User talk:Karanacs/RCC Proposal

Some stuff on Latin America
Given that this is an area of some expertise for me (though I don't claim to be an expert in the 19th-century, or in church-state relations, or on Mexico, for instance)... Here's a rough draft of a much reduced summary-style paragraph on 19th- and early 20th-century Latin America. NB I don't have time to seek out sources.


 * In Latin America, after most of the continent had won independence from Spain in the 1820s, the 19th-century was marked by conflicts between Conservatives and Liberals. Conservatives usually sought to protect the traditional powers of the Church; Liberals were set on modernization, and sometimes introduced anti-clerical reforms, which were particularly harsh in Mexico in the 1860s.  In many ways, these struggles were, however, the continuation of tensions between secular and religious authority that had already marked the colonial period.  In the first half of the 20th-century, a new set of populist and national liberation movements arose, for instance with the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1915 and Argentine Peronism in the 1940s and 1950s.  The post-revolutionary Mexican government was particularly noted for its anti-clericalism (between 1926 and 1934, over 3,000 priests were exiled or assassinated), and provoked a rural uprising known as the Cristero War.  The Peronists were originally supported by the Church, but turned against it in the final years of Perón's first regime.  By the second half of the 20th-century, with the rise of liberation theology, some sectors of the Church were much more sympathetic to liberation and nationalist movements.

OK, so in the end it's not much shorter. NB, however, that there's a problem in that section with the timeline jumping ahead and then back again: really, the Cristero war has nothing much to do with the liberal regimes of the 1860s. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 18:07, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

Oh, and... the pre-19th century account of Latin America should include the explusion of the Jesuits. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 18:08, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

Colonial history
The section on the colonial history of the Americas is also ugly, and marked both by POV wars and general... well, ignorance. Any such account that omits Las Casas is reprehensible. Here's an attempt to rewrite and cut down...


 * Through the late 15th and early 16th centuries, European colonizers spread Catholicism around the world, particularly to the Americas which Pope Alexander VI had divided between Spain and Portugal.[56] The Americas saw extensive abuse and genocide of the native inhabitants. Though the Church was often complicit in these atrocities, it was also one of the few institutions that defended native rights. As early as December 1511, the Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos openly rebuked the Spanish authorities governing Hispaniola for their mistreatment of the American natives, telling them "... you are in mortal sin ... for the cruelty and tyranny you use in dealing with these innocent people".  Inspired by this message, the Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas devoted his life to the defense of the indigenous people.  In a set-piece debate in Spain with the jurist Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, he argued that the Spanish crown had a duty of care to those it had conquered, and that its motivation should be christianization rather than simply rapacious greed. Spain enacted measures such as the Laws of Burgos and Valladolid in response to such opposition; though enforcement was lax, indigenous people did have defined rights.  An outpouring of self-criticism and philosophical reflection among Catholic theologians, most notably Francisco de Vitoria, led to debate on the nature of human rights[60] and the birth of modern international law.[62]  The Church was also notable for its interest in studying indigenous culture (it is mostly thanks to churchmen that we have any records of pre-Columbian beliefs), and in educating native peoples, if for its own purposes.

OK, again so I did a rather poorer job of cutting down. There should of course be a separate article on The Church in Latin America, or similar. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 18:21, 19 June 2008 (UTC)