The Catholic Church in the Nicaraguan revolution: a Gramscian analysis.
Sociology of Religion › Vol. 58 Nbr. 1, March 1997
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The Catholic Church in the Nicaraguan revolution: a Gramscian analysis.
The Nicaraguan revolution(1) is unique because it was the first revolution in history which involved the active and continuing participation of large numbers of Christians as Christians. While both Catholics and Protestants played a significant role in the revolutionary process, particularly intriguing are the intricacies of the Catholic Church's participation both before and after the triumph of the Sandinistas in 1979. Though traditionally most of the institutional Church had given its uncritical support to the country's dictatorial elites, in the mid-1960s the sectors challenging the system of repressive rule began to grow. Through a complex process, by the time the Sandinistas marched victorious into Managua on 19 July 1979, virtually the entire Church - from laity to the Archbishop - appeared briefly to be on their side. The development of this novel alliance and the manner in which it deteriorated throughout the 1980s has fascinated scholars ever since and has led to the publication of a small mountain of books and articles on the subject (see the literature review in Brett 1993).
For all the detail and sophistication of many of these treatments, however, certain errors in analysis and interpretation are frequently made. For example, as Gismondi (1986: 13-14) notes, some commentators cite the religious factor as "crucial" or a "moving force in the overthrow" without adequately recognizing that religious forces did not uniformly promote the Sandinistas. Other scholars (e.g., Bakhtiari 1986; Gilbert 1988), while making the essential distinction between the base and the hierarchy in the Church, fail to search deeply enough for the underlying logic of each faction's position and hence risk distorting or oversimplifying the nature of both Church-Sandinista and intra-Church relations. Thus, some appear to assume that post-Vatican II innovations and liberation theology were chiefly responsible for the participation of the base in the revolution. By emphasizing narrowly religiou...See the full content of this document
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