The Path of Latin American Catholicism

Abstract

Between Europe and America lies an ocean, the Atlantic, which, depending on your point of view, either separates or unites them. Is it preferable to note the banality of the statement, or to stress the reality of the distance? Words disappear, realities persist. In Europe, since the beginning of the century, national traits have become more marked, and yet at the same time the continent has developed a particular identity. Even through the very wars which ravaged her, she has built a community with an historic destiny based on her economic and political predominance in the world, her cultural and colonial expansion, and the forms taken by the ‘social question’ and the ‘religious question’. Western Catholicism as we know it, which is far from constituting the whole of the Latin Church, or even the whole of the Roman Catholic Church, is the product of this history. From Leo XIII onwards, it has been more and more marked by Catholic Action and by the Catholic social movement under names and in forms which have varied in time and in place.KeywordsMilitary RegimeSocial DoctrineCollegial ChurchCatholic HierarchyCatholic ActionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.