Abstract

In the decades after the Second Vatican Council, Latin American Catholicism displayed a very contextual ecclesiology, resulting in theological and magisterial expressions that became roadmaps of great prominence. Last year, for example, marked the fortieth anniversary of the Third Conference of the Latin American Episcopate, held in Puebla, where the conviction had crystallized that partiality for the marginalized is an evangelical demand in the local socio-political context . That primacy of context was largely heir to the conciliar effort to develop an ecclesiology from the place of the “other”. Such an ecclesiology required a qualitative and consciously kenotic leap towards the margins of the institution, where borders blur in the face of other Christian institutional models, other religious understandings, or even in the face of unbelief and daily societal evolution. Latin American Catholicism empathized very well with that which was located outside its own borders, and this empathy prompted a significant evolution in the church’s relationships with what we can call the extra-Catholic, in the sense that these relations extended beyond institutional borders and especially to those marginalized by society. Our hypothesis is that one problematic way of understanding these extra-Catholic or ad extra relationships commits two unforgivable oversights: 1) internal relationships were unprotected, thereby perpetuating an ecclesiological model that understood the evangelical necessity of taking responsibility for the concrete faces of the poorest and oppressed; at the same time, this ecclesiological model left installed the asymmetry of internal power that filled the church with the faces of those had been violated by the abuse of power; 2) the relationship of the church with the public arena, including the political dimension of faith that is intrinsic to that relationship, was conducted under a paradigm that identified Catholic power with a Catholic state. This paradigm has led to ambiguous consequences for the church’s public mission and the role of the laity therein. The church presented itself as poor, in the midst of the poor, and against poverty (as has been the slogan in Latin American Catholicism); the church left monologue behind in order to enter into dialogue, and consequently to stand on an equal footing, symmetrically and horizontally, with the “other”.