This study analyzes the celebrated Plenary Council convened by Pope Leon XIII in Rome in 1899 and attended by the highest authorities of the Catholic Church in Latin America. The process of progressive Romanization of the clergy and the “iglesias particulares” (in my opinion, better labeled “national” churches) is well enough known. This process was impelled from the Holy See beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, and it buttressed a church that had been seriously affected, on the one hand, by a modernizing process stemming from the Enlightenment, which we have labeled secularization. It was also affected, although less significantly, by the territorial loss resulting from the formation of the nation-state of Italy. The instruments used by the Holy See to recapture spaces of power (not only spiritual) are less well known: one of these instruments was the Latin American Plenary Council.
This is a subject...
