Montevideo still has old buses of 1890 vintage, ‘made in England’ and lovingly maintained. When Europe expanded in the nineteenth century, Latin America quickly caught the imagination of businessmen, whilst Christians were looking towards the new mission fields of Africa, Asia, Oceania. Did they really need to worry about this ‘Christian continent’ which had been baptized when it was colonized in the sixteenth century? But suddenly the spell broke: Latin America was in peril. Communism threatened, there were too few priests, sects menaced the integrity of the churches: all this impinged brusquely about twelve years ago. With the result that Latin America came to the forefront of pre-occupation. New organizations appeared: C.E.L.A.M. (Bishops’ Council for Latin America, 1955) and the pontifical commission for Latin America at Rome in 1960. (We might note in passing that it was also in 1960 that the Alliance for Progress was launched, designed to show that ‘free men, working within the framework of democratic institutions, are better able to satisfy human aspirations than regimes like that of Cuba’: so spoke the Charter of Punto del Este, a year after Fidel Castro’s seizure of power in the January of 1959.) A new channel was opened, with its source in Europe (one need think only of such West German organizations as Adveniat, Misereor, Caritas) and the U.S.A.: money and men, priests, lay people and religious. The Council insisted on the necessary sharing between rich and poor churches, each bishop being responsible for the whole of the Church in virtue of the principle of collegiality.