Social Science Research Council

"The Catholic Action Movement in Guatemala, 1929-1974"

In June 1954, a CIA-engineered coup d'état overthrew the democratically-elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz. The coup had received full support from the Guatemalan oligarchy, the military and the Catholic Church. Archbishop Mariano Rossell y Arellano, in particular, had used his position as the leader of the church to oppose Arbenz, whose policies he had denounced as “communist.” Indeed, in the previous decade, Rossell y Arellano had opposed the radicalism of the leaders of the October Revolution (1944-1954), a period of unprecedented reform that witnessed the implementation of democratic elections, a social security system, a labor code and a land reform law. It is ironic, however, that the church that opposed the October Revolution and helped depose the reform-minded Arbenz government would in the 1960s become an institution at the forefront of social development, in many cases advancing some of the reforms of the 1944-1954 period.

My dissertation seeks to trace the evolution of church thinking by exploring the activities of Catholic Action, a lay movement formed in the 1930s intended to reverse the institutional and spiritual weakness of the church in urban and rural Guatemala. Archbishop Rossell y Arellano promoted a vision of a hierarchical and Catholic society, thus rejecting what he saw as a state-led movement towards a leveling of society and a communist social order. To this end, he promoted the expansion of the Catholic Action movement, which under the direction of priests and lay missionaries, sought to uproot religious “paganism” and political radicalism. But what was meant to combat the expansion of paganism and communism gradually evolved into an organization primarily dedicated to socioeconomic development. In the late 1950s, Catholic Action, as opposed to focusing purely on “spiritual” matters, became a key pastoral tool of activist priests and lay people, who formed agricultural cooperatives, educational projects, land reform initiatives and other programs intended to promote socio-economic development and social justice among indigenous groups. While priests remained at the forefront of these efforts, lay people, especially catechists, came to play an increasingly greater role within the Catholic Action movement. Tracing how both priests and catechists contributed to the evolution of this shift—from a conservative ideology rooted in the maintenance of the status quo to an ideology espousing socio-economic justice—is at the center of my dissertation.