Professional Documents
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The last five decades have borne witness to how and how much the Catholic Church has lost its monopoly in the Latin American religious market. In 1997, Jean-Pierre Bastian published his study La mutacin religiosa de Amrica Latina [Latin Americas Religious Mutation], in which he showed that up to the 1950s the vast majority of consumers of the religious goods of salvation accepted the necessary mediation of Catholic cleric-producers of such goods. But now, he stated, increasing social strata are diversifying the source of their purchase. In 1960 only five Latin American countries had a population in which the Protestant Christian tradition accounted for over 5% of the total population. But by 1985, many countries already had a Protestant population close to or beyond the 10% mark, in some cases reaching 20%. In Central America, Panama, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua were among the former while the latter included Guatemala. That trend continued in the following two decades. According to a 2010 study by the Central American University of El Salvadors Public Opinion University Institute (IUDOP), 33% of Salvadorans over the age of 18 are Protestants and 50% are Catholics. The San Jos, Costa Rica-based Latin American Socio-religious Studies Program (PROLADES) registered Protestants as accounting for 36% of the population in Honduras (2007), 34% in El Salvador, 31% in Guatemala (2006), 24% in Costa Rica (2008) and 23% in Nicaragua (2005). Jess Garca-Ruiz, who specializes in studies on religious issues, quoted David Meja, president of the Evangelical Alliance of Guatemala, as saying there were 20,000 Protestant churches in that country and that 45% of the countrys population belonged to some denomination of the Evangelical nebula. The most accelerated increases in Protestantism, understood as the historical separation from Catholicism, have taken place in the last two decades. In his essential book on the topic, City of God, Canadian anthropologist Kevin Lewis ONeill echoed those who sustain that Guatemalas devastating 1976 earthquake was a religious
watershed in that country, with the membership of Evangelical churches rising by 14% in the months following that natural disaster and achieving an annual growth of 23.6%, almost four times the previous decades annual rate of expansion. The palpable solidarity and the unexpected universality in the way the aid was channeled to the victims demonstrated their proselytizing effectiveness. US historian Virginia Garrand-Burnett, from whom ONeill took this theory, stated that this boom benefited the Pentecostals more than any other group.
For Prez de Antn, the heart of the matter was the inconsistent Catholic condemnation of wealth and private property: And it was clear that a Council plagued with conflicts and disagreements had transformed private ownership into an ambiguous and insecure right. After having abused it for centuries and having owned and created a good part of the large landed estates of Europe and Latin America, the high clergy was criticizing the presumed perversion of ownership of people like myself who were not even the owners of the houses we lived in. As a result, millions of Catholics and tens of thousands of clerics, monks and nuns also abandoned the church, most of them due to the exclusionary policy the high clergy was practicing on those of us in disagreement. The Catholic Church distanced from itself a good part of the middle classes that did not agree with the clergys interference in public life, let alone in the home. In summary, his main explanation for the erosion of the Catholic social base among the middle classes was the condemnation of material prosperity and the defense of the poor; in other words, the fact that socialist thinking started to become the ideological support of Catholicism. What Prez de Antn points out with a severe wag of his finger coincides with what Juan Carlos Abril, pastor of the Guatemalan El Shaddai Neo-Pentecostal church, told German sociologist Anke Schnemann. He felt that the people running Catholic high schools turned them into focal points for recruitment of guerrilla fighters: In different Catholic high schools people were taken on excursions or activities they were programming to places where there was conflict, where there was a guerrilla presence, where as young people they had a direct relationship with participants, people who were transmitting their ideas. And they were taken by the head teachers, by the people from those schools who were really nuns or priests Taking a young person who was 15, 16 or 17 years old to a place like that? It was obviously to awaken an interest... There was a direct participation in enrolling people, making them part of the cause.
option for the secular clergy. Countless devout and opulent ladies financed diocesan seminaries and seminarists. But in Central America, most of the religious congregations took many decades to recognize that members of the native peoples could also be the object of vocational calls. Some religious orders took this great leap towards the second half of the 20th century, when they started to be affected by the scarcity of religious vocation in their traditional quarry and when liberation theology, insisting on the preferential option for the poor, offered an ideological stimulus for that social recomposition of their ranks, previously swollen by well-off foreigners and nationals. At the beginning of this turnaround, the opening focused on the middle and upper classes from smaller cities, on the sons of farmers from small rural towns and on the offspring of urban salary earners from liberal professions. The doors later opened to genuinely marginalized sectors.
Emigrants to Neo-Pentecostalism
The secularizing wave in confessional teaching is palpable in the flourishing of Catholic high schools, a phenomenon that displays an uneven development in the region. In Guatemala, the most famous elite high schools dont profess any confession. Their secularism is more suitable for a country in which the offspring of the native elites have to coexist with the sons of Asian and European executives who profess non-Christian and non-monotheist religions, or even no religion at all. At the other extreme is Nicaragua, where the Christian Academy, Notre Dame, Lincoln Academy, Saint Augustine and Saint Dominic, among other Catholic high schools, are markedly confessional. Their offer of bilingualor trilingualand religious education is very attractive for the middle-class strata that desire a private and ritual religiosity focused on sexual morals and removed from any social moral that goes beyond business social responsibility or other audacious strategies that fit camels through the eye of a needle. It is important to highlight here that those middle and upper-middle strata were longing for more modern and globalized religious reference groups and frameworks to live their faith. The new priests, monks and nuns stopped being the gurus of many Catholics. A lot of couples seek out their equals to talk about issues that affect their day-to-day life, married couples and others who talk about such pedestrian things as how to administer a household and manage money. The Catholic high schools arent enough for those most eager about religious practice . After a sometimes very long religious cooling off period among people from the traditionally Catholic middle and upper strata, they migrated to Neo-Pentecostal groups such as Hosanna in Nicaragua and El Shaddai in Guatemala. Part of Hosannas membership is made up of middle strata with Catholic roots. They found the discourse, speakers and attention to problems they were longing for among their peers. Many of them keep a foot in Catholicismfor work or family reasons telling others and themselves that Hosanna isnt a church, but rather a multi-denominational meeting place, although they sound more convincing than convinced.
Prez de Antns reproachestaken here as representative of a particular sector of Catholics refer to a set of features and trends that could be declared undesirable from a confessional point of view focused on the preferential option for the poor: authoritarianism, dogmatism, antiquated language, the meager protagonism of laypeople and even more meager protagonism of laywomen. They also refer to other elements that the same option perceives as inescapable hard-won conquests that are nonetheless precarious: greater access to the ecclesiastical career for social sectors lower on the economic scale, denunciation of unbridled greed, prioritizing the communitys needs over individual ambition, and the rights of the disfavored. This is not the place to discuss the moral quality of the features and tendencies that Prez de Antn condemns, but rather to take note of what is frightening off white-collar Catholics. Today, like yesterday, the so-called religious conversions have more sociological motives than religious ones. A yearning for the absorption of secular tendencies, changes to the social strata in the Catholic leadership and a desire for God to bless the itch for material prosperity underlie the conversions of half-hearted Catholics from the professional-managerial class into enthusiastic Neo-Pentecostals. Its a metamorphosis in which positive thinking and management culture define the what and how, the ends and the means.
our colleagues better If the solution is so simple, why are so many Jesuits suffering privations and risking their lives among indigenous and other marginalized people? AUSJAL Letter, the publication of the Association of Universities Trusted to the Society of Jesus in Latin America (AUSJAL), printed Lowneys text What 21st-century leaders can learn from 16th-century Jesuits in which he tries to convince us that the leader in each of us could be brought out by the Society of Jesus through the virtues that made it strong to the point of being even older than Telefnica and the English Court. Would many Jesuits be proud of that comparison?.
results, but leaving behind un-erasable tracks. One of Ignatius contemporaries, the Florentine Leonardo Bini, contributed unexpected information that Tellechea gathered like a treasure: I have known the Father Ignatius who preached at the Zecca Vecchia and the children threw apples at him. He endured it with patience, without losing his temper and continued the sermon. In relation to Fathers Lanez and Salmern, chosen to participate in the Council of Trent, Villoslada highlights their dazzling interventions and their humility in lodging in a mule-boys room, without table or light to study. Lanez and Salmern dedicated the free time left to them when not attending the important council sessions to their preferred ministries of confessing, catechizing, visiting hospitals, etc., which were tasks at that time little cared for by the clergy, added Tellechea Idgoras, with the kind of critical audacity that would not be allowed today.
issue is that the Society maintains institutions within, and supports itself on, an economy to which it is opposed; it maintains public relations that make it an institution perfectly integrated into this system that causes so much corruption, inequality and suffering. Unfortunately, to paraphrase Len Giecos song, famously sung by Mercedes Soza, managerialism is a big monster that treads hard. It is not easy to avoid its influence, in Lowneys siren songs or in coercive tactics. A large number of NGOs of religious inspiration are subjected to the tyranny of managerialism due to the origin of the funds that sustain them. Throughout Central America, pastoral care for human mobility, Catholic Relief Services, Fe y Alegra and other entities, including the Juan XXIII and Nitlapn institutes in Nicaragua, have to dance to the funders tunes, be they harmonious or markedly out of tune. There is no ideological autonomy without financial independence, and anyone who doubts it should remember the advice to follow the money that Deep Throat supposedly gave to the Washington Post journalists investigating the Watergate case.
To be continued.
Jos Luis Rocha is a researcher for the Jesuit Service for Migrants of Central America (SJM) and a member of the envo editorial council.