The new evangelization in Latin American perspective

the church knows and preaches that any social transformation must of necessity take place through the conversion of hearts. That is the church's first and main mission. There must be an emphatic arousal of the moral conscience of all human beings . . . so as to make them sensitive to the demands of justice and prompt them to really meet those demands.(12)

In this context, socio-political consciousness-raising through the see-judge-act method gives way to a spiritual awakening and an appeal to traditional Catholic charity more in line with movements such as the Charismatic renewal.

For post-Medellin progressive Catholics, the option for the poor meant positioning the church within specific struggles for economic justice and political participation. In contrast, the pope's reaffirmation of the "transcendent dignity of the human person" stresses the need to respect freedom of religion, a concern that emerges in part from John Paul II's experience in Eastern Europe. By reformulating the option for the poor in abstract, mainly moralistic and religious terms, the church can preserve its unity and universality without getting involved in the fractious world of class politics. It can claim to be faithful to Vatican II's call for openness toward the world, especially the laity, while trying to immunize itself from power dynamics in the social world.

This concern for unity and the desire to avoid potentially polarizing divisions is evident in a San Salvador parish we studied. The parish has been sharply divided between two Catholic groups: a CEB, which emerged in the early 1970s, and a cofradia (brotherhood), a lay group which espouses a traditional form of folk Catholicism. Over a long and complicated history, the cofradia members and leaders had alienated both laypeople and pastoral workers (including three archbishops) through their refusal to cooperate with progressive pastoral agents. More ominously, some members had close links with military authorities and denounced CEB members as "subversive." As a result, other residents held them responsible for scores of death-squad killings in the neighborhood in the 1970s and '80s.

Pastoral workers did little to reconcile the cofradia members and more progressive parishioners. In fact, pastoral agents generally supported CEB members actively involved in social movements opposed to government repression. This support, in turn, deepened division within the parish. Since the early 1980s, however, a new priest has stressed the need for unity in the parish as the central mission of all Catholics. Some parishioners enthusiastically embraced the call to fellowship, while others, especially long-time CEB members, viewed the drive to join their antagonists in the cofradia with great suspicion. They resented the effort to incorporate the group which, one lay pastoral leader complained, "was so detested by the people."

To carry out his goal to unify the parish, the new priest has concentrated on the promotion of "noncontroversial" activities such as sports programs for the youth. In response to a rise in juvenile delinquency in the neighborhood in the postwar period, the priest sees sports as a strategy to attract truant youths and teach them about values and morality. This San Salvador parish exemplifies the evolution of the option for the poor under the new evangelization: in the face of continuing social dislocation and injustice, the church proposes not structural change, but personal moral conversion for the promotion of local, largely apolitical social projects.