This book brings important new evidence and compelling arguments to the task of understanding change in Latin American Catholicism. Working with survey data from the Archdiocese of São Paulo, the author presents a thorough and empirically grounded study of Christian base communities, or CEBs (comunidades eclesiais de base). CEBs are often depicted as “liberation theology in practice,” vehicles for energizing religious change and cultural and political transformation, and for empowering new social movements throughout Latin America. Brazil is an important test case because, more than most, the Brazilian Catholic church has backed the CEBs with important symbolic and material resources, sponsoring their links with social and political movements as part of a broad democratizing agenda.
Throughout the 1980s, many observers believed the CEBs to be the seedbed of a new and more democratic future. But as empirical studies have accumulated, a more nuanced and careful picture has emerged of both the potential and the limitations of change they present. Hewitt’s work is among the most comprehensive and empirically well grounded of these recent efforts. He examines the origins of CEBs and details their social composition, typical activities, leadership patterns, and ties to the institutional church.
The author corrects the conventional wisdom on several important points. For example, he shows that CEBs draw members not from the poorest of the poor but rather from stable working and lower middle classes: “from those who are relatively, as opposed to absolutely, deprived” (p. 66). He affirms that relations with the institutional church (manifest in the orientations of clergy, nuns, or pastoral agents who work with the groups) explain more than does the social class base of the group. The groups that emerge from his portrait are also more conventionally religious and less explicitly political than much of the rhetoric about CEBs claims.
Hewitt s findings, which are common to much recent work, do not mean that CEBs bring no change, but rather that change is less explicit, less unidirectional, and much more constrained by links with the institutional church than earlier, mostly nonempirical studies had anticipated. There is much variation among CEBs and growing competition with evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants. In any event, activist CEBs with strong ideological and institutional ties to liberation theology have lately come under growing Vatican pressure throughout Latin America, as efforts to restore traditional patterns of hierarchical authority and internal discipline have taken effect. Hewitt’s work sheds important light on these issues, and should interest not only students of Latin America but also those interested in the relation of religion to cultural and political change in general.
