Towards a socio-cultural perspective of the Catholic Church history in Chile: La Virgen del Carmen in national independence Sesquicentennial (1968)

Abstract

This paper discusses the issue of nationhood through discourse that produced the Chilean Catholic Church in 1968. We conceive it as an institution producing meaning through the issuance of a discourse oriented toward the spiritual and temporal, tried to establish a representation of national identity that fully converged in a political and cultural expression. We propose that the image of the Virgen del Carmen, converged all the principles and values that the Church wanted to convey to the Chilean society. Therefore, we intend to account from the sociopolitical and religious areas, the factors that influenced the construction of this discourse of the Church, and also to raise a critical historiographical study on the phenomenon of religion in Chile.