I count my experience of the post-Vatican II church in Latin America as  a great good fortune. It changed and enriched my professional and personal life in profound and lasting ways.  It opened me to new ideas, to enduring friendships, and to a   new way of living a consistent and satisfying life.

I first went to Latin America to study religion, society, and politics in the late 1960s. That initial encounter grew into a long term project of study and reflection, which has been both an intellectual and a personal journey. I began my studies from a point of view that is conventional in the social sciences: objective, neutral, skeptical, disinterested. I was careful to maintain a distance. But that turned out to be impossible to sustain.  My encounters with religion as lived and experienced in Latin America, and with countless people who gave voice to new ideas  and whose action gave them social presence and staying power, made me question those positions. They eroded the emotional distance of the disinterested observer.  From skeptical observer I became sympathetic and (I hope) empathetic, and from there a believer.

I arrived in Latin America only a few years after the close of the Council. Some impacts were already visible.  Some of the most notable impacts Vatican II had on pastoral practice and the quality of religious experience have to do with language, participation and group structure. The translation of liturgies into local languages (Spanish and Portuguese) and the growing openness to Bible studies made participation much more accessible and meaningful for many, and religiously linked and identified groups more autonomous. Countless ordinary believers and activists have told me what a difference this made to their religious lives, and many eagerly sought out opportunities to read and discuss the Bible in groups of friends and neighbors. For some, it was an incentive to learn to read.

This process encouraged a profusion of bible centered groups like base ecclesial communities or CEBS , which are  a direct outgrowth of the impact of the Council. The model of the Church as Pilgrim People, living in and working its way through history, has had a profound influence, enhancing the value of ordinary experience and shifting the basis of reflection from deductive reasoning to reflections on experience. Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutierrez (whose landmark book A Theology of Liberation was published in 1971) points to both of these in his stress on the idea that there is one history (not human history now and sacred history later, but one continuing experience illuminated and guided by faith), and in his definition of theology as second act (experience is first, theology is reflection). These same changes legitimated and encouraged a range of new social and political involvements by institutional churches and religiously linked or inspired groups and individuals.

The landmark conference of the region’s Catholic bishops, held at Medellin Colombia in 1968, was a key medium for bringing the insights of Vatican II to Latin America.  The official title of that Conference was “The Role of the Church in the Present Day Transformation of Latin America in the Light of the Council.” True to the title, the bishops gathered at Medellin strove to understand the evolving, divided, and violent reality around them and to craft a position that would be true to that reality, and true also to the insights of the Council, which altered the image of the church from perfect unchanging reality to Pilgrim People of God working its way through history. This means taking ordinary experience as a point of departure for theological understanding and pastoral practice. Positions like these were reinforced  liberation theology’s characteristic stress on accompaniment (sharing experience with the poor and vulnerable) as an expression of authentic faith.

These stances have resonated in the theory and practice of the Church ever since, and have been recently rescued from official marginality by Pope Francis, who has made a point of celebrating the Council (which he has described as a “great work of the Holy Spirit”) and taking up its injunction to share fully in the joys and hopes of the world. His words and actions, his warm and open personal style have shown how the church can  engage the modern world in ways that go beyond maintaining a defensive crouch, and working to enhance unity and discipline. Although Francis is unquestionably popular,  his positions on issues such as inequality, migration, ecology, gender, sexuality and acceptance of homosexuality have met with  sharply divided reaction, in Latin America as elsewhere.  There was (and still is) deep division within the Catholic Churches of the region: this is contested terrain.

In Latin America today, Pope Francis faces a world that has changed in basic ways from the one that his predecessors knew. Although the region remains overwhelmingly Christian, and continues to hold almost 40% of the world’s Catholics, the days of unquestioned Catholic monopoly are over.  The years in which Vatican II made its mark in Latin America were also years of profound conflict and massive cultural, social, and political change: revolutions, repressive regimes, and a return to democracy were accompanied by accelerated urbanization, a more open civil society, expanded literacy and growing access to mass media, and now to the internet. Together these trends   provide the underpinnings for a remarkable transformation of the religious field in Latin America, as Protestant and particularly Pentecostal and neo Pentecostal churches have grown at a geometric pace. The private and public life of faith in the region has been changed in basic ways: there are many religious alternatives, competition is vigorous, and the Catholic Church is no longer the sole unquestioned voice of religion.  The open, less defensive stance that Pope Francis embodies and promotes is a sign of how  the church can build a meaningful and effective presence in this part of the world in the twenty first century and beyond.

I began this comment by noting the personal impact all these changes have had on me. In closing let me return briefly to this theme. Much of my scholarship has argued that it impossible to understand religion without opening oneself to the power of belief and practice. For the neutral skeptical observer, the risk is that one will end up pulled across the porous frontier that separates faith from unbelief, thereby compromising one’s objectivity.  I was asked more than once why I was really doing my research, what I was seeking, what had brought me there. I did not have a ready answer. All I know is that I did not go looking to find new ways of believing and living, but these have their own dynamic and I soon felt their pull. The fact that this was the post Vatican II church made a clear difference to the nature of the experience.   I still remember the first mass I ever attended which was in the country side in Venezuela. I could understand it and follow it.  I remember how struck and moved I was by the idea of a communion across time and space: “I am with you”. This deepened my understanding of what religious faith and participation were all about. The experience was different from any other. Witnessing the steadfast commitments undertaken and sustained by so many in the churches was inspiring to me and made me rethink my assumptions about the meaning of religious faith and commitment. All this has changed and  enriched my life in ways that I am still learning about.