The Beginning of CELAM

The progressive beginnings of the Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano (CELAM). A conference of Latin American Catholic Bishops, CELAM was founded in Rio de Janeiro in 1955 with an initially progressive outlook pushed forward by decades of resistance to neo-colonialism and poverty in the region. During the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s, CELAM promoted a greater emphasis on issues of poverty and exploitation from its offices in Colombia. Years later, during the rise of liberation theology, CELAM supported the movement and its methodology until a backlash elected a conservative cleric to its leadership in 1972. The election in the Vatican of the right wing Pope John Paul II in 1978 cemented the global swing to the right of the Catholic Church, which distanced itself from its left wing clerics, and led to purges and complicity in the murder of liberation theology proponents during the continents dirty wars.