Author Description

Milagros Pena investigates how social protest has become a significant aspect of religious ideology throughout Latin America, particularly with the emergence of liberation theology in Peru. Through extensive research of archived documents, newspapers, and interviews with Catholic theologians of all persuasions, including Father Gustavo Gutierrez, and other central figures in Peru's social movements, Pena assesses the fate of liberation theology, its strengths and weaknesses, and the responses of such conservative Catholic movements as Sodalitium Vitae and Opus Dei, with their theology of reconciliation. This in-depth analysis covers the various historical periods of religious action and counter-action in Peru: the Church's control over education and cultural institutions; anticlericalism; the Catholic Action movement; the radicalization of the Catholic Church that produced liberation theology and its support of poor people's causes; and the response of the conservative Catholic right, which, with the support of Pope John Paul II, attacked liberation theology as Marxist and as promoting violence and guerrilla warfare.