Book Reviews

Schwaller, John F. (2011) The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America: FromConquest to Revolution and Beyond, New York University Press (New York, NY),ix + 319 pp. $35.00 hbk.

John Schwaller’s five-century synthesis of Latin American Church history provides atimely recapitulation of the historiographical gains of the past half-century and breaksnew ground in repositioning the Church in our analyses of the Latin American past.The first authoritative volume of its kind in English, the book deftly weaves togetherMexican, Central American, and South American history, and places Catholicism at thecentre of a larger story about the exercise of power.

The book opens with a useful introduction that defines Schwaller’s regional focus(Ibero-America excluding the Caribbean) and lays out the key themes to be covered:internal diversity, indigenous agency and popular religion, the tension between centraland local control, and between the civil and religious powers. The body of the work,comprising eleven chronologically organised chapters, offers roughly equal coverage ofthe pre- and post-Independence periods. The author begins with a chapter describing thereligious worlds of pre-contact Iberians and indigenous Americans before bringing thetwo groups together. Subsequent chapters analyse the Spanish and Portuguese conquestsof the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the religious dialogue of evangelisation, theconsolidation of unique, often syncretic forms of Baroque Catholicism in the seventeenthcentury, and the Enlightenment’s challenge to Church authority during the Bourbonand Pombaline reforms of the eighteenth century.

Along the way, Schwaller underlines key threads that tie together the history of colo-nial Catholicism and explain post-Independence changes and continuities. Particularattention is given to the struggle between centralised authority – exercised by the crownthrough the royal patronage – and local control by religious officials on the ground. Theauthor also discusses the socio-economic role of the Church, its complex ecclesiasticalstructure, and the persistent divisions between its various corporate bodies. Despite suchdivisions, Catholicism formed the very social fabric of Latin American life. Eighteenth-century reforms, attempting to subordinate the Church to the civil authority, thus shookup Latin American societies and contributed to the Independence movements (p. 115).

© 2013 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2013 Society for Latin American StudiesBulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 32, No. 3 387

Book Reviews

In the second half of the book, Schwaller highlights the enduring problems resultingfrom Independence that shaped the Church’s nineteenth-century history. Chief amongthese was the question of royal patronage, which broke down at Independencebut was quickly assumed by Latin American nation-states. The papacy, seeing inIndependence the chance to reassert its control over the American churches, resistedsuch a move. The ensuing debates, along with the intensification of state reform effortstargeting Church wealth, resulted in the bloody clashes and political instability of theliberal–conservative conflict.

Latin American states ‘worked out the differences’ over patronage and Churchwealth over the course of the nineteenth century, reaching tenuous arrangementsbetween secular and religious authorities that allowed Latin American statesmen topursue modernisation programmes. Such late-nineteenth-century programmes, whichoften attacked the corporate protections of both the Church and ‘subaltern’ groups,eventually created an atmosphere of ‘social turmoil’ that led to the popular millenarianmovements of Mexico and Brazil (p. 188).

In the remaining chapters, Schwaller chronicles the Church’s engagement with themilitary regimes, social revolutions, civil wars and labour movements of the twentiethcentury. Here, a key trend was the development of forms of lay association and activism,which exerted pressure on the Church hierarchy to distance itself from authoritariangovernments and develop a response to the challenges of socialism and communism.In the short term, the Church moved toward an inclusive, populist stance, culminat-ing in the ‘liberation theology’ of the 1960s and 1970s. However, Vatican II alsoopened long-submerged rifts within the Church – between inclusive/democratic andexclusive/hierarchical visions of the Catholicism itself – that resulted in a powerful con-servative backlash. The contemporary period, Schwaller argues, has witnessed a gradualreconciliation of these populist and conservative strains, along with an adaptation to theincreasing secularism and religious pluralism of Latin American societies (pp. 272–275).

This volume represents a massive undertaking, and the results are quite successful.The book’s broad, cogent analysis rests on the digestion of a wealth of secondary stud-ies, of which the author makes prudent use throughout. The book is well suited for theundergraduate classroom and will make essential reading for scholars of Latin America.Nevertheless, some specialists will find Schwaller’s coverage of their own particulartopics or regions inadequate. The chapter on ‘The Established Order and the Threat ofPopular Religion’, for example, relies heavily on the millenarian movements at Tomochicand Canudos at the expense of other important nineteenth-century developments inpopular religiosity, priest–parishioner relations, and political mobilisation, some ofwhich have been compellingly studied in recent works. Ultimately, these are minorquibbles with a work that accomplishes an extraordinary amount in under 300 pages.

Brian StaufferUniversity of Texas at Austin

© 2013 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2013 Society for Latin American Studies388 Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 32, No. 3