The creation of a third-world segment in Latin American Catholicism

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the creation of a third-worldist segment in the Latin American Catholic Church, mainly from the Manifiesto de los Obispos del Tercer Mundo (1967), and the Movimiento de Sacerdotes para el Tercer Mundo (1967), documents that helped to propagate this new vision across the subcontinent, contributing to the transformation of the Catholic field. With the adoption of the Third World agenda, part of Latin American Catholicism ends up distancing itself from Roman orthodoxy, consolidating itself with the “preferential option for the poor” after the Medellín Conference in 1968. The Third World emerges as a political agenda after the Bandung Conference in 1951 and influences from foreign policy issues, passing through cinema and religion, becoming a worldview with its own characteristics, a polysemic concept that will also come into dispute in the religious context.