The purpose of this research is to examine the account in the book Sharing the Faith Across the Hemisphere by Mary M. McGlone the collaboration among the churches of the Americas during the first half of the 20th century, the Church's north-to-south missionary-service projects of the 1960s, and the Church's commitment to evangelization and service to the poor of Latin America that began with the 1968 bishops' conference at Medellin, Colombia.
The chapter on collaboration of the churches of America during the first half of the 20th century is an account of the strong anticlericalist sentiment in many of the countries of Latin America, especially Mexico, as well as of the evolution of a cohesive ecclesiastical and missionary structure in the United States that first took shape in the wake of World War I. The two were intertwined because out of the US experience came the Maryknoll missions, which would figure in the evangelization of the later years, and a clarification of religious and lay constituencies within the domestic Church. The National Catholic War Council, formed during the war as a mechanism of unified action, evolved into the National Catholic Welfare Council, which was intended as an umbrella governance organization but which actually was a consultative body comprising representatives of America's independent dioceses.
Meanwhile, in Mexico, anticlerical policies initiated in 1857 were strengthened in 1917 and again in 1926. Basically, these policies nationalized church property and forbad provision of ecclesial and clerical services--all with a view toward suppressing the influence of the Church on national secular life. In response, the Mexican bishops articulated a stance of abandonment of all ministerial practices, while remaining silent on or quietly supporting the violent proclerical guerrilla tactics of a group identified as Cristeros (pp. 74-76; p. 89).
In the United States, Catholic magazines and the NCWC la...