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Panama is a very Catholic country, with some 80 percent of its inhabitants adhering to that branch of the Christian faith. Our history for the past half-millennium is profoundly influenced by both Catholicism and the anti-clericalism common in societies where the church is deeply influential. The starting points for most of our best writers, even non- or anti-religious ones, have long been the Catholic version of the Bible and catechism. Although we have freedom or religion here, Catholicism is taught in the public schools and the most of the best private Panamanian educational institutions are run by Catholic orders.

To fully understand last year's strife over the Seguro Social reforms, you really ought to know something about the Catholic left that joined the the protesters' ranks as well as the role the hierarchy played in mediating an end to the month-long strike. To comprehend the movement that led Panama to throw its lot in with Simón Bolívar and declared independence from Spain, you need to know the religious subtext of that struggle, which was about free thinking independence leaders like Bolívar and the anti-clerical attitudes they held versus a Catholic Church that had a financial stake in Spanish rule over Latin America. To know the roots of Panamanian independence from Colombia, you need to understand that through most of the 19th century and into the 20th century's devastating Thousand Day War, Colombian Liberals and Conservatives found endless wars over, among other things, whether the Catholic Church would be the country's officially recognized religion.

On January 31 a crowd approximating that of the largest turnouts for last year's Seguro Social protests or the biggest 2004 campaign rallies took part in the annual Don Bosco Procession, which honors an Italian saint who founded the Salesian orders. In Panama for the event, and for a few weeks of consultations and exhortations about problems that beset Panamanian society and issues within the Catholic Church was Cardinal Oscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, the Archbishop of Tegucigalpa. In one sense, the event was part of a religious revival, and in another sense it reflected the efforts of a new pope's emissary to uphold traditional views among a far from unanimous Roman Catholic flock. However one wants to look at it, the Don Bosco Procession was an impressive display this year.

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