The Catholic Church and Democracy in Chile and Peru

Michael Fleet, Brian H. Smith

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780268079833
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Storia del cristianesimo

Recent changes imposed by the Vatican may redefine the Chilean and Peruvian Church's involvement in politics and social issues. Fleet and Smith argue that the Vatican has been moving to restrict the Chilean and Peruvian Church's social and political activities. Fleet and Smith have gathered documentary evidence, conducted interviews with Catholic elites, and compiled surveys of lay Catholics in the region. The result will help chart the future of the Church and Chile and Peru.

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Church and Society in Theoretical Perspective

The Roman Catholic Church is a large, complex organization firmly rooted in its traditions. Its cautious adaptability has helped to make it the oldest continuous institution in Western culture. After 2,000 years of existence, and despite the powerful secularizing trends of the last 300 years, it remains a significant national institution in virtually every society (European, Latin American, and African) in which it is the principal Christian Church.

Its political influence has been decidedly conservative for most of its history. This was particularly true of the centuries immediately following the Reformation, during which it reaffirmed its hierarchical control and opposed the liberal currents of secular change that were to shape the emergence of the modern world. Since the late nineteenth century, and especially in the last fifty years, however, the Church has undergone significant internal change, expanding the scope of its mission to include the promotion of social justice and human rights in the secular world, decentralizing responsibilities for its various ministries, and affording individual members greater freedom of moral choice. In the process, its impact has become more progressive, particularly in countries (in Latin America, for example) experiencing chronic poverty and human rights abuse.

Changes in as large and complex an institution as the Roman Catholic Church are the result of forces affecting it from within and from without. Internal changes in this century have come in response to secular forces that have challenged the Church’s legal prerogatives and its religious or moral credibility. These external threats helped to legitimate new religious emphases and styles of ministry that had arisen earlier but had not yet become normative, and in some cases were actually condemned by Church authorities.

In the end, these new religious ideas and strategies gained acceptance because of their potential for countering external threats to the Church’s credibility and influence. They have helped the Church to recapture its capacity for influence on secular society. Their impact has been greater or lesser depending upon the social and political configurations of the national contexts in which the Church interacts with other social forces (attempting to promote or blunt change in these contexts). It has been greatest where secular ideologies, structures, and attitudes have been moving in the same direction and are susceptible to reinforcement by new religious and moral values. The Church’s role has also been important when other social and political institutions are stalemated, enabling or obliging it to act as a surrogate political force.

Secular dynamics thus impinge on the Church’s pursuit of religious goals, and these objectives change over time, as do the strategies designed to achieve them. As the Church changes, however, it must remain true to certain core or perennial concerns. Its new emphases and styles of ministry have to be justified religiously, i.e., they had to be shown to be consistent with the institution’s traditional character and distinguishing characteristics. Religious ideas, structures, and strategies are thus influenced by societal dynamics but are not simply a reflection of them. Similarly, religious values are seldom the primary causes of change in society but can have important reinforcing or legitimating effects at certain moments, especially if aided by secular “carriers.”

In this chapter we identify and discuss the interacting religious and secular forces that affected the Church’s recent evolution and are likely to condition its future development. These include: (1) traditional core features or concerns that are central to its religious mission, providing it with flexibility yet limiting its adaptive capacities; (2) the historical dominance of an institutional model of Church and its political implications; (3) secular challenges that the Church has faced during the past century and its pastoral responses; (4) new political roles (moral tutor, social leaven, and surrogate social and political actor) that the Church has taken on in connection with these responses; and (5) hypotheses on how the Church can exercise these new political roles effectively without sacrificing its perennial core features.

Traditional Core Features of the Roman Church

Four organizational features have been central to Roman Catholicism since the fourth century. They are: (1) its hierarchical structure of authority, flowing from the pope, through the bishops, to priests, religious men and women, and finally lay men and women, at the local level; (2) the universal scope of its membership, allowing for uneven allegiances among its constituents; (3) the varying specificities and binding forces of its religious and moral teachings; and (4) its transnational character, with peripheral structures, personnel, finances, and teachings coordinated by a single center, the Vatican.¹ These core features have provided the Church with continuity and adaptability over time. They also limit its capacity for change and its impact on other social forces.

The Roman Catholic Church has been a hierarchically structured institution in which religious and moral authority has rested with a pope (the bishop of Rome) and is shared with bishops directly accountable to him. Over the centuries, Rome has defended such a structure as essential for the preservation of unity, doctrinal orthodoxy, and the structure of apostolic succession, on which the integrity of the Church’s sacramental life is held to rest.

The chain of command from pope to bishop to priest can facilitate institutional and other changes once they have been embraced by hierarchical authorities. Similarly, key people at or near the top can generate dramatic changes in style and orientation throughout the organization, as occurred during the papacy of Pope John XXIII (1958–63). Local clergy and religious (nuns and monks), on the other hand, have only modest decision-making powers within the Church, although their daily fulfillment of sacramental, teaching, and administrative responsibilities gives them significant de facto authority and influence. Along with Church theologians, they are sources of new ideas and strategies that can rise up the chain of command and may be endorsed by formal Church authorities.

The Church’s authority structures limit the amount of change to which its leadership will accede. Since the Reformation, its leaders have viewed challenges to episcopal and papal authority with alarm, and have frequently taken disciplinary action against the “offenders.” Changes in the distribution of responsibilities across the chain of command do occur, and greater discretion can be given to local Church leaders from time to time. But any movement from below that threatens vertical authority will be seen by the pope and by most bishops as a threat to the Church’s nature and mission, and therefore will be resisted whatever its social or political implications.

A second core feature of the Church has been the universal scope of its membership. In Troeltsch’s terms, this membership has constituted a “church” rather than a “sect,” an institution insisting that God’s grace has been offered to all men and women, whatever their class, race, nationality, level of religious or moral development, or other measure of “worthiness.”² No one is privileged or excluded from membership on the basis of social position, intensity of faith, level of external observ-ance, or other sectarian criteria. Saints and sinners alike are welcome, and excommunication is invoked only rarely, and for very grave sins, e.g., public apostasy or physical attacks on clerics.

Within the Catholic tradition, there are three levels of (legitimate) Church membership. There are sacramental Catholics whose faith is expressed in regular or occasional Mass attendance and reception of sacraments. There are organizational Catholics who, apart from their sacramental involvement, participate in Church-sponsored programs in spiritual formation, education, welfare services, and social communication. They are intensely exposed to the socialization process of the Church and represent its values and positions most consistently and integrally in their daily lives. Finally, there are cultural Catholics who, although baptized, rarely if at all attend Mass and do not participate in any Catholic organizations. They constitute the largest number of laypeople in most countries. They are formally part of the Church and espouse many of its moral values, even if they do not always live up to them in their personal or social lives.

Catholics thus come in all shapes and sizes. They expose the Church to varied perspectives on leading issues and problems, and they give it a potential for influence in virtually every sector of society. They also set limits on its adaptive capacities, and on its development of coherent and consistent moral or political positions. Catholic authorities long have resisted efforts to refashion the Church into an exclusive community; often they have abandoned pastoral programs, initiatives, and decisions that were likely to alienate sizable classes or groups. The Church, after all, must continue to minister effectively to all people.

Its tolerance of varying levels of membership commitment has diluted the Church’s impact on the thinking and the activity of lay Catholics. Most nonpracticing Catholics in the “Catholic” countries of Europe and Latin America ignore the admonitions of Church leaders when these are not in accord with their personal moral or social interests. Church leaders may lament this, but they rarely attempt to impose regular practice or attentiveness on “followers.” The Church’s potential for secular influence thus may be great because of the extent of its membership, but its tolerance of uneven commitment limits the extent of loyalty and obedience it can reasonably expect in return.

Roman Catholicism’s third distinguishing feature is the varying specificities and forces of its religious and moral teachings. Certain dogmas are specifically worded and considered binding under pain of sin. But these are relatively few in number and limited to theological, rather than moral, matters, e.g., the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, his virgin birth, Mary’s sinlessness from the moment of conception, her assumption into heaven, and the infallibility of the pope when speaking ex cathedra.³ Other teachings are considered authoritative but not “infallible.” They are to be taken seriously but unlike the above-mentioned articles of faith do not require unquestioning acceptance. This is because the Church, from early in its history, has used human reason in applying its moral teachings to specific situations, thereby making dissent possible.⁴

In fact, the Church has never claimed infallibility for any of its ethical teachings. When addressing issues of sexual morality (e.g., birth control and abortion), economic or business practices (e.g., the charging of interest on money loaned), and violence (e.g., the killing in war), Church authorities have defended fundamental values and principles but have acknowledged difficulties of application in specific circumstances. Indeed, the Church has modified its teaching in these areas over time precisely because changing contexts have made previous applications of general principles obsolete.⁵

In particular, Church leaders have tried to avoid taking positions on the adequacy of specific economic strategies and political policies. These are contingent matters in which Church leaders have no particular competence, and are best left to lay experts to decide. Accordingly, Church statements on most social questions with moral import are couched in terms general enough to be meaningful in different contexts. This generality and nonbinding force of its moral teachings have enabled the Church to be flexible in approaching particular situations. At the same time, however, they have also diminished its capacity for consistent impact. Its social principles can be interpreted and applied differently by different people in different contexts. For example, wealthy Catholics have often ignored Church social teachings about the obligation to pay workers a just wage, since the Church leaves it up to them to decide what precisely this obligation entails in each particular situation.

The greater the specificity of the Church’s social pronouncements, the harder it is for such groups to excuse themselves from compliance. Given the complexity of contemporary economic and political issues, however, most leaders appear to think that greater specificity will tie the Church to programs and policies to which many Catholics will have legitimate objections, and will adversely affect the Church’s unity and moral authority.

The Church’s fourth major core feature is its transnational character. Catholic dioceses, apostolic territories, parishes, religious congregations, schools, hospitals, and charitable institutions are to be found in every country in the world but are supervised by an administrative and policy-making center in Rome. This facilitates accommodation of distinctive national and cultural concerns within a broader unity of purpose and tradition.

The international character both enhances and limits the Church’s capacity for change. The Vatican can do much to nudge a particular national church in new directions through appointment of progressive bishops or by directives for updating from the papal nuncio, the Vatican’s official representative to each nation-state. The bishops’ ability to move personnel and financial resources from more endowed to less endowed national churches has bolstered official Catholic presence in developing countries. These resources have enabled churches in poor countires to undertake a range of social and economic services in addition to strictly spiritual works.

But Catholicism’s transnational character also limits its capacity for absorbing or accommodating change. The Vatican can and will intervene to slow down the pace of change in a particular national church if it believes, for example, that it is not adequately dealing with a threat to a core Catholic concern that change is precipitating. This intervention can take the form of disciplinary action against local clergy, investigations of, or reprimands to, theologians or seminary professors, and the replacement of liberal bishops (usually upon retirement) with those more in accord with Vatican concerns.

Over the centuries, Rome has acted both to stimulate change and to restrain reforms in periphery churches. The Church’s transnational character provides the means to bring about change, and the Vatican acts as the guardian of the other three core features (hierarchical authority flows, variegated membership patterns, and differentiated moral and religious teachings). As final arbiter, the papacy has been a central factor in the Church’s survival and development over the last two thousand years.

The Dominance of an Institutional Church and Its Political Implications

The Church has defended its core concerns over the years with considerable flexibility. Its ecclesiology, i.e., its understanding of itself as Church, has gone through several paradigmatic shifts, each of which has been justified as either a more faithful expression of its religious mission or a more effective means of fulfilling it.

Five different models of Church can be discerned in Scripture and apostolic practice. In the earliest years, Christians lived as a close-knit group (community) of friends who reaffirmed their faith by repeating stories of Jesus and celebrating rituals together. These first believers also preached throughout the Mediterranean, announcing (as herald) the beginning of God’s kingdom in Jesus’ ministry, death, and resurrection. Those who were wealthy served (servant) their less fortunate fellow Christians by sharing their resources with them. Following the deaths of the apostles, unity in doctrine and practice was preserved by establishing clerical offices and by defining rules and obligations for members, providing the Church with a juridical dimension (as institution). Finally, in each of these modes of existence, the Church sought to be a continuation of Jesus’ own life, a sign (sacrament) mediating God’s grace and pointing to his presence in the world.⁶

To varying degrees and at varying levels, these dimensions have continued to exist throughout Church history. Church as community has been more applicable at the local parish level or in smaller monastic groupings. Church as servant has been uppermost in the minds of those (clergy and laity) who have staffed the Church’s charitable agencies over the years. The Church as gospel herald has been represented by the preaching clergy and by nuns and laypeople in Catholic schools. The sacramental Church has been sustained and projected through Catholicism’s richly symbolic ritual life.

The early apostolic Church functioned in a decentralized, collegial style.⁷ As it expanded in numbers and extent of territory covered, however, its institutional aspects grew in importance. Amidst growing persecution, and with the emergence (in the second century) of heresies regarding Jesus’ nature, the bishops asserted their authority over the local church and looked to Rome as a centripetal force. Clerical office, central guidance from the successors of St. Peter, and the impositions of sanctions and penalties for major sins came to be used to preserve Church unity and discipline.

The tendency towards institutionality was further strengthened in the fourth century with the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire by Theodosius. The Church expanded rapidly (all citizens of the Empire were obliged to become Christian), and was assigned charitable and educational responsibilities in some regions. Between the fifth and eighth centuries, the Church became a major preserver and transmitter of Western culture, and when the Empire’s political power began to decline, Catholic bishops took over the administration of territories and other political functions as well.⁸

These commitments required greater administrative infrastructure and coordination. By the eleventh century the Church established a strong central bureaucracy (the curia) in Rome to assist the pope in overseeing Church affairs and to counter the efforts of secular princes to take back the prerogatives that the Church had been granted earlier. The reforms of Pope Gregory VII (which included a code of canon law) were introduced as a means of curbing abuses that had arisen with greater Church involvement in secular affairs.

Over time, these institutional interests and concerns came to dominate, even displace, the other dimensions. The Protestant Reformation was an attempt to restore a balance among the various styles or models, emphasizing Church as herald of the gospel, a community of beli...