Contemporary Catholicism, Religious Pluralism, and Democracy in Latin America

For a detailed conference description, click here.

Click here for conference agenda.

In many Latin American countries, the advent of democracy has removed the need to fight against the abuse of human rights for political purposes, taking away a cause that had united Catholic leaders and their supporters. Today, democracy has unleashed demands for many sound policies that run counter to the Church's teachings, at a time when the religious hegemony of the Catholic Church has eroded. These challenges were at the heart of the conference on "Contemporary Catholicism, Religious Pluralism, and Democracy in Latin America: Challenges, Responses, and Impact," held at Kellogg on March 31 and April 1, 2005. Kellogg Faculty Fellow Frances Hagopian, a political science professor at Notre Dame, directed this effort.

At the conference, distinguished scholars met practitioners-Catholic lay and clerical leaders-in a multi-stage approach to addressing the Catholic Church's ordeals in Latin America. Six panels contributed to identifying the challenges, charting Catholic responses, and assessing their impact on the Church and on democratic politics. Four of the six panels were composed of a scholar and a practitioner, with special care taken to include at least one Latin American panelist in each of the sessions.

The conference was made possible by generous funding from The Coca-Cola Company and was co-sponsored by Catholic Relief Services and the Secretariat for the Church in Latin America of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), as well as Notre Dame's Erasmus Institute, the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, and the Henkels Lecture Series of the Institute for Scholarship in Liberal Arts (ISLA). It is part of an ambitious multi-year program, "Kellogg Religion Initiative: Comparative Study of Catholicism in Latin America."

For information on the 2003 religion workshop, click here.