This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series Change in British Society, given by A.H. H. Holsey, was originally

broadcast in 1978. Christ was a great revolutionary. So Fidel Castro declared during his

visit to Jamaica last year, adding that he saw no incompatibility between Christianity and Cuban socialism.

In 1970, just after his election as president of Chile,

another Marxist, Salvador Allende, observed that the Catholic Church had changed fundamentally.

In fact, he saw it now as being, as he put it, in our favour.

And of his Marxist alliance, he said said we're going to try to make a reality out of Christian thought these extraordinary remarks

testify to the very considerable shifts of emphasis that have occurred within South American

Christianity in the last two decades they They point to changes which are only

imperfectly appreciated in Western society. This lack of understanding in part derives

than the great preparedness of Western Christians to listen to the views of Latin American

ecclesiastical progressives, then to the opinions of the more typical established religious

leadership. Christians of the developed world regard the Latin

American radicals as authentically speaking for the oppressed and exploited of the third world.

But are they? It is indeed the case that South America is the only holy Christian continent

of the developing world. Yet despite some obviously unique features in recent Latin American religious history,

there's a lot that's extremely familiar about the politicisation of the progressive element

in the church, the part which has acquired so much influence, both inside and outside South

America.

Much of their thinking, however, as elsewhere in politicised Christian circles, depends upon

ideological presuppositions that are neither distinctively Christian nor Latin American.

...