Why hasn't Catholicism had a more positive effect?

If any corner of the globe should bear the imprint of Catholic values, it's Latin America. Catholicism has enjoyed a spiritual monopoly in the region for more than 500 years, and today almost half the 1.1 billion Catholics alive are Latin Americans. Moreover, Latin Americans take religion seriously; surveys show that belief in God, spirits and demons, the afterlife, and final judgment is near-universal.

The sobering reality, however, is that these facts could actually support an "emperor has no clothes" accusation against the church. Latin America has been Catholic for five centuries, yet too often its societies are corrupt, violent, and underdeveloped. If Catholicism has had half a millennium to shape culture and this is the best it can do, one might be tempted to ask, is it really something to celebrate? Mounting defections to Pentecostalism only deepen such ambivalence.

In this tiny country of seven million, violence is so endemic that even the guards at the Pizza Hut across the street from our hotel carried automatic weapons. According to the World Health Organization, Honduras has a murder rate five times the global average, largely due to the maras, or drug-related gangs. One sign of the times: Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga of Tegucigalpa loaned us his driver and vehicle for some of my appointments, which meant that we moved with a military escort because of death threats against the cardinal, an outspoken opponent of the drug trade. (I confess that I sometimes wondered if we might actually be safer in a cab.)

Most of the estimated 30,000 young Hondurans who belong to these gangs, it's worth recalling, were baptized as Catholics and raised in Catholic families.

Corruption is also ubiquitous. To take one example, electrical blackouts are chronic because the state-run electric company is perpetually on the brink of bankruptcy. In a classic vicious circle, revenue shortfalls due to corruption have produced a staggering national "electricity tax" of 49 percent, prompting people to refuse to pay their bills, making breakdowns even more routine. Once again, the officials responsible for this mess are overwhelmingly Catholic.

In light of such realities, I repeatedly put the question to my hosts: Why haven't five centuries of Catholicism left a more impressive social fingerprint?

To my surprise, the response I anticipated -- that despite the best efforts of the church, Latin America is hostage to meddling from the United States, as well as neo-liberal economic systems -- wasn't at the top of the list.

To be sure, Hondurans understand the role that American interests, both political and commercial, have played in destabilizing their country. Honduras is the original "banana republic," where U.S-based fruit companies long wielded more power than the government. In the early 20th century, U.S. Marines landed in Honduras no less than four times to protect the banana trade.

More recently, the United States played a huge role in Honduras during the 1980s, when the country formed a critical corridor between the Contra revolt against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and El Salvador's efforts to put down the Marxist FMLN. John Negroponte, today deputy secretary of state, cut his teeth as ambassador to Honduras, where critics say he turned a blind eye to human rights violations by the military, especially the infamous Battalion 316, thought to be responsible for thousands of "disappearances."

Post-Communist economic globalization has hardly been an unmixed blessing either. While CAFTA (the Central American Free Trade Agreement) is generating new wealth for Honduran elites, 80 percent of the country lives in poverty. Rodriguez believes that export economies won't work here, given that his country's principal products -- bananas, minerals and vegetable oil -- have been devastated by a collapse in international prices. Today, Rodriguez says, his country's real exports are "illegal immigrants and drugs."

Despite all this, most Hondurans seem determined not to blame outside forces for their struggles.

Fr. Ricardo Flores, pastor of San Jose Obrero parish in Tegucigalpa, told me that in his view, globalized economic systems and American policy "are not the big problems we face," and don't explain why Honduras is in crisis. He said the real issues are corruption, a lack of social solidarity, and inadequate investment in education -- all of which, he said, are basically home-grown.

The most frequent explanation I heard boils down to this: For most of the 500 years since the arrival of Columbus, Catholicism in Latin America often has been skin-deep. People were baptized into the faith, married and buried in it, but for a variety of reasons there was precious little else.

To be sure, the church exercises considerable political clout. But that influence, many observers say, often masks a superficial Catholicism at the grass-roots.

At first blush, the claim that five centuries haven't afforded enough time for real evangelization might seem a terrible indictment. Honduran Catholics told me that, given its scarce resources, the church never stood a chance. Moreover, they say, baptismal counts notwithstanding, the region has never been ideologically homogenous.

For example, some Hondurans assert that during the Cold War, the dominant ideology was not Catholicism, but Marxism, which had a much greater impact in shaping the attitudes of political and social elites. That's the view at the new Catholic University of Honduras, founded in 1993 and named "Our Lady Queen of Peace" in honor of the reputed apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Medjugorje, in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

During my visit, rector Elio David Alvarenga Amador and members of his staff explained that the university was founded by lay Catholics who taught at the secular national university, and who were frustrated with what they saw as Marxist indoctrination, especially in education and the social sciences.

Vice-rector Virgilio Madrid Solís, who keeps an image of St. Josemaría Escrivá, the founder of Opus Dei, on his desk, though he's not a member, minces no words in describing the new university's mission: "To change Honduras."

Erika Flores de Boquín, another vice-rector, unpacked the point. She told the story of a recent engineering graduate who went to work for the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment, where he was asked to sign what Flores described as a falsified environmental impact study, presumably skewed by corruption. The engineer lost his job, but he made a stand for principle.

"Little by little, such acts will transform this country," Flores de Boquín said. "The church is starting this work only now."

Hondurans also point to a severe priest shortage as limiting the extent to which Catholicism took hold. With just over 400 priests, the ratio of priests to people in Honduras today is 1 to 13,000.

"At the time of independence from Spain, most of the Catholic clergy were expelled," Rodriguez said. "We had one bishop and 15 priests for the entire country."

That shortage left vast sections of the population with no regular access to the sacraments, and no meaningful catechesis. The few clergy on hand, mostly foreign missionaries, did their best, but dreams of Honduran Catholicism shaping culture in the sense that one associates with Poland under Communism, local Catholics say, was never in the cards.

Ruminating on these explanations, I'm reminded of the famous quip from G.K. Chesterton: The problem is not that Christianity has been tried and found wanting, but rather that it's been found difficult and never tried. Repeatedly, that's the story I was told by Hondurans. The problem is not that Catholicism has failed, but that authentic Catholicism has never been tried.

That view would appear to have been more or less endorsed by CELAM, the Conference of Bishops of Latin American and the Caribbean. In the lineamenta for their upcoming Fifth General Conference in Brazil, the bishops flagged inadequate religious formation, a mix of Catholicism and indigenous religious practices, and a lack of coherence with Catholic beliefs among the faithful, as central challenges.

Rodriguez, the first cardinal in Honduran history, emphatically believes that deep evangelization is a work still to be done, and thinks the church in Latin America is now developing the muscle to pull it off.

In that light, it will be especially interesting to watch the upcoming CELAM conference in early May in Brazil. Benedict XVI will be in attendance, and one imagines he too will be looking to see if Rodriguez's brother bishops share his confidence -- and, more importantly, what ideas they have to make it a reality.

Secularization of a poor, urbanized people has always had disasterous effects, whether in Detroit, Tegucigalpa, or Kingston.

I don't think enough people understand how secularized much of Latin America has become. Speaking as someone who has spent a considerable amount of time in Panama, to say nothing of Costa Rica and Mexico, I can tell you that while certain sectors of the population are turning toward Pentecostalism, an even greater share, particularly in the cities, has turned away from religion en totem, not even bothering to baptise their children.

Funny... Any check I can find of the success of the Catholic Church in Latin America shows it to be rather minimal. The historic absence of any denomination hardly means that everyone is Catholic. I think we could all agree that a very strong measure of the Catholicity of any group is the number of priests. But historically, Latin America has been virtually devoid of priests. Instead, what has existed is a very small Catholic community ministering very inadequately to an enormous indigenous community under harsh suppression of anti-clerical regimes which were often funded by Anglosphere leaders who happened to be Protestant (i.e., Roosevelt, Eisenhower, etc.)

Only since John Paul II has a true evangelization of Latin America taken place.

The brutal repression of Catholicism in Latin America is best exemplified by Mexico, a Marxist-Troskyite regime older than the Soviet Union, wherein tens of thousands of Catholic priests and nuns were slaughtered.

, an even greater share, particularly in the cities, has turned away from religion en totem, not even bothering to baptise their children.

That's a very interesting observation. I think the same is true with Hispanic immigrants in the US - some of them go off to the charismatics, but many of them just don't care. They think it's more modern and more "American" to be completely non-religious.

Of course, they are assisted in reaching this conclusion by foundation-supported social policy organizations such as Planned Parenthood. The latter group may have a specific objective (population control) but it approaches it indirectly, with a pitch to modernity, the idea of freeing oneself from the oppressive past (by which they mean religion and traditional morality), etc. They don't confront religion head-on, but in some ways, their direct, marginalizing approach is even more effective.

**Why hasn't Catholicism had a more positive effect?**

The fact is, Catholicism had had a tremendous effect on the world.

Consider the issues of:
abortion
euthanasia
stem-cell research
contraception
same-sex marriage

And stories like
Fatima
Lepanto
Lanciano
Divine Mercy
The Passion of the Christ.

Does anyone want me to go on?

Or can we all admit that it really is open season on Jesus and especially Catholicism???

Keeping the flock is much easier when you have an agrarian society with no outside diversions apart from sex, work, and the occassional pick up soccer game. Its much more difficult when you move to the city, can afford cable TV, and want to lose as much of your peasant past as possible.

The secularization of my family proceeded much slower because mass culture and affluence, which was in incubation since the late 19th century, but was cut off by the depression, only became a strong factor in the industrialized world in te 1950s. I has spread to the developing world more slowly, but is now there in spades. I've seen Indians living in one room homes in Chiapas with cell phones and satellite dishes.

Interestingly enough, this is a key factor behind the fact that the average birthrate per mother in Mexico has gone from six children in the early 1960s to about two today (and falling). The normal diversions of an urbanized society, along with easy access to birth control (it is easier to get condoms in your average mid sized Mexican city than it is in say, Louisville), mean that the RCC, and religion in general, has lost and will continue to lose influence in Mexican society, and that of any portion of the developing world that has a (relatively) open society.

Open season on Catholicism? I didn't get that at all from this article.

Allen has been in Honduras for about a month, this is just one of many articles he has written during his trip.

To me, this article just seems to be an observation on the old canard that Latin American cultures are deeply influenced by the Catholic faith of their populations. If that's true, why are these societies in such poor shape? The question was posed to the Hondurans he spoke to and they all had a similar answer, the Church has always been in a minority position to influence society.

There is often an assumption that the Church has a nearly absolute influence on society in various times and places. That assumption always ignores the much stronger influence, IMO, of forces other than the Church.

I agree with you here, "The result was that the Church had to deal with a large number of very primitive indigenous populations throughout Latin America." Europeans were always vastly outnumbered by indians in LA. More importantly, however, one must question whether failures are from religion or from the inability to develop healthy political and economids systems.

In the 1950s...primary school teachers succeeded in teaching most children who attended school to read to the level of autonomy...

Obviously, if a child has a parent(s) who is educated and/or values education, that child has a built-in advantage. But, as you state, those who were in the position, as teacher, had the ability and the methods to teach children to read, along with the other basic subjects.

This success did not begin in the 1950s. I would take it back to at least the 1920s, and probably before that.

I've watched the "new" and "progressive" methods of teaching reading and math for a number of years, and asked myself what was wrong with the way we, of the earlier years, learned to read and do math.

Whatever works, that's what matters. I shouldn't be stuck in the past!

...not even bothering to baptize their children.

You surely are aware that not all Catholics in the U.S. show a strong priority for having their newborn baptized as soon as possible. Looking back on my grandparent's generation and my parent's generation, children were usually baptized at about three weeks of age.

I don't know if this belief is widespread today.

the inability to develop healthy political and economids systems.

I think that has a lot to do with it. Even some of that is the result of having suddenly acquired a large indigenous population that was still tribal in its patterns and had no background in Western political/economic systems. But part of it is also attributable to Spain, which had a very centralized, top-down government and economy at the time of the settlement of Latin America. Everything had to go to Madrid for approval and economic resources were also doled out through Madrid.

This model had developed gradually but of course was firmly established by the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, which unified Spain and concentrated the power. It was a system which, over the years, was helpful to Spain in many ways and probably did enable it to do the quantity of exploration and settlement it did for a couple of centuries. Yet at the same time, it was inflexible, unrealistic and unsuited to the conditions.

But in many ways, when the criollos finally rebelled, they simply put in place tiny models of that system in their own countries. This accounts for the Latin American preference for the strong man, the centrality of the state, etc. But it's not a successful model.

Many have observed that the Spanish just spent all the money they got and when it was gone they were broke. I think it is unusual that we invest not only money but lots of effort on improving the quality of life. That has produced an unknown level of general prosperity. I note that many other countries just work for money and don't make the investments in infrastructure that we do. India is one example and Iraq may be another. In all those societies, ones home just presents a wall to the world. all the emphasis is on the inside. Who cares if the streets are littered with trash, beggars, and open sewage?

It's not Catholicism, it's the Spanish. Anywhere the Spanish settled they tended to enslave and exploit the local population, as opposed to the British who did the same thing but also brought law, infrastructure, and most importantly the British education system. Look at a map of the world, former colonies that are doing well are almost all former colonies of the British Empire.

Ah, the old Black Legend, inspired by the Brits. The British practiced slavery in their colonies well after it had been abandoned by Spain in Spanish colonies (in fact, enslavement of the Indians was specifically forbidden and Columbus was punished for having brought some Indians back to Spain with him). Latin America had universities long before the British colonies even had primary schools.

However, Spain also had a very centralized government, a somewhat statist economy and a weak middle class, for historical reasons, and this was the structural problem it transmitted to its colonies. It was also the problem that led to its own economic and social collapse in the 19th century, which was precisely the time at which the colonies were becoming free. Most British colonies did not obtain their independence until much later, at a time when Britain was a stable, modern country and could impart this model to its colonies.

Latin America has been Catholic for five centuries, yet too often its societies are corrupt, violent, and underdeveloped.

The latter is because the people have had no power in Latin America, it typically instead residing in the hands of corrupt oligarchs and dictators until that past few decades. The Masonic inspired expulsion of clergy at independence, combined with periodic pogroms against the few clergy in country (as in Mexico during the 1920's and 1930's in the Cristero revolt) has hardly helped.

The mass violence in Latin American society is a modern trend mirroring the mass violence in America since the 1960's, and is a result of the drug trade.

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