The new evangelization in Latin American perspective

Cross Currents, Fall, 1998 by Anna L. Peterson, Manuel A. Vasquez

The "romanizing" of post-Vatican II innovations in Latin America means a weakening of effective involvement of lay activists and the poor.

In recent decades, conservative movements within different religious traditions, notably Islam and evangelical Protestantism, have received a great deal of popular and scholarly attention. It is tempting to understand recent trends in the Roman Catholic Church in parallel terms, as the ascendance of a backward-looking sector within the broader institution. However, this interpretation misreads, or at least oversimplifies, changes within Catholicism today, which are more ambiguous than a simple fundamentalist renewal.

Many of the changes are centered in Latin America, the site of the Catholic Church's most dramatic innovations during the 1960s and '70s. Since church-based projects nurtured important social movements during a period of political repression in much of Latin America, shifts in the church can be expected to force changes in these movements and affect their constituent groups. Making sense of Latin American politics still requires knowledge of trends and power structures within the Catholic Church, as do efforts to understand religious diversity in the region. Although Protestantism is growing in Latin America, the Roman Catholic Church retains a great deal of power, and what happens within it affects other religious groups in Latin America (and vice versa). Beyond Latin America, progressive Catholicism, and especially liberation theology and the base Christian communities associated with it, inspired theologians, activists, and congregations in the U.S. and Europe to reconsider, and sometimes to transform, their own approach to social involvement, theology, and liturgy. Present changes in the Latin American Catholic Church thus reverberate far beyond religious and regional boundaries. At a time of crisis for modern humanism, such changes in Catholicism can shed light on the fate of religious and social reform movements.

The Latin American church's recent transformations, known collectively as the "new evangelization," are both incomplete and paradoxical. They entail a partial break with some progressive currents unleashed by the Second Vatican Council and a conservative redeployment of others, which gives post-Vatican II pastoral methods an alternative reading that supports the institutional church's drive to affirm its unity, authority, and universality. In other words, the conservative trends within Catholicism stem from concerns by the hierarchy and especially Pope John Paul II about both ecclesial structure and broader social and political currents. They represent an effort to make pastoral method more effective - and to bolster the institutional church - in the context of increasing religious fragmentation, the growth of evangelical Protestantism, and political and economic changes.

Post-Vatican II Pastoral Innovations

The Second Vatican Council (1962-65) was a turning point for the Catholic Church, marking an aggiornamento (updating), which finally transformed centuries of suspicion and rejection of the secular, modernizing world into dialogue with it. The church became a "pilgrim," eager to listen to and learn from the world and, especially, to respond to the aspirations and needs of the laity. These concerns led the church to update its social doctrine, with a new stress on Catholicism's commitment to justice, and to adopt a series of pastoral innovations designed to extend the church's social reach and increase the role of the laity.

These innovations reached perhaps their highest level of maturity and visibility in Latin America. The best-known initiative was the theology of liberation, a school of thought which both reflected and influenced grassroots pastoral and educational strategies. Many of these efforts had a powerful effect not only within the church but in society at large, fostering the participation of marginalized sectors in social as well as religious activism. Reform efforts actually began in the early to mid-1960s, even before the Vatican II sessions ended. Pastoral workers in different parts of Latin America, and especially Brazil, had begun innovations designed to increase lay leadership and make religious faith more relevant to ordinary people's life experiences. Although these early experiments have received relatively little attention, they helped define and create spaces for the more sweeping changes that occurred in the 1970s.

The 1950s witnessed the emergence of the first grassroots Christian communities (comunidades eclesiais de base, or CEBs), the small, lay-oriented reflection groups which formed the heart of postconciliar pastoral innovations in Latin America. Other groups, with a variety of names but generally similar structures, began to emerge throughout Latin America in the mid-1960s, when a number of other pastoral innovations also emerged. Regional pastoral education centers, such as the Latin American Pastoral Institute (Instituto Pastoral Latinoamericano, or IPLA) in Quito, Ecuador, provided priests and nuns with information and materials about, as well as enthusiasm for, innovative pastoral projects. Growing communication among pastoral workers in the region, facilitated by the Latin American Conference of Religious (Conferencia Latinoamericana de Religiosos, or CLAR) and other regional networks, also encouraged the spread of new pastoral principles and methods.