Rendering unto Caesar

For most of its history, the Latin American Catholic Church has been considered a pillar of conservatism. This image changed dramatically in the 1960s and 1970s, when bishops in countries such as Brazil, Chile, and El Salvador publicly denounced repressive dictatorial regimes in their respective countries. Observers rushed to understand both the causes and consequences of this phenomenon, while unfortunately ignoring the persistence of Catholic support for authoritarianism in Argentina, Honduras, and Uruguay. In Rendering unto Caesar, Anthony Gill offers an answer to the question of why Catholic leaders in some countries came to oppose dictatorial rule but, equally important, why many did not.