Caution’s the Word for Believers in Chile

“Everyone in Latin America sighs for `the revolution’ as if they were sighing for the Messiah,” says Orlando Sandoval, director of the University Student Center in Chile. In his country “the revolution” came quietly when Salvador Allende, a Marxist, was elected president in 1970.

The Fourth Assembly of the World Council of Churches has come and gone. Uppsala (1968), a small university town in eastern Sweden, has joined Amsterdam (1948), Evanston (1954), and New Delhi (1961) in the unfolding of the Ecumenical Movement.

In order to appreciate the far-reaching consequences of traditional religion on the Latin American mentality and way of life, it becomes imperative to look historically at the phenomena which we may call in borrowed symbolism “Miracle, Mystery and Authority.”