Religion and Politics in Latin America: The Catholic Church in Venezuela and Colombia

Abstract

The coming of age of the study of religion and politics in Latin America is clearly demonstrated by Daniel H. Levine's excellent book. Up until the late 1960s, such studies tended to use models derived from North American or European contexts and to depend on the repetition of a limited set of ideas concerning the Catholic Church in Latin America. While Levine maintains the institutional focus of these studies by rooting his data in interviews of the Colombian and Venezuelan bishops, his analysis is far more sophisticated, insightful, and sensitive to the human element. Levine also has a dispassionate feel for the institution and the people involved in it and touched by it. Although the author himself wonders how a non-Christian, non-Latin had the temerity to undertake such a study, he has clearly turned this to advantage, for the work does not suffer from the tendency of some other recent studies to give expression to frustrations generated by individual disenchantment with the Catholic Church. Levine focuses on evolving images of the Church and their effect on the manner in which religious faith influences social and political activism; the recent emergence within the Catholic Church of more dynamic views of change and the role of the Church in the world; and how concepts of power, force, and violence determine the attitudes of Church people towards class conflict. The author aptly describes the dynamism of change within the Catholic Church over the past two to three decades without becoming enamoured with a vision of the Church as a revolutionary institution. Rather, he clearly perceives the weight of the traditional sectors, particularly among church elites. Levine also realizes that even these have undergone substantial permutations and relates these to attitudes and behavior towards church administration, authority, social and political action, as well as to the clerical and lay bases of the Church. The author notes that the post-Vatican 11 (1962-65) and post-Medellin (1968) enthusiasm for social action and renewal of church structures quickly declined in favor of preoccupation with lessened unity in the Church and intensification of evangelization. While Levine does not focus specifically on the base Christian communities (although he is currently engaged in such a study), his work suggests that such innovations were very much part of the desire to renew the Church by incorporating into it substantial numbers of the relatively unevangelized in the face of increasingly strong appeals from both religious and secular competitors. This conservative tactic has spawned mechanisms that have promoted societal and ecclesial change. Such developments, at the same time that the Catholic Church was receiving an infusion of