Catholic Church in Venezuela

Based on Wikipedia: Catholic Church in Venezuela

A Church That Sided With the Empire

When Simón Bolívar and his fellow revolutionaries fought to free Venezuela from Spanish rule in the early nineteenth century, they faced an uncomfortable truth: the Catholic priests weren't on their side. The Spanish clergy, by and large, remained loyal to the Crown. It was a betrayal the young nation would remember.

This awkward beginning helps explain why Venezuela's relationship with Catholicism has always been more complicated than in neighboring Colombia, where the Church became deeply woven into national identity. In Venezuela, the Church has spent centuries trying to recover from backing the wrong horse.

Conquistadors and Friars

The story begins in 1515, when Franciscan and Dominican friars established Cumaná—the first permanent European settlement on the South American mainland. They called it Nueva Toledo, though that name wouldn't stick. Neither would the settlement itself, at first.

The monks found themselves caught between two hostile forces. Indigenous people, understandably resistant to colonization, attacked repeatedly. Meanwhile, Spanish slavers operating from the nearby island of Cubagua raided the mainland for captives, making the friars' attempts at "peaceful" conversion nearly impossible. The settlement had to be refounded multiple times before it finally took hold.

One of the most famous figures in early colonial Latin America, Bartolomé de las Casas, tried to establish a peaceful colonization project in the region. Las Casas was a Dominican friar who had witnessed the brutal treatment of indigenous peoples and became their most vocal defender. His experiment never got off the ground. In 1521, a conquistador named Gonzalo de Ocampo launched punitive raids against local indigenous communities in retaliation for the destruction of a Dominican convent at Chichiriviche. So much for peaceful conversion.

Coro, founded in 1527 on Venezuela's western coast, became the country's first capital and the seat of its first bishop. That diocese, established in 1531 by Pope Clement VII, holds a distinction worth noting: it was the first Catholic diocese anywhere in South America. The Church was staking its claim early.

The Rise and Crushing of Church Power

For the first few centuries of Venezuelan history, the Catholic hierarchy enjoyed a cozy relationship with the ruling class. Until the mid-1800s, ranking clergy maintained close ties with the conservative oligarchy that ran the country. The Church controlled much of the educational system. This was the natural order of things in colonial and post-colonial Latin America.

Then the Liberals came to power.

Antonio Guzmán Blanco, who dominated Venezuelan politics from 1870 to 1888, launched an anticlerical campaign that nearly destroyed the institutional Church. His government didn't just limit Church power—it attacked it directly, even attempting to legalize the marriage of priests. For Catholics, priestly celibacy is a non-negotiable discipline in the Latin Rite. Guzmán Blanco was taking a sledgehammer to Church authority.

These anticlerical policies persisted for decades. The Venezuelan Church, unlike its Colombian counterpart, never fully recovered its institutional strength.

The Twentieth Century Revival

It took nearly a hundred years for the Church to regain significant influence. The turning point came in the mid-twentieth century, when Christian social teaching—the Church's growing body of thought about justice, workers' rights, and the distribution of wealth—began to resonate with Venezuelan society.

Catholic laypeople played a central role in founding COPEI, the Social Christian Party, in 1946. The name stands for Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente, but everyone just called it COPEI. This was Venezuela's Christian Democratic party, part of a broader movement across Latin America that tried to offer a middle path between capitalism and socialism, grounded in Catholic social principles.

The Church's political influence became undeniable in 1958. When dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez fell from power that year, observers credited the Church's vocal disapproval as a contributing factor. In a country where the vast majority identified as Catholic, the bishops' opinion still mattered.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the Church expanded its involvement in education and social welfare. COPEI won presidential elections in 1968 and 1978, and while the Church had no formal ties to the party, many believed that clergy and Church-affiliated institutions helped deliver those victories.

The Venezuelan Madonna

Understanding Venezuelan Catholicism requires understanding the Virgin Mary—or rather, understanding that there isn't just one Virgin Mary in popular devotion. Venezuelan Catholics venerate several distinct apparitions and images, each tied to specific regions and carrying their own histories.

Our Lady of Coromoto is the most important. According to tradition, she appeared to an indigenous chief named Coromoto in Portuguesa state in 1652. The Virgin supposedly left behind a small image, now housed in a massive basilica that draws pilgrims from across the country. In 1950, Pope Pius XII declared Our Lady of Coromoto the patroness of Venezuela.

In the eastern islands of Nueva Esparta, devotion centers on the Virgen del Valle, the Virgin of the Valley. Fishermen and sailors have venerated her for centuries. Her feast day, September 8th, draws enormous celebrations.

In the western part of the country, near the Colombian border, Our Lady of the Rosary of Chiquinquirá commands devotion. This particular image is shared with Colombia, where an apparition site in the town of Chiquinquirá attracts millions of pilgrims annually. The cross-border veneration reflects how arbitrary the lines between these two countries can be when it comes to popular religion.

Hugo Chávez and the Church's New Enemy

Hugo Chávez, the socialist firebrand who took power in 1999, identified as a practicing Catholic. He invoked Christ regularly in speeches, comparing his "Bolivarian Revolution" to Jesus's teachings on poverty and justice.

The bishops weren't buying it.

The Venezuelan Church hierarchy clashed repeatedly with Chávez over education policy. The Church runs approximately 700 schools across Venezuela, most of them subsidized by the state—an arrangement dating back decades. When Chávez's government moved toward more direct oversight of these schools, Cardinal Jorge Urosa, the Archbishop of Caracas, called for peaceful demonstrations.

The fight over religious education in public schools proved even more contentious. The government wanted to remove religious instruction from regular school hours. For a Church already feeling squeezed, this felt like an existential threat.

Here's the irony: before Chávez, the Church had been losing ground to Protestant churches, particularly charismatic and Pentecostal denominations that were converting urban poor Venezuelans in significant numbers. The Church lacked the funds, personnel, and frankly the energy to compete. But once Chávez took power, evangelical conversion rates declined. It turned out the new government posed a more immediate concern than the Protestants.

Chávez made no secret of his disdain for the Catholic hierarchy. He was dismissive of the bishops' role in Venezuelan society, treating them as representatives of an old elite rather than spiritual leaders. The feeling was mutual.

A Church in Decline

The numbers tell a stark story. In 2009, according to the CIA World Factbook, 96 percent of Venezuelans identified as Roman Catholic. By 2018, a Latinobarómetro survey put the figure at 66 percent. A thirty-point drop in less than a decade suggests something dramatic happening beneath the surface.

Since the Second Vatican Council—the transformative gathering of Catholic bishops from 1962 to 1965 that modernized many Church practices—the Venezuelan Church has struggled with vocations. Simply put, not enough Venezuelans want to become priests or nuns. Many clergy serving in the country today were born elsewhere, a pattern common across Latin America but particularly acute in Venezuela.

This reliance on foreign priests creates vulnerabilities. When political or economic crises hit—and Venezuela has experienced both in abundance—foreign clergy may leave. Local priests, with deeper roots and family ties, tend to stay. A church built on imported labor is a church standing on uncertain ground.

The Maduro Years

When Nicolás Maduro succeeded Chávez after the latter's death from cancer in 2013, the Church's opposition continued. The bishops have been vocal critics of Maduro's increasingly authoritarian government, speaking out as Venezuela's economy collapsed and millions of citizens fled the country.

Pope Francis, notably, has tried to remain neutral—a stance that frustrated many Venezuelan Catholics hoping for stronger condemnation from Rome. During the 2019 presidential crisis, when opposition leader Juan Guaidó declared himself interim president and was recognized by dozens of countries while Maduro clung to power with military backing, Francis declined to take sides publicly.

The Vatican's neutrality may reflect a diplomatic calculation: the Holy See maintains relations with governments across the political spectrum and prefers quiet diplomacy to public confrontation. It may also reflect Francis's general reluctance to wade into Latin American political disputes, despite—or perhaps because of—his Argentine roots.

The Venezuelan bishops, closer to the suffering on the ground, have felt no such restraint. In January 2020, when a disputed National Assembly election saw a pro-government figure named Luis Parra claim the assembly presidency, the Episcopal Conference of Venezuela rejected his claim outright. When Parra tried to attend a meeting of the organization days later—accompanied by armed forces, no less—he was denied entry.

The Weight of History

Venezuela's Catholic Church carries three centuries of complicated history. It backed the colonizers against independence. It allied with conservative oligarchs. It was crushed by Liberal anticlericals. It rebuilt through Christian Democratic politics. It clashed with socialist revolutionaries. It watched a third of its faithful walk away.

Through it all, the devotion to Mary persists—to Coromoto, to the Virgin of the Valley, to Our Lady of Chiquinquirá. The institutional Church may weaken; the popular religion endures. Pilgrims still travel to shrines. Fishermen still ask for the Virgin's protection. Mothers still name daughters after apparitions their grandmothers venerated.

Whether the institutional Church can rebuild its strength, attract new vocations, and find its footing in a transformed political landscape remains uncertain. What seems clear is that Venezuelan Catholicism will continue to be shaped by forces the hierarchy cannot control—by governments, by economics, by evangelical competitors, and by the stubborn persistence of popular devotion that doesn't require permission from bishops or blessing from Rome.