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  • New Worlds: A Religious History of Latin America by John Lynch
  • Daniel R. Miller
New Worlds: A Religious History of Latin America. By John Lynch. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2012.

John Lynch has written a history of the Catholic Church in Latin America that is both sympathetic and critical. While it relies mostly on secondary sources, the author’s deep familiarity with the topic allows him to offer judicious assessments of complex and contentious issues and also to include telling or just fascinating anecdotes.

Several themes recur throughout the narrative. Defining what it means to be “Catholic” has always been a matter of negotiation and debate between the hierarchy, itself divided along various lines, and the laity who express their religiosity in ways appropriate to their local communities and ethnic identities. Another theme is the struggle between those clergy who sought to place the Church on the side of oppressed groups and the hierarchies in America and Rome that were more concerned to protect ecclesiastical prerogatives by aligning the Church with the regnant political establishment, be it the Bourbon monarchy or Populist politicians.

The book is especially excellent in its coverage of the 18th and 19th centuries. Its account of the tortured relationship between the Church and slavery includes both the hierarchy’s official reluctance to condemn the institution until it was almost moribund and the courageous efforts of obscure (to me) priests who ministered to slaves and suffered imprisonment for their efforts to end the institution. Lynch argues that the hierarchy failed to offer a reasoned response to the 18th century Enlightenment and thereby condemned their 19th century successors to a succession of losing battles against anti-clerical liberals. At the same time, the Church’s rationalistic theology also made it tone deaf in its dealings with popular religious movements.

The Latin American Church began to recover intellectually and institutionally in the late 19th century under the influence of reformist currents emanating from Rome, but that process also made it vulnerable to dictation from a papacy that claimed absolute doctrinal authority as seen in the Papal crackdown on Liberation Theology. While Lynch is clearly sympathetic to progressive clerics, his judgments are carefully nuanced. His discussion of the Cold War period includes detailed narratives from several nations in South and Central America to illustrate the range of lay and clerical responses to the ideological currents and political calamities of the age. They demonstrate how difficult it was for Catholics to navigate these treacherous political waters without foundering on the shoals of one sort of extremism or another.

Unfortunately, given the book’s subtitle, other religious traditions are discussed with far less substance and subtlety. Lynch’s account of pre-Columbian religions is perfunctory. He crowds most of his discussion of Judaism, Protestantism, and Spiritualism [End Page 226] into a single chapter, tellingly the shortest one in the book. Had the subtitle of the book been A History of the Catholic Church in Latin America, there would be no cause for complaint, for on that subject, the book is superb.

Daniel R. Miller
Calvin College
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