The Maryknoll Catholic Mission in Peru, 1943–1989: Transnational Faith and Transformation by Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens (review)

Abstract

The Maryknoll Catholic Mission in Peru, 1943-1989: Transnational Faith and Transformation. By Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 2012. Pp. xii, 315. $38.00 paperback. ISBN 978-0-268-02905-0.)Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, an associate professor of history at California State University-Northridge, has produced an historical perspective on the work and consequences of the Maryknoll missions in Peru during the years indicated and even beyond, based on extensive personal research in many of the relevant communities and archives of Peru and the United States. She is a sympathetic relator of the heroic Maryknoll missioners (both men and women), who, she interprets, were at the heart of liberation theology, progressive Catholicism, and revolution, which placed them in opposition to U.S. policy in Latin America (p. 1). Her account provides many layers of understanding and helpful information, especially as she explores the many unintended consequences of Maiyknoll missionary endeavors in Peru and of the near disappearance of Maiyknoll from the scene, both in Peru and in the United States.Although the book is mostly organized chronologically, there are large sections where no dates are provided, making some forms of analysis and comparison impossible, if not confusing. More admirably, the author endeavors to explore the antecedent history and underlying causes of Maryknoll methodology in Peru, beginning with the recruitment of men and women that was imbued, she argues, with the immigrant Catholicism of the 1930's U.S. Church. The first chapter provides an immense amount of information about Maryknoll, the immigrant Church in America, the Latin American Church, international ecclesial structures, and critiques of the initial Maryknoll efforts from the perspective of the 1960s and later. An uninformed reader might find it difficult to follow.In subsequent chapters, the author has focused more on particular local communities, paying close attention to the personalities and approaches of individual missioners and locals. It is thick history from below. Herein, she begins to explore the results of the insertion of a foreign element into local power structures and the resistance that sometimes occurred among those of the missionaries' ministry. The translation of previous mission experience from China and other Oriental lands to indigenous Catholic cultures in Peru was often met with surprising consequences, which are artfully explored. …