The Impact of Religion in Central America: A Bibliographical Essay
Prior to the last two decades most scholars paid little attention to the Central American Catholic Church, viewing it in general as little more than a benevolent arm of the elite power structure or as an anachronistic institution intent on regaining privileges it lost during the nineteenth-century Liberal reforms. Traditionally conservative, its sacerdotal leadership had long accepted without question the medieval notions of church-state cooperation and social inequality. Such a mentality had led to a paternalistic approach to the poor. Rejecting as un-Christian all concepts of class conflict, the church believed the lower classes should be patient and ought not take it upon themselves to attempt to better their own condition. Instead, a well- ordered society was seen as a cooperative, top-down venture in which the upper class worked with the church to ameliorate the condition of the masses.