Download file 98 KB Texto completo en español More of: Joaquín Fermandois

Chile has been part of the "Western system" from which liberalism arose. Like in the rest of Latin America, the relationship between liberals and conservatives in the 19th century was closely linked to the clerical/anti-clerical polarity ultimately inherited from the Iberian world. Catholicism, as identified with the Occident, simultaneously belongs and does not belong to the phenomenon of "self-criticism." All this converges in the ideological struggles of the 20th century and in the so-called "value quarrels" of our time. By having to defend its positions on the basis of "the liberal spirit," the author says that Catholicism has come to resemble it in part and at the same time feel that it is strange.