"Change Direction": Influencing the National Church through the Vatican during the Pinochet Dictatorship in Chile (original) (raw)

Unorthodox Fate: The Rise of Chile's Christian Democratic Party

This essay is a theoretical and historical analysis of how and why Chile's political Catholicism followed a unique course of development during the first half of the twentieth century. For most part of modern history, Catholicism and democratic Liberalism were antithetical worldviews; however, at the first decades of the twentieth century, political Catholicism in Chile followed a political path that embraced the basic tenet of Liberalism, postponing political polarization, violence, and authoritarianism which had engulfed other Catholic societies In the earliest phase of the Chilean Christian Democratic Party, from 1934 to1941, two groups of individuals fought an ideological battle over opposing conceptions of society. The democratic faction of the young Catholic party, led by Eduardo Frei Montalva, prevailed against the Fascism-inspired group. That was the beginning of the first successful Catholic Democratic party in modern history. The principal purpose of this study is to understand why Chile’s political Catholicism followed a unique historical path. To answer this question, this study will historically reconstruct the ideological conflicts and the role of theological conceptions in the early phase of the Chilean Christian Democratic Party during the years 1920-1945 and use several theoretical traditions, including network theory and Max Weber’s theory of religious orientations, to explain why the democratic faction became the ultimate victor of these ideological conflicts.

Church-Regime relations in Argentina (1976-1983): a history of weak secularization

The last Argentinian Junta left profound scars in contemporary history and there are several readings, findings and discussions about what happened during that period. This paper attempts to give a critical contextualisation of the subject by identifying major historical, ideological and legal points according to three scholars: Loris Zanatta, Gustavo Morello and Juan Navarro Floria. (Other minor sources will also be used to support the arguments). The main focus will be on Church-regime relation, its implications and legacy; A brief comment on the literature will be given in the last section.

THE SPANISH CATHOLIC CHURCH, DICTATORSHIP AND TRANSITION

Academia Letters, 2021

Between 1939 and 1977 relations between Spain and the Vatican were highly controversial, marked by the influence of the Second Vatican Council on the Spanish ecclesiastical hierarchy that culminated in the separation of Church and State. There is not much specific literature on Church and State relations in the Transition and the one there is from within the Church itself. Jesús Iribarren, Secretary of the Episcopal Conference from 1977 to 1982, delved into the position of the Church when he wrote in 1992 "Papers and memoirs: Half a century of Church-State relations in Spain (1936-1986)" reflecting the official position of the Episcopal Conference in 1977 and the tensions experienced within the Church. Likewise, in the works on Transition there are not many references to the Church and those who mention it show contrary points of view. On the one hand, there are those who recognize that the Church was one of the sectors that contributed most to the search and settlement of the new political configuration-as the journalist Victoria Prego affirms in her work "This is how the Transition was made" (1995) explaining the conflicts of Francoism with the Church (1)-. And that same year, Abel Hernández analyzed in "The Fifth Power: The Church, from Franco to Felipe" (2) some of the reasons that led to the change in the political configuration, such as the influence of the Second Vatican Council, the position of progressive Catholic intellectuals or the contact of some Christian militants with clandestine political opposition groups. In more recent years Carmen Molinero and Pere Ysás in "The Transition: History and Stories" will analyze the role of the Church and its hierarchy in political change (3). In contrast, there is another current that hardly gives importance to the role of the Church in the Transition. José Félix Tezanos, Ramón Cotarelo and Andrés De Blas mention in "The Spanish Democratic Transition" that it was the very process of secularization of Spanish society that contributed to the change in the Church (4)). And in more recent years there is talk of the

Local History of a Charismatic Catholic Base Community during the Pinochet Dictatorship. The "Dios con Nosotros" Community, 1973-1983

The principle objective of this paper is to illustrate the experience of a community from the Catholic Charismatic Renewal – Renovación Carismátic Católica – (RCC) in the Manuel Rodríguez section of Santiago, Chile (now Pudahuel) from 1973 to 1983. It analyzes how residents of this charismatic community developed a new way of living together in the face of a military dictatorship and puts forward a reflection on the following two aspects. First, it underlines the heterogeneity of the Ecclesial Base Communities – Comunidades Eclesiales de Base – (CEB) in opposition to the tendency of some studies to overlook their distinct internal dynamics. Second, it highlights the importance of these communities as popular spaces for rebuilding the social fabric in the face of state repression.