This book by one of the field’s most distinguished historians is the first scholarly English- language history of the Catholic Church in Latin America from the conquest to the present. The language of the book is not heated or passionate — this is not Lynch’s style in any of his work — but it feels personal, almost like a labor of conscience. The central interpretive theme, and the one that lends the book its framework of analysis, is social justice. Neither the author’s disappointment in the church’s many failures to make life better (spiritually and materially) for the faithful nor his approval of its many successes in so doing is ever too far beneath the surface.
Lynch’s guiding interest in the church’s struggles to defend the faith and to protect the faithful leads him to feature on the one side of the social justice ledger the sixteenth- century missionary orders,...
