Perhaps an apropos place to begin this brief review is with the author’s concluding sentence: “In the end, the history of the Church in Latin America is in reality all of this — the large interplay of great ideas and theologies, and the daily faith of the millions of people working out the story of salvation in their own lives and in their own time and place” (p. 275). While other themes have their place in John F. Schwaller’s The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America, it is the author’s consistent attention to two major competing visions of the church as defined by either ecclesiastical hierarchy or the “body of the faithful” (p. 268) that makes this book a remarkable work of scholarly synthesis.
Schwaller organizes his work chronologically, with chapters that mirror the peri-odization of any general history of Latin America. By adhering to the aforementioned...
