Christianity, mainly in its Roman Catholic form, has been an integral part of Latin American life for five centuries. It was of course imposed as one of many aspects of Spanish or Portuguese colonial rule, which involved the domination of the local inhabitants and the transport of Africans to work as slaves on sugar plantations. These policies were justified at the Spanish court by Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who claimed that the indigenous peoples ‘are inferior to the Spaniards just as children are to adults, women to men, and, indeed, one might even say, as apes are to men.’
Such arguments were countered by Bartolomé de Las Casas, who had been a landowner and slave owner and seen the effects of the system. He became a Dominican friar and in 1542 wrote A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, in which he argued that ‘The reason why the Christians have killed and destroyed such an infinite number of souls is that they have been moved by their wish for gold and their desire to enrich themselves in a very short time.’ Las Casas was influenced by an earlier Dominican critic of the colonial project, Antonio de Montesinos, who delivered a scorching condemnation of it in 1511: ‘You are all in mortal sin. In it you will live and die because of the cruelty and tyrannical behaviour with which you treat these innocent peoples. Tell me by what right and on the basis of what justice you keep the Indians in such cruel and horrible servitude…Are they not human? Do they not have immortal souls? Are you not obliged to love them as yourselves?’
The abolition of slavery did not immediately transform the lives of the ex-slaves. Most had little alternative than to continue the same work, possibly in less harsh conditions, but with next to no income. The legacy of racism and disadvantage still affects Afro-descendant populations today.
In Brazil, the largest country of the sub-continent, the social outreach of the Catholic Church cannot be separated from the name of Hélder Câmara. This diminutive native of Fortaleza in the north-east of Brazil had been appointed auxiliary bishop of Rio de Janeiro, when he founded the Brazilian bishops con ference in 1952. Essentially a means for the bishops to keep in touch with each other and share their concerns and ideas, it became a sort of civil service for the Church. It eventually had a Pastoral Land Commission that worked to support small farmers against the attacks – sometimes murderous – of rich landowners, and an Indigenous Missionary Council that helped to defend indigenous people against similar attacks directed at them.
The bishops conference organises a yearly educational and fund-raising campaign. Over the years the themes became less churchy and included land, housing, Afro-Brazilians and the Amazon region. The Church also encouraged the formation of small groups to discuss the relevance of faith to local situations. These church base communities, as they became known, were for a while a powerful force at the grassroots, and had national assemblies every five years. The effectiveness of these various campaigns depended largely on the bishop in charge in each locality, and there were wide variations.
In general, in the mid-20th century the Brazilian Catholic Church could be described as conservative. When a military coup took place in 1964, the bishops gave thanks for Brazil’s deliverance from communism. As the violence of the military became more apparent, however, the bishops began to protest. Hélder Câmara, by now archbishop of Recife, stood up publicly to the military, and was subject to attacks and could not be mentioned in the media. In São Paulo the new archbishop, Paulo Evaristo Arns, sheltered people at risk of arrest, and organised a public inter-faith service in his city centre cathedral for the Jewish journalist, Vladimir Herzog, who had died under torture, that became a mass protest against the dictatorship.
If Brazil had a military dictatorship lasting 21 years, Colombia was torn by 60 years of internal armed conflict costing an estimated nine million lives. There were two main guerilla groups, the FARC and the ELN, and paramilitary forces financed by landowners, often in alliance with the state’s armed forces, which perpetrated some of the most brutal killings. A peace agreement was finally agreed with the FARC in 2016, though negotiations with the ELN have still not been concluded. One of the unusual features of the ELN is that it was founded by two priests, the Spanish former worker priest Manuel Pérez, and Camilo Torres, a pioneering Colombian sociologist, who died in combat in 1966.
In 2022 the Colombians elected as President Gustavo Petro, a former guerrilla, the first time the country has had a left-wing president. His main proposal was ‘total peace’, negotiations with all groups still engaged in conflict, a process that is still in progress. The conflict was made worse by the drug trade, in which the FARC became involved.
Throughout the conflict the Colombian Jesuits, through their thinktanks and development programmes, made important contributions to work for peace and development. The Social Ministry department of the bishops conference was also important in bringing into the discussion the experiences of communities remote from the seat of power.
At a global level, in the 1960s the Catholic Church was being pushed to transform itself to meet the needs of the world after the Second World War. In 1962 Pope John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council, the first ecumenical council since 1870. A sign of the mood among the assembled bishops was that they rejected the drafts prepared by the Vatican bureaucracy and insisted on discussing the challenges they faced in their various countries and possible ways of addressing them. In Latin America the Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez published A Theology of Liberation in 1971, launching a movement that was to bring Catholicism out of the churches and into everyday life. Gutiérrez was clearly formulating a mood that was already present in the sub-continent: in 1968 the Latin American bishops, meeting in Medellín, Colombia, adopted the ‘option for the poor’, the concept that channelled liberation theology into action.
Like other Latin American countries, Peru endured a military dictatorship and a guerrilla war led by the Maoist group Shining Path between 1980 and 2012.
Peruvian bishops were heavily influenced by the Second Vatican Council and promoted social and economic reform. The Catholic Church in the Southern Andes created the Andean Pastoral Institute and developed approaches to engage with the local Quechua and Aymara population and work for land reform. In 1999 Pope John Paul II appointed the conservative Juan Luis Cipriani as archbishop of Lima, which led Gustavo Gutiérrez to join the jurisdiction of Cipriani. Cipriani tried to impose his control over teaching in the Pontifical University of Lima, until he was removed as chancellor by Pope Francis in 2016.
The tiny Central American country of El Salvador was an improbable powerhouse of radical Catholicism, brought to international attention when Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated on 24 March 1980. Romero had called on the army fighting the FSLN guerrillas and the population that largely supported them: ‘In the name of God stop the repression!’ Nine years later, in November 1989, six Jesuits of the Central American University, their housekeeper and her 16-year-old daughter were murdered by an elite battalion of the Salvadorean army. One of the murdered Jesuits, Ignacio Ellacuría, was a leading liberation theologian.
Things appeared more promising in neighbouring Nicaragua. There the Sandinista revolution triumphed in 1979, and the initial governing junta included four priests, Miguel D’Escoto as foreign minister, Fernando Cardenal as education minister, his brother, the poet Ernesto Cardenal, as minister of culture, and Edgard Parrales as social welfare minister. Their involvement with the Sandinistas resulted in their Dominican order, to remove himself from the suspension from their priestly functions, and Ernesto In Brazil Protestants organise politically more than Cardenal received a public finger-wagging rebuke when he tried to greet Pope John Paul II at the start of his visit to Nicaragua in 1983. The Polish Pope was intensely suspicious of revolutionary movements and liberation theology, which he identified with communism.
In the course of time the Sandinista movement became more authoritarian, and Nicaragua became a dictatorship ruled by the former guerrilla leader Daniel Ortega as president and his wife, Rosario Murillo, as vice-president. The initial revolutionary impulse had attracted broad support, including from intellectuals such as Sergio Ramírez, the novelist. In 1994 Ortega removed Sergio Ramírez from his leadership roles. In the same year Ernesto Cardenal resigned from the Sandinistas, saying: ‘My resignation from the FSLN has been caused by the kidnapping of the party carried out by Daniel Ortega and the group he heads.’
In 2018 anti-government protests were put down with extreme violence, particularly against students, many of whom were given refuge in the Jesuit Central American University. The government has since closed the university, setting up its own university in its premises, though it has had difficulty in getting off the ground. Much of the residual opposition to the Ortega regime has come from the Catholic Church, with one bishop forced into exile and another, Rolando Álvarez, and several clergy, imprisoned. On 9 March 2023 the regime deported 222 political prisoners to the United States, and on 15 January 2024, after negotiations with the Vatican, deported 18 clergy, including Álvarez and another bishop, to the Vatican.
Despite the harassment of the Catholic Church, the archbishop of Managua, Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes, has made no criticism of the regime. In fact, in March this year he accepted public congratulations from Rosario Murillo on his 75th birthday. The vice president said: ‘Thank God we have been able to leave behind us the days of bell-ringing and broken windows, those terrible days when there were attempts to break down the sense of family and community, and the alliance of reconciliation and union in our Nicaragua.’
In recent years Roman Catholicism has been in decline in Latin America, especially as Catholics have moved to Pentecostal churches. This change began in the 1970s: whereas Catholics were 92% of the population in 1970, in 2020 they were only 57%. The decline seems to be particularly fast in Brazil: one survey in 2020 put Catholics at 54%, whereas the last official census in 2010 had them at 64%. Catholics, though in earlier times this would have been a defence against an overwhelming Catholic majority. In the federal Congress there has been an Evangelical Parliamentary Front since 1980, and the conservative parliamentary groups defending landowners came to be known as the ‘beef, bible and bullets’ bloc. The use of religion for political ends was at its most extreme in the career of Jair Bolsonaro, an undistinguished military officer elected to Congress in 1990. He was elected president in 2012.
Brought up as a Catholic, Bolsonaro had himself baptised in the river Jordan in 2016, which enabled him to appeal to both Catholic and Protestant voters as co-religionists. In his inaugural address as president, Bolsonaro proclaimed that he would ‘respect religions and our Judeo-Christian tradition, preserving our values. Brazil will once more be a country free of ideological shackles.’
As president, Bolsonaro appointed both military officers and Protestant pastors as ministers. He reduced the protection for indigenous peoples and proclaimed that he would ‘integrate’ the Amazon rainforest into the rest of Brazil. He also relaxed the legislation on carrying arms. Perhaps his most notorious position was to dismiss COVID-19 as ‘a touch of flu’ and refuse to wear a mask or be vaccinated; this attitude was regarded as contributing to Brazil’s total of half a million deaths from the disease.
In the subsequent election in 2022 Bolsonaro was defeated by the Workers Party candidate and previous president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. On 8 January, a week after Lula was sworn in as president, a mob of Bolsonaro supporters invaded the presidential palace, the Congress and the Supreme Court, damaged and destroyed furniture and fittings, even the photos of former presidents. It later became clear that the attack had been organised on social media, buses had been arranged to bring people from all over Brazil, and food had been provided for them.
Bolsonaro himself had left Brazil on 30 December to avoid taking part in the swearing in of Lula, but when he returned he was declared ineligible for public office until 2030 for attempting to undermine the result of the 2022 election. Evidence had come out that he had discussed a coup with the commanders of the armed forces, and only the refusal of the commander in chief of the army had prevented a full scale military take-over. This it seems is what happens when, as Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelle, claimed: ‘Jesus governs Brazil.’