Carrying the Cross: Popular Christian Communities and Religious Protest during Pinochet's Dictatorship, 1973–90

Abstract

This article examines the activities of Comunidades Cristianas Populares (Popular Christian Communities, CCPs) in marginalised neighbourhoods of Chile's capital, Santiago, during the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. It traces how the CCPs emerged, thrived and then stopped, to showcase the uneasy co-existence between liberationist practices espoused by popular sectors and traditional ecclesiastical paradigms until their breaking point in 1990. In doing so, I argue that religious ritual is an important form of social protest against authoritarianism. Public processions exposed tensions between the Church and state, within the Church's diverse constituents, as well as between Christian community members and left-wing party militants. In the late 1980s, as the Church increasingly retreated from liberation theology, the dictatorship successfully co-opted social organisations and rendered religious rituals largely ineffective as a form of social protest.