The field of Latin American Christianity is presently marked by plurality and diversity. Each denomination has its own distinctive understanding of gender relations and leadership building, making it difficult to address women's leadership and participation in Christian churches as a whole. This essay focuses principally on women leaders in the Catholic Church and to a lesser extent on mainstream Protestant and Pentecostal church leaders.

Women Leaders in the Catholic Church

Leadership by women in the Catholic Church is constructed through many mechanisms and supported through different structures that frame diverse women's groups. In this essay I focus mainly on one of these groups: women religious. By addressing them I intend to analyse the tensions in gender relations within the Catholic Church. I will also consider the leadership offered by lay women in the church, without going into too much detail on their particular dynamics.

Women religious, commonly known as sisters, are consecrated celibate women who live in community. Over the past two centuries they have been playing important roles, from which they construct their leadership both within the Catholic Church and in the wider society. They sustain many church activities in and out of the parishes, related to Christian formation and to liturgical and missionary activities. They play very important roles in sustaining worship in local communities and advancing the ministry of the church. However, they do not enjoy the level of institutional recognition that is given to priests.

Women religious have also played important social roles through their contributions in the fields of education, health and assistance for vulnerable sectors of the population. In the educational field, they established and ran thousands of schools all over Latin America. At a time when education was expanding in the region (in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), they founded Catholic schools, most of them only for female students, thus fostering greater social inclusion for girls. Many other sisters have been providing professional and spiritual assistance in hospitals, mental health units, orphanages and old people's homes.

Since the late twentieth century, sisters have also been choosing new forms of ministry inspired by a greater commitment to social justice.