By Januarius Asongu, PhD

When “Christian” No Longer Means Catholic

I encountered the question that animates this chapter not in a theological seminar or ecclesial document, but in the ordinary texture of conversation. In June 2025, while visiting Costa Rica, I asked a friend—himself a baptized Catholic and my informal guide—to take me to Mass on Sunday morning. Religion had not previously featured in our discussions. His response therefore was neither defensive nor rehearsed. He paused and asked, almost casually, “Are you Catholic, or are you Christian?”

Assuming a misunderstanding, I replied that I was Catholic. He smiled and explained that in Costa Rica, to identify simply as Christian is commonly understood to mean Pentecostal or evangelical.[1] Catholics, by contrast, name themselves explicitly. Catholicism no longer functions as the unmarked category of Christian belonging. It has become one option among others—recognized, but no longer assumed.

The exchange stayed with me not because of its sociological precision, but because of what it revealed about religious imagination. A shift had occurred in the grammar of faith. What once went without saying now required clarification. Catholic identity, long woven seamlessly into the cultural fabric of Latin American societies, now spoke with an accent.

This shift cannot be explained adequately by demographic change alone. It raises a deeper theological question: how theologically grounded is Catholic identity in contexts where Catholicism has been culturally dominant but pastorally overstretched? If Catholicism must now distinguish itself from Pentecostal Christianity, then something more fundamental than competition is at stake. Expectations have changed. So has experience.

Latin America presents the global Church with a paradox unmatched elsewhere. It remains home to some of the largest Catholic populations in the world, yet it is also the epicenter of Christianity’s most dramatic Pentecostal expansion.[2] This is not secularization in the European sense. It is a reconfiguration within Christianity itself. Millions of baptized Catholics have not abandoned belief in God, Christ, Scripture, or moral seriousness. They have migrated ecclesially—often quietly, often relationally, often without polemic.

This chapter argues that such movement is best understood not as defection but as search. It reflects a struggle over the form of salvation—over how justice, spiritual power, community, sacrament, and daily survival are held together in lived faith. Liberation theology and Pentecostalism did not simply compete; they responded to different dimensions of the same hunger. Catholicism, holding the Eucharist at its center, often failed to integrate those dimensions convincingly at scale.

The Costa Rica question—Catholic or Christian?—thus becomes diagnostic. It signals a moment when Catholicism can no longer rely on inheritance alone. It must ask whether it still offers a total grammar of Christian life, capable of naming injustice, sustaining hope, mediating God’s presence, and forming durable communities of belonging.

To answer that question, we must return to the moment when Latin American Catholicism last attempted such wholeness with sustained seriousness: the rise of Liberation Theology.

Mapping the Shift: Data, Demography, and Religious Recomposition

Any theological account of Latin America’s religious transformation that neglects its empirical contours risks abstraction. The movement from Catholic dominance toward a plural Christian landscape is not anecdotal; it is one of the most thoroughly documented religious shifts of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.[3] Yet what the data reveal is not the collapse of faith, but its recomposition. Latin America has not secularized in the European sense. It has re-Christianized along different ecclesial lines.

In the early 1970s, over 90 percent of Latin Americans identified as Catholic. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, that figure had fallen to roughly two-thirds, with sharp regional variation.[4] In countries such as Brazil, Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, Catholic affiliation dropped below 60 percent, while evangelical and Pentecostal communities grew rapidly. Brazil alone now counts tens of millions of Pentecostal adherents, making it one of the largest Pentecostal nations in the world. These shifts occurred not over centuries, but within two generations.

Several features of this transformation deserve attention.

First, the change is generational. Younger Latin Americans are significantly less likely to identify as Catholic than their parents or grandparents. This does not necessarily reflect disbelief, but diminished institutional loyalty. Where Catholicism once functioned as inherited identity, Pentecostal affiliation is typically chosen. Conversion often marks a rupture with family tradition, signaling a desire for a faith that feels active rather than assumed. Theologically, this shift matters: Christianity is no longer primarily received through cultural osmosis but through decision, testimony, and belonging.

Second, the change is urban. Pentecostal growth has been most dramatic in rapidly expanding cities shaped by rural-to-urban migration, informal labor, and social fragmentation.[5] Migrants arriving in megacities often lose traditional support networks—extended family, village solidarity, and parish familiarity. Catholic parishes, already stretched thin, struggle to absorb these populations meaningfully. Pentecostal churches, by contrast, are agile. They emerge in storefronts, homes, and warehouses, often within walking distance. Geography becomes theology: God is encountered where the Church is present.

Third, the change is class-specific, but not in simplistic ways. While Pentecostalism has strong roots among the urban poor, it has also gained traction among lower-middle and middle-class populations seeking moral clarity, entrepreneurial discipline, and community coherence.[6] Catholicism, meanwhile, retains stronger identification among elites and older populations, often tied to cultural memory rather than active participation. The result is not a clean class divide, but differentiated religious economies operating within the same social space.

Fourth, and crucially, the change is not ideological. Surveys consistently show that many who leave Catholicism do so without rejecting Catholic beliefs about God, Christ, Scripture, or even the sacraments.[7] What they reject is not theology as such, but distance—distance from leadership, from community, from moral accompaniment, from felt spiritual efficacy. This distinction is decisive. It suggests that ecclesial form, not doctrinal content, is the primary driver of migration.

Fifth, the shift is gendered. Women are disproportionately represented in Pentecostal congregations, often serving as the first point of contact for families. Their conversion frequently precedes that of spouses and children, reshaping household religious identity from within.[8] This gendered pathway underscores that religious change is mediated through everyday life—through health, domestic conflict, addiction, and economic vulnerability—rather than through abstract theological disagreement.

Finally, the transformation is Christian-internal. Unlike Europe, where Catholic decline correlates with secularization, Latin America’s religious marketplace remains densely Christian. Bible reading, prayer, moral discourse, and public expressions of faith remain widespread. Pentecostalism does not replace Christianity with modernity; it replaces one Christian form with another that appears more responsive to contemporary conditions.

This empirical landscape reframes the theological task. The issue confronting Catholicism is not disbelief, but competition over coherence. Pentecostalism grows where it offers an integrated narrative linking suffering, hope, discipline, and divine agency. Catholicism struggles where its own integrative resources—Scripture, sacrament, social teaching, and communal life—are institutionally fragmented.

Seen this way, the data do not indict Catholic theology. They indict Catholic delivery. They reveal a Church rich in sacramental truth but uneven in pastoral reach, confident in doctrine but cautious in structural reform. They also reveal a people not abandoning faith, but searching—often urgently—for a Christianity capable of sustaining life under pressure.

Theologically, this matters because it shifts the interpretive burden. The question is no longer why people are leaving Catholicism, but why Catholicism has struggled to remain experientially whole at scale. Liberation Theology addressed this challenge by politicizing faith; Pentecostalism addressed it by personalizing faith. Neither fully resolved it.

The data, therefore, do not close the argument. They open it. They force theology to confront structure, authority, gender, and community as theological variables rather than administrative afterthoughts. They also prepare the ground for a more nuanced judgment: that the Pentecostal surge cannot be understood apart from the partial institutional retreat of a Church that once dared to imagine a more integrated form of discipleship.

It is to the internal tensions within Liberation Theology itself, and the role of ecclesial authority in constraining its maturation, that we must now turn.

Liberation Theology from Within: Achievements, Internal Tensions, and a Missed Ecclesial Maturation

To understand Liberation Theology only through its external reception—whether celebratory or condemnatory—is to misunderstand its internal complexity. Liberation Theology was never a single system, nor a closed ideological program. It was a theological movement in process, emerging from pastoral practice, refined through reflection, and constantly subject to revision by the very communities that generated it.[9] Its most significant limitations were not intrinsic failures of insight, but the consequences of an ecclesial environment that struggled to tolerate theological development under conditions of political volatility and institutional anxiety.

At its core, Liberation Theology represented a reorientation of theological method. Theology was no longer conceived primarily as speculative system-building detached from history, but as critical reflection on Christian praxis in the light of the Word.[10] This methodological shift did not deny tradition; it relocated tradition within lived struggle. Scripture, doctrine, and sacrament were reread from the standpoint of the poor—not as a hermeneutical preference, but as a theological necessity rooted in the Incarnation itself.

Within this framework, important internal distinctions quickly emerged.

First-generation liberation theologians differed significantly in emphasis. Some prioritized socio-economic analysis, drawing selectively on Marxist categories to name structural sin with clarity. Others emphasized Christology and spirituality, insisting that liberation without deep communion with Christ risked becoming secular activism.¹¹ Still others explored ecclesiology, asking what kind of Church could credibly proclaim liberation while reproducing hierarchical distance.[12] These debates were not signs of incoherence; they were evidence of a living theology negotiating its own boundaries.

One of Liberation Theology’s greatest achievements was its anthropological seriousness. It refused to reduce salvation to interior consolation while ignoring the conditions that crush human dignity. Poverty was not romanticized; it was analyzed. Suffering was not spiritualized; it was named. In this sense, Liberation Theology restored moral credibility to the Gospel in contexts where Christianity had long been associated with power rather than solidarity. It allowed the poor to recognize themselves not as objects of divine pity, but as subjects of history and grace.

Yet this very seriousness exposed unresolved tensions.

One such tension concerned the relationship between structure and subjectivity. Liberation Theology excelled at naming unjust systems, but often struggled to sustain a pastoral language capable of addressing interior wounds—trauma, addiction, despair, family fragmentation—that did not resolve neatly through political action. While liberationist praxis emphasized collective struggle, many believers carried private suffering that required intimate accompaniment, prayer, and healing.[13] The theology did not deny these needs, but its dominant rhetoric often relegated them to the background.

Another tension concerned eschatology. Liberation Theology insisted—correctly—that salvation has historical consequences. The Kingdom of God is not reducible to the afterlife. But the danger lay in compression: when eschatological hope is collapsed too tightly into political horizons, disappointment becomes theologically destabilizing. Revolutionary movements fail. Reforms stall. Dictatorships endure. Without a sufficiently articulated theology of endurance, forgiveness, and resurrection hope beyond immediate outcomes, faith risks exhaustion.

A third tension concerned ecclesial mediation. Liberation Theology challenged clericalism by empowering the laity as theological agents. Yet it relied heavily on clergy and religious willing to accompany base communities under conditions of danger. When those clergy were reassigned, silenced, or killed, communities were left vulnerable.[14] The movement lacked institutional mechanisms to secure continuity beyond charismatic leadership. This was not an inevitable flaw; it was a structural vulnerability exacerbated by ecclesial retreat.

At this point, the role of Rome becomes decisive.

The Vatican’s interventions in the 1980s were not, in themselves, unjustified. Concerns about ideological reductionism, the uncritical adoption of Marxist analysis, and the risk of subordinating faith to political projects were legitimate.[15] Liberation Theology required correction, clarification, and theological deepening. But correction is not synonymous with contraction. What occurred in practice was less a patient process of ecclesial discernment than a premature foreclosure of theological development.

This distinction is crucial.

Liberation Theology was still maturing when it was subjected to definitive judgment. Its internal debates had not yet stabilized. Its pastoral forms were still evolving. Its theological grammar had not yet fully integrated sacramentality, spirituality, and eschatological patience. What was required was not suppression, but time—time for revision, retrieval, and synthesis. Instead, the movement encountered suspicion, monitoring, and withdrawal of support. In many dioceses, innovation became risky. Pastoral courage gave way to caution.

The result was not theological purification, but pastoral thinning.

It is therefore important to state clearly: the subsequent erosion of base communities and the loss of liberationist momentum cannot be laid simply at the feet of Liberation Theology itself. Nor can it be blamed primarily on external political repression, though that repression was severe. A decisive factor was the Church’s own difficulty in accompanying a theology born at the margins through a sustained process of ecclesial maturation.

Had liberationist insights been allowed to evolve—had they been sacramentally deepened, spiritually enriched, and institutionally stabilized—the pastoral landscape might have looked very different. Liberation Theology did not need replacement; it needed completion. Its critique of injustice required integration with a robust theology of prayer, healing, forgiveness, and Eucharistic communion.[16] That integration was possible. It was already nascent in the movement’s later phases. It was never fully realized.

This judgment is not retrospective idealism. It reflects a broader pattern within ecclesial history: theology develops through use, correction, and reception, not through containment. Vatican II itself unfolded through decades of contestation and refinement. To demand immediate doctrinal finality from a contextual theology operating under conditions of violence and upheaval was to misunderstand the nature of theological growth.

The consequences of this missed maturation are now visible. As liberationist structures weakened, Pentecostal communities expanded into the pastoral vacuum. They offered what liberationist practice had insufficiently institutionalized: sustained accompaniment, emotional expression, healing rituals, and intimate belonging. Pentecostalism did not refute liberationist claims; it bypassed them by addressing unmet needs.

The tragedy, then, is not theological error but ecclesial impatience.

Liberation Theology revealed what happens when faith is taken seriously in history. Pentecostalism revealed what happens when faith is taken seriously in the body. Catholicism now faces the task of holding both together without fear. That task does not require repudiating liberationist insight. It requires retrieving it within a broader Eucharistic horizon capable of sustaining justice, power, memory, and hope in a single act of communion.

The question that remains is whether the Church is prepared to learn from this history—not defensively, but faithfully. The next section turns to the gendered and domestic dimensions of this learning, where the dynamics of conversion, endurance, and belonging become most visible.

Pentecostalism: Proximity, Power, and the Reordering of Belonging

a) Women, Family, and the Hidden Logic of Conversion

Any adequate account of Latin America’s religious recomposition must attend to a reality that statistics alone only partially reveal: most conversions do not occur first at the level of ideology, but within the household. The decisive arena of ecclesial change has been neither the university nor the episcopal conference, but the intimate spaces of family life—kitchens, bedrooms, sickrooms, and informal economies of care. It is here, quietly and persistently, that Pentecostalism has exercised its greatest influence, and it is here that Catholic pastoral practice has most visibly struggled to keep pace.

Women occupy the center of this story. Across Latin America, women constitute the majority of Pentecostal adherents and are often the first in a household to convert.[17] Their religious movement is rarely framed as theological dissent. It is more accurately described as pastoral necessity. Faced with domestic instability—alcohol abuse, infidelity, economic precarity, untreated illness, and emotional isolation—many women encountered Pentecostal communities as sites of immediate support and moral leverage. Conversion offered not only prayer, but protection; not only hope, but structure.

Pentecostal churches function, in this respect, as informal social repair mechanisms. They provide clear moral norms, communal accountability, and narratives of transformation that can be enacted within everyday life. Testimony plays a crucial role here. Stories of husbands who stop drinking, families that stabilize, and children who “find the Lord” operate not merely as religious claims but as social scripts. Faith becomes a technology of survival.

This domestic logic helps explain a recurring conversion pattern. Women convert first, often through networks of friendship or kinship. Their participation reshapes household rhythms—Sunday worship replaces certain social activities; alcohol consumption is contested; prayer enters daily routine. Over time, men may follow, sometimes reluctantly, drawn less by doctrine than by the tangible reordering of family life. Children are socialized into the new ecclesial world as normative. Conversion, in other words, proceeds relationally rather than polemically.

Liberation Theology, for all its attention to structural injustice, struggled to address this domestic register consistently. Its primary interlocutor was the collective subject—the poor as a class, the oppressed as a people. Family life appeared mainly as a site affected by injustice rather than as a theological locus in its own right. While base communities offered solidarity and political consciousness, they were less equipped to provide sustained pastoral intervention in cases of addiction, domestic violence, or psychological distress. Conscience was awakened, but endurance was often assumed.

Catholic pastoral structures faced a similar limitation. Large parishes, overstretched clergy, and sacramental schedules oriented around rites of passage left little room for ongoing accompaniment within family life. Confession was available, but episodic. Counseling was rare. Healing ministries were often peripheral. Women confronting immediate crises frequently encountered a Church that spoke powerfully about justice but weakly about now.

Pentecostalism filled this gap with remarkable efficiency.

Yet this efficiency came at a theological cost. While Pentecostal practice often increased women’s agency within the household—reforming male behavior, stabilizing finances, and legitimating female moral authority—it also reinscribed conservative gender norms at the doctrinal level. Leadership remained male-dominated. Women’s authority was exercised informally rather than institutionally. Submission rhetoric persisted even as lived power shifted. The result was a paradox: women experienced empowerment without structural recognition.

This paradox reveals a deeper theological tension. Pentecostalism succeeded pastorally by addressing the body—habits, emotions, crises—while often leaving questions of justice, gender equality, and social transformation underdeveloped. Liberation Theology addressed justice while leaving the body comparatively unattended. Catholic sacramentality held resources for both, but lacked the pastoral form to integrate them at scale.

Family, therefore, becomes a diagnostic lens. Where the Church cannot accompany families through the slow work of healing, discipline, and reconciliation, it cedes moral credibility—regardless of doctrinal soundness. Conversion is not simply about belief; it is about whether faith works in the places where life is most fragile.

This insight presses toward a broader ecclesiological conclusion. The Church’s future cannot be secured by correct teaching alone. It requires pastoral structures capable of sustained intimacy. Women’s conversion patterns expose this truth with particular clarity. They show that ecclesial vitality depends less on abstract coherence than on whether faith can be lived as a resource for daily survival and dignity.

The Eucharistic question returns here with renewed urgency. If the Eucharist is truly the sacrament of communion, then it must be embedded within communities capable of accompanying families over time. Eucharistic grace does not replace pastoral presence; it presupposes it. Without such presence, sacrament risks abstraction, and the faithful will continue to seek elsewhere what they cannot find at home.

The next section returns to institutional authority, asking why the Church struggled to translate its theological riches into pastoral structures capable of meeting these domestic realities—and how Rome’s management of risk shaped that struggle.

b) Rome, Risk, and the Governance of Fear: Authority at a Missed Kairos

The pastoral and theological tensions traced thus far cannot be understood without confronting the role of ecclesial authority—particularly the way authority was exercised during a moment of genuine historical openness. The rise of Liberation Theology coincided with a kairos, a season in which the Church in Latin America stood poised to develop new forms of ecclesial life capable of integrating justice, spirituality, and community. What followed, however, was not sustained discernment but a growing management of risk, driven by fear of fragmentation, ideological capture, and loss of control.

This fear was not invented. The Cold War formed the geopolitical horizon within which Liberation Theology emerged. Revolutionary movements, some explicitly Marxist, were active across the continent. Several liberationist theologians and pastoral agents employed Marxist social analysis—selectively and critically, but visibly. In this context, Rome’s concern that theology might be instrumentalized by political projects was understandable. The Church had lived through earlier periods in which alliances with power proved disastrous. Prudence was warranted.

What proved consequential, however, was how prudence was operationalized.

Rather than accompanying Liberation Theology through a long process of theological refinement—allowing it to be tested, corrected, and integrated—Rome increasingly approached it as a problem to be contained.[18] Monitoring replaced mentorship. Suspicion replaced dialogue. Theological development was treated as deviation rather than maturation. The result was a chilling effect that extended far beyond the theologians themselves, shaping episcopal behavior, seminary formation, and pastoral experimentation across the continent.

This shift altered the ecology of Catholic leadership. Bishops learned that innovation entailed risk, while restraint entailed safety. Priests learned that prophetic engagement could limit advancement. Lay leaders learned that initiative might be welcomed locally but questioned institutionally. Over time, the Church’s internal incentive structure favored caution over creativity, administration over accompaniment.

The irony is striking. Vatican II had explicitly reimagined authority as service to communion, encouraging episcopal collegiality, local discernment, and engagement with the signs of the times.[19] Yet when a concrete contextual theology attempted to embody that vision under difficult conditions, the institutional response reverted to centralization. Authority was exercised defensively rather than generatively.

This pattern had predictable pastoral consequences. Base ecclesial communities, which depended on episcopal support and clerical accompaniment, weakened as that support receded.[20] The laity, once encouraged to read Scripture critically and act collectively, found their spaces narrowed. Theological imagination contracted. What had been a movement of shared responsibility gradually became an episode remembered with ambivalence.

It is essential to state clearly—without polemic—that this was not an indictment of Rome’s doctrinal concern, but of its temporal impatience. Liberation Theology did not require immunity from critique; it required time. Theological traditions mature through trial, error, and correction. To demand immediate equilibrium from a theology forged amid violence, poverty, and political upheaval was to misjudge the nature of theological growth itself.

The deeper issue was ecclesiological. Rome struggled to trust that the Spirit could work creatively through local churches without threatening unity. Diversity was tolerated, but only within tightly managed boundaries. Yet unity achieved through containment is fragile. It suppresses symptoms without addressing underlying needs. When liberationist structures weakened, they did not leave neutrality in their wake; they left a vacuum.

Pentecostalism entered that vacuum not as a theological rival, but as a pastoral solution. It offered what the Church had ceased to authorize at scale: local leadership, rapid multiplication of communities, emotional expressiveness, and immediate response to suffering. Pentecostal growth, therefore, must be read not simply as external competition, but as unintended consequence of ecclesial retrenchment.

Authority, in this light, appears not merely as guardian of truth but as shaper of pastoral possibility. By constraining liberationist experimentation without providing alternative forms capable of sustaining intimacy and empowerment, the Church effectively narrowed its own range of action. Doctrine remained intact; delivery faltered.

This diagnosis does not call for repudiation of authority. It calls for its reconfiguration. Authority that guards without generating life risks irrelevance. Authority that listens, accompanies, and corrects without fear can become a catalyst for renewal. The Latin American experience reveals that the Church’s most significant losses did not occur through doctrinal compromise, but through missed opportunities for integration.

The question that now presses forward is constructive rather than accusatory. If authority is to be exercised differently—less as gatekeeping and more as guardianship—what form of ecclesial life could hold together justice, spiritual power, community, and sacrament? The answer, as argued earlier, lies not in novelty but in retrieval: in allowing the Eucharist to function not only as the Church’s summit, but as its organizing center.

It is to the deepening of that Eucharistic vision—expanded now beyond synthesis into a full ecclesial framework—that we must return.

From Control to Communion: Authority, Risk, and the Church’s Difficulty Learning in History

The Latin American experience exposes a recurring difficulty in Catholic ecclesial life: the challenge of learning institutionally from history while it is still unfolding. The problem is not that the Church lacks mechanisms for preserving doctrinal integrity; it is that those mechanisms often function more effectively to contain risk than to accompany development. Authority, in moments of uncertainty, tends to default toward control rather than communion.

This tendency is not accidental. It reflects a deep ecclesiological anxiety about fragmentation. Catholic unity has historically been preserved through hierarchical coherence, sacramental discipline, and centralized oversight. These have served the Church well in moments of doctrinal crisis. But when the crisis is not doctrinal error but contextual incompleteness, the same instruments can become blunt.

Liberation Theology confronted the Church not with heresy, but with epistemic disruption. It asked who may speak theologically, from where theology may arise, and how lived suffering participates in the discernment of truth. Its most unsettling claim was not political but ecclesial: that the poor are not merely recipients of doctrine, but agents of theological insight.[ 21] This claim did not deny magisterial authority; it re-situated it within a broader ecology of discernment.

The difficulty Rome faced was not whether this claim could be tolerated in principle—Vatican II had already affirmed the People of God as a theological subject—but whether it could be trusted in practice, under conditions of political volatility and ideological contestation. The answer, implicitly, was no. The risk appeared too great.

Authority therefore shifted from accompaniment to supervision.

This shift reshaped ecclesial behavior in ways that rarely appear in official documents but are decisive in lived reality. Bishops learned that theological experimentation entailed institutional exposure. Seminaries learned to emphasize safety over creativity. Pastoral agents learned to moderate prophetic speech. None of this required explicit condemnation. It operated through what might be called anticipatory obedience—a narrowing of imagination before censure ever arrived.

The result was a Church that remained doctrinally intact but pastorally cautious, increasingly reactive rather than generative. The irony is profound: a theology born from Vatican II’s call to read the signs of the times was constrained by a postconciliar ecclesial culture increasingly uncomfortable with time-bound discernment.

This is where Latin America becomes paradigmatic rather than exceptional.

What occurred there foreshadows later ecclesial struggles—over sexuality, gender, ecology, and anthropology—where similar patterns reappear. In each case, the Church encounters not doctrinal negation but lived complexity. In each case, authority struggles to distinguish between error that must be resisted and experience that must be interpreted. And in each case, the temptation is to resolve ambiguity through containment rather than accompaniment.

The cost of this posture is not immediate schism, but ecclesial thinning. The Church retains sacramental legitimacy but loses interpretive credibility. Faith remains true, but its ability to inhabit daily life weakens. Theology migrates—sometimes into Pentecostal communities, sometimes into private conscience, sometimes into silence.

Latin America shows that authority exercised primarily as risk management does not prevent fragmentation; it relocates it. When liberationist structures were weakened without alternative forms capable of sustaining intimacy and empowerment, the Church did not return to stability. It ceded ground to movements willing to risk disorder in order to generate belonging.

This is not an argument for ecclesial recklessness. It is an argument for ecclesial patience.

The Church has always developed through processes that were initially untidy. Monasticism, mendicant orders, lay movements, even scholastic theology—all generated anxiety before they generated consensus. Each required time, correction, and reception. To expect contextual theologies emerging amid violence and poverty to achieve immediate equilibrium is to misunderstand the Church’s own history.

The tragedy of the Latin American moment lies precisely here. Liberation Theology did not reach exhaustion; it was interrupted. Its internal tensions—between justice and spirituality, structure and subjectivity, history and eschatology—were real, but they were also resolvable. What was lacking was not theological capacity, but institutional willingness to stay with the process.

This unwillingness reshaped Catholic authority itself. Over time, authority came to be experienced less as teacher-in-communion and more as regulator-of-boundaries. Trust narrowed. Listening became selective. Theological creativity was tolerated only within carefully policed limits. The Church retained unity, but at the cost of diminishing its capacity to learn from lived faith.

Pentecostalism thrived in this environment not because it offered superior theology, but because it offered permission—permission to testify, to pray loudly, to interpret suffering theologically without waiting for approval. Its authority structures are fragile, but they are porous. Catholic authority structures are durable, but often impermeable.

The choice before the Church, therefore, is not between authority and chaos, but between control and communion.

Communion-based authority does not abandon truth. It recognizes that truth is received through history, not imposed upon it fully formed. It creates ecclesial spaces where experience can speak, be tested, and be integrated. It allows theology to grow through pastoral use, not only through juridical clarification.

This is precisely the vision now re-emerging under the name synodality.[22] But synodality is not new. It is the path not taken in Latin America when it mattered most. The Church is now attempting—globally—to recover what it once hesitated to trust locally.

The Eucharistic implications are decisive. Authority that serves Eucharistic communion must be willing to organize the Church around presence rather than surveillance, formation rather than control, shared responsibility rather than delegated compliance. Otherwise, the Eucharist risks functioning as a summit without a path—a mystery revered but insufficiently embodied.

Latin America teaches that when authority hesitates to trust the Spirit’s work in concrete communities, those communities do not cease to seek God. They seek God elsewhere.

The remaining task of this chapter is therefore constructive. Having named fragmentation and authority’s role in sustaining it, we must ask what kind of ecclesial form could realistically integrate justice, spiritual power, sacrament, and community. That question returns us—once again and decisively—to the Eucharist, not as ritual endpoint, but as organizing center.

The Eucharistic Synthesis: Integrating Justice, Spirit, and Communion

a) Eucharist as Social Ontology: Body, Memory, Power, and the Shape of the Real

To speak of the Eucharist as social ontology is to make a claim about reality itself. It is to assert that the Eucharist does not merely symbolize communion, nor simply confer private grace, but constitutes a way of being-in-the-world. In the Eucharist, the Church does not only remember Christ; it learns what reality is for. This claim carries decisive implications for Latin America’s fractured ecclesial landscape, where justice, spiritual power, and community have been pried apart by competing pastoral logics.

Ontology concerns what exists and how it exists. A social ontology asks how persons are formed in relation—how bodies, institutions, memory, and power cohere into a shared world. The Eucharist, understood sacramentally rather than metaphorically, answers this question not by abstraction but by enactment. Bread is broken. A cup is shared. Bodies gather. Words are spoken. Memory is made present. In this act, the Church rehearses a truth about reality: life is given, not seized; communion precedes possession; power is perfected in self-gift.

This Eucharistic ontology stands in sharp contrast to the ontologies operative in much of Latin American religious recomposition. Liberation Theology often adopted a conflictual ontology—history as struggle between oppressor and oppressed, salvation as liberation from unjust structures. Pentecostalism frequently operates with an interventionist ontology—reality as a battlefield of spiritual forces, salvation as divine breakthrough into individual lives. Each ontology names something true; neither is sufficient on its own. The Eucharist integrates both by grounding them in a prior reality: the Body given for the life of the world.

1. Body: From Individual Possession to Shared Life

The Eucharist begins with the body—not as metaphor, but as material truth. “This is my body, given for you.” The statement resists privatization. The body is not owned; it is offered. In Eucharistic ontology, the human body is never merely individual. It is always for—for God, for others, for the common good. This is a radical claim in societies marked by commodification, exploitation, and gendered violence.

In Latin America, where bodies bear the weight of poverty, migration, and labor precarity, the Eucharist insists that no body is disposable. Liberation Theology rightly named the broken bodies of the poor as the locus of Christ’s suffering.[23] Pentecostalism, for its part, restored attentiveness to the body through healing prayer, embodied worship, and testimony. The Eucharist gathers these insights into a single act: the broken body is neither romanticized nor bypassed; it is taken up, blessed, broken, and shared.

This has social consequences. A Eucharistic Church cannot treat bodies instrumentally—whether as labor units, moral problems, or spiritual vessels to be evacuated. Nor can it spiritualize suffering without addressing its causes. The Eucharist forms a people trained to see bodies as sites of dignity and obligation. To receive communion while tolerating systems that crush bodies is to contradict the sacrament at the level of ontology.

2. Memory: History Redeemed, Not Escaped

The Eucharist is anamnesis—memory that makes present. “Do this in remembrance of me” does not command nostalgia; it inaugurates a mode of remembering that reconfigures the present. The past is neither erased nor idolized. It is drawn into a living act that opens the future.

This Eucharistic memory matters profoundly in Latin America, a region haunted by historical trauma: colonial violence, dictatorship, civil war, and economic dependency. Liberation Theology insisted that memory be politicized—names spoken, crimes remembered, martyrs honored.[24] Pentecostalism often sought relief from memory’s burden, emphasizing new beginnings and personal testimony. The Eucharist integrates both impulses. It refuses forgetfulness without imprisoning the faithful in resentment. It remembers suffering in order to transform it, not to perpetuate it.

In Eucharistic ontology, memory is not an archive; it is a practice of truth-telling ordered toward reconciliation. The wounds of history are neither denied nor weaponized. They are brought to the table, where they are named in the presence of the One whose own wounds remain visible in resurrection. This is why martyrdom occupies such a central place in Latin American Catholic imagination. The blood of martyrs is not an interruption of Eucharistic life; it is its costly extension.

A Church formed by this memory cannot accept a future built on amnesia. Nor can it preach forgiveness without justice. The Eucharist teaches a disciplined remembrance that holds together truth and mercy, confession and hope.

3. Power: From Domination to Gift

Perhaps the most decisive contribution of Eucharistic ontology concerns power. In much of Latin America’s religious experience, power has been the missing or distorted element. Liberation Theology sought power through collective action against unjust systems; Pentecostalism sought power through spiritual gifts and divine intervention. Catholic sacramentality, meanwhile, often appeared powerful in theory but weak in practice—authoritative without being transformative.

The Eucharist redefines power at its root. Power is not the capacity to dominate or to control outcomes. It is the capacity to give oneself without remainder. The omnipotence revealed at the altar is cruciform. Christ reigns not by coercion but by self-donation. This does not negate political power or spiritual gifts; it reorders them.

For Liberation Theology, this means that justice pursued apart from self-gift risks reproducing the logic it resists. For Pentecostalism, it means that spiritual power divorced from kenosis risks becoming spectacle or technique. The Eucharist disciplines both by locating true power in communion. The Spirit poured out in the chalice is the same Spirit who sends the Church into the world not as conqueror, but as servant.

This has direct ecclesiological implications. Authority within a Eucharistic ontology cannot be exercised as surveillance or control. It must be exercised as capacity-building for communion. Bishops, priests, and lay leaders exercise power most faithfully when they enable participation, protect the vulnerable, and sustain shared life. Power that cannot be shared contradicts the sacrament it claims to serve.

4. Economy: Gift Against Scarcity

The Eucharist also proposes an alternative economic ontology. Bread is given freely. The table is not restricted by merit. Scarcity does not determine distribution. In societies shaped by inequality and competition, this Eucharistic economy is quietly subversive.

Liberation Theology analyzed unjust economic structures with precision, but it sometimes struggled to generate durable alternative practices beyond resistance. Pentecostalism often adapted to market logic, spiritualizing prosperity and framing faith as investment. The Eucharist interrupts both. It neither sanctifies scarcity nor baptizes accumulation. It proclaims gift as the deepest truth of the world.

This does not eliminate economic struggle; it reframes it. A Eucharistic people are trained to resist the absolutization of the market and to practice solidarity concretely—through mutual aid, shared resources, and preferential care for the poor. Parish life ordered eucharistically becomes a site of alternative economy, where charity is not episodic but habitual, and justice is not abstract but embodied.

5. Communion: The Real as Relational

Finally, Eucharistic ontology culminates in communion. Communion is not sentiment; it is participation in a shared reality that precedes choice. “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body.[25] This is not metaphorical language. It is ontological claim. The many do not become one by consensus; they are made one by gift.

This claim directly addresses Latin America’s ecclesial fragmentation. Liberation Theology formed communities of resistance; Pentecostalism formed communities of experience; Catholicism often presided over communities of inheritance. The Eucharist calls the Church to become a community of shared life—small enough for recognition, strong enough for mission, and open enough for difference.

Such communion requires structure. It does not arise spontaneously from ritual alone. Small Christian communities, neighborhood cells, and participatory ministries are not optional supplements; they are the social form of Eucharistic ontology. Without them, communion remains asserted rather than lived.

To recover the Eucharist as social ontology is to recover the Church’s capacity to integrate what history has torn apart. It allows justice and spiritual power, memory and hope, authority and participation to inhabit a single grammar of life. Latin America’s crisis reveals what happens when this ontology is obscured. Its future—and the future of the global Church—depends on whether the Eucharist is allowed to shape not only belief, but being.

The next section will extend this ontology into pastoral form, asking how Eucharistic life can be organized institutionally without losing its sacramental depth or its communal power.

b) Eucharist and Pastoral Form: From Sacramental Event to Ecclesial Ecology

If the previous section argued that the Eucharist offers a social ontology—a truth about reality itself—then this section addresses the unavoidable follow-up question: what kind of ecclesial form can sustain that ontology in lived practice? Ontology without structure remains aspirational. Sacrament without pastoral ecology becomes episodic. The Latin American experience demonstrates with painful clarity that Eucharistic truth, however theologically secure, cannot integrate Christian life unless it is embedded within forms capable of sustaining proximity, participation, and shared responsibility.

The crisis, therefore, is not whether the Church believes rightly about the Eucharist. It is whether the Church has organized itself in ways that allow Eucharistic communion to shape daily Christian existence.

1. From Parish-as-Service-Station to Parish-as-Communion Network

For much of modern Latin American Catholicism, the parish functioned primarily as a sacramental service station. Baptisms, weddings, funerals, and occasional Mass attendance marked one’s ecclesial belonging. This model presumed cultural Catholicism, geographical stability, and clerical sufficiency. As these conditions eroded, the model’s limitations became stark.

Pentecostalism succeeded precisely because it rejected the service-station model. Its congregations function as networks of constant interaction—spaces where members are expected to attend frequently, speak publicly, pray for one another, and assume responsibility. Belonging is reinforced weekly, sometimes daily. Catholic parishes, by contrast, often gather large numbers briefly and disperse them quickly.

A Eucharistic pastoral form requires a different imagination: the parish not as a single gathering point, but as a communion of communities. Small Christian communities, base communities, neighborhood cells, and ministry groups become the ordinary sites where Eucharistic life is interpreted, embodied, and sustained. The Sunday Eucharist then gathers what has already been lived throughout the week.

This is not innovation; it is retrieval. The early Church grew precisely through household-based assemblies linked by sacramental unity. Liberation Theology rediscovered this form through base communities.[26] What failed was not the form itself, but its institutional stabilization. A Eucharistic Church must therefore commit to making such communities normative rather than exceptional.

2. Proximity as a Sacramental Requirement

Latin America teaches a difficult truth: proximity is not optional for sacramental credibility. Where priests and pastoral leaders are distant—geographically, relationally, or emotionally—the Eucharist risks appearing abstract, even if doctrinally affirmed. Pentecostal pastors succeed not because they possess sacramental authority, but because they are present.

A Eucharistic pastoral ecology must therefore multiply forms of mediated presence. Ordained ministry remains indispensable, but it cannot bear the entire weight of accompaniment alone. Lay leadership—catechists, pastoral agents, community coordinators, prayer leaders—must be recognized not as helpers, but as co-responsible ministers of communion.

This requires a shift in clerical self-understanding. Priests are not managers of sacramental supply but weavers of Eucharistic networks. Their role is to preside, teach, and discern in ways that empower others to accompany. Where this shift occurs, priest scarcity becomes a challenge rather than a paralysis. Where it does not, sacramental life thins regardless of orthodoxy.

3. Charism and Discipline: Healing the False Divide

One of Pentecostalism’s most powerful appeals lies in its unapologetic deployment of charisms—healing prayer, prophecy, testimony, deliverance. Catholicism possesses a far richer pneumatology but has often sequestered charisms to the margins of parish life. Liberation Theology, wary of individualism, sometimes shared this hesitation.

A Eucharistic pastoral form cannot afford this division. The same Spirit who consecrates the elements also distributes gifts for the building up of the Body. Healing prayer, intercession, testimony, and charismatic expression do not compete with sacramentality; they flow from it when properly discerned.

The issue is not whether charisms should be present, but how they are integrated. Eucharistic discipline does not suppress spiritual vitality; it orders it. Charisms exercised within a Eucharistic horizon are accountable, communal, and oriented toward service rather than spectacle. This integration directly addresses the Pentecostal critique that Catholic worship feels distant or inert, without conceding theological ground.

4. Catechesis as Formation, Not Information

Another lesson from Latin America concerns catechesis. Catholic catechesis has often been informational—focused on transmitting doctrinal content necessary for sacramental reception. Pentecostal formation, by contrast, is transformational. New members are immediately embedded in practices: prayer, testimony, moral discipline, community obligation.

A Eucharistic pastoral ecology must reunite knowledge and practice. Catechesis must become formation in a way of life shaped by Scripture, sacrament, moral discernment, and prayer. This includes formation in social teaching, but also in interior life. Conscience and consolation cannot be separated.

Liberation Theology excelled at forming critical consciousness. Pentecostalism excels at forming devotional intensity. Eucharistic formation must hold both together. It trains believers to read the signs of the times and the movements of the Spirit; to resist injustice and to endure suffering without despair.

5. Family, Healing, and Accompaniment as Central, Not Peripheral

The gendered dynamics of conversion explored earlier demand a decisive pastoral response. A Eucharistic Church cannot relegate family life, trauma, addiction, and mental health to auxiliary ministries. These are central theological sites where communion is tested and formed.

Pentecostal communities understood this intuitively. They accompanied families through crisis, however imperfectly. Catholic pastoral structures often addressed such realities episodically or indirectly. A Eucharistic ecology must place accompaniment at the center: counseling, healing services, support groups, and sustained pastoral presence woven into parish life.[27]

This is not capitulation to therapeutic culture. It is fidelity to the Incarnation. The Word became flesh in wounded bodies and fractured families. Eucharistic communion must therefore take flesh in patient, ongoing care.

6. Authority Revisited: Enabling Rather Than Policing Communion

Finally, Eucharistic pastoral form requires a reconfiguration of authority. Authority exists not to monopolize initiative, but to enable communion to flourish without disintegration. This means trusting local discernment while maintaining sacramental unity. It means allowing experimentation without abandoning oversight. It means accepting that not all coherence emerges immediately.

Latin America reveals the cost of authority exercised primarily as constraint. It also reveals the danger of authority abandoned altogether. The Eucharistic path lies between these extremes: authority as guardianship of a living process.

When the Eucharist shapes pastoral form, the Church no longer forces believers to choose between justice and power, structure and intimacy, sacrament and experience. The Church becomes a habitable space—a place where faith can be lived whole.

Latin America’s tragedy was not that the Eucharist failed, but that it was under-organized. Its promise remains intact. The question is whether the Church will now allow Eucharistic ontology to generate Eucharistic form.

The final section of the chapter will draw these threads together, returning to Latin America as a mirror for the global Church and articulating what kind of future becomes possible if the lessons of this crucible are taken seriously.

Latin America as Ecclesial Mirror: From Fragmentation to Eucharistic Wholeness

The question that opened this chapter—“Are you Catholic, or are you Christian?”—can now be heard in its full theological weight. What initially sounded like a linguistic peculiarity turns out to be a diagnosis of ecclesial fragmentation. It signals not the collapse of faith, but the erosion of coherence. Catholicism, long presumed to be the default grammar of Christian life in Latin America, now speaks as one voice among many—recognized, but no longer assumed.

This shift does not reflect doctrinal rejection. Nor does it signify secularization in the European sense. It reflects a crisis of integration. Latin America’s religious journey reveals what happens when the elements of Christian life—justice, spiritual power, sacrament, community, authority, and daily accompaniment—are allowed to drift apart. Believers do not abandon faith; they redistribute it across ecclesial options that promise wholeness, even if partial.

Liberation Theology emerged as a courageous attempt to restore coherence by reuniting faith with history. It named injustice truthfully, returned Scripture to the poor, and restored moral credibility to a Church long entangled with power.²⁸ Pentecostalism emerged as a different response to the same fracture, restoring immediacy, agency, healing, and dense community where Catholic pastoral forms proved distant. Each movement responded to real absence. Each revealed a truth Catholicism needed to hear.

What fractured Catholic life in Latin America was not error in principle, but incompletion in practice. Justice was proclaimed without always being sustained by spiritual consolation. Sacrament was celebrated without always generating community. Authority was exercised without always enabling trust. The Eucharist was present, but its capacity to organize ecclesial life was constrained by structures unable—or unwilling—to carry its weight.

This chapter has argued that the decisive theological issue is not competition between Christian forms, but the Church’s difficulty allowing the Eucharist to function as more than a ritual summit. When the Eucharist is reduced to an endpoint rather than embraced as an organizing center, its integrative power remains latent. The Church may believe rightly about the Eucharist while failing to live eucharistically.

Latin America exposes this contradiction with unusual clarity because the stakes were existential. Poverty, violence, migration, and political repression stripped away cultural Catholicism and revealed what pastoral forms could actually sustain faith under pressure. Where Catholic structures were thin, Pentecostal communities multiplied. Where base communities were discouraged, intimacy collapsed. Where authority defaulted to control, learning stalled.

This history must be read with care. It is not an indictment of Liberation Theology. Nor is it an endorsement of Pentecostal theology. It is a judgment on ecclesial impatience—particularly at the level of Roman governance. Liberation Theology required correction, yes, but also time, trust, and sacramental deepening. What it encountered instead was premature closure.²⁹ A theology still maturing was treated as though it had claimed finality. The result was not purification, but pastoral contraction.

The Church now faces the consequences of that missed maturation. Pentecostalism did not triumph because it offered a more adequate theology, but because it offered permission—permission to speak, to testify, to heal, to interpret suffering without waiting for ecclesial approval. Catholicism, rich in sacramental truth, often appeared poor in pastoral availability. The faithful responded accordingly.

Yet the chapter has also insisted that the resources for renewal were never absent. They were under-integrated.

The Eucharist, understood as social ontology, reveals a different possibility. It names a reality in which bodies are given, not consumed; memory is redeemed, not erased; power is exercised as self-gift, not domination; and communion precedes possession. When this ontology shapes ecclesial form—through small communities, shared leadership, integrated catechesis, healing ministries, and authority exercised as guardianship—the false alternatives that drove ecclesial migration lose their force.

A Eucharistic Church does not force believers to choose between justice and spiritual power, between sacrament and intimacy, between tradition and transformation. It holds these dimensions together because they already belong together in Christ. The Eucharist does not resolve tension by eliminating difference; it disciplines difference into communion.

Latin America thus emerges not as a peripheral case, but as an ecclesial mirror. It shows the global Church what happens when theology outruns structure, when authority manages risk rather than accompanying growth, and when sacramental truth is insufficiently embodied.³⁰ It also shows what remains possible: a Church renewed not by novelty, but by retrieval—by allowing its deepest mystery to generate its most ordinary practices.

The lesson is sobering but hopeful. Unity preserved through control proves fragile. Communion cultivated through trust proves resilient. The future credibility of Catholicism—whether in Latin America, Africa, or post-Christian Europe—will depend less on defending doctrine than on inhabiting it.

If the Church can learn from Latin America without defensiveness, the question “Are you Catholic, or are you Christian?” may one day lose its force. To say “I am Catholic” would again mean “I am Christian”—not by cultural inheritance, but by coherence. Catholic identity would signify a way of life where justice is pursued, the Spirit is encountered, wounds are accompanied, authority listens, and communion is real.

Latin America’s journey, then, is not a story of decline. It is a costly lesson in ecclesial truth. The fire that burned there did not destroy the Church; it revealed its fractures. Whether that fire becomes merely a memory—or the beginning of deeper wholeness—depends on whether the Church is willing to let the Eucharist shape not only what it celebrates, but how it exists.

Endnotes

1. Andrew Chesnut, Competitive Spirits: Latin America’s New Religious Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 45.
2. Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 101-125.
3. Pew Research Center, Religion in Latin America: Widespread Change in a Historically Catholic Region (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2014), 5-10.
4. Ibid., 15.
5. David Martin, Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 150-175.
6. Chesnut, Competitive Spirits, 78-82.
7. Pew Research Center, Religion in Latin America, 42-45.
8. Martin, Tongues of Fire, 195-210.
9. Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, rev. ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988), xxiii-xxv.
10. Ibid., 6-11.
11. Jon Sobrino, Jesus the Liberator: A Historical-Theological Reading of Jesus of Nazareth (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991), 45-60.
12. Leonardo Boff, Ecclesiogenesis: The Base Communities Reinvent the Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986), 12-25.
13. Januarius Asongu, Holistic Resilience: Counseling at the Intersection of Faith, Family, and Identity (Townsend, DE: Saint Monica University Press, 2025), 88-92.
14. Óscar Romero, The Violence of Love, trans. James R. Brockman (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988), 112.
15. Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction on Certain Aspects of the “Theology of Liberation” (Vatican City, 1984), I.7-10.
16. Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium (1963), 47.
17. Pew Research Center, Religion in Latin America, 88-92.
18. Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation (Vatican City, 1986), VI.81.
19. Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium (1964), 27; Dei Verbum (1965), 8.
20. Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano (CELAM), The Church in the Present-Day Transformation of Latin America in the Light of the Council (Medellín Documents, 1968), 14.2.
21. Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation, 57.
22. Pope Francis, Episcopalis Communio (Vatican City, 2018), 1-2.
23. Sobrino, Jesus the Liberator, 75-80.
24. Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano (CELAM), Evangelization in Latin America’s Present and Future (Puebla Documents, 1979), 31.
25. 1 Corinthians 10:17, as referenced in Lumen Gentium, 7.
26. Boff, Ecclesiogenesis, 30-45.
27. Asongu, Holistic Resilience, 145-150; Januarius Asongu, “Triple Masking and Mental Health: A Study of the Burden of Identity Management for Autistic LGBTQ+ Christians in Conservative Church Settings Using a Sequential Explanatory Mixed Methods Design,” Journal of Epidemiology and Public Health 4, no. 1 (2026): 22-28.
28. Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation, 25.
29. Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium (Vatican City, 2013), 198-201.
30. Jenkins, The Next Christendom, 256-260.