The twenty-first century put one of its spotlights on Latin America when the 2013 conclave named Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope. Francisco, as he chose to call himself, would be the first Latin American to be named Pope and also the first Jesuit in the Pontificate. The fact that a Latin American was constituted Bishop of Rome was not a matter of chance; this fact came to show the social and theological fruits of this continent 521 years after the arrival of the conquerors and their religion in the lands of America.

Since the mid-twentieth century, the Latin American Catholic Church as a block had been processing its own theological history and interpretation. Latin America was experiencing the political tension of right-wing governments, some of them military dictatorships, and governments of left-wing movements highly monitored by the USA. From Mexico to Patagonia, poverty, coupled with a demographic explosion in the area and the increasing trend of human mobility from the countryside to the cities, led the bishops to seek consensus in the region to work together.

As we will analyse, in Latin American Catholicism the long, medium and short durations of times intermingle to generate the present and give an originality to culture and Christianity. This is especially clear in the case of popular Catholicism and even Pentecostalism, which continue to draw on the early experiences of Christianity in these lands and the symbiosis between Christianity and local spiritual traditions.

Episcopal Conferences

Following in time and its own style, according to those constitutive elements that characterise the Latin American and Caribbean church, a church emerged seeded with real networks of interaction with concrete and challenging objectives, an advanced conception of pastoral life in ecclesial assembly and ecclesial communities. Undoubtedly, as Leonidas Ortiz affirms, the sixteenth-century Limean and Mexican councils, the many that followed and the Latin American Plenary Council of the late nineteenth century were true ‘precursor milestones’. In the twentieth century, with greater emphasis, the founding in 1942 of the Episcopal Secretariat of Central America (SEDAC) emerged. In Río de Janeiro in 1955, CELAM, the Latin American Episcopal Council, was founded.