Abstract

LARGO VARGAS, Joan Manuel. The Virgin of Fatima, the People and “El Amparo”. Secularization and Catholicism in the mid-20th Century in Cali, Colombia. Secuencia [online]. 2019, n.105, e1609.  Epub Sep 05, 2019. ISSN 2395-8464.  https://doi.org/10.18234/secuencia.v0i105.1609.

This work uses the new political-intellectual history to explore the history of Catholicism and secularization in the Colombian southwest, using the case of Cali in the 1940s. Viewing Catholic agents as active subjects, rather than enemies of modernization, it analyzes two specific events. It achieves an understanding of the conflict of opinion that created a disagreement between the diocese of Cali and a Franciscan community regarding the ownership of a building, and of the discourse triggered by the arrival of a religious image in 1949. Both events condense several representations of the political order of the time. The two events demonstrate the malleable nature of the language used by Catholic sectors towards the “people” and their political enemies. A review of these semantic coordinates opens up new interpretations for the history of Catholicism in Colombia and Latin America.

Keywords : secularization; catholicism; people; Colombia; Cali.