CONFLICT AND COMPETITION: The Latin American Church in a Changing Environment
edited by Edward L. Cleary / Hannah Stewart-GambinoCHAPTER 6 =================================
The Catholic Church and Politics in Venezuela:
Resource Limitations, Religious Competition, and Democracy
====================================== BRIAN FROEHLEVenezuelan Catholicism, described in the 1930s as anomalous to its counterparts in the rest of Latin America,(1) today is not only a representative case but also suggestive of possible religious futures elsewhere in Latin America. The Venezuelan Catholic church has more than thirty years of experience operating within a political democracy as a respected member of civil society. It has long experience with limited finances and personnel and is conscious of the increasing inroads of religious competition arising from evangelicals and other religious movements of nonCatholic inspiration.
In this chapter I first discuss how the historically specific experience of the Venezuelan church has shaped its understanding of the world in which it operates and at the same time has led to the challenges it now faces. Second, I analyze the impact of limited resources and religious competition experienced by the church in Venezuela on a microlevel by bringing into focus the church of Caracas. Catholic and non-Catholic religious organizations are examined at their institutional and individual levels in order to portray contemporary Venezuelan religious reality and transformation at the community level. I conclude by considering the effect changing social and political realities have had on the framing of meaning within Venezuelan religious life. The emerging structures and meanings of the different religious groups promise potentially dramatic effects on the society within which they operate.
The Venezuelan Catholic Experience The Historical Context
During three centuries of colonial rule, the Venezuelan church was "either as powerful as the churches of the major viceregal capitals of the empire such as Mexico City, Lima, or Bogotá nor as weak as those of the relatively declining Antillean region or the frontier areas of the southern cone. Rather, the Venezuelan church occupied a middle position, comparable to its counterparts in Central America -- prosperous, expanding, and sufficiently financed and staffed, yet hardly in the luxurious situation of being located in the regions of vast wealth, political prominence, and cultural advancement characteristic of the former centers of the indigenous empires conquered by the Spanish.(2) Although it had fewer than half the priests of the more developed archdioceses of colonial Latin America, the extensive archdiocese of Caracas nevertheless did have the greatest income, as measured by the royal tithe, of any archdiocese in colonial Latin America by the end of the eighteenth century.(3)
A century later, the Venezuelan church had become one of the most marginal in Latin America in terms of its resources, institutional development, and political relevancy. The political program that led to the series of reversals the church experienced during the nineteenth century was inspired by Enlightenment thinking. It was largely based on French and Spanish revolutionary decrees designed to curtail powerful privileged social elements. However, Venezuelan civil society was weak, and the real power of the church hardly compared to the European models. The first and most encompassing piece of restrictive legislation was the 1824 Law of Patronage, whereby the state claimed the power to establish ecclesiastical divisions, appoint bishops, restrict activities of religious Orders, and control migration of foreign priests. Anticlerical legislation continued, reaching its zenith in the 1870s during the regime of Antonio Guzmán Blanco, who found the church to be the only independent source of opposition, however weak, to his personal authority. He thus completed the already established anticlerical program in a particularly thoroughgoing way. The life cycle was completely desacralized. Births and marriages were secularized, as were cemeteries. All religious orders were expelled and their property seized. All seminaries were closed. Attempts were made to foster rival belief systems, and there was even talk of creating a national Venezuelan church separated from allegiance to Rome. By the end of his rule, the church was for all practical purposes nonexistent as a force in the life of civil society.
By the last decade of the nineteenth century, the process of rebuilding the Venezuelan church began, and not surprisingly the model followed was one exclusively religious, conscious of limitations within an inhospitable political climate. During the series of dictatorial governments that followed, the church carefully avoided political entanglements. It kept a low political profile and neither excessively committed itself to nor explicitly opposed any government. All the while it sought loopholes and advantages where it could, attempting in the process to rebuild and expand its institutional space.(4)
The nineteenth-century decline in the institutional presence of the church in society -- a phenomenon by no means unique to Venezuela -- is perhaps best measured by the decline in clergy and the number of unstaffed parishes resulting from this decline. During the height of the colonial period, priests had increased dramatically, from 456 in 1784 to 547 in 1810 and to 640 by 1820. In the aftermath of independence and civil wars, as well as ensuing restrictive legislation, their number decreased to 440 by 1847. Those remaining were for the most part old or infirm, and only 273 were physically able to attend parishes, leaving 40 percent of the parishes unattended. A few years later, in 1855, only 154 priests were left in the country, rendering some 68 percent of the parishes abandoned. By the census of 1881, conditions had stabilized, the number of priests had increased to 255, and 40 percent of the parishes were again staffed regularly.(5) Given that the boundaries of each parish were usually coterminous with those of the civil division in which it was situated, each unattended parish generally meant that inhabitants of a town of some size and its hinterland had no contact with the institutional church. The population, however, did not stop being Catholic. Rather, it substituted for orthodox practice and formation formerly offered by the priest the religious practices and formation within the family, chiefly that given by mothers and grandmothers from generation to generation. As a result, Venezuelan Catholicism has demanded lay initiative and been less clerical in practice. Accompanying this development, popular Catholicism became the religious norm in many areas of the country as religious practices and beliefs came to be increasingly unmediated by religious elites. Popular religiosity effectively replaced official colonial Catholicism as a form of civil religion.
Institutional Strategies and Class Alliances
The Venezuelan church's almost complete lack of class or institutional allies put A in a somewhat different position from other Latin American churches during the nineteenth century.(6) The particular form of plantation economy used in cacao production during the colonial period, the key industry of the time, had effectively discouraged the development of a "traditional" landholding aristocracy favoring the church. Use of imported, replaceable slaves in place of indigenous labor mitigated The need for a religious ideology that would produce a docile labor force. Further, the rationalist, agricultural capitalist class that emerged was highly dependent on the Caribbean trade routes of the Dutch and English, the traditional source of Enlightenment ideas in the Americas. Not surprisingly, the Venezuelan colonial elite was among the most enlightened and anticlerical of the continent. After independence, Venezuelan institutions such as the army were at best indifferent to the problems the church experienced and often were led or controlled by precisely the same persons who directed an unfriendly state. Civil society remained weak, the result of the colonial heritage, continuing political upheavals, endemic civil wars, and a dislocated, unproductive plantation economy.
Insofar as church personnel also came from the national period of the enlightenment, they influenced the local intellectual environment, and in the early years of independence, many priests were among those who attacked the privileges of the church. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, church leaders and ordinary clergy alike had become ardent supporters of the papacy as a result of their definitively weak position vis-à-vis the state. Under the impetus given by the first Latin American Bishops' Conference of 1899-1900, the first conference of Venezuelan bishops in 1904, and the International Eucharistic Congress celebrated in Caracas in 1907,(7) the church began to develop organizationally and increase its social projection. More parishes were served than ever, clergy increased, and the bishops began to have regular consultations with each other and issue joint pastoral letters.
The lack of class or institutional allies continued to be a pressing problem for the church. In this regard, the decision made during the early twentieth century to adopt the heavily institutional program followed in most of the Catholic world at the time had a special role in Venezuela. The building and promotion of educational institutions soon became by default the major rebuilding strategy of the Venezuelan church. This policy permitted the church to develop a constituency that could be counted on to identify its interests with those of the church.
Precisely during the time when Catholic schools began to expand dramatically, the incipient urban professional class was in a very fragile position. Although these middle sectors aspired to play a leading role in the transformation of Venezuela from a backward plantation society to an industrial, urbanized one, they were unable to reproduce themselves without education and were confronted by a notable absence of government schools. Their invaluable ally thus became the expanding, vigorous Catholic school system of low-cost, imported European teachers recruited from religious orders and congregations. By 1944, half of all students in secondary schools were in Catholic schools.(8) Once the state became more committed to education, this number would decrease significantly, but Catholic schools would continue to have a special place in the life of the urban middle classes. The relationship was mutual, and the church came to expect that it could rely on this group for defense when necessary. Precisely such a moment came when the government attempted to nationalize aspects of the church's school system in 1946 and 1947.(9) Threatened with the loss of its patient, arduous work of the previous half century, the church desperately committed its resources to what became virtually a crusade for survival that can only be understood in light of its previous losses. The church spearheaded a countermovement against the "communit and atheist" government -- and for the first time found itself on the winning side in a confrontation with the state. Indeed, when the existing government collapsed in 1948, a myth developed that it had failed largely because it had opposed the church.(10) In fact, the victory came about more through a coup led by military officers interested in eliminating the "radicalism" of the civilian government.
The shared preoccupation with communism characteristic of the church and succeeding military regimes during this period resulted in relatively more acceptance and freedom of action than had been the rule previously. With the definitive establishment of a democratic regime in 1958, church and state were also able to find common ground in their rejection of communism and interest in political stability. The leading party of the democratic transition -- precisely the despised adversary of the educational struggle a decade earlier -- had since purged itself of radical and anticlerical elements and sought the support of the church and its middle-class allies in shoring up the regime against guerrilla attacks and alleged Cuban infiltrations as well as conservative, antidemocratic opposition. For its part, the church came to accept its former enemies as preferable to what had occurred in Cuba. The church was able to increase its political prestige between the end of the dictatorship and the rise of democracy, confident that its declarations, no less than the forces it had mobilized, largely through the schools, had been key players in the successful birth of a new era of democratic politics.(11) Reflecting the new cordiality in church-state relations was the elimination in 1969 of the Law of Patronage, which was replaced with a definitive ecclesiastical status negotiated with the Vatican to the satisfaction of both parties.(12)
Implications of the Institution-Building Program
By the 1960s the strategy of building the church through the development of a school system for urban middle-class youth came to present three major contradictions.
First, this strategy solved the problem of the shortage of personnel, but only in the short term. The schools founded were run by European, chiefly Spanish, religious orders. This situation continues: More than 70 percent of the Catholic schools in the country remain in the direct control of religious orders and congregations, and only 10 percent are controlled by the parishes.(13) By the 1960s, these religious groups had created Venezuelan administrative subdivisions, thereby promoting more local planning and administration. However, insufficient new adherents to vocations emerged to change the imbalance between foreign-born (often naturalized) religious and their native recruits. In terms of personnel, this is a long-term problem that will not be fully felt until the last of the imported religious of the 1960s pass their productive years.
Second, dependence on religious orders for church personnel has promoted the decentralization of church resources and reduced the role of the local diocesan church as a coherent unit. Foreign religious congregations had relatively plentiful supplies of personnel until about 1965, and the Venezuelan bishops, not unlike their counterparts throughout the continent, saw no other way to staff the new parishes made necessary by accelerating population growth. The local church came to depend excessively on foreign priests, particularly foreign-born members of religious orders.(14) As a result, once religious-order priests began to enter the country in substantial numbers by be 1930s, the number of total priests per inhabitant remained steady until the 1960s in spite of rapid population growth. In 1912, there were 5,600 inhabitants per diocesan priest, at that time virtually the only priests in the country. By 1960, there were 5,500 persons per any type of priest in the country, including religious-order priests, who by then represented 55 percent of the total number of priests. At the same time, the number of persons per parish was rising sharply. In effect, the relative social projection of Catholic church personnel had shifted dramatically away from parish work because religious priests most commonly were to be found in the schools.(15) Today, religious-order priests still constitute 55 percent of the total number of priests, but diocesan clergy have been increasing relatively more rapidly. Although growth rates for both are positive, they are considerably less than the population growth rate. In the 1980s, the population increased by 2.5 percent annually, and priests by 1.2 percent.(16)
The presence of religious priests in parish life in Latin America relative to Europe or North America underlines their special role in the region. Very few European countries have more than 10 percent of their parishes conducted by religious orders, and no more than some 15 percent of parishes in the United States and Canada are so administered. Of twenty Latin American countries, however, seventeen have more than 20 percent of their parishes in nondiocesan hands.(17) Venezuela is at the Latin American average, with 28 percent of its parishes administered by religious orders or congregations.
The presence of religious, religious parishes, and foreign-born priests relative to their native counterparts tends to reduce the ability of the local hierarchies to control Catholic activity in their dioceses. This is all the more so when the foreign diocesan and religious priests staffing the parishes come from cultural perspectives and historical traditions significantly different from those of local church leaders.(18) Further, religious orders and congregations of priests and sisters more commonly identify with progressive political and ecclesial positions than do bishops and diocesan priests. The independent resource and formation networks of religious priests and sisters remove them from direct communication lines with the hierarchy and thus from conservative tendencies stemming from local church policy and Vatican influences. Many religious are also involved in pastoral work in poor neighborhoods, which in itself promotes isolation from specifically ecclesiastical issues while widening concern for social problems and political issues. As a result of these factors, although over time church organization has become more complex at the top, the church's ability to control those at the bottom remains limited. Leadership remains possible but difficult, and the role of the bishops has therefore typically been to bless initiatives after they have been shown successful rather than to set priorities and invest their limited resources in possibly risky new programs.
Third, a focus on institution building has implied that resources were to be committed not only in the short term but over the long term, thereby sacrificing a certain degree of flexibility. The schools that the religious communities conducted fit well with the ecclesiology of Christendom that prevailed until the aggiornamento of the 1960s. They were a closed universe, a fortress of Catholicism where students would be prepared to go out and do battle with an indifferent society that must in the end follow the lead of Catholicism. Such a worldview had a certain affinity with the prevailing model of religious life common at the time. If not "cloistered," then at least the model was for these groups of religious to live and teach on-site in their institution and devote themselves to their students and their spiritual development. This model found itself questioned as the "signs of the times" were read during the 1960s and Catholic leaders throughout the world reconsidered the direction of their past efforts. The effects of such reconsiderations would be all the more powerful in a country where such a single-minded effort had been devoted to the development of the schools, which until that moment had been an absolutely uncompromisable rebuilding strategy.
Indicative of the shifting outreach characterizing Catholic education since the post-Medellín period, a survey of Catholic educators in 1974 found some 81 percent in favor of orienting Catholic education toward the poor and reducing the overall effort spent in education of the rich.(19) In 1991, however, the Venezuelan Association of Catholic Schools (AVEC), the umbrella organization of Venezuelan Catholic schools, was still planning how to "popularize" the schools to a greater degree, proposing that those in poor areas more fully integrate themselves into the local community and that schools in rich areas preferentially admit poor students from nearby neighborhoods.(20) The most common response of the religious congregations to the dramatic postconciliar changes in orientation was to keep the existing schools open but to open no more, gradually shifting religious personnel from education to pastoral work in the dramatically expanding shantytowns of the major cities. In itself, this has been a most challenging task and, given institutional commitments, impossible to ex ecute rapidly. Religious groups made little progress in detaching themselves from their educational institutions in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but by the early 1980s this process had advanced considerably.(21) Between 1978 and 1984 alone, the percentage of religious dedicated to educational activities declined from 51 percent to 28 percent.(22)
Tendencies in the Church Today: Quiet Cacophony
The change from an eminently institution-centered ministry to one involving more open-ended pastoral work in the barrios was not made to create a new class clientele for the church, but rather derived from a new understanding of the gospel and the role of Christian ministry. Since then, church personnel have contributed considerably to popular organizations, nongovernmental social services, and informal education in poor neighborhoods. The social and political impact of this shift has been notable and began precisely when the urban popular sectors were expanding most dramatically. Just as the institutional strategy to develop education resulted, somewhat unexpectedly, in an alliance of mutual interests between the middle class and the church, so too the response to the "preferential option for the poor" cultivated a new social constituency. Nevertheless, one must be cautious in coming to any strong conclusions regarding this new focus of church activity. Although political understandings have changed in some sectors of the church, and organization of the poor by Catholic activists has increased, spillover effects are relatively limited because this phenomenon has never been characteristic of the institutional church as a whole but rather of an activist minority. At the same time, though the poor are a key political sector by virtue of sheer numbers, one cannot expect this new relation to have the same effect as the older ties with the middle classes, which brought significant social resources to their alliance with the church.
The impact of the new social orientation of the postconciliar church was perhaps even more profound in internal church politics. In the wake of the new emphasis on serving the poor, increasing discord developed between those who favored the newer, explicitly political agenda and those who preferred to continue the earlier program of internal institution building. As has been the case throughout Latin America and the church in general, this turn toward the social gospel has changed the discourse with which church members and leaders relate to and understand politics. One notable example in Venezuela was the turn made by the Jesuits who published the magazine SIC, created during the 1930s as the organ of the interdiocesan seminary and dedicated to internal church issues. In the 1960s, the magazine was reoriented toward national and international social issues, and its content strongly questioned the traditional, cautious politics practiced by church leaders and urged more radical options from within the framework of a church dedicated to the poor.(23)
By 1972, conflicts in the Venezuelan church between conservanves and progressives reached a point of crisis. These developments occurred when they did for several key reasons. First, the conflicts with the church took place during a stable democratic regime hospitable to the church. Thus, there were no strong external threats to encourage internal church unity. Second, institutional memory of difficult church-state relations precluded any interest the hierarchy might have had in new external commitments that could risk its institutional gains. Third, the lack of personnel and resources made it seem unwise to take on new commitments when the ongoing project of institution building had been so promising. As such, the conservatives, fearful of losing their hegemony, moved effectively to prevent any change in direction at the organizational level.(24)
The immediate conservative response appeared definitive. Progressive institutes were closed, movement organizations were dissolved or stripped of their church affiliation, and progressive church leaders were transferred to nonthreatening positions or simply fired. Yet after conservative elements of the hierarchy assured themselves offormal inqitutional control and progressives conceded their losses in exchange for autonomous action within their own spheres, hostilities mellowed. The country and the population are simply so vast relative to the limited human and material resources of the church that virtually any form of Catholic ministry is usually, by necessity, either accepted, bargained with, or blithely ignored by the hierarchy. To be overly ideological at the expense of a compromising, pragmatic spirit would simply sacrifice too much for either side. The hierarchy cannot afford to lose the already minimal presence of the church in most social sectors and innovators would rather expend their limited energy on their projects than on the ecclesiastical battlefield. An indication of the notable success of the progressive project twenty years after its supposed defeat may be measured by the progressive Inter-Religious Theological Seminary in Caracas, established in 1980 as the chief advanced training ground for religious in the country. This institute forms part of a network that connects religious activists with social and pastoral work while serving as a space for the development of their theological and ecclesial perspectives. In the final analysis, the Venezuelan church simply goes in many directions at once, and the most compelling result of the struggles between conservatives and progressives has been that both the winners and losers are stronger than ever today. The Venezuelan hierarchy instinctively articulates a "chord" of explicit cautiousness and orthodoxy combined with an implicit spirit of compromise and coexistence. At the same time, many Venezuelan religious orders and congregations, among others, have adopted a notably progressive chord, creating durable networks of institutions and contacts while explicitly cultivating a peaceful coexistence with the institution and implicitly accepting their nondominant status within the larger church community. Only the future will tell whether these chords will be able to be articulated from cacophony to symphony in order to meet common goals.
The Postconciliar Catholic Project and Religious Competition New Challenges
The contemporary Venezuelan church, like many other Latin American churches, may be characterized as an understaffed, underfunded institution with relatively few strongly committed members. Unlike European Catholic countries that average between 2,500 to 5,000 persons per parish, Latin America in general averages over 18,000 persons per parish and Venezuela has some 20,055 persons per parish.(25) Using the average size of churches and chapels in Caracas and the average number of weekly masses celebrated in them, I estimate that 2,000 persons at maximum are able to attend mass within an average parish over the course of a year, at least on a sporadic or standing-room basis. This indicator suggests that over 50 percent of Europeans in Catholic countries have an opportunity formally to practice Catholicism and participate in parish life, whereas only from 2 to 19 percent of Latin Americans do, depending on the country. About 10 percent of the Latin American population as a whole, and a similar percentage of Venezuelans in particular, may thus be expected to participate in local parish life. The situation is reversed north of the Rio Grande: Subtracting out the protestant majorities in North America leaves as few as 3,675 Catholics per parish in the United States and Canada. That is, over 50 percent of North American Catholics but less than 10 percent of Latin Americans, Venezuelans included, may be touched by parish structure and personnel.
The challenge for the Latin American Bishops' Conference in 1992, the so-called "new evangelization" proclaimed by the bishops and the pope as the conference theme, has perhaps even further-reaching implications than those of the Medellín conference in terms of the long-term future of the Latin American church. In large part, of course, the impact of this new agenda will depend on just how "evangelization" is interpreted.(26) At the beginning of Lent 1990, in order "to prepare for the fifth centennial of the evangelization of America," a catechism was distributed free in every newspaper purchased in the greater Caracas metropolitan region. This catechism was a reprint of one written by Caracas Archbishop Rafael Arias Blanco in the late 1950s and is a virtual twin of the Baltimore catechism, presented in a question-and-answer, true-false fashion.(27) There was no observable impact of this effort, and this particular booklet, in spite of its enormous dissernination, seems to have lasted no longer than the editions of the newspapers that accompanied it.
Should a more serious commitment on the part of the bishops' conferences and the church in general be made to evangelization, profound consideration of the dynamics behind the notable expansion of the evangelical churches will have to be made. Between 1967 and 1980, the Venezuelan evangelical movement began to grow spectacularly, increasing from some 47,000 to 500,000 members.(28) Simple explanations of this as a passing phenomenon created by politically motivated foreign sponsors and resources do not account for the dramatic, growing numbers of enthusiastic adherents of these new religious movements. Indeed, although Venezuelan evangelical churches grew out of British and North American mission efforts dating back to the end of the nineteenth century, the great majority of these churches are now completely independent of the original missions and fully national in terms of their financial and personnel resources.(29) Proportionally, the number of normative evangelical pastors today is insignificant. In contrast, the available data for Catholicism present a different situation. A 1984 study found that 984 of 1,077 Catholic religious order priests, or 94 percent of the total, were not born in Venezuela.(30) In Caracas 68 percent of all parish pastors (53 percent of the diocesan ones and 90 percent of the religious) are foreign-born. At the very least, such data make relative the "foreign factor" cited by many Venezuelan Catholic church officials as being a principal cause for the continuing development of evangelical groups.(31) when precisely such a factor accounts even more for the continuing vitality of Venezuelan Catholicism and much of Latin American Catholicism in general.
In order for the Venezuelan Catholic church to initiate a process of reevangelization, a better understanding of the emergence and dramatically increasing appeal of the evangelicals is required. In any such explanation, consideration must be given to the changing ideas and meanings given to religion as Latin American societies completed the transition from a rural plantation society to an urban service economy. In the new urban environment, the traditional Catholic approaches no longer work, and newer ones have proved insufficient to prevent the increasing consolidation of the religious alternative represented by evangelicals. At the same time, the extraordinary deficits of Catholic personnel and infrastructure relative to the population and the rapid and unproblematic expansion of evangelical pastors suggest a far-reaching challenge to the future of Catholicism.
Caracas: Religious Change and Competition
During the 1950s and 1960s, urban popular sectors in Latin America began to grow dramatically, and those of Caracas were no exception. Between 1958 and 1962 alone, As impoverished sectors grew by some 200,000 additional residents.(32) These were also the decades of the first dramatic expansion in evangelical and other non-Catholic religious movements. In 1967, there were 75 evangelical churches and 233 Catholic places of worship in Caracas. By 1990, Catholic churches or chapels where weekly worship was conducted numbered 217, whereas evangelical sites of weekly worship alone numbered 239, and other non-Catholic sites of Christian worship may be estimated as an additional 30.
In early efforts to counteract these developments, Catholic church leaders in Caracas commonly pursued a strategy based on the Christendom mentality of providing institutional fortresses to combat "the threat every day more manifest of sectarian infiltration, as much protestant as communist."(33) By the late 1960s, difficulties in erecting sufficient institutional fortresses, combined with new ways of thinking after the Vatican Council and the Medellín conference, led the Caracas archdiocese to develop two new forms of providing ministry to the expanding neighborhoods of the urban poor: religious vicariates and evangelization centers.
Religious vicariates owe their existence to post-Vatican II changes in canon law that permitted religious congregations of women to administer portions of parishes; evangelization centers are an invention of the archdiocese. These centers developed from post-Vatican II initiatives of a variety of religious congregations and orders that attempted to share the living conditions characteristic of the impoverished majority without formally constituting parishes.(34) The first centers were created when Maryknoll was turning over its parishes to diocesan control and redirecting efforts toward nonparish pastoral work in the poorest neighborhoods with teams of priests and lay volunteers. Because these centers are typically composed of priests, they tend to involve more sacramental activity than the vicariates and offer relatively fewer community services and outreach than vicariates.
In many ways, these new forms of local church life are not particularly different from parishes in popular areas. The emphasis remains one of youth groups, catecheses, and community resources. The intent, nevertheless, is to present a ministry closer to the community and less institutional than the traditional parish. These organizations have enjoyed slow but undiminished growth, increasing from 8 in 1972 to 24 by 1990.(35) Because only 22 of the 104 traditional territorial-based parishes of the archdiocese are located in similar social sectors these pastoral centers are a key part of the Catholic presence in those social sectors that comprise over half of the city's population. These new forms of local church life nevertheless remain affiliated with a mother parish and often dependent on it for sacramental services. These experiments have ensured a continuing Catholic presence in the popular sector, but by no means have they reduced the threat to the Catholic religious monopoly presented by the dynamic new non-Catholic churches.
Table 6.1 Relative Social Locations of Religious Organizations in Caracas, 1990 (percentages)
Social
Range
of PopulationEvangelical
ChurchesCatholic
ReligiousCatholic
ParishesUpper 19 18 44 37 Middle 38 54 44 52 Bottom 44 28 13 12 Source: Survey by Brian Froehle, 1990.
Note: Columns may not total 100% due to rounding.The data on the social strata in which Catholic and evangelical groups are found indicate a tendency of Catholic institutions to be located in middle and upper sectors, and a contrasting tendency of evangelical organizations toward location within middle and lower portions of the population (see Table 6.1). The relatively rich presence of Catholic organization in privileged social sectors may explain why the evangelical newcomers have concentrated on less privileged areas. Such a division may also have to do with the considerably greater indifference institutional Catholicism has traditionally encountered in the popular sectors.(36) The evangelical presence in such areas may also reflect certain affinities underprivileged classes have for salvational, congregational religion.(37) In any case, these data underline the relative difficulties the Catholic church has had in keeping up with population growth and evangelical competition, particularly in the rapidly growing popular classes.
Although evangelicals in general and Pentecostals in particular have a strong presence in the lower classes, to locate the social prospects of the evangelicals in the "uprooted and marginal," as many have argued,(38) is not confirmed by the evidence in Caracas. Case studies of evangelical churches and interviews of their members indicate that they are hardly marginal to economic and political life and no more "uprooted" than their nonevangelical neighbors. Further, although more present in poor areas than Catholic organizations, evangelical and Pentecostal churches are relatively less present among the poorest. Only 28 percent of the evangelical churches of Caracas are located among the poorest 44 percent of the population. In a social ranking in which 1 represents the most affluent areas and 10 the least affluent,(39) the locations of the 166 Pentecostal evangelical churches average a ranking of 7, and those of the 73 non-Pentecostal evangelical churches a 5.
Table 6.2 A Sample of Neighborhood Religious Activity by Social Strata
Social
Range of PopulationReligion Average
Number of
ChurchesFounding
DatePercent of
Total Attendance
Per Religious GroupUpper (19%) Catholics 5 1824 59 Protestants 3 1961 14 Middle (38%) Catholics 16 1952 28 Protestants 24 1977 74 Lower (44%) Catholics 8 1969 13 Protestants 8 1978 12 Source: Survey by Brian Froehle, 1990.
In order to understand more clearly the religious activity characteristic of individuals in relation to their social strata, I collected detailed data on all public places of regular worship within a stratified random sample of socially homogeneous areas in Caracas. In the sampled areas, 45 percent of all the places of public Christian worship are Catholic. Of those persons who attend any weekly worship in a given week in these areas, 68 percent attended Catholic places of worship, 26 percent evangelical ones, and 6 percent churches of denominations traditionally outside the evangelical mainstream such as the Jehovah's Witnesses or Seventh-Day Adventists.
Presented in Table 6.2 are the number of churches, their average founding dates, and the percentage of total attendance for Catholics or non-Catholics found in each social strata of the sample. The data indicate an overwhelmingly strong Catholic presence in the most affluent portion of the population where it has traditionally been established. The upper and upper-middle classes have long been closely affiliated with institutional Catholicism through their ties to Catholic schools and social tradition. Some 59 percent of all Catholic attendance on any given Sunday occurs within the upper 19 percent of the population. In contrast, only 14 percent of non-Catholic attendance is found in these strata. Nevertheless, it was within these areas that Protestantism first established itself. The oldest, most traditional evangelical churches are located here. The middle range of the sample was found to contain the highest relative concentration of evangelicals. In fact, in absolute numbers, more non-Catholics than Catholics attend churches within this middle range. Evangelical activity in these areas is of a considerably more recent nature than its Catholic counterpart and on average dates to the 1970s. The Catholic churches and chapels within these areas trace their roots to the 1950s when large numbers of fresh foreign recruits so invigorated the institutional expansion program of the time. Finally, although the number of churches is the same, there are more persons in attendance at Catholic churches than non-Catholic ones in the poorest areas of the sample. However, the evangelical movement seems to be making its most recent gains here. The moment when Catholic pastoral activity began to be focused on the needs of the poorest in the late 1960s was Aso the time when the number of persons called to vocations plummeted; thus, available recruits to carry on a program of vigorous, expanding Catholic ministry in difficult environments dramatically decreased. In any case, this portion of the sample remains the least touched by institutional religion -- only 13 percent of those who are in any church on any given Sunday may be found within the kinds of areas where the lower 44 percent of the population lives.
Individual-Level Data: The Urban Population in General
Available data on individual religious behavior, although limited, are helpful in identifying what kinds of people are more likely to attend weekly services and how often this practice occurs in the population. Individual-level data are also helpful in understanding relative Catholic and evangelical dynamics and suggest how profound the social impact of contemporary religious transformation may actually be.
In a random survey I conducted, 88 percent of those persons surveyed identified themselves as Catholics. Sixteen percent of those, or 14 percent of the total sample, reported attending mass during the previous weekend. Of the Protestants, 7 percent of the sample, 71 percent reported that they had attended services. This difference is quite impressive in itself, but there is reason to believe that Catholic attendance is even lower than actually reported. Archival data on Catholic places of worship, seating space, and the numbers of available celebrants within the territory that today comprises the archdiocese of Caracas suggest that the proportion of the population that could have attended Catholic mass on any particular Sunday dropped from 13 percent in 1950 to 8 percent by 1990. Attendance figures collected from priests at every place of Catholic worship in the archdiocese for 1990 indicate that no more than 6 percent of the entire population actually attended Catholic worship on any particular Sunday that year. During times when there may be a greater general interest in attending, such as Christmas or Easter, the churches may of course be filled, though overall the percentage of the population in attendance does not dramatically change. In any case, such low percentages of regular weekly mass attendance are by no means unheard of within the Catholic world. According to available studies, less than 10 percent of the popula tion attends weekly mass in such European cities such as Florence, (40) Pisa, (41) Paris, (42) and Brussels. (43)
Table 6.3 Social Characteristics of Persons Reporting Attending Mass in Caracas, 1989
Social Characteristics Percentage Attending Weekly Gender: Female 61 Male 39 Age: 15-24 29 25-44 26 45+ 45 Education: Primary 26 Secondary 29 Superior 45 Source: Encuesta sociopastoral de Caracas: Resultados globales (Caracas: Centro de Investigación en Ciencias Sociales [CISOR], 1989)
The social characteristics of those likely to attend Catholic services are suggested by a 1989 pastoral survey of Caracas conducted for the archdiocese.(44) In accord with traditional cultural patterns, a majority of those persons who report attendance are women (see Table 6.3). Further, although the national age distribution is concentrated in the younger ages, attendance is skewed toward the older age groups. Consistent with its middle-class character, the church draws a plurality of attendees from among those who have completed advanced levels of schooling, a characteristic at the same time more common in the younger generation. This suggests that there my be two contrasting poles in the church around which group life and a common discourse may develop, one of older women and another of relatively well-educated young adults.
Underlining the importance Catholic schools have had in building commitment to the Venezuelan Catholic church is the fact that 55 percent of those who reported attending mass at least once a month also reported having attended Catholic schools, although such schools have had less than 10 percent of the school-age population for decades. This echoes Greeley's studies on the impact of US Catholic education on Catholic practice and commitment.(45) In terms of sacramental practice, 44 percent of those who described themselves as practicing Catholics reported that they never or almost never receive communion when they attend mass. Such a separation between the laity and the sacred is found neither in folk Catholicism, with As emphasis on sawed objects and rites within the reach of all,(46) nor in evangelical Christianity, which often highlights the direct accessibility of a personal God through prayer, Holy Spirit-filled experiences, and the Bible.
Shifting Frames in Changing Contexts Like any social movement, religious groups must be able to attract members, cultivate commitment, and reproduce themselves. What makes religious movements particularly interesting is that in addition to offering their publics incentives of social goods, such as social networks, schooling, and social services, they offer spiritual incentives, in the process giving a code of conduct and a sense of meaning to people's lives. Both the social and spiritual dimensions of religion are key to understanding why individuals are more drawn to one group or another or to any at all.
The long-standing affinity in Venezuela between the Catholic church and the more affluent social sectors is a case in point. The social goods the church offered, particularly the schools, fit the social needs of the middle class. At the same time, the traditional message of affirmation the Catholic church offers found a certain resonance in the spiritual environment of this social sector. In contrast, evangelicals project a frame centered on conversion -- the notion that one needs to work out one's salvation following behavior patterns that often starkly contrast with those of one's peers. Such a countercultural yet profoundly personal message implies a different audience in terms of class and personal experience. As interviews indicate, many of those who find this frame appealing have undergone some sort of personal crisis and seek the support that can often only be found in small, highly committed religious groups. The tendency of Pentecostal groups to be located in relatively poorer areas than traditional evangelicals suggests that an emphasis on the power of the Holy Spirit, outside the control of the recipient, makes more sense to people of whom control is seldom an option.
In a climate of religious competition, religious movements are influenced by their competitors, both consciously and unconsciously, no less than by their social environment In stable and relatively more affluent areas, where evangelical competition has been relatively limited, the Catholic church largely continues to emphasize its traditional themes, whereas within popular sectors, there has been more experimentation with congregational styles of ministry and organization. The religious vicariates and the evangelization centers previously mentioned are two examples of this, as are the socially oriented CEBs and the internally focused neocatechumenate groups. These latter two types of organizations are designed to produce small grassroots groups in order to heighten in a communitarian, congregational way the role of the Scriptures in members' lives.(47) The charismatics, originally a middle-class phenomenon, have become increasingly characteristic of lower-class parish life and bring in new orientations toward spontaneous prayer and fervent, animated worship, including an emphasis on divine healing and speaking in tongues.(48)
The change has been significant. Traditional devotional groups, such as cofradías, accounted for some 35 percent of all Catholic parish groups in 1967 and only 24 percent of all groups in 1990. Centrally organized church groups, such as Catholic Action, the Cursillo movement, and the Christian Family Movement, declined from 24 percent of all Catholic parish groups in 1967 to only 7 percent in 1990. In contrast, the more congregational-style groups, which were nonexistent in 1967, such as charismatic groups, CEBs, and neocatechumenate communities, now constitute 10 percent of all parish groups. Correspondingly, youth groups, which also place relatively greater emphasis on group dynamics than do traditional devotional groups, increased from 7 percent of all groups in 1967 to 20 percent by 1994 Indeed, locally based, communally focused, and relatively highly committed groups form the most dynamically growing sector of parish organizations. Although they share notable similarities with their evangelical counterparts, none are slavish imitators and all have a distinctive Catholic flavor.
Evangelical groups are no less influenced by Catholicism, though perhaps more so by popular Ibero-US Catholicism than by institutional Catholicism per se. Ever since the relative decline in social presence of the Catholic church during the social dislocations of the nineteenth century, popular forms of Catholicism have remained the dominant form of actual Catholic practice and belief in Venezuela. Such religiosity is notable for its powerful sense of the sacred within a focus on the immediate problems of everyday life. In this environment, spiritual mediators before the supernatural powers that can dominate one's life have a particularly important role. Spiritual healings from disease are often seen as more permanent and efficacious than merely physiological ones. In this sense, the particular form Pentecostal Protestantism has taken represents not so much a rejection of traditional religiosity as a systematization of it. For example, Pentecostal churches emphasize the devil and the rejection of the devil, thus highlighting the power of the Holy Spirit to save one from evil spirits and cure both physical and spiritual ailments. The personal encounter with Jesus so central to the evangelicals is often understood as a kind of spiritual possession by the Holy Spirit. The idea of using holy water, common in Latin American popular Catholicism, is frequently not eliminated outright, but instead the water is replaced with an oil of anointing considered even more efficacious. Such oil is commonly used in praying for the sick or exorcising demons from the disturbed. Often even the pulpit may be referred to as an altar and considered a sacred space through which only the most worthy-pastors and their closest associates -- may pass.
Future Prospects
Analysis of the contemporary Venezuelan church experience suggests some possible futures for Latin American churches as recent democratic transitions come to a conclusion and the churches confront a difficult era of relatively declining resources and increasing religious competition. One phenomenon of interest in this sense is that after thirty years of operating under democracy, the Venezuelan hierarchy has not fundamentally changed its traditional, undynamic character. Under dictatorial regimes, the hierarchy was cautious in order to survive and grow under hostile governments with a minimum of state interference. Under democracy, the church is no longer so compelled to respond to state pressures, but its need to appeal to all, particularly its middle-class allies who provide the resource base for the church, has tended to perpetuate the cautious, conservative nature of the bishops. Although the Venezuelan state under democracy has retained some of its traditional legal power over the bishop -- for example, it may reject episcopal candidates deemed unsuitable on political grounds and provides a portion of their income in the form of annual subsidies -- such formal power has not been especially necessary to ensure the reproduction of an undynamic, cautious hierarchy. Rather, the hierarchy reproduces its established, traditional character through internal processes, instinctively practicing a sort of self-censorship. Clerics not disposed to play by the unwritten rules are hardly likely even to begin to climb the ladder of church appointments. In Venezuela this serves all the more to reinforce the conservatism of the native clergy because according to the modus vivendi of 1964, only Venezuelan-born priests may be appointed bishop. Given the limited number of native Venezuelan clergy, a high proportion of their number may become bishops. This allows the existing hierarchy to offer them very tangible rewards for conforming to the established leadership patterns.
Such a situation underlines a wider problem. Each bishop acknowledges and accepts the national Bishops' Conference, but jealously guards his local autonomy of action. Yet local autonomy is considerably limited by the role of normative clergy, the preponderant presence of religious orders and congregations relative to that of the dioceses, and the limited resources at a bishop's disposal.(49) Given that the bishops do not exercise a particularly active leadership role at the local diocesan level, it should not be surprising that little decisive unity is evident at the national level. Such tendencies are reflected in public pronouncements on social issuesstatements are made more when it is clear that something must be said in order not to lose credibility as a participant in civil society rather than to serve as a catalyst for action, These patterns may change under the more activist bishops who have recently come into leadership positions. However, given the kinds of countervailing pressures stemming from the hierarchy's need for resources, its middle-class allies, and its internal formation process, profound changes are hardly likely. Given such pressures, there has been little need for external papal tinkering with episcopal appointments. The only notable interventions, in fact, have been in those cases when retiring bishops have recommended close associates who are otherwise largely unqualified.(50)
In 1972, the Venezuelan Catholic church faced a crossroads as the gulf between the conservative and progressive sectors widened in the wake of reduced external threats and the multiple political options resulting from the democratic transition. In the final analysis, however, the conflicting sectors came to coexist quietly with each other rather than make the unacceptably costly moves necessary to eliminate their opponents. Thus, in a church characterized by a traditionalist, conservative hierarchy, activists are permitted and even encouraged. Under democracy, there is no longer a need to preserve unity for the sake of a united front before a hostile, dictatorial state. Yet religious competition is a new, perhaps even more compelling force for peaceful coexistence between the hierarchy and activist elements. Because the latter are working precisely in popular areas, where competition is fiercest and the institutional presence of Catholicism weakest, the hierarchy cannot negate or ignore their importance within the church.
Catholicism continues to have immense institutional staying power and remains a continuing source of cultural identity, within both the upper and lower classes. Nevertheless, the level of upper-class commitment to the church is not likely to increase. Both the absence of new imperatives for Catholic commitment and the continuing lack of sufficient human and material resources preclude such a possibility. Among popular sectors, newer forms of religious practice and organization, such as the congregational and charismatic groups, are likely to increase as continuing social crises promote a greater reliance on mutual support and meaningful systems that enable such support. The relative and continuing shortage of Catholic personnel will significantly slow such possibilities of growth, but the momentum of evangelical groups is not likely to be lost. Their structure permits rapid expansion, the social sectors with which they have been associated are increasing, and their message provides islands of meaning and support in a time of increasing social crisis.
Conclusion
The prospects for religion cannot be predicted by static institutional analysis. Rather, dynamic ideas and meanings are the essence of religion and religious change. Analysis of the frames out of which Catholicism and Protestantism operate leads to compelling ways of thinking about the interaction of religion and society. Such dynamics within Catholicism and the evangelical movement suggest that religious change in Venezuela is not simply an issue of the growth of one group relative to another but the reflection of cultural shifts based on social dynamics that affect all social institutions, including religious ones. To understand the prospects for religious groups and religion in general in Venezuela, one needs to consider possible societal futures no less than the changing agendas within religious movements themselves. A full consideration of possible societal futures and their impact on religion is outside the scope of this chapter, though I have tried to indicate possible effects of some phenomena, such as the long-term operation of democratic politics and the shifting role of different class groups. One of the clearest immediate social prospects is the increasing prominence of non-Catholic Christianity within social life. This socioreligious transformation promises to negate the traditional myth that Latin America is Catholic in an institutional sense. The net result for institutional Catholicism must eventually be a recognition of fundamentally new rules of the game within the sphere of religion itself.
At the same time, religion is not simply a passive recipient of social change. The new religious phenomena of a multifaceted Catholicism and a militant evangelical movement must inevitably have repercussions within social life in general. In a context of a traditionally weak civil society with few participatory alternatives in daily life, the expansion of religious options of a congregational, communitarian type promises to deepen not only religious pluralism but cultural pluralism as well. As such, these changes are significant not only in terms of religious change but also in their potential effect on the politics of the society in which they operate.
Notes Special thanks to Edward Cleary, Thomas Depew, Susan Eckstein, Mary Froehle, Alberto Gruson, Daniel Levine, Jochen Streiter, and Luis Ugalde for their helpful criticisms and comments.
1. See Mary Watters, A History of the Church in Venezuela: 1810-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933). Her work remains a classic among research on the Venezuelan church and on the historical development of religion and politics within Latin America in general.
2. For corroborating this point, I am indebted to Hermann González Oropeza, director of the Center for Venezuelan Church History.
3. Watters, A History of the Church, p. 35.
4. Alberto Micheo and Luis Ugalde, "El proceso histórico de la iglesia venezolana," in Historia general de la iglesia en América Latina: Colombia y Venezuela (Salamanca, España: Ediciones Sígueme, 1981), p. 623.
5. Watters, A History of the Church, pp. 34, 90, 156.
6. This interpretation was first suggested in ibid., p. 220, based on comments by the turn-of-the-century Venezuelan literary critic Laureano Vallenilla Lanz in his Críticas de sinceridad y exactitud (Caracas: Imprenta Bolívar, 1921), p. 401. However, the detailed interpretation I present here is my own, inspired by the kind of political economic analysis suggested by Jeffrey Paige, Agrarian Revolution (New York: Free Press, 1975); Barrington Moore, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966); and Maurice Zeitlin, The Civil Wars in Chile (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984).
7. Hermann González Oropeza, La liberación de la iglesia venezolana del patronato (Caracas: Ediciones Paulinas, 1988), pp. 130-136.
8. Daniel Levine, Conflict and Political Change in Venezuela (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 71.
9. For a full account of these events, see ibid., pp. 64-73.
10. See ibid., pp. 88-92; and Micheo and Ugalde, "El proceso Histórico," p. 627.
11. For more on this theme, see Levine, Conflict and Political Change, p. 109; and González Oropeza, La liberación, pp. 141-146.
12. See González Oropeza, La Liberación, p. 146; Levine, Conflict and Political Change, p. 109; and Irene Casique, Relaciones entre la institución eclesiástica y el estado venezolano a partir de la firma del modus vivendi (19641985) (Caracas: Escuela de las Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad Católica Andrós Bello, 1989), pp. 39-52. Casique's work is an undergraduate thesis that focuses on the changes in church-state relations brought about by the modus vivendi.
13. See Boletin estadistico: 1989-1990, a compilation of the most recent statistical information on the Venezuelan Catholic school system, issued by Asociación Venezolana de la Educación Católica (AVEC), in 1990.
14. Daniel Levine, among others, has traced out this theme, a common reality in many Latin American churches during this period. See Daniel Levine, Religion and Politics in Latin America: The Catholic Church in Venezuela and Colombia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 72.
15. For a detailed comparative, statistical study of two very different Latin American countries that received a considerable influx of Spanish-born clergy during the immediate postwar period, see Isidoro Alonso, Merardo Luzardo, Gines Garrido, and José Oriol, La iglesia en Venezuelay Ecuador (Bogotá: Oficina Central de Investigaciones de FERES and Madrid: Centro de Información y Sociología de la Obra de Cooperación Sacerdotal Hispanoamericana, 1962). The statistics cited in the text are given on p. 55.
16. For population data, see Oficina Central de Estadística e Información (OCEI), "Nueve años de cambios demográficos," in Tiempo de Resultados, 1, 1 (Febrero 1991) p.4. For information on Catholic clergy, I used the time series data available in the Annuarium statisticum eclesiae (Rome: Vatican Secretary of State, 1987).
17. See the data presented in Annuarium statisticum ecclesiae, esp. ch. 1, pp. 17-70.
18. See Micheo and Ugalde, "El proceso histórico, pp. 630-631. Alberto Gruson also covers this problem in his Area urbana de Caracas: Ecológica del personal ecclesiático católico (Caracas: CISOR, 1970). CISOR was founded in 1966 by Father Alberto Gruson, at the request of the Venezuelan Bishops' Conference, as the Centro de Investigaciones Socio-Religiosas (CISOR). By 1970 its mission had widened; it therefore was renamed the Centro de Investigación en Ciencias Sociales, but retained its original acronym.
19. See Alberto Gruson, La problemática de la educación católica en Venezuela: Primeros resultados de la consulta a los educadores católicos (Caracas: CISOR, 1974), pp. 89-105.
20. Asociación Venezolana de Educación Católica (AVEC), "Los pobres nos necesitan," Caracas, 1991. This was a policy statement of AVEC signed by Father Ramon Requciro Salgado, the president of AVEC, for the organization.
21. Micheo and Ugalde, "El proceso histórico," p. 630; and Los religiosos en Venezuela: Informe descriptivo de respuestas a la encuesta a los religiosos y religiosas de Venezuela (Caracas: SECORVE, Secretariado Conjunto de Religiosos y Religiosas de Venezuela, 1978).
22. See Los religiosos en Venezuela: Informe Descriptivo; and Los religiosos en Venezuela: Levantamiento sociográfico (Caracas: SECORVE, t984).
23. Juan Carlos Navarro, Contestación en la iglesia venezolana (1966-1972): Contribución al estudio de los movimientos sociales (Caracas: Escuela de las Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, 1981), p. 119. Navarro's work is an undergraduate thesis that focuses on the period of open infighting within the Venezuelan church, relating the events to a Tourainian perspective on social movements.
25. Annuarium statisticum ecclesiae, pp. 33-41.
26. See, for example, "La nueva evangelización," ITER 1, 1 (Enero-Junio 1990). ITER is a biannual journal produced by the Instituto de Teología para Religiosos.
27. Rafael Arias Blanco, Catecismo de iniciación cristiana (Caracas, various newspapers, 1990).
28. Jacinto Ayerra, Los Protestantes en Venezuela (Caracas: Ediciones Trípode, 1980), p. 26.
30. Los religiosos en Venezuela: Levantamiento sociográfico, p. 23.
31. See the pastoral letter of the Venezuelan bishops, La instrucción pastoral del episcopado venezolano sobre el fenómeno de las sectas (Caracas: SPEV, Secretariado Permanente del Episcopado Venezolano, 1988), p. 16. Typical of the interpretation of the growth of evangelical Christianity in Venezuela commonly heard from Catholic clergy are the comments of Nicholas Espinoza, rector of Holy Trinity Chapel, interviewed November 15, 1990.
32. Kenneth Kartz, Murray Schwartz, and Audrey Schwartz, The Evolution of Law in the Barrios of Caracas (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center, 1973).
33. Rafael Arias Blanco, "Arzobispo coadjutor de Caracas al sehor director de urbanismo," letter written April 27, 1954, and found in the archdiocesan archives.
34. This information was provided by Hector Maldonado, chancellor of the archdiocese of Caracas, interviewed September 15, 1990.
35. ADSUM: Directorio de la arquidiócesis de Caracas. (Caracas: Archdiocese of Caracas, 1972, 1990). Although religious vicariates appeared as early as 1970, the first directory of the archdiocese to contain them was not published until 1972. See Vicarias en acción: Boletín informativo, 1970 (Archives, CISOR).
36. Based on data in CISOR's archival collection of hundreds of interviews with Catholic parish priests in the archdiocese of Caracas between 1967 and 1977. The complete collection includes interviews, surveys, and documentation from virtually every parish in Venezuela during this period.
37. Max Weber, Económia y sociedad: Tomo I (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1974), pp. 366-367.
38. For example, John Coleman, "Will Latin America Become Protestant?" in Commonweal, 118, 2 (1991), pp. 59-63, esp. p. 62; Bryan Roberts, "Protestant Groups and Coping with Urban Life in Guatemala City," in American Journal of Sociology 73 (1968), pp. 753-767; and Christian Lalive D'Epinay, El refugio de las masas: Estudio sociológico del protestantismo chileno (Santiago: Editorial del Pacifico, 1968).
39. The data used in the social rankings consist of 639 sociologically homogeneous divisions of the metropolitan area of Caracas identified, categorized, and ranked between 1985 and t990 by CISOR. This ambitious task was undertaken in order to permit future stratified random sampling by socially homogeneous areas. As an associated researcher at CISOR, I was able to use these data in the random sample surveys conducted in the course of my research as well as in the analyses of social rank of religious organizations in the Caracas metropolitan area.
40. Paul Furlong, "Authority, Change, and Conflict in Italian Catholicism," in Thomas Gannon, ed., World Catholicism in Transition (New York: Macmillan, 1988), p.121.
42. Henri Madelin, "The Paradoxical Evolution of the French Catholic Church," in Gannon, World Catholicism in Transition, p. 61.
43. Karel Dobbelaere, "Secularization, Pillarization, and Religious Change in the Low Countries," in Gannon, World Catholicism in Transition, p. 96.
44. The preliminary results of the pastoral survey have been published by CISOR under the title Encuesta socio-pastoral de Caracas: Resultados globales (Caracas: CISOR, 1989).
45. On this point, see Andrew Greeley, Religious Change in America (Boston: Harvard Universiy Press, 1989).
46. Angelina Pollack-Eltz "Magico-Religious Movements and Social Change in Venezuela," Journal of Caribbean Studies 2,2 and 3 (1981), pp. 162-180; and "Pentecostalism in Venezuela," Anthropos: International Review of Ethnology and Linguistics 73 (1978), pp. 462-482.
47. Daniel Levine, "Popular Groups, Popular Culture, and Popular Religion," Comparative Studies of Society and History, 32, 4 (1990), pp. 718-764,
48. See, for example, María Diaz de la Serna, El movimiento de la renovación carismática como unproceso desocialización adulta (Mexico: Cuadernos Universitarios, Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana Iztapalapa, 1985), esp. p. 49. Angelina Pollack-Eltz, an Austrian-Venezuelan anthropologist whose specialty is the study of popular religious cults, such as that of María Lionza, has long been interested in charismatic religious phenomena within the established churches in Venezuela. Her article "Pentecostalism in Venezuela" related her observations of Pentecostal worship services, and in an interview with the author on May 21, 1991, she shared her observations of the Catholic charismatic movement over the past twenty years, particularly of the yearly Pentecost celebration held in Caracas.
49. Báltazar Porras, El episcopado y los problemas de Venezuela (Caracas: Ediciones Trípode, 1978), p. 285.
50. For this information, as well as the intellectual and personal support given throughout my research, I am grateful to Luis Ugalde, university president and professor of sociology at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello.
INDEX