I’m going to write about three international events today – the death of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and the inauguration of President Lula in Brazil and President Petro in Colombia. These seemingly disparate events are connected, as I explain in this essay.
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI died this week at the age of 95. He had been living in the Vatican since his retirement in 2013. The story of the two popes got some traction because it had been 600 years since a pontiff left office by renunciation (resignation).
The Catholic Church is the largest Christian denomination in the world – 50% of the world’s Christians are Catholic, while 37% are Protestant and 12% are Orthodox of various kinds. Latin America is home to the largest number of Catholics in the world – 425 million (39% of the world’s Catholics) – while Europe houses 257 million (24%), Sub-Saharan Africa has 171 million (16%), Asia/Pacific has 180 million (12%), and North America comes in with 88 million (8%).
Two other international stories this week are connected to this story about the leadership of the Catholic Church. Political instability continues in both Colombia and Brazil even as new presidents are sworn in – Luiz Ignacio “Lula” da Silva in Brazil and Gustavo Petro in Colombia. Both presidents face serious problems that are connected in part to the role of the Catholic Church in the history of their countries.
So what is the connection between events in these countries in South America and the death of a retired pope?
We are so accustomed to political instability throughout Central and South America that we barely take notice of it anymore. But history doesn’t just happen randomly. We often blithely state that “actions have consequences,” but it is equally true that “events have causes.”
The Catholic Church is directly responsible for political instability in Latin America. This is a bold statement, but it is accurate.
The colonization of Latin America by Spain took a different path from what the British did in North America. The people who founded the British colonies were largely not the elites of British society. In New England, the colonizers were often religious dissenters who left England to seek religious freedom. In colonies where the motivations for settlement were economic rather than religious (often in New England as well), the settlers were often either impoverished people who came to the colonies as indentured servants or people of moderate means who were not economically successful in the villages or cities they came from. Even settlers with means were often younger sons in a noble lineage; unlikely to inherit from their wealthy fathers, they came to the colonies to seek their fortunes.
The situation was different in almost every way in Latin America. There were three motives behind Spanish and Portuguese colonization: spreading Catholicism, finding wealth in the form of precious metals, and expanding the empire. The men who came to these colonies (and they were mostly men) were soldiers, noblemen, or priests. This triumvirate of power drove the founding and evolution of these colonies.
It is also important to note the dates during which these colonies were settled. Without going into specifics, the colonies of Spain and Portugal were settled primarily during the 16th century while British colonization happened during the 17th century. Why does this matter? The philosophical movement called The Enlightenment impacted northern Europe during the 17th century. This movement, which emphasized the power of reason and the secularization of government (not immediately, but gradually) meant that the British colonies in North America took a very different path than the Spanish colonies in Latin America, where the power of the church and the crown joined to create colonies that were tightly organized and dependent on these two power bases. The countries of southern Europe didn’t experience the Enlightenment with the intensity that it was felt in northern Europe, and this philosophical movement had little impact on the development of their colonies.
During the Age of Revolution in the late 18th and early 19th century, the colonies in Latin America declared their independence from Spain and Portugal, following the model of the United States Constitution to set up their post-independence governments. But the groundwork had never been laid for the gradual evolution of democracy as was experienced in the United States; instead, the newly independent countries of Latin America saw a continuation of the efforts of the rich landowners and the Catholic Church – who held the reins of power as tightly as the monarchy their revolutions overthrew – to assert and maintain control over the largely mixed-race peasants who worked their land.
Fast forward to the 20th century. In the 1960s and 1970s, a new brand of Catholicism called “liberation theology” emerged in Latin America. This movement called for a radical reassessment of theology, the job of a priest, and the Catholic Church itself. In the wake of the Second Vatican Council that sat between 1962 and 1965, the Latin American Bishops convened in 1968 in Medellin, Colombia, to flesh out the spirit of Vatican II. An important text emerged from this meeting – A Theology of Liberation by the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutierrez. Broadly speaking, this new theology was what we would call “left-wing” Christianity today – a theology rooted in the Christian call to clothe the naked, feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, and care for the ill. The new Church born out of this philosophy would be one that denounced injustice, recognized institutional poverty and repression, and lived in solidarity with the poor and oppressed.
This is the church that was the home of Jorge Mario Bergoglio (later Pope Francis), who was ordained in the Jesuit order in Argentina in 1969. He was not a radically liberal priest – in the past has specifically rejected elements of liberation theology – but his emphasis on the problems of unbridled free market capitalism and overdevelopment placed him at odds with a Catholic Church whose net worth is estimated to be $30 billion. He supports the causes of refugees around the world, and is widely recognized for his humility and identification with the poor. His approach to the church was in stark contrast to the conservatism of his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI.
When Pope Benedict XVI, resigned from the papacy in 2013, Bergoglio chose the name “Francis” in honor of Saint Francis of Assisi, whom he described as “The man who gives us this spirit of peace, the poor man,” and he added “how I would like a poor Church, and for the poor.”
Circling back to the current instability in Colombia and Brazil; in both of these countries, the endemic inequality created by their colonial history has led to recurring problems in forming functional governments. The church was an important ally for the authoritarian dictatorial regimes that form a large part of the history of both of these nations. When the church and state are intertwined, both suffer.
After rocky experiments with democratic government in Brazil over the years, the army undertook a successful coup in 1964 and governed the country for 21 years. Although a new Republic was created in 1985, the army still exerts a strong influence in Brazilian politics. The newly elected president, known universally as “Lula,” is entering his third term as president – he served previously for two successive terms from 2002 through 2010. In 2022, Lula defeated the proto-fascist Bolsonaro, whose time in office had seen a return to greater power by the military. As other evidence of the fragility of democracy in Brazil – in 2022, there were 24 political parties represented in the Brazilian Congress. NOTE: In the wake of his electoral defeat, Bolsonaro has moved to Florida where he was seen this morning walking around a Publix store.
Colombia experienced some degree of political stability early in the 20th century, but since then things have gone downhill. The political scene has been dominated by an ongoing but low-intensity armed conflict between government forces, leftist guerrilla groups, and right-wing paramilitaries. One of the first acts undertaken by the newly elected president Petro was to enter into a six-month truce with the various paramilitary groups that had threatened government stability for decades.
You can draw a straight line between the dominance of the Catholic Church in the evolution of Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Latin America and the political instability that has characterized this part of the world in the two centuries since independence. The church historically demanded the fealty of the people while it supported the very institutions that were repressing them. The United States escaped this kind of instability in part because our founding ethic, shaped by the Enlightenment, led to a separation of church and state.
In the US today (literally) we are watching a group of extremists push for what they call Christian nationalism — a denial of the separation of church and state that has kept the US from the kind of instability we have come to expect in Latin America. The current nonsense playing out on the floor of the House of Representatives reflects the “culture war” elements of Christian nationalism. This is dangerous and destabilizing and we should oppose it.
Oops! I started a response and lost it somewhere. But yes, an excellent article. I especially liked how you connected your comments with the nonsense in DC.
Excellent. Excellent. Excellent.