Politics and the Catholic church in Nicaragua
By: John M. Kirk ; foreword by Phillip Berryman.
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Published: 1992
Place of publication: Gainesville, FL
Language: eng
Number of pages: 246
Subjects: Catholic Church -- Nicaragua -- History.; Church and state -- Nicaragua -- History.; Nicaragua -- Politics and government.; Nicaragua -- Church history.
Description: Guerrilla-priests and liberation theology are not new phenomena in Nicaragua. Ever since the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores, Catholic Church leaders have played a major role in that country's politics. The result, John Kirk writes, is a polarized church, one with a progressive minority at loggerheads with the conservative hierarchy. Kirk sets each stage of the church-state debate in a historical continuum, then examines the forty-year period of Somocismo and the Sandinista period (1979-90) that followed. This social revolution - blending nationalism, Marxism, and Catholicism - dared to be different, he claims, and accordingly it paid the price. Kirk wrote this book following three trips to Nicaragua during the 1980s, when he witnessed firsthand the social polarization occurring at the time. But the involvement of the Catholic Church in Nicaraguan politics is not exceptional, he says: "Most - if not all - religions are also encumbered with socio-political concerns that go beyond the essentially 'religious.'"
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 239-241) and index.