Christian Base Communities

Christian base communities are small, grassroots neighborhood groups dedicated to reading the Bible and encouraging participants to mobilize in order to achieve social justice. The Second Vatican Council provided much of the theological and political basis for these groups, and they emerged throughout the Catholic world but became especially significant in the Latin American countryside. They have become closely identified with liberation theology [Page 324]and have participated directly in movements for social justice.

Christian base communities (often known by their Spanish name, comunidades eclesiales de base, or CEBs) were a logical extension of the new theology and politics emerging out of Vatican II (1962–1965). Vatican II had a multilayered impact on Catholic theology and practice, but at the most general level, it represented an attempt to increase Catholicism's accessibility and to emphasize its commitment to social justice. Vatican II encouraged a rereading of the Bible, and it encouraged a far greater variety of people to put themselves in a position to read, teach, and lead, based on this rereading. The groups engaged in this rereading took many forms (and by no means supplanted the church and the chapel), but probably the most common was the Christian base community. Christian base communities immediately came to provide a forum in which even the poorest and least educated could take part. Their structure encourages all participants to actively engage Church representatives and to emphasize the progressive and even revolutionary teachings of Christianity. The Church representatives who have led these groups come from all sectors of society.

Christian base communities proliferated rapidly in the late 1960s and 1970s, for several reasons. First, they established a presence in many remote areas, in which they came to represent a fundamental religious and political reality to their participants. For a poor, marginalized peasant to take part in a base community was often a transformative act. Second, the conditions prevailing in and around Christian base communities gave credence to the reformist and revolutionary ideas expressed in liberation theology. The more radical words of Christ applied immediately and directly to these conditions. For both of these reasons, Christian base communities became most numerous and politically significant in Latin America, a region marked by dictatorship and inequality in the 1970s. The cultural dominance of Catholicism in Latin America also was crucial: Catholicism was so deeply entrenched that some of the radicalism of the region was bound to be channeled through the Church.

If CEBs had an original “home,” it was Brazil, where Paulo Freire pioneered the practice of “conscientization” (which, in its Spanish and Portuguese forms, means a mixture of education and politicization). But they spread quickly throughout the region. There was, in fact, a close correspondence between the CEB presence and the amount of poverty and oppression in a particular country. In this context, then, CEBs became a fixture in the Latin American rural areas during the 1970s, and many of the most prominent advocates for social justice and revolution got their starts in these organizations. Variations of Christian base communities have emerged throughout the world and are by no means limited to Catholicism. But they owe a political and theological debt to the rethinking of Christianity that took place during Vatican II.

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