On 25 January 1959, Pope John XXIII announced the convocation of the Second Vatican Council in Rome to bring the Catholic Church ‘up to date’ by committing to ‘the joys and hopes, sorrows and anguish of the men of our time, especially of the poor and of those who suffer’. In 1960, the Protestant world organised the Strasbourg World Conference of Theology, on the Presence of the Church in Rapid Social Transformations. A common spirit in both events can be detected. In 1959, the Cuban revolution triumphed with the participation of priests and pastors, while at the same time in Bogotá in Colombia Father Camilo Torres-Restrepo and Presbyterian sociologist Orlando Fals-Borda created the first sociology faculty on the continent at the National University. Christianity in Latin America and the Caribbean began to embrace a new time of structural changes in consonance with a world that was shaking off colonial-capitalist oppression. This was marked by a dialogue between Christianity and Marxism and an attempt to break with the domination and dependency of the past.

Three events deepened this new engagement during the 1960s: the World Council of Churches Conference on Church and Society, in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1966; the death in combat of Father Torres-Restrepo in the Colombian mountains; and the second general conference of the Latin American Episcopal Council in Medellín, Colombia, in 1968. A significant new expression of Christianity emerged that stopped offering unquestioning ideological support to the system and abandoned the traditional alliance with powerful elites, represented in hierarchies of political, military and religious power.

In 1968, the Governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, made a tour of Latin America in order to report to President Richard Nixon and recommend changes in the relations of the US government to its ‘backyard’. Colombian President Carlos Lleras-Restrepo, visiting President Nixon on 13 June 1969, denounced the danger of communist infiltration in the Latin American Catholic Church. He alleged that many of the bishops and priests in various countries had become involved in university, labour and student affairs, using the same slogans and concepts as the Marxists. He also claimed that certain foreign missionaries, for example some of the Maryknoll priests, had taken this kind of revolutionary line. Consequently, Nixon asked the Rockefeller mission to report on the Catholic Church and its role in Latin America, along with a detailed analysis of the events and causes that could lead to such radicalisation.