Evangelization and Human Promotion

Abstract

The binary evangelization – human promotion has developed within a process whose culmination was the Second Vatican Council and whose elements were: the Church’s slow and tense engagement in social questions, the reconciliation with the modern world, the overcoming of the dualism natural vs. supernatural etc. This process, in turn, reached higher levels and bigger proportions within the ecclesial dynamism inaugurated by itself. In the Latin American Church this binary bore particular relevance and was translated in terms of liberation. Thus, a proper understanding of this binary means situating it in the context of a large process of ecclesial renewal, elucidating its Latin American specificity, and, by way of conclusion, at least briefly, alluding to the centrality as well as to the new dimensions that it has assumed in Pope Francis’s pontificate.