Analytical and Native Concepts in Argentina’s Post-Conciliar Catholicism: The Case of “Liberationism”, “Popular Pastoral Theology”, and “Theology of the People”

Abstract

“Liberationism”, a term derived from Liberation theology (LT), is an analytical concept used by religious historians and sociologists as a generic designation for Latin American post-conciliar Catholicism. “Theology of the People” (TP) designates a theological school created in Argentina during the late 1960s by the Episcopal Pastoral Commission (COEPAL), although the term used by its members was not TP but “Popular Pastoral theology” (TPp). Successive generations of theologians developed new versions of TPp (“popular piety theology”, “theology of culture”, etc.). I call those versions the diachronic variants of TP, and I regard TP as their synchronic representation. TP has been called the “Argentine School of Liberation Theology”, but there are substantial differences between TP and TL. In this paper, I argue that it is inaccurate to use the term “liberationism” to refer to TP because that term alludes to LT’s model of inter-relations between religion and social change, a model explicitly rejected by the creators of TP. I frame the theoretical discussion on the use of analytical and native concepts in Quentin Skinner’s linguistic contextualism perspective and I explain the differences between TP and TL in the context of the theological–political debates in late-1960s Argentina around the issue of popular Catholicism.

1. Introduction

Liberationist Christianity, or liberationism, has been defined by Löwy as “the social movement that has its intellectual expression in liberation theology [hereafter, LT] and criticizes the ‘really existing’ modernity in Latin America (dependent capitalism) in the name of pre-modern values and the promise of a utopian modernity (the classless society) through the socio-analytical mediation of Marxist theory, which unites the critique of the first with the promise of the second” (Löwy 1999, p. 64). This definition has been widely adopted by historians and religion sociologists to designate the different brands of the “progressive” theology that emerged in Latin America during the first long decade of the post-conciliar period (roughly, from 1965 to 1979), including the theology of the people [hereafter, TP]. The goal of this article is not to discuss to what extent this definition accurately describes the different expressions of LT over the years1, but to demonstrate that applying the analytical term “liberationism” to TP is inaccurate and misleading because it ignores crucial differences between LT—as defined by Löwy—and TP, therefore obscuring the latter’s meaning.

TP was originally developed by the team of theological experts or periti of the National Pastoral Commission (COEPAL, for its acronym in Spanish), created in 1967 by the Argentine Episcopal Conference to implement in that country the resolutions of Vatican II.2 The name that those experts gave to their theological reflections was not TP but popular pastoral theology (TPp) (Boasso 1974). In the following decades, this school of theology was also known by other names, such as), the Argentine School of popular pastoral (Alliende 1976), populist theology (Oliveros 1977), theology from the praxis of the Latin American peoples (Scannone 1976, [1982] 1983), theology of culture, and popular religiosity theology (Scannone 1974a, 1990a). By the turn of the century, and especially after the election to the papacy of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the term “theology of the people” became the overarching denomination for all the developments of this theological school since its inception (Scannone 2013, 2014a, 2014b, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c, 2015d, 2017, 2019; Zanca 2022). Here, I will use “TP” with a synchronic perspective, to refer to all these developments considered as a whole and coherent body of theological thought, and I will use “TPp” or any other variety of TP under a diachronic perspective, focused on a specific version of that theological thought, anchored in a specific historical period.3

Methodologically, my rejection of the use of “liberationism” to refer to TP in any of its historical variants is based on a contextualist perspective, inspired by the Cambridge School of intellectual history. According to the main representative of this historiographical current, “any text is always primarily an intervention in an argument, and the most interesting question is always to ask about the character of the intervention.” (Skinner 1997, pp. 71–72; my italics). For Skinner, the historiographical task basically consists in restoring a certain text to its original context and in determining what the author was trying to do with that text, i.e., reconstructing the meaning of the text and its author’s beliefs and intentions (Skinner 2006, p. 125).

Any relevant reconstruction of the linguistic context requires in turn to distinguish between analytical and native concepts. The relevance of this distinction in the Argentine historiography of this period has already been noticed with regard to other native concepts, such as national populism (Amaral 2018), the Peronization of university students (Friedemann 2017b), the vernacular New left (Martínez 2020), and “socialismo national”4 (Caruso 2022). The present article shares the theoretical concerns of those works.

I will divide my demonstration into two parts. First, I will address the relationship between LT and TP and the debate over Marxism and Marxist theory in their early days (the late 1960s–early 1970s). This was a theological–political and methodological dispute that shook the foundations of the Argentine and Latin American Church and had long-term implications for LT and TP standing within the Church’s official teaching. In the second part, I will describe the debate over the nature of popular Catholicism between the COEPAL’s periti and Aldo Büntig, one of the earliest proponents of LT. The periti rejected Büntig’s secularist outlook of religious phenomena and emphasized instead the supernatural character of popular faith and the importance of popular culture as a historical carrier of those supernatural values (Gil and Bender 1999).5 My purpose in this paper is not to survey and determine the peculiarities of the periti’s conception of popular Catholicism of popular culture vis a vis those of other LT theologians, but to delve into a contextual analysis of their debate with Büntig in order to expose the mainstays of their theological thought. In other words, I will focus on a diachronic analysis of TP and LT. Further developments of LT, less closely connected with the Marxist theory (Segundo 1984; De Schrijver 1998), as well as the so-called convergence between TP and LT under Francis’ pontificate (Løland 2021) are of course relevant from a synchronic perspective but do not invalidate the diachronic analysis of their differences—and similarities—within the linguistic context of their historical emergence.

2. The Methodological and Theological–Political Debate

2.1. Is TP a Variant of LT or an Autonomous Theological School?

TP, under the different names by which it has been known since its creation, has been described as a current of LT (Oliveros 1977; Lehmann 1978; Scannone [1982] 1983, 1987a, 1987b; Gutiérrez 1988), and more specifically, as the “national and popular line” of said theology (Methol Ferré 1982). Others, both defenders (Politi 1992; Scannone 2017, 2019) and critics of TP—including the creator of the term “theology of the people”, Uruguayan Jesuit Juan Luis Segundo (Segundo 1975)—emphasize instead the differences between the two. Historically, the latter perspective proved to be more accurate: in the heat of the theological–political debates of the 1970s and 1980s of the past century, LT and TP would be seen within the Church as two antagonistic versions of Latin American post-conciliar theology.

In the beginning, this was not the case. The theologians who in the wake of Vatican II began to develop what would later be known as TL and TP, drew on a common pool of ideas ascribed to the so-called “progressive Catholicism” of that time, such as dependency theory, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism and the ubiquitous concept of “liberation”, a concept that would remain at the center of the theological debate for the next couple of decades.6

The term “liberation theology” gain traction internationally after the publication of Gustavo Gutiérrez’s book by that title (Gutiérrez [1971] 2015). Shortly before the appearance of Gutiérrez’s book, the same title had been used in a lecture by Argentine bishop Eduardo Pironio (Pironio 1970), then secretary general of the Latin American Episcopal Council (CELAM, its acronym in Spanish). The fact that Pironio had a key role in the dissemination of TP in Latin America—and, even more importantly, in its incorporation (through the notion of popular religiosity)7 to papal magisterium8—suggests that during the early years of the post-conciliar period, Latin American theologians still shared a common frame of reference. In any case, over the 1970s LT became a metonym for Latin American theology, and later for progressive theology, especially, but not exclusively, in the Third World.

LT has four defining characteristics: (1) the claim of a preferential option for the poor; (2) an emphasis on the social consequences of Scripture; (3) the idea that praxis or action precedes theological reflection, and (4) the prophetic commitment, i.e., the denunciation of the structures of oppression, originally understood as socio-economic oppression but later extended to all kinds of oppression: racial, gender, etc. (Egan 2009, pp. 76–77). The coexistence under the same denomination of such a broad spectrum of ideas has led some to speak of theologies of liberation (Scannone [1982] 1983, p. 276), but the term continues to be used, both within and outside the specialized field, in the singular. Complicating the matter even further, many authors have “evolved” over the years in regard to how they define this term.9

The term “theology of the people”, with its original-dismissive bent, was vindicated two decades later by Sebastián Politi, a disciple of one of COEPAL’s leading periti, Lucio Gera (Politi 1992). Politi’s book, based on his graduate dissertation for the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Seminary, was prologued by Gera, who had also supervised his dissertation.10 In the prologue, Gera establishes a direct link between what Politi calls the theology of the people and the popular pastoral theology (although he does not call it by that name) produced by the COEPAL two decades earlier.11 The term, initially limited to Argentine theological circles, spread globally after the election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio to the papacy.

Generally speaking, the four characteristics highlighted above can be applied to TP and all of its diachronic variants (TPp, popular piety theology, theology of culture, etc.); in this sense, it is legitimate to claim that TP is a variant of LT. However, when we move from the generalities to the specificity of the arguments, the differences between one and the other emerge in a clear and unmistakable way.

The key difference lies in the third postulate. By the 1960s, philosophers and nouvelle theologie practitioners had already argued that existence and action were the constitutive dimensions of human life; the first generation of liberation theologians built up on that legacy and added the conceptual apparatus of Marxism, considered then by many as “the [insurmountable] formal framework of all philosophical thought” (Gutiérrez [1971] 2015, p. 8).12 This formal framework included the concepts of social class and class struggle. However, TP will be developed against these concepts, which it will respectively counter with a non-Marxist notion of people and with the idea of the unity of nation over its social class divisions, a recast of the old organicist theses of Catholic corporatism and the “myth of the Catholic nation” (Zanatta 1999).

COEPAL’s theologians regarded the Marxist perspective of the nascent LT as “sociologism” and dismissed it as a mix of abstract, universal ideas and conceptual schemes, which they considered foreign to Argentina’s (and by extension, Latin American) history and cultural traditions—contrary, in a word, to its Volksgeist.13 To the “sociologism” of that “imported” (as opposed to home-grown) ideas, they opposed their “historical-cultural method”, a recall of the ideographic role of history as a paradigm for social sciences (Remeseira 2020).14

Through these arguments, the COEPAL’s periti and their allies in the clergy and the academy were intervening in two major discussions of the early 1970s. The first was a theological–political debate raging within the Third World Priests’ Movement (MSTM), the leading left-wing clerical movement in Argentina to which Gera, O’Farrell, Tello, and other important members of the COEPAL were connected (Pontoriero 1991; Martín 1992, 2013; Touris 2021). That debate veered mostly around whether Juan D. Perón, a former President who had lived in exile since his overthrow in 1955 by a civic and military uprising but remained the most popular figure for the Argentine working class, was ideologically able to lead the country through a socialist revolutionary process, at a time when the paradigm for such a process was the Cuban Revolution and, tragically briefly, the Chilean “democratic via to Socialism”. The second was a debate on the role that social sciences in general and Marxist theory in particular should have in the formulation of LT. Although prima facie methodological, this scholarly debate would eventually provide the conceptual framework for the larger theological–political controversy.

2.2. Marxism, Peronism, and the Political–Theological Debate

The first debate, known as the Peronism–Socialism debate (Bresci 1994, pp. 163–67), pitched a vocal minority of left-wing members of the MSTM against its Peronist majority (Pontoriero 1991, p. 97). The “Third World”, as the MSTM was colloquially known, was a loose “constellation” of priests (Touris 2021) who advocated for a radical implementation of Vatican II and stood against the more powerful conservative wing of the Argentine Church.15 The Peronism–Socialism debate was therefore a controversy among self-defined progressives.16

The MSTM was born during the dictatorship known as “Revolución Argentina” (1966–1972). Opposition to the military rulers kept the “Third World” factions together and overpowered their inner disputes, but the end of the dictatorship accelerated their centrifugal trends. Perón returned to the country in November 1972, and on March 11 of the following year, a Peronist-led front won the national elections, bringing Héctor J. Cámpora, a Peron’s appointee, to the presidency. Despite the return of democracy, the guerrilla organizations that had fought against the military dictatorship—most prominent of all, the Peronist-leftists Montoneros—refused to give up the armed struggle and urged for a deeper radicalization of the new government. Amid growing instability, President Cámpora, considered too lenient with Montoneros and the Peronist left-wing, was forced to resign, and new elections were called for September. Yet not even the election of Perón for an unprecedented third term as President was able to stop the escalation of political violence. In this rarified environment, the tensions between the leftist and Peronist factions of the MSTM grew even more bitter. The Peronism–Socialism debate came to an abrupt end at the VI National Encounter of the MSTM, held at Santa Fe province in August 1974 when the Peronist group walked out of the sessions.

From a theoretical perspective, however, the most important aspect of the Peronism–Socialism debate did not take place at the MSTM meetings but in the academy, especially at the Cátedras Nacionales de Sociología (literally, the National Chairs of Sociology, hereafter CN), a series of courses and seminars taught by a number of Peronist social scientists at the University of Buenos Aires School of Sociology between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s (O’Farrell 1970; Argumedo 1971; O’Farrell et al. 1972; González 1997; Moscona 2010; Friedemann 2017a; Ghilini and García 2008; Ghilini 2011, 2015, 2021; Gómez 2016). The founder of the Cátedras Nacionales was Justino O’Farrell, who alongside Gera and Tello was one of the major “poles” of COEPAL’s team of periti (González [2005] 2010, pp. 75–83). One of the CN faculty members laid out the political rationale for the dispute: if Marxism is both the most advanced theoretical framework for social analysis and the synthesis of revolutionary praxis, how could Marxist intellectuals and activists reject Peronism, the quintessential expression of Argentina’s popular struggle for Liberation? For the author, this blatant contradiction between the diktat of a revolutionary elite and the majoritarian political choice of the Argentine people undermined not only the explanatory value of Marxism but also its claims to scientific status and universality (Argumedo 1971).

A similar debate erupted among theologians. By the early 1970s, a growing number of new books and scholarly articles had created a critical mass of what was quickly known as LT (Alves 1969, 1970; Assmann 1971a, 1971b, 1972a, 1972b, 1973a, 1973b; Boff 1972, 1975; Büntig 1970, 1973; Comblin 1970, 1973; Dussel 1972, 1973a, 1973b, 1974; Galilea 1973a, 1973b; Gutiérrez 1971, 1973, [1971] 2015; Segundo 1972, 1973a, 1973b, 1973c, 1975).17 This body of work constitutes the larger argument into which the COEPAL’s periti intervened with the creation of TPp. For the analysis of Latin American social reality, most of those works relied on sociological analysis heavily indebted to Marxist theory; in some cases, they overly conflated Marxism and Christian beliefs and ideas.18 Disagreements over this point emerged early on at international gatherings of theologians, such as the momentous 1972 El Escorial Encounter in Spain (Ames Cobián et al. 1973; Borrat 1973a, 1973c; Scannone 1973c) and in Catholic publications, such as the Uruguayan Vispera (Borrat 1973b; Dussel 1974; Galilea 1973b; Scannone 1973b), whose editorial line was very close to the theological–political views of the COEPAL’s theologians.19

But if faith is a “liberating praxis of transformation” of the socio-economic a political environment, how can the theological discourse “descend” to the strategic and tactical levels of such a practice without being engulfed in ideologically sectarian positions? Moreover, if we try to keep the theological and the political poles of this equation in a productive tension, how can we avoid falling back into a language that is both “theologically impoverished and socio-analytical and politically useless?” (Borrat 1973b, p. 34, my translation). The starkest alternative to Gutiérrez’s vision was displayed by Scannone (Scannone 1973a). His presentation, originally appeared as an article in Víspera (Scannone 1973d), was a response to a previous debate he had had with Assmann in 1971, during the II Jornadas Académicas organized by the Schools of Philosophy and Theology of the Jesuit Universidad del Salvador in San Miguel, Argentina (González and Maddonni 2018). The debate, in which other El Escorial participants also intervened (Assmann 1972b; Borrat 1972; Dussel 1972; Scannone 1972a, 1972b) veered around the value of Marxism for the analysis of social reality; this was arguably the first public instance of such a debate among “liberationist” theologians.20

Instead of Assmann’s (and Gutiérrez’s) focus on the notions of class and class struggle, Scannone emphasized the role of popular nationalism in the fight against imperialism. This was of course the same alternative that divided the Peronist and socialist factions of the MSTM. The point is furthered by Comblin, who unknowingly offers an even more clearly articulated exposition of COEPAL’s periti ideas (Comblin 1973, pp. 101–16). Since the Mexican Revolution, he said, populism, i.e., the wide-ranging ideological vindications of a people in need of redemption, has been the soul of Latin American revolutions. “Latin American ‘socialism’ is above all anti-imperialism and nationalism” (Borrat 1972, p. 34)

Comblin’s presentation, argued Álvarez Bolado, shed light on the meaning of LT’S “family of kindred options”: on the one hand, we have those options that, in the manner of Gutiérrez and other like-minded theologians, focus on the “dependency-oppression” living conditions of the poor; on the other, those who, similar to Scannone and the COEPAL’s theologians, emphasize the “more spontaneous, popular and utopian” significance of national liberation, a perspective that is “less reducible to a socio-analytical interpretation that seeks to explain a complex historical process in terms of a single ideological or political orientation”; in other words—that rejects a Marxist interpretation (Ames Cobián, cit: 17). Unlike Scannone or the COEPAL’s periti, however, Comblin does not endorse this second option, but he affirms that “only through the lens of Latin American nationalism we can properly understand the present movements and ideologies (…) and how they interact with (…) Marxist and explicitly Christian movements” (Comblin 1973, pp. 101–2, my translation).21

Populism is intimately linked to popular religiosity; having experienced Peronism, “the most lasting populist experience ever registered in Latin America” (Borrat cit: idem), Argentine theologians were particularly interested in this issue. The Argentine panelist who spoke on popular Catholicism presented a competing view to the anti-secularist COEPAL perspective (Büntig 1973). We will develop this point in the last section of this paper.

3. ECOISYR, COEPAL, and the Debate on Popular Catholicism

3.1. Popular Religiosity and Secularization Paradigm

The first clear articulation of the difference between what would later be called LT and TP arose in the debates over the nature of popular Catholicism that took place between Argentine religious sociologists and theologians in the late 1960s. The historical setting of those debates was COEPAL and its predecessor, the Coordinating Team for the Research of Society and Religion (Equipo Coordinador de Investigación de Sociedad y Religión, ECOISYR). The conflicting thesis was originally argued for by two members of the latter group, priests and sociologists Aldo Büntig (Büntig 1968a, 1968b, 1969a, 1969b, 1970; Soneira 1996) and Justino O’Farrell (Gil and Bender 1999). Büntig’s overall position can be considered the cornerstone of the modern Argentine sociology of religion.22 O’Farrell’s thesis (Severini 2000), which was later elaborated from a theological standpoint by his COEPAL colleagues Gera and Rafael Tello (Gil and Bender 1999; Forcat 2016), constitutes the foundation of the TPp.23 The clash of these two positions marks the theoretical dividing line between the Marxist-leaning and Peronist “Third World” priests mentioned above, in this case, not from the methodological perspective but from the perspective of popular faith. 24 In the broader Latin American context, this was the fall-out of the debates at the II CELAM Conference, held in 1968 in Medellín, Colombia25, which anticipated the lines of force of the popular religiosity debate that would shake the Catholic Church over the next couple of decades.26

The post-conciliar context of this controversy in Latin America has been studied in-depth by theologians and historians, but there is another geographically–conceptually broader context that we should also be paying attention to: the debate between sociologists of religion in Europe and the United States that would give rise to the “paradigm of secularization” and the birth of the sociology of religion as a church-independent, scientific discipline. (Tschannen 1992a, 1992b). The intersection of these two contexts brings greater depth to our analysis.27

To summarize, for the COEPAL’s periti, their opponents were “sociologists”, incapable of recognizing the supernatural character of the religious faith of the poorest segments of Latin American society; for Büntig and other liberation theologians, popular religiosity was at best a kind of Catholicism corrupted by superstition and non-Christian beliefs, and at worst a pious mask for a conservative social ideology. The wounds opened by this division will only begin to heal after the end of the Cold War. Against this backdrop, the unstoppable advance of secularization and urbanization was undermining a sociological discipline that had been largely monopolized by the different Christian churches.

3.2. The ECOISYR and the Sociology of Religion: Aldo Büntig

ECOISYR had been created at the end of 1966 by a group of sociologist priests to provide their professional expertise to the Argentine Catholic Church hierarchy in order to contribute to the implementation of Vatican II resolutions.28 By the mid-1960s, religious sociology had a small but active set of practitioners in Argentina, trained mainly in Belgium and France (Zanca 2006, pp. 183–89). The use of surveys and other quantitative methods of research had had a long tradition in the Argentine Catholic Church29, those antecedents served as fertile ground for the growth of the discipline since at least the 1940s.30 By the late 1950s and early 1960s, these seeds had borne fruit (Amato 1957, 1963, 1965; Donini 1961, 1968; O’Farrell and Donini 1963).31 At the same time, and thanks in part to foreign aid, religious sociology had spread throughout Latin America.32

ECOISYR had a brief life. In 1967, the Episcopate created the aforementioned COEPAL, which absorbed the former’s functions and even some of its members, such as O’Farrell, Alberto Sily, and COEPAL’s future Executive Secretary, Gerardo Farrell. However, some of the projects started by ECOISYR were completed after the group disbanded. The most important of these projects was a series of Cuadernos (literally, notebooks) on popular Catholicism coordinated by Büntig. The series approached the phenomenon from an interdisciplinary perspective: sociological, biblical, psychological, anthropological, and historical.33 Büntig also wrote the first of the Cuadernos, which includes the theoretical foundation of the entire series (Büntig 1969a).34

Popular religiosity had been one of the central themes discussed at Medellín. The conference’s final document held an ambiguous position in this regard: it acknowledged the importance of popular Catholicism but called for its “purification” of irrational or semi-pagan beliefs and, above all, weighed upon its potential to hinder social change. The latter is apparent in the division of the document into two parts, dedicated to the Church’s social action (“human promotion”) and evangelization mission (“promotion of the faith”) respectively; this division suggests that social and apostolic work represent two separate dimensions of the Church (CELAM 1998).35 According to Gera, who participated in Medellín as a theological expert, this was “a sort of dissociation in the mission of the Church” (Gera 2007, p. 306ff, my translation). Gera also claimed for himself and his fellow supporters of the “Coepalian” view of popular religiosity the inclusion of this issue in Medellín’s final document.36 He had co-authored for the Argentine Episcopal Conference the 1967 National Pastoral Plan, which extolled the theological value of popular religiosity and its “revolutionary” potential for social change, two issues that would be expanded by COEPAL.37 Büntig sought to remain equidistant between Medellín’s twofold division, which he defined as “iconoclastic” and “angelist” (Büntig 1969a, p. 15), but his ideas would be eventually dismissed by the COEPAL theologians as “sociologizing”38, “Enlightened” (for 18th-century Enlightenment) and foreign-looking (as opposed to rooted in national history and culture).39 In their view, these were all extremely negative traits, and continue to be regarded to this day as negative traits by TP followers, for whom “Enlightened” (Iluminista) is probably the worst insult that they can hurl at an opponent.

The question underlying the ECOISYR Cuadernos is to what extent popular Catholicism is an authentic or a doctrinally flawed expression of the evangelical message, and whether the advance of secularization40—visibly accelerated in Argentina during the 1960s—would not make popular Catholicism and increasingly “alienating, massifying and social-change impeding” (González [2005] 2010, p. 30, my translation). Büntig’s response (Forcat 2016, pp. 5–8; Zanca 2016, pp. 227–29) is framed within the theories of modernization and secularization then in vogue in Europe and the US, theories that he would spearhead in Argentina.41

Büntig’s hypothesis was that popular Catholicism is “the normal result of the process of institutionalization42 and inculturation43, typical of any universal religion that becomes a natural part of a given socio-cultural world [el resultado normal del proceso de institucionalización e inculturación, propios de toda religión universal que se hace parte connatural de un mundo sociocultural determinado].” (Büntig 1969a, p. 17). Everywhere this process unfolds, what he calls “modelled gestures” (empirically observable manifestations of a universal religion: rites, devotions, festivities, cults of the dead, various sacramental practices, etc., such as those analyzed in the survey included in the same Cuaderno) “tend to lose their substantive doctrinal strength (they repeat themselves self with ever little value and motivational content) [tienden a perder su vigor sustantivo-doctrinal (se repiten gestos con escaso contenido valorativo y motivacional]” and to popularize. (Idem: 17–18). After this allusion to the Weberian idea of the routinization of the charism (Weber 1946, pp. 262–64), Büntig defines “popular Catholicism” as “all and only those ‘patterned’ gestures that have been assumed by the Catholic people—at various levels and with various degrees of identification—as ordinary and spontaneous expressions of their religious experience” (Büntig 1969a, p. 19).

Up to this point, the author seems to lean towards what he has previously defined as the “iconoclasts”, but he immediately relativizes his position: those “patterned expressions (…) can be easily—not necessarily—devoid of authentically Christian values and motivations” (Ibid.). However, he highlights those “religious gestures” that are Catholic only “in their external appearance, but which are sustained by non-Christian values (superstitions, religious syncretism, etc.).” On this definition, Büntig based another important distinction, between “real” Catholicism and “doctrinal” Catholicism, or Catholicism adjusted to orthodoxy (Ibid). This conceptualization applies especially to the “inculturated Catholicism [catolicismo inculturado]”44 of the least modern areas of Latin America—in Argentina, the Northwestern (NOA) and Northeastern (NEA) sections of the country—in which “values and motivations belonging to the pre-Hispanic cultural world” subsist under the disguise of Catholic rituals and devotions (Idem: 21). The clash between these two worldviews is also seen in the popular neighborhoods of the Greater Buenos Aires, where hundreds of thousands of internal migrants from the Northern regions had settled since the 1930s. At the same time, European immigration breathed new life into popular Catholicism through the devotions that they brought from their countries of origin, such as the cult of the Sacred Heart, San Cayetano (the saint patron of jobs), Our Lady of Nueva Pompeya, etc., by now fully incorporated into the national culture (Idem: 27).

This popular Catholicism, both in their Latin American and European streaks, is rooted in the agrarian world. In a society as urbanized and rapidly developing as the Argentine society of the 1960s, those roots tend inevitably to wither and die, and traditional forms, when not straightforwardly rejected by the increasingly unbelieving or just plainly de-Christianized younger generations, tend to be displaced by religious substitutes (horoscopes, divination, “New Age” philosophies, etc.).45 The retreat of traditional religion, combined with the irruption of neo-pagan religious substitutes, raises some fundamental questions about the value of popular Catholicism. In order to “save” Catholicism from this process of secularization, “that urges us to demagify [sic] the world”, Büntig urges his readers to “rescue what is salvageable (…) and progressively suppress what cannot be rescued, (…) in order to eliminate not the true God, but the denaturalization of the sacred Power”. (Idem: 70). In other words: Bünting calls to value “doctrinal Catholicism” over “real Catholicism”.

This definition brings forth another key distinction, this time between two types of believers: the “naïve” believer of popular Catholicism and the “mature” believer of doctrinal Catholicism, equipped with the right religious education and the “correct motivations”.46 Forming mature believers should be for Büntig the goal of catechesis, and in general, of the Church’s pastoral care.

3.3. Critique of Büntig’s Theses, I: The Sociological Argument (O’Farrell)

Büntig’s ideas caused a strong rejection among the COEPAL experts. According to Farrell, the first to react was an old colleague of both of them at ECOISYR, Justino O’Farrell. O’Farrell had begun to define his view of popular Catholicism in a couple of recent articles (O’Farrell 1966, pp. 125–26; 1968), but the most systematic exposition of that view is contained in an unpublished work entitled “Basis for a Research Plan of sociology of religion in Argentina”, preserved in Farrell’s personal files. Although it is not dated, its classification by Farrell with other ECOISYR documents and the lack of mention in it to the COEPAL allows us to suspect that it must have been written between the end of 1966 and mid-1967, right before the creation of COEPAL.47 The purpose of this work was to serve as a “basis for discussion” for the “socio-religious research plan” alluded to in the title (O’Farrell n.d., p. 26). It is equally probable that O’Farrell refers here to the plan that would eventually materialize in Büntig’s Cuadernos, although with a perspective entirely different from what O’Farrell would have wanted. His draft, in effect, is a frontal attack on the theoretical–methodological foundations of religion sociology, as it was understood by Büntig and his followers. O’Farrell concentrates his attack on two “fundamental facts” that mark “the naiveté and false consciousness in the handling of the sciences of man “ in Latin America, and whose overcoming is essential to “get closer to our peoples, who are the real source of social and religious creativity and, therefore, the protagonists of their liberation (O’Farrell n.d., p. 1, my translation) The first of those facts is that the discipline of the sociology of religion, as it was understood in those years, was an “imported cultural product.”48 The second is the inability of this imported product to adequately describe Latin American religious practices (and strictly speaking, any social phenomenon). In other words, the problematic nature “of the process of the relationship between the historical and ‘social’ processes of our countries and, at the same time, their explanation”. (ibid) Despite the Marxist terminology employed (false consciousness, alienation, praxis, etc.), O’Farrell’s approach is essentially Hegelian, although in an idiosyncratic way: as antecedents of his “relational dialectic”, he also cites Plato, Aristotle, and Jesus Christ (Idem: 6). What O’Farrell takes from Hegel is basically the notion of totality and the rejection of the empiricist conception of knowledge, according to which social facts can be known in themselves, isolated from the totality of historical, political and social relations and processes in which they are inserted.49

Of course, this argument exceeds the field of the sociology of religion. O’Farrell’s critique of the discipline is part of a broader onslaught that he and his colleagues at Cátedras Nacionales50 were carrying out in those years against “scientist sociology (sociología cientificista)” and in favor of the “national sociology” they wanted to establish in its stead in the academe.51 The main targets of his attack were the theories of modernization, development, and secularization then in vogue in the scholarly world and the inter-American planification and funding institutions for national and regional policies of social and economic development.52 By treating social facts in isolation, argued O’Farrell, those theories and policies were in fact hiding the historical and political preconditions of Latin American social reality: neocolonialism and dependency. The dependency theory allows O’Farrell to link his methodological criticism to the cultural one: the conceptual schemes that make it impossible to achieve a “total” perception of reality are in fact helping to impede the people’s social and political liberation.53 In his reasoning, there is another, decisive element: O’Farrell’s critique was not just directed against the Inter-American capitalist and neo-colonial theories and policies but also Marxist and neo-Marxist theory practices (Idem: 13).54 This was also a central element of the CN’s national-popular ideology. In spite of its leftist-sounding appearance, the anti-Capitalism and anti-Liberal stances that O’Farrell adds to the opposition between national vs. imported culture can be in fact traced back to the counter-revolutionary tradition of integral Catholicism, in which O’Farrell and the other priests of his generation had d been formed.

The main legacy of this tradition can be seen in the conclusions of his essay. Beyond the epistemological and methodological questions, the ultimate foundation of O’Farrell’s criticism of the sociology of religion à la Büntig is that it ignores the supernatural dimension of popular religiosity. For this reason, neither popular Catholicism nor the people’s liberation can be reduced to the material transformation of social structures: this transformation must be imbued with the transcendent meaning of the Gospel. The People of God, O’Farrell will say, is nothing but the Mystical Body of Christ unfolding in human history (Idem: 17).

3.4. Critique of Büntig’s Theses, II: The Theological Argument (Gera and Tello)

I have not been able to establish whether O’Farrell’s proposal was ever discussed at an ECOISYR meeting. What I can say for certain is that his colleagues at COEPAL’s team of theological experts wholeheartedly endorsed it. According to his colleague Farrell, the subject of popular Catholicism was originally brought to the team’s attention by O’Farrell, and later elaborated upon by its two leading periti, Gera and Tello (Gil and Bender, cit) The issue of popular Catholicism, in its different variants (popular culture, popular piety, etc.) would then become the core of the TPp/TP.

Forcat, whom I follow in this part, has reconstructed the circumstances in which this theological elaboration took place. The decisive moment was at COEPAL’s Periti Team meeting of 24 August 1969 (Tello [1969] 2015, p. 39ff; Forcat 2016, p. 8ff). Since Gera could not be present that day, Tello led the discussion, which basically reproduced the main ideas introduced by Gera at COEPAL’s Studies Week held at Mallín, Córdoba, in February of the previous year (Gera 2006, pp. 345–99).

The critique of Büntig’s thesis can be divided into three parts. First, Tello sets his general frame of reference, which are the notions of faith and Church set forth by Lumen Gentium [LG], one of the four dogmatic constitutions of Vatican II. Second, Tello makes a characterization of Latin American popular Catholicism, emphasizing the relationship between faith and popular culture. Lastly, he affirms the priority of faith over the believers’ psychological motivations or religious knowledge, thus debunking Büntig’s distinction between real and doctrinal Catholicism. To support this point, Tello appeals to a traditional theological argument: the distinction between credere Deum, credere Deo, and credere in Deum, established by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century.55

In the first part of his argument, Tello describes the supernatural and ecclesial or communitarian nature of the Christian faith:

“Mankind’s plan of salvation is a mystery (…) What makes man consciously accept and receive that mystery is faith. (…) By faith, we understand here the theological virtues complex, and even all the moral virtues that depend on them: faith, hope, charity, etc.; (…) faith is what connects, what provides the communion of life with God (…) But that communion of life [with God] simultaneously (…) forms (…) a communion of life with other men (…) Gera insists a lot on this: (…) Faith within man’s heart—that’s what the Church really is (…) Faith, present in man’s consciousness, creates the Church, which is the place of mystery, or God’s temple. This conception of faith, and above all of the Church, is the most fundamental one, and what illuminates, I think, the whole process”. (Tello [1969] 2015, p. 8, my translation).56

The second part of Tello’s argument is a succinct classification of Latin American Catholicism:

“[There are] formal Catholicism, comprised of all the people who have a sense of belonging to the Church; cultural Catholicism, which refers to society’s Christian values; political Catholicism, i.e., the Church as part of the national social body, ingrained in its historical roots; social Catholicism, for instance, the importance that baptism and the related issue of the compadre and the comadre have for the popular classes [and] implicit Catholicism, or implicit faith” Ibidem.57

Drawing on his ecclesiological perspective (the first part of his argument), Tello can now answer Büntig’s question about the theological value of popular Catholicism. Tello’s “clear and forceful” response—the third step in his argument—is that the only criterion for determining the theological validity of any form of Catholicism is the presence of faith: “If there is a communion with the Mystery—in other words, if there is faith—it is true Catholicism” (Tello [1969] 2015, p. 25). This is why “popular Catholicism is true Catholicism”, regardless of “all the cosmological, psychological, primary or secondary motivations Büntig may want to consider” (Ibidem). At the end of the sociological and theological reflection, Tello, Gera and his COEPAL colleagues arrive at exactly the opposite of Büntig’s view on popular religiosity.

In this way, Tello lays out the theological foundation of the cultural–historical perspective that O’Farrell had invoked against Büntig’s own sociological perspective: “Faith is not identified with its material content (credere Deum); faith is above all adherence (credere Deo) and tendency (credere in Deum) that guides and gives meaning to the life of man. The act of faith does not end in the statement but in God”(Forcat 2016, p. 12, my translation).58 Faith, moreover, is transmitted in a given culture, in this case, Argentine or Latin American popular culture, which can only be valued through a correct appreciation of that culture’s history, “without a hint of sociologism” (Scannone 1995, p. 27, my translation).59

“Faith is the affirmation, the movement towards God, towards a salvific Absolute. That seems so clear to me, so absolutely clear in our people! Both in the criollo [mestizo native] and the immigrant, the affirmation of life’s transcendent meaning, the affirmation that life has a destiny; that life takes place not only in this world but beyond. That life depends on Someone, and that Someone is frequently named with the name “God”. It would not be necessary, but the whole sense of God is very explicit. The sense of a God who saves, of a God who in some way communicates, of a God who in some way brings about the fullness of life. It seems to me that all that is built in our people’s bones, even if its formulation is flawed. Of course, if they are told about the Plan of Salvation or the Economy of Salvation, they do not understand a word, but that reality is very profound in our people: the reality of a God who fulfills and gives meaning to human life.” (Tello [1969] 2015, p. 31, my translation).60

The final step in Tello’s critique of Büntig’s argument links this transcendent sense of popular faith with O’Farrell’s critique of secularization theory and cultural colonialism:

“It is said that popular religiosity has a magical sense. This is the grossest mistake; indeed, the magic ones are Büntig and company. That’s right. There is an order of the transcendent, of the absolute, of the divine, of the sacred. Magic tries to seize and, by its own means, put at its service that transcendent and that divine. If there is true faith, neither the sacrament, nor the devotion or the holy water are magical, not in the least. Because [popular religious practices] ultimately depend (…) of the action of the Incarnate Word. But the European conception of a rationalized society, which is Büntig conception, says that Man, with his own forces, with the forces of his reason, is capable (…) of dominating nature and (…) fully realize himself. And that leads us to consumer society, to the modern society closed in on itself (Marcuse’s magnificent analysis): Man does not need God, Man is self-sufficient for his own fulfillment. So, the process of secularization is exclusion from God. But it is exactly this what is magical: technology is magicalized [sic] Technology is the magic that provides fullness of existence and human life. And so Büntig is the ‘magical’ one, because he wants to lead Man to a technical life. Popular religiosity is anti-magical insofar as it gives a transcendence that is true transcendence towards the Mystery, the Absolute, the Savior, who is not of this world” (Tello [1969] 2015, p. 40, my translation).61

To summarize: Gera-Tello’s theological argument complements O’Farrell’s methodological critique of Büntig’s sociological approach, which analyzes popular Catholicism as a series of gestures or outward expressions of religious experience. The affirmation of the transcendent character of faith incarnated in popular Catholicism—the principle that would later be defined simply as the inculturation of the Gospel in popular piety62—and the celebration of its historical and intergenerational transmission through popular culture will be distinctive marks of the TPp and its immediate successor, the theology of culture. Unlike other approaches to popular culture in LT, TPp’s rejection of any sociological relativization of popular faith is based on an unquestioned acceptance of the supernatural character of that faith and a deep Volkisch sense of popular culture.63

This was noted early on by TPp/TP critics. Büntig, in a 1974 article co-signed with his fellow MSTM priest Osvaldo Catena, highlighted what he regarded as the major pitfall of the COPEAL approach to popular faith. His argument is a reprise of the one presented at Cuadernos but with an edge of irony, a sign of the souring debates on theological–political issues that had erupted since then among Argentine progressive clerics:

Since this inculturated religion is almost the only thing that simple folks [el pueblo simple] can live and feel, and since all that comes out from the people is good, there is nothing, or very little, to be questioned—one must faithfully respect popular processes. Otherwise, they say, we risk making our people lose the little faith they still have. Those who dare criticize certain sacral and apparently adulterated gestures are Europeanizing [europeizantes] who don’t understand our people (Büntig and Catena 1974, p. 107).

It is precisely this uncritical approach to “simple folk” religion that led to the critique of TP as an advancement of cultural and political conservatism over the progressive trends set in motion by Medellín (Ezcurra 1988; González [2005] 2010, pp. 122–23). In any case, TP’s notion of popular piety, which entered papal magisterium with Evangelii Nuntiandi64 and was enshrined in the II CELAM Puebla conference final document of 1979 (where Gera himself played a decisive role as theological peritus) became the centerpiece of the Vatican and episcopate’s efforts to stem and revert the growth of LT in Latin America.

4. Conclusions

The reaction of the COEPAL periti against the notion of popular Catholicism defined by the ECOISYR Cuadernos was crucial for the articulation of their own vision of popular religiosity, which would in turn be the core of the TPp/TP. In retrospect, it was also the moment when the dividing line between TP and LT was drawn. The fundamental difference between the two lies in the approach to and the concept of popular Catholicism. This approach and concept were articulated for the first time in 1969 at the meetings of the COEPAL’s team of theological experts by Lucio Gera, Rafael Tello, and Justino O’Farrell, in the context of a debate over the series of publications on Popular Catholicism coordinated by Aldo Büntig for the ECOISYR. This theological–pastoral debate overlapped with a contemporary theological–political debate on the relation between Socialism and Peronism among Argentina’s progressive clerics from 1960–1970 and a broader methodological–political debate on the value of Marxist theory for theological reflection and social change in Latin America. In the curse of the controversies around LT that would shake the life of the Catholic Church in the following two decades, the “Coepalian” conception of popular Catholicism, which emphasizes the supernatural character of popular faith in contraposition to the more sociological, and in many cases, bluntly Marxist assumptions of LT, would gain increasingly greater importance, not only in Argentina and Latin America but also in the papal magisterium, from Paul VI to Francis65. These radical differences were observed in his time by critics and supporters of LT and TP, both to bolster or to bring down each of these theological perspectives. Therefore, to use the term “liberationism”, clearly inspired by the legacy of LT, to refer to the TPp/PT, distorts the meaning of the latter, which beyond their common historical origin, was historically developed in opposition to the LT. The use of this term is also not justifiable by the common use of the proponents of both schools of the term “Liberation”, since for the theologians of the people, the use of “liberation” will have important differentiating notes with respect to its use by the theologians of liberation. This differentiation is summed up in the central reaffirmation of the supernatural quality of popular faith, as expressed in the sensus fidei fidelium (Boasso 1974, p. 56) the believers’ sense—or supernatural “instinct”—of faith.66