In the Absence of Priests: Young Women as Apostles to the Poor, Chile 1922-1932
The Roman Catholic Church in Chile first acknowledged its inability to pastor its flock in the 1920s because of an acute shortage of priests.1 Alberto Hurtado Cruchaga, SJ addressed the clerical crisis in a 1936 article, La Crisis Sacerdotal en Chile. When critics found his analysis "exaggerated," he conducted a survey of Chilean religious practices and published the findings in a controversial essay entitled Es Chile un país católico? which is said to have earned him the wrath of the hierarchy because it called attention to the woeful neglect of pastoral duties especially among the rural and working class populations.2 This empirical data demonstrated that the Catholic Church in Chile had 1615 priests, of whom 780 were secular and 835 regular clergy; of the same 1615 priests 915 were Chilean and 700 were foreigners. There were 451 parishes, some of which contained several towns and villages scattered over a thousand square kilometers with l0, 000 parishioners to be ministered to by a single priest.3 Hurtado's solution—a larger and better-educated clergy—was a long-term solution to an urgent problem that would never be achieved. Something had to be done immediately to keep the faith alive. In the gendered world of Chilean Catholicism, the task of preserving the faith fell to young laywomen.
In 1921 newly consecrated Bishop Rafael Edwards Salas returned to Chile from Rome with orders to organize Catholic Action.4 His initial appeal [End Page 207] fell on deaf ears, for at the time very few Chilean clergy were interested in the "social question."5 In the decade of the 1920s the Conservative Party, the official political voice of the Catholic laity, was not yet predisposed to accept the social teachings of Leo XIII and his successors.6 After mixed attempts to organize men, Edwards tapped the talent and energy of a fresh pool, young women. Contemporaries argued that in some ways women were superior apostle material than men because their faith came from their hearts not to mention that they formed the last defense against the materialistic philosophy that was embedding itself in homes more often then not headed by a Mason or an atheist.7 In 1921 a decade before Catholic Action officially began in Chile, for its foundation date is given as 1931,8 Edwards launched the Asociación de la Juventud Católica Feminina de Chile, [hereafter AJCFCh] and helped to transform a generation of teenage girls into religious activists and apostles to the poor.
This essay builds upon recent scholarship that addresses how women and gender shaped the history of the modern Catholic Church in Chile. It first addresses why mass defections of Chilean men from participation in organized religion have not resulted in a feminized historiography of the modern Catholic Church there.9 It then examines how women's religious culture and [End Page 208] roles changed in the early twentieth century and how these changes impacted Chilean society and the Catholic Church. The AJCFCh updated and genderized missionary strategies. It combined traditional ingredients from the female religious recipe book with contemporary organizational and propaganda techniques to reach its audience of mostly women and children. The priest shortage allowed AJCFCh members to organize and improvise community worship in ways that resembled prototypes of Christian Base Communities.
The AJCFCh required members to assume a public role that coupled social action with catechization. In the process young women acquired the tools and training to participate more fully in civil society because the AJCFCh functioned as a species of voluntary society that organized young women along both horizontal and vertical networks into a national force beginning at the grassroots level. Latin American religious scholarship supports the idea that real participation in church organizations can develop a "culture of citizenship" that is essential to democracy.10 In "Religion: A Movement and...
