The Catholic Church in the Most Recent Mexi- can and Argentine Historiographies. Religion, Modernity, and Secularization

Abstract

During the last decades, historians have become increasingly interested in the Catholic Church, so that now we can find a great amount of researchers devoted to the history of the Latin American church. However, this would have been unimaginable decades ago, because the Church was a topic dealt with exclusively by “confessional” historians belonging to the ecclesiastical institution. The development of ecclesiastical history as a relevant research field for professional historians has many common traits in Mexico and Argentina, the two cases described in this paper, which offers a critical review of the most recent historiography on the Church produced in these two countries. This analysis allows us to compare two historiographic trajectories with many common concerns, viewpoints, and problems.