Rendering unto Caesar: The Catholic Church and the State in Latin America

Accounts of the Latin American Catholic Church in recent decades have tended to present a romantic picture of heroic priests and laypersons risking torture, imprisonment, and death in order to deliver a message of hope and resistance to their impoverished flock. Even skeptical academics have applauded the church’s transformation from bastion of privilege to advocate for the dispossessed. It would seem, however, that few have delved into the reasons behind this transformation, or asked why it occurred in some countries but not in others. Such inquiry is bound to drain much of the color from this tale. It may even strike some as slightly blasphemous, as if the nasty truth might rob martyrs of their glory.

Anthony Gill is one scholar who is not afraid to subject the tale to the rigors of scientific inquiry. Certainly no one will accuse him of over-romanticizing it. His book is replete with statistical analyses, charts and graphs, seemingly endless discussions packed away in endnotes, and mind-numbing social science jargon (we read, for example, that a “monopolized supply of religious compensators” tends to “underproduce religiosity”). Underlying it all is a provocative, cogently argued thesis: The Catholic Church may have a divine mission, but, as an institution, it behaves mostly according to mundane interests. In the name of institutional survival and prosperity, the church has a powerful incentive to maximize its adherents at the least possible cost. For much of Latin America’s history, of course, Roman Catholicism enjoyed a religious monopoly, so the church had little need to tailor its message and services to the poor. Once the church had to compete in an open marketplace, it discovered that its survival depended upon its ability to attract and hold the largest numbers of people (which, in Latin America, meant the poor).

Challenges to the church’s monopoly came from Marxism, Spiritism, and, especially, Evangelical Protestantism. Accordingly, the church’s outpouring of compassion came about not so much as a response to the increase in poverty and repression experienced under military regimes, nor even as a consequence of Vatican II; it happened because some segments of the church were forced in this direction. Given the choice, the general pattern of institutional behavior suggests that the church would have maintained its religious monopoly and its traditional indifference toward the poor. Well-researched and incisive case studies of Chile (where Protestantism became a formidable popular force) and Argentina (where Protestantism remained a sort of nonproselytizing enclave) bear out the point. In Chile, the episcopacy became one of Latin America’s most progressive, while the Argentine episcopacy darkened its reputation by supporting one of Latin America’s ugliest regimes.

Gill notes that “a scholarly work should inspire as many questions as it answers.” Gill’s book certainly does this, for in fact Rendering unto Caesar really focuses on only one question: Why did the church hierarchies in some countries support authoritarian regimes, while those in other countries condemned them? Gill’s answer to this question is quite convincing. Still, one must hope that future scholars will delve into some of the murkier variables that Gill leaves untouched. The views of national episcopacies are surely important at the macrolevel, but they are by no means the whole story. Even if the reactionary bishops of Argentina applauded barbarism, many lower clergy and rank-and-file Catholics most emphatically did not. Granted, the opinions of the episcopacy are easy to find out, and thus amenable to the scientific approach. However, a truly well-rounded view of the church’s role in politics must at some point leave hard science behind and delve into the world of the mysterious and the imprecise.