The large parish of San Jose Obrero on the outskirts of Santiago, the Chilean capital, contains a cross-section of the city’s poor. On one side of the Avenida San Pedro which runs down the middle of the parish are four storey blocks of flats, a memorial to a democratic Chile in which elected civilian governments built housing for the working class. These flats look across the avenue on the vast expanse of small, poorly constructed wooden huts which are the typical homes of Chile’s poor. This huge poblacion, as these areas are called, contains some 150,000 people who moved in to take this land and build their flimsy huts during the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende.

Living in one of these wooden huts among the people are four Chilean sisters. While teaching three mornings a week in a local primary school to make a living the sisters concentrate their time on supporting the network of Christian communities which have been growing in their area. In the immediate chapel which is the primary focus for their work (it is one of the eight such chapels in the parish) they now have four fully developed adult communities and one youth community, each of which has about 20 members. As well as that there are looser groups organised around the chapel: six groups of family catechetics in each of which some eight or nine couples attend weekly meetings for two years as part of the obligatory diocesan programme before First Communion; two groups of preparation for Confirmation in each of which about 20 teenagers attend a weekly meeting, again for two years as the only way in which they are permitted to receive Confirmation; two groups of parents who want their child baptised and who must attend a series of eight talks, and finally two groups involved in an experimental catechetics for which the catechists take their themes from the experience of the local people rather than using the diocesan course.

This article is inspired by an interest in basic Christian communities in Latin America, and also by a critical interest in some attempts to translate the Latin American experience to this country. The texts on which my criticism is based are John Vincent’s essay ‘Doing Theology’ in Agenda for Prophets (ed D Haslam and R Ambler, 1980), and, to a lesser extent, Basic Communities by David Clark (1977). I want to make it clear that I am concerned with David Clark’s view of the significance of the basic communities and not with the communities themselves. I shall be going on to argue that both writers implicitly deny the importance of a scientific study of society and the importance of intellectual work in social theory, politics and economics. They appear to be antiintellectual, preferring an instinctive, common-sense response with an emphasis on action. This means that they have no way of developing an awareness of their own ideological conditioning and so seem to accept many liberal middle-class values in an uncritical way. A comparison of the Latin American and British situations reveals that if the church in the west is ever going to stand with the poor and the weak, then western Christians must develop a critical attitude towards those class ideologies which they take for granted as common-sense. This is only possible through a social and political education, in theory and practice.

The Problem of evil, from Epicurus via Philo of Alexandria to today, has usually been presented in more or less the same way. We are generally offered three, sometimes more, propositions:

1. 1 God is omnipotent

2. 2 God is good/loving

3. 3 Evil/suffering exists