Felipe Portales

Chileno, Sociólogo de la Universidad Católica; Director de Derechos Humanos de la Cancillería (1994-1996); Académico de la U. de Chile (2005-2017). Escritor: "Chile: una democracia tutelada"; "Los mitos de la democracia chilena" (dos volúmenes); "Historias desconocidas de Chile" (dos volúmenes).

Vatican, authoritarianism and anti-Semitism (IV)

With the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Catholic – and extreme right-wing secular – anti-Semitism in Europe increased even more. Thus, in 1921, the Vatican magazine CiviltaCattolic conceptualised that “at bottom Bolshevism is not the old Judaism that embraces (…) the…

Vatican, authoritarianism and anti-Semitism (V)

The Vatican and church hierarchies not only said nothing in defence of the Jews in the face of growing Nazi persecution, but maintained their radical anti-Semitism unperturbed in the 1930s. Thus, for example, even in a country as remote as…

Vatican, authoritarianism and anti-Semitism (IV)

With the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Catholic – and extreme right-wing secular – anti-Semitism in Europe increased even more. Thus, in 1921, the Vatican magazine CiviltaCattolic conceptualised that “at bottom Bolshevism is not the old Judaism that embraces (…) the…

The Vatican, authoritarianism and anti-Semitism (III)

After the loss of the Papal States in 1870, the Vatican intensified its conservative, intolerant and anti-Semitic positions. This was expressed fundamentally in the biweekly, semi-official Vatican magazine La Civilta Cattolica, directed by Jesuits, which from 1880 to 1938 published,…

The Vatican and pedophilia. The absent gospel (I)

With this title, Editorial Catalonia has just published a book on the subject. The idea has been to delineate as accurately as possible the dimensions of the phenomenon and to search for its deepest historical roots in order to understand…

Chilean Congress will not implement new constitution

In case of winning the “I approve” in the plebiscite of September 4th, we will face an unprecedented situation in a constituent process at world level: That the organ in charge of concretizing in laws a great part of the…

How little we know about Chile’s history (III)

It has been known that the 1925 Constitution sought to replace the discredited oligarchic parliamentary regime, incorporating the emerging middle sectors into the state apparatus and seeking to implement a model of industrialisation based on import substitution. But what has…

How little we know about Chile’s history (II)

The Political Constitution of 1925 not only had a completely anti-democratic origin – as we saw in Part I – but also had an extremely authoritarian-presidential character. In contrast to the de facto political system existing between 1891 and 1925…

How little we know about Chilean history!

In the brief historical references given by the Government about the previous Constitutions -in its information campaign on the constituent process- there is a serious error regarding the 1925 Constitution. This is that it states that this Constitution was written…

Suicide of the Constitutional Convention?

The theoretical and limited democratic achievements of the Constitutional Convention (given the undemocratic quorum of two thirds, which threw out numerous articles approved by more than 60% of the Convention members) could be eliminated, if the Convention – through the…

1 2