Algunas tendencias del catolicismo social en Chile: Reflexiones desde la historia

Abstract

In this essay, the author proposes a different perspective on what has been understood up to now regarding the relationship between Social Catholicism and the groups that have sustained it. In the decade of the 1930s, for diverse motives, different groups emerged from a special generation of young Chilean Catholics linked to a hard-line conservatism. These groups interpreted in their own ways how to put into practice the social doctrines dictated by Rome. Those different interpretations generated a deep división within Chilean Catholicism which transcended into the world of politics and generated deep resentments that subsisted for several decades. A review of those positions is proposed here, serving to help us understand part of the process that national Catholicism lived out in the 20th century, and comprehend the origin of some positions that are still current in that Catholic spectrum linked to more traditional and conservative postures.