| The impossibility of combining Catholicism and democracy was a commonplace for the founding fathers of sociological thought; only Alexis de Tocqueville thought that there was no essential incompatibility between them. Fascism in Italy and Spain before 1945, supported by Catholic political movements, confirmed this mainstream view. However, in Chile, a group of young Catholics challenged these assumptions by creating a Christian democratic party.;In the earliest phase of the Chilean Christian Democratic Party, from 1934 to 1941, two groups of individuals fought an ideological battle over opposing conceptions of society. The democratic faction of the young Catholic party, led by Eduardo Frei Montalva, prevailed against the Fascism-inspired group. That was the beginning of the first successful Catholic Democratic party. The principal purpose of this study is to understand why Chile's Catholic political movement followed a unique historical path.;To answer this question, this study will historically reconstruct the ideological conflicts and the role of theological conceptions in the early phase of the Chilean Christian Democratic Party during the years 1920-1945 and use several theoretical traditions, including network theory and Max Weber's theory of religious orientations, to explain why the democratic faction became the ultimate victor of these ideological conflicts. |
