Religious Pluralism, Democracy, and the Catholic Church in Latin America

7 Social Justice, Moral Values, or Institutional Interests? Church Responses to the Democratic Challenge in Latin America

257 7 Social Justice, Moral Values, or Institutional Interests? Church Responses to the Democratic Challenge in Latin America frances hagopian This chapter returns to the question posed in chapter 1: How is the Latin American Roman Catholic Church responding to the challenges of secularism and eroding religious hegemony in a context of democratic politics ? Its aim is to propose a framework for understanding the responses of national episcopates to what can be understood as the church’s contemporary strategic dilemma and flag the consequences of their decisions for electoral politics, public policy, and the church itself. I begin from the premise that church responses to government proposals to make available emergency contraception, license media outlets, or reform national educational curricula, and to the demands of the faithful for land or justice, are not well understood in the customary dichotomous terms of left or right, traditional or modern, or progressive or conservative. This is because the church’s positions on these and related policies cannot be collapsed along a single issue dimension. Ideally, the Catholic Church would simultaneously pursue multiple goals—to evangelize, guard insti­ tutional interests, promote public morality, and ground public policy in 258 | Frances Hagopian Catholic social teaching. But because its positions on socioeconomic policies and public morality crosscut the existing cleavage structures of party systems in most contemporary democracies in Latin America and elsewhere , the church’s stance on social justice might suggest one set of political allies on an issue such as wage and employment policy, while those same allies might be opponents on another issue, such as abortion rights. Thus, church leaders entering national policy debates face a dilemma: forced to emphasize one agenda or another, they must choose which of these two dimensions—the socioeconomic or the rights/morality—to prioritize ; how far they should move away from a national consensus, if one exists; and how intensely they should advocate their positions; the farther they travel along one dimension, the less capable they will be of intervening on the other. Moreover, the need to protect its institutional interests may compromise the church’s ability to advance the various strands of its policy agenda. In the United States, to cite one example, the Catholic Church once decried the nuclear arms race and poverty, but it has fallen silent on a range of issues—the war in Iraq, widening inequality, inadequate health care, and environmental degradation, all of which the Vatican has condemned—in favor of promoting a pro-life political agenda, which is also backed by the political party that has expressed an openness to providing public subsidies for religious schools and faith-based charities. Not all Latin American bishops respond to this dilemma in the same way. While many national episcopates are falling into step with a more conservative Vatican leadership, imposing greater control over the grassroots, defending their institutional interests, and seeking special protection from secular state authorities to enforce the policy outcomes that they cannot induce through moral persuasion, others have maintained progressive positions , invited more popular participation, devoted more pastoral care to the poor and excluded, and championed the church’s social doctrine. The Argentine and Chilean bishops, who diverged sharply in their responses to military governments (the Argentine hierarchy supported an authoritarian regime while the Chilean opposed one), have converged in recent years on a strategic option to emphasize public morality more vigorously than the church’s social justice message. In contrast, the Brazilian church, which like the Chilean opposed authoritarianism, has devoted considerably more attention to mobilizing the poor to use democracy to achieve social justice. Social Justice, Moral Values, or Institutional Interests? | 259 The Salvadoran church has focused on the themes of unemployment, social exclusion, violence, and hopelessness, while its Peruvian counterpart has maintained relative silence on these questions despite similarly devastating poverty levels. Why this should be the case has not been well explained by the principal frameworks that have guided the study of religion and politics in Latin America. The institutionalist paradigm is hard-pressed to explain diverse episcopal responses to the democratic dilemma given that national churches operate in the same institutional milieu, and the rational choice paradigm is similarly unable to account for this diversity given its expectation that the logic of religious competition and resource scarcity under democracy (Gill 2002) should produce a uniform pattern of retrenchment from popular causes. The fact that scores of like-minded leaders were appointed by...