The twenty-first century has brought rapid changes in the relationship between religion and politics in Latin America. The secularization process that accompanied the new constitutionalism arising after democratization in the late twentieth century was accompanied by a decline in the number of people who considered themselves Catholic in the region. However, although the institution progressively lost its leading role, it did not disappear from the public scene. Its voice became equal to that of other actors who had previously stood behind it. Ecclesial processes such as the Fifth General Conference of the Latin American and Caribbean Episcopate (2007) did not have the political prominence of Medellín (1968) or Puebla (1978), but it did allow Latin American agendas to be discussed in the light of candles and cassocks. New ecclesial leaderships emerged or reappeared on the scene, as was the case with the Metropolitan Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Bergoglio. The rise of this man, who became Pope Francis in April 2013, once again drew the attention of the Catholic world to Latin America, precisely coinciding with the end of the commodity and raw materials price boom, as well as with the decline of the so-called pink tide, that surge of left-wing governments whose precursor was Hugo Chávez.
How have relations between states, social movements and the Catholic Church changed during this first quarter of the century? What have been the patterns of relationship between ecclesial movements and the structures of the Catholic Church with these states, which, although they have become secular, still maintain a strong Christian-Catholic tradition? How much did Pope Francis’s papacy influence these reconfigurations?
