Aparecida: Quo Vadis? (review)

This volume, edited by Robert Pelton, is a collection that examines the 2007 conference of the Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELEM), held in Brazil. The Aparecida meeting was the fifth such conference since the Second Vatican Council, following the famous CELEM conferences that took place in Rio de Janeiro (1955); Medellín, Colombia (1968); Puebla, Mexico (1979); and Santo Domingo (1993)—all significant milestones in Latin American Catholicism, where the basic tenets of liberation theology were first formally articulated by the hierarchy and then, over time, largely dismantled. The CELAM V conference at Aparecida—the first such meeting to convene under Pope Benedict XVI, after the long reign of Pope John Paul II, whose influence overshadowed all the prior meetings after Medellín, marked an important milestone in contemporary Latin American Catholicism. Studying this juncture, the volume’s contributors, most of whom are clerics and theologians, seek to both provide a close read to some of the main documents produced at Aparecida for a well-informed audience of Catholic academics, as can be gleaned from the title, which means “Where are you going?” But this work also appeals to a broader audience as it attempts to explicate the direction in which the Church is now headed, with a nod both to the past and to the challenges of the future.

By and large, the tone of the book is relatively optimistic; senior clergy, including Gustavo Gutierrez, who gave liberation theology its name in the 1960s, and José Marins, both of whom helped frame the documents that came from Medellín, are cautiously hopeful that Aparecida marks the beginning of a return to the Church’s embrace of social justice and against what was described as “structural sin,” including support for the famous “see-judge-act” model that is integral to liberationist action. Their optimism is tempered by the ways in which Church scholars modified and watered down some of Aparecida’s most passionate pronouncements. Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of the book is the way it allows the reader to see the many iterations and redactions that Church statements undergo before they become official, even including papal utterances. For example, paragraph 188 of one Aparecida document originally read, “There still remain [sic] in the collective imagination a colonial mentality and gaze with regard to native peoples and African Americans.” In the final, official version of the document, this phrase has been changed to a much more qualified and limper statement: “In some cases there remains a mentality and a certain gaze of diminished respect for the indigenous and African Americans” (p. 127).

In this volume’s final section, scholars outside of the Church, including political scientist Daniel Levine, who has long been one of the Church’s most astute observers, take a more pessimistic view. Levine writes that the way the “future looks from Aparecida is dangerous and filled with threat and peril” (p. 198; emphasis in original) from religious competition and, more important, the erosion of the Church’s influence and teaching in the cultural and moral sphere. Yet even from these shadows, Levine, along with others, including Edward Cleary, who has also written extensively on the Church in Latin America, see the future as full of challenges for Catholicism, but they argue that there is also no reason for fear. As Levine notes: “In Latin America today, religion is a buzzing, blooming confusion of possibilities, full of innovation and full of social and cultural energies (p. 198). In the face of these possibilities, Aparecida suggests, however tentatively, that the Latin American Catholic Church is ready again to fully engage with the future.