Canada/Latin America: Catholic Networks and Communitarian Paths – Co-operativism, Community Development, and Christian Base Communities, 1940s-1970s.

• In Event: Revolutions of the Saints: The Politics of Religion in Latin America’s Long Cold War: Panel II

Abstract

Canada too participated in the Cold War, during which time new Catholic forms of connection to Latin America took both developmentalist and prophetical forms. Having taken root in several Canadian regions during the Great Depression, co-operativism took a particularly dynamic form in the Catholic Antigonish movement of Nova Scotia that, in the 1950s and early 1960s, sent offshoots into several Caribbean, Central and South American countries through the initiative of Canadian Catholic missionaries and of Latin American priests and lay people. Some of the rural Catholic co-operatives became the foundation of government-sponsored community development programs funded by the Alliance for Progress and the Canadian Agency for International Development, particularly in areas of agrarian reform. Others instead metamorphosized into Christian base communities and Christian social movements espousing revolutionary structural transformation. This paper explores inter-American Catholic debates about “community” and “development” that emerged during the Cold War and how and why transnational links between Canadian and Latin American actors – religious and non-religious -- took divergent political trajectories in different Latin American localities.

Author

• Catherine C LeGrand, McGill University