Colombia

Colombia held on to confessional establishment longer than almost any of its neighbours. The constitution of 1886 and the concordat that followed in 1887 made Catholicism the religion of the nation, put the church in charge of public education, gave it civil registration and made its teaching the standard against which textbooks were measured. That settlement was not a formality. It was one of the axes along which Conservatives and Liberals fought, and the mid century violence known simply as La Violencia had a religious dimension throughout, with Protestant congregations attacked and clergy involved on both sides.

Disestablishment came with the constitution of 1991, which declared freedom of worship and no official religion. The change was rapid in its effects. Evangelical and Pentecostal churches, already growing, moved into public life directly, forming their own parties and winning parliamentary seats, and the constituent assembly that wrote the 1991 text itself included evangelical delegates.

The devotions that define popular Catholicism here are regional. The sanctuary of Las Lajas in Narino is built across a gorge on the site of an apparition, with the image said to be imprinted on the rock face of the canyon wall itself. The Holy Week processions of Popayan, carried through the streets on wooden pasos since the sixteenth century, are inscribed by UNESCO as intangible heritage.

Indigenous practice continues in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, where the Kogi, Arhuaco and Wiwa maintain a religious order under their mamos, and in the Amazon, where yage is used ceremonially by taitas of several peoples.

Colombian Catholicism has occupied every position in the country's armed conflict, and the positions are not reconcilable into a single story.

Camilo Torres Restrepo was a priest and a founding figure of Colombian sociology who concluded that the structures he was studying could not be changed by the means available, left the priesthood, joined the ELN guerrilla and was killed in his first combat action in 1966. He became an emblem for liberation theology across the continent and an embarrassment to a hierarchy that was, at that point, closely aligned with the Conservative order.

Clergy were also killed in large numbers by every armed actor. Bishop Jesus Emilio Jaramillo was murdered by the ELN in 1989. Bishop Isaias Duarte Cancino, who had denounced the entry of drug money into politics, was shot outside his church in Cali in 2002. Priests in rural parishes were killed by guerrillas for cooperating with the state and by paramilitaries for sheltering the displaced.

And the church was central to ending it. Catholic bodies provided mediation and back channels over decades, and in the Havana negotiations with the FARC they helped organise the victim delegations that were flown to Cuba to speak directly to the negotiators, a procedural innovation widely regarded as decisive. The Truth Commission established under the 2016 agreement was presided over by a Jesuit, Francisco de Roux, and delivered its final report in 2022.

Three roles, then: insurgent, victim and mediator, held by the same institution within a single lifetime. Colombian accounts of the war that mention only one of them are describing a part.