John Lynch's oft-cited essay on the Latin American Church, published in the fourth volume of Leslie Bethell's edited collection The Cambridge History of Latin America, has now been transformed, happily, into an authoritative book covering the colony to the present. The field New Worlds joins, it should be said, is less barren than it once was, as recent surveys by Kreebs (2002), González and González (2009) and Schwaller (2011) all attest. For my money, however, Lynch's is the most satisfying and magisterial survey available, and the most eloquent.
New Worlds follows a largely chronological structure. Chapters 1 and 2 survey the arrival of peninsular Catholicism in the Americas and the building of the colonial Church. Less space is given to pre-Colombian religion or patronage than in some surveys; however, there is a useful discussion of the syncretism thesis and of the relationship between culture and religion (pp. 22–4). This, in some ways, provides the book's main conceptual axis. Following Burkhart and Farriss, for example, Lynch emphasises religious synthesis among Christianised Indians (pp. 15–17). Their Catholicism was ‘fundamentally authentic’, he argues, albeit expressed through exuberant rituals and cults; inquisitorial sadists like De Landa were thus guilty not just of cruelty but also of punishing the Indians for basically cultural, rarely doctrinal, excess (pp. 38–45).
Chapter 3, meanwhile, discusses the Bourbon Church, stressing its failure to absorb Enlightenment thinking creatively. Lynch is unconvinced by that Church's modernising project: instead of embracing rationalist critiques of religion and opening Catholicism to ideas of liberty and renewal, the Church preferred enlightened despotism and client status as a ‘state Church’ (p. 67). The Jansenising theology of late colonial prelates was code for regalism (p. 75); worse, the Church grew puritanical, enamoured of ‘a kind of modernity that attacked popular cultures’ and especially joyous aspects of the faith (p. 89). In contrast, Lynch's sympathies lie with the expelled Jesuits: Bourbonism wrecked a flourishing mission that could be defended on utilitarian and spiritual grounds, one whose loss was never made good by secular Church or state.
In one of the book's most devastating judgments – second only to its reflections on the Church's failure consistently to oppose slavery or Southern Cone military juntas – Lynch argues that the late colonial Church squandered a historic opportunity to regenerate Catholicism in dialogue with the Enlightenment, and so lost its control over culture, which grew more secular (p. 67). As a result the late colonial Church became a state prop, one that had handed the intellectual initiative to new elites who resented the Church for delaying independence (p. 105).
It would take the Church almost a century to redress this folly, Lynch argues in the book's central (and core) chapters. Following a rather short essay on independence – in which religion's role in driving creole patriotism gets surprisingly short thrift, given the preceding critique – Lynch charts the Church's mid-nineteenth- to early twentieth-century revival (chapters 5, 7 and 8). Here he skilfully shows how the post-colonial Church sought to outwit predatory liberal and conservative states from 1850 by redefining itself as a ‘perfect society’, one free of national tutelage but legally and doctrinally dependent on Rome. The narrative then tracks the serried conflicts between the state and this reforming, increasingly ‘Roman’ yet paradoxically American Church. The last chapter of this trio considers the Church's institutional and intellectual revival under Thomist influences, which propelled the vigorous rechristianisation efforts made in Argentina, Mexico, Chile and elsewhere c. 1890–1930. On the one hand, Lynch traces the emergence of a modern piety resting on avatars such as the Sacred Heart and set pieces like the Eucharistic congresses celebrated after 1900. On the other hand, Lynch shows, this was the modern Church's apogee, the period when it sallied forth from its pious redoubts, embracing workers and peasants and daring to recatholicise socio-economic relationships. Though clashes with the state sometimes ensued, Lynch seems drawn to this social apostolate, and to the likes of Fathers Grote and Hurtado. The three-page vignette describing the execution of the Mexican Jesuit, Pro – martyred by revolutionary state-builders in 1927 – feels symbolically placed in the narrative, like an exemplary novena tucked into the pages (pp. 248–50).
If New Worlds has a significant lacuna, it is the immediately following decades of the 1940s and 1950s, which are glimpsed through the Argentine and, to a lesser extent, Cuban experiences. The closing narrative chapters (9, 10 and 12) examine the Church's troublingly ambivalent record under dictatorship in Argentina and Chile, its more creditable if diminishing role during the Central American insurgencies and genocides of the 1970s and beyond, and the theory and practice of liberation theology. Liberationism's tragedy, Lynch concludes, is that it relied on Marxist analysis, so inviting censure, when it already contained a sufficient theological principle: enacting hope, as opposed to deferring to faith or begging for charity (pp. 346–9).
The two remaining chapters provide contrasting but suggestive excursions into religious sociology, institutional radiografías of a Church beset first by liberalism (chapter 6) and then twentieth-century pluralism (chapter 11). In the first case, Lynch gauges the popular state of nineteenth-century devotion using statistical indices and accounts of millenarian fervour in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico. Overall, he concludes, ‘faith was secure, behavior lamentable’ (p. 165), again deploying the study's religiosity/culture paradigm. In his penultimate chapter, Lynch studies the spread of evangelical Protestantisms, Afro-American religions and charismatic Catholicism, phenomena that he collectively dubs ‘rechristianization from below’ (p. 341).
As this cursory review shows, Lynch's canvas is vast, and it is entirely to his credit that almost every portion is coloured with the same attention to detail, with the same nuance and erudition. His verdicts are always humane and mostly judicious. For Lynch, as the book's title implies, faith thrives when embedded in cultural practice as opposed to being abstracted to a discrete realm of piety – hence his sympathy for worker priests, Jesuit missionaries and those, from Las Casas to Romero, whose Catholicism was a guide to transforming the social as well as the interior world. Hence, too, Lynch's conceptualisation of popular religions of the kind found at Canudos or Tomochic: these were charismatic responses to structural injustices, yet emanated from within mainstream Catholicism as opposed to representing absolute variance (pp. 171–2). In these passages, Lynch guides his readers as a benign parish cura, wise from his rural rides. As an ecclesiastical judge, however, Lynch is implacable: unengaged, aloof piety, especially when power's accomplice, meets with fierce criticism. Why was the intellectual response to positivism so long left to non-Catholics (p. 189)? Why was the Church in twentieth-century Argentina so bound by its Erastian past that it failed to speak up for the junta's victims, even when priests and faithful joined the disappeared (pp. 270–3)? Why, over many decades, did the Church not just ‘apply a few simple Christian principles’ and denounce slavery (p. 63)? Why, indeed?
