Towards the Founding of a Native Clergy and the Revival of ‘Mamacha Cocharcas’: Popular Lived Catholicism in the Wake of Vatican II

Abstract

In the years directly following the Second Vatican Council under the guidance of its second bishop Mons. Enrique Pelach i Feliu, the Andean diocese of Abancay—founded in 1959 in one of the most rural and most indigenous areas of Peru—experienced the founding of a new seminary intended to train a new generation of native clergy, and a concerted clerical effort to revive and promote the Marian pilgrimage of the Virgin of Cocharcas. The former meant the advent of a generation of native clergy made up of men born and raised in rural farming families in Abancay and native speakers of Quechua, the local indigenous language, which transformed the relationship between the institutional Church and indigenous Catholics from one rooted in antipathy and hostility to one based in a shared cultural background and language. The latter meant the elevation of the indigenous figure of Sebastian Quimichu as exemplar of both Andean Catholic faith and practice for his role in founding the Marian shrine of Cocharcas, and the legitimisation of popular Andean Catholic practices that had previously been stigmatised. This article provides a dual historical and ethnographic account of these events, and in doing so demonstrates the profound transformation of rural Andean lived religion and practice in the years following Vatican II.

Envisioning a Catholic Past, Present and Future: Conversion, Recuperation and Andean Christianity in Talavera, Peru

“…All were trained in the local seminary in Abancay-founded in the 1970s by a previous bishop, Msgr. Enrique Pélach, who was highly conservative but locally renowned for his command of the indigenous language, Quechua, and for his sympathy for local Andean customs and people (Lee 2019(Lee , 2021. During his tenure as bishop from 1968 to 1992-the decades directly following the Second Vatican Council and the 'opening up' of the Catholic Church that it sparked-he not only founded the seminary with the aim of fostering a generation of indigenous clergy, but also undertook a number of other initiatives focused on the revitalisation of local Andean Catholicism such as the revival of regional pilgrimages and other festivals (Lee 2021).…”

“…Enrique Pélach, who was highly conservative but locally renowned for his command of the indigenous language, Quechua, and for his sympathy for local Andean customs and people (Lee 2019(Lee , 2021. During his tenure as bishop from 1968 to 1992-the decades directly following the Second Vatican Council and the 'opening up' of the Catholic Church that it sparked-he not only founded the seminary with the aim of fostering a generation of indigenous clergy, but also undertook a number of other initiatives focused on the revitalisation of local Andean Catholicism such as the revival of regional pilgrimages and other festivals (Lee 2021). The local curate observed to me that Catholicism's time for conversion had long passed; now, he said, people are born to Catholicism-implicitly also indicating, in the spirit of Msgr Enrique's endeavours, that the Andean past and Andean culture were no longer to be regarded as a threat to Christianity.…”