Based on wide reading in U.S. and European historical literature, this book is a long reflection on the changing role of the church in modem Latin American society and a mirror of the author’s intellectual trajectory from youthful left anticlericalism to belief His well-known work on the Mexican Cristeros, which brought him into close and respectful contact with the peasant survivors of that conflict, was the bend in the river. That experience and a long period of inquiry enable Jean Meyer to produce here a broad, comprehensive, critical analysis that is also sympathetic to and understanding of religion and church. The sections on Mexico draw on documentary evidence; the other chapters rely upon printed works in several languages. The style is discursive and informal. It is a most useful book that I imagine will reveal for many readers, as it certainly did for me, the depth of our ignorance on this fundamental subject.
Several chapters explore the relationship between the nineteenth-century church and the liberal elites and between the clergy and the popular classes. After maneuvering for alliance and survival among the liberal-conservative conflicts in the decades after independence, the church emerged later in the century strongly influenced by French and German thought—ultramontane, authoritarian, and for the first time since Columbus, separated from state power. Its attack then against liberals, positivists, Masons, and Protestants was actually more effective because it came from a position independent of the state. Moreover, the church was broadly supported by the popular masses, because at that time (as the author applauds Mariátegui for observing) if the creole aristocracy “took on a liberal air, the people in reaction became conservative and clerical” (89). By the turn of the century the transatlantic threats of socialism and anarchism drew Latin American liberals and conservatives closer together. By the end of World War I, conditions were right for the “spectacular rapprochement” between the church and most Latin American governments; Mexico was an obvious exception. Interwoven into these chapters is a lively discussion of the political forces at work in García Moreno’s dedication of Ecuador to the Sacred Heart, a section on religious life in the nineteenth century, the popular Catholicism of Canudos and Juazeiro placed in comparative perspective, and a summary of the author’s work on Mexico in the 1920s. Where other governments endeavored to subject the church to projects of national construction, the Mexican revolutionary state, according to Meyer, rejected the church as a social institution and with the aid of Masons, Protestants, and “Reds” aimed to impose its absolute hegemony.
The last six chapters comprise complex and original analyses of the Cuban Revolution, the impact of Vatican II, the conflict over liberation theology, and the Sandinista movement. Not everyone will rejoice in Meyer’s tastes or conclusions, but few readers will fail to appreciate the work of an independent and original mind informed by graceful erudition. Translated into English the book would make a useful and provocative addition to undergraduate survey courses.
