My host family has a family barbeque every Sunday. This event usually brings most of the extended family into contact once a week. Sometimes it occurs during an important soccer match and the men in the family are glued to the TV screen for most of the afternoon while the women talk in another room over coffee. Though it is a Sunday, the day Catholics are supposed to be at Mass, the entire family is hanging out in someone’s apartment and enjoying grilled beef, sausage, a little wine, and perhaps a siesta.
Santiago is like many big cities around the world—millions of people push around each other every day, cars and buses blast their horns as they bully through traffic, McDonald’s and Burger King are dotted throughout the different neighborhoods. The religious sector has not gone untouched by the developments that accompany a big city either. There is a struggle for the attention and attendance of the religious people of the community, even as other attractions threaten to distract churchgoers from taking communion on a regular basis. The problem is not the lack of religious people in Chile—rather, it is the lack of religious people in Chile who choose to engage their spirituality through public or communal means like the Church. My host family has proven to be an apt example of this practice. Perhaps one family member goes to Mass on a regular basis out of the 10 to 15 family members I see at our weekly gatherings (they usually go on a Monday night, if they have time). In conversations with other members of the family I have learned that though the idea of God and spirituality is important to them, going to Mass is much less so. The reasons for this vary from person to person in my family, ranging from a loss of faith in the ability of organized religion (particularly the Catholic Church) to a general indifference towards the Church to the desire for more spare time on the weekends after a long and busy work week.
Also, when I took trips to both Boliva and Peru, I gained a new perspective on Chilean religious attitudes and traditions. Both Peru and Bolivia have very high indigenous populations, while Chile’s is much smaller. The culture and traditions of these two neighboring countries are deeply influenced by this sect of the population, especially in regard to religion. Churches in Cusco, Peru typically showed the Virgin Mary with a large, flowing dress that becomes wider as it reaches the ground, giving her figure a triangular appearance. This is meant to incorporate the idea of the Pachamama, the god from the indigenous population represented by the image of a mountain, into the image of Mary. By fusing these two symbols together the Catholic Church in Peru earned more churchgoers who could more easily relate to Catholic ideology with this slightly altered symbol, and indigenous culture found a way to survive within a new system that was imposed during the colonial years. I have never seen such a symbol in any of the churches in Santiago, nor any symbols that were as easily identified as a fusion of the Catholic and indigenous beliefs.
It could be that I am looking in the wrong places. Perhaps there are similar instances of this in the southern part of Chile, which has a larger indigenous population and where indigenous culture is stronger than in and around Santiago. It may be that in the larger cities of Peru or Bolivia there are not the same fusions of indigenous and Catholic religion. However, judging from what I have seen, it is quite possible that there is a general apathy for church attendance in Chile because the Church has failed to find ways to adequately adapt itself to the environment and culture of this. It could be that the globalization of Chile, and Santiago in particular, has sapped attention and energy from the local connections of different institutions, like the Church, and this has created a greater indifference towards involvement in those institutions. A longer, more serious study would be needed to effectively analyze the links between higher globalization in Chile and the drop in church attendance. But even as the world becomes more connected by technology, a feeling of isolation and atomization can develop among people who feel their old institutions and support networks are unable to adapt to these rapid societal changes.
