Abstract
This quotation from a book written by former Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI and Head of the Vatican State, reminds us of the divergent, tension-ridden impacts that the themes “activism” and “tradition” may have in the complex current transnational reproduction of the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America. With these themes sharply in focus, this collection of essays works toward a refinement of our methodological and theoretical anthropological tools for studying the Roman Catholic Church through a lens of “the political.”1 This special issue focuses on three principal axes of analysis. First, we argue for renewed attention to the changing scholarship on the anthropology of Catholicism, this within a broader anthropology of Christianity. Second, we wish to elaborate on the contribution these papers make to the ethnographic pluralities that have been created by the de facto, backlash revision of the reforms put in place by the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). This revision was initiated by the politics of Pope John Paul
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