Social Catholicism, Anticommunism, and the Young Catholic Workers Movement in Mid-Twentieth-Century Chile

The Young Catholic Workers (JOC) movement played a significant role in the widespread mobilization of Chile’s working class in the mid-twentieth century. A specialized branch of Catholic Action, the JOC took root after World War II with strong support from the country’s progressive bishops, who envisioned the movement as a bulwark against growing communist influence.  The JOC flourished in Chile’s booming industrial centers and rapidly expanding slums.  It quickly became the largest lay movement for both male and female working-class youth, and the movement’s social impact extended far beyond the walls of the parish church.  However, scholarship on the Chilean Church in the decades before the advent of liberation theology generally ignores workers, while the literature on the working class in this period tends to downplay Catholicism, dismissing it as a purely conservative force.

This paper explores how the JOC promoted community and labor activism by fomenting social consciousness intertwined with progressive Catholic religiosity. Using both written and oral sources, including more than seventy-five interviews with former JOC participants, it sheds new light on grassroots Catholic activism in twentieth-century Latin America.  The JOC steadfastly rejected Marxist doctrine and embraced the social Catholic ideal of achieving justice for workers through class harmony, not class conflict, but the movement never shared ecclesiastical leaders’ strident anti-communism.  While proclaiming the need for a more humane capitalism, JOC militants pushed vigorously for improved living and working conditions in cooperation with their Communist and Socialist neighbors and co-workers.  Moreover, the JOC actively supported involvement in secular trade unions, in opposition to the Church hierarchy’s support for separate Christian unions.  This radical appropriation of social Catholic discourse and collaboration with Marxists transformed young Catholics’ political outlook and helped forge a path for the liberationist Church that emerged in the 1970s.