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Dominican Republic RELIGION
More than 90 percent of Dominicans were professed Roman
Catholics. In the late 1980s, the church organization
included 1
archdiocese, 8 dioceses, and 250 parishes. There were over
500
clergy, more than 70 percent of whom belonged to religious
orders. This yielded a ratio of nominal Roman Catholics to
priests of more than 10,000 to 1. Among Latin American
countries
only Cuba, Honduras, and El Salvador had higher ratios in
the
late 1980s.
Roman Catholicism is the official religion of the
Dominican
Republic, established by a Concordat with the Vatican. For
most
of the populace, however, religious practice was limited
and
formalistic. Few actually attended Mass regularly. Popular
religious practices were frequently far removed from Roman
Catholic orthodoxy. What little religious instruction most
Dominicans traditionally received came in the form of rote
memorization of the catechism. Many people felt that they
could
best approach God through intermediaries--the clergy, the
saints,
witches (brujos), and curers (curanderos).
The
saints played an important role in popular devotion.
Curanderos consulted the saints to ascertain which
herbs,
roots, and various home cures to employ. Witches
(brujos)
also cured by driving out possessive spirits that
sometimes
seized an individual.
Many Dominicans viewed the Roman Catholic clergy with
ambivalence. People respected the advice of their local
priest,
or their bishop, with regard to religious matters;
however, they
often rejected the advice of clergy on other matters on
the
assumption that priests had little understanding of
secular
affairs. Activist priests committed to social reform were
not
always well-received because their direct involvement with
parishioners ran counter to the traditional reserve
usually
displayed by the Roman Catholic clergy. Villagers often
criticized this social involvement. Nonetheless, the
priest was
generally the only person outside their kinship group that
people
trusted and confided in. As such, the parish priest often
served
as an advocate in rural Dominicans' dealings with larger
society.
Foreigners predominated among the clergy. The clergy
itself
was split between the traditional, conservative hierarchy
and
more liberal parish priests. At the parish level, some
priests
engaged in community development projects and in efforts
to form
comunidades de base (grass-roots Christian
communities),
designed to help people organize and work together more
effectively.
The Roman Catholic Church was apolitical during much of
the
Trujillo era, although a pastoral letter protested the
mass
arrests of government opponents in 1960. This action so
incensed
Trujillo that he ordered a campaign of harassment against
the
Church. Only the dictator's assassination prevented his
planned
imprisonment of the country's bishops. The papal nuncio
attempted
to administer humanitarian aid during the 1965 civil war.
The
bishops also issued various statements throughout the
1970s and
the 1980s, calling for respect for human rights and an
improved
standard of living for the majority. In the 1970s, Bishop
Juan
Antonio Flores of La Vega campaigned for indemnification
for
peasants displaced by the expansion of the Pueblo Viejo
mine.
Bishop Juan F. Pepen and Bishop Hugo Polanco Brito both
supported
the efforts of peasants and sugar colonos to
organize.
Protestants first came as migrants from North America
in the
1820s. West Indian laborers added to their numbers in the
late
nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. By the
1920s, the
various Protestant groups had organized nationally and had
established links with North American Evangelical groups.
The
main Evangelical groups included the Seventh Day
Adventists, the
Dominican Evangelical Church, and the Assemblies of God.
Protestant groups expanded, mainly in the rural areas,
during the
1960s and the 1970s; Pentecostals made considerable
inroads in
some regions. With minor exceptions, relations between
Protestants and the Roman Catholic majority were cordial.
Most Haitian immigrants and their descendants adhered
to
voodoo, and practiced it in secret because the government
and the
general population regarded the folk religion as pagan and
African. In Haiti voodoo encompassed a well-defined system
of
hierology and ceremonialism
(see Dominican Republic - Voodoo
, ch. 7).
Data as of December 1989
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