Analytical and Native Concepts in Argentina’s Post-Conciliar Catholicism: The Case of “Liberationism”, “Popular Pastoral Theology”, and “Theology of the People”

Abstract

“Liberationism”, a term derived from Liberation theology (LT), is an analytical concept used by religious historians and sociologists as a generic designation for Latin American post-conciliar Catholicism. “Theology of the People” (TP) designates a theological school created in Argentina during the late 1960s by the Episcopal Pastoral Commission (COEPAL), although the term used by its members was not TP but “Popular Pastoral theology” (TPp). Successive generations of theologians developed new versions of TPp (“popular piety theology”, “theology of culture”, etc.). I call those versions the diachronic variants of TP, and I regard TP as their synchronic representation. TP has been called the “Argentine School of Liberation Theology”, but there are substantial differences between TP and TL. In this paper, I argue that it is inaccurate to use the term “liberationism” to refer to TP because that term alludes to LT’s model of inter-relations between religion and social change, a model explicitly rejected by the creators of TP. I frame the theoretical discussion on the use of analytical and native concepts in Quentin Skinner’s linguistic contextualism perspective and I explain the differences between TP and TL in the context of the theological–political debates in late-1960s Argentina around the issue of popular Catholicism.