The Church in Bolivia

Abstract

Izara doesn’t appear on the map of Bolivia. It is a tiny village of some 100 people lying in the foothills of the range of mountains that mark the edge of the Altiplano, the 14,000 foot high plateau on which most of the country’s five million people live. It is just one of the 50 communities served by three priests who live in the village of Paria some 30 miles away by an unpaved dusty road. I went with one of the priests, an Englishman, Fr John Sullivan, on his quarterly visit to Izara during which he married a young couple, baptised two babies and said Mass. But the small Indian community of Izara doesn’t have to wait another three months to celebrate their faith or receive instruction since every Sunday Luis, the village catechist, leads the community’s liturgy.

Luis is just one of the 4,000 adult catechists who have become the leaders of the church in their traditional and isolated communities. They have grown up in the communities and they get their formation as community leaders by going away for week- long courses every few months organised for the catechists of a particular area. It is this network of catechists which has become the single most important influence in the growth of a grass-roots church in Bolivia. They are, Mr Pedro Duran, the co-ordinator of the episcopal commission on catechetics, explained to me a phenomenon in Bolivia where the church relies on foreign missionaries for 90 per cent of its clergy. For the first time Bolivians have become not just helpers of foreign missionaries but an autonomous force evangelising their own people from within their highly distinctive culture and not from outside it.