Book Review

The Other Americas

The Rebirth of Latin American Christianity
by Todd Hartch
Oxford University Press, 2014
(294 pages, $24.95, paperback)

reviewed by Leon J. Podles

Todd Hartch, a professor of Latin American history at Eastern Kentucky College, maintains that Latin America has become both more Protestant and more Catholic in the past two generations. He holds that "Protestantism was a blessing in disguise for the Catholic Church. Nothing roused Latin American Catholics more than the spread of Protestantism."

Catholicism was the universal religion of Latin America, but the Catholic Church encompassed a spectrum of religious modes, from the clerical, European Catholicism of the cities to the folk Catholicism of the countryside, where priests were rare, and which faded off into syncretism and paganism.

Mainline denominations established a small presence in Latin America, and were welcomed by progressives as a sign of toleration and modernity. They were followed by fundamentalist and Pentecostal missionaries, sometimes but not always from the United States. The churches they founded were accused of being agents of the United States and were persecuted, sometimes violently, but the new denominations were attractive to the poor and quickly became indigenized. These churches were able to use married men with minimal education as ministers, and they therefore had a far higher proportion of ministers to congregants than did the Catholic Church, whose requirements of celibacy and higher education severely limited the number
of priests.

Roles for the Laity

The Second Vatican Council had an enormous impact on Latin America because of its emphasis on social justice, the role of the laity, and ecumenism.

Liberation theologians decided that the poor in Latin America needed to be freed from sinful, oppressive structures, even, some theologians claimed, by violent revolution. Landowners kept large tracts out of cultivation while landless workers starved; cities did not provide the favelas, or shantytowns, with basic services such as water and sewage. As Latin American countries fell under military rule in the 1970s, Catholic clerics led the resistance to repression and political murder. Some of them, such as Óscar Romero of San Salvador, paid with their lives for their opposition. John Paul II was suspicious of the Marxist rhetoric used by liberation theologians and slowly staffed the hierarchy with bishops less inclined to give a political interpretation to liberation.

The laity found a new role in the Comunidades eclesiales de base, which were religious communities developed from the grassroots. In Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s there were 50,000 such communities; many took on a leftist coloring. Others, like the New Ecclesial movements, were less political and more orthodox and were therefore favored by the Vatican. These were mainly middle-class lay movements dedicated to helping their members lead Christian lives, including serving the poor. Opus Dei is probably the best known and has provoked the greatest criticism. The Cursillo was very active in Mexico; Focolare came to Latin America (and elsewhere) from Italy; the Sodalatium Cristianae Vitae was native to Peru. All these movements were regarded with hostility by liberation theologians because they were not overtly political.

Pentecostalism flourished, especially among the poor. Once they had a few basic services, the poor were not interested in politics, but in miracles and ecstatic experiences, to the disappointment of liberation theologians. The Catholic Charismatic Renewal came from the United States, and provided a way for charismatics to remain within the Catholic Church. In Brazil, half the population belongs to one or the other group.

Possibilities & Dangers

Ecumenism encountered many difficulties. Catholics referred to Protestant groups as "sects." Many Protestants regarded Catholicism as a non-Christian religion. The military dictatorships of the 1970s, opposed by leftist Catholics, turned to Protestants, who were either apolitical or supportive of the military regimes, which they saw as a bulwark against Communism. Rios Montt, the Protestant ruler of Guatemala in the early 1980s, gave radio sermons while carrying out a repressive and murderous policy in the countryside. Leftist Catholics saw Protestants as tools of U.S. imperialism.

Continue Reading

---