Vatican II and Latin-American Response

This new model of the Church emerging from the grass-roots has not been entirely out of tune with the Church of Rome, even though all its implications and applications are not yet acceptable to the "official" Church. "Vatican II must be seen as a historic cultural turning point for Roman Catholicism. It sanctioned with the highest authority movements for institutional, liturgical, and theological reform that had been resisted if not repudiated for two centuries ... It relativized the normative character of the language and habits of thought with which the Church had legitimated its teachings and activities ... It abandoned the idea of a single normative culture, identified with Western "Christian civilization," and called for an incarnation of Catholic Christianity in the variety of the world's cultures".(2) Until Vatican II, the Catholic Church had regarded the culture that Christendom had created as an unsurpassable ideal, which only needed minor adaptations to be relevant to new historical eras or to newly discovered societies.

For the assumption of local self-responsibility for the Church, the Medellin Conference (1968) had a paradigmatic character. There the Latin American Church reflected on itself both "in the light of the Council" and in the context of "the present-day transformation of Latin America". Medellin and Puebla became models for other Churches to imitate. Africans and Asians have also made their own moves in this direction, but if the results have not received as much notice it is only because the Christian influence for bringing about any major social-political change continues to be weaker in these continents than in Latin America.

It is also important to keep in mind that Latin America had at least nominally a century-long existence of independence even before the decolonization process started in Asia and Africa. Afro-Asian decolonization and the rise of non-aligned consciousness brought more sharply into focus for the Latin Americans their own situation of century-long dependence which was now termed neocolonialism. Particularly since the Great Depression, the Latin-American countries have very severely experienced their dependence on Anglo-American capital, and their efforts to introduce greater industrialization with import-substitution led to labour controls, with populist politics and the corresponding growing popularity of left movements. The Reconstruction of Europe and the Marshall Plan provided wide scope for American investments and for exploitation of cheap labour during the immediate post-war period. The East-West divide and the formation of the Socialist Block with its Comecon demanded new areas for investment for Western capital. Latin America has always been the first to suffer in this connection, because of its proximity to the US.

As well as that, the rest of the Third World in the 1960s was targeted for such investments under the guise of the "development decade". The Church's strong antagonism to Communism was exploited to recruit its services as an international agent of "development". Vatican II did much in this regard, but the political economists and social scientists of Latin America had already developed their own analysis in the form of "dependence theory", which the Latin American Church adopted at Medellin. The "dependence theory" saw in the zeal for development on the part of "metropolitan capital" a way of promoting their own interests through control of "dependent capital" in the underdeveloped countries. This was articulated into a new pastoral methodology in the form of BCCs and the new theological-pastoral framework of Liberation Theology, which based its reflection on the praxis of the people's struggle for an integral liberation, borrowing the Marxist social analysis of class conflicts in society and making a preferential option for the poor.

2.Joseph A. Komonchak, "The Local Realization of the Church", in: The Reception of Vatican II, (Washington D. C., 1987) 81.