Guatemala’s Catholic Revolution: A History of Religious and Social Reform, 1920–1968 by Bonar L. Hernández Sandoval (review)

Bonar Hernández Sandoval’s pathbreaking examination of the Guatemalan Catholic Church’s development over nearly five decades promises to excite academics in many fields beyond religious studies. In particular, this work should be of great interest to scholars interested in Cold War-era rural developmentalism and/or indigenous resistance and adaptation to sociocultural pressures. Hernández has produced a concise and well-researched book that employs Church records produced by foreign missionaries in the Guatemalan countryside, as well as those produced by Vatican and Guatemala City Church officials, to trace the interplay between national, regional, and global forces and events that shaped the position of the Catholic Church within Guatemalan society during the middle decades of the twentieth century.

Hernández takes a chronological approach, with the book’s first two chapters explaining how in the 1920s Vatican and Guatemalan Church leaders largely avoided national politics, which served to strengthen Church-state relations in the interwar years. Critically, as Hernández notes, the Catholic Church had lost power and presence throughout Guatemala in the late 1800s as part of the nation’s nineteenth-century liberal reforms. Against this background, the book’s subsequent two chapters expose the often-frustrated efforts of US-based Maryknoll missionaries in the 1940s and 1950s to Romanize Catholic practice in the Maya-dominated highlands. These missionaries were tasked with countering Mayan spiritual practice, which melded pre-Columbian and Catholic elements, to encourage orthodox Catholicism. Syncretic faith practices had experienced a resurgence in the late 1800s as the Church’s presence dwindled in the highlands as a consequence of liberal reforms. Hernández details how Maryknoll missionaries confronted Mayan spiritual leaders, or costumbristas, over the use of church spaces and Romanizing efforts that centered on inculcating a sacrament-centered worship.

Maryknoll missionaries largely failed to end the heterodox use of incense on church altars and other syncretic practices; however, they made great strides in recruiting lay Catholics who would help develop a more sacrament-centered practice over time. The lay catechists Hernández describes as “the shock troops of sacramentalism” not only served as translators in non-Spanish speaking communities, but they also led catechist courses in remote communities, and in the process confronted costumbre and its adherents. Sadly, Hernández delves little into the motivating factors that drove Mayan men and women to become catechists in the 1950s. Certainly, Church sources rarely capture these voices, but oral histories and other more local sources might have helped humanize the stories of these historical actors.

The book’s fifth chapter focuses on how Maryknoll missionaries and the military government, which came into power after a US-sponsored 1954 military coup, found common ground as anticommunists committed to modernization and development projects in the countryside. This alliance would begin to break down in the late 1960s in the context of changes within the Latin American Church that would lead to the birth of liberation theology and in response to increasing state violence in the countryside.

Although readers will find much to commend in this work, many will likely be disappointed that Hernández’s work ends in 1968 with the start of the Guatemalan civil war. A pair of chapters focusing on the most violent decades of Guatemala’s Cold War, the 1970s and 1980s, would have greatly strengthened the impact of this Cold War-era framed book as a whole. In particular, this work would have benefitted from an examination of the role religion played in defining state-sponsored genocide in the 1980s. As is well documented, Guatemala’s Protestant President Efraín Ríos Montt (1982–83) associated Mayan peasants and Catholicism with communism. This correlation encouraged government troops to target lay catechists as part of a broader genocidal scorched earth campaign that was undertaken in the Guatemalan highlands under General Ríos Montt’s presidency. Despite...