Catholicism and Society in Twentieth-Century Brazil

Abstract

During the 1960s, social scientists optimistically predicated a significant role for Roman Catholicism in the promotion of social reform throughout Latin America. But political developments during the 1970s, notably in Chile and Brazil, implicitly challenged that view and the theoretical foundations on which it rested. Not surprisingly, one recent and knowledgeable reassessment of the Church's role contends that Catholicism—for reasons that went unaccentuated in earlier scholarship—is both institutionally and ideologically incapable of legitimating and implementing reforms basic to a new egalitarian order.