and Marie-Theres Wacker, 98. London: Concilium Press, 2008.

complete bibliography   549 Ivereigh, Austen. Catholicism and Politics in Argentina, 1810–1960. London: Macmillan, 1995. Jarround, Marinela. “The Main Challenge for Ecofeminism is Its Own Contradictions: Interview with Coca Trillini.” Inter Press Service News Agency, January 19, 2014. http://www. ipsnews.net/2012/11/qa-the-main-challenge-for-ecofeminism-is-its-own-contradictions/. Jenkins, Philip. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Jesus Film. http://jesusfilm.org Jindra, Ines. A New Model of Religious Conversion: Beyond Network Theory and Social Constructivism. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2014. João Paulo II. Mensagem ao VIII Encontro internacional da Fraternidade Católica. http://www. vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/speeches/1998/june/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_ 19980601_carismatici_po.html (January 7, 2017). John Paul II. “Opening Address at Puebla.” In Puebla: Evangelization at Present and in the Future of Latin America: Conclusions, ed. National Conference of Catholic Bishops. Washington, DC: National Conference of Catholic Bishops. Johnson, Elizabeth A. “Truly Our Sister: A Feminist Hermeneutical Disciplinary Approach.” In The Many Faces of Mary, ed. Diego Irarrázaval, Susan Ross, and Marie-Theres Wacker. London: Concilium Press, 2008. Johnstone, Patrick, and Jason Mandryk. Operation World. Carlisle: Paternoster Lifestyle, 2001. Journet, Charles Cardinal. The Apostolic Hierarchy. Vol. 1 of The Church of the Word Incarnate: An Essay in Speculative Theology. Trans. A.  H.  C.  Downes. New York, NY: Sheed and Ward, 1955. Jrade, Ramón. “Inquiries into the Cristero Insurrection against the Mexican Revolution.” Latin American Research Review 20, no. 2 (1985), 53–69. Kahn, Hana Muzika. “Modern Guatemalan Mayan Literature in Cultural Context: Bilinguaging in the Literary Work of Bilingual Mayan Authors.” PhD diss., Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, 2008. Kamen, Henry. The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Kamsteeg, Frans. Prophetic Pentecostalism in Chile: A Case Study on Religion and Development Policy. PhD diss., Free University Amsterdam, 1995. Karasch, Mary C. Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro 1808–1850. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. Keck, Margaret, and Kathryn Sikkink. Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. Kedar, Benjamin Z. Crusade and Mission: European Approaches toward the Muslims. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Keen, Benjamin. Essays in the Intellectual History of Colonial Latin America. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998. Keen, Benjamin, trans. and ed. Latin American Civilization: History and Society, 1492–the Present. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991. Kelemen, Pál. Baroque and Rococo in Latin America. Vol. 1. New York, NY: Macmillan, 1951. Kelemen, Pál. Baroque and Rococo in Latin America. Vol. 2. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Dover, 1967. Kellner, Mark. “Urban Evangelism Is Wilson’s Call to Adventist World Church.” Adventist News Network. October 8, 2011. Kelly, Leo  A. “Bl. Ignacio de Azevedo” The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York, NY: Robert Appleton Company, 1910, vol. 7. www.newadvent.org/cathen/07639b.htm.

550   complete bibliography Kelly, Thomas M. “Ecclesiology in Context.” In When the Gospel Grows Feet. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2013. Keogh, Stacy, and Richard L. Wood. “The Rebirth of Catholic Collective Action in Central America: A New Model of Church-Based Political Participation.” Social Compass 60, no. 2 (2013), 273–291. Kerwin, Donald, “Rights, the Common Good, and Sovereignty in the Service of the Human Person.” In And You Welcomed Me: Migration and Catholic Social Teaching, ed. Donald Kerwin and Jill Marie Gerschutz, 93–121. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009. Kessler, Juan  B.  A., Jr. Conflict in Missions: A History of Protestantism in Peru and Chile. Denver, CO: International Academic, 2001. Kiddy, Elizabeth  W. Blacks of the Rosary: Memory and History in Minas Gerais, Brazil. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. Kiddy, Elizabeth W. “Ethnic and Racial Identity in the Brotherhoods of the Rosary of Minas Gerais, 1700–1830.” The Americas 56, no. 2 (1999), 221–52. “Killings of Environmentalists on the Rise.” Associated Press, June 21, 2012. http://globalnation. inquirer.net/40833/killings-of-environmentalists-on-the-rise-50-killed-in-philippines. Kimel, Eduardo Gabriel. La Masacre de San Patricio. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Dialéctica, 1989. Kingston-Smith, Andy. “The Liberating Dimension of the Kingdom of God—Evangelical, community, civil society and political action.” Justice Advocacy and Mission, January 28, 2013. http://justiceadvocacyandmission.wordpress.com/2013/01/. Kirk, John M. “From Counterrevolution to Modus Vivendi: The Church in Cuba, 1959–1984.” In Cuba: Twenty-Five Years of Revolution, 1959–1984, ed. Sandor Halebsky and John M. Kirk, 93–113. New York: Praeger, 1985. Kirk, John M. Between God and the Party: Religion and Politics in Revolutionary Cuba. Tampa, FL: University of South Florida Press, 1989. Kirk, John M. Politics and the Catholic Church in Nicaragua. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1992. Kirkendall, Andrew. “Paulo Freire, Eduardo Frei, Literacy Training and the Politics of Consciousness Raising in Chile, 1964 to 1970.” Journal of Latin American Studies 36, no. 4 (2004), 687–717. Klaiber, Jeffrey. The Catholic Church in Peru, 1825–1985: A Social History. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1992. Klaiber, Jeffrey, S.J. The Church, Dictatorships, and Democracy in Latin America. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998. Klaiber, Jeffrey, S.J. The Jesuits in Latin America, 1549–2000: 450 Years of Inculturation, Defense of Human Rights, and Prophetic Witness. St. Louis, KY: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2009. Klein, Cecelia. “Depictions of the Dispossessed.” Art Journal 49, no. 2 (1990), 108–109. Klein, Herbert S. and Ben Vinson III. African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Kloppenburg, Boaventura. “Génesis del Documento de Puebla.” Medellín 5.17–18 (1979), 189–207. Klor de Alva, J.  Jorge. “Spiritual Conflict and Accommodation in New Spain: Toward a Typology of Aztec Responses to Christianity,” The Inca and Aztec States, 1400–1800: Anthropology and History, ed. George Collier, Renato Rosaldo, and John Wirth. New York, NY: Academic Press, 1982. Knight, Alan. The Mexican Revolution, vol. I: Porfirians, Liberals and Peasants. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1990.

complete bibliography   551 Knight, Alan. “The Mentality and Modus Operandi of Revolutionary Anticlericalism.” In Faith and Impiety in Revolutionary Mexico, ed. Matthew Butler, 21–56. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Knorr, Nathan H., and William E. Van Amburgh. “Articles of Amendment (Officers’ Certificate of Amendment to the Articles of Incorporation of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society pursuant to the Nonprofit Corporation Law of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania).” State of Pennsylvania, County of Allegheny, February 27, 1945. Kobayashi, María. La educación como conquista (empresa franciscana en México). Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1974. Koltko-Rivera, Mark. The Rise of the Mormons: Latter-Day Saint Growth in the 21st Century. Amherst, NY: 7th Street Books, 2012. Konetzke, Richard, ed. Colección de documentos para la historia de la formación social de Hispanoamérica 1493–1810. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1953–1962. Konings, Johan. La espiritualidad del compromiso. Bogotá: Paulinas, 1990. Konrad, H. A Jesuit Hacienda in Colonial Mexico: Santa Lucia, 1576–1767. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1980. Kovic, Christine. Mayan Voices for Human Rights: Displaced Catholics in Highland Chiapas. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2005. Kovic, Christine, “Violence of Security: Central American Migrants Crossing Mexico’s Southern Border,” Anthropology Now 2, no. 2 (2010), 87–97. Kramer, Eric W. “Law and the Image of a Nation: Religious Conflict and Religious Freedom in a Brazilian Criminal Case,” Law & Social Inquiry 26, no. 1 (2001), 35–62. Kramer, Eric W. “Possessing Faith: Commodification, Religious Subjectivity, and Collectivity in a Brazilian Neo-Pentecostal Church.” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2001. Kubler, George. “The Quechua in the Colonial World.” In Handbook of South American Indians. Vol. 2: The Andean Civilizations Julian H. Steward, ed. 331–410, Washington, DC: Bureau of American Ethnology, 1946. Kubler, George. Mexican Architecture of the Sixteenth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1948. Kung, Hans. Libertad conquistada. Madrid: Trotta, 2004. Ladero Quesada, Miguel Ángel. La España de los reyes católicos. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1999. Lafay, Jacques. Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness, 1531–1813. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Lalive d’Epinay, Christian. Haven of the Masses: A Study of the Pentecostal Movement in Chile. London: Lutterworth, 1969. Lampe, Armando, ed. Christianity in the Caribbean: Essays on Church History. Barbados: University of the West Indies Press, 2000. Land, Gary. “Shut Door Theory.” In Historical Dictionary of the Seventh-Day Adventists, edited by Gary Land, 272–273. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005. Landers, Jane. Black Society in Spanish Florida. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Lang, Martin and Reinhold Iblacker. Witness of Hope: The Persecution of Christians in Latin America. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1981. Langella, Simona. Teologia e legge naturale: Studio sulle lezioni di Francisco de Vitoria. Genova: Glauco Brigati, 2008. Lara, Jaime. “Church: Interior.” In Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque: Transatlantic Exchange and Transformation, ed. Evonne Levy and Kenneth Mills. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2013.

552   complete bibliography Lara, Jaime. City, Temple, Stage: Eschatological Architecture and Liturgical Theatrics in New Spain. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana. 2004. Lara, Jaime. Christian Texts for Aztecs; Art and Liturgy in Colonial Mexico. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. Larkin, Brian. The Very Nature of God: Baroque Catholicism and Religious Reform in Bourbon Mexico City. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2010. Laso de la Vega, Luis. “Huei tlamahuiçoltica. Mexico, 1649.” In The Story of Guadalupe: Luis Laso de la Vega’s Huei tlamahuiçoltica of 1649, edited by Lisa Sousa, Stafford Poole, and James Lockheart. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Lavrin, Asunción. Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. Lawson, Ronald. “From American Church to Immigrant Church: The Changing Face of Seventh-Day Adventism in Metropolitan New York.” Sociology of Religion 59, no. 4 (1998), 329. Lawson, Ronald, and Ryan T. Cragun. “Comparing the Geographic Distributions and Growth of Mormons, Adventists, and Witnesses.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 51, no. 2 (2012), 220–240. doi:10.1111/j.1468-5906.2012.01646.x. Lawson, Ronald, and Armando Miranda. “At the Eye of the Storm: The Continuing Conflict Concerning the Ordination of Women within the International Seventh-Day Adventist Church.” Conference Presentation presented at the Meeting of the Religious Research Association, Houston, Texas, October 2000. Leatham, Miguel C. “Rethinking Religious Decision-Making in Peasant Millenarianism: The Case of Nueva Jerusalén.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 12, no. 3 (1997), 295–309. Lefebvre, Sue. “No More Deaths, A Short History of Our 10 Years.” Tucson, AZ: No More Deaths, 2014. Le Goff, Jacques. Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages. New York, NY: Zone Books, 1990. Lehmann, David. Democracy and Development in Latin America. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1990. Lehmann, David. Struggle for the Spirit: Religious Transformation and Popular Culture in Brazil and Latin America. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996. Leinsle, Ulrich G. Introduction to Scholastic Theology. Trans. Michael J. Miller. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010. Leite, Antônio Attico de Souza. “Memória sobre a Pedra Bonita ou reino encantado na comarca de Villa Bella, província de Pernambuco.” Revista do Instituto Archeológico e Geográphico Pernambucano, vol. XI (1904), 217–248. Lempériére, Annick, “¿Nación moderna o República Barroca? México, 1823–1857.” In Imaginar la Nación, ed. François-Xavier Guerra and Mónica Quijada. Münster: Lit, 1994, 135–177. León-Portilla, Miguel. The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. León-Portilla, Miguel Tiempo y realidad en el pensamiento Maya. Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de México, 1968. Lernoux, Penny. Cry of the People. New York: Doubleday, 1980. Lernoux, Penny. Hearts on Fire: The Story of the Maryknoll Sisters. Centenary ed. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011. Lernoux, Penny. People of God: The Struggle for World Catholicism. New York, NY: Viking, 1989. Levine, Daniel H. “The Future of Christianity in Latin America.” Journal of Latin American Studies 41, no. 1 (2009), 121–145.

complete bibliography   553 Levine, Daniel  H. “The Future as Seen from Aparecida.” In Aparecida: Quo Vadis? Robert S. Pelton, ed., 173–190. Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 2008. Levine, Daniel  H. Popular Voices in Latin American Catholicism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Levine, Daniel H. Religion and Political Conflict in Latin America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Levine, Daniel H. Religion and Politics in Latin America: The Catholic Church in Colombia and Venezuela. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1981. Levine, Daniel  H. Politics, Religion, and Society in Latin America. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2012. Levine, Daniel  H. “Protestants and Catholics in Latin America: A Family Portrait.” In Fundamentalisms Comprehended, ed. Martin  E.  Marty and R.  Scott Appleby, 155–178. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Levine, Robert  M. Vale of Tears: Revisiting the Canudos Massacre in Northeastern Brazil, 1893–1897. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992. Levenson-Estrada, Deborah. “Reactions to Trauma: The 1976 Earthquake in Guatemala,” International Labor and Working Class History 62 (2002), 60–68. Levy, Evonne and Kenneth Mills. Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque: Transatlantic Exchange and Transformation. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2014. Lewis, Laura A. Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Lezama Lima, José. La expresión Americana. México, DF: Fondo de Cultura, 1957. Libânio, João Batista. Conferências gerais do episcopado latino-americano. São Paulo: Paulus, 2007. Lindhardt, Martin. “La Globalización Pentecostal: Difusión, Apropiación y Orientación Global.” Revista Cultura y Religión V, no. 2 (2011), 117. Lindhardt, Martin, ed. New Ways of Being Pentecostal in Latin America. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016. Llaguno, José A. La personalidad jurídica del indio y el III Concilio Provincial Mexicano. Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1963. Lloret, Albert Julian. “The Maya Evangelical Church in Guatemala.” PhD diss., Dallas Theological Seminary, Dallas, TX, 1976. Lockhart, James. Nahuas After the Conquest. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Lockhart, James. We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1993. Lofland, John, and Rodney Stark. “Becoming a World-Saver: A Theory of Conversion to a Deviant Perspective.” American Sociological Review 30, no. 6 (1965), 862–875. Lokken, Paul. “Sugar, African Migrants, and Gente Ladina in Colonial Guatemala.” In Blacks & Blackness in Central America: Between Race and Place. Ed. Lowell Gudmundson and Justin Wolfe, 27–56. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. López de Palacios Rubios, Juan. “El Requerimiento, 1513.” Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/El_Requerimiento_ by_Juan_Lopez_de_Palacios_Rubios_1513. Lopez Rodriguez, Dario. The Liberating Mission of Jesus: The Message of the Gospel of Luke. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2012. López Trujillo, Alfonso. Liberación marxista y liberación cristiana. Madrid: Editorial Católica, 1974.

554   complete bibliography Lorentzen, Lois Ann. “Bread and Soil of Our Dreams: Women, the Environment, and Sustainable Development–Case Studies from Central America.” In Ecological Resistance Movements: The Global Emergence of Radical and Popular Environmental Movements. Ed. Bron Taylor, 56–70. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995. Lorentzen, Lois Ann. “Indigenous Feet: Ecofeminism, Globalization, and the Case of Chiapas.” In Ecofeminism and Globalization: Exploring Culture, Context, and Religion. Ed. Heather Eaton and Lois Ann Lorentzen, 57–73. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. Lorentzen, Lois Ann. “Radical Catholicism, Popular Resistance, and Material Culture in El Salvador.” In Technology and Cultural Values: On the Edge of the Third Millennium. Ed. Peter  D.  Hershock, Marietta Stepaniants, and Roger  T.  Ames, 252–265. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003. Lorentzen, Lois Ann. “Virgin of Guadalupe.” In The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, 2. Ed. Bron Taylor, 1703–4. London: Continuum 2005. Lorentzen, Lois Ann and Salvador Leavitt-Alcantara. “Religion and Environmental Struggles in Latin America.” In Oxford Handbook of Religion and Ecology. Ed. Roger S. Gottlieb. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006. Losada, Angel, trans. Tratados políticos de Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Políticos, 1963. Lourdes, Cordero, and Marcelo Várgas, eds. Espiritualidades indígenas, interculturalidad y misión integral. Buenos Aires: Kairós, 2010. Loveman, Mara. “High-Risk Collective Action: Defending Human Rights in Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina.” The American Journal of Sociology 104, no. 2 (1998), 477–525. Lowden, Pamela. Moral Opposition to Authoritarian Rule in Chile, 1973–1990. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Lucero, Jose Antonio. “Representing ‘Real Indians’: the Challenges of Indigenous Authenticity and Strategic Constructivism in Ecuador and Bolivia” Latin American Research Review 41, no. 2 (2006), 31–56. Lugo, Luis, “Pope to Visit ‘Pentecostalized’ Brazil,” Pew Research Center on Religion and  Public Life, April 19, 2007, https://www.pewforum.org/2007/04/19/pope-to-visitpentecostalized-brazil/. Lumen Gentium [Dogmatic Constitution on the Church]. Pope Paul VI. Vatican City, 1964. http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_ const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html. Lupher, David  A. Romans in a New World: Classical Models in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 2003. Lynch, John. “The Catholic Church in Latin America, 1830–1930.” In The Cambridge History of Latin America. Ed. L.  Bethell, 527–595. 12 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–2008. Lynch, John. “The Quest for the Millennium in Latin America: Popular Religion and Beyond.” In Latin America between Colony and Nation: Selected Essays, ed. John Lynch, 194–222. London: Palgrave, 2001. Lynch, John. New Worlds: A Religious History of Latin America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. Lyons, Barry. Remembering the Hacienda: Religion, Authority, and Social Change in Highland Ecuador. Austin, TX, University of Texas Press, 2006. McAdam, Doug, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly. “Toward an Integrated Perspective on Social Movements and Revolution.” In Comparative Politics, edited by Mark Lichbach and Alan Zuckerman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

complete bibliography   555 McAdam, Doug, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly. Dynamics of Contention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. McAlister, Robert. Mãe de santo: Georgina Aragão dos Santos Franco. [Rio de Janeiro], GB: Empreendimentos Evangélicos, 1968. McAlister, Crentes endemoninhados: A nova heresia. Rio de Janeiro: Igreja de Nova Vida, 1975. MacCarthy, Gerald. “A Christian Response to the Mexican Drug Wars,” Thinking Faith, November 2012. McCleary, Rachel M., and Jonatan Lemus Avila. “Evangelizing at the Expense of Educating.” Unpublished manuscript, 2011. MacCormack, Sabine. “Pachacuti: Miracles, Punishments, and Last Judgment: Visionary Past and Prophetic Future in Early Colonial Peru.” American Historical Review 93, no. 4 (1988), 960–1006. MacCormack, Sabine. Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. MacCormack, Sabine. On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain and Peru. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Reformation: Europe’s House Divided. London: Allen Lane, 2003. McDermott, R. “The Neocatechumenal Way: Background, Exposition, and Canonical Analysis of the Statue.” The Jurist 62 (2002), 92–113. Macedo, Edir. S libertação da teologia. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Gráfica Universal, 1992. Macedo, Edir. Orixás, caboclos e guias: Deuses ou demônios? Rio de Janeiro: Universal Produções, 1990. Macedo, Edir. ˆNothing to Lose: Moments of Conviction That Changes My Life. Barcelona; Madrid: Lunwerg, 2013. MacEoin, Gary. “The Stakes at CELAM III: competing ecclesiologies in Latin America.” Commonweal (August 1978), 495–498. McElroy, Robert  W. “A Church for the Poor: Pope Francis Makes Addressing Poverty Essential.” America, October 21, 2013. McElwee, Joshua  J. “Pope Francis: A bishop Serves, Not Dominates.” National Catholic Reporter, October 24, 2013. MacEoin, Gary and Nivita Riley. Puebla: A Church Being Born. New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1980. Macera, P. “Instrucciones para el manejo de las haciendas jesuitas del Perú (ss. XVII – XVIII).” In Nueva corónica 2, no. 2 (1966), 39–49. McFarlane, Anthony, “Rebellions in Late-Colonial Spanish America: A Comparative Perspective,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 14, no.3 (1995), 313–338. McGinn, Bernard. Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1979. McGrath, Marcos. “Ariel or Caliban?” Foreign Affairs 52, no. 1 (1973), 75–95. McGrath-Andino, Lester. Quo Vadis Vieques: Etica social, política y ecumenismo. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Seminario Evangélico de Puerto Rico, 2003. McKinley, Michelle. “Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Legal Activism, and Ecclesiastical Courts in Colonial Lima, 1593–1689.” Law and History Review 28, no. 3 (2010): 749–790. McKnight, Kathryn Joy. “Blasphemy as Resistance: An African Slave Woman before the Mexican Inquisition.” In Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World. Ed. Mary  E.  Giles, 229–53. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Machado, Maria das Dores Campos. “Aborto e ativismo religioso nas eleições de 2010.” Revista Brasileira de Ciência Política no. 7 (2012), 25–54.

556   complete bibliography Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. Trans. Peter Bondanella. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005 [1532]. MacIntyre, Alasdair. God, Philosophy, Universities. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. MacKin, Robert  S. “Becoming the Red Bishop of Cuernavaca: Rethinking Gill’s Religious Competition Model.” Sociology of Religion 64, no. 4 (2003), 499–514. Maclean, Iain  S. “Christianity-Liberation Theology.” In The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, ed. Bron Taylor. London: Continuum, 2006. Maclean, Iain S. and Lois Ann Lorentzen. “Boff, Leonardo.” In The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature. Ed. Bron Taylor, 207–208. London: Continuum, 2006. Maclean, Iain  S., ed. Reconciliation, Nations and Churches in Latin America. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York, NY: McGrawHill, 1964. Madera, Lisa Marie. “Mary in Latin America.” In The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature. Ed. Bron Taylor, 1051–1053. London: Continuum, 2006. Maia, Humberto Junior. “Os novos centros da fé: a construção de megatemplos.” Revista Época, December 19, 2011, 57–63. Mainwaring, Scott. The Catholic Church and Politics in Brazil, 1916–1985. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986. Mainwaring, Scott. The Progressive Church in Latin America. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989. Mainwaring, Scott, and Alexander Wilde. “The Progressive Church in Latin America: An Interpretation.” In The Progressive Church in Latin America. Ed. Scott Mainwaring and Alexander Wilde, 1–37. Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989. Mainwaring, Scott, and Timothy R. Scully. Christian Democracy in Latin America. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Maldonado, David, ed. Protestantes/Protestants: Hispanic Christianity within Mainline Traditions. Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1999. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. “Liberation Theology and the Search for the Lost Paradigm: From Radical Orthodoxy to Radical Diversality.” In Latin American Liberation: The Next Generation. Ed. Ivan Petrella, 39–61. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005. Mandryk, Jason. Operation World, 7th ed. Colorado Springs, CO: Biblical Publishing, 2010. Manz, Beatriz. Paradise in Ashes: A Guatemalan Journey of Courage, Terror, and Hope. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004. Maravall, José Antonio. Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986. Maravall, José Antonio. Carlos V y el pensamiento político del renacimiento. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 1999. Mariano, Ricardo. Neopentecostais: Sociologia do novo pentecostalismo o Brasil. São Paulo: Edições Loyola, 1999. Mariano, Ricardo. “O reino da prosperidade da Igreja Universal.” In Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus: Os novos conquistadores da fé, edited by Ari Oro, André Corten, and Jean-Pierre Dozon, 53–68. São Paulo: Paulinas, 2003. Mariz, Cecília Loreto. Coping with Poverty: Pentecostal Churches and Christian Base Communities in Brazil. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1994. Mariz, Cecília, and Luciana Aguilar. “Shalom: Construção social da experiência vocacional.” In Novas Comunidades Católicas, ed. Brenda Carranza et al., 241–266. Aparecida: Idéias & Letras, 2009.

complete bibliography   557 Marsden, George M. Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1991. Martí, José. “El Padre Las Casas.” In La edad de oro, edited by José Martí, 141–148. Barcelona: Linkgua, 2008. Martin, David. Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Martin, David. Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Martin, Luis. Daughters of the Conquistadores: Women of the Viceroyalty of Peru. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1983. Martínez, Juan Francisco. Los Evangelicos: Portraits of Latino Protestantism in the United States. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2009. Martínez, Juan Francisco. Los Protestantes: An Introduction to Latino Protestantism in the United States. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2011. Martínez, Juan Francisco. Sea la Luz: The Making of Mexican Protestantism in the American Southwest, 1829–1890. Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 2006. Martinez, Manuel. “Las Casas on the Conquest of America.” In Bartolomé de las Casas in History: Toward an Understanding of the Man and His Work. Ed. Juan Friede and Benjamin Keen, 309–349. Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008. Martínez, María Elena. Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. Martínez de Codes, Rosa María, “De la reducción a la plantación. La utilización del esclavo negro en las haciendas jesuitas de la América española y portuguesa,” Revista Complutense de Historia de América 21 (1995), 85–122. Martinez-Fernandez, Luis. Protestantism and Political Conflict in the Nineteenth-Century Hispanic Caribbean. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Martinez Novo, Carmen. “Building an Anti-Neoliberal Nation with the Indigenous Movement: The Salesian Missions of Ecuador.” In Bridging the Gaps: Faith-Based Organizations, Neoliberalism, and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. Tara Hefferin, Julie Adkins, and Laurie Ochipinti, 213–228. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009. Masías-Hinojosa, Victor Hugo, Paola Ramírez-Pérez, and María Inés Winkler-Müller. “Construcción de identidad en personas convertidas a la Iglesia Metodista Pentecostal de Chile.” Forum: Qualitative Social Research 9, no. 1 (2008), 1–29. Mather, Christine. Baroque to Folk: De lo barroco a lo popular. 1980. Painting. Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe, NM. Matovina, Timothy. “A Response to Stafford Poole.” Catholic Historical Review 100, no. 2 (2014), 284–291. Mattos, Paulo, “An Introduction to the Theology of Bishop Edir Macedo (Universal Church of the Kingdom of God): A Case Study of a New Brazilian Pentecostal Church.” S.T.M. thesis, Christian Theological Seminary, Indianapolis, 2002. May, Roy  H. Ética y espiritualidad, Curso de Educación Pastoral 17. San José: Universidad Bíblica Latinoamericana, 2000. May, Roy  H., Jr. Ética y Medio Ambiente: Hacia una vida sostenible. San Jose, Costa Rica: Editorial DEI, 2004. May, Roy H., Jr. Poor of the Land. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991. May, Roy H., Jr. Tierra: Herencia o mercancía?: Justicia, paz e integridad de la creación. San José, Costa Rica: Editorial DEI, 1993. Meacham, Carl. “Changing of the Guard: New Relations between Church and State in Chile.” Journal of Church and State 29, no. 3 (1987), 411–433.

558   complete bibliography Mecham, J.  Lloyd. Church and State in Latin America: A History of Politico-Ecclesiastical Delations. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1934. Megged, Amos. “The Rise of the Creole Identity in Early Colonial Guatemala: Differential Patterns in Town and Countryside.” Social History 17, no. 3 (October 1992), 421–440. Megged, Amos. Social Memory in Ancient and Colonial Mesoamerica. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Melvin, Karen. Building Colonial Cities of God: Mendicant Orders and Urban Culture in New Spain. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. Mendieta, Eduardo. “Bartolomé de las Casas.” In The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, ed. Bron Taylor, 271–272. London: Continuum, 2006. Menjívar, Cecilia. Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. Mesters, Carlos. “Logros alcanzados y problemas relevantes que deben enfrentarse.” Páginas 5–6 (1976), 24–27. Metcalf, Alida C. “Millenarian Slaves? The Santidade de Jaguaripe and Slave Resistance in the Americas.” The American Historical Review 104, no. 5 (1999), 1531–1559. Metcalf, Alida A. Go-betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500–1600. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2005. Methol Ferré, Alberto. Puebla: proceso y tensiones. Buenos Aires: Editorial Documenta, 1979. Metz, Johannes-Baptist and Edward Schillebeeckx, eds. Martyrdom Today, Concilium. NY: Seabury Press, 1983. Meyer, Jean. La Cristiada, 3 Vols. Mexico City: Siglo XXI Editores, 1973–1974. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Meyer, Jean. The Cristero Rebellion: The Mexican People between Church and State, 1926–1929. Trans. Richard Southern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Meyer, Jean. El conflicto religioso en Oaxaca, 1926–1938. Oaxaca: IAGO, 2006. Meznar, Joan. “Our Lady of the Rosary, African Slaves, and the Struggle against Heretics in Brazil, 1550–1660.” Journal of Early Modern History 9, no. 3–4 (2005), 371–397. Mignone, Emilio. Witness to the Truth: The Complicity of Church and Dictatorship in Argentina. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986. Míguez, Daniel. “To Help You Find God:” The Making of a Pentecostal Identity in a Buenos Aires Suburb. PhD diss., Free University Amsterdam, 1997. Míguez Bonino, José. Doing Theology in a Revolutionary Situation. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1975. Míguez Bonino, José. Toward a Christian Political Ethic. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1983. Míguez Bonino, José. ed. Faces of Jesus: Latin American Christologies. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984. Míguez Bonino, José. Faces of Latin American Protestantism. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997. Mijangos y González, Pablo. The Lawyer of the Church: Bishop Clemente de Jesús Mungía and the Clerical Response to the Mexicnan Liberal Reforma. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Miller, Daniel R. Coming of Age: Protestantism in Contemporary Latin America. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994. Miller, Donald, and Tetsunao Yamamori. Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007.

complete bibliography   559 Millones, Luis, ed. El retorno de las huacas: Estudios y documentos sobre el Taki Onqoy, siglo XVI. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1990. Mills, Kenneth. Idolatry and its Enemies: Colonial Andean Religion and Extirpation, 1640–1750. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Mills, Kenneth. An Evil Lost to View? An Investigation of Post-Evangelisation Andean Religion in Mid-Colonial Peru. Liverpool: University of Liverpool, 1994. Mills, Kenneth, William  B.  Taylor, and Sandra Lauderdale Graham, eds. Colonial Spanish America: A Documentary History. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2002. Mintz, Sindey. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin Books, 1986. Mintz, Sidney. Worker in the Cane: A Puerto Rican Life History. New York: W.W. Norton, 1974 [1960]. Mumford, Jeremy. “The Taki Onqoy and the Andean Nations: Sources and Interpretations.” Latin American Research Review 33 no. 1 (1998). Moltmann, Jürgen and Karl-Josef Kuschel, eds. Pentecostal Movements as an Ecumenical Challenge. London and Maryknoll, NY: SCM Press and Orbis Books, 1996. Monast, Jacques. Los Indios Aimaraes: ¿Evangelizado o solamente bautizados? Buenos Aires, Carlos Lehle, 1972. Ministerio de Educación Pública, Guatemala: Quiché, Cakchiquel, Mam y Kekchí. “Publicaciones especiales del Instituto Guatemala.” In Holy Saints and Fiery Preachers: The  Anthropology of  Protestantism in Mexico and Central America: Religion in the Age of  Transformation, ed. James  W.  Dow and Alan  R.  Sandstorm. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2001. Mondragón, Carlos. Like Leaven in the Dough: Protestant Social Thought in Latin America. Translated by Daniel Miller and Ben Post. Vancouver: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010. Monge, José Trías. Puerto Rico: The Trials of the Oldest Colony in the World. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1997. Monroy, Juan A. Un enfoque evangélico a la Teología de la Liberación. Terrassa: CLIE, 1991. Montgomery, Tommie Sue. “The Church in the Salvadoran Revolution.” Latin American Perspectives 10, no. 1 (1983), 62–87. Morales, Lorenzo. “The Mysterious Death of Father Reinel Restrepo.” Americas Quarterly, October 13, 2011. http://www.americasquarterly.org/node/2947. Morales Mazariegos, Néstor Raciel. “Análisis de contenido de spots radiofónicos de emisorasCristiano-evangélicas de amplitud modulada en la ciudad de Guatemala.” Thesis, Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, Escuela de ciencias de comunicación, April 2008. Morello, Gustavo. “Secularización y derechos humanos: Actores católicos entre la dictadura Argentina (1976) y la administración Carter (1977–1979).” Latin American Research Review 47, no. 3 (2012), 62–82. Morgan, Ronald J. Spanish American Saints and the Rhetoric of Identity, 1600–1810. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2002. Morgan, Ronald J. “Postscript to His Brothers: Reading Alonso de Sandoval’s De Instauranda Aethiopum Salute (1627) as a Jesuit Spiritual Text.” Atlantic Studies 5, no. 1 (2008), 75–98. Morse, Richard. New World Soundings: Culture and Ideology in the Americas. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Morquecho, Gaspar, “El Congreso Diocesano Pastoral de la Tierra Madre,” América Latina en movimiento, January 14, 2014. http://www.alainet.org/es/active/70495.

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568   complete bibliography Rivera Ramos, Efrén. The Legal Construction of Identity: The Judicial and Social Legacy of  American Colonialism in Puerto Rico. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2001. Rivera, Ruben. “Rembao, Alberto (1895–1962) Mexican-Born Ecumenical Protestant Thinker, Journalist, and Advocate for Social Christianity, Democracy, and Internationalism,” Boston University School of Theology, History of Missiology, http://www.bu.edu/missiology/ missionary-biography/r-s/rembao-alberto-1895-1962 Riviere d’Arc, Helene. “Has Basismo Disappeared?” Bulletin of Latin American Research 18, no. 2 (1999), 199–209. Roa Bárcena, José María, La quinta modelo, in Novelas y cuentos. Mexico: Factoría, 2000. Roberts, Bryan R. “Protestant Groups and Coping with Urban Life in Guatemala.” American Journal of Sociology 73, no. 6 (1968), 753–767. Roberts, Kenneth. “The Mobilization of Opposition to Economic Liberalization.” Annual Review of Political Science 11, no. 1 (2008), 327–349. Robins, Nicholas  A. Genocide and Millennialism in Upper Peru: The Great Rebellion of 1780–1782. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. Robinson, Shirley Taylor. “Mexico, Pioneer Settlements in.” In Encyclopedia of Mormonism, ed. Daniel H. Ludlow, 895–897. New York: Macmillan, 1992. CD-ROM. Rodríguez, Daniel R. La Primera Evangelización Norteamericana en Puerto Rico 1898–1930. Rochester, NY: Ediciones Borinquen, 1986. Rodriguez, Jeanette. “Theological Aesthetics and the Encounter with Tonantzin Guadalupe.” In She Who Imagines: Feminist Theological Aesthetics. MN: Liturgical Press, 2012. Rodriguez, Patricia M. “With or Without the People: The Catholic Church and Land-Related Conflicts in Brazil and Chile.” In Religious Pluralism, Democracy, and the Catholic Church in Latin America, ed. Frances Hagopian, 185–224. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009. Rojas-Sanchez, Mario, ed. Nican Mopohua. Dn. Antonio Valeriano, traducción del nahuatl al castellano. Mexico: Imprenta Ideal, 1978. Rolheiser, Ronald. The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality. New York, NY: Doubleday Publishing, 1999. “Roma fecha Seminários em Recife.” Revista Eclesiástica Brasileira 49, no. 196 (1989), 964–966. Romero, Catalina. “Religion and Public Spaces: Catholicism and Civil Society in Peru.” In Religious Pluralism, Democracy, and the Catholic Church in Latin America. Ed. by Frances Hagopian, 365–401. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009. Romero, Oscar  A. Monseñor Romero: El Pueblo es mi profeta. San Salvador, El Salvador: Equipo de Educación Maiz, 1994. Romero, Mons. Oscar  A. Su Pensamiento, VI. San Salvador: Publicaciones pastorales del Arzobispado, 1981. Rommen, Heinrich A. The State in Catholic Thought. St. Louis, MO: Herder Book, 1945. Rosenberg, Bruce  A. “The Message of the American Folk Sermon.” Oral Tradition 1, no. 3 (1986), 695–727. Rowell, Nicholas. Church-State Ties, Roman Catholic Episcopacies, and Human Rights in Latin America, PhD diss., University of New Mexico, 2012. Rubiés, Joan-Pau. “Theology, Ethnography, and the Historicization of Idolatry.” Journal of the History of Ideas 67, no. 4 (2006), 571–596. Rubin, Jeffrey, David Smilde, and Benjamin Junge. Religion, Social Movements and Zones of Crisis in Latin America. Pardee Center Paper Series, Issues in Brief, Boston University, 25 (November 2012), 1–8.

complete bibliography   569 Rubin, Sergio, and Ambrogetti, Francesca. El Papa Francisco: Conversaciones con Jorge Bergoglio. Buenos Aires: Ediciones B, 2013. Rubio-Goldsmith, Raquel, M.  Melissa McCormick, Daniel Martinez, and Inez Magdalena Duarte. “The ‘Funnel Effect’ and Recovered Bodies of Unauthorized Migrants Processed by the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner, 1990–2005, Report Submitted to the Pima County Board of Supervisors, Tucson, AZ: Binational Migration Institute, 2006. Rugeley, Terry. Of Wonders and Wise Men: Religion and Cultures in Southeast Mexico, 1800–1876. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001. Ruiz, Olivia, “Immigrants at Risk, Immigrants as Risk: Two Paradigms of Globalization.” In Migration, Religious Experience, and Globalization. Ed. Gioacchino Campese and Pietro Ciallella. NY: Center for Migration Studies 2003. Ruiz, Samuel. Cómo me convirtieron los indígenas. Santander: Sal Terrea, 2002. Rus, Jan, Shannan L. Mattiace, and Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo, “Introduction,” Mayan Lives, Mayan Utopias: The Indigenous Peoples of Chiapas and the Zapatista Rebellion. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003. Russell, Charles Taze. “Volunteers Wanted.” In Zion’s Watchtower and Herald of Christ’s Presence, April 15, 1889. Russell, Charles  F. “Wanted, 1,000 Preachers,” Zion’s Watch Tower, April 1881, 214. https:// ia601406.us.archive.org/23/items/WatchtowerLibrary/magazines/w/w1881_E.pdf. Russell-Wood, A. J. R. “Iberian Expansion and the Issue of Black Slavery: Changing Portuguese Attitudes, 1440–1770.” American Historical Review 83, no. 1 (1978), 16–42. Ruston, Roger. Human Rights and the Image of God. London: SCM Press, 2004. Rutherford, Joseph Franklin. “Special Edition for Workers.” The Bulletin, 1929. Rutherford, Joseph Franklin, A. N. Pierson, W. E. Van Amburgh, J. D. Wright, A. I. Ritchie, R. H. Hirsh, and Isaac F. Hoskins. “Charter of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society with Important Notes.” Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, County of Allegheny, 1884. http:// www.ukbiblestudents.co.uk/John%20Edgar/wt%20charter.pdf. Rylko, Stanislaw. Mensagem VII Congresso Nacional das Novas Comunidades. http://­ novascomunidades.wordpress.com/informações (September 17, 2016). Sacerdotium Ministeriale [Letter to Bishops of the Catholic Church on Certain Questions Concerning the Minister of the Eucharist.] Cardinal Joseph Ratizinger. Vatican City, 1983. http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_ doc_19830806_sacerdotium-ministeriale_en.html Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction on Certain Aspects of ‘Theology of Liberation’, 1984: http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/ rc_con_cfaith_doc_19840806_theology-liberation_sp.html. Sahagún, Bernardino de. Psalmodia christiana. Translated by Arthur J. O. Anderson. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1993. Saignes, Thierry. “The Quechua-Aymara Heartland 1570–1780. In Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas (vol. 3, pt 2). Ed. Frank Salomon and Stuart  B.  Schwartz. 59–137. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Salazar-Santana, Elizabeth. “Pentecostalism in Latin America: A Look at Its Current Challenges,” In The Many Faces of Global Pentecostalism, ed. Harold D. Hunter and Neil Ormerod. Cleveland, TN: CPT Press, 2013. Saler, Benson. “Religious Conversion and Self-Aggrandizement: A Guatemalan Case.” Practical Anthropology 13, no. 1 (1965), 107–114. Samson, C.  Mathews. Re-Enchanting the World: Maya Protestantism in the Guatemalan Highlands. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2007.

570   complete bibliography Santiago-Vendrell, Angel D. Contextual Theology and Revolutionary Transformation in Latin America: The Missiology of M. Richard Shaull. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2010. Santidrán, Pedro R. Diccionario breve de pensadores cristianos. Navarra: Verbo Divino, 2001. Saranyana, Josep Ignasi. ed., Teología en América Latina. 3 vols. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 1999–2002. Saranyana, Josep Ignasi. ed., Breve historia de la teología en América Latina. Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 2009. Sathler, Josué A. and Amós Nascimento. “Black Masks on White Faces: Liberation Theology and the Quest for Syncretism in the Brazilian Context.” In Liberation Theologies, Postmodernity and the Americas. Ed. David Batstone, Eduardo Mendieta, Lois Ann Lorentzen and Dwight N. Hopkins, 95–125. London: Routledge, 1997. Sauvage, Pierre. “Los obispos latinoamericano en el grupo” and “Jesús, la iglesia y los pobres,” durante el concilio Vaticano II. Páginas. September 2013. Scannone, Juan Carlos. “Theology, Popular Culture, and Discernment.” In Frontiers of  Theology in Latin America. Ed. Rosino Gibellini, 213–239. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1979. Schillebeeckx, Edward. “The Christian Community and its Office-Bearers.” Concilium 133 (1980), 95–127. Schillebeeckx, Edward. “The Teaching Authority of All–A Reflection about the Structure of the New Testament.” Concililum 4, no. 180 (1985), 12–22. Schmidt, Jalane. Cachita’s Streets: The Virgin of Charity, Race, and Revolution in Cuba. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Hearing Things, Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Schmitt, Carl. The Nomos of the Earth. Translated by G.  L.  Ulmen. New York, NY: Telos Press, 2003. Scholes, France  V. “Franciscan Missionary Scholars in Colonial Central America.” The Americas 8, no. 4 (April 1952), 391–416. Schroeder, Susan. “Father José María Luis Mora, Liberalism, and the British and Foreign Bible Society in Nineteenth-Century Mexico,” The Americas 50, no. 3 (1994) 377–397. Schultz, Lorraine O. Bringing God’s Word to Guatemala: The Life and Work of William and Betty Sedat. Kansas City, MO: Nazarene, 1995. Schultze, Quentin  J. “Catholic v. Protestant: Mass-Mediated Legitimation of Popular Evangelicalism in Guatemala,” Public Relations Review 18, no. 3 (1992), 257–263. Schwaller, John Frederick. The Church and Clergy in Sixteenth-Century Mexico, Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1987. Schwaller, John Frederick. The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America: From Conquest to Revolution and Beyond. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2011. Schwarz, Richard  W., and Floyd Greenleaf. Light Bearers: A History of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. Nampa, ID: Pacific Press, 2000. Schwartz, Stuart B. All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Schwartz, Stuart B. “Opening the Family Circle: Godparentage in Brazilian Slavery.” In Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery, edited by Stuart Schwartz, 137–60. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Schwartz, Stuart B. Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society Bahia, 1550–1835. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

complete bibliography   571 Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Second General Conference of Latin American Bishops. The Church in the Present-Day Transformation of Latin America in the Light of the Council: Conclusions. Washington, DC: National Conference of Catholic Bishops, 1979. Seed, Patricia. Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Segal, Gerald. World Affairs Companion: The Essential One-Volume Guide to Global Issues. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1991. Segundo, Juan Luis. Theology and the Church: A Response to Cardinal Ratzinger and a Warning to the Whole Church. Minneapolis, MN: Seabury, 1985. Segura, Harold. Ser iglesia para los demás. Hacia una espiritualidad comprometida. 3rd ed. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Kairós, 2012. Selka, Stephen L. “Ethnoreligious Identity Politics in Bahia, Brazil,” Latin American Perspectives 32, no. 1 (2005): 72–94. Sell, Barry  D. and Louise  M.  Burkhart, eds. Nahua Christianity in Performance, vol. 4 of Nahuatl Theater. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009. Sell, Barry D. and Louise M. Burkhart, eds., Death and Life in Colonial Nahua Mexico, vol. 1 of Nahuatl Theater. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004. Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de. Tratados Políticos de Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. Trans. Angel Losada. Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Políticos, 1963. Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de. Demócrates segundo, o, De las justas causas de la guerra contra los Indios. 2nd ed. 1550. Reprint, Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto Francisco de Vitoria, 1984. Serbin, Kenneth. Needs of the Heart: a social and cultural history of Brazil’s clergy and seminaries. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. Serbin, Kenneth. Secret Dialogues: Church-State Relations, Torture and Social Justice in Authoritarian Brazil. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000. Servicio Evangelizadora para América Latina. La hora de dios para Guatemala. Guatemala: Editorial SEPAL, 1983. Sexton, James D. Campesino: The Diary of a Guatemalan Indian. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1985. Shapiro, Judith. “From Tupã to the Land without Evil: The Christianization of Tupi-Guarani Cosmology,” American Ethnologist 14, no. 1 (1987), 126–139. Shaull, Richard and Waldo Cesar. Pentecostalism and the Future of the Christian Churches: Promises, Limitations, Challenges. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2000. Shenk, Wilbert R. Henry Venn, Missionary Statesman. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983. Shepherd, Frederick  M. “Church and State in Honduras and Nicaragua Prior to 1989.” In Religion and Democracy in Latin America, ed. William H. Swatos, 117–134. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1995. Shepherd, Gary, and Gordon Shepherd. Mormon Passage. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1998. Shiels, W.  Eugene. King and Church: The Rise and Fall of the Patronato Real. Chicago, IL: Loyola University Press, 1961. Sierakowski, Robert. “Nicaraguan Revolution, 1970s–1980s.” In The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, ed. Immanuel Ness. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell, 2009. Blackwell Reference Online.

572   complete bibliography Sierra, Javier. “A Divine Gift.” Sierra Club. http://www.sierraclub.org/ecocentro/ingles/ divinegift.asp. Sigmund, Paul E., ed. Religious Freedom and Evangelization in Latin America: The Challenge of Religious Pluralism. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999. Sigmund, Paul  E. Liberation Theology at the Crossroads: Democracy or Revolution? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Siller-Acuña, Clodomiro L. “El método de la evangelizacion en el Nican Mopohua.” Servir 17 (1993–1994), 255–293. Siller-Acuña, Clodomiro L. Flor y canto del Tepeyacac: Historia de las apariciones de Sta. Ma. De Guadalupe; Texto y comentario. Xalapa: Servir, 1981. Siller-Acuña, Clodomiro  L. Para comprender el mensaje de Maria de Guadalupe. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Editorial Guadalupe, 1984. Silveira Campos, Leonildo. Teatro, Templo e Mercado: Organização e marketing de um empreendimento neopentecostal. Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 1997. Simons, Marlise. “Latin America’s New Gospel,” New York Times Magazine, November 7, 1982. Simpson, Matthew. Cyclopedia of Methodism: Embracing Sketches of its Rise, Progress and Present Condition, with Biographical Notices and Numerous Illustrations. Philadelphia, PA: L. H. Events, 1878. Skinner, Quentin. The Age of Reformation. Vol. 2 of The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ed. Quentin Skinner. 1978. Reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Slater, Candace. Trail of Miracles: Stories from a Pilgrimage in Northeast Brazil. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986. Slessarev-Jamir, Helene. Prophetic Activism: Progressive Religious Justice Movements in Contemporary America. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2011. Smallwood, James. “Radio Station TGNA in Guatemala.” Journal of the North American Shortwave Association (May 1979), 2–4. Smilde, David. “Contradiction without Paradox: Evangelical Political Culture in the 1998 Venezuelan Elections.” Latin American Politics and Society 46, no. 1 (2004), 75–102. Smilde, David. “Evangelicals and Politics in Latin America: Moving beyond Monolithic Portraits.” History of Religions 42, no. 3 (2003), 243–8. Smilde, David. Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007. Smith, Brian  H. The Church and Politics in Chile. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982. Smith, Brian H. Religious Politics in Latin America: Pentecostal v. Catholic. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998. Smith, Christian. The Emergence of Liberation Theology: Radical Religion and Social Movements. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Smith, Christian. Moral, Believing Animals. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2003. Smith, Dennis A. and Leonildo Silveira Campos, “Concentrations of Faith: Mega Churches in Brazil,” In Mega Churches: A Moving Faith Goes South. Ed. Jonathan D. James. London: Sage Publications, 2015. Smith, Timothy L. Revivalism & Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957. Smutko, Gregorio. Una espiritualidad laical para América Latina, Bogotá: San Pablo, 1997. Snell, Marilyn Berlin. “Bulldozers and Blasphemy: In Latin America, Catholics are standing up to those who covet their gold and timber.” Sierra, September/October 2007. http://vault. sierraclub.org/sierra/200709/bulldozers.asp

complete bibliography   573 Snow, David  A., and Richard Machalek. “The Sociology of Conversion.” Annual Review of Sociology 10 (1984), 167–190. Soares, Mariza de Carvalho. People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in EighteenthCentury Rio de Janeiro. Durham, NC: Duke University Press [2000] 2011. Sobrino, Jon. “A Crucified People’s Faith in the Son of God.” Concilium 153 (1982), 23–28. Sobrino, Jon. “The Winds in Santo Domingo and the Evangelization of Culture.” In Santo Domingo and Beyond: Documents and Commentaries from the Fourth General Conference of Latin American Bishops. Ed. Alfred  T.  Hennelly, 167–187. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993. Sobrino, Jon. Liberación con espíritu: Apuntes para una nueva espiritualidad. Santander: Sal Terrea, 1985. Sobrino, Jon. “Spirituality and the Following of Jesus.” In Mysterium liberationis: conceptos fundamentales de la teología de liberación. Ed. Ignacio Ellacuría and Jon Sobrino, 677–701. San Salvador: UCA Editorial, 1991. Socolow, Susan. “Acceptable Partners: Marriage Choice in Colonial Argentina, 1778–1810.” In Sexuality & Marriage in Colonial Latin America. Ed. Asunción Lavrin, 209–51. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Solano, Xóchitl Leyva. “Regional, Communal, and Organizational Transformations in Las Cañadas.” In Mayan Lives, Mayan Utopias: The Indigenous Peoples of Chiapas and the Zapatista Rebellion. Ed. Jan Rus, Rosalvo Aída Hernández Castillo, and Shannon L. Mattiace, 1161–85. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Solórzano, Katy. Se hizo seña: Medición y percepción del tiempo en el siglo XVII caraqueño. Caracas: Planeta, 1998. Soto, Domingo de. Relectio de dominio. In Relecciones y opúsculos. Ed. Jaime Brufau Prats. Salamanca: Editorial San Esteban; 1900. Soustelle, Jacques. Daily Life of the Aztecs on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1970. Southern, R.W. Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe. Vol. 1. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell, 1995. Southerton, Simon G. Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA, and the Mormon Church. Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 2004. Souza, Luiz Alberto Gómez de. A JUC, os estudantes e a política. Petrópolis: Vozes, 1984. Spadaro, Antonio. “A Big Heart Open to God.” America, September 30, 2013. Spain, Mildred W. “And in Samaria”: A Story of More than Sixty Years’ Missionary Witness in Central America, 1890–1954. Revised and extended ei. Dallas, TX: The Central American Mission, 1954. Spickard, James V. “Rethinking Religious Social Action: What is ‘Rational’ about RationalChoice Theory?” Sociology of Religion 59, no. 2 (1998), 99–115. Spittler, Russell  P. “Implicit Values in Pentecostal Missions.” Missiology: An International Review 16, no. 4 (October 1988), 410–424. Stack, Peggy Fletcher. “Single Word Change in Book of Mormon Speaks Volumes.” The Salt Lake Tribune. November 8, 2007. https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=7403990&itype= NGPSID . Stack, Peggy Fletcher. “Age Change Should Propel More Mormons into Missions.” The Salt Lake Tribune. December 11, 2012. http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/55035591-78/lds-agechurch-women.html.csp. Stanley, Brian. The Global Diffusion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Billy Graham and John Stott. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2013.

574   complete bibliography Stark, Rodney. “The Rise of a New World Faith.” Review of Religious Research 26, no. 1 (1984), 18–27. Stark, Rodney, and Roger Finke. Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. Stark, Rodney, and Laurence R. Iannaccone. “Why the Jehovah’s Witnesses Grow so Rapidly: A Theoretical Application.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 12, no. 2 (1997), 133–157. Steigenga, Timothy J. “The Politics of Pentecostalized Religion.” In Conversion of a Continent: Contemporary Religious Change in Latin America. Ed. Timothy  J.  Steigenga and Edward L. Cleary, 256–279. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007. Steigenga, Timothy J., and Edward L. Cleary. “Understanding Conversion in the Americas.” In  Conversion of a Continent: Contemporary Religious Change in Latin America, ed. Timothy J. Steigenga and Edward L. Cleary, 3–32. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007. Steinfels, Peter. “Latin Bishops Reopen Debate on Church Role.” New York Times, October 13, 1992. http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/13/world/latin-bishops-reopen-debate-on-churchrole.html. Stewart-Gambino, Hannah. The Church and Politics in the Chilean Countryside. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1992. Stewart-Gambino, Hannah. “Las Pobladoras y la Iglesia Despolitizada en Chile.” América Latina Hoy 41 (2005), 121–138. Stoll, David. Is Latin America Turning Protestant? The Politics of Evangelical Growth. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990. Strickland, William  J., and H.  Ray Dunning. J.  O.  McClurkan: His Life, His Theology, and Selections from His Writings. Nashville, TN: Trevecca Press, 1998. Strong, Mary. Art, Nature, and Religion in the Central Andes: Themes and Variations from Prehistory to the Present. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2012. Stuckey, Sterling. Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Suess, Paulo. La nueva evangelización: Desafíos históricos y pautas culturales. Quito: ABYAYALA, 1991. Suderman, Roberto J. Tengan valor yo he vencido al mundo: Espiritualidad y misión. Bogotà: CLARA-Semilla-Visión Mundial Bogotá, 1998. Sullivan, Francis Patrick. Indian Freedom: The Cause of Bartolomé de las Casas, 1484–1566. New York, NY: Sheed and Ward, 1995. Svelmoe, William L. A New Vision for Missions: William Cameron Townsend, the Wycliffe Bible Translators, and the Culture of Early Evangelical Faith Missions, 1917–1945. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2008. Svelmoe, William L. “ ‘We Do Not Want to Masquerade as Linguists’: A Short History of SIL and the Academy,” Language 85, no. 3 (September 2009), 619–629. Sweet, David G. “Black Robes and ‘Black Destiny’: Jesuit Views of African Slavery in 17thCentury Latin America.” Revista de Historia de América 86 (1978), 87–133. Sweet, James H. Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African- Portuguese World, 1441–1770. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Synthesis of Contributions Received for the Fifth General Conference. Bogotá: Latin American Episcopal Conference, 2006. Tamayo, Juan José, and Juan Bosch, eds. Panorama de la teología latinoamericana. Navarra: Verbo Divino, 2001.

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576   complete bibliography Tracy, Olive G. We Have Seen the Sun: The Work of the Nazarene among the Indian Tribes of Guatemala. Kansas City, MO: Nazarene, 1961. Traffano, Daniela. Indios, curas, y nación. Torino, Italy: Otto, 2001. Trejo, Guillermo. Popular Movements in Autocracies: Religion, Repression and Indigenous Collective Action in Mexico. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Trejo, Guillermo. “Religious Competition and Ethnic Mobilization in Latin America: Why the Catholic Church Promotes Indigenous Movements in Mexico.” American Political Science Review 103, no. 3 (2009), 323–342. Tsing, Anna  L. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Tucker, Mary Evelyn and John Grim. “Overview of World Religions and Ecology.” The Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale, 2009. http://fore.research.yale.edu/religion/. Tweed, Thomas. Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002. United Nations Truth Commission for El Salvador. From Madness to Hope: The 12 Year War in El Salvador. Report of the Commission on the Truth for El Salvador. New York, NY: United Nations, 1993. Valeriano, Antonio. Nican Mopohua. Trans. Nahuatl to Spanish by Father Mario Rojas Sánchex; trans. from Spanish into English by Jeanette Rodriguez. Tlalnepantla, Mexico: Nihil Obstat, 1978. Vallier, Ivan. Catholicism, Social Control, and Modernization in Latin America. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970. van Deusen, Nancy E. “The World of Ursula de Jesús.” In The Souls of Purgatory: The Spiritual Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Afro-Peruvian Mystic, Ursula de Jesús. Ed. Nancy E. Van Deusen, 1–77. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2004. van Deusen, Nancy  E. “ ‘The Lord walks among the pots and pans’: Religious Servants of Colonial Lima.” In Africans to Spanish America: Expanding the Diaspora. Ed. Sherwin Bryant, Rachel Sarah O’Toole, and Ben Vinson III, 136–162. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Van Wagoner, Richard S. Mormon Polygamy: A History. Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1989. Van Young, Eric. The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Mexican Struggle for Independence, 1810–1821. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Varas, Juan Antonio Montes. Una revolución enquistada en la Iiglesia intenta a destruir la civilización y la moral Cristiana: Desde la Teología de la Liberación a la teología ecofeminista. Santiago: Acción Familia, 2011. Vásquez, Manuel A. The Brazilian Popular Church and the Crisis of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Vásquez, Manuel A. More than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010. Vásquez, Manuel A., and Rocha, Cristina. “Introduction: Brazil in the New Global Cartography of Religion.” In The Diaspora of Brazilian Religions. Ed. Cristina Rocha and Manuel Vásquez, 1–42. Boston: Brill, 2013. Vaughan, Mary Kay. Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930–1940. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1997. Vaughters, William C. Fruits of Progress: The Church of the Nazarene in Mexico and Central America. Kansas City, MO: Nazarene, 1968. Verbitsky, Horacio. El silencio: De Paulo VI a Bergoglio: Las relaciones secretas de la Iglesia con la ESMA. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2005.

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Index

Note: Figures and tables are indicated by an italic “f ”, “t” and notes are indicated by “n” following the page numbers.

A

d’Abbeville, Claude  125 abortion rights  227–28, 265 Abreu, Emilio  313 Acosta, José de  26, 28, 85, 142 AD (Assembleia de Deus)  299–300 Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) 418 Adventists. See Seventh-day Adventists Afro-Latin Americans alternative spiritual practices of  111 Catholicism, domestic oratories and  71 Catholicism and marginalization of  101 confraternities of  109–11 diversity among  107 enslaved, Catholicism and  3, 101–5 enslaved, Jesuits and  105–7 Inquisition targeting  111–12 interracial marriage and  112–13 marriage traditions of  108 mestizo, creole and  368n26 millenarian movements and  124 Protestantism and  113 sainthood and  109 witchcraft and  111–12 agency, slavery and  107–11 agriculture, Jesuits and  15–16, 20 Aguilar Álvarez, Rodolfo  238–39 Albert, C.  356 Alexander (Pope)  460 Alexander VI (Pope)  139 Allende, Salvador  158 Alliance for Progress  185 Alsina, Juan  241 altar indigenous Christianity and  88 material Christianity in Latin America and  71–74, 73f

alternative spiritual practices Afro-Latin Americans, of  111 millenarian movements and  134 Alves, Rubem  185–86 Amaru, Túpac  128–29 Amaru, Túpac II  129 Anderson, Allan  2 Anderson, Conway  370n51 Anderson, Rufus  352 Andes 10 baroque art in church structures in  68–69, 68f, 69f extirpation in  18–19, 60 millenarian movements in  128–29 Quechua language forms in  11, 17 resistance in  143 Angelelli, Enrique  243 Anglo-Portuguese treaty of 1810  444, 451n22 anticlericalism, Mexican Revolution and 178–79 La Antorcha Guadalupana  281 Aparecida CELAM meeting, 2007  160, 168, 170, 173n33, 210, 508, 518 Apocalypse millenarian movements and  121–23 time and  25–26 Apostolado de la Oración (Apostolate of Prayer) 498–99 Aquinas, Thomas  40–41, 45, 46, 47, 50 Arana, Marco  463 Arbenz, Jacobo  245 architecture. See also church structures conversions and  66 domestic oratories and  70–71 material Christianity in Latin America and  57–58, 65–70, 67f–69f reducciónes and  67–68 Arenas, Felipe  502

582   index Arévalo, Juan José  244 Argentina authoritarian repression in  221 Catholic politics in  263 Christian human rights activism in  222–23 clergy relationships with military regime in 202 “Dirty War” in  175 Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in  244, 477–78 martyrdom in  242–44 post-colonial millenarian movements in 131–32 progressivism in clergy in  258 religious affiliation by group in  310t reproductive rights movement in  228 Aristotle  41, 44, 45 Arizona Human Rights Coalition  281 Arns, Paulo Evaristo  201–2, 221–23 Arriola, Silvia  251 art baroque  63–65, 68–69, 68f, 69f, 72, 75, 145–46 crucifixion  75, 77f indigenous, material Christianity in Latin America and  62–65, 63f Nahua, in church structures  66–67 Artimé, Manuel  182 Asociación Universal de la Sagrada Familia (Universal Association of the Holy Family) 498 Assembleia de Deus (AD)  299–300 Augustine, Saint  150 Augustinians 10–11 authoritarianism Catholic politics response to  258–64 Christian human rights activism and 220–24 Pentecostalism and  341 authority education and  29 indigenous Christianity and  84, 144 slavery and  104–5, 107–11 autochthonous Pentecostalism  312 Azevedo, Ignacio de  237–38 Aztec empire, Nahuatl language in  11 Azusa Street Revival, Pentecostalism and  293

B

Baggio, Sebastiano  207–8 Bailey, Gauvin  64 baladas santas (holy ballads)  404 baptism Adventists and  421 Dominican compared to Franciscan beliefs on 12 Jehovah’s Witnesses and  421 Mormons and  420 Pentecostalism and spiritual  334–35 slavery and  104 Barabas, Alicia  126 Barnett, Willie Etta  355 baroque art  145–46 altar and  72 Andean church structures, in  68–69, 68f, 69f counter-conquest and  65 imperialism and  64 material Christianity in Latin America and 63–65 realism and  75 void and  65 Barreto, Luiz do Rego  130 Base Ecclesial Communities (CEBs) agendas of  509, 518 Brazil, in  185 CELAM and  508, 511 Christian human rights activism and  220, 225 clergy and  204–6 contemporary features of  510 creation of  240 definition of  509 ecology and  463–64 future of  518 John Paul II (Pope) on  511 liberation theology and  164, 185 origins of  507 transformation of  509–10 Vatican II and  507–8 Batista, Fulgencio  181 Batista, Pedro  133 Batz, Domingo del Barrio  246 Beaty, James C.  357 belief, liberation theology and  163

index   583 Belief-Motivational Model  260 Benedict XVI (Pope)  96, 151, 152, 167, 283 liberation theology, on  380–81 poverty, on  512 Bennett, Herman  108 Beozzo, José Oscar  514 Berg, Daniel  299–300 Bergoglio, Jorge. See Francis (Pope) Bergosa y Jordán, Antonio  491, 492, 494 Bernard of Clairvaux (Saint)  384 Bertone, Tarcisio  473 Bible conversions and  336–37 literacy and  348–50 societies, Protestantism and  439, 442 translations of, for indigenous peoples  348, 353–55, 366n5 typology and  25–26 Zayas Alvarado on  336 Bíblicos, in Puerto Rico  440 Bingemer, Maria Clara  483 biodiversity, ethics of  469 bishops. See clergy blank slate (tabula rasa)  59–61, 61f Boaventura, Miguel Lucena (José Maria)  133 Boff, Leonardo “Church of the People,” on  203–4 counterculture leadership of  389–90 ecology and injustice, on  161, 462–63 following Jesus Christ, on  387 Francis (Pope) praised by  467 liberation theology and  150–52 published works of  165 Trinity, on  163 Vatican silencing  167–68, 209, 211 Bolívar, Simón  52 Bolivia Nationalist Revolution of 1952 in  175 Protestantism in  443 religious affiliation by group in  310t Bonaventure, Saint  40–41 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich  385 Bonino, José Miguez  165–66, 435 Books of Chilam Balam  33–34 Bosch, Juan  391n12 Bourbon dynasty  145–47, 437 Bradley, Amos  350–51, 370n51

Bradley, Effie  370n51 Brazil. See also Catholic Charismatic Renewal AD in  299–300 Adventists in  426–27, 426f Catholic demographics in  395 Catholic politics in  263 CC in  299 CEBs in  185 CNBB in  184, 202, 259, 266–67 gospel music in  402–4 human rights abuses in  218 IEQ in  300 ISAL in  185 IURD in  301–3 Jehovah’s Witnesses in  426f, 427 laity leadership in  514 martyrdom in  241 military coup in, 1964  159t, 241 Mormons in  426f, 427–28 National Evangelization Crusade in  300 neo-Pentecostals in  300–303, 394 Pentecostalism in  299–303, 394 post-colonial millenarian movements in 129–34 poverty reduction in  171 Protestantism in  299, 395, 443, 448 religious affiliation by group in  310t reproductive rights movement in  228 sociopolitical and religious pluralism in 400 state-sponsored murders in  175 television in  302–3 Templo de Salomão in  303–4 Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in 344n12 Brenneman, Robert  229 Brevísima relación (Las Casas)  52 Bridges, Thomas  439 Bristol, Joan  112 Broken Spears, The (León-Portilla) 32 Brown, Michael F.  133 Burdick, John  210–11 burials confraternities and  110–11 indigenous religion and  86 Burkhart, Louise  29–30 Butler, John Thomas  370n51

584   index Butler, Lena Hertenstein  370n51 Butler, Matthew  149

C

CA. See Catholic Action Calancha, Antonio de la  140 Caldera, Rafael  184 calendars, Zapotec  31 Calles, Plutarco Elías  149, 179, 180 Cristero Rebellion against  238 Calles Law  238 Calvin, John  436, 437 Câmara, Dom Hélder  184, 185, 199–201, 221, 222 Camp Wycliffe  353 Campos, Bernardo  467 Canal 21, in Guatemala  362–63 Canal 27, in Guatemala  363 Cañas, Mercedes  465 Canção Nova, CCR and  406 Canek, Jacinto  128 Cano, Melchor  46, 49 canonically structured organizations, in Mexico 498–99 Cardenal, Ernesto  188, 204, 209, 340, 383 Cárdenas, Lázaro  180 Cárdenas, Nabor  134 Cardijn, Joseph  183–84, 200–201 CARECEN (Central American Resource Center) 280 Carlos II  103 Carnival of Jesus  404 Carpentier, Alejo  65 Carranza, Venustiano  178, 238 Carter, Jimmy  187, 249 Carter, Miguel  463 Casa Mambré shelter  282–84 Casaldáliga, Pedro  387 Casley, Frank  371n53 Casley, William  371n53 Castillo, José María  386 Castrellón, Darío  207 Castro, Alonso de  27–28 Castro, Fidel  182–83, 245 cathekontic rationality  321 Catholic Action (CA)  185 Christian human rights activism and 219–20

creation of  240 declining membership of  219 education focus of  182–83 growth of  181 indigenous people in  91–92 progressivism and  183–84, 200 Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR). See also Pentecostalism/Pentecostals acceptance of  394–95 Canção Nova and  406 challenges of  407–8 church structures of  398–99 clergy and  397 Committee on Gender Equality fought by 400 communities of Life and communities of Alliance in  405–7 EnCristus and  401 European resistance to  407 gender ideology panic spread by  400 gospel music and  402–4 growth of  393–94, 397–98, 408, 510 hierarchical obedience in  397 identity of  395, 396 laity and  397 liberation theology and  409n9 mass media used by  394, 398, 404 origins of  395–96 political activism of  399–402 prayer groups in  396 School Without Homophobia Program fought by  400 Secretariat of Faith and Politics and  401 Shalom and  406 television and  398 Tomas Moro Institute and  401 youth socialization and  404 Catholicism/Catholics. See also clergy; Vatican II African-descended, domestic oratories and 71 Afro-Latin American marginalization and 101 Afro-Latin Americans, domestic oratories and 71 Brazil population, in  395 canonically structured organizations in Mexico of  498–99

index   585 Christianity in Latin America and size of Pentecostals compared to  4 Colegio Pío Latinoamericano and  148 Constitution of Cádiz and  147 contemporary laity and, in Latin America 513–15 conversion views of  140 counter-revolution, violence and  176–77 country, by  310t Cristero Rebellion and  132, 149, 179–80, 238 Cuban Revolution and  176, 181–83 domination and  460 dropping numbers of  171 ecology and  460–61 enslaved Africans and  3, 101–5 folk 89–92 FSLN and  177, 187–88 global network of  92–93 historic theology and  150 house churches and  513–14, 519 human rights and  3 indigenous peoples, justice and  139–40 indigenous peoples and spread of  141 indigenous peoples in Mexico and revivalism of, 1880s–1920s  500–502 indigenous song and dance restrictions and 141–42 laity and clergy in Mexico and revival of, early 20th century  491–92 Latin American dominance of  257 liberalism and secularism rejected by 147–49 liberation theology in  157 Mexican Revolution and  177–81, 339 Mexico and ideological struggles 19th century, in  492–94 Nicaragua in Cold War and  186–89 Oaxaca, Mexico, 1880–1920s  490–503 orders within, in  9–11 patron saint’s feasts in Mexico 19th century 494–96 progressivism, Cold War and  183–86 Protestant missions in Guatemala and 368n20 Protestant Reformation response of  13 Puerto Rico, in  345n25 regular clergy in  9–10

renewal of  304, 377, 389 secular clergy in  10 Social 494 Spanish reform of  139 state linkage with  338–40 violence and  189 women in  13–14 Catholic politics, in Latin America Argentina, in  263 authoritarianism response of  258–64 Brazil, in  263 Catholic State and  258–59 Chile, in  263–67 democratization and  264–69 forbiddance of  264–65 Honduras, in  262–63 ideology and  258, 260, 262–63, 268 influence of  269 institutional arrangements and  258–59, 261, 263–64, 268 laity mobilization and  268–69 land rights and  276 liberation theology and  260 Nicaragua, in  262–63 organizational interests and  258, 260–62, 267–68 PICO and  266 progressivism and  258–59 social justice and  266 theories on  257, 269–70 Uruguay, in  265 Catholics for a Free Choice (CFC)  227–28 Catholic Society, The (Sociedad Católica)  498 Catholic State, Catholic politics in Latin America and  258–59 CC (Congregação Cristã)  299 CCLA (Committee on Cooperation in Latin America) 447 CCR. See Catholic Charismatic Renewal CEBs. See Base Ecclesial Communities CELA (Latin American Evangelical Conference) 454n70 CELAM. See Latin American Episcopal Conference Central American Mission  351, 353, 355, 361, 369n37 Central American Resource Center (CARECEN) 280

586   index Centro Familiar de Adoración (Family Worship Center), Paraguay  313, 315 CEPAD (Council of Protestant Churches of Nicaragua) 188 Cerruti, María del Rosario de  478 Cervantes, Fernando  66 CFC (Catholics for a Free Choice)  227–28 Chamorro, Pedro Joaquín  187 Charles II  145 Charles III  146, 437 Chávez, Cruz  132 Chávez y González, Luis  247 Chemnitz, Martin  437 Chile Adventists in  426, 427f, 428 Allende’s election in  158 authoritarian repression in  221 Catholic politics in  263–67 Christian human rights activism in Pinochet-era 223–24 human rights violations in  175, 202, 241 Indigenous Pastoral Commission in 266–67 Jehovah’s Witnesses in  427f, 428 martyrdom in  241–42 military coup in, 1973  159t Mormons in  427f, 428 Pentecostalism conversions in  312–14, 319–22 Pentecostalism in  292 poverty reduction in  171 progressivism in clergy in  258 religious affiliation by group in  310t reproductive rights movement in  228 Cholango, Humberto  96 Christian, William  503 Christian Democratic movement  184 Christian human rights activism, in Latin America. See also Catholic politics, in Latin America; human rights Argentina, in  222–23 authoritarianism and  220–24 CA and  219–20 CEBs and  220, 225 clergy and  218, 221–22 democratization and  224–25 El Salvador, in  225

gang violence and  229 grass roots  218 growth of  219–20 indigenous peoples and  227 MST and  226–27 NGOs and  226 Peace and Justice Commissions and  220 Pinochet-era Chile, in  223–24 political process theory and  221 Protestantism and  222–23 public spaces and  229 reproductive rights movement and  227–28 scholarship on  230–31 SMOs and  226–27 Vatican II and  217 women and  227–28 Christian spirituality  384 Christianity, in Latin America. See also specific topics Colegio Pío Latinoamericano and  148 conversions and historical development of 2–3 demographics of  341 ecology and  459–60 following Jesus, spirituality and  386–87 historic theology and  150 holidays and  19 indigenous music challenges for  17 indigenous peoples expression of  20–21 Jesuit expulsion from  146 land rights in Mexico and  276–78 love and  385 Pentecostals compared to Catholics in size of 4 population growth of  1 slavery, authority and agency through 107–11 syncretism and  19 time and early  23–34 violence misconceptions with  141 Christianity in a Nutshell (Boff)  169 Christology  161, 168 Christoteques 404 Church, Charism and Power (Boff)  167–68, 209, 389 Church of God  295, 356–57, 359–61. See also Pentecostalism/Pentecostals

index   587 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. See Mormons Church of the Nazarene, in Guatemala  351, 355 “Church of the People,” clergy and  203–6 Church and Society in Latin America (ISAL) 185 church structures altar and  71–74, 73f architecture of material Christianity in Latin America and  65–70, 67f–69f baroque art in Andean  68–69, 68f, 69f “bicultural splendor” of  70 confraternities and  110 domestic oratories and  70–71 indigenous peoples constructing  66, 87–88 Nahua art in  66–67 neo-Pentecostals and CCR, of  398–99 reducciónes and  67–68 Cicero, Marcus Tullius  41, 50 The City of God (Augustine)  150 CLADE (Latin American Congress for Evangelization) 454n70 CLAR (Confederation of Latin American Religious) 198 Clarke, Maura  250 Claver, Pedro  106–7 Cleary, Edward J.  5, 198, 514 clergy Argentina military regime relationships with 202 CCR and  397 CEBs and  204–6 CELAM and identity of  196–99 Christian human rights activism and  218, 221–22 “Church of the People” and  203–6 Colegio Pío Latino Americano for  196–97 extirpation tensions among  19–20 indigenous peoples and  27–28 John Paul II (Pope) appointments for  209 John Paul II (Pope) on human rights and 208 laity role changes with  204–5 Latin American identity of  195 Mexico and Catholicism’s revival, early 20th century, in  491

patron saint’s feasts in Mexico 19th century, in 495 professionalization measures for  196 progressivism objections of  206–7 regular  9–10, 13, 15, 19–20 Romanization reforms and  197 secular  10, 15, 19–20 seminarian reforms and  200 shortage of  514 sixteenth century growth of  15 social justice, human rights and  199–203, 239 Spanish Crown limiting  20 Vatican II struggles of  206 CNBB (National Conference of Brazilian Bishops)  184, 202, 259, 266–67 Codigo Negro Carolino, slavery and  104 coercion conversions and  84–86 evangelization and  26 cofradías. See confraternities Cohn, Norman  122 Coke, Hugh Milton  353–54 Cold War end of  158 Nicaragua and Catholicism, in  186–89 progressivism, Catholicism and  183–86 Colegio Pío Latino Americano  148, 196–97 Coligny, Gaspar de  436 Colombia, religious affiliation by group in  310t colonialism. See also Spanish conquest ecology and  468–69 land rights and  276–77 millenarian movements and  125–29 coloquio in Mexico City, 1524  23–24 Columbus, Christopher  42 Comaroff, Jean  296 Comaroff, John  296 Comblin, José  161, 164, 165, 170 comity agreements, Protestant missions in Guatemala and  355, 371n54 Committee for Cooperation and Peace in Chile (COPACHI)  224 Committee on Cooperation in Latin America (CCLA) 447 Committee on Gender Equality  400

588   index communication technologies, Protestant missions in Guatemala and  347–48, 358–63 communities of Life/communities of Alliance, in CCR  405–7 Conceição, José Manuel da  443 Condes Vineyard, Las (Viña Las Condes), Chile 313 Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE)  227 Confederation of Latin American Religious (CLAR) 198 confession, conversions and  314 Confessionario (Acosta)  85 confraternities 16 of Afro-Latin Americans  109–11 Congar, Yves  517, 520 Congregação Cristã (CC)  299 consciousness-raising evangelization  162 Conselheiro, Antônio  131 Considine, John  515 Con-spirando women’s collective  465–66 Constitution of Cádiz  147 Contestado movement  133 contextual theology  517–18 Contreras, Eduardo  462 convents  13–14, 17–18 conversions. See also evangelization; indigenous Christianity architecture and  66 Bible and  336–37 Christianity in Latin America and historical 2–3 coercion and  84–86 Dominicans and  11, 26–27 family, to Pentecostalism  331 Franciscans and  10–11 friendships following  317 Guatemala, in  294, 298 Gutiérrez on  387–88 indigenous peoples, of  9, 11, 16 Jesus Christ and  388 language challenges with  11–12 liberation theology and  387–88 literacy and  349 Mercedarians and  11 Pentecostalism, to contextual factors in  314–15, 320

Pentecostalism, to explanations of  311–12 Pentecostalism, to individual factors in  315 Pentecostalism, to in Paraguay and Chile  312–14, 319–22 Pentecostalism, to institutional factors in 315–16 Pentecostalism, to social network factors in 317–19 poverty and  329–30, 335–36 powerful, of  392n41 regular clergy and  10 Spanish conquest agenda with  9 terminology in  314 COPACHI (Committee for Cooperation and Peace in Chile)  224 Corbett, Jim  280 Cortés, Donoso  148 Cortés, Hernán  140–41 Costa Rica religious affiliation by group in  310t Virgin Mary devotion in  476 Council of Protestant Churches of Nicaragua (CEPAD) 188 Council of Trent  13, 15, 59 counter-conquest altar and  71–74 baroque art and  65 iconography and  74–75 material Christianity in Latin America and  59, 78 counter-revolution. See also liberation theology; Mexican Revolution Catholicism, violence and  176–77 Christian Democratic movement and  184 Cristero Rebellion and  179–80 in Nicaragua  187–89 counterculture leadership, liberation theology and 389–90 Cox, Harvey  2 CPT (Pastoral Land Commission)  227, 266 creole, mestizo and  368n26 Cristero Rebellion  132, 149 counter-revolution and  179–80 deaths during  238 martyrdom and  179–80, 238–39 Crockaert, Pierre de  46 crucifixion art  75, 77f Cuba, Virgin Mary devotion in  476–77

index   589 Cuban National Ecclesial Encounter (ENEC) 183 Cuban Revolution  159t Catholicism and  176, 181–83 deaths in  175 Marxism and  182 Protestantism and  448–49 cultural agency  321 culture, liberation theology and  170 cursillo movement, in Guatemala  200 cyclical time, in Mesoamerica  33–34

D

Dahl-Bredine, Phil  516 Damian, Carol  461 dance, indigenous, restriction of  141–42 Daniels, David Douglas  367n11 Daughters of Mary (Hijas de María)  498 Davis, Mike  467 Dawson, Christopher  149 De regia potestate (Las Casas)  51–52 De thesauris (Las Casas)  51 Dean, Carolyn  60 Decadência (Decadence)  302–3 Democrates primus (Sepúlveda)  44 Democrates secundus (Sepúlveda)  44–45 democratization Catholic politics in Latin America and 264–69 Christian human rights activism and 224–25 development, liberation theology compared to 157 Deza, Diego de  43 Díaz, Pascual  179 Díaz, Porfirio  177–78, 442, 497 Diego, Juan  479–82 diocesan clergy. See secular clergy “Dirty War,” in Argentina  175 disaffiliation, conversions and  314 disease, poverty and  169 Do Vaticano II a um novo Concilio (Souza) 510 Doce dudas (Las Casas)  51 domestic altar  72–73, 73f domestic oratories  70–71 domination, Catholicism and  460 Dominican Republic, Protestantism in  441

Dominicans 9–10 baptism beliefs of  12 conversions and  11, 26–27 scholastic theology and  39 Donovan, Jean  250 “double mistaken identity,” language and  12 dress code, slavery and  105 Dries, Angelyn  515 Drogus, Carol  228 Durán, Diego  59, 142 Durandus, William  142 Durham, William  299 Dussel, Enrique  165, 166

E

earthquakes, in Guatemala 1902 369n36 1976  297, 369n30 Eason, Carlos  361 EATWOT (Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians)  166 Ecce Homo  67, 67f ecclesiology 164 “Church of the People” and new  203–6 ecofeminism 464–67 ecology Boff on justice and  161, 462–63 Catholicism and  460–61 CEBs and  463–64 Christianity in Latin America and  459–60 colonialism and  468–69 Francis (Pope) on integral  466–67 indigenous peoples and  460–61 liberation theology and  461–64 Our Lady of Guadalupe and  461 Protestantism, Pentecostalism and  467–68 PWP and  468 sin and  463 social 462 survival and  468 Ecuador Protestantism in  261, 442 religious affiliation by group in  310t Ecuadorian Indigenous Evangelical Federation (FEINE)  95 Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT)  166

590   index ecumenical movement, Pentecostalism and 342 Edmunds Act, 1885  414 education. See also scholastic theology Adventists, of  423 authority and  29 CA focus on  182–83 Colegio Pío Latino Americano and  148, 196–97 indigenous Christianity and  500 indigenous peoples and Franciscan  27–29 Jehovah’s Witnesses, of  423 Jesuit activities with  15 Mormons, of  423 scholastic theology in  40–41 women’s struggles for  17–18 Edwards, Lisa M.  196 Egipcíaca da Vera Cruz, Rosa Maria  109 Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) 227 Eldridge, Joe  223 Elizondo, Virgilio  477 Ellacuría, Ignacio  161, 162, 172n5, 251, 383 El Salvador  202 authoritarian repression in  221 Christian human rights activism in  225 economic growth in, 1960s  247 martyrdom in  247–51 Maryknoll missionaries in  516–17 PICO in  266 religious affiliation by group in  310t violence during civil war in  275 Virgin Mary devotion in  483 EnCristus 401 ENEC (Cuban National Ecclesial Encounter) 183 enslaved Africans. See Afro-Latin Americans; slavery Erasmus of Rotterdam  40 Escamilla García, Rodolfo  238–39 Escobar, José  509 D’Escoto, Miguel  188 Espinal, Luis  382 Esquipulas Black Christ feast  360 Esquivel, Adolfo Perez  222 Essay on Religious Tolerance (Rocafuerte) 444

ethics biodiversity, of  469 liberation theology and  165 ethnicity, poverty and  340–41 Eucharist  188, 192n56 Evangelical Alliance of Guatemala  357 Evangelicals, definition of  1, 364n1. See also Pentecostalism/Pentecostals; Protestantism Evangelical Synod  295 Evangelii nuntiandi (Paul VI)  151 evangelization. See also conversions; indigenous Christianity Adventist outreach and  418 coercion and  26 consciousness-raising 162 Jehovah’s Witnesses outreach and  418–19 Jesuits, of  143–46 material Christianity in Latin America and  59–61, 61f Mendicants, of  143–46 Mormon outreach and  417–18 Passion Plays and  29–30 pastoral night  404 regular clergy, by  10 syncretism and  19 time and  32–33 US campaigns in Guatemala  372n63 extirpation  18–20, 60 EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) 227

F

Faces of Latin American Protestantism (Bonino) 435 Faith Based Principles of Immigration Reform (No More Deaths)  281 Fallaw, Ben  180 family conversions, to Pentecostalism  331 Family Worship Center (Centro Familiar de Adoración), Paraguay  313, 315 Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN)  221, 251 Farmer, Paul  169 Farriss, Nancy  33–34 FEINE (Ecuadorian Indigenous Evangelical Federation) 95

index   591 Fernández de Sotomayor, Juan  439 Ferreira, João  130–31 Fife, John  280 Figueroa, Ruben  273 films, Protestant missions in Guatemala using 360–61 finger-fonos  359, 373n82 Fiore, Joachim de  25 First International Congress on World Evangelization 454n70 First Order of Saint Francis  13 Florescano, Enrique  33 FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front)  221, 251 folk Catholicism  89–92 following Jesus, spirituality and  386–87 Ford, Ita  250 Foreign Mission Society, of Adventists  413, 415 Foucault, Michel  113 Foursquare Gospel Church  300 Fox, Carol  358 Fox, David  358 Francescon, Luigi  299 Francis (Pope)  160, 167, 169–70, 401, 484 Boff praising  467 ideological evolution of  189–90, 211 integral ecology, on  466–67 liberation theology and  381–82 martyrdom stance of  253 youth challenge of  512 Franciscans 9 baptism beliefs of  12 conversions and  10–11 indigenous peoples education by  27–29 second coming beliefs of  12 time and  23–26 Franco, Jean  296 Franklin, John  295 Fraternidad Cristiana, in Guatemala  298–99 free choice, natural law and  47 free thought societies  441 freedom marriage and  107, 108 religious, Protestantism and  438–39 Frei, Eduardo  184 Freire, Paulo  162, 185, 204, 389, 392n43

Freston, Paul  292 friendships, after conversions  317 FSLN. See Sandinista National Liberation Front Fujimori, Alberto  175

G

Galilea, Segundo  384, 388–89 Gálvez Galindo, Carlos  246 gang violence, Christian human rights activism and  229 Garcés, Julián  12 García, Fernando Lucas  245 García, Isabel  280 García, Miguel  102–3 García Moreno, Gabriel  148 García Rodríguez, Juan  514 Gardiner, Allen  439 Garrard-Burnett, Virginia  468 Garretón, Manuel  184 Gazzari, Pablo  244 Gebara, Ivone  169, 228, 463–65, 467, 469, 483 gender ideology panic  400 Gera, Lucio  162 Gerardi, Juan  222 German immigrants, Nazism, Protestantism and 445 Gil, Emilio Portes  179 Gill, Anthony  222–23, 261–62 Gillow y Zalvalza, Eulogio  491, 492, 496, 499–502 Gisbert, Teresa  69 Global South, Christianity in  1 God of Christians, The (Muñoz, R.)  163 Goizueta, Roberto  477 Goldfrank, Benjamin  223 Gómez de Souza, Luiz  510 González, Tomás  273 González Cárdenas, Federico  179 Good Press Society (Sociedad de la Buena Prensa) 498 Good Samaritan biblical story  279 Gorostiaga, Xabier  188 Gospel in Solentiname, The (Cardenal)  340 gospel music, CCR and  402–4 Goubaud, Antonio  351 Graham, Billy  297, 300, 357

592   index Gran Cirera, José María  246 Grande, Rutilio  247 grass roots Christian human rights activism 218 Great Commission, Protestant missions in Guatemala and  352 Grieg, Ann  516–17, 519–20 Grim, John  459 Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe  140 Guatemala. See also Protestant missions, in Guatemala Church of the Nazarene in  351, 355 civil war deaths in  175, 296 conversions in  294, 298 cursillo movement in  200 earthquake of 1902 in  369n36 earthquake of 1976 in  297, 369n30 Evangelical Alliance of  357 Fraternidad Cristiana in  298–99 indigenous languages in  351 indigenous Protestantism in  91 martyrdom in  244–47 morería businesses in  360, 374n93 National Linguistic Conference in  367n9 neo-Pentecostals in  298–99, 364n1 Pentecostalism in  291, 294–99, 304, 355–58 post-colonial millenarian movements in 134 poverty in  244 Primitive Methodist Church in  295, 355, 356, 370n51 Protestantism in  294–99, 309–10 religious affiliation by group in  310t US evangelistic campaigns in  372n63 violence in history of  244, 275 Guaynas, Eduardo  462 Guerra, Elena  395–96, 409n11 Gutiérrez, Gustavo action, on  162 conversion, on  387–88 jobs of  161 liberation theology and  150, 160, 185–86 poverty, on  201 scholarly work of  168–69 spirituality, on  383 Virgin Mary, on  474 Guzmán Blanco, Antonio  443

H

Hagopian, Frances  268 Halkes, Catharina  476 Hanke, Lewis  43 Hapsburg dynasty  145 Harper, Charles  223 Haskett, Robert  31 Haymaker, Edward  351 Hays, Margaret N.  353 Hennelly, Alfred  203, 209 Henríquez, Raúl Silva  202, 222 Hermanos Menonitas, Villa Anita, Paraguay 313 Hernández, Antonio Badillo  440 Herz, Carlos  462 Hidalgo, Miguel  437–38 Hijas de María (Daughters of Mary)  498 Hines, Inéz Ruth  356 Hinkelammert, Franz  392n41 historic theology  150 History of the Indies (Las Casas)  45 Hobsbawm, Eric  122 Hoffman French, Jan  210 holy ballads (baladas santas)  404 “Holy Wednesday” (Passion Play)  29–30 Honduras Catholic politics in  262–63 religious affiliation by group in  310t house churches, laity and  513–14, 519 Huerta, Victoriano  177–78 Humane Borders  280 humanism, scholastic theology and  41 human rights. See also Christian human rights activism; immigrant rights Brazil abuses of  218 Catholicism and  3 Chile violations of  175, 202, 241 clergy and  199–203, 239 John Paul II (Pope) on clergy and  208 Maryknoll missionaries and  188 poverty and  52–53 scholastic theology and  49–53 scope of  218–19 Zapatista Army of National Liberation demands for  278 Hurteau, Robert  515 Hymns and Sacred Songs (Watts)  329

index   593

I

Iberian traditions, millenarian movements and 123 IBGE (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística) 303 iconography indigenous Christianity and  90 material Christianity in Latin America and  74–77, 76f, 77f IEQ (Igreja do Evangelho Quadrangular)  300 Iglesia de Jesús, in Mexico  440, 441 Iglesia Metodista Pentecostal (IMP)  312, 315, 316, 318 Igreja do Evangelho Quadrangular (IEQ)  300 Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (IURD) 301–3 image makers (santeros)  62, 63f imaginative rationality  321 immigrant rights. See also human rights Arizona Human Rights Coalition and  281 Good Samaritan biblical story and  279 Humane Borders and  280 Mesoamerican Migrant Movement and  284 migrant Viacrucis at Mexico’s southern border and  273–74, 285 Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity and  283–84 No More Deaths and  280–81 Las Patronas and  283 refugees at US-Mexico border and  279–81 Sanctuary Movement and  280 shelters and  282–84 United States’ security policies and  274 violence and  274, 284 Immigration Law and Enforcement Monitoring Project  280 IMP (Iglesia Metodista Pentecostal)  312, 315, 316, 318 imperialism baroque art and  64 natural law and  44–45 relectiones and  46–48 Inca empire Quechua language in  11 rituals of  18 inculturation, indigenous Christianity and 93–95

indentured service, indigenous Christianity and 88 Index of Prohibited Books  437 indigenous Christianity. See also conversions; evangelization altar and  88 authority and  84, 144 coercion and conversions in  84–86 education and  500 folk Catholicism and  90 global networking of  92–93 iconography and  89–92 inculturation and  93–95 indentured service and  88 indigenous practices incorporated into 142–43 language in  93, 95 liberation theology and  93 locality of  87–89 Mexican apparition movement and, 1880s–1920s 502 modernity and  92–95 origins of  83 Our Lady of Guadalupe and  479–83 process of  95–97 Protestantism and  90–92, 95 Requerimiento and  84 selfhood and  87 visitas de indios and  87 Indigenous Congress of Chiapas, 1974  277–78, 285 Indigenous Pastoral Commission, Chile 266–67 indigenous peoples baroque art and  64–65 Bible translations for  348, 353–55, 366n5 CA, in  91–92 Catholicism, justice and  139–40 Catholicism spread by  141 Chile, in Catholic politics  266–67 Christian expression of  20–21 Christian human rights activism and  227 church structures constructed by  66, 87–88 clergy and  27–28 conversions of  9, 11, 16 domestic oratories and  70–71 ecology and  460–61

594   index indigenous peoples (continued) extirpation and  18–19, 60 Franciscan education of  27–29 indigenous Christianity incorporating practices of  142–43 Inquisition and  14–15, 141–42, 144–45 land rights of, in Mexico  276–78 language of  11, 351 literacy and  17 material Christianity in Latin America and art of  62–65, 63f Mexican Catholic revivalism and, 1880s–1920s 500–502 millenarian movements and  124–25 music of  17 Our Lady of Guadalupe and  479–83 Passion Plays, in  29–30 primordial titles and  30–31 Protestant missions in Guatemala and  350–53 reducciónes and  67–68 sacrifice and  50–51 self-defense and  50–51 sodalities of  16 song and dance of, restriction of  141–42 syncretism and  19 tithes and  14 indigenous religion. See also indigenous Christianity Acosta on traditions of  85 burials and  86 extirpation and  18–19, 60 landscape and  18 Taki Onqoy and  85–86, 143 Tonantzín and  479 Inés de la Cruz, Sor Juana  17–18 Inquisition, indigenous peoples and  14–15, 141–42, 144–45 Inquisition, slavery and  111–12 Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)  180 Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE) 303 Instituto Teológico do Recife (ITER)  200 instrumental rationality  321 integral ecology, Francis (Pope) on  466–67 interracial marriage  112–13 Introduction to Pentecostalism (Anderson, A.) 2

Iribarnegaray, Mauricio Silva  244 ISAL (Church and Society in Latin America) 185 Is Latin America Turning Protestant? (Stoll)  4, 339 ITER (Instituto Teológico do Recife)  200 Itinerarium mentis in Deum (Bonaventure) 41 IURD (Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus) 301–3

J

Jaca, José de  103 Jansenism  146, 154n18 Jarlan, Andrés  242 JEC (Young Catholic Students)  184 Jehovah’s Witnesses (Witnesses)  134, 411, 429 baptism and  421 Brazil, in  426f, 427 Chile, in  427f, 428 dis-fellowshipping in  420 education of  423 evangelism and outreach of  418–19 geographic concentrations of  424 growth of  425–28, 426f in-group restrictions of  419 Latin American initial entry of  415, 416t, 417 membership statistics of  421, 422t, 423–24 Mexico, in  427f, 428 origins of  413–14 weekly services of  419 women in  420 WTBTS and  413 Jenkins, Philip  1 Jesuits 9–10 agriculture and  15–16, 20 education activities of  15 evangelization of  143–46 expulsion of  146 nationalities of  20 reducciónes and  67–68 slavery and  105–7 Spanish Crown expelling  20 Jesus Christ conversion and  388 following, spirituality and  386–87

index   595 liberation theology and  164, 386–87 Jesus Christ Liberator (Boff)  150 Jimenez, Maria  280 Jiménez de Cisneros, Francisco  139 JOC (Young Catholic Workers)  181, 184, 201 John Paul II (Pope)  151, 161, 163, 167, 183, 186, 264 CEBs, on  511 clergy and human rights, on  208 clergy appointments of  209 liberation theology, on  380, 381 Nicaragua, in  188–89, 209 Pentecostalism threat, on  312 John XXIII (Pope)  184, 198, 240, 377–78 José Maria. See Boaventura, Miguel Lucena Juárez, Benito  440, 442 Junta Eclesiástica of 1539  141–42 justice. See also social justice Boff on ecology and  161, 462–63 CELAM and  519 indigenous peoples, Catholicism and 139–40 liberation theology and  152–53 relectiones and  46–48 scholastic theology and  39 slavery and  102 Spanish conquest and disputes over  42–46 war and  48, 51

K

Kakchiquel Multiple Translation Project  366n5 Kaqchikel New Testament  348–49 Kazel, Dorothy  250 Kennedy, John F.  185 Kicanas, Gerald  281 K’iche’ Bible Institute  351, 361

L

de la Barra, Francisco León  178 labor union organizing, in Puerto Rico  330, 338 ladino, definition of  368n26 laity. See also Maryknoll missionaries Brazilian leadership from  514 Catholic politics and mobilization of 268–69

CCR and  397 clergy role changes with  204–5 contemporary Catholic, in Latin America 513–15 house churches and  513–14, 519 Mexico and Catholicism’s revival, in early 20th century  491–92 Lalive d’Epinay, Christian  337, 435 Landa, Diego de  60, 85, 142 Landless Workers Movement (MST)  211, 226–27 land rights Catholic politics and  276 Central America, violence and, in  275–76 colonialism and  276–77 CPT and  227, 266 Maya and  94 Mexico, in  276–78 MST and  211, 226–27 poverty and  277 landscape, indigenous religion and  18 Land-without-Evil pilgrimages, Tupí-Guaraní and 124–25 language conversion challenges with  11–12 “double mistaken identity” and  12 indigenous Christianity, in  93, 95 indigenous peoples, of  11, 351 Nahuatl  11, 16–17, 479–80 slavery and  106 Spanish, Protestant missions in Guatemala and 351–52 Lara, Jaime  70 Larraín, Manuel  184, 199 Lasaga, José Ignacio  182 Las Casas, Bartolomé de  26, 43, 45, 49–53, 168, 275, 460 Latin America. See Andes; Christianity, in Latin America; Mesoamerica Latin American Congress for Evangelization (CLADE) 454n70 Latin American Episcopal Conference (CELAM) 159t Aparecida meeting, 2007  160, 168, 170, 173n33, 210, 508, 518 CEBs and  508, 511 clergy identity and  196–99

596   index Latin American Episcopal Conference (CELAM) (continued) functions of  198 ideological conflict at  206–7 justice and  519 liberation theology origins and  150–51, 176 Medellín meeting, 1968  158, 162, 170, 176–77, 185, 201, 379, 508, 519 poverty and  378, 512–13, 518–19 progressivism and  184–85 Puebla meeting, 1979  158, 160, 207–9 Romanization reforms and founding of 197 Santo Domingo meeting, 1992  160, 209–10, 381 Vatican II reforms and  158, 198–99 Latin American Evangelical Conference (CELA) 454n70 Laudato Si (Pope Francis)  466–67 Leibsohn, Dana  60 Lemus, Gladis  465 León-Portilla, Miguel  32 Leo XII (Pope)  147 Leo XIII (Pope)  148, 149, 178, 259, 396 Lernoux, Penny  208 Levine, Daniel  210, 219 Libânio, João Batista  209 liberalism, Catholicism rejection of  147–49 liberation theology. See also counter-revolution action and  162, 170 Aparecida CELAM meeting, 2007, and  160, 168, 170, 173n33, 210, 508, 518 belief and  163 Benedict XVI (Pope) on  380–81 Boff and  150–52 books on  160–61 Catholicism, in  157 Catholic politics in Latin America and  260 CCR and  409n9 CEBs and  164, 185 CELAM and origins of  150–51, 176 consciousness-raising evangelization and 162 contextual changes surrounding  158–61, 159t–60t conversions and  387–88

counterculture leadership and  389–90 culture and  170 development compared to  157 durability of  381 ecofeminism and  465 ecology and  461–64 Europe compared to Latin American, in 161 Francis (Pope) and  381–82 growth of  461 Gutiérrez and  150, 160, 185–86 indigenous Christianity and  93 ISAL and  185–86 Jesus Christ and  164, 386–87 John Paul II (Pope) on  380, 381 justice and  152–53 love and  382–83 love of neighbor and  384–85 martyrdom and  167 Marxism and  151, 166 Medellín CELAM meeting, 1968 and  158, 162, 170, 176–77, 185, 201, 379, 508, 519 moral theology, ethics and  165 neoliberalism denounced by  462–63 new approach of  379–80 opposition to  167–68 political implications of  166–67 poverty and  152–53, 162, 169, 276, 340, 461–62 Protestantism and  391n12 Puebla CELAM meeting, 1979, and  158, 160, 207–9 reassessment of  151–52, 168 Santo Domingo CELAM meeting, 1992, and  160, 209–10, 381 socialism and  166 spirituality and  164–65, 382–84, 389–90 Trinity and  163 21st century, in  168–71 Vatican II and  189, 378 violence and  276 Virgin Mary and  476–78 women and  166, 169–70 Life of Christ  360–61 Lima, José Lezama  57, 64, 68 Lima diocese  12 Lindsay, Gordon  357

index   597 linear time, in Mesoamerica  33–34 Linton, Ralph  122 Lisboa, Antonio Francisco  70 literacy Bible and  348–50 conversions and  349 indigenous peoples and  17 Nicaragua, in  167 Protestant missions in Guatemala and rates of  348–49, 349f LNDLR (National League for the Defense of Religious Liberty)  179, 180 Locke, John  342 Lockhart, James  66 Lombard, Peter  40, 43, 46 Longueville, Gabriel  243 López, Amando  251 López, Carmen María  132 López, Eufemio Hermógenes  245 López Trujillo, Alfonso  151, 158, 160, 207–8 López y López, Joaquín  251 Lord’s Supper celebrations  204–5 Lorscheider, Aloísio  208 los Ángeles, Francisco de  23, 27 love Christianity in Latin America and  385 liberation theology and  382–83 neighbor, of  384–85 power of  390 social justice and  385 spirituality and  384–85 Loveman, Mara  222 Luna, Carlos Enrique “Cash,”  299 Luther, Martin  40 Lutherans  435, 442, 444, 445 Lynch, John  4, 148

M

Macedo, Edir  300–303, 398–99 Machiavelli, Niccolò  44 Macías, Alirio Napoleón  249 Maciel, Antônio Mendes  131 MacNutt, Francis  396 Madero, Francisco I.  177–78 Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, in Argentina  244, 477–78 magic lantern projector  360

Mahon, Leo  206, 507 mainline Protestantism  435–49 Mainwaring, Scott  222 Mair, John  43–44 Maistre, Joseph  148 Making Saints (Woodward, K.)  237–38 Maritain, Jacques  149, 184 marriage Afro-Latin American traditions in  108 freedom and  107, 108 interracial 112–13 slavery and  106–8 Martí, José  52 Martin, David  4 Martín-Baró, Ignacio  251 Martínez, José María  179 Martínez, María Elena  103 Martínez, Victor  243–44 Martinez Novo, Carmen  227 martyrdom Argentina, in  242–44 Azevedo, of  237–38 Brazil, in  241 Chile, in  241–42 Cristero Rebellion and  179–80, 238–39 criteria for  237–38, 252 El Salvador, in  247–51 Francis’s (Pope) stance on  253 Guatemala, in  244–47 liberation theology and  167 Pro, of  239 Maruzzo, Tullio Marcello  246 Marxism Cuban Revolution and  182 liberation theology and  151, 166 Maryknoll missionaries El Salvador, in  516–17 human rights and  188 Latin American arrival of  89–90 legacy of  517, 519–20 Nicaragua, in  250 origin of  515–16 Peru, in  200 Mary: Mother of God, Mother of the Poor (Gebara and Bingemer)  483 Mary of the people, Virgin Mary as  475–76, 484

598   index Más que Vencedores (More than Conquerors), Paraguay  313, 315 mass media, CCR using  394, 398, 404 Mastai-Ferretti, Giovanni Maria  147 material Christianity, in Latin America altar and  71–74, 73f architecture and  57–58, 65–70, 67f–69f baroque art and  63–65 counter-conquest and  59, 78 disruption and emergence of  78 domestic oratories and  70–71 evangelization and  59–61, 61f extirpation and  60 iconography and  74–77, 76f, 77f indigenous art and  62–65, 63f murals and  67, 67f ritual and  57–58, 58f Spanish conquest and birth of  58–59 Matta, Roberto da  122 May, Roy H., Jr.  468 Maya cyclical and linear time and  33–34 inculturation and  94 land rights and  94 rituals of  85 mayordomías, patron saint’s feasts and  496 McAlister, Robert  300–301 Medellín CELAM meeting, 1968  158, 162, 170, 176–77, 185, 201, 379, 508, 519 Medrano, José  247 Melo, Fábio de  403 Méndez Arceo, Sergio  261 Méndez Medina, Alfredo  178 Mendicants evangelization of  143–46 standards of  139 Mendieta, Gerónimo de  25–26, 123 Mercado, Tomás de  102 Mercedarians  10, 11 Merida Initiative  282 Mesoamerica 10 cyclical time in  33–34 extirpation in  18–19 linear time in  33–34 Nahuatl language forms in  11 rituals in  18 Mesoamerican Migrant Movement  284

Mesters, Carlos  205 mestizo, creole and  368n26 Metcalf, Alida C.  124 Mexican-American War (1846–1848)  440 Mexican Revolution, 1910 anticlericalism and  178–79 Catholicism and  177–81, 339 deaths in  175 Mexico Adventists in  427f, 428 canonically structured organizations in 498–99 Catholicism ideological struggles in, 19th century 492–94 Catholicism in Oaxaca, 1880–1920s 490–503 church-state conflict in, colonial period 489–90 Constitution of 1857 in  496–97 Cristero Rebellion and  132, 149, 179–80, 238–39 economic depression following independence of  495–96 EZLN in  227 Iglesia de Jesús in  440, 441 indigenous Christianity apparition movement in, 1880s–1920s  502 indigenous peoples in and Catholic revivalism, 1880s–1920s  500–502 Jehovah’s Witnesses in  427f, 428 laity, clergy and Catholicism’s revival in, early, 20th century  491–92 land rights in  276–78 liberal reforms in  496–97 Mendicant evangelization in  143–44 migrant Viacrucis at southern border of  273–74, 285 Mormons in  427f, 428 patron saint’s feasts in, 19th century 494–96 post-colonial millenarian movements in 131–34 poverty, violence and liberation theology in 276 Protestantism in  448 Reform Laws, 1855–1860, in  440 refugees at US border with  279–81

index   599 religious affiliation by group in  310t Zapatista Army of National Liberation human rights demands in  278 Mexico City, coloquio in, 1524  23–24 Meyer, Jean  180 Mignone, Emilio  242 Mignone, Mónica  242 migrant Viacrucis, at Mexico’s southern border  273–74, 285 millenarian movements Afro-Latin Americans and  124 alternative spiritual practices and  134 Andes, in  128–29 Apocalypse and  121–23 characteristics of  122 colonial 125–29 conditions for rise of  122–23 definition of  122 Iberian traditions and  123 indigenous peoples and  124–25 post-colonial 129–34 resistance and  121, 126–28 utopian renewal and  133 Virgin Mary and  126–28, 133–34 Miller, James  246 Miller, William  412 Mintz, Sidney W.  329–31, 336, 338, 342. See also Zayas Alvarado, Anastacio “Taso” miraculous healings history of  332–33 neo-Pentecostals and  344n12 Our Lady of Guadalupe and  332 Pentecostalism and  333–34 Zayas Alvarado, of  333 Mysterium liberationis (Ellacuría and Sobrino) 383 Moiran, Epifano de  103 Molina, Alonso de  16 Molina, Luis de  102 Monast, Jacques  90 Monroe Doctrine, in US  439 Montes, Segundo  251 Montesino, Antón  42 Montesinos, Antonio de  460 Montsalvatge, Ramón  442 Moody, Dwight L.  372n63

Mora, José María Luis  439 moral theology, liberation theology and  165 Morelos, José María  437–38 Moreno, Juan Ramón  251 morería businesses, in Guatemala  360, 374n93 More than Conquerors (Más que Vencedores), Paraguay  313, 315 Mormons  134, 429 baptism and  420 Brazil, in  426f, 427–28 Chile, in  427f, 428 education of  423 evangelism and outreach of  417–18 geographic concentrations of  424 growth of  425–28, 426f in-group restrictions of  419 Latin American initial entry of  414, 416t, 417 membership statistics of  420–21, 422t, 423–24 Mexico, in  427f, 428 Native Americans and  412 origins of  411–12 polygamy and  412, 414 weekly services of  419 women in hierarchy of  420 Morquecho, Gaspar  277 Morrow, Dwight  179 Mott, John Raleigh  358 Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity 283–84 Movement of the Landless  463 MST (Landless Workers Movement)  211, 226–27 Mugica, Carlos  242 Müller, Gerhard  169 Muñoz, Doris  465 Muñoz, Ronaldo  163–64, 169 murals, material Christianity and  67, 67f Murias, Juan Carlos de Dios  243 music gospel, CCR and  402–4 indigenous peoples, of  17 indigenous songs, restriction of  141–42 Protestant missions in Guatemala using 358 Muzi, Giovanni  147

600   index Mysterium Liberationis  161, 165–66, 172n18 Mysterium Salutis  172n5

N

Nahuas  23–24, 27, 29 art of, in church structures  66–67 Our Lady of Guadalupe and  479–83 Nahuatl language  11, 479–80 Spanish translations of  16–17 Napoleonic invasion of Spain  146–47 National Catholic Party (PCN)  178 National Conference of Brazilian Bishops (CNBB)  184, 202, 259, 266–67 National Evangelization Crusade, in Brazil 300 National League for the Defense of Religious Liberty (LNDLR)  179, 180 National Linguistic Conference, in Guatemala 367n9 National Synarchist Union (Unión Nacional Sinarquista) 181 Native Americans, Mormons and  412 natives. See indigenous peoples natural law free choice, self-movement and  47 imperialism and  44–45 sacrifice and  50–51 scholastic theology and  40–42 Navarro Oviedo, Alfonso  248 Nazism, German immigrants, Protestantism and 445 Nebel, Richard  474, 477 neighbor, love of  384–85 neoliberalism liberation theology denouncing  462–63 Protestantism and  152 neo-Pentecostals 78n2 Brazil, in  300–303, 394 church structures of  398–99 communication technologies used by  347 definition of  364n1 Guatemala, in  298–99, 364n1 IURD and  301–3 miraculous healings and  344n12 Pentecostals compared to  454n71 second coming focus of  292 television and  302–3

Nesvig, Martin  28 New Shape of World Christianity, The (Noll)  2 New Spain  24 patron saints in  74 relaciones geográficas and  30 time views in  28 New Worlds: A Religious History of Latin America (Lynch)  4 Next Christendom, The (Jenkins)  1 NGOs (nongovernmental organizations)  226 Nican Mopohua  479–81, 483 Nicaragua Catholicism and Cold War in  186–89 Catholic politics in  262–63 counter-revolution in  187–89 FSLN insurrection in  175, 177, 187–88 John Paul II (Pope) in  188–89, 209 literacy in  167 Maryknoll missionaries in  250 religious affiliation by group in  310t Nicholson, E. G.  441 No More Deaths  280–81 Noll, Mark  2 non governmental organizations (NGOs)  226 Nutini, Hugo  74

O

Obando y Bravo, Miguel  187–89 Obregón, Álvaro  238 O’Donnell, Mary Anne  516 O’Neill, Kevin  229 On Job (Gutiérrez)  168 Ortiz Luna, Octavio  248 Ortner, Sherry  122 Osborn, T. L.  357 O Seminário  200 Our Lady of Fatima  474 Our Lady of Guadalupe apparition and traditional account of  474, 480–83 ecology and  461 healing and  475–76 iconography of  74 indigenous people and  479–83 message of  478–79 miraculous healings and  332 Nahuas and  479–83

index   601 story of  145 theological focus on  474 Our Lady of Lourdes  474

P

“ . . . Padre Las Casas”, El (Martí)  52 Pagden, Anthony  26 Palacios, Rafael  248–49 Palacios Rubios, Juan López de  84, 460 Palafox y Mendoza, Juan de  19–20 Panama, religious affiliation by group in 310t Papal Volunteers for Latin America (PAVLA) 515 Paraguay 200 Pentecostalism conversions in  312–14, 319–22 religious affiliation by group in  310t Parentelli, Gladys  465 Parrales, Edgard  188 Passion Plays  29–30 Pastoral Land Commission (CPT)  227, 266 pastoral night evangelization  404 Patagonian Missionary Society  439 Patronas, Las  283 patron saints, in New Spain  74 patron saint’s feasts mayordomías and  496 Mexico 19th century, in  494–96 Protestant missions in Guatemala and  360, 374n92 Paula, Doña  72–73, 73f Paul VI (Pope)  151, 378 PAVLA (Papal Volunteers for Latin America) 515 PCN (National Catholic Party)  178 PCRI (Pentecostal-Charismatic Research Initiative) 325n27 Peace and Justice Commissions  220 Pedernera, Wenceslao  243 Pedroza, Aristeo  179 Penados, Próspero  222 Penn, William  437 Pentecostal-Charismatic Research Initiative (PCRI) 325n27 Pentecostalism/Pentecostals. See also Catholic Charismatic Renewal; neo-Pentecostals;

Protestantism; Protestant missions, in Guatemala authoritarianism and  341 autochthonous 312 Azusa Street Revival and  293 belief system of  1–2, 293 Brazil, in  299–303, 394 Chile, in  292, 319–22 Christianity in Latin America and size of Catholics compared to  4 Committee on Gender Equality fought by 400 conversions to, contextual factors in 314–15 conversions to, explanations of  311–12 conversions to, individual factors in  315 conversions to, in Paraguay and Chile  312–14, 319–22 conversions to, institutional factors in 315–16 conversions to, social network factors in 317–19 country, by  310t definition of  364n1 ecology and  467–68 ecumenical movement and  342 family conversion to  331 first- and second-wave  292, 294–98, 355–58, 394 focus of  78n2, 393 gender ideology panic spread by  400 Guatemala, in  291, 294–99, 304, 355–58 IEQ and  300 John Paul II (Pope) on threat of  312 Latin American growth of  291, 309–12, 311t, 330, 337–39 miraculous healing and  333–34 National Evangelization Crusade and  300 neo-Pentecostals compared to  454n71 orality of  356, 363, 367n11 origins of  293, 393–95 political activism of  337–38, 399–402 political impact of  339–40 population growth of  2, 4 poverty and  340–41 preaching style of  396 Protestantism percentage of  310t

602   index Pentecostalism/Pentecostals (continued) revivals and  356–57 School Without Homophobia Program fought by  400 speaking in tongues and  349–50 spiritual baptism and  334–35 success of global  309–12 Templo de Salomão and  303–4 Zayas Alvarado and  330–31, 334 Penzotti, Francisco  443 People Improving Communities through Organizing (PICO)  266 Pereira, Agostinho José  113 Pérez, Antonio  127–28 Pérez, Jacinto  132 Pérez, Laura  73 Pérez Alonso, Carlos  246 Pérez Serantes, Enrique  182 Peru Maryknoll missionaries in  200 Protestantism in  443 religious affiliation by group in  310t Shining Path deaths in  175 Pessar, Patricia  122 Peterson, Anna  250, 460 Peterson, Jeanette Favrot  461 Pfefferkorn, Ignaz  20 Phelan, John Leddy  25 PICO (People Improving Communities through Organizing)  266 Piñera, Bernardino  379–80 Pinochet, Augusto  175 Christian human rights activism in Chile during rule of  223–24 Pius IX (Pope)  147–48 Pius VII (Pope)  147 Pius XI (Pope)  259 Plant with Purpose (PWP)  468 Pocomchí New Testament  353–54 Poewe, Karla  292 political process theory, Christian human rights activism and  221 Politics (Aristotle)  44, 45 politics, liberation theology implications for 166–67 polygamy, Mormons and  412, 414 Ponce de León, Carlos  243–44

Pontifical Pius Latin American College  178 Porres, Martín de  101, 109 poverty Benedict XVI (Pope) on  512 CELAM and  378, 512–13, 518–19 conversions and  329–30, 335–36 disease and  169 ethnicity, race and  340–41 Guatemala, in  244 Gutiérrez on  201 human rights and  52–53 land rights and  277 liberation theology and  152–53, 162, 169, 276, 340, 461–62 Pentecostalism and  340–41 reductions in  171 Vatican II and  378 Virgin Mary and  475–76, 483–84 Zayas Alvarado, of  335 power. See authority powerful, conversions of  392n41 prayer groups, in CCR  396 pre-affiliation, conversions and  314 PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party)  180 priests. See clergy Primitive Methodist Church, in Guatemala  295, 355, 356, 370n51 primordial titles  30–31 Pro, Miguel  238–39 Proclaimer device  359 progressivism. See also liberation theology Argentina clergy, in  258 CA and  183–84, 200 Catholicism and Cold War, in  183–86 Catholic politics in Latin America and 258–59 CELAM and  184–85 Chile clergy, in  258 clergy objections to  206–7 Vatican II promotion of  259 Protestantism. See also Pentecostalism/ Pentecostals 1900-present, in  438–46 Afro-Latin Americans and  113 Bible societies and  439, 442 Bolivia, in  443 Brazil, in  299, 395, 443, 448

index   603 CCLA and  447 Christian human rights activism and 222–23 Colonial Period, 1492–1820, in  436–38 conservative values and  438, 452n40 country, by  310t Cuban Revolution and  448–49 Dominican Republic, in  441 Early Republics, 1820–1900, in  438–46 ecology and  467–68 Ecuador, in  261, 442 FSLN and  188 Guatemala, in  294–99, 309–10 immigration and 19th century  444–46 indigenous Christianity and  90–92, 95 Latin American growth of  257, 261, 291, 296, 299 liberal values and  438, 447, 448, 452n40 liberation theology and  391n12 mainline 435–49 Mexico, in  448 Nazism, German immigrants and  445 neoliberalism and  152 Pentecostals as percent of  310t Peru, in  443 religious freedom and  438–39 types of  435–36 Uruguay, in  443, 444 US missions and  439–41 Venezuela, in  442–43 Protestant missions, in Guatemala bias against  348–49 Bible translations for indigenous peoples and  353–55, 366n5 Catholicism and  368n20 comity agreements and  355, 371n54 communication technologies and  347–48, 358–63 films used by  360–61 finances of  352–53, 357 first-wave Pentecostalism and  355–58 Great Commission and  352 independence of  352 indigenous peoples and  350–53 innovative techniques of  359–60, 364 K’iche’ Bible Institute and  351, 361 literacy rates and  348–49, 349f

music used by  358 orality of  349–50, 356, 363 patron saint’s feasts and  360, 374n92 radio and  347, 361–62 recordings used by  358–59 Spanish language and  351–52, 369n37 television used by  362–63 visual techniques of  360–61 Protestant Reformation, Catholic response to  13 public spaces, Christian human rights activism and  229 Puebla CELAM meeting, 1979  158, 160, 207–9 Puebla-Tlaxcala diocese  12 Puerto Rico Bíblicos in  440 Catholicism in  345n25 labor union organizing in  330, 338 political and social turbulence in  338 religious affiliation by group in  310t Pullin, Thomas  295, 355 Purnell, Jennie  180 PWP (Plant with Purpose)  468

Q

Quechua language  11, 17

R

race, poverty and  340–41 radio, Protestant missions in Guatemala and  347, 361–62 Radio Buenas Nuevas  361 Radio Cultural Coatán  362 Radio Kekchi  362 Radio Maya TGBA Barillas  361 Rahner, Karl  252 Ramírez Monasterio, Augusto  246–47 Rankin, Melinda  441 Rationale divinorum officiorum (Durandus) 142 Ratzinger, Joseph. See Benedict XVI (Pope) Reagan, Ronald  189 realism, baroque art and  75 Reason to Believe (Smilde)  321 reconciliation theology  152 recordings, Protestant missions in Guatemala using 358–59

604   index Rede Globo, Brazil  302–3, 403 Rede Record, Brazil  302–3 Reform Laws, 1855–1860, Mexico  440 refugees, at US-Mexico border  279–81 regular clergy  9–10 extirpation tensions between secular clergy and 19–20 sixteenth century growth of  15 Spanish Crown limiting  20 women and  13 relaciones geográficas, time and  30 Relectio de dominio (Soto)  46–47, 49 Relectio de Indis (Vitoria)  46–47 Relectio de iure belli (Vitoria)  48 relectiones 46–48 religious freedom, Protestantism and  438–39 Religious Pluralism, Democracy, and the Catholic Church in Latin America (Hagopian) 268 religious pluralism, in Brazil  400 religious syncretism  3 Rembao, Alberto  447–48 Rendering unto Caesar (Gill)  261 reproduction, slavery and  106 reproductive rights movement  227–28, 265 Requerimiento (Palacios Rubios)  84, 460 Rerum Novarum (Leo XIII)  148 resistance Andes, in  143 millenarian movements and  121, 126–28 Ress, Mary Judith  465 Restrepo, Reinel  463 revivals, Pentecostalism and  356–57 Ricard, Robert  2, 28 Richard, Pablo  199, 381 Ríos Montt, José Efraín  134, 246, 296–98 rituals Inca empire and Mesoamerica, of  18 material Christianity in Latin America and  57–58, 58f Maya, of  85 Rivera Damas, Arturo  222, 226, 247, 252–53 Roberts, Oral  300 Robinson, Edward  351 Rocafuerte, Vicente  444 Román, Gustavo Rosales  361 Romanization reforms, clergy and  197

Romão Baptista, Cícero  132–33 Romero, Catalina  229 Romero, Gabina  134 Romero, Óscar  162, 202, 221–22, 247–50, 483, 484 Roncalli, Angelo Giuseppe  378 Rosas, Juan Manuel de  444 Rossi, Marcelo  399, 403 Rother, Stanley  246 Rouger, Nelio  244 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  52 Ruano, Ramón  357 Ruiz, Samuel  276, 378 Ruiz García, Samuel  275, 277–79, 285 Ruiz Pérez, Vicente  476 Ruiz y Flores, Leopoldo  179 Rumbia, José  448 Russell, Charles Taze  413, 415 Rutherford, Joseph Franklin  414

S

sacrifice, indigenous peoples and  50–51 Sahagún, Bernardino de  60 sainthood, slavery and  109 Saint Rose of Lima  17–18 Sánchez, Miguel  145 Sanctuary Movement  280 Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) 175 Catholicism and  177, 187–88 international support for  187 Protestantism and  188 revolutionary success of  187 Sandoval, Alonso de  106–7 santeros (image makers)  62, 63f Santo Domingo CELAM meeting, 1992  160, 209–10, 381 Santos, João Antonio dos  130 Santos, José Eusébio Ferreira dos  133 Santos, Luis  463 Santos, Silvestre José dos  130 Scannone, Juan Carlos  162 Schillebeeckx, Edward  206 scholastic theology Dominicans and  39 education, in  40–41 humanism and  41

index   605 human rights and  49–53 justice and  39 natural law and  40–42 relectiones and  46–48 Spanish conquest and justice disputes in 42–46 tradition of  40 School Without Homophobia Program  400 Schwaller, John  177 Sebastião I  123 second coming neo-Pentecostal focus on  292 time and  23 Second Order of Saint Francis  13 Secretariat of Faith and Politics  401 secular clergy  10 extirpation tensions between regular clergy and 19–20 sixteenth century growth of  15 secularism, Catholicism rejection of  147–49 Segundo, Juan Luis  151, 161, 165, 166 self-defense, natural right of  50–51 self-movement, natural law and  47 selfhood, indigenous Christianity and  87 seminarian reforms  200 Señor de Chalma shrine  71 Sentences (Lombard)  40, 43, 46 Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de  44–45 Serbin, Kenneth  200 Seventh-day Adventists (Adventists)  411, 429 baptism and  421 Brazil, in  426–27, 426f Chile, in  426, 427f, 428 education of  423 evangelism and outreach of  418 Foreign Mission Society of  413, 415 geographic concentrations of  424 growth of  425–28, 426f in-group restrictions of  419 Latin American initial entry of  414–15, 416t, 417 membership statistics of  421, 422t, 423–25 Mexico, in  427f, 428 origins of  412–13 socioeconomic status of  424–25 weekly services of  419 women in  420

Seymour, William J.  293 Shalom, CCR and  406 Shaull, Richard  185 shelters, immigrant rights and  282–84 Shining Path, in Peru  175 Sicilia, Javier  283 SIL (Summer Institute of Linguistics)  353, 366n5, 367n9, 370n38 Siller-Acuña, Clodomiro  480 Silva, Pereira da  131 sin, ecology and  463 SIT (Superintendencia de Telecomunicaciones) 362 slavery Afro-Latin Americans, Catholicism and  3, 101–5 agency and  107–11 alternative spiritual practices and  111 authority and  104–5, 107–11 baptism and  104 Codigo Negro Carolino and  104 confraternities and  109–11 defense and justifications of  102–5 dress code and  105 Inquisition and  111–12 Jesuits and  105–7 justice and  102 language and  106 limitations of, debates over  103–4 marriage and  106–8 rebellions from  126 reproduction and  106 sainthood and  109 self-defense from  50 Spanish conquest and  42–44 violence and  101, 112 women and religious practice in  109 Slessarev-Jamir, Helene  279 small Christian communities. See Base Ecclesial Communities Smilde, David  321 Smith, Brian  222 Smith, Joseph, Jr.  411 Smith, William French  280 SMOs (social movement organizations) 226–27 Sobrinho, José Cardoso  209

606   index Sobrino, Jon  161, 162, 166, 168, 383, 386 Social Catholicism  494 social ecofeminism  465 social ecology  462 socialism, liberation theology and  166 social justice. See also justice Catholic politics in Latin America and  266 clergy and  199–203, 239 love and  385 social movement organizations (SMOs) 226–27 social networks, Pentecostalism conversions and 317–19 Sociedad Católica (The Catholic Society)  498 Sociedad de la Buena Prensa (Good Press Society) 498 Society of Jesus. See Jesuits sociopolitical pluralism, in Brazil  400 sodalities, of indigenous peoples  16 Solané, Gerónimo de  132 Somoza Debayle, Anastasio  167, 187 Somoza Debayle, Luis  187 Somoza García, Anastasio  187 songs, indigenous, restriction of  141–42 Soto, Domingo de  26, 46–47, 49 South Texas Human Rights Center  281 Spain, Napoleonic invasion of  146–47 Spanish-American War of 1898  441, 447 Spanish conquest. See also colonialism conversions agenda of  9 justice and, disputes over  42–46 material Christianity in Latin America and 58–59 relectiones and  46–48 religious disruption of  78 self-defense and  50–51 slavery and  42–44 traumatic events of  31–32 Spanish language, Protestant missions in Guatemala and  351–52, 369n37 speaking in tongues, Pentecostalism and 349–50 Spickard, James  321 spiritual baptism, Pentecostalism and  334–35 spirituality Christian 384 following Jesus and  386–87

Gutiérrez on  383 liberation theology and  164–65, 382–84, 389–90 love and  384–85 Stewart-Gambino, Hannah  228 Stoll, David  4, 304, 339 Suárez, Francisco  52 Suárez, Pino  178 Sullivan, John  516 Summa theologiae (Aquinas)  41, 45, 46 Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL)  353, 366n5, 367n9, 370n38 Sumrall, Lester  300 Superintendencia de Telecomunicaciones (SIT) 362 survival, ecology and  468 Syllabus of Errors (Pius IX)  148 syncretism  19, 341

T

tabula rasa (blank slate)  59–61, 61f Taki Onqoy  85–86, 143 Tamayo Cortez, José Andrés  463 Támez, Elsa  165–66 tape recordings, Protestant missions in Guatemala using  358–59 Tavárez, David  31 Taylor, William  145, 443 television CCR and  398 neo-Pentecostals and  302–3 Protestant missions in Guatemala using 362–63 Templo de Salomão, Brazil  303–4 Tenochtitlán. See Mexico City Theology and the Church (Segundo)  151 A Theology of Liberation (Gutiérrez)  150, 160, 162, 380 Thomson, James “Diego,”  439, 442 Tillich, Paul  342 time Apocalypse and  25–26 cyclical, in Mesoamerica  33–34 early Christianity in Latin America and 23–34 evangelization and  32–33 Franciscans and  23–26

index   607 “Holy Wednesday” and  29–30 linear, in Mesoamerica  33–34 New Spain views on  28 primordial titles and  30–31 relaciones geográficas and  30 second coming and  23 typology and  25–26 Zapotec calendars and  31 tithes, indigenous peoples and  14 Tlaxcala, Todos Santos celebration in  74 T. L. Osborn Evangelistic Association  359 Todos Santos celebration, in Tlaxcala  74 Toledo, Francisco de  143 Tomas Moro Institute  401 Tonantzín, indigenous religion and  479 Torres, Sergio  161 Townsend, Cameron  351, 354 transculturation 12 transubstantiation 192n56 Trejo, Guillermo  227, 267 Trinidad (Trinity), La Chile  313 Trinity, liberation theology and  163 Trinity (La Trinidad), Chile  313 Truman Furman, Carrie  370n51 Truman Furman, Charles  295, 355, 370n51 Trumbull, David  443 Tucker, Mary Evelyn  459 Tupí-Guaraní, Land-without-Evil pilgrimages and 124–25 typology, Bible and  25–26

U

Ubico, Jorge  244 UCA (University of Central America)  221–22, 251 UFCO (United Fruit Company)  245 Unión Nacional Sinarquista (National Synarchist Union)  181 Unión Radio  361 United Free Gospel and Missionary Society  295, 355, 371n53 United Fruit Company (UFCO)  245 United States (US) evangelistic campaigns of, in Guatemala 372n63 immigrant rights and security policies of 274

Monroe Doctrine in  439 Protestant missions from  439–41 refugees at US border with  279–81 Universal Association of the Holy Family (Asociación Universal de la Sagrada Familia) 498 Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, in Brazil 344n12 University of Alcalá  139 University of Central America (UCA)  221–22, 251 University of Salamanca  46–49, 139 Urrea, Teresa  132 Ursula de Jesús  109 Uruguay Catholic politics in  265 Protestantism in  443, 444 religious affiliation by group in  310t US. See United States utopian renewal, millenarian movements and 133

V

Valdés, Juan de  448 Valdivieso, Antonio de  237–38 Valeriano, Antonio  480 Vallier, Ivan  260, 262 Vargas, Getulio  448 Vatican II  150, 159t, 177, 184–85 CEBs and  507–8 CELAM and reforms of  158, 198–99 Christian human rights activism and  217 clergy struggles with  206 contextual theology and  517–18 focus of  378 liberation theology and  189, 378 poverty and  378 progressivism promoted by  259 renewal movement of  377 violence following directives from  239–40, 243 Vega, José Reyes  179 Vencedoras, Las  465 Venezuela Protestantism in  442–43 religious affiliation by group in  310t Venn, Henry  352

608   index Vera, Saltillo Raul  285 Viacrucis, migrant  273–74, 285 Vicaría de la Solidaridad  202, 264 Villa, Pancho  178 Villa Anita, Hermanos Menonitas, Paraguay 313 Villanueva, Faustino  246 Viña Las Condes (Las Condes Vineyard), Chile 313 Vingren, Gunnar  299–300 violence. See also martyrdom Catholicism and  189 Central America, land rights and, in  275–76 Christianity in Latin America and misconceptions of  141 counter-revolution, Catholicism and  176–77 El Salvador civil war, in  275 gang, Christian human rights activism and 229 Guatemala’s history of  244, 275 immigrant rights and  274, 284 Latin America 20th century, in  175 liberation theology and  276 slavery and  101, 112 Vatican II and  239–40 Virgens, Manoel Gomes das  130 Virgin Mary. See also Our Lady of Guadalupe apparitions of, recognized  474, 480–83 Costa Rica and devotion to  476 Cuba and devotion to  476–77 directions of theological reflection on 474–75 El Salvador devotion to  483 Gutiérrez on  474 healing and  475–76 historical 473 iconography of  75, 76f liberation theology and  476–78 Madres de la Plaza de Mayo and  477–78 Mary of the people, as  475–76, 484 millenarian movements and  126–28, 133–34 poverty and  475–76, 483–84 views of  475

Virgin of Guadalupe. See Our Lady of Guadalupe visitas de indios, indigenous Christianity and 87 Vitoria, Francisco de  26, 46–49 void, baroque art and  65 Von Helde, Sérgio  303 Voordeckers, Walter  245–46 Voz Evangélica de América  361

W

Waldensians  444, 445, 453n51 Walker, Tamara  105 war, justice and  48, 51 Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) 223 Watanabe, John  81n32, 90 Watchtower Bible and Tract Society (WTBTS) 413 Watts, Isaac  329 WBT (Wycliffe Bible Translators)  353 We Drink from Our Own Wells (Gutiérrez)  168 Westmeier, Karl-Wilhelm  435 White, Ellen  413, 420 White, Robert  250 Williams, Harold  300 witchcraft, Afro-Latin Americans and  111–12 Witnesses. See Jehovah’s Witnesses Witness to the Truth (Mignone, E.)  242 WOLA (Washington Office on Latin America) 223 women Adventists, in  420 Catholicism, in  13–14 Christian human rights activism and  227–28 ecofeminism and  464–67 education struggles of  17–18 Jehovah’s Witnesses, in  420 liberation theology and  166, 169–70 Mormon hierarchy, in  420 regular clergy and  13 religious life, in  17–18 reproductive rights movement and  227–28 slavery and religious practice of  109 Wood, Stephanie  30, 70, 75

index   609 Woods, William  245 Woodward, Kenneth  237–38 Woodward, Michael  242 Worker in the Cane (Mintz)  329–31. See also Zayas Alvarado, Anastacio “Taso” World Harvest Radio International  300 A Worldwide Heart (Hurteau)  515 Wright, Jaime  223 WTBTS (Watchtower Bible and Tract Society) 413 Wycliffe Bible Translators (WBT)  353

Y

Young Catholic Students (JEC)  184 Young Catholic Workers (JOC)  181, 184, 201 youth socialization, CCR and  404

Z

Zacchaeus 388 Zamora, Mario  249 Zapata, Emiliano  178 Zapatista Army of National Liberation, human rights demands of  278 Zapotec calendars  31 Zayas Alvarado, Anastacio “Taso,”  342 Bible, on  336 manual labor and  329–30 miraculous healing of  333 Pentecostalism and  330–31, 334 poverty of  335 spiritual baptism and  334–35 Zuidema, R. T.  81n32 Zumárraga, Juan de  14, 141