The Church in Chile

Abstract

The large parish of San Jose Obrero on the outskirts of Santiago, the Chilean capital, contains a cross-section of the city’s poor. On one side of the Avenida San Pedro which runs down the middle of the parish are four storey blocks of flats, a memorial to a democratic Chile in which elected civilian governments built housing for the working class. These flats look across the avenue on the vast expanse of small, poorly constructed wooden huts which are the typical homes of Chile’s poor. This huge poblacion, as these areas are called, contains some 150,000 people who moved in to take this land and build their flimsy huts during the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende.

Living in one of these wooden huts among the people are four Chilean sisters. While teaching three mornings a week in a local primary school to make a living the sisters concentrate their time on supporting the network of Christian communities which have been growing in their area. In the immediate chapel which is the primary focus for their work (it is one of the eight such chapels in the parish) they now have four fully developed adult communities and one youth community, each of which has about 20 members. As well as that there are looser groups organised around the chapel: six groups of family catechetics in each of which some eight or nine couples attend weekly meetings for two years as part of the obligatory diocesan programme before First Communion; two groups of preparation for Confirmation in each of which about 20 teenagers attend a weekly meeting, again for two years as the only way in which they are permitted to receive Confirmation; two groups of parents who want their child baptised and who must attend a series of eight talks, and finally two groups involved in an experimental catechetics for which the catechists take their themes from the experience of the local people rather than using the diocesan course.