Structural Obstacles to Grassroots Pastoral Practice: The Case of a Base Community in Urban Brazil

Base Christian Communities (CEBs) represented a key element in progressive Catholicism in Latin America, particularly in Brazil where they attained a high level of development. This article examines the evolution of a CEB in the periphery of Rio de Janeiro, exploring the obstacles to the production, circulation, and reception of the progressive Catholic message. While tensions and contradictions within the CEB contributed to its decline, they had deleterious effects only when they were conditioned by external processes such as the Vatican restoration and the economic crisis Brazil faced beginning in the mid-1980s. These macro processes exacerbated tensions between the pastoral agent and lay people and among different lay factions. They also disempowered the core of activists in the CEB. The paper concludes by challenging recent readings of the ‘crisis’ of Brazilian CEBs and by arguing for the need to place local religious dynamics in their proper institutional and structural context.