ABSTRACT
This chapter situates Catholic institutions and actors at the center of an account by re-construing how agents of the Church were the first to embrace forms of regional, that is supra-national, integration in the 19th and 20th centuries. It shows how the process of the implantation of the Church in the Spanish and Portuguese Americas–usually referred to as the Indies–fastened together regions of the hemisphere that in every other aspect were extremely different from each other. The hypothesis is that the stage of virtual “reconstitution” undergone by the Church in the 20th century, after the secularization earthquake, had a continental scope and direction in the case of Latin America. The chosen topics are really well known and have been thoroughly studied, which is why this analysis will not be exhaustive. Alternatively, it will be argued why they were vehicles to spread ideas that converged into actions and processes for resilience of integration.
