UC San Diego

This dissertation examines the role of Catholicism in shaping educational reform, political conflict, and gendered authority in Chile between 1964 and 1973. Scholarship has often treated the Catholic Church as either a cohesive institutional actor or as a reactive force in the face of political polarization. By contrast, this project argues that Catholicism functioned as an internally fragmented political field, in which clergy, lay organizations, educators, and students mobilized shared theological frameworks to advance competing visions of social and political change. Focusing on the reformist period of Christian Democratic governance and the subsequent Popular Unity years, this dissertation traces how education became a central arena in which these conflicts unfolded. Drawing on archival sources from the Archive of the Archbishopric of Santiago, educational policy documents of the era, Catholic periodicals, and university publications, it examines debates over agrarian reform, literacy campaigns, and the Popular Unity government’s National Unified School (ENU) proposal to show how Catholic actors across the political spectrum engaged with concepts such as pluralism, subsidiarity, and conscientization. These concepts, rooted in Catholic Social Doctrine, (especially as expressed in Vatican II and Medellín Council writings), did not produce consensus but instead enabled divergent–and at times contradictory–political projects. This dissertation further argues that these conflicts were structured by a gendered logic of authority which underpinned the modernization projects of both governments. Through the expansion and feminization of teaching, educational reform institutionalized a model of the “woman-as-mother-educator,” positioning women as key moral and pedagogical authorities while simultaneously delimiting their political roles. I illustrate how opposition to the ENU thus drew on anxieties over the displacement of maternal authority by the state, revealing the extent to which debates over education were also debates over family, morality, and social order. By situating Catholicism at the center of these transformations, this study contributes to the historiography of modern Chile, the global 1960s, and the Cold War by demonstrating that ideological conflict was not only political and economic, but also moral and gendered. In doing so, it highlights education as a critical site through which competing visions of authority, citizenship, and social change were articulated and contested.