Unorthodox Fate: The Rise of Chile’s Christian Democratic Party

Abstract

This essay is a theoretical and historical analysis of how and why Chile’s political Catholicism followed a unique course of development during the first half of the twentieth century. For most part of modern history, Catholicism and democratic Liberalism were antithetical worldviews; however, during the first decades of the twentieth century, political Catholicism in Chile followed a political path that embraced the basic tenet of Liberalism, postponing political polarization, violence, and authoritarianism which had engulfed other Catholic societies. In the earliest phase of the Chilean Christian Democratic Party, from 1934 to1941, two groups of individuals fought an ideological battle over opposing conceptions of society. The democratic faction of the young Catholic party, led by Eduardo Frei Montalva, prevailed against the Fascism-inspired group. That was the beginning of the first successful Catholic Democratic party in modern history. The principal purpose of this essay is to explain why Chile’s political Catholicism followed a unique historical path in the early decades of the twentieth century. For that purpose, this study will historically reconstruct the ideological conflicts and the role of theological conceptions in the early phase of the Chilean Christian Democratic Party during the years 1920–1945, and use several theoretical traditions, including network theory and Max Weber’s theory of religious orientations, to explain why the democratic faction became the ultimate victor of these ideological conflicts.