The Church and the Independence of Latin America

After introducing the immediate political, economic and ecclesiastical background that explains the emergence of the BCCs, I wish to link up this emergence with its more distant historical background. It is important to establish such a link for a fuller understanding of the present-day developments and future trends. Such an exercise will need to be done with regard to Asia in general and to Hong Kong in particular. Critical intervention in history at the present for a better future cannot be done without gathering the past.

The struggle for the independence of Latin America was the struggle between the Creoles and the peninsulares [people of Peninsular Iberia] and both sides sought the ideological and economic support of the Church. The nationalist tensions were brought to the fore during the Napoleonic Wars, when the English blockade made supplies from Spain to the Indies difficult. Spain had to decree the ports of the Indies open to neutral shipping to save the situation. North Americans jumped in and almost monopolized the situation.

The Napoleonic invasion of Spain changed the Spanish anti-English stance. The Creoles of the Indies were not against the Monarchy or the Church in Spain as long as they were left to run their own affairs. They wanted no Jacobinism and no Bonaparte. Latin America was shaken by insurrections all over, starting with the newer viceroyships of La Plata and New Granada. There was no general coordination. Only in Mexico was the insurrection more a popular revolt caused by land hunger and led by a priest named Hidalgo, and there the Creoles joined the Spanish viceroy in stamping it out. From 1814-16 the Spanish rule was restored, except in Buenos Aires. Bolivar (Venezuelan liberator) and San Martin (commander of the La Plata army) took up the common cause of Latin America and with patriotic and mercenary forces gained the liberation of the rest of Latin America (1816-25). But the captains could not cooperate and both the leading conquistadors had to leave for exile.

Their followers partitioned the subcontinent and its large viceroyships into different unitary and centralized states. Most of the new rulers were even noisily pious, but they were all unanimous in desiring to restrict the independent political activities of the Church and employ it as the guardian of the new social order. However, things did not work out that way. From the beginning the Church Hierarchy for the most part supported the royalist cause as a natural response to the Patronato real. The overwhelming majority of the hierarchy were peninsulares and identified with the interests of Spain. They also recognized the threat posed by revolution and liberal ideology to the established position of the Church. Bishops whose loyalty to the crown was suspect were either recalled to Spain or effectively deprived of their dioceses. Most dioceses were filled with candidates of unquestioned political loyalty, but there were a few who clearly sympathized with the patriots.

The lower clergy, especially the secular clergy, were predominantly Creole and though divided, like the Creole elite as a whole, were more inclined to support the struggle for self-rule and eventually independence. There was a deep resentment at the virtual monopoly of the higher ecclesiastical posts by peninsulares. Some of the lower clergy played an outstanding role in the struggle for Spanish American independence, and they proclaimed the Virgin of Guadalupe the patron saint of the Spanish American Revolution. By 1815 over 100 priests had been executed in Mexico. At the same time, a substantial number of loyalist priests preached obedience to the Crown. This was particularly the case in the religious orders, where the proportion of peninsulares to Creoles was higher.

Throughout most of the period of the revolution and the wars for Spanish American independence, the papacy maintained its traditional alliance with the Spanish Crown. In his encyclical Etsi longissimo (30 Jan. 1816), Pius VII urged the bishops and clergy of Spanish America to make clear the dreadful consequences of rebellion against legitimate authority. Later the Vatican became more neutral, partly in response to petitions from Spanish America, and partly because of the anti-clerical attitude of the liberal government in Spain after the Revolution of 1820, culminating in the expulsion of the Papal Nuncio in January 1823. However, under Pope Leo XII, a strong defender of legitimate sovereignty, Rome's attitude towards revolutionaries hardened again, and that at a moment when the royalists were about to suffer their final defeat.

The Catholic Church in Spanish America emerged from the struggle for independence considerably weakened as a result of its too close ties with the Crown. The same voices of reason that repudiated absolute monarchy also challenged revealed religion. The architects of independence sought a moral legitimacy for what they were doing, and they found inspiration not in Catholic political thought but in the philosophy of the age of reason, particularly in the utilitarianism of Bentham. As a result the position of the republican State vis-a-vis the Church was not friendly. Under pressure from the Holy Alliance powers, Rome continued adamant in its opposition to the liberal republics, and most dioceses remained vacant for long periods. It was only under Pope Gregory XVI (1831-46) that many vacancies were filled and, beginning with New Granada in 1835, political relations established with the Spanish American republics.

The structure of the Church was much damaged during the post-revolutionary period as a result of the hostile legislation that closed many convents and appropriated their properties and capital. While acknowledging Catholicism as the State religion, the new governments frequently accepted the principle of religious toleration under pressure of Britain. The Inquisition was invariably abolished. The Church for its part, especially during the papacy of Pius IX, increasingly resisted and mobilized in its defence the conservative forces in Spanish American society, including popular forces. As a result, the conflict between the liberal State and the Catholic Church became a central political issue throughout Spanish America in the middle decades of the 19th century, especially in Mexico, where it led to violent confrontation and full-scale civil war in the 1850s and 1860s. The situation was somewhat similar in Colombia.

As was the case elsewhere, the Catholic Church in Central America was a strongly conservative force. In the 1920s, for example, the Nicaraguan bishops paid little attention to the struggle of Augusto Cesar Sandino except to urge his followers to abandon their "sterile struggle" and return to family, work, and religion. In 1942 the archbishop of Managua crowned President Anastasio Somoza's daughter Queen of the Army in a ceremony using a crown from the statue of Our Lady of Candelaria. In 1954 Archbishop Rossell of Guatemala City organized nationwide processions with a popular "black Christ" to stir up anti-communist sentiments, and he cooperated with the US Embassy in the CIA overthrow of the Arbenz government. In general there was the day-to-day reinforcement of a fatalistic world view through popular religiosity, in which the image of God resembles a celestial hacienda owner. As has been frequently stated, the Church was one of the three pillars of society, the other two being the landholding oligarchy and the military.

The situation of the Church in Brazil was somewhat different, as it had neither the institutional strength and political influence, nor the economic wealth and juridical privileges which it had in Mexico or Peru. Under the padroado real, Brazil's one archbishop and six bishops were, like the Spanish American episcopate, appointed by and subordinate to the Crown. The Church hierarchy, however, included many Brazilians and there was much less of a divide－economic, social or ideological－between the hierarchy and the lower clergy. The transfer of the Portuguese court to Brazil in 1807 saved Brazil and its Church from the extreme political and ideological conflicts which beset Spanish America. In the political crisis of 1821-2, the majority of the Brazilian clergy supported the Brazilian faction and eventually the independence of Brazil. There were some pro-Portuguese elements within the Church, some of whom were deported. There were also some extreme liberal and republican priests, but most were moderate liberals and played an important role in the politics of the time.

The first legislature (1826-9) included more priests (26 out of 100 deputies) than any other social group. The relatively peaceful political transition in Brazil and the continuance of the Monarchy ensured that the Church emerged relatively undamaged and was not threatened by aggressive liberal anticlericalism in the period after independence. There were no serious clashes between the Church and the State till the Brazilian hierarchy came under the influence of ultramontanism in 1870s. Today, Brazil is making a most creative contribution to the evolution of the Church in Latin America through its very wide existing network of nearly 150,000 BCCs in 252 dioceses. This is possible in Brazil because of its supportive Hierarchy, unlike elsewhere in Latin America as we shall see in the next section.