Catholic Church in Latin America and the Caribbean

By: John Burdick

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Catholic Church in Latin America and the Caribbean

For five centuries, throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, the relationship between the Catholic Church and people of African ancestry has been fraught with contradiction. The Church's complicity in slavery, its Eurocentric cosmology, and its bouts of inquisitorial zeal have rendered it an uninviting space for Afro-Latin identity. Yet the Church's need to attract converts, its overall tolerance of heterodoxy, and its public recognition of black saints, have over time made major contributions to Afro-Latin cultures. To this day this contradiction, far from being resolved, has inner potentialities that are yet to be fully realized.

Slavery and the Church

It is a major irony of world history that Christianity, which teaches the fundamental equality of all souls before God, condoned for 1800 years the most unequal of all institutions. The early Church Fathers declared that slavery was a punishment for original sin. Medieval theologians accepted enslavement of prisoners in what they classified as “just” wars. In the fifteenth century the pope denounced the enslavement of Christians, while explicitly offering up “pagans” as fair game. And, as Europeans began to drag Africans across the Atlantic as slaves, the Church pronounced this system justified as long as it was accompanied by the evangelization of the enslaved.

Thus began a monumental chapter in the history of hypocrisy. The Church bore witness to the slave trade by congratulating itself for bringing heathen souls into the light of Christian day. The Spanish, Portuguese, and French clergy in the colonies knew, however, that only a very limited number of Africans ever received instruction in the faith. The vast majority of slaves and their descendants rarely learned the creed, let alone anything of the Bible. For the most part, they remained indifferent to Catholicism, interpreted it according to their own views, or syncretized it with their own cosmologies.

In this drawing from the 1830s, Afro–Latin Americans celebrate the Fiesta of St. Rosalie, patron of blacks.

Oronoz

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From the start, European slave owners showed contempt for Africans' ability or need to understand their masters' religion. The holy water sprayed on enslaved Africans waiting to be packed into ships was little more than a tariff on export. If they survived the Middle Passage, enslaved Africans were sold to masters who by law were to see to their religious instruction but who rarely raised a finger to do so. Such things might interfere with production and make slaves rebellious. Many plantation owners refused even to let their slaves hear Mass; others told their slaves that baptism was evil magic. And the rural clergy were in no position to argue with the people who paid their salaries.

The situation was slightly different on estates run by religious orders. The Jesuits, for example, inculcated orthodoxy in their slaves, even taught them to read the Bible. They made sure, however, that they would draw no subversive conclusions. Passing over Paul's insistence that Christ knows man as “neither slave nor free,” they emphasized instead the virtues of patience and resignation. “Know, my brothers,” a Jesuit preached to slaves in Peru, “the Lord will send comfort for your hearts; he will reward you with that gift of the crown of Heaven, better than all the gold.”

Enslaved men and women exposed to this message in the Catholic countries of the hemisphere rarely accepted it. Instead, they regarded the religion of their masters as a source of power and healing to be tapped here and now. Africans were already familiar with the healing powers of water. In Saint-Domingue (Haiti), for example, many slaves sought baptism repeatedly as a healing rite, to treat sickness and affliction. Others regarded the saints as the magical source of power that had enabled Europeans to found vast empires. It should thus come as no surprise that Catholic figurines were worshiped in runaway slave communities, such as the great seventeenth-century Brazilian quilombo (fugitives' enclave) of Palmares. Here, the runaways turned to Catholic saints not only because they served as a common denominator across ethnic African divides, but also because they obviously possessed great protective power.

Black Brotherhoods

Although slaves in the countryside of the New World Catholic societies received little encouragement to participate in the Church, the situation was different in urban areas such as Lima, Salvador, and Havana. There, slaves worked as artisans, peddlers, and domestics, and the urban context offered them more time, mobility, and literacy than did the plantation. These were energies that could, from the point of view of white society, become volatile unless channeled quickly toward socially desirable ends. This was why Catholic whites in cities throughout the hemisphere urged people of color to become involved in the Church.

Many did, by entering one or another Catholic brotherhood (irmandade in Brazil, cofradia or cabildo in Spanish America). Confraternities were dedicated to particular saints, for whom they organized processions. The brotherhoods functioned as mutual aid societies, through which members gained access to credit, health care, and a decent burial. The latter was of special interest to Africans, for whom death without proper burial left the spirit dissatisfied and wandering. By the eighteenth century, hundreds of black brotherhoods had been founded and were busy building chapels.

The brotherhoods (which often included “sisters”) embodied the Church's contradictory relationship to Africans. On the one hand, they were an assimilating force, drawing Afro-Latins into the values of respectability, status, and invidious distinction that served white society. Many black brotherhoods existed at the pleasure of white benefactors, who made donations to ensure the “savages” would become civilized. Black confraternities were also notorious for reinforcing the distinctions from which the ruling class benefited. In Brazil, for example, only Dahomean blacks could belong to the brotherhood of Good Jesus of Redemption, and only Yorubas could enter the brotherhood of Our Lady of the Good Death. Other brotherhoods required that members be born in Angola or in Brazil; that they be slaves or freedpeople; that they be “pure” blacks or mulattoes (of African and European descent), and so on.

Jean-Baptiste Debret's lithograph (1831) shows Afro-Brazilian women entering a church with their children to be baptized.

Houghton Library, Harvard University

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Despite these factors, the brotherhoods were often places where blacks were able to keep alive their own values, attitudes, and ideas. For example, they nourished a number of cults to revere black saints, including Benedict, Anthony of Categerona, and Ephigenia. Costa Rican slaves revered a dark-skinned Virgin Mary who had appeared to a slave woman. Further, the brotherhoods instituted annual royal processionals, coinciding with the Feast of the Magi, for which they elected representative kings and queens. The dances and music played for these processionals were known as congadas in Brazil and Cuba, and kept alive the high value placed by West Africans on royalty.

The brotherhoods made another more underground contribution to Afro-Latin culture: They paired Catholic saints with African deities. The Church's evocative chromolithographs of suffering and triumphant saints forged powerful links between Catholicism and African gods. As long as members kept up appearances, the Church looked the other way. In Brazil, the Yoruba god of smallpox, Omolú, was identified with sore-covered Saint Sebastian. Oxóssi, goddess of the hunt, was linked to the warrior Saint George. And the Beji, the divine twins, were associated with Cosmos and Damian. In Haiti, meanwhile, Ezili, the Dahomean water goddess of love, became paired with the Virgin Mary; Benin's python god Damballah was associated with Saint Patrick, because of his triumph over snakes; and Legba, guardian of destiny who holds keys to the underworld, became Saint Peter. Similar correspondences developed elsewhere in the hemisphere.

One should not forget, as well, the role the black brotherhoods played in gaining freedom for slaves. A key function of the confraternity was to accumulate funds through dues, donations, and testamentary bequests, and to use them to buy certificates of freedom. Thousands of slaves throughout the hemisphere gained their freedom in this manner. And when the movements to end slavery reached a fever pitch in Brazil and Cuba in the late nineteenth century, black Catholic brotherhoods were key actors agitating for total abolition.

Under slavery the Church had expended little effort to root out unorthodox practices in the black brotherhoods. This was due largely to the independence of colonial clergy from the dictates of Rome. Under the colonial system of the patronato, clerics answered to the secular, not religious, authorities, who were not greatly concerned with religious heterodoxy. By the start of the twentieth century, however, Rome had reestablished its authority in the western hemisphere; its top agenda was to eliminate impurities it still saw in the black brotherhoods. Between the 1890s and 1920s, practices such as the congadas were expelled from the Church and thrown onto the street, while religious syncretism was denounced and punished. People who held such practices dear were obliged to continue them elsewhere. In Brazil, the congada became the dance of kings and queens at Carnival time. Members of brotherhoods whose cosmology included strong pairs of saints and gods carried these into the sacred precincts of other religions, such as Candomblé, Santería, Shango, and Batuque. For the next sixty years the Catholic Church in Latin America and the Caribbean maintained a distinction between doctrinal orthodoxy and the syncretisms of these other religions.

Recent Developments

Since the 1980s, however, the pendulum has begun to swing in the opposite direction. Under pressure as a result of the worldwide explosion of Protestant conversion, the Catholic Church has begun to experiment with accepting culturally diverse innovations of the High Mass. Throughout Latin America, for example, the Church has endorsed initiatives on the part of black clergy to perform “Afro Masses,” which incorporate elements of Afro-derived dances, music, instruments, dress, cosmologies, and food, and seek to keep alive the memory of slavery. In Brazil the Afro Mass is the result of a sizable black Catholic antiracist movement, led by black seminarians and clergy, that seeks to pressure the Church to include a call for racial justice in its social agenda.

A similar process is at work in Haiti. There the Church has started to acknowledge the value of the Afro religion on the island. Now the Church publicly praises Vodou artists and even employs them. In Haiti's new Catholic iconography, Christ, the saints, and apostles are often represented as black, and sometimes as officiating in Vodou temples. The same drums that are played during Vodou ceremonies are now permitted in some parish churches. And curates have been known to pour libations of water at the four cardinal points before the celebration of the Eucharist, echoing the gesture of the Vodou ritual leader who pours rum at the four corners of the Vodou cult center.

Traditional Catholic religiosity, especially saint worship, is also capable of nurturing racial identity and of generating reflection on racial inequality. For example, in Brazil there exists an enormously popular Catholic devotion to a semi-mythical nineteenth-century enslaved woman named Anastacia, believed to have been tortured to death when she refused to submit to the master's lust. In practice, Anastacia has inspired many people to struggle against racism. One black woman, a devotee of Anastacia's, was moved to found a hair salon dedicated to valorizing Afro-Brazilian women's beauty. Another founded the Slave Anastacia Women's Group, a small neighborhood-based group dedicated to educating local black women about their culture, their bodies, and their health. Still another woman, also stimulated by her love of Anastacia, started a small literacy program for poor black children in her neighborhood and honored Anastacia by naming the project after her.

The implication should be clear. Throughout the hemisphere Catholicism and its parent, the Catholic Church, are held in fairly low regard by black movement activists committed to building a strong sense of Afro-Latin identity and antiracist sentiment. It may however be too early to dismiss the potential contribution the Catholic Church can make to this struggle. While the contradictions of the Church's stance toward Afro-Latins have yet to be resolved, they continue to include promising syntheses of the Catholic worldview, black identity, and antiracism. It is, in the end, up to leaders of the hemisphere's black movements to decide whether they wish to follow these leads.

See also Carnivals in Latin America and the Caribbean; Maroonage; Protestant Church in Latin America and the Caribbean; Religions, African, in Brazil; Religions, African, in Latin America and the Caribbean; Religious Brotherhoods in Latin America; Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean.

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