Guatemala's Catholic Revolution: A History of Religious and Social Reform, 1920-1968

Guatemala’s Catholic Revolution

GUATEMALA’S CATHOLIC REVOLUTION

A History of Religious and Social Reform,

1920–1968

BONAR L. HERNÁNDEZ SANDOVAL

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

undpress.nd.edu

Copyright © 2019 by the University of Notre Dame

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018043815

ISBN-13: 978-0-268-10441-2 (hardback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-10443-6 (WebPDF)

ISBN: 978-0-268-10444-3 (epub)

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To Marta, Roberto, and Liv Karen

for being there for me

To Marguelli

for being there for me

CONTENTS

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Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART ONE. FOUNDATIONS

CHAPTER ONE. Papal Power and Church-State Relations

CHAPTER TWO. The Romanized Church

PART TWO. EXPANSION

CHAPTER THREE. The Resurgent Church

CHAPTER FOUR. The Missionary Church

PART THREE. TRANSFORMATIONS

CHAPTER FIVE. The Reformist Church

CHAPTER SIX. The Progressive Church

Epilogue

Notes

Works Cited

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

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MAP

Map of Guatemala from a papal document from 1950. Source: Correspondencia, 1920–1964: Emiliano Castellani a Mariano Rossell Arellano, Guatemala, April 2, 1950. Fondo diocesano. Archivo arzobispal. Monseñor Mariano Rossell. Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Guatemala.

FIGURES

FIGURE 1. Luis Durou y Sure in 1938. Durou, who served as archbishop between 1929 and 1938, epitomized the ascendancy of papal power and paved the way for the revitalization of Catholicism in Guatemala. Source: Revista Eclesiástica 78 (November–December, 1938), 1.

FIGURE 2. Mariano Rossell y Arellano in 1942. Rossell’s tenure (1939–1964) as archbishop of Guatemala was one of the longest in the country’s history. He oversaw the arrival of foreign missioners, the creation of Catholic Action, and the institutionalization of the Church’s programs of development in the highlands. Source: Revista Eclesiástica 6 (July–September, 1942), 558.

FIGURE 3. Costumbrista performing a religious ritual in Huehuetenango. During the postwar years, Maryknoll missioners sought to undermine the religious and social influence of costumbristas at the parish level. Source: Maryknoll Mission Archives, Ossining, NY.

FIGURE 4. Catechist in Huehuetenango provides religious instruction to a group of parishioners. During the 1950s and 1960s, Maya catechists became the backbone of the Church’s efforts to disseminate a sacramentalized religious worldview and practice. Source: Maryknoll Mission Archives, Ossining, NY.

FIGURE 5. Training and nontraditional crops. During the 1960s, Maryknoll missioners promoted the cultivation of nontraditional crops (including cabbages, as shown in this photograph) and the formation of a new class of Maya community leaders. Source: Maryknoll Mission Archives, Ossining, NY.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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The journey that led me to write this book has been both an academic and a deeply personal one. At the age of fourteen, I moved not only from middle school to high school but also from my native country, Guatemala, to the United States. In the ensuing years I was kept busy learning English, adapting to a foreign society, and grappling with my newfound identity as an immigrant. It was not until my sophomore year at San Francisco State University that, encouraged by my professors, I developed a serious interest in the field of history. As I enrolled in an increasing number of history courses, I became fascinated by the process involved in historical inquiry. In particular, I was drawn by the search, in the words of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, for what happened and that which is said to have happened.¹ This study is in many ways the byproduct of my own ongoing journey as an immigrant and as a historian of Guatemala.

In my evolution as a historian and in completing this book, I benefited from the support of many individuals. At San Francisco State University, I would like to express my gratitude to Julyana Peard, Abdiel Oñate, and Rudolph Busby for encouraging me to think as a historian and for their help and words of wisdom as I decided to pursue graduate studies. I am also indebted to a number of professors and the staff in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin, where this book began as a dissertation project that was originally intended to shed light on the history of Catholic Action in Guatemala. In particular, I would like to thank Jonathan C. Brown, Charles R. Hale, Mark A. Lawrence, and Matthew Butler. Virginia Garrard deserves special mention. She has been a kind mentor who provided guidance and encouragement as I expanded the geographical and thematic focus of this book. She has helped improve this project in many different ways.

This study would not have come to fruition without the assistance of the staff at a number of archival institutions. In Guatemala, I am grateful to the archivists at the Archivo de la Provincia Franciscana, the Archivo Histórico Arquidiocesano de Guatemala, the Hemeroteca Nacional Clemente Marroquín Rojas, and the Teologado Salesiano. In the United States, I would like to thank the staff at the Maryknoll Mission Archives in Ossining, NY, and the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. In Vatican City, the staff at the Vatican Secret Archives proved extremely helpful. The archivists at these institutions, including Alejandro Conde, were patient with my seemingly countless requests for materials and in helping me locate valuable materials for this book.

In addition, I would not have been able to start, much less complete, this project without the financial support of a number of institutions. At the University of Texas at Austin, I received support from the Department of History, the Graduate School, and the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies. I also benefited from funding from the Social Science Research Council. I completed the last stage of this book with funding from the Department of History and a Small Research Grant from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University.

Eli Bortz, senior acquisitions editor at the University of Notre Dame Press, provided encouragement, guidance, and editorial support throughout the publication process. At UND Press, I am also indebted to Susan Berger, Robyn Karkiewicz, and Wendy McMillen. Matthew F. Dowd, managing editor, pointed me in the direction of Kellie M. Hultgren, whose careful copyediting has helped improve the text. Two anonymous reviewers provided perceptive feedback that allowed me to sharpen the argument and think of the contributions of this book in a much broader sense than I originally imagined.

Colleagues, friends, and students contributed in many ways to the completion of this study. Special thanks (in alphabetical order) go to José Barragán, Creighton Chandler, Bill Malone, Annie Mendoza, Pablo Mijangos, Benjamín Narváez, Mauricio Pajón, Juan Carlos Sarazúa, Arnoldo Sola, and Fernanda Soto. My colleagues at East Stroudsburg University motivated me to continue with this project. At Iowa State University, my colleagues in the Department of History provided much support and encouragement as I completed this book. I would like to thank especially James Andrews, Michael Bailey, Jeff Bremer, Simon Cordery, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Jennifer Rivera, and Tao Wang. Special thanks goes out to the students in my Latin American History graduate seminar.

Among other things, doing research for and writing this book has convinced me that individual accomplishments are the result of collective efforts. This project (which has taken more time to complete and has taken me to more places than I would ever have imagined) would not have been possible without the supportive environment provided by my family. My relatives in Maryland kindly opened the doors of their homes and patiently listened to my intellectual pursuits. In Guatemala, where I have spent many months throughout these years, my relatives also provided much-needed support. I would like to thank my family in Guatemala City, particularly Maricela Sandoval and her family and Sayda Salazar, and my family in Ipala, Quezaltepeque, and Esquipulas. These relatives welcomed me in their homes, allowed me to listen to their stories and to tell them my story, and, lest I forget, shared with me countless warm meals. Among other things, they have reinforced my love for Guatemala and its cuisine.

Words cannot describe how deeply grateful I am to my parents, Roberto Hernández and Marta Sandoval de Hernández, and my sister, Liv Karen Hernández Sandoval. They have supported and motivated me at every moment, in the process giving me the confidence to imagine myself as a historian and the strength to persevere as I started and finished this project. My wife, Marguelli Bojórquez, has also accompanied me in this endeavor, patiently listening to my academic pursuits, inspiring me to finish this project, letting me accompany her in her own personal and academic journey, and encouraging me to understand myself better. Her smile, support, and unselfish love nurture me every day. This book—and my life—is the product of their unconditional love and support.

Throughout the completion of this book I have come to understand that it is a reflection of my experiences as an immigrant and my search for my own personal narrative. Much like the transnational perspective provided in the chapters that follow, the completion of this book was the culmination of a transnational personal story, one that first brought me to the United States and then led me back to Guatemala. I had to go away in order to come back to my native country. This book has led me back, and by that I’m immensely blessed. I’m also infinitely grateful to those mentioned above, for they have pushed me forward—and continue to do so—in this ongoing journey.

Map of Guatemala from a papal document from 1950. Source: Correspondencia, 1920–1964: Emiliano Castellani a Mariano Rossell Arellano, Guatemala, April 2, 1950. Fondo diocesano. Archivo arzobispal. Monseñor Mariano Rossell. Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Guatemala.

Introduction

On December 21, 1967, the Guatemalan government expelled from the country four Catholic missioners. The four clerics—Sister Marian Peter, Blasé Bonpane, and the brothers Arthur and Thomas Melville—were members of the U.S.-based Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America, better known as Maryknoll. During the preceding months, the Maryknollers had joined a small number of radicalized laypeople who concluded that the solution to Guatemala’s long-standing history of political exclusion, social inequality, and institutionalized racism resided in the formation of a Christian-inspired revolutionary movement. A new generation of socially committed clerics and lay activists, they believed, would lead this armed revolution. These revolutionary Christians planned to join the Marxist-inspired insurgency that had emerged earlier in the decade in the eastern part of the country while at the same time retaining their Christian identity. This Catholic movement did not materialize in the late 1960s, for news of the missioners’ radicalized posture soon reached Maryknoll authorities and officials at the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City. Shortly thereafter the four American missioners were forced to leave the country and boarded a plane headed for Miami.¹

The expulsion of the Maryknollers took place against the background of an emerging progressive religious and social movement within the Catholic Church that took much inspiration from the theological opening inaugurated by Pope John XXIII (1958–1963) and his call for an ecumenical international council. This meeting, collectively known as the Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, brought together Church leaders, prominent theologians, and laypeople from around the globe in a series of gatherings between 1962 and 1965. Vatican II marked a theological shift within the global Church, for it encouraged clerics and lay Catholics to engage modernity and people’s spiritual and social realities. In Latin America, these transformations coalesced during the second meeting of the Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano (Conference of Latin American Bishops), held in 1968 in Medellín, Colombia. This gathering gave Latin American Catholics the religious and social perspective for adapting and applying Vatican II’s conclusions to the social and political circumstances of the region. It equipped them with the language to articulate a new set of pastoral priorities, in the process leading many Catholics to denounce socioeconomic inequality, political exclusion, and other forms of oppression. Thus, a new generation of Catholic activists emerged as advocates of a progressive religious trajectory, which was partly encapsulated by liberation theology and its accompanying preferential option for the poor posture. During the 1970s, this socially conscious generation of Catholics became radicalized by the violence brought about by the Cold War and often joined various local and transnational social and political movements.²

This narrative about Latin American Catholicism serves as a reminder of the transformative effects of Vatican II and the Medellín conference. It highlights how Catholics, inspired by global and regional developments, took an active role in advancing a variety of social causes. In addition, it has given scholars a framework for situating the Latin American Church within the context of increasingly polarized and militarized societies. For, as they have reminded us, the proponents of liberation theology carried out their pastoral work in the midst of—and oftentimes in opposition to—state-sponsored violence during the Cold War.³ Sister Marian Peter, Bonpane, the Melville brothers, and other socially committed Catholics were no exceptions in this respect. Their progressive pastoral position and subsequent radicalization were part and parcel of the religious and political changes affecting the Guatemalan and, more broadly, the Latin American Church in the aftermath of World War II.

Despite its interpretative value, this Vatican II–centric canvas—which posits Vatican II and Medellín as watershed moments—sheds little light on the historical circumstances that nurtured the religious and social environment that fostered a progressive Catholic ethos. It fails to clarify why national churches whose leaders espoused patently conservative and anticommunist positions and generally supported military regimes eventually produced a grassroots generation of Catholics who challenged Latin America’s religious, social, and political traditions and structures. Thus, as Daniel H. Levine reminded us in 1992, the common impression that Vatican II was the sole source and spark for change in the Latin American churches requires modification.⁴ In the case of Guatemala, a perspective that considers Vatican II and the Medellín conference as turning points at the expense of other historical narratives obscures the long-term context that explains why clerics and lay Catholics alike became committed to transforming their societies through the lenses of a Christian-inspired religious position. It does not fully illuminate, moreover, how and why a not-insignificant number of Catholic missioners and laypeople surfaced as active participants in the Cold War, pushed forward a progressive brand of Catholicism, became advocates of a new social order, and supported or joined armed revolutionary movements.

In this study, I take a broad transnational approach that spans the five decades from the 1920s to the 1960s and moves beyond, but does not discount, national boundaries—in the process reconstructing the ideological and institutional connections between Rome and Guatemalan Catholicism—as a way to uncover the origins of progressive Catholicism. A transnational history, as Stephen J. C. Andes and Julia G. Young have recently argued, emphasizes the interconnections, shared symbols, and intertwined mobilization that characterized the Catholic activist movements in Latin America, even before Vatican II.⁵ A transnational lens is particularly relevant for the study of Guatemalan Catholicism, for, as Susanne H. Rudolph has reminded us, religious communities are among the oldest of transnationals.⁶ I argue that the aforementioned transformations within the Guatemalan Church were propelled by the institutional renewal of rural Catholicism, which dates back to the interwar period when a reconfiguration of national and international politics created new spaces for the Church’s resurgence. This changing landscape, largely spurred by Vatican activism, paved the way for the transnational movement of foreign missionary groups such as Maryknoll, the formation of a myriad of lay Catholic associations, and the crystallization of a grassroots progressive religious spirit in the countryside. In tracing this history, I emphasize the multilayered and oftentimes contentious interaction between Church authorities, clerics, and laypeople both within and beyond the context of Guatemala, and I contend that religion—that is, religious institutions and the lived experiences that sustain them—must be understood as both a reflection of societal processes and a force of change (and social reform) in the modern period.

Research on these themes has taken place within fairly limited discussions about Guatemalan Catholicism during the twentieth century. Generally speaking, the existing historiography has moved into two divergent trajectories. One group of scholars has taken an institutional approach, focusing on the history of Church-state relations, and the anti-liberal, anti-secular, and anticommunist rhetoric espoused by Church leaders before and during the Cold War. These studies, which have examined Guatemalan Catholicism through the lens of national politics, have described the rise of the Church as a conservative force that generally opposed political democracy and left-of-center social and political ideologies.⁷ From this analytical vantage point, Guatemalan Catholicism emerges as a static, if not reactionary, institution invariably trapped in its own conservative past, and, as a result, the progressive Church of the postwar period appears as an unexpected occurrence. A second interpretative framework, mostly taken by anthropologists, has focused on the history of Catholicism at the local level. Interested in examining religious change among indigenous communities, these scholars have traced the rise of a multireligious landscape inhabited by conflicting groups, particularly Maya traditionalists, a new cadre of Church-sanctioned lay Catholic associations, and a small yet expanding number of Protestant converts. They attribute these religious transformations first to increased political activity during the Cold War and second to a series of modernizing trends that affected the nature of social and economic relations among Maya communities. These factors set the stage for the erosion of traditional religious and political hierarchies and the modernization of indigenous people.⁸ Yet this scholarship, which provides important local perspectives of Catholicism and gives prominence to the history of conflict at the parish level, tells us little about how religious ruptures at the community level related to national or global developments, what conditions gave rise to a generation of progressive-minded Catholics in Huehuetenango for whom the spiritual realm mattered as much as daily material realities, and why the postwar Church became a major religious and social force in the countryside before and after Vatican II.⁹

TRANSNATIONAL CATHOLICISM, ROMANIZATION, AND RENEWAL

This study pivots on the argument that we cannot understand religious change at the national and community levels, and, for that matter, the origins of progressive Catholicism prior to the 1970s, without first employing a transnational approach, one that forces us to look at the historical links between the Church of Rome and Guatemalan Catholicism. The rebirth of Catholicism and the roots of the aforementioned progressive religious trajectory began not in 1962, with the opening sessions of Vatican II, nor in 1968, with the beginning of the Medellín conference, but in the interwar years. In 1920 the Guatemalan Church was a frail institution. It had lost most, if not all, of its political and economic clout as a consequence of the triumph of Liberalism in the late nineteenth century. Led by Justo Rufino Barrios, Liberals saw the Church’s power as an impediment to the material progress of the nation and as contrary to their vision of a secular nation-state. During the 1870s they implemented an anticlerical program that effectively put an end to the prominence Catholicism had enjoyed since colonial times. Liberals nationalized Church property, suppressed religious orders, expelled foreign clerics, created a secular educational system, and enshrined the separation of church and state. In the wake of this program, the Church became a ghost of its former self. By 1925, there were only ninety-four Catholic pastors for a population of two million inhabitants. Nowhere was this institutional weakness more evident than in the countryside, where a small number of clerics attended to the spiritual needs of communities scattered across extensive terrain. As a result, the rural population, particularly Maya indigenous peoples, embraced vastly localized sets of religious beliefs and practices, so that by the turn of the twentieth century numerous expressions of popular religiosity had developed almost autonomously from the Church’s sacramental life.¹⁰

During the interwar period, Church officials undertook a reform program intended to regain control of this unsanctioned religious landscape. They embarked on an era of expansion and renewal, primarily by establishing closer and often cordial relations with the Guatemalan state. The fruits of this Church-state rapprochement became most evident during the 1930s and 1940s, when religious leaders—particularly Luis Durou y Sure (1928–1938) and Mariano Rossell y Arellano (1939–1964)—implemented a series of reforms aimed at redefining the priesthood, promoting a sacrament-driven form of Catholicism, expanding the number of clerics in the country, and creating lay associations as a way of integrating the laity more fully into the structures of the Church. By the end of World War II, a number of initiatives meant to spur the Church’s institutional growth and revitalization were in place.

The major force behind these reforms came not from the Guatemalan Church or Maya communities in the countryside, but rather from the Vatican. With few exceptions, the historiography of Guatemalan Catholicism remains silent regarding the dimensions of papal influence prior to Vatican II. Hubert J. Miller, in a 1996 article, documented the presence of papal representatives and their interactions with Guatemalan religious and political leaders. He attributes these contacts to a softening or decline of anticlerical politics during the interwar years.¹¹ This book builds upon Miller’s article but goes further by situating the history of the Guatemalan Church within the context of the centralization of papal power. I contend that Vatican activism stood at the center of a Church-state rapprochement during the interwar period and the subsequent resurgence of Catholicism. Papal authorities had long viewed Latin America as evangelization area, where the Church had to work to reclaim the religious and social spaces it had lost as a result of anticlericalism, the dissemination of secular values, and the appearance of leftist political doctrines. During the first decades of the twentieth century Vatican officials, inculcated in the doctrine of papal infallibility, sought to spur a revival of Catholic culture in Guatemala and expand the pope’s power over the national church. Pius XI (1922–1939) and Pius XII (1939–1958) spearheaded a religious campaign designed, above all, to forge a new political pact—a modus vivendi—between the Church and the Liberal state. This policy culminated in 1936 with the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Vatican and the dictatorial regime headed by Jorge Ubico (1931–1944). This political reconfiguration had long-lasting effects. For one, it turned the Church into an apolitical actor that generally favored political cooperation with government officials and thus remained silent about the social and political matters of the day. This explains why Archbishop Rossell, an ardent anticommunist crusader who espoused a hierarchical social order, became one of the most reliable ideological supporters of the status quo as embodied by Ubico’s dictatorship.

This period of Church-state convergence gave papal officials and Guatemalan clerics the freedom to actively support the resurgence of the Church. They did so by promoting the immigration of European and American missioners who were summoned to expand a Romanized vision of Catholicism, one that placed sacramentalism at the core of the Church’s life. Romanization—and the Church’s resurgence—was both an ideological and an institutional process, for it gave the Church of Rome greater control over the institutional growth of Guatemalan Catholicism and brought Catholic practice closer to a Romanized (and Europeanized) practice of religion.¹² Thus, beginning in the 1940s, a small contingent of foreign missioners, including the members of Maryknoll, began to arrive in the western highlands. Historically, this rural region, which consists of a series of mountain ranges extending from the central to the western part of the country, has been inhabited by the majority of the country’s indigenous Maya population and a small population of mixed descent, popularly known as ladinos.¹³ The presence of foreign clerics in the highlands meant that the main force behind the twentieth-century revival of Catholicism came from the outside. It stemmed from the centripetal nature of papal power.

Using recently declassified and previously unexplored archival documents located in Vatican City and Guatemala City, I examine the ideological and institutional ties between Rome and Guatemalan Catholicism. I seek to uncover the process by which the pope’s diplomats emerged as key religious figures during the 1920s and 1930s. These officials formed part of an expanding network of international envoys who became the face of a Romanized religious vision. They advanced a hierarchical and sacrament-based worldview, which, as we shall see, became the driving force behind the institutional revival of the Guatemalan Church. This is not to say that Guatemalan clerics (and lay Catholics) passively accepted the dictates of Rome or that Romanization did not have its limits. The first two chapters of this study examine the rift that developed between Vatican diplomats and Guatemalan clerics. This conflict, which revolved around alternative definitions of Catholic practice, brought to the fore long-established divisions within the Church. Yet, perhaps ironically, the weakened condition of the Church assured the ascendancy of papal power and the Romanization of Catholicism.

In focusing on the effects of Vatican influence, this book joins an expanding scholarship on the transnational dimensions of Catholicism. Church historians have called attention, to borrow Peter R. D’Agostino’s phrase, to the transnational networks that linked Rome and national churches and the concomitant centralization of papal power in the context of anticlerical, secular, and materialist movements.¹⁴ The celebration of the First Vatican Council (1869–1870) and the subsequent proclamation of the so-called social encyclicals, particularly Rerum Novarum (1892) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931), signaled the hegemony of the Church of Rome.¹⁵ Such development sparked a revival of Catholic culture, which in the case of Latin America resulted in the expansion of the clergy, the creation of a new generation of lay associations, and a more public—although not always political—role played by the Church. In the process, the Latin American Church increasingly became a Romanized Church, that is, an institution that closely mirrored the sacramentalized religious vision put forward by papal authorities.¹⁶ Papal envoys, this study contends, were at the heart of the Romanization of the Latin American Church.

A transnational approach sheds light not only on the roots and impact of Romanization, but also on the history of Church-state relations. Papal officials stood at the center of the emergent modus vivendi. They acted as intermediaries between government officials and Church leaders, thus surfacing as religious and, in certain cases, political interlocutors, although they generally opposed political activism. Vatican diplomats supported engagement with the state, which resulted in a triangular relationship whereby the pope’s representatives interacted with religious and political authorities. In the process they worked to create amicable relations between national churches and dictatorial regimes.¹⁷ The impact of papal diplomacy on the Church-state rapprochement of this period was not unique to Latin America, for during the 1920s and 1930s the Vatican also spearheaded a new period of Church-state collaboration in Europe.¹⁸ Seen from this vantage point, the history of Church-state relations emerges as part of a regional and global trend and, more precisely, as invariably