The Influence Of “intergral Catholism” In The Society Of Latin America

Since European Colonists arrived at Latin America, Catholicism continued to keep its influence on every aspect of society such as economy, culture and politics. Before the first half of 20 th century, the church of Catholicism in Latin America was dependent on the state in the economic aspect and supported the state with supernatural legality. The whole church-state system was called “Patronato”. But with the modernization, this kind of relationship between church-state changed gradually. The Catholicism in Latin America began to have an independent economic position the first time in its own history but simultaneously lost the alliance with state and the specific way to impact the political process. Under this context, many religious scholars claimed that Catholicism would retreat from the secular public area and totally being “privatization”.However, the reality is just opposite to the theory. In many countries of Latin America, Catholicism begins to try its best to adapt to the change of secular society, with many new ways to maintain its position and influence in the political and social areas. This “Catolicismo Integral” is not confined to the institutional church no more but diffuses the religious ideas into the whole society and combines with different social ideological trends to maintain its power in the society and impacts the social process through party, base community and social organization. For example, in the case study of Chile, the writer describes the Christian Democratic Party, The Christian Movement for Socialism and Vicaria de la Solidaridad and points out these three movements represent three different dimension of Catholicism. More than that, the three movements combines with the social thoughts such as developmentism, Marxism and human rights to propagate the core ideas in the Catholicism and put these ideas into the real political practice. Finally, all of these behaviors impact the social process in Chile in the critical moment.Based on this, this article not only reconstructs the methods with which Chilean Catholicism impacts in the modern society, but also reflects the importance of Catholicism in the modern society. Through the specific religious view, the article describes the profund changes in Chile and the relationship between the changes and “Catolicismo Intergral”.