This beautifully written, richly documented and passionately argued book details the history of the Maryknoll mission in Peru over nearly half a century, beginning in the mid-1940s. Maryknoll missionaries, men and women, went to Peru carrying a reformed and ‘Romanised’ version of Catholicism that emphasised rote learning of doctrine and catechism, and rigid participation in the sacramental life of the Church. They went to change Peru and its Church, but in the end they were changed – as were the Peruvians – by the encounter.

The author maintains a consistent focus on the trajectory of Maryknoll, of Peru as a nation, of Peruvian Catholicism and of the relations between the three. Maryknoll was founded in 1911 as a missionary society, with differentiated organisations for men and women, clergy, sisters and brothers. The formal name is still the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America; nuns belong to the Foreign Mission Society of St Dominic, and brothers to the Auxiliary Brothers of St Michael. The congregation's early efforts were directed at China, which for so many years was a prime mission field for US and UK churches. After Communist victory in 1949 closed China to the missions, new horizons were sought and Latin America became a prime area for relocation. The Good Neighbor Policy, and later the Alliance for Progress, encouraged new relations, but the decisive moment for US Catholics came with papal calls for orders and clergy in the United States and Europe to devote 10 per cent of their personnel and effort to Latin America. Maryknoll and others responded enthusiastically, sending clergy and sisters to work in rural and urban areas where they built churches, founded schools and played a key role in developing networks of Catholic social movements that had long-lasting influence in many countries. The author states that in these years ‘Maryknoll sent more missionaries to Latin America than to any other mission field. Latin America defined Maryknoll’ (p. 19).

The first Maryknollers arrived in Peru in 1943, committing themselves to work in the Andean diocese of Puno – high, poor, overwhelmingly indigenous and deeply unequal. They found a church that was established and ‘powerful’ but heavily dependent on local elites and structurally weak, with scarce resources, few clergy and almost no independent organisations. Puno offered a challenging physical environment: high in the altiplano (3,500 to 4,000 metres), cold, arid and with minimal infrastructure. Clean water was a challenge, and transport difficult and erratic. Missionaries suffered greatly but pressed on, founding schools (including radio schools), training local teams and after a while establishing a net of research institutes to provide instruction in local language and culture, and ultimately to recruit indigenous clergy. The author argues that although they never promoted revolution (despite charges to that effect by local elites), they were revolutionary in their approach. Their direct outreach to remote populations, their energetic and ‘gringo’ style and the resources they were able to bring to the region undermined traditional civil religious hierarchies.

Fitzpatrick-Behrens matches her attention to male clergy with a rich and fascinating account of the activities of Maryknoll sisters, who from the beginning were active in cooperatives and social services, notably in the capital city of Lima. She shows how quickly these energetic women broke the constraints of conventional feminine roles to carve out new areas for action accompanying the growing communities of immigrants and squatters in Lima. The extended case studies of sisters Aurelia Atencio, Maria Zeballos and Patricia ‘Pat’ Ryan (pp. 177–92) offer fascinating insights into the dynamics of these personal and community transformations.

The environment for change in Peru was transformed by the progressive military regime of Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968–76), whose reform programme undermined traditional rural hierarchies and stimulated grassroots organisation of all kinds. Maryknoll itself had begun to change in these years, both in the United States (with closer attention to racism and inequality at home) and in Peru, where clergy and sisters shared in much of the ferment that made Peruvian Catholicism one of the original homes of liberation theology. The net result of these linked transformations was a basic change in the very idea of missionary work – away from instructing the unwashed and educating ‘pagans’ in order to bring them to a proper practice of the faith, and towards a consistent effort to see the face and hear the voice of God in others while serving as a voice for God's people, accompanying them and supporting them in the struggle for a better life.

This favourable conjunction of circumstances did not last long. The Velasco regime was replaced in 1976 by a more conservative military group which yielded in 1980 to the conventional democratic politics of Belaunde Terry. In that same year, Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path, SL) launched its insurrection, which soon became a devastating struggle in which communities were often caught between the military and the guerrillas. The war was most intense in the high Andes where SL first arose and where Maryknoll had been active for decades. Maryknoll and its organisations were trapped between these competing armies, each of which viewed the churches and their organisations as suspect. In the resulting struggle and violence, human rights arose as a central issue (pp. 208–9). The situation within the Peruvian Church also changed in ways that were not favourable to the Maryknoll project. In the 1960s and 1970s, Maryknoll's flourishing activities were supported in Peru by a notably vigorous and progressive group of Catholic bishops who took the lead in social action and later in human rights, both at the national level and particularly in the Andean South, where Maryknoll efforts were concentrated. But beginning with the papacy of John Paul II and continuing to the present, the Peruvian Catholic hierarchy was transformed from one of the most progressive in Latin America to one of the most conservative, with a notably high representation of Opus Dei among bishops. The result was little sympathy for social outreach and open hostility to efforts to promote human rights as a cause. The last step for Maryknoll came in 2007 and 2008, when new bishops in the Andean South terminated its contracts. The author concludes: ‘The actions undertaken to vitiate the changes brought about by nearly three quarters of a century of efforts to promote social transformation and participation in an integral Catholic faith that recognized and valorized indigenous culture [are] one component of a larger transformation of the Catholic Church in Peru, Latin America, and the world … the legacy of the twentieth century Catholic transformation in Peru will not disappear, but for those who participated in these changes and witnessed the results, the current reversal can be devastating’ (pp. 238–9).

The close of Maryknoll's efforts in Peru should also be seen in the context of the congregation's own situation. Maryknoll went to Peru at the height of its capacities, and was able to devote substantial human and material resources to the propagation of its vision of reformed and Romanised Catholicism. Maryknoll was transformed by the encounter with Peruvian reality, and became a leading source for progressive initiatives. But like many Catholic religious orders, Maryknoll has declined. Recruitment is down, the order is visibly aging, and buildings once full of hopeful missionaries now feature endless empty hallways. The world has changed, and the place of traditional missionising is no longer as clear as it was when Maryknoll first turned to Latin America. But then, Latin America itself is no longer what it was, nor indeed is the Catholic Church itself.