The Catholic Church in Haiti and recent political and social change

This dissertation examines the history of the Catholic Church in Haiti, focusing on Church-State relations during the regime of President-for-Life Jean-Claude Duvalier (1971-1986). The Church in Haiti generally supported the government in power. The movement against Duvalier, however, was different; the Church provided the leadership and moral authority for Haitians to overthrow Jean-Claude Duvalier on 7 February 1986. The changes that led the Church from acquiescence to activism are the consequence of both internal and external factors. As the initially weak and foreign-dominated institution grew stronger and increasingly Haitian, it adopted a new sense of mission. Ideas stemming from the Bishops' Meetings at Medellin, Colombia and Puebla, Mexico, Vatican II, and the visit of the Pope to Haiti, contributed to the change. We conclude that restrictions on civil liberties, economic decline, religious and racial friction, and the dichotomy between government promises and reality created tensions that produced a revolutionary climate in Haiti. Increasingly deprived of other outlets to vent frustration and express its moral outrage, the Haitian public turned to the Church as a mechanism for dealing with the government. Conscious of a need to redress the past and motivated by the new ideas, a significant sector of the Church, with its well-established systems of communication, became the leading institutional vehicle for the expression of discontent and, ultimately, a champion for change.