The Chilean Catholic Church: Challenges and Hopes
opinions. Most significantly, the Aparecida conference affirmed
once again the see-judge-act and signs-of-the-times discernment
methodologies that proved to be so effective in Gaudium et Spes and
at the watershed CELAM II conference in Medellín, Columbia, in 1968.
This in turn led to a much clearer understanding of the preferential
option for the poor.
At the Fifth General Conference of the Latin American Bishops, it was
agreed that each national Latin American church would prepare an
overview of its mission, which was to be renewed annually into the
final national mission in the year 2013. Unlike the churches of some
Latin American nations, the Chilean church was exemplary in following
this assignment.6 They have successfully followed the schedule every
year between CELAM V and 2012.
The Catholic Church in Chile anticipated Vatican II as well as responded to it.
Unfortunately, several other aspects of Chilean society, most notably
the economic and educational spheres, are more troubling.
Much of the enormous change between Chile’s now-thriving
economy and the economy of Alberto Hurtado’s time was produced
by worldwide recovery from the Great Depression of the 1930s, a
depression which impacted Chile more profoundly than any other
nation, according to League of Nations economists. Nevertheless,
the “Chicago Ideology” of Milton Friedman has altered the shape of
economics in Chile so profoundly that much of the credit for Chile’s
overall economic strength and much of the blame for the everwidening economic inequality between rich and poor both belong to
the profits-before-all-else policies championed by Friedman and his
followers, the so-called “Chicago Boys” who have strongly influenced
Chile’s economic policies for more than four decades.
These policies were undeniably successful in increasing Chile’s Gross
Domestic Product (GDP), which averaged 1.0 percent growth from
1997 to 2011 and 1.4 percent growth during 2012, but those same
policies clearly value individual profit more highly than the common
good, than human dignity, and than Catholic social teaching. Neither
Hurtado nor CELAM’s bishops can think highly of the institutionalized
inequality inherent to policies that reward the richest 10 percent
of the population with 47 percent of GDP while allocating only 1.2
211