Soñar la iglesia con el Concilio en la mano. Circulation and appropriation of radical theologies in the Argentine intellectual field in the 1960s and 1970s.?

ZANCA, JOSÉ ANTONIO

Lovaina

Conferencia; Conference Progressive Catholicism in Latin America and Europe 1950s?1980s. Social Movements and Transnational Encounters; 2018

KADOC-KU Leuven, Documentation and Research Centre on Religion, Culture and Society (Lovaina, Bégica).

The 1960s were characterized by a deep crisis of modern values. There was a general mutation of forms of authority (political, ethical, religious, intellectual, etc.). Religions, which had played a conservative role in the West, also became agents of that transformation. Religion was a vector of political reflection and the political effects of decolonization, the Cuban Revolution and the Vietnam War also impacted religious discourse.In Christian thought (both Catholic and evangelical) various theologies emerged that sought to "accommodate" the image of God to a world marked by the pre-eminence of the "secular city." The 1960s was marked by the appearance of a series of books - such as The Human Phenomenon and The Divine Milieu of the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ, The Secular City of Protestant Theologian Harvey Cox or Honest to God of the Anglican John Robinson - in Which were positively assumed the transformations acquired by modernity, particulary, the sovereignty of the individual.The historiography of this period has concluded that such innovations had little repercussion in Argentina. According to these readings, the Vatican II Council in Latin America in general - and in Argentina in particular - would have had political-centered appropriation, leaving strictly religious debates in the background. This paper aims to clarify these views, analyzing the circulation and local appropriation of different versions of radical theologies originating in the United States and Europe. This survey reveals, first, that far from being two separate continents (that of "European" concerns and that of "Latin American" concerns), there is no Latin American thought unlinked to the debates of the old continent. We argue that the theological liberationism of the 1970s should be read as a continuation of these radical theologies, which recognized in secularization a positive social process for religion. Secondly, in more general terms, the radicalized discourse of theologians far from being a "step back", in an anti-modern ideological key, responds to a more complex relationship with modernity. In the preoccupations of radical theology the symptoms of the crisis of modernity, the criticisms of the illustrated project, are exposed in an interpellation proper to the dawn of postmodernity.The analysis is based on Argentine theological discourses, mostly priests or former priests. We have analyzed a set of periodical publications, representative of the most important areas of circulation and sociability of the Catholic intellectual field, trying to cross a broad ideological spectrum, from the 1960s to the 1970s. The journals Stromata and Estudios, both belonging to the Jesuit cultural field, have been analyzed. The first was the successor to the journal Ciencia y fe, which began in 1939, which brought together the Faculty of Philosophy and the Faculty of Theology of the University of Salvador. Both worked in the Seminary of San Miguel, main center of formation of the Jesuits and an effervescent area of the Latin American theological culture of the sixties. Estudios, on the other hand, was a publication founded in 1911 as organ of the Academia literaria del Plata, an institution created and intimately linked to ex alumni of the School of El Salvador. We also analyze Teología magazine. It was founded in 1962, when the Jesuit fathers relinquished control of the metropolitan seminary to the secular clergy. It became, until this day, the magazine of the Faculty of Theology of the Universidad Católica Argentina. In the years of the Council and post-concilium it became an area of debate, incorporation and elaboration of a new Latin American theology. Finally the magazine Cristianismo y revolución has been incorporated. This publication has been analyzed as a political publication in several works, in recent years. Its editors were linked to the first members of the Montoneros guerrilla organization. However, the discursive practice of the journal is crossed by the logic of religious discourse, and in no case fails to maintain a dialogue - clearly hostile - with the hierarchy of the church.