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The Political Impact on Religious Development in Uruguay

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Russell H. Fitzgibbon
Russell H. Fitzgibbon
Affiliation:
University of California at Los Angeles
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Extract

It is an easy and not an essentially inaccurate generalization to say that Latin America is a Catholic world. If we begin to apply the generalization more narrowly, caution and reservations become increasingly necessary. In parts of Haiti, for example, the Catholic veneer is thin. A useful book about Mexico published some years ago carried the intriguing title Idols Behind Altars. Its author did not mean the connotation exactly as it sounds but she might have so meant it. In large parts of Indo-America, especially in those areas such as the Andean highlands and parts of Central America and southern Mexico where the pre-Columbian Indian cultures were best developed and most tenacious, Catholicism has had to make a degree of accommodation which adopted and adapted various pagan practices. The same process occurred about a millennium earlier when Christianity moved into pagan Germany.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , March 1953 , pp. 21 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1953

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References

1. But a strongly Catholic layman, a franquista Spanish diplomat in Uruguay, wrote a few years ago that “Catholic Urguayans do not appear to form a majority among its citizens.” La Orden, Vide Ernesto, Uruguay, el Benjamén de Espa a;, p. 296Google Scholar. Not only would it seem that Catholics represent a minority but there is evidence that they are at least relatively declining in numbers.

2. The national census of 1908 (the latest taken in Uruguay, although another is scheduled for 1952) included certain data on religious affiliations. The total population of 1,042,686 was classified as follows: Catholic, 637,681 (61.16 per cent); Protestant, 16,498 (1.58 per cent); freethinkers, 150,669 (14.45 per cent); unspecified or “without religion,” 237,- 838 (22.82 per cent). The total number of inhabitants more than fourteen years of age (the usual age of confirmation) was 614,222. They were classified: Catholics, 430,095 (70.02 per cent); Protestant, 12,232 (1.99 per cent); freethinkers, 126,425 (30.59 per cent); unspecified or “without religion,” 45,470 (7.4 per cent).

3. Some persons account for this on the basis of the degree of sophistication of the Uruguayan population which allegedly leads them to forego formalistic or, some would say, “superstitious” manifestations.