Catholic Church

The Catholic Church is presented as a conspicuous counterexample to explanations of international conflict based on religion: in Latin America, its commitment to the poor made it a target of U.S. policy and violence, while the United States supported radical Islamist forces elsewhere when they served its purposes. In Noam Chomsky’s account, the contrast exposes submission to power—not religious identity—as the more consistent test for choosing enemies and allies.

Political Role in Latin America

Chomsky identifies the Church’s taking the side of the poor as the offense that brought it into conflict with the United States. He describes the Church as the principal target of U.S. warfare in Central America during the 1980s, a campaign whose consequences he summarizes as roughly two hundred thousand dead, millions of orphans and refugees, and four devastated countries. The Church appears here within a broad account of violence and political power, rather than as an institution whose internal structure or religious doctrine is examined.

The argument makes the political stakes of the Church’s stance central: support for the poor is treated not as a neutral religious commitment, but as a challenge that provoked a powerful response. Chomsky’s pointed description of that commitment as a supposed mortal sin recasts the language of religious judgment as political irony. The contrast is between the Church’s solidarity with the poor and the interests protected by U.S. power.

A Contrast with Religious Explanations

The Church’s experience is set against U.S. support for radical Islamists during the 1980s. Chomsky says those forces were favored because they were exceptionally effective fighters, while the Church in Latin America suffered for siding with the poor. The comparison makes religious identity an inadequate explanation for U.S. choices: radically different religious movements could be supported or opposed according to their political usefulness.

Chomsky develops the contrast into a rejection of a simple civilizational divide. If the Church in Latin America could be set against the United States while the United States supported Muslim forces elsewhere, religious blocs do not explain the pattern. In his formulation, the decisive criteria are submission and service to power, not religion. The Church thus helps make visible the selectivity of the language used to describe political friends and enemies.

Significance in the Argument

The Church recurs as evidence in Chomsky’s critique of the tendency to present violence as a conflict between civilizations or religions. Its Latin American position sits alongside examples involving Muslim clients and allies, undermining any stable division between a religious West and a religious adversary. The juxtaposition does not make the Church and those other forces equivalent; it shows instead that the political alignment shifts with power and strategic advantage.

That role connects the Church’s treatment to Chomsky’s wider concern with the naming and justification of state violence. His discussion argues that the language of counterterrorism, humanitarian action, and religious difference can obscure who is exercising force and whose interests it serves. Against that framing, the Church’s fate illustrates the costs of a political commitment that conflicts with powerful interests, and why religious identity alone cannot account for the pattern of repression and support.