| This dissertation examines a case in which religion and religious institutions played an important role in the formation of public life after the separation of church and state. While formally the Ecuadorian liberal state subdued the church after disestablishment, collaboration and intense negotiation between state and church continued over the control of society. The Catholic Church adapted to the new arrangements by modernizing itself, maintaining a crucial role in the regulation of society and contesting the prevailing understanding of what the nation means to Ecuadorians.; This study investigates three domains in which the church continued to play a significant role. The first is the place of Marian devotions in public life, through which the Church expressed its understanding of the close affinity between religion and national identity. The second area concerns the church' efforts to control socialization and the definition of social norms through religious education for males, and the continuity of a moral-religious order in domestic space controlled by women. The third area is the active role of religious associations, particularly of women, in defining the character of an embryonic civil society in Ecuador. The events in these three areas are grounded in institutional transformations of the Church that took place during the second half of the nineteenth century and that prepared the church for accommodation to the new order of things after disestablishment. The Church forged its place in public life under Liberalism by selectively restating aspects of its tradition in a modern context. It transformed its institutions, changed its forms of appeal and adopted a discourse of modernization.; The consequence of these transformations, in part unintended, was that, in lieu of a sharp distinction between secular and religious worldviews, there emerged a complex adaptation of religious views to modernity that shaped the development of both Church and State. Beyond the separation of church and state, religious institutions and practices permeated the attempts to found a new social and political order on the basis of democratic principles. |
