In the Absence of Priests: Young Women as Apostles to the Poor, Chile 1922–1932

Abstract

The Roman Catholic Church in Chile first acknowledged its inability to pastor its flock in the 1920s because of an acute shortage of priests. Alberto Hurtado Cruchaga, SJ addressed the clerical crisis in a 1936 article,La Crisis Sacerdotal en Chile. When critics found his analysis “exaggerated,” he conducted a survey of Chilean religious practices and published the findings in a controversial essay entitledEs Chile un país católico?which is said to have earned him the wrath of the hierarchy because it called attention to the woeful neglect of pastoral duties especially among the rural and working class populations. This empirical data demonstrated that the Catholic Church in Chile had 1615 priests, of whom 780 were secular and 835 regular clergy; of the same 1615 priests 915 were Chilean and 700 were foreigners. There were 451 parishes, some of which contained several towns and villages scattered over a thousand square kilometers with 10,000 parishioners to be ministered to by a single priest. Hurtado's solution—a larger and better-educated clergy—was a long-term solution to an urgent problem that would never be achieved. Something had to be done immediately to keep the faith alive. In the gendered world of Chilean Catholicism, the task of preserving the faith fell to young laywomen.