Catholic Action, the Second Vatican Council, and the Emergence of the New Left in El Salvador (1950–1975)

In 1958, Roque Dalton, a young poet affiliated with the Communist Party of El Salvador (PCS), won the first prize in a poetry contest at the University of El Salvador. A few days later, members of Salvadoran Catholic University Action, a student organization known as ACUS or simply Catholic Action, published a demolishing but carelessly written critique of Dalton.¹ The anonymous writer of an article titled “Under the Empire of Vulgarity” turned his disgust with the poem written by Dalton into a diatribe against Dalton’s political persona.² Dalton’s raw allusions to double standards in the sexual morality of priests and his remarks about the Catholic practice of fasting seem to have especially upset the leaders of ACUS.³ A month later, ACUS published a rejoinder written by Dalton, along with excerpts of the controversial poem. In his retort, Dalton stated that ACUS dodged debates on substantial political and aesthetic issues by engaging in “insults, quick and facile judgments, and rude pigeon-holing that closes all means of intellectual comprehension.”⁴

What is telling about this episode between the ACUS intellectuals and Dalton, who were about the same age and came from similar social and educational backgrounds, is their obviously contrasting aesthetic and political sensibilities. But more importantly, this exchange shows that the leaders of ACUS took seriously their self-appointed role as arbiters and defenders of “decency” and “honor” in university life. ACUS publications often warned about the threat posed by an emerging “materialist morale in different orders of life” and called on Catholics to “safeguard their faith against the [anti-Catholic] prejudice skillfully promoted” by Marxists.⁵ Although ACUS is virtually unknown outside Catholic Church circles in El Salvador, it had a major impact in the political history of that country. Some of its members founded the Christian Democrat Party (PDC) in 1960 and, later, in the early 1970s, two insurgent organizations: the Revolutionary Army of the People (ERP) and the Popular Liberation Forces—the FPL Farabundo Martí. Together, these constituted the backbone of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), an insurgent coalition that fought a 12-year war against the Salvadoran regime between 1980 and 1992.

This article examines the roles that Catholic Action intellectuals played in the foundation of the New Left in El Salvador.⁶ It ponders how and why they adopted innovative approaches on religion and politics that constituted a rupture with a long-standing conservative Catholic tradition in El Salvador. I argue that the radicalization of the young Catholic Action intellectuals was an unexpected result of the cataclysmic theological transformations experienced by the Catholic Church in the 1960s. From an institutional viewpoint these transformations were intended to preserve the traditional influence of the Catholic Church in Latin America.⁷ Instead, they enabled the convergence between Catholic intellectuals and members of revolutionary movements who sought a structural transformation of capitalism.⁸ Catholic intellectuals assimilated, often uncritically, the new theology of the Catholic Church formulated by the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) and the Second Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM) held in 1968, which they learned through highly scripted pedagogical processes at a time of epochal political and institutional changes.⁹ These changes included the growing polarization of Salvadoran society and politics in the context of the 1960s Cold War, a major reform at the University of El Salvador between 1963 and 1967, and the mobilizations of students in the United States, France, Mexico, and elsewhere. The new theological leadership of the Catholic Church formulated a radical critique of the core principles and ideology of liberal capitalism, the colonial past, and “new forms of colonialism.” It also undermined traditional Catholic anti-Marxist attitudes, and it legitimized the use of revolutionary violence against tyranny, echoing the Christian doctrine of the “Just War.”¹⁰ These theological notions were crucial in inspiring the young Catholic Action intellectuals who formed the New Left insurgency in the early 1970s. The changing political and religious mentality of this cohort was also informed by what Michael L...